She believes al Qaeda 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’s 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.
Brooks’s 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, Brooks’s recent L.A. Times columns evidence views some may find disconcerting.
In 2007, she labeled al Qaeda 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 Qaeda has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001.”
Brooks wrote that both 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.
Brooks is 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’s Open Society Institute.
She has consulted for Human Rights Watch and served as a board member of Amnesty International USA.