Newsweek‘s Mark Hosenball writes (12/22/08):
The head of Obama’s intel transition team, John Brennan, was the leading candidate for CIA chief until he was slammed by liberal bloggers for not doing enough while serving as a top CIA and anti-terror official to oppose Bush.
Actually, “liberal bloggers” hadn’t “slammed” Brennan for “not doing enough…to oppose Bush”; they criticized him for being an ardent public defender of rendition and “enhanced interrogation tactics,” which is a euphemism for torture. Since Obama campaigned as an opponent of such policies, Brennan would have been a dubious choice to be his top CIA official.
One has to be a little skeptical of Hosenball’s crediting “liberal bloggers” with the ability to determine who gets to be head of the CIA.
