Pentagon official blames U.S. for al-Qaida attacks

Rosa Brooks

She believes al-Qaida was an "obscure group" turned into a massive threat due to U.S. policies.

She's referred to former President Bush as "our torturer in chief" and a "psychotic who need(s) treatment" while comparing Bush's arguments for waging a war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's use of political propaganda.

She's worked on behalf of George Soros' philanthropic foundation.

Meet Rosa Brooks, the Obama administration's new adviser to Michelle Fluornoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, a position described as one of the most influential in the Pentagon.

"I prefer to think of (my new position) as my personal government bailout," Brooks wrote in a departing piece at the Los Angeles Times, where she served as a regular columnist.

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Brooks' new boss earlier this month briefed Congress on U.S. policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, two countries for which she has enormous power concerning drafting future military doctrine.

"Brooks will wield an extraordinary degree of influence in helping shape U.S. policy. Her extreme views should therefore be closely scrutinized," wrote Nile Gardiner, a contributor to the London Telegraph's online blog.

Indeed, Brook's recent L.A. Times columns evidence views some may find concerning.

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In 2007, she labeled al-Qaida as "little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky. … Thanks to U.S. policies, al-Qaida has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001."

Also that year, she called the surge in Iraq a "feckless plan" that is "too little too late" with "no realistic likelihood that it will lead to an enduring solution in Iraq." The surge was widely credited with helping to stabilize Iraq.

Brooks wrote Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "should be treated like psychotics who need treatment. … Impeachment's not the solution to psychosis, no matter how flagrant."

She also penned a column about Bush entitled "Our torturer-in-chief" in which she inferred attacks against the U.S. were a result of torture policies.

"Today, the chickens are coming home to roost," she fumed, but "the word 'accountability' isn't in the White House dictionary."

In another column she referred to the regimes of Iran and North Korea as "foreign authoritarians," while calling the Bush administration a "homegrown" authoritarian regime.

In a column last month, Brooks claimed the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel arguments for prosecuting the war on terrorism were similar to tactics used by Hitler.

According to Brooks: "How did such dangerously bad legal memos ever get taken seriously in the first place? One answer is suggested by the so-called Big Lie theory of political propaganda, articulated most infamously by Adolf Hitler. Ordinary people 'more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie,' wrote Hitler."

Last week, FoxNews.com highlighted Brook's departing column in which she argued for more "direct government support for public media" and government licensing of the news.

Wrote Brooks: "Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off."

In response, L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, countered, "The day that the government gets involved in the news media you see the end of the democratic process, because an independent news media is absolutely essential to the success of a democracy."

Brooks is also a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she serves as director of Georgetown Law School's Human Rights Center. She previously served as special counsel to the president at Soros' Open Society Institute. She has consulted for Human Rights Watch and served as a board member of Amnesty International USA.

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