Sigh. I was not going to comment on David Patraeus gross dereliction of duty but several colleagues are totally pissed off and they are correct to be angry. Here are a mix of supposition and fact along with my conclusions on this sorry disgrace to the Republic. HOWEVER, I conclude this is not about Patraeus — many others should be indicted along with him and many others have committed high crimes and misdemeanors that exhonerate him in relative terms.
UPDATED to integrate specific observations from IDENS A-C.
UPDATED to add key paragraphs from Marcy Wheeler at SALON and Ray McGovern.
Short URL: http://tinyurl.com/Patraeus-Mossad
Fact: Broadwell is an American Jew by birth and practice. She is also a West Point graduate who elected a West Point summer exchange tour in Israel.
Fact: Many Jews consider their loyalty to Israel and Zionism greater than their loyalty to their country. Those that agree to help the Mossad directly as access or support agents are fewer in number and are called sayonim or “helpers” by the Mossad.
Supposition: They are given a complete pass by our largely toothless gutless FBI.
Opinion: Sayonim are in my view traitors who should be stripped of their citizenship and deported once identified and convicted of direct aid and support to a foreign power actively and persistently subverting the US Government.
Fact: If the FBI knows about Broadwell's West Point cadet exchange time in Israel and her possibly soft recruitment by the Mossad then, they are not talking. The primary responsibility would have been Army counterintelligence, but the in-country exchange would in theory be a joint concern.
Fact: Petraeus was known by the Zionist government of Israel to be a critical commander with access to all relevant secret information pertaining to an area considered by them to be of existential importance. EVERY relationship of his should have been subject to rigorous counterintelligence evaluation and oversight.
Supposition: Paula Broadwell, a Jew scoped out by the Mossad while on a West Point summer exchange in Israel where she may have also received training in clandestine communications, was activated by the Mossad later to spring a honey trap on Patraeus. I have often reflected that if I had any influence on the FBI, the JFK School at Harvard would be labeled a hot zone and a special counterintelligence unit put in place — this has clearly become a hub for Mossad (and perhaps other) honey trap operations against influential speakers who clearly have no self-control when offered the right bait far from home.
IDEN A: West Point cadets are a known target zone. West Point cadets who are Jewish and choose to go to Israel for an official exchange program should be but are not a counterintelligence gong.
Supposition: Petraeus was known to be in an unfulfilled marriage on auto-pilot. It is assumed that when Broadwell made herself available it never occurred to him to wonder what she thought of his comb-over.
IDEN A: The “comb-over” bit is snarky. Fact is…she is very attractive; he was a man of power but plain. He should have seen it coming. I counseled fellow Commanding Officers. When you are in command, you become the funniest, smartest, most charming of fellows. “Hormones ooze off your shoulder boards as eager young ladies will want to caress the medals on your chest, and the crease in your pants.” I warned, don’t believe any of it! Some listened, many did not.
Fact: Patraeus quickly fell to Broadwell's persistent combination of free sex and ardent admiration.
Speculation: This was a well-devised and well-executed cover story, that of wanting to write his biography (this normally would not occur until after retirement and then with a hired ghost writer under a lucrative contract).
IDEN A: The pre-retirement biography no doubt played to his vanity, and soon diminishing self-worth. Using a “writer” to target a “writer” is very sound tradecraft.
Fact: Patraeus visibly flaunted Broadwell as a companion to high-level meetings, sharing the flag compartment on his aircraft, and granting her vastly inappropriate access to himself, his computer, his notebooks, and his staff, at all times, the USA then being in a state of war (which makes all this much much more serious).
Speculation: Petraeus' G-2 (more than one of them) either tried and failed to keep Petraeus honest, or lacked the integrity to do so, while his subordinate commanders and the Chief of Staff of the US Army, all skilled at avoiding the truth and avoiding consequences, allowed this blatant dalliance and unauthorized access to continue. The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI) are equally culpable. This is not about Petraeus bedding a female not his wife — this is about his providing a presumed agent of a foreign power direct sustained access to classified information including plans and intentions that Petraeus afforded her, against all of his oaths of office and all of the precepts of his training.
Fact: What Petraeus did certainly spans multiple felonies (as the FBI itself announced), and is in no way, shape or form anywhere near a misdemeanor. He could have been found guilty at the higher levels, sent to prison, stripped of his rank and pension and given a dishonorable discharge. The contrast with how we have treated Jonathan Pollard — could not be more profound. One law for the rich and the connected, another for the poor and the loyal….or perhaps our most senior intelligence officer had more integrity back in the day, and Presidents were more respectful of counterintelligence concerns.
SALON: Among the things Petraeus recorded in 8 small notebooks he called his “Black Books” (and then let his mistress peruse for 5 days in 2011) were the identities of covert officers, deliberations at the National Security Council, code word protected programs, intelligence “mechanisms,” and even conversations he had had with the President. Court documents show that in 2011, he stored the Black Books “in a rucksack up there somewhere,” and in April 2013 when the FBI searched his house, they found the Black Books in an unlocked desk drawer in his study.
Ray McGovern: Or former CIA officer John Kiriakou who was sent to prison for inadvertently revealing the name of one Agency official cognizant of CIA torture. … When, on Oct. 23, 2012, Kiriakou acquiesced to a plea deal requiring two-and-a-half years in federal prison, then CIA Director Petraeus sent a sanctimonious Memorandum to Agency employees applauding Kiriakou’s conviction and noting, “It marks an important victory for our agency … there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.” [emphasis added]
Consequences for Kiriakou but not, as we now know, for Petraeus.
Fact: A deliberate decision has been made at the Attorney General level if not the Presidential level, to not explore whether Broadwell is a recruited agent of a foreign power — Pollard in drag except that Pollard threw himself at the Turks and others before the Mossad finally took him in.
IDEN B: In reaction to the idea that Broadwell was an asset of Mossad, one would have to wonder about her reaction to the other woman and her going after the other woman in a clumsy manner that resulted in Mossad's case, if that is what it was, being blown up. How much better would such a case be if Mossad could maintain access to the DCI? As such a case, it would have been the ultimate access agent. The KGB chief, the Mossad chief, any chief of intel of any important power – who wouldn't want to protect such a case. It could have kept running if only she hadn't gone after the other woman in such a clumsy way. In a way, if we were sitting around the conference table discussion this as an active CI case, wouldn't we have to wonder whether it was really a Mossad case? They have to be better than that. But, the joke always used to be, “The real CIA is headquartered in Pittsburgh, because this CIA can't possibly be the real one.”
Supposition: A very large part of the Executive decision to break Petraeus had to do with John Brennan wanting Petraeus to be disgraced and out of that job so Brennan could take it. I personally find Jim Clapper's abandonment of Petraeus in the latter's time of need to be despicable. While this was more serious than Bill Clinton's being taken down by neo-con honey trap Monica Lewinsky, and while it may seem contradictory with my conclusion below, had I been DNI I would have supported Petraeus and not allowed Brennan to abuse his White House power. I would have handled this an an internal affair — but then I would also have indicted Dick Cheney and George Tenet for treason in relation to 9/11 and Iraq. Context and timing matter.
IDEN C: It really needs to be emphasized that the blatant access that Broadwell had to Petraeus and his knowledge was known when he was nominated to be D/CIA. He was taken off the grid (as a presidential contender, for example), and then after the election was over, there was a purge across the board of those military officers who dared to challenge the Obama way, notably Allen, Ham, McCrystal, and Petraeus. More recently Mike Flynn may have been a long-delayed part of this. In this context, warrantless wiretapping by NSA, continued rendition and torture and secret prisons (now including one in Chicago under ubber-Zionist Rahm Emanuel) and drone assassination are all over-looked while Israel's access to the D/CIA is also down-played in this final verdict.
Supposition: The settlement is not about Petraeus and his misbehavior. It is about not holding Zionist Israel accountable for poaching a major US military commander. It is about not holding the DNI or Attorney General or Chief of Staff of the US Army or any of the tens of other senior officers accountable for failing to do their jobs. Broadwell is getting a free pass — no indictment for being an agent of a foreign power and no inquiry into her violations as an Army Reserve officer and citizen.
What Would I Have Done? Once forced to deal with this publicly, I would have linked the indictment of Broadwell and determination of her foreign agent status to how we approached Petraeus. I probably would have found Petraeus guilty of at least one felony as well as security violations so severe that he should lose his security clearances, lose at least one if not two stars in retirement, and receive a prison sentence of at least one year, suspended. I would have supported a Presidential pardon allowing him to retire and keep his four star pension, contingent on a lifetime ban from every holding clearances, including SECRET, ever again. If Broadwell has indeed been an agent of a foreign power, I would provide her with an administrative discharge from the US military and a one-way ticket to Israel, accepting her voluntary revocation of citizenship in lieu of a prison term. I would, as President, reprimand in writing the DNI, USDI, Chief of Staff of the US Army, the Director of the FBI, and every G-2 covering for Petraeus during his gross dereliction of duty in relation to classified materials as attendant to his bedding of Broadwell. They should all take that as a signal to retire before I think of something to charge them with.
IDEN B: By the by, has anyone not noticed that Broadwell is a Colonel now? She clearly has “protection.”
IDEN C: If you were President, presumably Petraeus would never have been nominated and Brennan would be nowhere near the White House. In many ways this whole affair — light justice for Petraeus, no scrutiny of Brennan or Broadwell or others, the original placement of Petraeus for the wrong reasons — is a fine reflection of how badly modern Presidents manage their affairs (pun intended).
In Fairness to Petraeus. What George Tenet did as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and what Mike Hayden and Keith Alexander have done as directors of the National Security Agency (NSA) and what Jim Clapper and Mike Vickers and John Brennzn have done as DNI, USDI, and Director of the CIA (D/CIA) have been vastly more harmful to the security of the USA than anything Petraeus did with Broadwell. We have a security state that uses secrecy to cover up daily persistent high crimes and misdemeanors by everyone from the President on down to the driver of the average assassination drone flight. In that larger context, Petraeus is a rounding error and justice — as now defined — has been served. How this was handled across time and space is a microcosm of the pathology of the US Government generally and US intelligence and counterintelligence specifically.
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On Zionism & US Democracy: JFK was assassinated by LBJ and J Edgar Hoover along with elements of the CIA — not necessarily CIA as an institution — as well as Cuban crime based in New Orleans, Cuban exiles from Miami, New York money, and Texas energy interests; Yitzhak Rabin from Israel was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and presumably part of the plot — he then became the next US Ambassador to the USA. A useful prologue is told here, it should be taken in conjunction with JFK's warning to Israel that he was going to stop CIA smuggling of nuclear materials to Israel. Then we have the USS Liberty and a wide variety of false flags and other atrocities now known to be directly attributable to the Zionist government of Israel. It is naive of Americans to think that Israel is any form of ally — for Israel the USA is a “shiksa,” or gentile slut, and in their immortal terms, “shiksas don't count.”
IDEN C: I think you're right, but are leaving out a massive other dimension to this that connects to Benghazi, General Carter Ham, General John Allen, and Jill Kelley. Petraeus, Ham, and Allen were all gone IMMEDIATELY after the 2012 election and not long after Benghazi.
One day on CNN, former CIA case officer Bob Baer said, “The CIA would have known about Petraeus' affair with Broadwell before he became director and decided that it wasn't a security risk. Allen Dulles had hundreds of affairs while DCI, so did many others. This isn't about the affair. Look at Jill Kelley. She's foreign (Lebanese), she was heavily in debt, and had access to the CENTCOM Generals Petraeus, Allen, Ham, etc. She's a perfect access agent.” THE VERY NEXT DAY Bob Baer was on CNN again with the same panel and someone else on the panel said, “Well, but in a case like this where it's clearly just about sex…” and the camera cut over to Bob Baer, who just mumbled, “Uh, yeah, it's clearly just about sex.” THAT is TELLING. Between interview A and interview B, somebody yelled at Bob Baer to stick to the cover story.
Did the Israelis get all this info through either Broadwell or Kelley or both and then purposefully give it to the Iranians so they'd hit Benghazi to give a negative October Surprise to Obama and sink his re-election? And given how John Allen “resigned to spend time with his family in the wake of the flirty e-mails scandal” RIGHT AFTER THE ELECTION AND BENGHAZI and how Carter Ham essentially did the same right around the same time as Petraeus makes me think Obama/CIA busted up a Seven Days in May attempt backed by the Iranians or Israelis in conjunction with the Iranians.
Petraeus Mossad Headlines
