CIA Director General Petraeus Resigns

[Peter Lemkin]

The scandal that brought down CIA Director David Petraeus has spread to the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen. The Pentagon says the FBI has uncovered thousands of "potentially inappropriate" emails between Allen and Jill Kelley, the woman who complained of harassment from Petraeus' biographer and lover, Paula Broadwell. Kelley's complaint to the FBI led to the discovery of Broadwell and Petraeus' relationship, prompting Petraeus' resignation on Friday.

"You are talking about a massively invasive investigation that without any of their knowledge obtained their most intimate communications, all without evidence of any predicate crime," says Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now!, "It really illustrates how invasive and sprawling this unaccountable surveillance state has become. This happens all the time, just generally to people less powerful and influential than the two generals in question here. I hope that we learn lessons, I hope, about what we have allowed the government do in terms of its investigative powers."

[Peter Lemkin]

On Friday morning, former CIA director David Petraeus is set to head to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate and House intelligence committees about the attack on Benghazi, which led to multiple deaths, including that of Ambassador Chris Stevens.

During the closed-door briefing today, the committee members saw a film put together by the National Counterterrorism Center of the events in Benghazi. Also testifying today were FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce, Under Secretary of State for Management Pat Kennedy, and National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen.

"The film is a composite from a number of sources. It is real-time and does begin from when before the incident started and it goes through the incident and the exodus," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

She added that the footage includes video shot from an unmanned aerial vehicle. But she did not answer whether the video showed Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the assault on the compound.

Petraeus's testimony is much anticipated.

"Director Petraeus went to Tripoli," Feinstein said. "He interviewed many people, as I understand it, that were involved and so the opportunity to get his views is very important."

Feinstein would not comment on the CIA's inspector general investigation into Petraeus' conduct regarding an extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell.

"The purpose of this hearing is Benghazi," Feinstein said of Friday's hearing with Petraeus. "We're not going into the FBI investigation or the inspector general or anything else. This is Benghazi."

[Peter Lemkin]

WASHINGTON Ex-CIA Director David Petraeus told lawmakers during private hearings Friday that he believed all along that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was a terrorist strike, even though that wasn't how the Obama administration initially described it publicly.

The retired general addressed the House Intelligence Committee in his first Capitol Hill testimony since resigning last week over an extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell, but he did not discuss that scandal except to express regret about the circumstances of his departure.

Lawmakers said Petraeus testified that the CIA's talking points written in response to the assault on the diplomat post in Benghazi that killed four Americans referred to it as a terrorist attack. But Petraeus told the lawmakers it was removed by other federal agencies who made changes to the CIA's draft.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said Petraeus said he did not know who removed the reference to terrorism. King said to this day it's still not clear how the final talking points emerged that were used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice five days after the attack when the White House sent her to appear in a series of television interviews. Rice said it appeared the attack was sparked by a spontaneous protest over an anti-Muslim video.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Petraeus disputed Republican suggestions that the White House misled the public on what led to the violence in the midst of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign.

"There was an interagency process to draft it, not a political process," Schiff said after the hearing. "They came up with the best assessment without compromising classified information or source or methods. So changes were made to protect classified information.

"The general was adamant there was no politicization of the process, no White House interference or political agenda," Schiff said. "He completely debunked that idea."

Schiff said Petraeus said Rice's comments in the television interviews "reflected the best intelligence at the time that could be released publicly."

King said Petraeus had briefed the House committee on Sept. 14 and he does not recall Petraeus being so positive at that time that it was a terrorist attack. "He thought all along that he made it clear there was terrorist involvement," King said. "That was not my recollection."

Lawmakers said the affair with Broadwell that ended Petraeus' widely respected career came up only briefly at the top of Petraeus' 90-minute appearance before the House committee.

"The only thing he did in the beginning of his testimony is he did express deep regret to the committee for the circumstances for his depature" and reassure the committee that the Libya attacks had nothing to do with his resignation, said Rep. Jim Langevin, R-R.I.

Petraeus sneaked into the Capitol away from photographers and television cameras to provide his testimony before the House committee, which met in a secure room several floors below the main area of the Capitol Visitors Center where tourists gather when they are visiting Congress.

Petraeus, formerly one of the most respected U.S. military leaders, was whisked inside the hearing in a manner more suited to covert operative through a network of underground hallways leading to a secure room.

During previous appearances before Congress, CIA directors typically have walked through the building's front door. Petraeus later headed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The secretive movements attested to the circus-like atmosphere of the scandal that has preoccupied Washington, even as the possibility of war looms in Israel and the U.S. government faces a market-rattling "fiscal cliff" that could imperil a still-fragile economy.

Lawmakers spent hours Thursday interviewing top intelligence and national security officials, trying to determine what intelligence agencies knew before, during and after the attack. They viewed security video from the consulate and surveillance footage by an unarmed CIA Predator drone that showed events in real time.

Petraeus has acknowledged cheating on his wife of 38 years with a woman later identified as Broadwell. The FBI began investigating the matter last summer but didn't notify the White House or Congress until after the election.

In the course of investigating the Petraeus affair, the FBI uncovered suggestive emails between Afghanistan war chief Gen. John Allen and Florida socialite Jill Kelley, both of them married. President Barack Obama has put a promotion nomination for Allen on hold.

The CIA on Thursday opened an exploratory investigation into Petraeus' conduct. The inquiry "doesn't presuppose any particular outcome," said CIA spokesman Preston Golson. At the same time, Army officials say that, at this point, there is no appetite for recalling Petraeus to active duty to pursue any adultery charges against him.

Petraeus, in his first media interview since he resigned, told CNN that he had never given classified information to Broadwell. She has said she didn't receive such material from Petraeus.

But the FBI found a substantial number of classified documents on Broadwell's computer and in her home, according to a law enforcement official, and is investigating how she got them. That official spoke only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the case. The Army has now suspended her security clearance.

[Peter Lemkin]

Well there have been two general 'theories' floated in the press about why the consular official [IMO incorrectly labeled an ambassador] was killed....both could be true, one could be true, or both could be diversionary stories.....too early to tell. Here is the 'other' one - not the black site one.

Reuters notes that the CIA mission involved finding and repurchasing heavy weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals.

Business Insider reports that Stevens may have been linked with Syrian terrorists:

There's growing evidence that U.S. agentsparticularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevenswere at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.

In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Groupa group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens' life.

In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, "met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey" in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.

Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship "carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey." The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot downSyrian helicopters and fighter jets.

The ship's captain was "a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support," which was presumably established by the new government.

That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one personBelhadjbetween himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria.

Furthermore, we know that jihadists are the best fighters in the Syrian opposition, but where did they come from?

Last week The Telegraph reported that a FSA commander called them "Libyans" when he explained that the FSA doesn't "want these extremist people here."

And if the new Libyan government was sending seasoned Islamic fighters and 400 tons of heavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkeya deal brokered by Stevens' primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolutionthen the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it.

Furthermore there was a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as "a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles" … and that its security features "were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died."

And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out the heavy weapons from Libya.

In other words, ambassador Stevens may have been a key player in deploying Libyan terrorists and arms to fight the Syrian government.

Other sources also claim that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was mainly being used as a CIA operation to ship fighters and arms to Syria.

Many have speculated that if normal security measures weren't taken to protect the Benghazi consulate or to rescue ambassador Stevens it was because the CIA was trying to keep an extremely low profile to protect its cover of being a normal State Department operation.

[Peter Lemkin]

How Mistress Helped Petraeus
By Gareth Porter
OpEdNews Op Eds 11/16/2012 at 22:54:46

Paula Broadwell, whose affair with former Gen. David Petraeus brought his career to a sudden end last week, had sought to help defend his decision in 2010 to allow village destruction in Afghanistan that not only violated his own previous guidance but the international laws of war.

At the time, Petraeus was under pressure from the Obama administration to produce tangible evidence of "progress" that could be used to justify troop withdrawals. But the efforts had the opposite effect. The new Petraeus policy guidance allowed the destruction of villages in three districts of Kandahar province if the population did not tell U.S. forces where homemade bombs were hidden.
In early January 2010, Broadwell went to visit the Combined Task Force I-320th in Kandahar to write a story justifying the decision to destroy the village of Tarok Kaloche and much of three other villages in its area of operations.

Ironically, it was Broadwell who introduced the complete razing of the village of Tarok Kalache in Kandahar's Arghandab Valley in October 2010 to the blogosphere. Dramatic photographs of the village before and after it was razed, which she had obtained from U.S. military sources, were published with her article in the military blog Best Defense on Jan. 13, 2011. The pictures and her article brought a highly critical response from blogger Joshua Foust, who is a specialist on Afghanistan.

Tarok Kalache was only one of many villages destroyed or nearly destroyed in an October 2010 offensive by U.S. forces in three districts of Kandahar Province, because the heavy concentrations of IEDs had made clearing the village by conventional forces too costly.

In the late summer and early fall, commanders in those districts had been ordered to clear the villages of Taliban presence, but they had taken heavy casualties from IEDs planted in and around the villages. As commander of Combined Task Force I-320th, Lt. Col. David Flynn was responsible for several villages in the Arghandab valley, including Tarok Kalache.

Flynn told Spencer Ackerman of the Danger Room blog in early February 2011 that, once he felt he had the necessary intelligence on IEDs in Tarok Kalache, he had adopted a plan to destroy the village, first with mine clearing charges, which destroyed everything within a swath 100 yards long and wide enough for a tank, then with aerial bombing. U.S. forces completed the destruction on Oct. 6, 2010, dropping 25 2,000-pound bombs on what remained of Tarok Kalache's 36 compounds and gardens, according to Flynn's account.

And in an interview with the Daily Mail nearly three weeks after Tarok Kalache had been flattened, Flynn revealed that he had just told residents of Khosrow Sofla that if they didn't inform him of the location of the IEDs in their village within a few days, he would destroy the village. Flynn later confirmed to Ackerman that he had told the residents, if they couldn't tell him exactly where the bombs were located, he would have no way of disposing of them without blowing up the buildings.

The sequence of events clearly suggests that Flynn was using the destruction of Tarok Kalache to convince the residents of Khosrow Sofla that the same thing would happen to them if they didn't provide the information about IEDs demanded by Flynn.

That tactic apparently succeeded. Carlotta Gall reported in The New York Times on March 11, 2011, that after seeing what had happened to Tarok Kalache, the residents of the still undestroyed homes in Khosrow Sofla had hired a former mujahedeen to defuse the IEDs.

In her fawning biography of Petraeus, Broadwell quotes Flynn's response to being informed by the Khosrow Sofla village chief that the IEDs were all gone, which U.S. troops had verified: "No dozers. No mass punishment. They were already punished by the Taliban."

The destruction of Tarok Kalache was thus a "collective punishment" of the residents of the village as well as "intimidation" of the residents of Khosrow Sofla -- practices that were strictly forbidden by the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons. Article 33 of that agreement states, "Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."

The village destruction also contravened a central principle of the counterinsurgency guidance that had been promulgated by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal when he became the top commander in Afghanistan in 2009. "Destroying a home or property jeopardizes the livelihood of an entire family -- and creates more insurgents," said McChrystal's guidance.

Petraeus had confirmed that prohibition in an August 2010 guidance, warning that killing civilians or damaging their property would "create more enemies than our operations eliminate." But Petraeus was under pressure from the Barack Obama administration to produce tangible evidence of "progress" that could be used to justify troop withdrawals. He needed to be able cite the clearing of those villages, regardless of the political fallout.

Petraeus himself clearly approved the general policy allowing the destruction of villages by Flynn and other commanders in Kandahar in late 2010. Flynn told Ackerman he had sent his plan up the chain of command and believed that International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters were informed.

Carlotta Gall reported on March 11, 2011, that revised guidelines "reissued" by Petraeus permitted the total destruction of a village such in Tarok Kalache, according to a NATO official. Although the large-scale demolition of homes had been reported by the Times in November, it had not generated any significant reaction in the United States. But in Afghanistan, the home destruction created frictions between Afghans and Petraeus's command over the loss of homes and livelihoods.

When Broadwell traveled to Flynn's command post in early January 2011, Petraeus was anticipating a story in the New York Times on the growing friction over the home destruction. Broadwell's first article for Best Defense was published on Jan. 13, 2011, the same day as the New York Times article reporting that the Afghan government estimate of property damage from the destruction of homes and fields was 71 times higher than the $1.4 million ISAF estimate.

Although a note following her article referred to her as the author of a forthcoming book on Petraeus, Broadwell was ostensibly writing as an independent journalist rather than as a constant companion of Petraeus. The article portrayed Flynn as forced to choose between "suffering the tragic losses and the horrific daily amputees" to clear the four villages in question and destroying the IED-laden homes.

In a comment apparently reflecting Petraeus's concern, she said the unit "could not afford to lose momentum." Broadwell claimed the residents had abandoned the village when the Taliban "conducted an intimidation campaign to chase the villagers out."

After Afghanistan blogger Joshua Foust sharply criticized her lack of concern about the razing of Tarok Kolache, Broadwell wrote on her Facebook page, "I definitely have sympathy for the villagers who had been displaced, even though they made the judgment call to 'sell' the village to the Taliban."

Both those explanations were untrue, however. Former residents told IPS reporter Shah Noori in February that they had begun leaving their homes only in August when the Taliban began gearing up for an assault by U.S. troops by laying IEDs. They also said the Taliban had allowed residents to return to check on their houses, and to tend their gardens and orchards.

Broadwell repeated an ISAF claim that the compounds were booby-trapped, but residents insisted to Noori that only some compounds had explosives. Finally Broadwell claimed that the villagers who had lost their homes and gardens had told Petraeus and other visitors that "Flynn was their hero and they wanted him to move into the village with them."

Then she acknowledged that villagers were "pissed about the loss of their mud huts," adding cheerfully, "but that's why the BUILD story is important here."

[Jan Klimkowski]

In early January 2010, Broadwell went to visit the Combined Task Force I-320th in Kandahar to write a story justifying the decision to destroy the village of Tarok Kaloche and much of three other villages in its area of operations.

Ironically, it was Broadwell who introduced the complete razing of the village of Tarok Kalache in Kandahar's Arghandab Valley in October 2010 to the blogosphere. Dramatic photographs of the village before and after it was razed, which she had obtained from U.S. military sources, were published with her article in the military blog Best Defense on Jan. 13, 2011. The pictures and her article brought a highly critical response from blogger Joshua Foust, who is a specialist on Afghanistan.

Tarok Kalache was only one of many villages destroyed or nearly destroyed in an October 2010 offensive by U.S. forces in three districts of Kandahar Province, because the heavy concentrations of IEDs had made clearing the village by conventional forces too costly.

In the late summer and early fall, commanders in those districts had been ordered to clear the villages of Taliban presence, but they had taken heavy casualties from IEDs planted in and around the villages. As commander of Combined Task Force I-320th, Lt. Col. David Flynn was responsible for several villages in the Arghandab valley, including Tarok Kalache.

Flynn told Spencer Ackerman of the Danger Room blog in early February 2011 that, once he felt he had the necessary intelligence on IEDs in Tarok Kalache, he had adopted a plan to destroy the village, first with mine clearing charges, which destroyed everything within a swath 100 yards long and wide enough for a tank, then with aerial bombing. U.S. forces completed the destruction on Oct. 6, 2010, dropping 25 2,000-pound bombs on what remained of Tarok Kalache's 36 compounds and gardens, according to Flynn's account.

Destroying villages in order to save them.

Where have we heard that before?

Oh yeah, Ben Tre.

[Magda Hassan]

Coup and counter-coup in Washington


General David Petraeus, former CIA director
Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:12AM GMT


By Webster G. Tarpley
The pro-Obama group wants to avoid large conventional commitments. They want to rely on cyber-warfare, drones, assassinations, bombing, raids by special forces, and economic warfare in the form of trade sanctions and technology embargoes."




Sometimes, generals purge politicians. In 1648, during the English Civil War, Colonel Pride and his troops removed those members of the Long Parliament who opposed military domination; the puppets who remained were called the Rump Parliament.


This year, a cabal of generals evidently believed it could secure the White House for Mitt Romney by staging the Benghazi incident and using it as the signal for a cold coup under cover of elections -- probably including computer-generated election fraud -- to bring down Obama. They guessed wrong.

Politicians sometimes purge generals. When the French Secret Army Organization (OAS) staged a putsch in Algiers in April 1961 to prevent the independence of Algeria, President de Gaulle had to round up and jail a number of generals and other officers. The Obama administration and its establishment controllers appear to be ousting a number of intelligence and military officials who took part in illegal operations to replace Obama with Romney. These sackings are being presented to the public under the guise of soap opera sexual infractions or expense account padding, in the hope of hiding some real mechanisms of power from the popular gaze. The outgoing US military cabal favors the extension of colonial wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as an attack on Iran. Good riddance.

General Petraeus: Neocon Who Sought War with Iran

The most spectacular example is the fall of General David Petraeus, the CIA director, and one of the leading US advocates of an early war with Iran. The heads of several other rogue figures are rolling. The result is one of those rare moments when parts of the rogue network or invisible government can be observed by those who have enough knowledge to understand what they are seeing. But the firings have only scratched the surface.

The Romney backers were made up of neocons, Bush holdovers, and members of the Mormon Mafia in the intelligence community -- a relatively narrow base. The Obama supporters were the Brzezinski-Nye soft power group and military opposed to the Iran war. The neocons and reactionary Mormons wanted to restore aggressive war and wholesale bombing as the preferred option for US foreign policy. Although they love drones and assassinations, they want to keep significant US conventional forces in the Middle East.

The pro-Obama group wants to avoid large conventional commitments. They want to rely on cyber-warfare, drones, assassinations, bombing, raids by special forces, and economic warfare in the form of trade sanctions and technology embargoes. When they want to destroy a country like Syria, they do not favor direct US invasion or bombing, but rather seek to use proxies like Turkey and the al-Qaeda patsy network to get the double benefit of weakening both ally and enemy. Above all, they love color revolutions and soft-power subversion.

Benghazi, September 11: CIA assets kill US envoy while CIA team is ordered to stand down and other CIA assets fail to intervene

The Benghazi consulate was prevalently a CIA post, with significant military capabilities. Ambassador Stevens had strong CIA connections and served as a liaison with the al-Qaeda-linked terrorists of the Benghazi-Derna-Tobruk corridor, whom the CIA is using for the attack on Syria. His last conversation with a Turkish diplomat was evidently a discussion on this topic.

Stevens and others thought they had nothing to fear because their relations with the Islamist fighters were so cordial. The attack that killed Stevens was carried out by forces under the control of Sufiyan Qumu (also Kumu or Gumu), who had been held in Guantanamo for several years and released as a CIA asset for the overthrow of Gaddafi. A significant group of CIA paramilitaries stationed nearby was ordered to stand down by the CIA command structure.

Another CIA asset, the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, which had in the summer of 2011 assassinated General Younes in order to help the CIA operative General Hifter to take control of the rebel army, had contracted to provide additional security, but also did not intervene. General Petraeus went to the movies that night. On September 14, Petraeus told the House Intelligence committee that the Benghazi incident had been spontaneous, a demonstration gone violent.

This is the line which Susan Rice mouthed on television in mid-September. (She should be fired for other reasons.) The Obama administration was in any case eager to hide the fact that it had turned Libya over to al-Qaeda. The goal of Benghazi was an early October surprise to Carterize Obama, and the CIA was commanded by Petraeus.

Petraeus arrived at the CIA on September 6, 2011. Within a month, a new provocation was launched against Iran in the form of absurd accusations that members of the Quds Force were plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, DC. Intelligence community conduit David Ignatius wrote at the time that a big reason the implausible plot story gained credibility was the "fact the CIA [meaning Petraeus] and other intelligence agencies gathered information corroborating the informants' juicy allegations" implicating the Quds Force and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

In reality, the patsies involved came from the Drug Enforcement Administration and/or the Mujaheddin e-Khalq (MEK), an anti-Iranian terrorist force maintained by the US in Iraq. The MEK has now been rewarded by being removed from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. (David Ignatius, "Those Keystone Iranians: Why Such a Crude at Assassination Plot?, Washington Post, October 12, 2011) The goal of the operation was to abort possible diplomatic solutions to tensions between NATO and Iran.

In Washington, the neocon Petraeus was always considered as General Betray-US, Bush's warlord and the key front man for the Iraq surge. He was the darling of the civilian chickenhawk neocons, who saw in him a presidential vehicle to return to power after the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. Petraeus' neocon sherpas were Frederick Kagan and Max Boot, who also helped him to refurbish his image concerning Israel. Obama was always afraid that Petraeus would run for president, and when Romney took the nomination, feared that Petraeus might be a candidate for vice president.

Like General George Marshall on the evening of December 6, 1941 -- who stayed conveniently out of the loop under various pretexts because he wanted the Pearl Harbor attack to occur as a means of damaging President Roosevelt -- Petraeus was at the movies during the Benghazi attack, attending a private screening at the Canadian Embassy of the movie Argo with Ben Afflek, which deals with a 1979 covert CIA operation in Tehran.

The Night of the Long Knives

The hatred of key members of the US officer corps for Obama was illustrated through the comments of Petraeus' friend, the warmonger General Stanley McChrystal, who was ousted in June 2010. In addition to Petraeus, the following officers are also either sacked or the object of scandals or investigations:

Marine General John R. Allen is in trouble. Currently the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Allen had been slated to take over from Admiral Stavridis as NATO Supreme Commander, but Obama has now put this nomination on hold. Allen is accused of having an improper relationship with the Tampa, Florida hostess and socialite Jill Kelley, originally of the Lebanese Khawam family. Mrs. Kelley had insinuated herself into the social circle of generals at McDill Air Force Base, the location of the US Central command. Allen and Petraeus both wrote letters to a judge supporting Kelley's twin sister in a child custody fight. According to some accounts, Allen sent either 30,000 pages or 30,000 e-mails to Kelly over a few years. Allen denies wrongdoing, but the handwriting is on the wall.

General Carter Ham, commander of US Africom, whose area of responsibility includes Libya, manifestly failed to send forces to stop the attack on the Benghazi consulate and CIA post. Panetta announced on October 18 that Ham was being replaced. The official line is that Ham decided to retire of his own volition. There were many days of confusion in Washington about his leaving.

Admiral James G. Stavridis, the outgoing NATO Supreme Commander, has been officially reprimanded by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus for lavish spending on his personal lifestyle, including a junket to a wine dinner in France. He will soon leave his post.

General William E. "Kip" Ward, who commanded US Africom from October 2007 to March 2011, presided over the preparation and launching of the attack on Libya. On the surface, Ward is accused of spending several hundred thousand dollars of government money and resources on family members, luxury junkets, and flights. He had been under investigation for a year and a half, but it was announced on November 13 that he would be fined $82,000 and demoted from full general to lieutenant general, reducing his pension.

Lieutenant General Patrick J. O'Reilly, the Director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, has also been reprimanded by the Defense Department's Inspector General for intimidating and humiliating subordinates, thus creating a work environment characterized by one subordinate as "management by blowtorch and pliers." (Washington Post, November 15, 2012) O'Reilly is being ousted from his post before the conclusion of the usual four year tenure, and demoted to major general. His departure was deplored on the floor of Congress by Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, a reactionary and racist Republican.

Rear Admiral Chuck Gaouette was the commander of the USS Stennis carrier battle group, currently stationed in the Arabian Sea, near Iran and other possible targets for aggression and/or Gulf of Tonkin provocations. Gaouette is currently being investigated for "inappropriate leadership judgment" while on station in the Middle East.

Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, second in command of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and a key man for Afghanistan logistics, is accused of raping and having an adulterous affair with a female captain he had gotten transferred to his command. The prosecution has already sabotaged its own case, raising the chances that the case will be thrown out of court, while charges of pornography and alcoholism on duty may have been invented, pointing once again to a political motive. Press accounts feature Sinclair's assertion, "I'm a general. I'll do whatever the [expletive] I want."

Commander Joseph E. Darlak, commanding officer of the frigate USS Vandegrifft and two other senior officers having been removed after a drunken orgy during a visit to the port of Vladivostok, Russia. Details are sketchy, but the goal of the escapade might well have been a provocation against the Putin government. According to one account, over 20 top naval officers have been fired during 2012.

Christopher E. Kubasik was fired as president and Chief Operating Officer of Lockheed Martin Corp., the top US defense contractor in 2008 and 2009. Lockheed Chairman Rob Stevens had allegedly requested an ethics investigation, which revealed a sexual affair with a subordinate. Lockheed's electronic warfare and cyber warfare capabilities are formidable.

Naturally, it is impossible to know at this time how many of these cases are actually based on the reasons stated, and how many actually involve complicity with operations targeting the White House.

On the Thursday after the presidential vote, Defense Secretary Panetta ordered Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey, an ally of Obama, to conduct a wide-ranging review of misconduct by senior military officers. The general public is supposed to think that this review will be mainly concerned with wrongdoing such as adultery, sexual harassment, embezzlement, and the like. But the reality is most likely a purge of officers associated with the pro-Romney coup machinations of September-October 2012.

With all these figures removed, it is likely to be more difficult for Israel's Netanyahu to launch his war against Iran in the way that had been planned. He has therefore fallen back on the option of starting a smaller war in Gaza as a means of stabilizing the US-UK-Israel war party while other options are sought. The rogue network, now a wounded beast, must be counted doubly dangerous.

The Mata Haris

Mata Hari's method was to seduce French generals and send their secrets to Berlin. The cover story for Petraeus' ouster involves his affair with Paula Broadwell, who fraternized extensively with the general in Afghanistan while she was preparing a fawning campaign biography of the general entitled All In: The Education of General David Petraeus -- not to be confused with Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale. Broadwell is a lieutenant colonel of military intelligence with a background at the Joint Special Operations Command and, according to some accounts, a knowledge of Arabic.

She says she has a top secret security clearance "and then some." She has hobnobbed at the Obama White House and with Karl Rove. By all indications, and whether she knew it or not, she was deployed to embroil Petraeus with a view to bringing him down, and she succeeded. When the dalliance became known to the FBI and thence leaked to GOP Congressmen Reichert and Cantor, Petraeus was told he had to resign by intelligence czar James Clapper, a creature of Obama.

Jill Kelley and her twin sister Natalie Khawam are also redolent of the intelligence community. Their focus was evidently to lead both Petraeus and Allen onto the flypaper.

The Rogue Network Down but Not Out

The US rogue network has been exceptionally active since the attacks of September 11, 2001 in which the rogues were heavily implicated. In the spring of 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney argued unsuccessfully for an attack on Syria on behalf of the rogue network whose spokesman he was. In August-September 2007, a B-52 bomber loaded with six nuclear cruise missiles was in effect hijacked by the rogue network -- taken out of legal US command -- and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana, presumably on its way to a bombing mission in the Middle East. The B-52 was stopped at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. Months later, Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff T. Michael Moseley for poor management of nuclear weapons. A special board under James R. Schlesinger studied nuclear safety, and doubtless also whom to fire. For knowledgeable observers, a window into the rogue network had been opened.

On Christmas Day, 2009, the Nigerian underwear bomber Mutallab attempted to blow up a passenger airliner in the skies over Detroit. During the first week of January, Richard Wolffe of MSNBC reported that the Obama White House had concluded that certain federal officials had acted to prevent Mutallab's operation from being shut down because they wanted to damage the Obama administration. Still later, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy told a House committee that the State Department had wanted to revoke Mutallab's visa, but had been prevented from doing so by another (unnamed) federal agency, under the pretext that the Nigerian suicide bomber was being tailed. The Obama administration cravenly backed off further public investigation of this incident, allowing the rogue network to strike again in Benghazi. (All these events are described on Tarpley.net.)

ORCA: Why the Pro-Romney Vote Fraud Did Not Materialize

The purge of so many Romney supporters from the intelligence community and from the military may explain why the expected computer-generated Republican election fraud failed to materialize in the expected dimensions in so many states. Tagg Romney and his associates, many of them investors in Bain Capital, had notoriously bought control of voting machines in almost a score of states, including Ohio. What frustrated the design to steal the election? Perhaps this operation was disrupted and aborted by investigations conveniently timed and targeting some of the main pro-Romney intelligence and military figures in the rogue network.

The answer may also be related to the apparent failure of ORCA, Romney's data-mining and data management operation, which was supposed to help GOP volunteers get out the vote, but which may have possessed additional and more sinister dimensions. But, as David Gewirtz of ZDNet wrote on November 13, ORCA "got harpooned. ORCA beached. It flopped. It died in the sun. It failed oh-so-bad." And with it failed the hope of Romney's backers that they could seize the White House.

The current scandals are extraordinary because they cast light on the rogue network or invisible government of the United States, a topic which is usually strictly taboo for the mass media. For this reason, David Ignatius of the Washington Post, considered close to the intelligence community, is already a warning that it is time to call a halt. Sunlight, Ignatius warns, can be "toxic under the wrong circumstances."

"For a reminder of why it's dangerous, take a look at The Crucible and the Lessons of History," Ignatius concludes. (David Ignatius, "A Modern Witch Hunt," Washington Post, November 18, 2012) In other words, time to stop the purges before they threaten to engulf the entire rogue network and thus the entire establishment. Patriotic citizens and those who want peace, by contrast, must hope that the revelations go on and on.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/11/19/...ashington/

[Peter Lemkin]

Tarpley on the mark - again! IMHO! All important, but the following incident should NEVER be forgotten of the danger of this group he speaks about:

In August-September 2007, a B-52 bomber loaded with six nuclear cruise missiles was in effect hijacked by the rogue network -- taken out of legal US command -- and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana, presumably on its way to a bombing mission in the Middle East. The B-52 was stopped at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. Months later, Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff T. Michael Moseley for poor management of nuclear weapons. A special board under James R. Schlesinger studied nuclear safety, and doubtless also whom to fire. For knowledgeable observers, a window into the rogue network had been opened.

Whatever and wherever those nukes were headed for would have spelled TROUBLE in letters as high as mushroom clouds - worldwide....and made 911 look like a minor event. As this cabal is still out there and being thwarted [only partially and at times] by an almost equally evil bunch doesn't give one much reassurance of happy times ahead.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Romney backers were made up of neocons, Bush holdovers, and members of the Mormon Mafia in the intelligence community -- a relatively narrow base. The Obama supporters were the Brzezinski-Nye soft power group and military opposed to the Iran war. The neocons and reactionary Mormons wanted to restore aggressive war and wholesale bombing as the preferred option for US foreign policy. Although they love drones and assassinations, they want to keep significant US conventional forces in the Middle East.

The pro-Obama group wants to avoid large conventional commitments. They want to rely on cyber-warfare, drones, assassinations, bombing, raids by special forces, and economic warfare in the form of trade sanctions and technology embargoes. When they want to destroy a country like Syria, they do not favor direct US invasion or bombing, but rather seek to use proxies like Turkey and the al-Qaeda patsy network to get the double benefit of weakening both ally and enemy. Above all, they love color revolutions and soft-power subversion.

The romantic in me wishes this was Seven Days In May, with the Evil generals thwarted by the forces of Good.

War mongering generals and admirals are being purged, but many more remain.

This is more Dumb or Dumber.

A plague on all their houses.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Petraeus Legacy: A Paramilitary CIA?
21st November 2012

" … A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying; it's supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program.' The CIA … is a killing machine now.' … "

By Jeremy Scahill (Excerpt)

The Nation, November 19, 2012
The Petraeus Legacy: A Paramilitary CIA?

While much of the media focus on l'affaire Petraeus has centered on the CIA director's sexual relationship with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, the scandal opens a window onto a different and more consequential relationshipthat between the CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Command. In a behind-the-scenes turf war that has raged since 9/11, the two government bodies have fought for control of the expanding global wars waged by the United Statesa turf war that JSOC has largely won. Petraeus, an instrumental player in this power struggle, leaves behind an agency that has strayed from intelligence to paramilitary-type activities. Though his legacy will be defined largely by the scandal that ended his career, to many within military and intelligence circles, Petraeus's career trajectory, from commander of US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to the helm of the CIA, is a symbol of this evolution.

"I would not say that CIA has been taken over by the military, but I would say that the CIA has become more militarized," Philip Giraldi, a retired career CIA case officer, told The Nation. "A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying; it's supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program." The CIA, he added, "is a killing machine now."

As head of US Central Command in 2009, Petraeus issued execute orders that significantly broadened the ability of US forces to operate in a variety of countries, including Yemen, where US forces began conducting missile strikes later that year. During Petraeus's short tenure at the CIA, drone strikes conducted by the agency, sometimes in conjunction with JSOC, escalated dramatically in Yemen; in his first month in office, he oversaw a series of strikes that killed three US citizens, including 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. In some cases, such as the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, commandos from the elite JSOC operated under the auspices of the CIA, so that the mission could be kept secret if it went wrong.

One current State Department liaison who has also worked extensively with JSOC describes the CIA as becoming "a mini-Special Operations Command that purports to be an intelligence agency." For all the praise Petraeus won for his counterinsurgency strategy and the "surge" in Iraq, he says, his real legacy is as a "political tool," an enabler of those within the national security apparatus who want to see a continuation of covert global mini-wars. Pointing to the "mystique that surrounds JSOC" and Adm. William McRaven, commander of the Special Operations Command, the liaison says, "Petraeus was trying to implement that kind of command climate at the CIA."

"Petraeus wanted to be McRaven, and now that window has closed," he said. "We are firmly in the age of McRaven. There is no other titular figure with the confidence of the president that is able to articulate strategies and hold their own in rooms where everyone else has the same or greater amount of intellectual heft. McRaven is everything that Petraeus is not."

Retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former senior defense intelligence official, says that Petraeus's arrogance"smoothly concealed beneath the appearance of the warrior scholar"made him deeply unpopular among the military's high-ranking officers. Dismissing the media's portrayal of Petraeus as a "super soldier" and great military leader as "phony bullshit," Lang describes him as the product of a military promotion system that encourages generals to think of themselves as "divinely selected." "In fact, he didn't write the COIN manual, the surge was not the main thing in improving the situation in Iraq…. They sent him to Afghanistan to apply the COIN doctrine in the same glorious way he did in Iraq, and it hasn't worked. So, if you look beneath the surface from all this stuff, it's just a lot of hot air. There are great generals, but this guy is not one of them." Arriving at the CIA, Lang says, Petraeus "wanted to drag them in the covert action direction and to be a major player."

As for Petraeus's future, the State Department liaison said, "There will be a lot of profits to be made by him and his immediate circle of advisers, as they're given a soft landing, whether it's in academia or within the nexus of the military-industrial complex."

Giraldi, the former senior CIA officer, expressed concern that in these circumstances, the "CIA is going to forget how to spy." He also noted the "long-term consequence" of the militarization of the CIA: "every bureaucracy in the world is best at protecting itself. So once the CIA becomes a paramilitary organization, there's going to be in-built pressure to keep going in that direction. Because you'll have people at the senior levels in the organization who have come up that way and are protective of what they see as their turf," he told me. "That's the big danger."

Despite President Obama's opposition to messy, large-scale military operations, the president is actually a "very careful hawk" when it comes to military action, Jeremy Scahill argued, in an interview early this year with Francis Reynolds.

http://www.thenation.com/article/171247/...litary-cia