Israeli military operations in Gaza have been “well over the top”, a former director of the US Central Intelligence Agency has said.
John Brennan said he “very much” admires the Irish Government’s position on Gaza but is “disappointed” by the positions taken by the Trump administration and the Biden administration before it.
As the US “provides most of the military capabilities to Israel”, he believed it was obliged and “should have done everything possible to prevent Israel carrying out what I think were too aggressive military operations”, he told The Irish Times in Dublin on Friday.
In his view, Israeli military operations in Gaza “have been well over the top” and the number of women, children and non-combatants killed was “unnecessary”. Asked would he describe it as a genocide, he said that was “for lawyers to decide”.
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“The deaths of 70,000 Palestinians, a lot of those deaths obviously were intentionally done by the Israelis. They are not targeting civilians but I think they have allowed disproportionate civilian casualties when they have gone after Hamas operatives.”
In the context of continuing debate about Ireland’s military neutrality, Mr Brennan said Ireland’s neutrality “is much respected and needed” but it does not mean Ireland “is not impenetrable by foreign adversaries, particularly given the digital realm and how much we are interconnected as a global community”.
It “makes sense” for Ireland to evaluate its security, defence and intelligence needs, he said.
Ireland has taken “some very principled stands”, including on Gaza, he said. If Ireland opted to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), there is a question whether or not that would limit Ireland’s ability to continue to pursue independent policies and positions, he said.
Joining Nato is, and should be, a matter for the Irish people to decide, he said. “Nato has been evolving, its European members recognise they need to do more on their own and cannot continue to rely continually on the US, so I think it’s a worthwhile question for the Irish people to ask.”
Mr Brennan, whose father Owen Brennan emigrated to the US from Co Roscommon in 1948, was in Dublin to address the inaugural summer school of the Law Society’s Centre for Justice and Law Reform, which explored the theme Defending Democracy: Legal Responses to Emerging Threats.
Other speakers included EU Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath, Attorney General Rossa Fanning, Online Safety Commissioner Niamh Hodnett and UK commissioner for countering extremism Robin Simcox.
Mr Brennan was a CIA officer for 25 years from 1980 before serving under president Barack Obama as his chief counterterrorism adviser. He was director of the CIA from 2013 to early 2017.
Asked how Ireland might combat extremism, he said all governments have to set a “delicate balance” in allowing free speech while not allowing hate speech and incitement to violence.
This is something the Irish people need to look at and to “weigh in on” with their politicians. The Law Society and other objective actors have important roles to help ensure that truthful, factual information is “pushed out into the communications bloodstream”.
During his career, he was mainly focused on countering terrorism by groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda but in more recent years, he is concerned about the growth of domestic extremism and violence in the US, epitomised by the assault on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, he said.
He has been personally targeted by extremists, including with a pipe bomb, Mr Brennan said.
He is concerned some domestic extremism was “fuelled” by commentary from public officials and said government officials have a “special responsibility” to try to clamp down extremist sentiment and be more uniting, less divisive, of people.
Some of president Donald Trump’s rhetoric is “rather combative” and there is “an increasing coarseness” in the public discourse, especially in the way Mr Trump and others make reference to their opponents, he said.
“I served for six presidents and none of them would publicly refer to their political opponents as scum and Donald Trump does that. I think that’s beneath the dignity of the office of the presidency.”
Even if public officials do not intend matters to then “take it to the next level”, it has that effect, he said. This sometimes happens on both sides and it is important to bring down that level of tension, animosity, anger and hatred and to try and find “more civil ways of discourse”.
He is concerned about the US administration’s commitment to the rule of law, including efforts to use the US Department of Justice “to go after political opponents”, and to try and “get around” some judicial rulings.
Democracy and the rule of law cannot be taken for granted and a lot of people see the US as “sliding towards authoritarianism”, he said.
In the CIA, he saw some countries use the democratic process to put authoritarian leaders in place. “The playbook is very similar, you crack down on opponents, use your instruments of government, whether they be the intelligence and security services, the courts, you crack down on the media.”
Asked about Mr Trump’s recent authorisation of a US military attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, Mr Brennan said he shares the concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme but believed the US attack was “unnecessary” and had not addressed the problem.
It seemed, from press reports, there did not appear to be a change in the intelligence community’s assessment that Iran has not restarted its nuclear weapons programme, he said.
Now the issues include whether Iran will move, perhaps in a “more clandestine” fashion, to try and reconstitute its programme and even move towards a nuclear weapon.
