Director of the CIA John Brennan said that Saudi Arabia is “among our closest counterterrorism partners” at an event at the Brookings Institution yesterday.
Brennan pointed to the enemies that both the United States and Saudi Arabia share, including the Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists.
“The Saudi government and leadership today has inherited a history whereby there have been a number of individuals both inside of Saudi Arabia as well as outside who have embraced a rather fundamentalist — extremist in some areas — version of the Islamic faith, which has allowed individuals who then move toward violence and terrorism to exploit that and capitalize on that,” Brennan said, according to Bloomberg‘s Nafeesa Syeed.
John Brennan is Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“There is no light switch that can transition a country like Saudi Arabia, that just a generation or so ago was really anchored in a very traditional environment…They have all the trappings of modernization, but yet the environment, the culture, the society and the religious traditions really have not yet adapted to the 21st century world, which is one of the things the Saudis are having to deal with.”
[Click here to read the full report from Bloomberg]
Brennan’s comments echo a recently released report by the Saudi embassy in Washington that detailed the Kingdom’s counterterrorism efforts within Saudi Arabia and its coordination with the United States.
The CIA Chief also reiterated at Brookings that he would not allow his agency to carry out brutal interrogations like those called for by Donald Trump, and suggested he might step down if a future president demanded him to do so.
