Free Republic

You won't have to wait for any investigations,  Obama has made so many enemies at State Dept,  CIA, and Pentagon, it's all coming out out now...  The walls are closing-in fast- and they know it: witness Jay 'Carney Barker' Carney's 'ashen appearance' at Friday's hostile presser... where all present witnessed the glorious miracle of the White House press corps arising from the grave in unison and actually starting to ask questions. Meanwhile other players are now starting to talk, i.e. David Patraeus' comment that he always considered the WH/State Dept Benghazi talking points to be 'useless'. And there's no shortage of questions to...

May 12, 2013 Watch out for Petraeus in Benghazi scandal Joseph Curl EXCERPT: Carnival barker Jay Carney looked almost ashen Friday as he took the podium to face a suddenly invigorated press corps. Of course, the public briefing came after a private session with “reporters who matter,” a sure sign the White House is in full hunker-down mode — and, more precisely, terrified. Speaking for the White House, the flack said the CIA was fully to blame for the talking points. Fully. “That is what was generated by the intelligence community, by the CIA,” he said. For the record, this...

One of the mysteries in the Benghazi scandal has been the role of David Petraeus, who was then the Director of the CIA but was forced to resign in a personal scandal shortly thereafter. While the White House and State Department tried to cobble together talking points to explain away the terrorist attack that took four American lives, what did Petraeus do? According to new information reported for the first time by Jonathan Karl on ABC News’ This Week earlier this morning, Petraeus rejected the final version as “useless” —

The White House scrambled Friday to explain newly released email excerpts that show a top State Department official pushing to water down the intelligence community's initial story-line on the Benghazi attack, as Republicans sharply challenged the administration's honesty. With new details emerging in the Benghazi-gate controversy, the White House held a background discussion with more than a dozen news organizations. Afterward, Press Secretary Jay Carney weathered a barrage of questions from the media during an at-times awkward White House briefing -- where he tried to defend the truthfulness of his and other officials' prior claims that the initial talking points...

CIA director David Petraeus was surprised when he read the freshly rewritten talking points an aide had emailed him in the early afternoon of Saturday, September 15. One day earlier, analysts with the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis had drafted a set of unclassified talking points policymakers could use to discuss the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. But this new version​—​produced with input from senior Obama administration policymakers​—​was a shadow of the original. The original CIA talking points had been blunt: The assault on U.S. facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist attack conducted by a large group of Islamic extremists, including...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Retired General and former CIA Director David Petraeus will teach part-time and mentor ROTC members at the University of Southern California, the school announced Thursday. Petraeus, who resigned as head of the CIA last year after confessing to an extramarital affair, will begin at the university this fall. “He embodies all the noble qualities of our founder along with a fearless commitment to excellence. His presence will have a profound impact on our students across many disciplines,” USC President C. L. Max Nikias said in a press release. Petraeus, 60, earned a PhD in international relations...

Ex-CIA director David Petraeus is replacing one kind of intelligence work with another. Macaulay Honors College at City University of New York said Tuesday the retired four-star general has been named a visiting professor for public policy. He starts Aug. 1. …

FBI Visits Petraeus' Home, Sources Tell NBC News Pete Williams and M. Alex Johnson FBI agents visited the home of former CIA director David Petraeus on Friday, two sources with knowledge of their visit told NBC News. USA Today reported Friday that the agents went there to "interview" Petraeus, but it's unclear whether he was at his home in suburban Washington. Officials said the visit didn't indicate any new development in the FBI's months-long investigation into allegations that writer Paula Broadwell improperly received or stored classified documents while she was working on Petraeus' biography.

WASHINGTON -- The United States is training secular Syrian fighters in Jordan in a bid to bolster forces battling President Bashar Assad's regime and stem the influence of Islamist radicals among the country's persistently splintered opposition, American and foreign officials said. The training has been conducted for several months now in an unspecified location, concentrating largely on Sunnis and tribal Bedouins who formerly served as members of the Syrian army, officials told The Associated Press. The forces aren't members of the leading rebel group, the Free Syrian Army, which Washington and others fear may be increasingly coming under the sway...

With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders. The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and...

Obama gave his chief counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, who is now the nominee to be the next leader of the CIA, a blank check. Brennan could do just about whatever he needed to do in North Africa and the Mideast, contend Murphy and Webb. Brennan chose to conduct a dangerous classified war without looping in Stevens, who paid with his life for his ignorance, according to the book. The Joint Special Operations Command, which Brennan controls, is a collection of special forces outside of the regular military command originally formed as a hostage-rescue team. But in the middle of last...

Brandon Webb, a former Navy SEAL, and Jack Murphy, a former Green Beret, reveal the new claims in their book EXCLUSIVE: David Petraeus was brought down after betrayal by vengeful CIA agents and his own bodyguards who made sure his affair was exposed, claims new book 'Benghazi: The Definitive Report' Petraeus was humiliated after a 'palace coup' by high-level intelligence officers who did not like the way he was running the CIA, authors say The book also claims that Petraeus and Ambassador Chris Stevens were caught off guard by Benghazi consulate attack because they weren't briefed about on-going U.S. military...

WASHINGTON — Last summer, as the fighting in Syria raged and questions about the United States’ inaction grew, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred privately with David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. The two officials were joining forces on a plan to arm the Syrian resistance. The idea was to vet the rebel groups and train fighters, who would be supplied with weapons. The plan had risks, but it also offered the potential reward of creating Syrian allies with whom the United States could work, both during the conflict and after President Bashar al-Assad’s eventual removal. Mrs....

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press. In the American instance, Murdoch's goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012...

The Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks to the press has snared a high-profile conviction of an FBI linguist, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison Monday after pleading guilty to giving classified information to a blogger. The sentence for Shamai Leibowitz is likely to become the longest ever served by a government employee accused of passing national security secrets to a member of the media. His case represents only the third known conviction in U.S. history for a government official or contractor providing classified information to the press. And it reflects a surprising development: President Barack Obama’s Justice Department...

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold for almost a year to work for Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Provided desks, e-mail accounts and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently. Their compensation from the U.S. government for their efforts, which often involved 18-hour workdays, seven days a week and...

A conversation that began in jest and that led to a passing comment at the end of my interview with General David Petraeus has turned into a firestorm of speculation and an attempt to denigrate Fox. Today, I’m bewildered by the reaction of the press to Bob Woodward’s story in the Washington Post. Though Bob is in possession of a secretly recorded tape of my conversation with the general...

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — Former CIA Director David Petraeus reveals that he “screwed up royally” in having an affair with his biographer.

Jill Kelley demands probe into who leaked her name... as it's revealed 15 investigators are working 7 days a week to scrutinize her 'inappropriate' emails with General Allen Tampa socialite who tipped off FBI about Petraeus' affair breaks her silence Attorneys claimed she never tried to exploit her friendship with CIA boss Officials reveal a team is working around the clock to investigate 60-70 emails she exchanged with Allen, leader of U.S. troops in Afghanistan Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2239567/Jill-Kelley-demands-investigation-leaked-press-Petraeus-sex-scandal.html

Let us turn from the post-Thanksgiving scenes of inflamed mobs clubbing each other to the ground for a discounted television set to the comparatively placid boulevards of the Middle East. In Cairo, no sooner had Hillary Clinton's plane cleared Egyptian air space then Mohammed Morsi issued one-man constitutional amendments declaring himself and his Muslim Brotherhood buddies free from judicial oversight and announced that his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, would be retried for all the stuff he was acquitted of in the previous trial. Morsi now wields total control over Parliament, the Judiciary, and the military to a degree Mubarak in his...