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Gasparilla..the extravaganza. When Jose Gaspar died, he supposedly left an untold fortune in buried treasure somewhere along the Florida coast. Though that treasure has never been discovered, the story of the swashbuckling Gasparilla was unearthed and his memory revived in 1904 when Tampa's social and civic leaders adopted the pirate as patron rogue of their city-wide celebration. Miss Louise Frances Dodge, society editor of the Tampa Tribune, was planning the city's first May festival. At the suggestion of George W. Hardee, then with the federal government in Tampa, she decided to develop a theme for the affair based on the legend of Gasparilla.

Secret meetings gave birth to the first "Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla," whose forty members planned to surprise the populace with a mock pirate attack on Tampa. Masked and fully-costumed, the first krewe arrived on horseback and "captured the city" during the Festival Parade.

HISTORY OF GASPARILLA TODAY
The first invasion was so successful and well-received by the people of Tampa that a city-wide demand was voiced to make the Mystic Krewe organization permanent and to replicate the carnival each year.

Tampa has upheld its tradition by celebrating Gasparilla every year with only ten exceptions since that infamous first invasion. Today, Ye Mystic Krewe numbers over 700 of the city's most prominent men, who uphold their mascot Gaspar as a "hearty old swashbuckler with courtly manners and possibly – just possibly – prankful habits."

In 1954 the Krewe commissioned the building of the world's only fully rigged pirate ship to be built in modern times. Named the Jose Gasparilla, the ship is a replica of a West Indiaman used in the 18th century. She is constructed of steel at 165' long by 35' across the beam, with 3 steel masts standing 100' tall. During the year she is usually docked at the Tarpon Weigh Station on Bayshore Blvd. for the public's viewing pleasure. In the past, Gasparilla has been celebrated on the second Monday in February.

A break in tradition came in 1988 with the move to a Saturday festival. The change allows surrounding communities to take part in the celebration. In 2002, the festival was moved to the last Saturday in January. In addition to the traditional invasion and parade, the Gasparilla celebration encompasses a full week's worth of activities held throughout the city. This January, Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla will lay siege upon Tampa once again.

Feinstein also she also may subpoena reports on a trip Petraeus took to Libya in the last year.


“I believe that Director Petraeus made a trip to the region shortly before this (Petraeus affair) became public,” Feinstein said on "Andrea Mitchell Reports." “We have asked to see the trip report. One person tells me he’s read it, and then we try to get it and they tell me it hasn’t been done. That’s unacceptable.”
“It may have some very relevant information to what happened in Benghazi,” Feinstein said.
A week and a half ago, Petraeus went to Tripoli and conducted a personal inquiry into the Benghazi attack, NBC News has confirmed.

JackRiddler wrote:.

The Benghazi nonsense will continue to swirl around this affair but I'm going to stick with my original intuition: Sending Petraeus to the CIA last year was always intended to result in his neutralization. (Perhaps I'm letting myself be faked out by the fact that my own prediction of last year has come true. It's possible I was only coincidentally right, or right for the wrong reasons.)

That doesn't mean I know necessarily who wanted him neutralized, or why. My guess is that it was straight-up partisanship and personal rivalry, a move to knock out a potentially formidable champion of the Republican Party and general all-around flag-waving war-making jingo nuisance.

Originally I concluded this solely on the basis that Petraeus was being sent to a place where they don't like outsiders. (They also don't like all insiders, hence their little wars with the Bush mob and disposal of Goss.) I'm sure Petraeus was aware of this and arrogant enough to believe he could win the bet anyway. Or stupid enough to think he could keep his hot affair secret. (If being the hardass commander of wars and an celebrated military "genius" doesn't already make you think you've got an S on your chest, lovemaking with a super-hot smarty-pants woman who is 20 years your junior but nevertheless mature and thus "really" choosing you and not just some groupie - even though she is the ultimate groupie! - may contribute to a false sense of invulnerability.)

Also, given the code of honor schtick he could hardly refuse an appointment from his C-in-C. That would have also made him look bad.

.

A Covert Affair:
Petraeus Caught in the Honeypot?
by Justin Raimondo, November 12, 2012

The outing of Gen. David Petraeus as an adulterer, and his subsequent resignation as CIA Director, was carried out by an unknown FBI “whistleblower” who leaked the facts of the FBI investigation into the General’s private life to Rep. Eric Cantor. The New York Times reports:

“Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, said Saturday an F.B.I. employee whom his staff described as a whistle-blower told him about Mr. Petraeus’s affair and a possible security breach in late October, which was after the investigation had begun.

“’I was contacted by an F.B.I. employee concerned that sensitive, classified information may have been compromised and made certain Director Mueller was aware of these serious allegations and the potential risk to our national security,’ Mr. Cantor said in a statement.

“Mr. Cantor talked to the person after being told by Representative Dave Reichert, Republican of Washington, that a whistle-blower wanted to speak to someone in the Congressional leadership about a national security concern. On Oct. 31, his chief of staff, Steve Stombres, called the F.B.I. to tell them about the call.”

The FBI probe apparently started in late spring, when several people associated with Petraeus — not just the one woman, as has been reported elsewhere — received harassing emails. The emails were traced to 40-year-old Paula Broadwell, national security analyst, military intelligence veteran, and author of a biography of Petraeus. Authorities believed his email account may have been hacked, and this led to a remarkable irony: the CIA chief’s emails were monitored, without his knowledge, whereupon it was discovered Broadwell may have either had access to his account or tried to obtain access. In any case, in the course of their spying, FBI monitors discovered a large volume of emails to and from Broadwell. Looking for evidence of a security breach, all they found was evidence of a “human drama,” as one anonymous FBI official put it: an illicit affair between Petraeus and Broadwell.

Petraeus was only informed of the investigation on October 25 or 26. So here we have the astonishing fact of the CIA’s head honcho being spied on for a period of months by our own law enforcement officials.

Or maybe it wasn’t a simple case of complaints about “harassing” or threatening emails. Fox News avers:

“The FBI had been investigating an unrelated and much broader case before stumbling on the affair. Fox News has learned that during the course of this investigation, the name of biographer Paula Broadwell came up. The FBI followed that lead and in doing so, uncovered his affair with her.”

What was this “much broader case”? Almost certainly it was a counterintelligence investigation, i.e. a pushback against efforts by some foreign entity to penetrate or otherwise compromise US secrets. We can only guess at the specifics, however we do know that in the course of that investigation Broadwell’s name “came up.”

On the surface, at least, Broadwell is not the sort of person whose name would come up in a counterintelligence investigation: a West Point graduate, where she earned degrees in political geography and systems engineering, she seems like the veritable embodiment of All-American
red-white-and-blue super-patriotism. This biographical account on her high school website says

“Paula pursued a military intelligence career abroad, serving in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During her service, especially after 9-11, Paula’s intensity was directed toward the war against terror; her contributions and efforts to thwart terrorism have been commended by the U.S. Army and by Europe’s Special Operations Forces Commanding General. In this arena, she has planned counter-terrorism initiatives presented to NATO and worked on transnational counter-terrorism issues with foreign and domestic agencies, U.S. Special Forces, and the FBI.”

Graduate studies at the University of Denver in Middle East studies enabled her to travel to “Jordan and Israel,” and make a swing through the Persian Gulf and Europe where she spoke at various conferences. This triumphal tour was capped by a Harvard fellowship “for study in Syria and Iran.”

While Broadwell’s current academic affiliation is with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, her previous post was deputy director of the Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. The Center, according to its self-description, “distinguishes itself by a philosophy that maintains counter-terrorism should be predictive, preventive and preemptive, with the latter being a last resort.” Founded in 2005, the Jebsen Center was made possible by the generous donation of one Jan Henrik Jebsen, heir to the Norwegian shipping fortune, who gave $1.3 million to set it up. Jebsen, a former investment banker with Lazard Freres, is the principal of Gamma Applied Visions Group, an international octopus with tentacles all over the place: part arms dealer and weapons developer, part “green” energy company. As one might expect from someone who has so much of his multi-billion dollar fortune invested in making and selling armaments, Jebsen is on the board of directors of the distinctly warlike Hudson Institute, where Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and practically every neocon you’ve ever heard of have found refuge.

While, in true neocon fashion, Hudson scholars conjure a wide diversity of imminent “threats” to the US, including China and Russia, their main focus is the threat of Islamist radicalism, especially as it impacts Israel. Indeed, Hudson operates inside Israel, where it pushes the far-rightist views of the most extreme elements in Israeli society: the settler movement, and the faction of Likud angling for war with Iran. It has also focused its attention on purging universities of academics who don’t toe the right-wing ultra-nationalist Likudnik line.

More recently, former Hudson president and “trustee emeritus” Max Singer — who has since moved to Israel, where, as a “public policy consultant” at Bar Ilan University, he spends his time inciting violence against Palestinians — is on a mission to protect Israel from the alleged threat posed by the President of the United States.

The Jebsen Center has been equally useful to the neocons. Richard H. Schultz, head of Tufts’ International Studies program (of which the Center is a part) was a signatory to the Project for a New American Century’s “open letter” to President Bush urging war with Iraq and a number of other Middle Eastern actors in the wake of 9/11. Here he is recommending the importation of Israeli “anti-terrorist” techniques to pacify the restless natives of Iraq. Here is another Jebsen Center scholar describing alleged terrorist actions engaged in by Iran worldwide. And then there’s the testimony of this guy:

“The idea of overthrowing the Iranian government through covert but peaceful means is not original. The project was first brought to my attention in August 2006 when I worked as an intern research assistant at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Diplomacy’s Jebsen Center for Counter-terrorism. I worked for the then director of the center Brigadier General Russell Howard (Ret.) on a project titled Bringing Down Iran Without Firing A Shot. I wasn’t very experienced in the world of covert operations in the field or in the academic realm but I was very interested in becoming involved in it. General Howard, on the other hand, was not only a counter-terrorism strategist but a veteran Special Forces officer, an academic, and a tutor. It was General Howard who introduced me to the idea of targeting factors specific to Iran in order to adapt to the country’s specific needs. He had six factors which he believed were important: The military use of ongoing insurgencies within Iran, political strife, economic strife, declining oil revenues, demographics, and deteriorating infrastructure.”

Interestingly, in November of 2006, during her tenure at the Jebsen Center, Broadwell led a group of Fletcher School students on a trip to New York City to meet with then Iranian UN representative Javad Zarif. Both are alumni of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

All this establishes a context that goes far beyond the titillating details of the alleged affair between Petraeus and Broadwell — and this is no doubt what set alarm bells ringing in the intelligence community when it was revealed. Is there really any need to point out the uses of the “honeypot” in intelligence-gathering and other covert activities regularly engaged in by spooks of all nations? From Mata Hari to the Mossad agent who lured Israeli nuclear scientist Mordecahi Vanunu, sex is a time-honored weapon in the war of spy-vs-spy. A secret affair with the CIA Director is the equivalent of the Honeypot Olympics, and we have to ask: was the remarkably fit Ms. Broadwell a lure? If so, she’s won a Gold Medal.

Broadwell’s actions — sending emails that were bound to be traced back to her — appear to make little sense on the surface. But if the goal of luring a 60-year-old geezer into an affair with a much younger woman was to expose him, and get him fired, then surely her antics succeeded in accomplishing that goal.

So who would have an interest in getting rid of Petraeus? Here’s where the Cantor connection comes in. The tip by an anonymous “FBI employee” that wound up in Cantor’s office two weeks ago came through Rep. David Reichert, Republican of Washington state, who has a friend who knows the whistleblower. Cantor then spoke to the whistleblower directly, who put him in touch with FBI Director Mueller.

Cantor is a great friend of Israel, and Petraeus — not so much. The General was attacked, as you’ll recall, by partisans of the Lobby, including Abe Foxman, when he delivered testimony before Congress citing Israel as a strategic liability in the Middle East. As the executor of the new Obamaite policy of sidling up to Islamists, not only in Libya but also in Syria and Egypt, Petraeus was no doubt seen by the Israelis as an enemy to be neutralized.

Broadwell’s affiliation with the Jebsen Center, and the Center’s connection to the neoconservative network, sets the scene: a young, attractive woman with impeccable national security credentials throws herself at Petraeus, and he takes the bait. Whether she’s been recruited by a foreign intelligence agency at this point or not is irrelevant: he’s already put himself in a vulnerable position, and there are any number of actors on the international stage more than willing to press their advantage.

Will we ever know the full story? At this point, the story is so hot that it may burn the cover story — “it’s all about sex” — right off the wrapper. Because there’s more — a lot more — here than meets the eye. When Cantor pledged to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he and his fellow Republicans “will serve as a check on the administration” in regard to the President’s policy toward Israel, he was clearly aligning himself with a foreign leader against American interests as perceived by the White House. But would he really go this far — deliberately taking down a key figure, one beloved by Republicans, in order to keep his promise to Netanyahu?

Stay tuned to this space, because this story is moving fast….

Update: This morning [11/12/12] the New York Times reports:

“F.B.I. agents interviewed Ms. Broadwell for the first time the week of Oct. 21, and she acknowledged the affair, a government official briefed on the matter said. She also voluntarily gave the agency her computer. In a search, the agents discovered several classified documents, which raised the additional question of whether Mr. Petraeus had given them to her. She said that he had not. Agents interviewed Mr. Petraeus the following week. He also admitted to the affair but said he had not given any classified documents to her. The agents then interviewed Ms. Broadwell again on Friday, Nov. 2, the official said.”

Bingo!

The Sins Of General David Petraeus
Petraeus seduced America. We should never have trusted him.

Michael Hastings
BuzzFeed Staff

Posted Nov 11, 2012 5:43pm EST
The fraud that General David Petraeus perpetrated on America started many years before the general seduced Paula Broadwell, a lower-ranking officer 20 years his junior, after meeting her on a campus visit to Harvard.
More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. “Perception” is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred."
Yes, it’s not what actually happens that matters — it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened.
Until this weekend, Petraeus had been incredibly successful in making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor, among other things. Most of the stories written about him fall under what we hacks in the media like to call “a blow job." Vanity Fair. The New Yorker. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Time. Newsweek. In total, all the profiles, stage-managed and controlled by the Pentagon’s multimillion dollar public relations apparatus, built up an unrealistic and superhuman myth around the general that, in the end, did not do Petraeus or the public any favors. Ironically, despite all the media fellating, our esteemed and sex-obsessed press somehow missed the actual blow job.
Before I lay out the Petraeus counter-narrative — a narrative intentionally ignored by most of the Pentagon press and national security reporters, for reasons I’ll soon explain — let me say this about the man once known as King David, General Betray-Us, or P4, by his admirers, his enemies, and his fellow service members, respectively. He’s an impressive guy, a highly motivated individual, a world-class bullshit artist, a fitness addict, and a man who spent more time in shitty places over the past 10 years than almost any other American serving his or her country has. I've covered him for seven years now, and he’ll always have my respect and twisted admiration.
So it’s fair to say that P4 probably deserves something a little better than the public humiliation he’s about to endure. Sources who long feared him have already begun to leak salacious details; one told me this weekend that he took Broadwell along with him on a government-funded trip to Paris in July 2011. And questions about his role in the Benghazi debacle are also likely to deepen.
And Broadwell, too, is about to get slandered in a way no woman deserves. She’s the Pentagon’s Monica Lewinksy — and, despite Team Petraeus’ much advertised lip service to courage and integrity, it didn’t take long for his allies to swarm the press with anonymous quotes smearing the West Point graduate and married mother of two: that she wore “tight clothes,” as The Washington Post reported, or that she had her “claws in him.” In other words, how could Old Dave have resisted that slut’s charms?
Pretty shitty behavior, all around. As Petraeus ally and counterinsurgency scholar Dr. Andrew Exum might put it, stay classy!
But the warning signs about Petraeus’ core dishonesty have been around for years. Here's a brief summary: We can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or that, in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. The policy wasn’t working, but Bush repaid the general’s political advocacy by giving him the top job in the war three years later.
There’s his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He’s more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption, and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as “Iraqi death squads.” On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called "surge," he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war.
He did it by papering over what the surge actually was: We took the Shiites' side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we’d help them out too. It was a brutal enterprise — over 800 Americans died during the surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus’ policies fueled. Then he popped smoke and left the members of the Sunni Awakening to fend for themselves. A journalist friend told me a story of an Awakening member, exiled in Amman, whom Petraeus personally assured he would never abandon. The former insurgent had a picture of Petraeus on his wall, but was a little hurt that the general no longer returned his calls.
MoveOn may have been ill-advised to attack the general as "Betray Us" in Washington, but there was little doubt that many in the Awakening felt betrayed.
Petraeus was so convincing on Baghdad that he manipulated President Obama into trying the same thing in Kabul. In Afghanistan, he first underhandedly pushed the White House into escalating the war in September 2009 (calling up columnists to “box” the president in) and waged a full-on leak campaign to undermine the White House policy process. Petraeus famously warned his staff that the White House was “fucking” with the wrong guy.
The doomed Afghanistan surge would come back to bite him in the ass, however. A year after getting the war he wanted, P4 got stuck having to fight it himself. After Petraeus frenemy General Stanley McChrystal got fired for trashing the White House in a story I published in Rolling Stone, the warrior-scholar had to deploy yet again.
The Afghan war was a loser, always was, and always would be — Petraeus made horrible deals with guys like Abdul Razzik and the other Afghan gangsters and killed a bunch of people who didn’t need to be killed. And none of it mattered, or made a dent in his reputation. This was the tour where Broadwell joined him at headquarters, and it’s not so shocking that he’d need to find some solace, somewhere, to get that daily horror show out of his mind.
(This past summer, there were more attacks in Afghanistan than in the summer before the surge, a devastating statistic. I could keep going, but if you’re interested, check out The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.)

How did Petraeus get away with all this for so long? Well, his first affair — and one that matters so much more than the fact that he was sleeping with a female or two — was with the media.
(For the record: Who really cares whom P4 is sleeping with? The idea that the FBI was investigating his sex life says more about the FBI and our absurd surveillance and national security state than it does about King David’s morality.)
Petraeus’ first biographer, former U.S. News and World Report reporter Linda Robinson, wrote a book about him, then went to CENTCOM to work for him. Yes — a so-called journalist published a book about him, then started getting a paycheck from him soon after. This went largely unremarked upon.
Another huge supporter was Tom Ricks, a former Washington Post journalist who found a second career as unofficial press agent for the general and his friends. Ricks is the ringleader of what I like to call “the media-military industrial complex,” setting the standard for its incestuous everyday corruption. He not only built Dave up, he facilitated the disastrous liaison between Broadwell and Petraeus. Ricks helped get Broadwell a literary agent, a six-figure book deal, and a publisher.
Broadwell was sold to publishers as much for her looks as what she was writing — she was an attractive package to push Petraeus and his counterinsurgency ideas. Little, Brown editor Geoff Shandler once told me how “hot” he thought Broadwell was after she came in to meet him at his office, and indicated to me that Broadwell had made him somewhat aroused. Intellectual integrity all around, to be sure.
Ricks blurbed her in All In, and earlier had promoted her content on his blog — the oddly titled Travels With Paula, a headline he slapped to a story about the U.S. military’s total destruction of a small village in southern Afghanistan. Broadwell described the ultra-violent wipeout in favorable terms — and when she was confronted with an angry villager whose house had been destroyed, she wrote that the Afghan’s tears and anger were a “a fit of theatrics.”
This was the kind of bullshit Ricks and Broadwell had been pushing — and it not only wasn’t called bullshit, it was embraced as serious work. Ricks wasn’t the only offender, of course — Petraeus more or less had journalists from many major media outlets slurping from the Pentagon’s gravy train. The typical route was to have all the cash and favors funneled through a third party like the Center for a New American Security.
CNAS was a Petraeus-inspired operation from its inception in 2007, and it made its reputation promoting Petraeus’ counterinsurgency plans. No problem, right? Except that it put the journalists who were covering those same plans and policies on its payroll. For instance, New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker took money and a position from CNAS and still covered the Pentagon; Robert Kaplan, David Cloud from the Los Angeles Times, and others produced a small library’s worth of hagiographies while sharing office space at CNAS with retired generals whom they’d regularly quote in their stories.
But Petraeus’ crash is more significant than the latest nonsense sex scandal. As President Obama says, our decade of war is coming to an end. The reputations of the men who were intimately involved in these years of foreign misadventure, where we tortured and supported torture, armed death squads, conducted nightly assassinations, killed innocents, and enabled corruption on an unbelievable scale, lie in tatters. McChrystal, Caldwell, and now Petraeus — the era of the celebrity general is over. Everyone is paying for their sins. (And before we should shed too many tears for the plight of King David and his men, remember, they’ll be taken care of with speaking fees and corporate board memberships, rewarded as instant millionaires by the same defense establishment they served so well.)
Before Dave fell for Paula, we fell for Dave. He tried to convince us that heroes aren’t human. They are human, like us, and sometimes worse.

Exclusive: Paula Broadwell’s Emails Revealed
by Michael Daly Nov 12, 2012 6:20 PM EST
Broadwell’s notes to Jill Kelley were full of ‘cat-fight stuff,’ a source tells Michael Daly—but there were no overt threats, and Petraeus was barely mentioned. So why did the FBI jump in?

The emails that Jill Kelley showed an FBI friend near the start of last summer were not jealous lover warnings like “stay away from my man,” a knowledgeable source tells The Daily Beast.


This July 13, 2011, photo made available on the International Security Assistance Force's Flickr website shows the former Commander of International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan Gen. Davis Petraeus, left, shaking hands with Paula Broadwell, co-author of "All In: The Education of General David Petraeus." (ISAF / AP Photo)

The messages were instead what the source terms “kind of cat-fight stuff.”

“More like, ‘Who do you think you are? … You parade around the base … You need to take it down a notch,’” according to the source, who was until recently at the highest levels of the intelligence community and prefers not to be identified by name.


The base described is MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, where Kelley serves as an unpaid “social liaison.” The source reports that the emails did make one reference to Gen. David Petraeus, but it was oblique and offered no manifest suggestion of a personal relationship or even that he was central to the sender’s spite.

Kelley herself seemed mystified as to what was behind the emails, much less who sent them.

“I don’t know who this person is and I don’t want to keep getting them,” she told the FBI, as recounted by the source.

When the FBI friend showed the emails to the cyber squad in the Tampa field office, her fellow agents noted that the absence of any overt threats.

“No, ‘I’ll kill you’ or ‘I'll burn your house down,’” the source says. “It doesn’t seem really that bad.”

The squad was not even sure the case was worth pursuing, the source says.

“What does this mean? There’s no threat there. This is against the law?” the agents asked themselves by the source’s account.

At most the messages were harassing. The cyber squad had to consult the statute books in its effort to determine whether there was adequate legal cause to open a case.

“It was a close call,” the source says.

What tipped it may have been Kelley’s friendship with the agent. The squad opened a case, though with no expectation it would turn into anything significant.

“They weren’t seeing this as the crime of the century,” the source says.

And certainly nobody was looking to do anything that might cause a huge fuss and maybe get them bounced from Tampa. The field office there is a $35 million palace with a second-floor fitness center whose plate-glass windows overlook Tampa Bay, and an eating area that includes an outdoor, screened-in extension for fed al fresco. The closest agents get to that in, say, cold and grimy New York is eating in their cars.

The agents soon determined that the emails were coming from Paula Broadwell. They then would have had to consult with the U.S. Attorney’s office in order to secure a search warrant enabling them to go into Broadwell’s email.

“I was with Ganrl Patrais? He came to my haws.”
They apparently did so and are said to have found a number of nonclassified documents that seemed to have originated with Petraeus but had not been sent by an account bearing his name. And yet they did not seem to have been forwarded from anywhere.

The agents then determined that Broadwell and Petraeus had been communicating with each other via private email accounts. As the Associated Press reported on Monday, the pair would save unsent messages in their inboxes, and then log into each other's account to read them.

“She really knows him,” the agents told themselves, by the source’s account.

The question then was the nature of the connection.

“What it was and most importantly what it wasn’t,” the source says.

Some of the steamier messages made clear that it was an affair. The besotted Broadwell may have viewed the curvaceous Kelley as a threat. Broadwell may be able to run a six-minute mile with Petraeus, but Kelley looks like a woman who lets the guys do all the running—and in her direction.

Maybe Broadwell chanced to encounter Kelley on some occasion and felt snubbed. Or Broadwell could have just seen online photos of Petraeus and his wife visiting the mansion that Kelley shares with her doctor husband and three young children. Kelley likely assisted her 7-year-old daughter, Caroline, in posting an online photo album that includes a picture of the girl and her two sisters with Petraeus.

“I was with Ganrl Patrais?’ the girl’s handwritten caption reads. “He came to my haws.”

For Kelley to help post this if she were having an affair with the general would border on the pathological. Bad enough that the news of Kelley’s involvement in setting the case in motion broke just in time for reporters to swarm the house during Caroline’s seventh birthday party there, complete with bouncy castle.

Broadwell is herself married to a doctor and has two young children. Maybe the parallels were part of what set her off. Her father told the New York Daily News that there is “a lot more here than meets the eye,” though he declined say what that might be.

Whatever transpired, the FBI agents found no indication that it constituted a crime or a threat to national security. They confirmed this when they interviewed Broadwell and then Petraeus. They are both said to have been forthcoming and consistent, even telling the agents more than they already knew.

Petraeus seems to have been the first guy in memory not to lie about sex. And a good thing too, because lying to a federal agent is a crime. Martha Stewart found that out the hard way.

By that point, FBI headquarters almost certainly had been notified. One former agent with extensive experience estimates that it would have taken no more than 24 hours for word to get to Director Robert Mueller. A case that might never have been if the agents in Tampa had heeded their initial misgivings now presented the head of the FBI with a predicament in which there were no happy options.

In all electronic surveillance, including emails, the FBI is legally compelled to adhere to the principle of “minimization,” limiting the invasion of privacy as much as possible to what is specifically warranted. This applies even when a case involves the worst kinds of criminals.

Agents are required to abstain from even listening to such purely personal conversations as mushy talk between a mob killer and his mistress. Minimization in these instances may have saved lives, as Mafia wives are notably more liable to express their fury physically than, say, military spouses. The wife of one Gambino crime-family boss sent an email concerning her philandering husband that was unquestionably a death threat. She then followed it with an apology.

“I am sorry I misspelled ‘arsenic.’”

As the Tampa case did not involve a crime or a threat to national security, one might have expected the spirit of minimization to lead the FBI to keep any personal revelations within the bureau and not say anything to anybody.

Perhaps Mueller was worried that if it leaked out somehow he might be accused of being like the FBI’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, who relished collecting dirt. Hoover was not shy about using it to blackmail even the president. Mueller might even have been accused to being party to a plot to muzzle Petraeus regarding the mess in Benghazi.

Mueller chose to refer the matter to Petraeus’s titular superior, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. The justification was that Petraeus was the head of an organization where such personal entanglements are considered a threat to security by making an agent a target for blackmail. No Bond girls for our spies. Mark it as an added twist that Skyfall opened in the midst of all this.

The CIA double-no code aside, nobody could possibly believe that Petraeus would allow himself to be blackmailed into betraying the nation over an affair. But the principle of the boss adhering to the rules remained. And Clapper is said to have urged Petraeus to resign on his own terms rather than await the jackals.

Petraeus dutifully went to the White House to tender his resignation. Never mind that the Oval Office has witnessed much philandering over the decades with nobody having to resign. Never mind that Bill Clinton remains living proof of the silliness of modern puritanism. Our present president is by every indication a faithful husband, but he needed Clinton’s help to get reelected.

The fact that the resignation came immediately after the election, even though the case is said to have begun back in late May or the beginning of June, has made more than a few people wonder about the timing.

Whatever the truth in this regard, it remains pitifully ironic that Petraeus could come to such grief over a little sex under a desk in a war zone where thousands of people were and are earnestly seeking to blow other people to bloody bits. Shoot but don’t schtup?

And just because Broadwell performed the literary equivalent of sex under a desk does not mean that any actual sex is anybody’s business.

By the long-honored principle of minimization, the members of Congress who are demanding to know why they were not told earlier about Petraeus’s affair with his biographer should be asking another question.

They should instead be demanding to know why anybody outside the FBI was told anything at all.

FBI Agent in Petraeus Case Under Scrutiny

By DEVLIN BARRETT, EVAN PEREZ and SIOBHAN GORMAN

WASHINGTON—A federal agent who launched the investigation that ultimately led to the resignation of Central Intelligence Agency chief David Petraeus was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors' concerns that he had become personally involved in the case, according to officials familiar with the probe.

New details about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation handled the case suggest that even as the bureau delved into Mr. Petraeus's personal life, the agency had to address questionable conduct by one of its own—including allegedly sending shirtless photos of himself to a woman involved in the case.
Associated Press
Jill Kelley leaves her house Monday.

FBI officials declined to identify the agent, who is now under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal-affairs arm of the FBI, according to two officials familiar with the matter.

The revelations address how the investigation first began and ultimately led to Mr. Petraeus's downfall as director of the CIA. The new developments also raise questions about the role played by the FBI and the adequacy of notification to administration and congressional leaders about the scandal.

The FBI agent who started the case was a friend of Jill Kelley, the Tampa woman who received harassing, anonymous emails that led to the probe, according to officials. Ms. Kelley, a volunteer who organizes social events for military personnel in the Tampa area, complained in May about the emails to a friend who is an FBI agent. That agent referred it to a cyber crimes unit, which opened an investigation.

However, supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter, and prohibited him from any role in the investigation, according to the officials.

The FBI officials found that he had sent shirtless pictures of himself to Ms. Kelley, according to the people familiar with the probe.

Enlarge Image

The Charlotte Observer/Associated Press
Paula Broadwell, at the center of the Petraeus case, poses with her biography of the former CIA Chief in January.

That same agent, after being barred from the case, contacted a member of Congress, Washington Republican David Reichert, because he was concerned senior FBI officials were going to sweep the matter under the rug, the officials said. That information was relayed to top congressional officials, who notified FBI headquarters in Washington.

By that point, FBI agents had determined the harassing emails had been sent by Paula Broadwell, who had written a biography of Mr. Petraeus's military command.

Investigators had also determined that Ms. Broadwell had been having an affair with Mr. Petraeus, and that the emails suggested Ms. Broadwell was suspicious of Ms. Kelley's attention to Mr. Petraeus, officials said.

The accusatory emails, according to officials, were sent anonymously to an account shared by Ms. Kelley and her husband. Ms. Broadwell allegedly used a variety of email addresses to send the harassing messages to Ms. Kelley, officials said.

One asked if Ms. Kelley's husband was aware of her actions, according to officials. In another, the anonymous writer claimed to have watched Ms. Kelley touching "him'' provocatively underneath a table, the officials said.

The message was referring to Mr. Petraeus, but that wasn't clear at the time, officials said. A lawyer for Ms. Kelley didn't respond to messages Monday seeking comment, nor did a lawyer for Ms. Broadwell. Neither woman has replied to requests to speak about the matter.

By then, what began as a relatively simple cyberstalking case had ballooned into a national security investigation. Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell, both of them married, had set up private Gmail accounts to contact each other, according to several officials familiar with the investigation. The FBI at one point was concerned the CIA director's email had been accessed by outsiders.

After agents interviewed Ms. Broadwell, she let them examine her computer, where they found copies of classified documents, according to the officials. Both Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell denied that he had given her the documents, and FBI officials eventually concluded they had no evidence to suggest otherwise.

Even as the probe of the relationship between Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell intensified in late summer and early fall, authorities were able to eventually rule out a security breach, though intelligence officials became concerned Mr. Petraeus had left himself exposed to possible blackmail, according to officials.

A day after the Nov. 6 election, intelligence officials presented their findings to the White House. Mr. Petraeus met with White House officials last Thursday and announced his resignation the following day.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have questioned whether Mr. Petraeus needed to resign over the affair, and some have argued that the FBI should have alerted both the White House and Congress much earlier to the potential security implications surrounding Mr. Petraeus.

In a separate twist in the tangled matter of Mr. Petraeus's resignation, the CIA disputed a theory advanced by Ms. Broadwell that insurgents may have attacked the U.S. consulate and a CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 in a bid to free militants being held there by the agency. Ms. Broadwell suggested that rationale for the consulate attack in an address at the University of Denver on Oct. 26.

"I don't know if a lot of you had heard this, but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner and they think the attack on the consulate was an attempt to get these prisoners back," she said then. "It's still being vetted."

A CIA spokesman said there were no militant prisoners there, noting that President Barack Obama ended CIA authority to hold detainees in 2009. "Any suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless," said the spokesperson.

Some critics pointed to Ms. Broadwell's remarks in Denver as an indication that she may have been passing on classified information, leading to speculation that Mr. Petraeus may have been the source. Based on descriptions by U.S. officials, the romantic relationship had ended by then.

In addition, the source of her comment may not have been intelligence information, but news reports. Earlier in her address, she cited findings of a report that day by Fox News. Immediately after, she mentioned the possibility that the CIA had held militants at the site, which the Fox report also mentioned.

The Sept. 11 consulate attack resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. One person briefed on U.S. intelligence said that reports focused on two main motives for the attack: inspiration from the violent protest that day at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, and the exhortation of al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri to avenge the death of his second in command. The possibility of attackers trying to free detainees never came up, this person said.

This week, lawmakers are slated to receive a series of closed-door briefings on the FBI investigation that turned up the affair between Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has one such briefing scheduled Tuesday. On Wednesday, leaders of the House intelligence committee—Rep. Michael Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the panel and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat—will be briefed by FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce and acting CIA director Michael Morell.

Senate intelligence committee staffers are working to schedule similar briefings. On Thursday, both the House and Senate intelligence committees were already slated to receive testimony on Benghazi from top intelligence and law-enforcement officials. The investigation that uncovered the affair is now expected to also be a central issue at those hearings, which won't be public.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), who chairs the Senate intelligence committee complained Sunday that she and her colleagues should have been told of the Petraeus-Broadwell affair when the FBI discovered it because of national-security concerns.

FBI AGENTS REPORTEDLY RAID HOME OF PETRAEUS’ ALLEGED MISTRESS PAULA BROADWELL
Posted on November 12, 2012 at 9:43pm by Jason Howerton Print »Email »
Comments (14)
FBI agents on Monday night raided the home of Paula Broadwell, the alleged mistress of former CIA director David Petraeus, WCNC reporter Dianne Gallagher reported via her official Twitter account.

Gallagher said “two men with briefcases just showed up to the Broadwell home… ran inside.” The reporter also said later “dozens of people” showed up to the home, carrying bags and boxes inside, possibly to gather evidence.

“FBI agents have been inside Paula Broadwell’s Dilworth home for about an hour now. About a dozen there, with bags/boxes, taking pics,” Gallagher added.

She estimated the first two agents arriving at 8:40 p.m. EST. And as of 10 p.m. EST, the agents, which had since multiplied, were reportedly still inside presumably collecting evidence of some sort.

Top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Allen, implicated in Petraeus scandal

RT Published: 13 November, 2012, 10:30

The US head of NATO forces in Afghanistan is under investigation in connection with the sex scandal that saw CIA director David Petraeus resign. Gen. Allen exchanged “inappropriate” emails with a woman linked to Petraeus.

The FBI has found 20,000 to 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate emails and documents between General John Allen and Jill Kelley, says the Pentagon. Investigators are now searching through the documents for any compromising information.
Mrs. Kelley was implicated in the Petraeus affair after telling the FBI she received threatening emails from the former CIA chief’s mistress, Paula Broadwell. Jill Kelley is a long-term friend of the Petraeus family and works as a “social liaison” at an air force base in Tampa, Florida.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered an investigation be opened into the matter on Sunday. He also called for Allen’s nomination to be made Commander of US European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe to be frozen for the time being. He was due to face a Senate hearing to assess his nomination on Thursday.

General Allen has denied any wrongdoing and will remain at his post until further notice.

Panetta praised Allen’s work in Afghanistan and said that “he is entitled to due process in the matter.” "While the matter is under investigation and before the facts are determined, General Allen will remain commander of ISAF," said Panetta in a statement.

jingofever wrote:He was having an affair with a woman and she got access to his e-mail? That sounds like a classic spy op. I'm calling it now, this woman is KGB, and by that I mean Mossad.

seemslikeadream wrote:Petraeus was no doubt seen by the Israelis as an enemy to be neutralized.

Jebsen is on the board of directors of the distinctly warlike Hudson Institute, where Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and practically every neocon you’ve ever heard of have found refuge.

Broadwell’s actions — sending emails that were bound to be traced back to her — appear to make little sense on the surface. But if the goal of luring a 60-year-old geezer into an affair with a much younger woman was to expose him, and get him fired, then surely her antics succeeded in accomplishing that goal.

A Covert Affair:
Petraeus Caught in the Honeypot?
by Justin Raimondo, November 12, 2012

Bingo!

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012 ... -honeypot/

Interestingly, in November of 2006, during her tenure at the Jebsen Center, Broadwell led a group of Fletcher School students on a trip to New York City to meet with then Iranian UN representative Javad Zarif. Both are alumni of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.