Category Archive 'David Petraeus'

12 Feb 2013

New Book Alleges John Brennan and CIA Spooks Took Out Petraeus

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The Daily Mail reports on spectacular accusations made by Benghazi: The Definitive Report, an eBook published yesterday, which apparently reveals the inside story behind the exposure and resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus.

David Petraeus was betrayed by his own bodyguards and vengeful high-ranking enemies in the CIA, who made sure his affair with his biographer was exposed to the public. …

Senior CIA officers targeted Petraeus because they didn’t like the way he was running the agency – focusing more on paramilitary operations than intelligence analysis. They used their political clout and their connections to force an FBI investigation of his affair with Paul Broadwell and make it public, according to ‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report.’

‘It was high-level career officers on the CIA who got the ball rolling on the investigation. It was basically a palace coupe to get Petraeus out of there,’ Jack Murphy, one of the authors, told MailOnline. …

Perhaps the most startling accusation in the book is that Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was leaked by the members of his personal protection detail.

The authors say that senior intelligence officers working on the 7th floor of Central Intelligence headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used their political clout to ensure that the FBI investigated the former Army general’s personal life.

They then told Petraeus that they would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t admit the affair and resign.

Hat tip to John Fund, who adds:

A lot of fact-checking will have to be done to substantiate the claims by Webb and Murphy. But from my own reporting, I have learned that no one runs afoul of senior CIA officials — or John Brennan — lightly or without peril. CIA officials angry at the Bush administration’s treatment of the agency in 2006 helped elevate the Valerie Plame affair into a national scandal and crippled much of the White House’s ability to conduct foreign policy. In the end, there was precious little evidence of any real security breach or wrongdoing beyond a perjury conviction of Scooter Libby, a top aide to Vice President Cheney.

14 Nov 2012

Petraeus Scandal Flowchart

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Courtesy of Gawker.

I was having trouble following who was doing what with whom under the table, and who all sent which emails to whom, and I still fail to understand what the FBI was doing investigating all this. It is quite clear why the axe falling was postponed until election day, however.

13 Nov 2012

How To Tell If You’re Part of the Petraeus Scandal

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Every American is naturally worried today that the FBI is poring over all his emails, tweets, and social media postings and concerned that the federal SWAT team may be arriving any minute now to knock down his door, search his house for incriminating evidence, and confiscate his PC.

The Borowitz Report offers comforting news that help in determining your personal vulnerability is on the way.

[T]he C.I.A. has published a new informational brochure entitled “How to Tell if You’re Involved in the Petraeus Scandal.”

The C.I.A. rushed to produce the brochure after it became clear that as many as one in three Americans may have some involvement in the Petraeus affair.

And with the scandal widening every day, “a lot of average folks out there are worried that they might somehow be involved in it without knowing,” says Carol Foyler, director of the C.I.A.’s public-information office. “This booklet should clear up a lot misunderstandings.”

The booklet includes a “simple, user-friendly checklist” that should help people determine whether they are at risk for being implicated in the scandal, she says.

“Have you ever met David Petraeus? Have you ever received and/or sent shirtless photos of an F.B.I. agent? Have you ever exchanged e-mails with Jill Kelley? Under five thousand pages of e-mails and you’re probably O.K., but anywhere between ten thousand and fifteen thousand pages of e-mails could potentially mean you’re involved in some way,” she says.

06 Apr 2011

Afghan Savages, Western Cowards

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You couldn’t hope to frame a better demonstration of the characteristic intellectual and moral confusion of the Western establishment leadership class than occurred over the last weekend.

In the United States, an absolute nobody, the Rev. Terry Jones of the ludicrously named “World Dove Outreach Center” in Gainesville, Florida, obviously feeling neglected since he had graciously canceled a burning of the Koran last year, got himself back into the news by putting the Islamic holy book on trial, finding it guilty, sentencing it, and carrying out his own Koran barbecue.

In the aftermath, in a variety of locations in Afghanistan, mobs of howling savages threw temper tantrums in response, blocking a main highway with burning tires, attacking US soldiers, storming a UN compound and brutally murdering seven innocent people with no connection whatsoever to Reverend Hookworms, and even immolating a effigy of Barack Obama.

The Encyclopedia Brittanica, one hundred years ago, described the same Afghan primitive:

The Afghans, inured to bloodshed from childhood, are familiar with death, and audacious in attack, but easily discouraged by failure; excessively turbulent and unsubmissive to law or discipline; apparently frank and affable in manner, especially when they hope to gain some object, but capable of the grossest brutality when that hope ceases. They are unscrupulous in perjury, treacherous, vain and insatiable, passionate in vindictiveness, which they will satisfy at the cost of their own lives and in the most cruel manner. Nowhere is crime committed on such trifling grounds, or with such general impunity, though when it is punished the punishment is atrocious. Among themselves the Afghans are quarrelsome, intriguing and distrustful; estrangements and affrays are of constant occurrence; the traveller conceals and misrepresents the time and direction of his journey. The Afghan is by breed and nature a bird of prey. If from habit and tradition he respects a stranger within his threshold, he yet considers it legitimate to warn a neighbour of the prey that is afoot, or even to overtake and plunder his guest after he has quitted his roof. The repression of crime and the demand of taxation he regards alike as tyranny.

The British of a century ago did not apologize for outbreaks of insane violence on the part of hirsute barbarians. They punished them and got on with it.

Today, any occurrence of native violence, proving all over again that we are dealing with the kind of people who are half-devil and half-child, instead of prompting the despatch of a useful punitive expedition to set an example long remembered among the hills instead produces a epidemic among our own elite of chin-stroking, grovelling, and bed-wetting.

Michael Walsh was appropriately indignant in the New York Post.

In a series of disgraceful statements, Sens. Harry Reid and Lindsey Graham, along with Gen. David Petraeus, have laid the blame for the unrest where it doesn’t belong: at the feet of the US Constitution.

Reid, the feckless Senate majority leader, said the body would “take a look” at Terry Jones’ actions in burning a copy of the Islamic holy book, and threatened hearings, as if the Senate didn’t have far more pressing issues — such as passing a budget and tackling the country’s fiscal problems.

Even more disgraceful was Graham, who said on “Face the Nation”: “I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable,” referring to Pastor Jones. “Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war. During World War II, we had limits on what you could do if it inspired the enemy.”

This is jaw-dropping in its ignorance and stupidity. Graham is arguing against freedom of speech — why else should an American citizen exercising his First Amendment rights, however offensive to some, be “held accountable” for the reactions of superstitious goatherds half a world away? — and equating an insult toward the religion that explicitly animated the 9/11 hijackers with the Bund marchers who supported Hitler.

But the prize for disappointment goes to Petraeus and NATO Ambassador Mark Sedwill, whose statement read in part: “In view of the events of recent days, we feel it is important . . . to reiterate our condemnation of any disrespect to the Holy Koran and the Muslim faith. We condemn, in particular, the action of an individual in the United States who recently burned the Holy Koran.

“We further hope the Afghan people understand that the actions of a small number of individuals, who have been extremely disrespectful to the Holy Koran, are not representative of any of the countries of the international community who are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people.”

To this we’ve come: Bogged down in an increasingly ineffectual military operation in Afghanistan that should have ended years ago after we defeated the Taliban and routed al Qaeda, we are instead apologizing to the very people who are killing American soldiers, and treating their holy book better than we do any other.

Petraeus’ statement can perhaps be excused on the grounds that his job is as much diplomatic as martial — but that, of course, is precisely what’s wrong with his current mission. He shouldn’t be “helping the Afghan people.” That’s a task for after the Islamist threat to the West has been eliminated.

10 Sep 2010

Double Standards on Endangering US Troops

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The American left is in the hypocritical position of applauding and giving journalism awards for publishing Intelligence leaks and out-of-context military reports inciting Islamic hostility toward the United States, while at the same time wringing its hands and piously denouncing burning a Koran or voicing opposition to locating Islamic victory-monuments-cum-recruiting-centers within the footprint of the 9/11 NYC attack.

Wikileaks is preparing another major dump of US classified documents, this time from Iraq.

A massive cache of previously unpublished classified U.S. military documents from the Iraq War is being readied for publication by WikiLeaks, a new report has confirmed.

The documents constitute the “biggest leak of military intelligence” that has ever occurred, according to Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit British organization that is working with WikiLeaks on the documents.

The documents are expected to be published in several weeks.

Will the New York Times editorialize against “endangering US troops” or will the Times again be one of Wikileaks’ collaborators and outlets?

Is President Obama going to plead publicly with the major news outlets and Julian Assange to stand down?

Will General Petraeus publish an editorial condemning the reckless action?

I doubt it. Endangering US troops is just ducky when the left is doing it to attack and undermine the US cause.

07 Sep 2010

Let’s All Burn the Koran Next Saturday

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General Petraeus, CNN reports, is warning that some Bible-thumping Florida church’s intention to burn the Koran next Saturday might endanger US troops.

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Monday criticized a Florida church’s plan to burn copies of the Quran on September 11, warning the demonstration “could cause significant problems” for American troops overseas.

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan,” Gen. David Petraeus said in a statement issued Monday.

The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, plans to mark the anniversary of al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington by burning copies of the Muslim holy book. The church insists the event is “neither an act of love nor of hate,” but a warning against what it calls the threats posed by Islam.

The event has drawn criticism from Muslims in the United States and overseas, with thousands of Indonesians gathering outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Sunday to protest the planned Quran burning.

“The burning is not only an insult to the holy Quran, but an insult to Islam and Muslims around the world,” said Muhammad Ismail, a spokesman for the hard-line Indonesian Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

With about 120,000 U.S. and NATO-led troops still battling al Qaeda and its allies in the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement, Petraeus warned that burning Qurans “is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems — not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

Can one begin to imagine General McArthur warning Americans against burning the Rising Sun flag during WWII, or General Patton advising a news organization that a symbolic burning of Mein Kampf might inflame Waffen SS units?

If you’re scared of the camel-fornicating sons of the Prophet, you shouldn’t be in the US military in time of war.

Frankly, I think instead of these endless exercises in cultural sensitivity and attempts to placate the religious bigotry of the Saracens, we ought to issue US troops bathroom tissue imprinted with the Koran and burn the Koran daily as part of routine latrine maintenance.

We’re at war with militant Islam. Islamic intolerance and insolent demands for deference to their superstition are the hallmarks of the ideology which produced the September 11th attacks on the United States. The Koran and the Prophet Mohammed are Islamicist symbols in very much the same way the meatball flag, the swastika, and pictures of Adolph Hitler were intrinsic to the ideology of our enemies in WWII.

Trying to fight a war, while supporting your enemies’ proposal to build a combined recruiting center and victory monument in the vicinity of their surprise attack, and while insisting on reverential treatment of their symbols, is nothing short of ridiculous.

All this shows that liberalism is so thoroughly decadent, so utterly bound up in namby pamby inhibitions against conflict and animosity, that liberals are basically incapable of making war. The liberal consciousness requires military action inevitably to be accompanied by simultaneous appeasement, and prohibits a genuine commitment to defeating the enemy out of self-defeating fears of antagonizing anyone. All liberal wars are Korea and Vietnam. They all have to end either in concession and withdrawal or in stalemate. For liberals, appeasement is always a substitute for victory.

I didn’t originally think much of that silly Florida church’s Koran-burning demonstration, but I’ve changed my mind. I plan to look for my own copy and take it out and light it up on Saturday, too, just to affirm a general policy of Americans declining to placate hirsute barbarians afflicted with superstitious extremism. If that makes the Taliban angry, that is just too bad.

24 Mar 2010

Petraeus Testing Presidential Waters in New Hampshire

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Fox News reports that a potential GOP candidate with an excellent resume who would have considerable appeal as an alternative to the current incumbent in 2012 has made his initial move.

David Howell Petraeus is appearing at one of the customary venues for future primary candidates in New Hampshire.

Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, is giving a talk Wednesday evening at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, a must-see campus for presidential candidates in a must-see state that hosts the first-in-the-nation primaries.

Sure, he owns property in New Hampshire and is registered to vote there. But that hasn’t stopped a new wave of speculation that the modest, scholarly general credited with leading the “surge” that turned around the Iraq war is, if not positioning himself, at least stirring the pot about his presidential prospects. …

Petraeus has been assiduous in shooting down rumors about his political aspirations; in several interviews with Fox News, he has said he has “no desire” to seek elected office.

He pledged no interest in running during an appearance at the Georgetown Law Center in January and again at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia last month.

So objective is Petraeus — a registered Republican — that he told Fox News in December that he stopped voting in 2002.

But it’s impossible to prove a negative — that Petraeus won’t run or isn’t interested — and the fact that most potential candidates deny interest in running this early inevitably leaves that door open.


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