John Brennan, the new CIA director for the United States, was trained by the Jesuits at Fordham University in New York where he obtained his degree in political science.
Roman Catholic Brennan studied in the Middle East and speaks fluent Arabic. In 2008 he became the counterterrorism advisor to President Obama. In 2010 Brennan became the first Obama administration official to acknowledge the use of drones in targeted killings in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. He also argued for their “legality, morality, and effectiveness.” In 2011 and 2012 he helped reorganize the drone program, which concentrated power and control over the process in the White House, particularly into the hands of the President.
In March 2001 Brennan became deputy executive director of the CIA. This was at the time when FBI agents were pinpointing suspected terrorists in flight training schools preparing to crash commercial airplanes into high profile U.S. buildings and warning U.S. government officials of the danger. The U.S. government did little to prevent the terrorists from carrying out their plans.
After the terrorist attacks on the U.S., Brennan was appointed director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004. In this role he would compile information for daily top-secret intelligence briefings for President Bush. In this role, Brennan would, no doubt, be familiar with the CIA’s use of torture in secret prisons throughout the Middle East and other locations in the name of fighting terrorism. Torture is a practice resurrected from the Middle Ages when the Holy Roman Empire persecuted those who did not agree with church teaching.
Brennan’s last post within the intelligence community was as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 and 2005, which incorporated information on terrorist activities across U.S. agencies.
When the Senate was set to vote on Brennan’s nomination as head of the CIA, in March, 2013 Kentucky senator Rand Paul began a 12-hour filibuster of the vote, citing the centralization of power into the hands of the president saying, “No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything that we fundamentally believe in our country.”
Brennan was eventually approved and sworn in on March 8, 2013 as the new CIA director.
“God’s word has given warning of the impending danger; let this be unheeded, and the Protestant world will learn what the purposes of Rome really are, only when it is too late to escape the snare. She is silently growing into power. Her doctrines are exerting their influence in legislative halls, in the churches, and in the hearts of men. She is piling up her lofty and massive structures in the secret recesses of which her former persecutions will be repeated. Stealthily and unsuspectedly she is strengthening her forces to further her own ends when the time shall come for her to strike. All that she desires is vantage ground, and this is already being given her. We shall soon see and shall feel what the purpose of the Roman element is.” The Great Controversy, page 581
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