No to Brennan

Andrew Sullivan says the appointment of John Brennan to be DCIA would be unacceptable. I'm inclined to agree. Reasonable people can disagree with pretty much all of Obama's appointments to this point on some grounds. Too many Clintonites. Nobody to Obama's left, etc. But you can't really argue that his appointments are fatally flawed. John Brennan describes intelligence in a way that makes sense. For instance:

I am a strong proponent of trying to focus more of our efforts on the upstream phenomenon of terrorism. I make the analogy to pollution. We learned that pollutants kill us when they get into the water we drink or the fish we eat or the air we breathe. But I think we also learned that we have to go upstream to identify and eliminate those sources of pollution. Terrorism is a tactic, and we have to be more focused upstream. Since 9/11, understandably we've focused downstream, on those terrorists who might be in our midst or trying to kill us, the operators. I think there needs to be much more attention paid to those upstream factors and conditions that spawn terrorists.

But surely there's somebody in the spook community (or in the suburbs of the spook community) who takes a holistic approach to intelligence gathering without also thinking that rendition and torture are acceptable under certain circumstances. John Brennan is implicit in the creation of the Bush-Cheney torture regime. He's gotta go.