Leon Panetta Should Resign

by John Hawkins | June 15, 2009 9:25 am

This is what happens when you take a political hack like Leon Panetta[1] and put him in charge of the CIA,

CIA director Leon Panetta says it’s almost as if former vice president Dick Cheney would like to see another attack on the United States to prove he is right in criticizing President Barack Obama for abandoning the “harsh interrogation” of terrorism suspects.

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue,” Panetta said in an interview published in The New Yorker magazine’s June 22 issue.

“It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”

Obama’s decision to put Panetta, who knows nothing about intelligence work, in charge of the CIA while there’s a war on terror going on tells you how serious Obama is about fighting it. Meanwhile, people across the world are looking to Iran and scratching their heads, wondering if the CIA has done anything to help the people.

Guess not, since terrorism has apparently taken a backseat to taking cheap political potshots. Move over, Osama Bin Laden; apparently the CIA has new top target: Dick Cheney. Sure, Osama Bin Laden may be responsible for 9/11, but Dick Cheney committed a greater sin in the eyes of the Obama Administration: he humiliated them in the debate over enhanced interrogation.

PS: Republicans should be calling for Leon Panetta to step down over this remark, so we can get a competent CIA director who knows something about fighting terrorism and is more interested in doing it than playing political games.