Leon Panetta: Open Mouth, Insert Foot

Until his July 1 appointment as the new Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta was head of the torture/murderer agency known as the CIA. Now he has an obvious problem: Until now, he could count on his foot-in-mouth escapades being kept secret by his agency. No sooner does he operate out in the open as Secretary of Defense then he promptly puts his foot right back in his mouth. During a visit to Baghdad last Monday, he told a group of 150 soldiers at Camp Victory that they were in Iraq because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Panetta told the troops, “The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked. And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaida. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.’’

Panetta’s spokesman Doug Wilson later tried to explain away Panetta’s blunder to journalists in attendance. In vain, because every little kid now knows that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had nothing to do with either the 9/11 attacks or with al-Qaida. On the contrary, bomb-throwers of every stripe were on dangerous ground if they dared enter Iraq. Al-Qaida terrorists didn’t become active in Iraq until the appearance of U.S. occupation troops in the country. But immediately following the 9/11 attacks, neoconservative hawks in the Bush administration, particularly Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, claimed Saddam Hussein was allied with Osama bin Laden and used that to justify an invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was all exposed as propaganda rather quickly in the U.S. media. When the ex-CIA chief again tries to perpetrate that swindle on the public eight years after the invasion it indicates that choosing the wrong people for top jobs in the American political system is still working flawlessly.