CIA Director Leon E. Panetta talks with the Commonwealth Club about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and other issues threatening America's national security.
He describes how the CIA is responding to these threats, and discusses his plans for the Agency's future.
Bio
Gloria Duffy
Gloria Duffy is President and CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California.
Gloria Duffy previously served as US Special Coordinator for Cooperative Threat Reduction and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration. Her mission was to convince the countries of the former Soviet Union to give up their weapons of mass destruction, and to prevent the spread of their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and material.
In years prior, she was the first Executive Director of Ploughshares Fund, a public charitable grant making foundation in San Francisco; Assistant Director of the Arms Control Association, a public interest group in Washington, DC; editor of Arms Control Today, and a resident consultant at the RAND Corporation.
A San Francisco native, Dr. Duffy holds M.A., M. Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Columbia University in New York, and an A.B. magna cum laude from Occidental College in Los Angeles. Gloria has also worked with the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, and been a member of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation since 1980.
Leon Panetta
Leon Edward Panetta became the 19th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on 13 February 2009. As Director, he leads the Agency and manages human intelligence and open source collection programs on behalf of the Intelligence Community.
Mr. Panetta has dedicated much of his life to public service. Before joining CIA, he spent 10 years co-directing with his wife, Sylvia, the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, based at California State University, Monterey Bay. The Institute is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit center that seeks to instill in young men and women the virtues and values of public service. In March 2006, he was chosen as a member of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan committee established at the urging of Congress to conduct an independent assessment of the war in Iraq.
From July 1994 to January 1997, Mr. Panetta served as Chief of Staff to President Clinton. Prior to that, he was Director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position that built on his years of work on the House Budget Committee. Mr. Panetta represented California’s 16th (now 17th) Congressional District from 1977 to 1993, rising to Budget Committee chairman during his final four years in Congress.
Mr. Panetta holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and a law degree, both from Santa Clara University. He was born on 28 June 1938 in Monterey, where his Italian immigrant parents operated a restaurant. Later, they purchased a farm in Carmel Valley, a place Director and Mrs. Panetta continue to call home. The Panettas have three grown sons and five grandchildren.
Principal intelligence and counterintelligence agency of the U.S., established in 1947 as a successor to the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services. The law limits its activities to foreign countries; it is prohibited from gathering intelligence on U.S. soil, which is a responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Officially a part of the U.S. Defense Department, it is responsible for preparing analyses for the National Security Council. Its budget is kept secret. Though intelligence gathering is its chief occupation, the CIA has also been involved in many covert operations, including the expulsion of Mohammad Mosaddeq from Iran (1953), the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (1961), and support of the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s.
Did the United States of America become a pacifist country or are the above comments a miss-underestimation of the U.S.A.'s will to defend its interest ?
Who writes these screenplays for this diaphanous nefarious thing talking , saturday night live is my guess , CIA panacea is to shoot up every country till the entire world becomes emollient , good luck on that one , if you had a country invade and destroy every infrastructure beyond repair ,you would not have forbearance , not at all , you would be labyrinthine with rage and strapping a gun on to defend your sempiternal DU contaminated little piece of earth , this is so ineffably disturbing to hear him "oink" , "meow" & "roar" his patriotic verbal diarrhea , i think i,ll head to the bar and drown myself , maybe serendipity will save me from the nightmare sure to follow after digesting this .
member. 
