The Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow on the confirmation of President Obama’s nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan. There are a number of questions Brennan should and needs to answer but the hearing presents the perfect opportunity to get the current top Obama administration counterterrorism official perhaps most closely involved in the targeted killing program against al Qaeda to answer the fundamental question about it: when does it end?

Since his first bid to direct the Agency fizzled in 2008 after questions were raised about his role in the CIA torture program during the Bush years, Brennan has filled an at times more vital role in the Obama administration. Acting as the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, serving under the National Security Adviser, Brennan has advised the President on counterterrorism for the past four years. As such, his access to the President to weigh in on security matters domestic and international has been almost unparalleled. In the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day bombing in 2009, Brennan authored a scathing review of what was then U.S. counterterrorism policy. While the Newtown tragedy was still ongoing last December, it was Brennan who first briefed Obama about the school shooting.

Brennan’s most controversial role has been his front-and-center position in the Administration’s military campaign against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The use of targeted killings — most famously executed with drones — against individuals and groups suspect of connection to terrorist groups off the battlefield is by far the most visible outcome of those discussions. In a profile written in the Washington Post, Brennan is identified as the primary supporter of codifying the rules regarding when and where armed drone strikes could be carried out into what’s now called “the playbook” and the benign-sounding disposition matrix that identifies targets for strikes.

So Brennan, then, is ideally positioned to answer the fundamental question that needs to be answered to get a hold on America’s targeted killing program:

What role do targeted killings play in the broader U.S. counter-terrorism strategy and under what circumstances might we cease to employ them?

The question goes beyond the tactic of drone strikes to the conditions that cause them to be used in the first place. As a tactic, drone strikes have garnered significant opposition due to the potential for blowback among the populations where they are utilized, as well as the secrecy that surrounds the CIA’s classified program in Pakistan and moral questions about the serious harm cost in civilian lives the program carries with it. However, whether the program is achieving the ends that the Obama administration seeks, or even an explanation of what those ends are, is often left out of the debate and questioning of government officials.

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Senate Armed Services Committee chair Carl Levin (D-MI) will reportedly delay the committee’s vote on Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be the next Secretary of Defense. Republicans are demanding that Hagel produce the texts of private speeches he made and disclose the financial dealings of private companies he is associated with. A spokesperson for Levin told ThinkProgress that the committee is “working on their concerns.”

The vote was expected to take place as early as Thursday, but Republicans — led by Sens. James Inhofe (R-OK) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) — asked that the vote be delayed after Hagel — citing legal and logistics issues — said he could not give the them everything they’re asking for.

“It’s up in the air,” the committee staffer told Politico. “Levin isn’t interested in pushing it through against their will. We’re trying to resolve their concerns, and hopefully we can get it addressed by tomorrow,” a committee staffer told Politico on Wednesday.

But now it seems like those concerns won’t be met and it’s unclear just how they can or should be addressed at all, seeing that Hagel has said he doesn’t have the texts of all his private speeches and the business dealings of private companies and organizations Hagel is affiliated with is, as the Atlantic’s Steve Clemons points out, “going to be a really fun slippery slope”:

The entangled relationships of all US senators and spouses would be screened to see what they might be able to cough up about firms they have some connection to but don’t run.

I don’t think we should go down that road — but if Senator Cruz compels it, it should be interesting.

“The committee’s vote on Senator Hagel’s nomination has not been scheduled,” Levin said today in a statement. “I had hoped to hold a vote on the nomination this week, but the committee’s review of the nomination is not yet complete. I intend to schedule a vote on the nomination as soon as possible.”

“If we’re really going to go down this route,” TPM’s Josh Marshall writes, “is it time to air the fact that AEI is partly funded by secret grants by the Taiwanese government (at least as of mid-last decade)?”

The Hill reports Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, plans to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), with the committee’s chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) this year. CISPA passed the House in 2012 despite significant organized opposition from privacy advocates, but was not considered by the Senate as it focused on its own cybersecurity proposal — one which also stalled, leading to reports the White House plans to issue a cybersecurity executive order calling for the creation of a voluntary program including minimum safety standards in critical infrastructure sectors.

CISPA proposed making information sharing between private companies and the intelligence agencies easier in order to allow collaborative responses to cyberattacks, likely at the expense of internet users’ privacy. While the bill enjoyed the support of many major companies including Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Symantec, AT&T and Verizon, civil liberties organizations expressed major doubts about the proposal and continue to do so. In a comment about renewed interest in CISPA to ThinkProgress today, Gregory T. Nojeim, Director of the Project on Freedom, Security & Technology at the Center for Democracy & Technology said:

“CISPA is deeply flawed. Under a broad cybersecurity umbrella, it permits companies to share user communications directly with the super secret National Security Agency and permits the NSA to use that information for non-cybersecurity reasons. This risks turning the cybersecurity program into a back door intelligence surveillance program run by a military entity with little transparency or public accountability. Members should seriously consider whether CISPA — which inflamed grassroots activists last year and was under a veto threat for these and other flaws — is the right place to start.”

The White House is expected to release a cybersecurity executive order after the State of the Union, although rumors of its imminence have been floating around since September. Nojeim noted that last year there were reasons to be optimistic about the cybersecurity executive order when rumors of it first emerged — including the White House’s threat to veto CISPA.

The executive order wouldn’t be the first foray into cybersecurity for President Obama: He signed a secret directive that redefined some cybersecurity actions previously deemed offensive as defensive in October as part of an effort to enable military personal to be more proactive in thwarting cyberattacks. The move occurred around the same time Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned of an impending “cyber-Pearl Harbor.”

The threat of cyber attacks on public and private infrastructure is very real, as demonstrated by the huge jump in incidents involving critical infrastructure requiring the involvement of U.S. Industrial Control System Cyber Emergency Response Team jumping from 9 in 2009 to 198 in 2011.

Outside of traditionally defined critical infrastructure, other sectors have also been the target of recent high profile cybersecurity breaches, including many major newspapers and banks.

Former Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright today said that military strikes on Iran would not completely end its nuclear program.

Appearing at a conference of the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled “Dealing with a Nuclear Iran,” Cartwright laid out what he saw as the difficulties inherent in launching a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program. Topping the former General’s list: the inability of any attack to wipe out the intellectual capital developed by Iran during its research.

An attack on Iran then would be one of delay, according to Cartwright, rather than denying Iran the ability to conduct further uranium enrichment. “You will not kill all of the intellectual capital,” Cartwright said, indicating that would take “tens of years” of occupation if that was the goal of a military strike. “If we want somebody to ‘uninvent’ [knowledge], that’s pretty unrealistic,” Cartwright said.

The calculus that states face today is whether they want to pursue nuclear weapons, Cartwright said, not whether they would have the ability. Iran has not made that choice, Cartwright continued, echoing the assessment of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities. Asked about the worry that the use of force against Iran would prompt the regime to accelerate towards obtaining a nuclear weapon, Cartwright responded that any military activities would have to be considered appropriate to change Iran’s decisions, rather than “reinforce where they were heading.”

The use of military force should only be considered, Cartwright went on, when there is “a problem that diplomacy has run out of tools for, and we want to reset that, so that at the end of conflict, those tools work again.” That reset has to be one that continues to serve an overall diplomatic solution. “You do not end in military conflict,” Cartwright said, noting that planners have to ensure that military tools used fit the desired end state. The policy outlined by the former second highest ranking military officer in the armed services lines up closely with the Obama administration’s stance of “all options remain on the table” when confronting Iran.

Cartwright made sure to stress that those diplomatic tools — including economic sanctions as well as direct talks — have not run out in dealing with Iran. Those talks have to be sure to not be one-sided affairs that include no “win.” “If you’re going to negotiate, you need to understand [your counterpart's] needs, wants and aspirations,” Cartwright said. Finding a way to guarantee Iran’s fears related to its sovereignty, then, “should be a part of the calculation in finding a solution space.” Negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 are scheduled to restart at the end of February in Kazakhstan, after a delay of several months.

Cartwright’s talk mirrored previous statements he’s made on the subject, including when testifying before Congress. Many of the concerns voiced by Cartwright also appeared in a report from The Iran Project on potential military strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. That report, signed on to many of Cartwright’s former colleagues in the armed services, warned that any strike on Iran would be difficult in nature, with the costs most possibly outweighing the benefits.

One of the more ridiculous criticisms of Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be Secretary of Defense is the claim that the government of Iran is rooting for him. The idea is that Iran’s rulers are somehow encouraged by President Obama having chosen a Secretary of Defense who has voiced concerns about the possible consequences of a U.S. attack on Iran (concerns shared, of course, by both previous Secretaries of Defense.) The fact that the sum total of evidence for this claim is one misleading CBS News headline (to a story in which the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman responded to the nomination with boilerplate language hoping for “practical changes” to U.S. foreign policy) hasn’t stopped it from hardening into the newest article of neoconservative faith.

In today’s New York Times, RAND Iran analyst Alireza Nader responds to these claims. “The Iranian regime is hardly cheering Hagel on,” Nader writes, “despite what some of his critics say.”

Yes, Hagel sounds cautious about a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but such a campaign isn’t what keeps the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, up at night. An American strike would spur the Iranian public to rally around the flag and buck up a wobbling, wheezing theocracy — and an Israeli strike would do so in spades.

The Iranian leadership’s real worry is not American planes but Iranian protesters. Their deepest anxieties revolve around a Persian version of Tahrir Square, a replay of the 2009 Green uprising that wasn’t ended by the regime’s violent repression. Strange as it may sound, the Islamic Republic is a lot more frightened of the imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh than it is of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As such, Hagel’s nomination was greeted in Tehran with a shrug, not a sigh of relief. The Islamic Republic hardly thinks that with Hagel nominated, it’s off the nuclear hook. Iran’s leaders see U.S. “hostility” as institutionalized and systematized, not produced by partisan politics or individual appointments. As Hossein Salami, a top-ranking Revolutionary Guards officer, said of Hagel, “We view the United States as a political and ideological system driven by its strategic interests rather than by individual politicians.”

“What the Islamic Republic fears most isn’t that American officials will be blustery and belligerent,” Nader concludes. “It’s that they will be patient and pragmatic.”

The idea that Iran’s rulers are pleased by the prospect of a Secretary of Defense who is cautious about military force (and would be displeased by a Secretary of Defense who appeared less cautious) is based in a fundamental misreading of what the regime actually fears. But don’t expect the fact that President Obama’s efforts to reasonably engage with Iran have done more to isolate it than all of the Bush administration’s threats ever did to make any dent in U.S. hawks’ apparently unshakeable belief in the transformative power of bluster.