The problem is not John Brennan: It's us

Because the 2000s are ancient history

The tradition of liberty is old.  The common people will let it grow old, yes.  They will sell liberty for a quieter life...

-"The Writer," from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange

On Monday, President Obama appointed former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to be his next secretary of defense, sending a curious signal to Democrats and progressives about the president's values. And while the nomination of Hagel received most of the attention, the president also on Monday appointed John Brennan to head the CIA. As explained by Salon's Alex Seitz-Waltz:
 

Meanwhile, no one on the left or the right seems to much care about Brennan's nomination, despite the fact that he was forced to withdraw his name from consideration from the very same job in 2008 thanks to controversy over his alleged involvement with Bush-era interrogation programs. Brennan spent years at the CIA and served as chief of staff to former director George Tenet during the creation of the post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs. The New Yorker's Jane Mayer described him as a 'supporter' of the programs, which included torture and the use of secret prison 'black sites.'

'There are some really important concerns that need to be publicly addressed before the Senate moves forward with the nomination,' said Laura Murphy, the ACLU's Washington legislative office director, in an interview with Salon. The ACLU doesn't take positions on nominees for executive branch jobs, but Murphy said Brennan's appointment is 'troubling,' adding, 'We definitely are concerned.'

The man who was so controversial that his initially rumored nomination to head the CIA had to be withdrawn before Obama had even been inaugurated now finally will have his chance. So much has changed since late 2008.

In his current job, for example, Brennan has spearheaded some of Obama's most controversial national security tactics, such as the aggressive escalation of drone strikes and so-called signature strikes, where targets are hit based on incomplete intelligence. He's also caught flak for claiming drone attacks didn't result in a 'single' civilian death in Pakistan one year and for initially (and erroneously) claiming that Osama Bin Laden 'engaged in a firefight' with Navy SEALs during the 2011 raid in which he was killed.

In 2008, liberals and civil libertarians were outraged by the possibility of Brennan heading the CIA.

On Monday, Meteor Blades quoted Spencer Ackerman:

Privately, Brennan has expressed doubts about the long-term efficacy of the drone war ' even as it spreads from Pakistan to Yemen and perhaps elsewhere. But publicly, not only has Brennan defended the drone program, he's claimed that 'there hasn't been a single collateral death' from drone strikes, which is difficult to square with what little evidence from the drone campaign is on display.

Accordingly, Brennan's nomination is attracting criticism even before Obama announces it on Monday afternoon. Mary Ellen O'Connell, an international law expert at the University of Notre Dame, sent out a statement urging the Senate to vote against sending Brennan to the CIA on the grounds that the drone program is among 'the most highly unlawful and immoral practices the United States has ever undertaken.' Council on Foreign Relations scholar Micah Zenko doesn't explicitly oppose Brennan's nomination, but called the claim that the drone strikes haven't killed civilians 'preposterous and in no way supported by reality.' Brennan withdrew as Obama's choice to head the CIA once before, in 2008, when he came under criticism for alleged involvement in the CIA's Bush-era torture efforts.

But that was a whole four years ago. Back then, Hagel was about to receive his first rating above zero from the Human Rights Campaign, for his one positive vote, in favor of emergency AIDS relief, which as John Aravosis points out, "isn't gay at all." So let's just forget that the new Defense nominee has a long history of virulent bigotry, and let's just forget that the new CIA nominee was considered too controversial for Democrats at the end of the Bush era, because of his activities during the Bush era. This is 2012, not the late-2000s, which is ancient history. The statute of limitations on outrage over abuses of human rights apparently is less than a handful of years.

(Continue reading below the fold.)