Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today....
— Hughes Mearns
How is it that John Brennan alone has said virtually nothing, and has escaped any serious questioning on the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi which killed four Americans including Ambassador Stevens? As "Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism," that terrorist attack was at the very center of Brennan's responsibility,— as he himself emphasized by travelling to Libya immediately afterwards for secret meetings.
Brennan's predecessor in that same job, Frances Townsend, told CNN Sept. 28, 2012, that, "We've seen John Brennan come out after the bin Laden raid, and, frankly, in response to the underwear bomber and all these other terrorist attacks. It's really odd. We've seen no — we have not seen him present publicly at all, or speak publicly at all [on Benghazi]. And he's really the President's most senior substantive adviser on these sorts of issues.
"Frankly, I don't know what role he has played, but it's a fair question, why isn't he talking publicly about it..."
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Indeed, some have written that Brennan was the one who changed the intelligence-community "talking points" given to Susan Rice on Benghazi,— while somehow none of the other witnesses can remember or reconstruct how it was that they were changed. If other intelligence community officials did cover up for Brennan in this way, it is because, as Obama's once-CIA Director Michael Hayden commented, "John Brennan's the actual national intelligence director," the capo di tutti capi of all the intelligence-agency heads, rather than the toothless James Clapper, the nominal director. See Micah Zlenko, foreignpolicy.com, Sept. 18, 2012.
Similarly, Americans were stunned to hear at a hearing on Feb. 7, 2013, that Obama learned of the Benghazi attack at about 5:00 PM on Sept. 11 in a meeting with Panetta and General Dempsey, but then never bothered to recontact either of them on that then-ongoing attack! Obama just didn't give a damn! Dempsey added, however, that he himself had remained in contact with White House staff. What staff? Almost certainly Brennan, but neither Dempsey nor Brennan has been asked that question. And if they were in contact, what passed between them?
Is Brennan a British-Saudi Asset?
Despite all the secrecy which surrounds him, there are ample grounds already in the public domain, to consider John Brennan a controlled asset of the Saudi monarchy, and therefore of the British-Saudi empire which launched the original Sept. 11 attacks of 2001, through their BAE Corporation. Start with two allegations by Michael Scheuer, who was head of the CIA's bin Laden task-force from 1996, almost from its inception, until 1999, and associated with it again from 2001 until he quit in 2004.
Scheuer wrote that one of the unit's first actions was to ask Brennan, then station-chief in Saudi Arabia, to get basic information and documents about bin Laden from the Saudis. When there was no response, the unit sent frequent messages to Brennan asking him to get this data. Brennan finally responded that he would no longer pass these requests to the Saudis because they were annoyed by them.
Scheuer writes that he and his colleagues were actually never certain that Brennan had ever communicated any of their requests to Saudi Intelligence.
Scheuer says that he gave this documentation to the Congressional 9/11 Commission, redacted to protect sources and methods, where it is easily available to Congress and media via the Freedom of Information Act.
Scheuer secondly charged that Brennan squashed a May 1998 plan to kill or capture bin Laden, with the argument that the bin Laden problem should be left to the Saudis. Brennan was forced to admit that this was true, in his public Senate testimony at his confirmation hearing on Feb. 7. See foreignpolicyjournal.com for Feb. 6, 2013.
On Sept. 12, 2011, former Senator Bob Graham was interviewed by host Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC, concerning the Saudi-supported "support network" for the 9/ll hijackers, which extended from San Diego, California, to Sarasota, Florida, with other centers in New Jersey, Virginia, and Arizona. Graham described his efforts to obtain release of the suppressed 28 pages from the Congressional 9/11 report concerning the Saudi role, and Graham said that he had talked to the White House and to Obama's counter-terrorism advisor, John Brennan, asking him to get the 28 pages released.
To this day, Brennan has failed to do so.
The Yemen File
Before going further, here are a few basics of what is known of Brennan's biography from an official CIA biography and the questionnaire he completed for the Senate Intelligence Committee. Long a fluent Arabic speaker, Brennan, born 1955, attended Fordham University, where he spent his junior year abroad, learning Arabic at the American University in Cairo. He joined the CIA in 1980, and did analysis in the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis in the Directorate of Intelligence from 1984-89. What the CIA biography omits, but was supplied by another knowledgeable source, is that during some or all of those five years of analysis, Brennan was not located at Langley, but actually in Saudi Arabia.
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He was then CIA Station Chief in Saudi Arabia 1996-99.
Much of his more recent career has been the subject of the daily press over the week ended Feb. 9. It was Brennan who negotiated with the Saudis for a secret CIA drone base which has been operating out of Saudi Arabia, from which the drones flew which killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, along with a second U.S. citizen, and then al-Awlaki's 16-year old son and a companion.
On August 8, 2012, Brennan conducted a seminar on (purportedly) U.S. policy toward Yemen at the Council on Foreign Relations. In a very lengthy discussion, Brennan, who claimed 30 years' experience with Yemen, immediately revealed himself as a master of the entirety of U.S. relations with Yemen,— not only the drone killings, but every detail of foreign aid and the full panoply of relations. Any reader of that seminar will realize that Brennan is the "Viceroy" of Yemen, in the same way that Paul Bremer was Viceroy of Iraq during the George W. Bush administration. But is he Washington's viceroy or somebody else's?
After his opening remarks, the CFR moderator, PBS correspondent Margaret Warner, noted the contradiction that Bernnan had said that one of our most important partners in Yemen is Saudi Arabia. But, "to what degree," she asked, "will Saudi Arabia allow the flourishing of a more vibrant, democratic model in Yemen with the kinds of institutions you cite; you know, flourishing political parties, opposition press, or free press, at least?" None of which are allowed in Saudi Arabia, of course.
Brennan appeared somehow to miss the irony, responding, "Saudi Arabia has done more for Yemen than any other country in the world,... So — and whenever I go out to Yemen, I invariably will go to Saudi Arabia, sometimes before as well as after my visits there."
What does this mean?
Although the Obama-Brennan drone-killing is supposedly secret, it seems clear that the greater part of the slaughter is done in two locations: Yemen and the FATA area of Pakistan. But what is Yemen? It is and has long been an unofficial colony of its neighbor Saudi Arabia, albeit with tremendous opposition among many Yemenis against the Saudis.
Who, then, are the many Yemenis whom Brennan has killed and is killing with his Saudi-based drones? Were they all boarding flights to the U.S. to conduct terror attacks? Of course not. They were in factional battles within Yemen, against Brennan's Saudi bosses and their Yemeni allies, as Micah Zlenko has written in www.foreignpolicy.com
Symbiosis
Administration officials say that Brennan serves as "a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Obama." The President meets with him several times a day, Brennan coming up from his windowless office in the White House basement, Zlenko reported on Sept 11, 2012. He has been a close advisor to Obama since November 2008, and homeland security advisor and deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism, with the rank of assistant to the President, from the first day Obama entered office.
In Daniel Klaidman's 2012 book Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, he describes the first meeting between Obama and Brennan, a few days after the November 2008 Presidential elections. "Brennan liked what he'd heard from Obama during the campaign.... The two spent an hour together ... and quickly established a bond. They talked about how their travels as young men in the Muslim world had helped shape their worldviews.... Terrorism dominated their conversation.... Their views were so complementary that Obama found himself finishing Brennan's sentences."
The most obvious point of their close bonding today is their shared passion about the drone-murder campaign, but within the overall context presented above, Klaidman's account points to much, much more.
Questions for Brennan
1. What specific role did you play on Sept. 11, 2012 as the senior counterterrorism aide to President Obama? Did you see the State Department emails from Embassy Tripoli, describing the initial attack on the mission as a heavily-armed assault by approximately 20 men? Did you see the subsequent email identifying Ansar al-Sharia as the group behind the attack? What was your role in the decision to have UN Ambassador Susan Rice represent the administation on five national television interview shows on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012? What role did you play in preparing Rice for the interviews? What role did you play in reviewing and altering the intelligence community talking points provided by the CIA and the DNI?
2. President Obama, during his 2008 campaign and in an Oval Office meeting in February 2009 with families of the original Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, promised to declassify the 28-page chapter from the Congressional 9/11 probe. Did President Obama consult with you on his decision to block release of that chapter? Did you know the content of the chapter and its identification of Saudi funding for the 9/11 attacks? Did you know Omar al-Bayoumi or Osama Basnan, the two Saudi General Intelligence Directorate officers who facilitated the operations of two west coast 9/11 hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Midhar? What government position did you hold at the time of the original 9/11 attacks and the period between the attacks and the completion of the 9/11 Commission report? Were you consulted in this process? Were you in contact with any officials of Saudi GID during this period?
