Latest news with #LeonPanetta
The Independent
27-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Former CIA director says people must understand ‘how dangerous a world we live in right now' in the wake of Trump's Iran strike
Leon Panetta, the former director of the CIA during Barack Obama 's first term, has warned that President Donald Trump 's decision to bomb Iran – and the intelligence disputes surrounding it – only serve to emphasize 'how dangerous a world we live in right now.' Panetta, 86, who also served as Bill Clinton 's chief of staff and currently co-hosts the foreign policy podcast One Decision, told The i Paper: 'I don't think there's any alternative but to understand how dangerous a world we live in right now. 'Not only because of the adversaries that are out there – whether it's China, or Russia, or North Korea, or Iran, or terrorism – but also because of the concerns about leadership, and whether or not the U.S. will exercise the right kind of leadership in a dangerous world.' After Israel launched air strikes against Iran on Friday June 13 as part of its Operation Rising Lion offensive, intended to stop Tehran developing a nuclear weapon, Trump initially kept his distance before dropping bunker-busting bombs on three Iranian uranium enrichment sites over the weekend. In the run-up, the president dismissed the significance of his own Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard briefing Congress in March that Iran was not currently advancing its efforts to build a weapon of mass destruction. He also sidelined her from Situation Room meetings discussing the conflict but offered no evidence of his own to contradict her assessment. The president and his administration have since attacked The New York Times and CNN for reporting on a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that found the damage done to the Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan facilities was not as severe as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had indicated. Responding to those tensions, Panetta said: 'There's no question that when the U.S. president makes a statement that our intelligence assessments are wrong and doesn't believe our own intelligence, that creates a very dangerous moment. 'It undermines the work of our intelligence professionals who really are focused on trying to provide the president with the truth. When the president questions their credibility, that certainly undermines their morale, I'm sure. 'But secondly, it also creates a real problem for the president, because if he rejects the intelligence he's receiving, then what will be the basis for the decisions that he makes in the future, and that is a very scary prospect.' The former official added: 'I have always been confident about our intelligence assessments with regards to Iran… The fundamental question is: did they make a decision to proceed with developing a weapon? And I think our intelligence indicates that that still was not the case.' For Panetta, the episode provides the latest example of Trump's 'unpredictability' as a leader, which poses a risk to America's NATO allies, who met this week in the Netherlands, at a time of heightened international unease. 'It really does rest with our European allies to do everything necessary to make sure that NATO is prepared militarily, to be able to respond if necessary,' he said.
CNN
27-06-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Former Defense Secy.: Iranian nuclear facilities damage assessment will take weeks
Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta explains why it will take time for an accurate assessment of the damage done to Iran's nuclear facilities and tells CNN's Wolf Blitzer what he thought of today's Pentagon news conference.
The Hill
26-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Iranian ‘sleeper cells': What to know about US warnings
The Trump administration has warned of Iranian 'sleeper cells' operating in America as the United States braces for Tehran's response to strikes on three of its nuclear sites over the weekend. Sleeper cells generally refer to foreign agents who lie low, going about their seemingly normal daily life, until called on to carry out a mission or attack. NBC News reported that Iran sent a communique to President Trump in the days before the strikes threatening sleeper-cell terrorist attacks inside the U.S. in retaliation. Former national security and defense officials say the threat should be taken seriously, even if it's less likely than other forms of Iranian retaliation. 'Look, they operate that way, not just in the United States, but around the world,' former Defense secretary and CIA chief Leon Panetta told CNN earlier this week. 'That's something that Iran is very capable of and has shown that it can do that in other areas.' Retired Gen. Wesley Clark told MSNBC he believed Iranian agents in the U.S. could 'self-activate' in response to American bombings, potentially seeking to murder certain officials or blow up the electric grid. However, he said there was a 'low probability' of such attacks, and that an Iran-linked militia attacking U.S. troops in the Middle East was more likely. Javed Ali, a former counterterrorism director at the National Security Council during Trump's first term, said Iran had little to gain from any direct attacks on the U.S. 'I don't think we're in a threat window where Iran is going to respond against the United States anywhere. I just think it would be completely counterproductive to the position that they're in,' he said, citing the fragile ceasefire between Iran and Israel. Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and former executive of the RAND Corporation, said cyberattacks linked to Iran were an 'omnipresent threat … that probably has become sharpened in the past week,' while a lone wolf attack was the 'preeminent threat.' The Department of Homeland Security warned Sunday that American networks could face low-level cyberattacks by either Tehran-affiliated or pro-Iran independent hackers. Iran-aligned hackers took credit for an attack over the weekend on Truth Social, Trump's social media network. The threat posed by Iran on American soil has been a recurring issue as tensions with Tehran rise and fall. The U.S. has accused Iranian individuals of plots to kill Trump, his former national security adviser John Bolton and former Secretary or State Mike Pompeo. In 2011, authorities foiled a plan to kill Saudi Arabia's then-ambassador to the United States using a bomb in Georgetown's Cafe Milano. Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian American used car salesman, was allegedly recruited by his cousin, a senior official in Iran's Quds Force. But the plan fell apart after Arbabsiar attempted to partner with a Mexican drug cartel member who was actually a federal informant. 'Amateurish on the one hand, but at the same time, that's a chilling determination. That would have been a major terrorist incident,' said Hoffman. 'Time and time again, it seemed like the people who were given the task to carry out those types of missions here were not professionals,' said Ali. The Trump administration has linked it's latest warnings to former President Biden's immigration policies, suggesting would-be Iranian terrorists were allowed to cross the border. 'I think it's a real threat,' said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of sleeper cells Wednesday on Fox News. 'This is just a carryover of the disastrous open border policies of Joe Biden,' he added. A memo sent Saturday from Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, obtained by The Hill's sister network NewsNation, said 'thousands of Iranian nationals have been documented entering the United States illegally and countless more were likely in the known and unknown got-a-ways.' 'Though we have not received any specific credible threats to share with you all currently, the threat of sleeper cells or sympathizers acting on their own, or at the behest of Iran has never been higher,' Scott added. During a Senate hearing Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi sidestepped a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-La.) about whether Iran had sleeper cells in the United States. 'We have thus far arrested 1,500 illegal Iranians in our country,' Bondi said after a pause. 'That is something that I would like to talk about in a classified setting.' Trump officials have also broadcast the arrests of 11 Iranian nationals they said were unlawfully present in the United States in separate cases over the weekend, including one man they claimed was an Iranian army sniper until 2021. Ali, who has been out of government since 2018, questioned whether sleeper cells could have gone undetected by American law enforcement. 'Are there people under investigation by FBI with links to the Quds Force or MOIS here in the United States? Maybe,' he said. 'But does it mean that they're part of actual attack cells? Also an open question. And if they were, then why weren't they arrested?'
Euronews
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
Will Trump really pull US troops out of Europe?
History may repeat itself, but not always with the same impact. In 2012, when then-US defence secretary Leon Panetta announced the withdrawal of two combat brigades - roughly 8,000 troops - from Europe in order to reduce military spending, western European governments shrugged it off. When US president Donald Trump mused this year about withdrawing US forces from Europe, it sent barely concealed shockwaves through European chancelleries. The difference: Panetta at the time said America's security commitments to Europe and to NATO were "unwavering". By contrast, Trump has threatened not to protect NATO members that spend too little on defence. And his own vice president and defence secretary made disparaging comments about European allies in a now-infamous group chat earlier this year, with defence chief Pete Hegseth expressing his 'loathing of European free-loading', according to the Atlantic magazine. Get the difference? On the eve of the NATO summit in The Hague this week, the chatter about the US military leaving Europe for good has somewhat subsided. Yet, European diplomats do fear an announcement by Trump after the summit. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a Euronews request for comment. Reason enough to hear from top US military experts whether they think a massive US troop withdrawal is on the cards and what the impact of such a move would be for the United States – logistically, financially and politically. First in line is the US ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, a lawyer by education, whose task has increasingly tended to soothing nervous European allies. 'Look, European security is on top of my mind,' he said at a recent public forum in Brussels. 'America needs allies, we can't do it all alone. And the reports on the US drawing down its troop presence are absolutely not true. Everything else we will discuss with our allies.' Right now, the US has nearly 84,000 active service members in Europe, according to the US European Command (EUCOM) in Stuttgart. The total number varies due to planned exercises and regular rotations of troops in and out of the continent. For example, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, some 20,000 were deployed to states neighbouring Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to support Ukraine and contain the conflict. Over the course of the war, the total number of troops has ranged between approximately 75,000 and 105,000 military personnel, primarily from the Air Force, Army, and Navy. The bulk of those troops is stationed in Germany (40,000), Poland (14,000), Italy (13,000) and the UK (10,000) with the rest scattered across the continent from Norway to Turkey. The practical logistics of a US withdrawal from Europe, such as redeployments to the US or elsewhere, would be significant and time-consuming. 'If this were to happen in a systematic manner, it would take many months, probably at least a year,' Mark Cancian, a retired colonel and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, told Euronews. 'The entire equipment, every tank, needs to be prepared and shipped. Then the families of the soldiers need to be shipped and finally the service members themselves,' he added. 'All in all, a quarter of a million people might be impacted, maybe more.' The biggest problem would be where they might go. 'Current bases in the US could absorb 5,000 people, maybe 10,000,' Cancian said. 'But the rest? It would take years to build new facilities.' Whether Trump would decide something of that strategic and political magnitude the effects of which would only almost certainly be seen beyond his presidential term is more than doubtful, according to Ian Lesser, a senior political analyst at the German Marshall Fund (GMF), a transatlantic think tank. 'We already saw an attempt by Trump to withdraw a sizable force from Europe during his first term, which only met considerable resistance from the security community in the US and was eventually shelved by President Biden,' Lesser told Euronews. The US Congress would also have to approve the withdrawal, which is not certain given the number of defence hawks, especially in the Senate. A recent bipartisan draft proposal by Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal on tougher anti-Russian sanctions reportedly has the backing of up to 90 of the 100 senators. 'Trump has no desire to look weak. But a dramatic reduction of the American military footprint in Europe would do exactly that to him,' Lesser said. In addition, a large part of the US forces in Europe are not members of combat brigades, which typically consist of about 5,000 soldiers each, but support troops who man a huge military infrastructure, especially in Germany. Historically, Ramstein Air Base, for instance, and its neighbouring Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest American hospital outside the United States, played a key role in supporting forward military operations, especially in the Middle East. 'It would make little sense to announce plans to withdraw US troops from Europe the moment there is an escalating war happening between Israel and Iran,' former US ambassador William Courtney told Euronews. 'And it would probably lead to massive criticism,' added Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, a global think tank. And then there are Trump's efforts to mediate in the war in Ukraine. 'Trump viewed a US troop withdrawal in connection with his strong hopes for an end of the war and improved relations with Moscow. Yet, it turned out there is no basis for that, no possibility, the negotiating positions of Russia and Ukraine being too far apart,' Courtney said. Were US troops to be withdrawn, Europe would have to replace the entire military infrastructure currently provided by the US at all levels, according to a study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) based in London. That means bases, training areas, weaponry and ammunition, administrative and organisational architecture, intelligence provisions and much more. This comes with a hefty price tag: the nine authors of the IISS study estimate that replacing the US contribution to NATO with European assets would amount to approximately $1 trillion (€870 billion). It's not clear what the cost of a US troop withdrawal would mean for the US taxpayer. None of the experts quoted in this article was ready to advance a number. That's one reason none of them considered such a decision as very likely. 'No way,' Daniel Runde told Euronews, a senior advisor with Washington-based consulting firm BGR Group and author of The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power. 'Trump will absolutely not do it. His aim is to get the Europeans to spend 5% of their GDP on defence. Then he will move on.'
Bloomberg
24-06-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Trump Sees Path to De-Escalate After Iran Barrage
"Balance of Power: Late Edition" focuses on the intersection of politics and global business. On today's show, Former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, shares his thoughts on Iran firing missiles at a US base in Qatar and the US intercepting the attack. Jeffrey Lewis, Professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, discusses roughly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium being stashed somewhere in Iran and what Iran could possibly do with that amount. Rep. Becca Balint (D) Vermont shares her thoughts on whether or not members of Congress should still push through with a vote on a war powers resolution even if President Trump states he no longer intends any additional military attack against Iran. (Source: Bloomberg)
