Liberal bloggers help prevent torture advocate from running CIA

Greenwald:

This is really exceptional news on multiple levels -- the best political news I've heard since the election:

Brennan out of running for top intel post

John Brennan, President-elect Barack Obama's top adviser on intelligence, has taken his name out of the running for any intelligence position in the new administration.

Brennan wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to Obama that he did not want to be a distraction. His potential appointment has raised a firestorm in liberal blogs who associate him with the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies.

"The fact that I was not involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored," he wrote, in a letter obtained by The Associated Press. . .

Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over online blogs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects, including waterboarding, which critics call torture.

[...]

It's certainly happened before that blogs have played a leading role in events like this -- the defeat of Bush's Social Security plan, the temporary defeat by the House of FISA and telecom immunity, the publicizing of the DOJ prosecutors scandal -- but it's very rare for the central role of blogs in such episodes to be so explicitly acknowledged by everyone, including the principal actors and the establishment media[...]

I'm proud to have been a small voice in that chorus.

digby:

In any case, I'm gratified that liberal blogs are considered critics with enough stature to sink a potential CIA chief. We've come a long way. If that means that anyone who had knowledge of this torture regime and failed to unequivocally denounce it in clear and unambiguous terms, simply cannot hold high office in the intelligence community, then we've done well.