Gates to Stay on as Defense Secretary; Brennan Out of CIA Running

CNN is reporting this evening that Defense Secretary Roberts Gates is expected to stay on at last through the first year of the Obama administration.

Sources said the arrangement is pretty much a "done deal."
ABC News and Politico report similar stories.

CNN and Politico also reported that Marine Gen. James Jones, Ret., former Marine commandant and commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, will be named national security adviser.

President-Elect Obama had wanted at least one or more Republicans in his Cabinet; Gates is no neocon. Gates served as CIA director in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. It's no secret that in a time with two huge, disastrous wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the global economic crisis roiling things up even more, some continuity is needed when Obama takes office.

Meanwhile, Obama's top adviser on intelligence, John Brennan, took his name out of the running today for any future intelligence job. Brennan is crying foul over the liberal blogs associating him with controversial Bush administration interrogation, detention and rendition policies.

"It is with profound regret that I respectfully ask that my name be withdrawn from consideration for a position within the intelligence community. The challenges ahead of our nation are too daunting, and the role of the CIA too critical, for there to be any distraction from the vital work that lays ahead," Brennan wrote.

Brennan reportedly privately told colleagues that he opposed waterboarding terror suspect and questioned the legality of other interrogation techniques. Some blogs are bringing up past statement he has made, such as denouncing waterboarding while at the same time saying it gas bore some fruit in the War on Terror, and saying rendition - sending terror suspects to countries that have more lax torture laws than we do - is a "vital tool."

Says Harper's Scott Horton:

"The problem isn't John Brennan's lack of credentials. He was a career intelligence operative who gets consistently strong marks for his effectiveness and intelligence from people who have worked with him. But he has a critical shortcoming: his completely ambiguous and inconsistent views about the CIA's use of torture and torture by proxy as techniques. As a company man, Brennan was quick to justify and support what was done. As an "independent" analyst for broadcast journalists, he also provided support and cover for practices from waterboarding to the use of psychotropic drugs. As an adviser to the Obama campaign, Brennan experienced an unconvincing epiphany and came to reject President Bush's "program" along the same lines as his boss. The timing and circumstances of Brennan's conversion suggest that it was dictated by political expedience and not ethics."

Brennan argues that people are forgetting he has opposed some of the controverisal policies.

"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 pre-emptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding," he said in his letter to Obama.