CIA ....Director??

Exerted from article by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball from MSN News

The abrupt withdrawal of John Brennan as a candidate to be CIA director could complicate Barack Obama's efforts to assemble a national security team untainted by past policies of the Bush administration. It is also a potential signal of more battles on the intelligence front in the weeks ahead, since many of the other names that have been prominently mentioned for CIA director or director of National Intelligence have their own ties to the intelligence community that include carrying out controversial policies under President Bush.
Brennan, a 25-year intelligence-community veteran, had been a top adviser to Obama on intelligence issues during the campaign and served as a leader of the Obama transition team for the intelligence community. "He was our guy on intelligence," one top Obama adviser told NEWSWEEK (who like all Obama advisors asked not to be identified speaking about personnel matters.) But Brennan made his surprise decision to pull his name from the CIA search after getting pummeled over the past few days by liberal critics for his alleged role in the use of abusive interrogation techniques against high-value Al Qaeda targets during a period he served as a top CIA official under George Tenet.
The irony is that though Brennan would have been a participant in some of the discussions over U.S. interrogation policy, he was never a decision-maker on such issues. Indeed, he insisted in a stinging public retort today that it has been "immaterial to the critics" that he had actually 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." Still, Brennan wrote in his letter to President-elect Obama (and released by the transition staff) that he did not want the issue of his role in Bush administration policies to be a "distraction" and therefore wanted to withdraw from consideration as CIA director.