Globe Trot: CIA chief snubs president to defend interrogation tactics

NATIONAL SECURITY: CIA Director John Brennan—in a forceful break with the president—held a press conference yesterday to respond to a Senate report released earlier this week that condemned the agency’s interrogation of 9/11-related terrorist suspects. Unusual for an intelligence chief, Brennan took to a podium in the lobby of CIA headquarters and said the detention and interrogation “produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.”

Brennan acknowledged some interrogating officers were “harsh” and “abhorrent” in some instances: “We are not a perfect institution, we are made up of individuals … imperfect individuals."

Brennan, a Jesuit-schooled career intelligence officer, was serving under CIA director George Tenet on 9/11. He said in 2009, “The U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities have to bat 1,000 every day. The terrorists are trying to be successful just once.”

Former FBI director Louis J. Freeh also takes issue with the report, and points out the “Senate committee’s Democratic majority failed to interview the three CIA directors and three deputy directors, or any other CIA employee for that matter, who had briefed them about the program and carried it out.”

MUSLIM militants around the world killed 5,042 people in the month of November alone—twice the number killed on 9/11 and averaging out to 22 attacks and 168 deaths per day.

BURMA: Two relief workers with the Free Burma Ranger’s mission were killed in Kachin State in an attack by the Burmese army. The border area of Burma, also known as Myanmar, has long seen conflict and is a locus for Christian refugees.

HONG KONG: After 74 days of protests, Hong Kong police have shut down the Umbrella Revolution. With no tangible success and more than 200 arrests, pro-democracy leaders who escaped police clutches vow to continue to challenge Chinese authoritarianism.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM has been the casualty of the new global disorder, writes Britain’s Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the Commonwealth and a staunch defender of persecuted Christians. “The time has come to say—enough. … Can we recognize God’s image in a person who is not in our image; whose color, creed or culture is not our own?”

AT HOME: Yesterday’s featured nation at Operation World is the United States of America. Its “non-religious bloc” has nearly doubled from 9 percent in 1990 to 16.5 percent in 2010. “Almost all of the largest Protestant denominations declined as a proportion to the total population from 2000 to 2010,” the prayer guide notes. “The religious canvas of American life is being repainted before our eyes.”