Leading candidate to head CIA under Obama withdraws from running

The leading contender to lead the CIA under Barack Obama, John Brennan, took his name out of the running today after coming under fire for his alleged support of violent interrogation tactics used by the Bush administration. Meanwhile, two widely reported choices for Obama's national security team were confirmed by ABC news: Robert Gates is said to be staying on temporarily as defense secretary, and former NATO commander James Jones is tipped to become the national security adviser. Brennan, who had led the intelligence arm of Obama's transition team, stepped aside in a letter to the president-elect that was also released to US media outlets. Labeling recent criticism from the left about his stance on abusive interrogations a "distraction", he asked that Obama deny him any major intelligence post next year. "It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration such as the preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding," Brennan wrote. "The fact that I was not involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored." The backlash against Brennan's prospective nomination, either to lead the CIA or become the director of national intelligence (DNI), began on Saturday with a letter to Obama signed by nearly 200 practicing psychologists and academics involved in the field. The psychologists asserted that Brennan helped initiate abusive tactics for use against detainees during his service under George Tenet, a CIA director for both George Bush and Bill Clinton. During his 25 years in the CIA, Brennan took a leading role in creating the National Counterterrorism Center four years ago. "We look forward to your administration as an opportunity for genuine change - in this case, for our country to take a new direction in its treatment of prisoners," the psychologists wrote to the president-elect. Their letter cited a 2006 interview Brennan granted to the Frontline TV program in the US, in which he described Tenet's support for the "dark side" interrogation techniques used on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and overseas CIA "black sites". The Frontline interview contained no overt endorsements of those tactics by Brennan. But liberal commentators have separately pointed to another remark he made in 2005 on the controversial practice of rendition, which involves the often-forcible transport of suspected terrorists to undergo interrogations in foreign nations. "I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the US government has been involved in … it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives," Brennan told PBS television three years ago. Brennan's letter did not specify whether the psychologists' letter or criticism from the liberal blogosphere was the primary reason for his withdrawal. The remaining contenders for the CIA and DNI posts under Obama include Republican senator Chuck Hagel; retired US army officer Don Kerrick, who served as deputy national security adviser under Clinton; and Dennis Blair, the former chief US military commander in the Pacific.