RUTHFULLY YOURS

Leon Panetta, one of the 51 former national security officials most connected to the Obama-Biden administration, who sullied his reputation by falsely claiming in a partisan pre-election open letter that the Hunter Biden laptop reporting bore the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation, has joined his co-author, John Brennan, in condemning Israel’s “Grim Beeper” operation.

As I detailed on Saturday, Brennan, who eventually succeeded Panetta as Obama’s CIA director, told NBC News last week that Israel’s infiltration of the communications of Hezbollah — which began bombing Israel in conjunction with Hamas’s October 7 atrocities — was an unacceptable form of warfare.

Panetta, who also served as Obama’s defense secretary, has one-upped Brennan, accusing Israel of executing “a form of terrorism.”

To reiterate what I contended in the column, it is difficult to quantify how idiotic such allegations are. Israel’s attack was narrowly targeted, discriminate, and proportional. To state the obvious, its targets were the operatives of a terrorist organization, which (a) has murdered hundreds of Americans and (b) has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization under federal law for 30 years.

Israel’s explosions were ingeniously designed to harm only the terrorist operatives to whom the terrorist organization distributed pagers in order to facilitate the planning of terrorist operations. Yet, according to Panetta’s meandering in a CBS interview on Sunday, this could amount to “a form of terrorism” because it is the exploitation of common communications devices: “The ability to place an explosive in technology that is very prevalent these days, and turn it into a war of terror” — indeed, “the battlefield of the future.”

Where to begin?

Under federal law, international terrorism refers to activities that involve violent acts that violate the criminal law of the United States or any foreign state and that are intended to intimidate a civilian population or force a government to change policy. By contrast, Israel is in a defensive war against Iran-backed jihadists on multiple fronts, meaning its operations are governed by the laws of war, not criminal law-enforcement standards; and Israel neither targeted Lebanon’s civilian population nor attacked Lebanon’s (Hezbollah-dominated) government — instead, it attacked Hezbollah, a jihadist force incorporated within Iran’s military structure, in order to try to break its will, which is the legitimate objective of warfare.

Even if Hezbollah were not itself a terrorist organization, it would still be asinine to describe as “terrorism” targeted, proportional attacks on enemy operatives with comparatively minor explosives (as military operations go) — explosives that are not prohibited under any international treaty to which Israel (or, for that matter, the United States or Lebanon . . . or anyone else) is a party.

Presumably, Panetta and Brennan would take umbrage at any suggestion that the Biden-Harris administration’s drone strike that killed ten civilians, including seven children, in Kabul in August 2021 was terrorism. They would insist, correctly, that it was a tragic error in a combat zone because American forces were trying to strike a suspected ISIS jihadist who posed an imminent threat.

As I recounted in the column, civilian deaths and other damage to civilian infrastructure from U.S. aerial strikes were a feature of Obama-administration counterterrorism — including in the years when Panetta and Brennan were among the top counterterrorism officials. The Obama administration itself estimated that between 64 and 116 civilians were killed in its drone strikes, a figure that other studies have found is laughably low (see, e.g., here).

By Panetta’s lights, then, if civilians who are minding their business at home or just walking down the street get killed by drone strikes — i.e., by a weapon the U.S. government knows often causes significant collateral damage — because they happen to be situated near a target Barack Obama and John Brennan decided, based on U.S. intelligence, was a terrorist, that is an unfortunate but inevitable result of lawful combat. By contrast, if a civilian happens to be harmed or killed by a much less powerful explosive implanted in a pager that the Israeli government believed, based on its intelligence, was assigned to a terrorist operative of a designated terrorist organization that is at war with Israel, that’s terrorism.

Sure, makes perfect sense.

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that top Obama-Biden administration officials made a conscious decision to grant Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief exclusively in exchange for hoped-for concessions on nuclear-weapons development but with no restrictions on terrorism promotion. At the time, not only were Obama-Biden officials fully aware that Iran was the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism; they openly conceded that at least some of those billions would go to Hezbollah and other terrorist operations that Iran funds globally. They knew they were, in effect, materially supporting terrorism but did so for what they decided was the greater good of trying — however futilely — to induce Iran’s cooperation and, ultimately, change Iran’s behavior.

I wonder if former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta would call such knowing facilitation of anti-American jihadists  “a form of terrorism”?