Joun Brennan, key architect of US bid to expand targeted killing

“The ‘playbook’ as Brennan calls it, will lay out the administration’s evolving procedures for the targeted killings that have come to define its fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates,” leading US daily The Washington Post reports in a Thursday article.
 
“What we’re trying to do right now is to have a set of standards, a set of criteria, and have a decision-making process that will govern our counterterrorism actions - we’re talking about direct action, lethal action - so that irrespective of the venue where they’re taking place, we have a high confidence that they’re being done for the right reasons in the right way,” Brennan is quoted as claiming in an August interview.
 
    A 25-year veteran of the premier US spy agency, the CIA, Brennan is the key engineer of “a policy that has transformed counterterrorism from a conventional fight centered in Afghanistan to a high-tech global effort to track down and eliminate perceived enemies one by one,” the report adds.
 
 
What used to be a “disparate collection of tactics,” assassination drone hits by the CIA and US military, overhead surveillance, deployment of small Special Forces ground units at remote bases, and allocation of military and economic assistance to threatened US-backed regimes, has become “a White House-centered strategy with Brennan at its core.”
 
According to the article, Brennan wields “enormous power” in influencing decisions on “kill” lists and the allotment of armed terror drones, “the war’s signature weapon.”
 
When operations are planned in Yemen, Somalia or elsewhere, says the report, “it is Brennan alone who takes the recommendations to Obama for a final sign-off.”
 
    Under Brennan’s direction, Obama has more than tripled the number of assassination drone strikes in Pakistan, from 36 in 2008 to 122 in 2010, the article says, citing figures released by the New America Foundation.
 
 
This is while the concentration of power in a single individual that is unelected and unconfirmed by US Congress has come under questions by critics.
 
In view of the international legal community and among human rights and civil liberties activists, says the article, Brennan, who has been described as having “deep knowledge of the Middle East, Islam and the CIA,” runs a policy “so secret that it is impossible for outsiders to judge whether it complies with the laws of war or US values - or even determine the total number of people killed.”
 
Some critics have described US assertions that the assassination drone strikes are “legal and effective” as immoral, rejecting Obama administration’s claims that few civilians have been among the nearly 3,000 people estimated to have been killed in drone attacks.
 
“There is ample evidence in Pakistan that the more than 300 strikes launched under Obama have helped turn the vast majority of the population vehemently against the United States,” the report adds.
 
Meanwhile, according to the report, Brennan has made frequent visits to Yemen and Saudi Arabia. He used his longtime contacts in the region “to cement a joint US-Saudi policy that would ultimately - with the help of Yemen’s Arab Spring revolt - bring a more cooperative government to power.”