Former CIA Director Leon Panetta (2009-2011) was among the featured speakerson the final day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on August 22 when Kamala Harris accepted the party’s nomination as its presidential candidate.

In his remarks, Panetta reinvoked the supposed glory days of the Obama administration when he gave the order to U.S. Special Forces to assassinate Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

DNC Convention Features Former CIA Director Who Was in Charge of Drone Programs that Killed Thousands

 Jeremy Kuzmarov

Panetta said that Harris would fit the bill as a “tough commander-in-chief to defend the USA against tyrants and terrorists.”

According to Panetta, Harris “knows a tyrant when she sees one” and “will stand up to them”—unlike Donald Trump, whom Panetta suggested had coddled dictators such as Vladimir Putin and effectively told them “they could do whatever they want.”

Panetta said that Trump is intent on “bringing back a new era of isolationism in U.S. foreign policy,” which the U.S. “foolishly and dangerously adopted in the 1930s.”

Quoting from Ronald Reagan, Panetta emphasized that “isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical government.”

Panetta ended his speech by highlighting that Harris was a good choice to reinvigorate American world leadership as she “has worked with 150 foreign leaders as Vice President,” served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and “worked closely with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to fight back against Russia and to protect [Ukraine’s] democracy.”

Panetta’s speech was filled with falsehoods. Ukraine, for example, is not a democracy as Zelensky has banned 12 opposition parties, canceled elections, outlawed the Russian Orthodox Church, and assassinated political rivals.

Trump never also allowed Putin to do whatever he wanted; rather, Trump—who is not an isolationist—adopted a hard-line, anti-Russia policy, pulling out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty while ratcheting up sanctions on Russia and arms supplies to Ukraine during his presidency.

Additionally, the U.S. never adopted isolationism in the 1930s. The country became a global empire in the late 19th century with its colonization of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and FDR embarked on a major naval build-up in the Asia-Pacific in the 1930s that led to the Pacific War.

Panetta’s speech at the DNC epitomized the Democratic Party’s evolution into a party of arch-imperialists and war hawks in the 21st century.

Neoconservative Bill Kristol, the Iraq War’s chief intellectual cheerleader, who has endorsed Kamala Harris, tweeted: “Leon Panetta quoting Ronald Reagan! my kind of Democratic convention.”

Many of the themes in Panetta’s speech were echoed by Harris in her coronation speech.

She placed herself on Donald Trump’s right when she criticized Trump for “threatening to abandon NATO,” for supposedly “encouraging Putin to invade Ukraine,” and for “cozying up to dictators like Putin and Kim Jong Un of North Korea” whom Harris said were a menace to world peace.[1]

Harris is reportedly very close to Hillary “the Hawk” Clinton, the Democratic Party nominee in 2016 whom Leon Panetta enthusiastically endorsed.

When Panetta spoke at the convention that year in Philadelphia, his speech was drowned out with chants of “no more war” from anti-war activists from the Oregon delegation, prompting organizers to turn the lights out in their section.

Panetta’s 2016 speech praised Hillary Clinton for supporting the Obama administration’s decision to go after Osama bin Laden and again made the claim that Trump praised dictators from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin.

Panetta, additionally, attacked Trump for allegedly calling on the Russians to hack Clinton’s emails, claiming falsely that “Donald Trump took Russia’s side” and “asked the Russians to engage in American politics. Trump wants to be president when he is asking one of our adversaries to engage in hacking our intelligence efforts against the USA to affect an election.”

These latter comments reflect Panetta’s role in spreading disinformation as part of the Russia- Gate hoax, which created a toxic Russophobic environment in the U.S. that has driven public support for the Ukraine proxy war and new Cold War.

By smearing Trump as a Russian agent, Panetta was reinvoking the rhetoric of McCarthyism and the extreme right-wing John Birch Society of the Cold War era that baselessly accused Republican President Dwight Eisenhower of being a Soviet agent along with such hawkish figures in the national security establishment as Walt W. Rostow.

Panetta himself has a right-wing background, having served in U.S. military intelligence during the Cold War and in the Nixon administration.

In October 2020, Panetta and a group of 50 other former senior intelligence officials signed a letter stating the Hunter Biden laptop controversy had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation,” which was entirely untrue.

As CIA Director, Panetta spread disinformation in support of the illegal U.S. invasion of Libya and told lies about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Seymour Hersh wrote that his story about bin Laden was “so full of lies, misstatements, and betrayals that it might have been written by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland.”[2]

When Panetta was appointed in 2011 as Defense Secretary, Philip Crawford and David Henderson, peace activists from Panetta’s hometown of Monterey, California, penned an article arguing that Panetta was a war criminal for supporting extraordinary rendition practices dating to the Clinton era and for helping to coordinate the U.S. drone war in the Middle-East.[3]

Citing a Pakistani newspaper report that pointed to an 8% success rate for drone strikes, Crawford and Henderson wrote that, “as director of the CIA, Mr. Panetta has been in charge of CIA programs that killed hundreds, if not thousands of people in Pakistan.”

In June 2009, a CIA drone fired a Hellfire missile that destroyed a suspected militant hideout in a border village in Pakistan, burying a family inside the ruins of the building.

When rescuers rushed to help the injured, the hovering drone fired a second missile, killing 13 of those seeking to help the victims of the first strike.

On the next day, a funeral procession for the dead was also hit, killing 80 civilians.

Crawford and Henderson emphasized that the CIA drone strikes described above were in clear violation of the Geneva Convention that outlaws attacks against civilians.

Panetta should thus be considered a war criminal, along with his former boss, Barack Obama, who also gave a keynote speech at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/08/29/dnc-convention-features-former-cia-director-who-was-in-charge-of-drone-programs-that-killed-thousands/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.