Leon Panetta, former U.S. secretary of defense and director of the CIA under the Obama administration, is facing ongoing criticism for characterizing Israel’s move to target the pagers and walkie-talkies of Hezbollah operatives last week as international terrorism.
“I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism,” he told CBS News on Sunday. “This is going right into the supply chain, right into the supply chain. And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question, what the hell is next?”
Panetta, also White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and a longtime Democratic House representative for California, conceded being concerned about the incident by America’s only Democratic ally in the Middle East. “This is a tactic. That has repercussions. And we really don’t know what those repercussions are going to be,” he said.
The 86-year-old demurred when pressed by anchor Lee Cowan if Israel should receive condemnation or if other countries should intervene.
“I think it’s going to be very important for the nations of the world to have a serious discussion. About whether or not this is an area that everybody has to focus on, because if they don’t try to deal with it now. Mark my word, it is the battlefield of the future,” Panetta replied.
The statements provoked immediate pushback.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, responsible for convicting the terrorist mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, disagreed with Panetta’s rhetoric, writing that he “still can’t get over how demagogically moronic this allegation from this source is.”
David Friedman, former U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Trump administration, wrote that “this is the thinking within the Obama/Biden/Harris universe—it empowers the real terrorists and places America and its allies at real risk.”
Conservative talk-radio host Mark Levin said X that the discourse depicted the Obama administration’s secretary of defense as “another longtime failure.”
