By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE
Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
John O. Brennan, President Obama’s choice to be director of the C.I.A., has been the president’s counterterrorism adviser.
WASHINGTON — As a new debate intensifies over the Obama administration’s targeted killing program, John O. Brennan, President Obama's nominee to be C.I.A. director, acknowledged as his confirmation hearing began Thursday that there is “widespread debate” about the administration’s “current counterterrorism policies.”
But, he said, the United States remains “at war with al-Qa’ida and it’s associated forces,” which “still seek to carry out deadly strikes against our homeland and our citizens.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein,the California Democrat who is the committee chairman, said in her opening statement that the she intends to propose legislation to create a new court to oversee the targeted killings. Such a move would bring judicial oversight to drone strikes for the first time. on Thursday afternoon for John O. Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, amid new revelations about the Obama administration’s targeted killing program that Mr. Brennan has helped oversee.
Mr. Brennan, who has wielded tremendous power as the president’s top White House counterterrorism adviser, is expected to face occasionally sharp questioning on a range of topics from members of the Senate Intelligence Committee: from the drone campaign in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere to his role in the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation program carried out while he was a top official at the C.I.A
Before the hearing began, a group of protestors angrily stood up an began shouting at Mr. Brennan before they were escorted out of the hearing room. One man yelled, “assassination is against the Constitution!” and one woman held up a sign that read “Drones Fly Children Die.”
But the protests continued throughout Mr. Brennan’s opening statement, forcing Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, to temporarily stop the hearing and close the room.
The hearing comes just days after the leak of a Justice Department document explaining the legal rationale for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who had joined Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was killed in Yemen in September 2011. Mr. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in Saudi Arabia, has been central to the Obama administration’s clandestine war inside Yemen.
Pressured by members of Congress in the days before the hearing, the White House on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to provide the Congressional Intelligence Committees with the formal, classified memos that provide the legal justification for the killing of Mr. Awlaki and other American citizens overseas who are considered terrorists. The Obama administration had previously refused to give lawmakers the full memos, written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Because so much of the targeted killing program remains shrouded in secrecy, however, it is unclear how much the Senate Intelligence Committee will press Mr. Brennan for detailed answers about the program during the public session, or whether it will wait until the additional “closed hearing” that is routine for the confirmation hearings of C.I.A. directors.
If he returns to the C.I.A. as its director, he will inherit an agency that has changed drastically in the years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with a new focus on hunting down terrorists that has led some to say that the agency has strayed too far from its traditional mission of foreign espionage and analysis.
In his responses to questions posed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in advance of the hearing, Mr. Brennan hinted that he shared some of these concerns. For instance, he said that the agency’s performance in anticipating and analyzing the tumult in the Arab world since 2011 shows “that the C.I.A. needs to improve its capabilities and its performance still further.”
Senate Panel Will Question Brennan on Targeted Killings
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Senate Panel Will Question Brennan on Targeted Killings
