by Steven Emerson and John Rossomando
IPT News
February 5, 2013
America’s top spy needs to be a steely-eyed realist, sensitive to emerging threats and keen about our foes’ intent to deceive us.
Unfortunately, President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, has shown a tendency to fall for the bait from radical Islamists. Globally, he repeatedly expressed a hope that “moderates” within Iran and its terror proxy Hizballah would steer their respective constituencies away from terrorism.
Domestically, he claims that radical Islam does not pose its own, unique threat to American security. He has helped strip language about “radical Islam,” “jihad” and similar terms from government vernacular, choosing instead to refer to “violent extremism” in an attempt to deny terrorists religious credibility. When it comes to jihad, he stubbornly maintains the word does not belong in conversations about terror, no matter what terrorists themselves say.
Likewise, he also yielded to demands from American Islamists to purge law enforcement and intelligence training material of the terms “jihad” and “radical Islam.”
Despite these positions, some American Islamists still oppose Brennan’s nomination because he is considered the architect of the drone program which has killed scores of al-Qaida terrorists.
That should tell him something. But there is little in Brennan’s record to indicate he’ll learn from the experience.
Brennan Promotes Iran-Hizballah Outreach
Brennan’s complacency regarding the jihad threat was made clear in May 2010, when he expressed a desire to encourage “moderate elements” of Hizballah, which is a State Department-designated terrorist organization.
via Obama CIA Nominee John Brennan Wrong for the Job :: The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
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