Brooks is particularly dangerous as a key Pentagon employee because she believes there is no real terrorist threat to the United States and is in a position to have an impact on U.S. national security policy.
As the
Washington Times recently editorialized, by appointing Brooks to the Pentagon post, President Obama "is surrendering national security." Putting Brooks in a Department of Defense policy office "is like Lyndon Johnson making Jane Fonda a senior adviser on Vietnam."
At least in tone, the work of Brooks, a former special counsel to the president at
George Soros's
Open Society Institute, bears more than a passing resemblance to that of radical feminist
Catharine MacKinnon, another left-wing law professor. Like MacKinnon, an anti-pornography crusader, Brooks is openly contemptuous of the First Amendment, which guarantees press freedoms. Brooks favors a
government takeover of media outlets funded by taxpayer dollars.
Brooks also suffers from acute so-called
Bush Derangement Syndrome. In a 2006
Los Angeles Times column, Brooks, who is now on leave from her teaching job at
Georgetown University Law School, described President George W. Bush as the nation's "torturer-in-chief." Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "should be treated like psychotics who need treatment," Brooks
wrote in 2007. Two weeks before Election Day 2008, Brooks
opined that the Republican Party was the bastion of "paranoid, rage-driven, xenophobic nuts."
Brooks has also written that
al Qaeda was "little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs" that "did not pose an imminent mortal threat to the nation." U.S. policies transformed the terrorist group into "the vast global threat the [Bush] administration imagined it to be in 2001."
As recently as March, Brooks
ridiculed Department of Justice memos that justified using enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorists. Invoking the specter of Hitler, Brooks said that "the Bush administration's big legal lies paved the way for some of the most shameful episodes in our history, including the official authorization of torture."