David Petraeus resigns as CIA chief citing affair

[JackRiddler]

The most interesting thread should turn out to be the FBI agent who appears to have violated rules in making this case, but they're not telling very much about him. There's one place to look for guhnneckshuns, as that gangster from The Great Gatsby would say.

Data dumping:

Three women intertwine in downfall of David Petraeus
Source: Reuters

Jill Kelley is a fixture on the Tampa, Florida, military scene, volunteering for community relations work with foreign military officers and their families stationed at MacDill Air Force base.

She is also a friend of David Petraeus, and yet, she appears to have contributed to his stunning downfall and departure as director of the CIA.

It was Kelley's complaints about harassing emails from the woman with whom Petraeus had an extramarital affair, Paula Broadwell, that prompted an FBI investigation that later exposed the liaison and led to his resignation last week.

People close to Petraeus have said Kelley is a family friend and that there was no romantic relationship. It's unclear why Broadwell would have sent threatening emails to her, but she may have seen her as a rival for Petraeus' affections, the same people said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The scandal has tarnished the reputation of a revered general and raised questions about how the FBI handled the situation and when the White House learned of the affair, which became public after the November 6 presidential election.

It has also brought uncomfortable attention to three women in Petraeus' life: Kelley, Broadwell and his wife of more than 37 years, Holly, an official with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Kelley and her husband, Scott Kelley, a Tampa cancer surgeon, became friends with Petraeus when he was stationed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa from 2008 until 2010, people familiar with the situation said.

At the time, Petraeus was commander of the U.S. military's Central Command, which runs operations in the Middle East and South Asia. The two families socialized in Tampa and in Washington, the people said.

Unlike Broadwell, who has been silent and out of public view since the story broke on Friday, Kelley has put out a statement on her family's friendship with the Petraeuses and asked that her family's privacy be respected.

A source close to the family said that Kelley is now being advised on how to respond to the Petraeus uproar by one of Washington's most prominent trial lawyers, Abbe Lowell, a family friend who has represented high-profile criminal defendants like former U.S. Senator John Edwards and disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Lowell did not respond to requests for comment.

Kelley has also enlisted the help of Judy Smith, a well-known crisis PR manager who is the model for the ultra-effective fixer and spin doctor Olivia Pope in the ABC Thursday night TV drama "Scandal."

Kelley could not be reached for comment. She was spotted driving away from her Tampa home on Monday in a car with "Honorary Consul" on the license plate. She is considered an unofficial ambassador at the MacDill base, promoting community relations with foreign liaison officers, said a source familiar with the situation.

Kelley is the daughter of Marcelle and John Khawam, now of Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, but with roots in the Northeast section of Philadelphia, said her brother, David Khawam, a lawyer who practices in Westmont, New Jersey. The Lebanese-born parents owned three restaurants, all called Sahara, when their children were growing up.

Kelley's vocation has been to be an "honorary ambassador" to the military, her brother said. "She has always wanted to take a certain role, in giving back to the community," he said.

He said it's not surprising she would go to the FBI after receiving threatening emails from an unknown source, considering her connections to the military and the fact that she has a wealthy husband and young children.

"I believe my sister probably reported this because of fear that somebody may be serious in any kind of threats they may be making towards her," he said.

FBI AGENT REPORTEDLY BARRED FROM CASE

The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI agent who started the investigation was a friend of Kelley's. He was later barred from taking part in the case over concerns that he had become personally involved. Officials found that he had sent shirtless pictures to Kelley, the Journal reported.

The agent's identity has not been disclosed.

Kelley, 37, also has an identical twin sister, Natalie Khawam, with whom she appears with Holly and David Petraeus and her husband in a 2010 photo published in newspapers on Monday.

Court records show Kelley played a role in a bitter child custody trial that preceded the divorce case between Khawam, and Khawam's then-husband, Grayson Wolfe of Washington, who once worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

In a scathing decision in November, 2011 against Khawam that granted sole primary and legal custody of their then 3-year-old son to Wolfe, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz refused to believe Kelley's claims that Wolfe had tried to push her sister down a flight of steps in Kelley's Tampa home.

"The court does not credit this testimony," Kravitz wrote, calling Kelley "a patently biased and unbelievable witness."

Neither Wolfe nor Khawam could be reached for comment.

Broadwell, 40, who sources said sent the threatening emails to Kelley, is an Army reserve officer and doctoral student who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and two young children.

FBI agents searched Broadwell's home on Monday, entering the house carrying boxes and remaining there for almost two hours. There was no sign that Broadwell or members of her family were at the house during the FBI search.

Broadwell met Petraeus in 2006 when she was student at Harvard. The general gave her his card and offered to help with her studies.

In 2010 when Petraeus was named commander in Afghanistan, she decided to turn a dissertation about his leadership into a book, called "All In," which was published in January. Interviews for the book often took place during runs together, Broadwell said later.

'ALPHA WOMAN'

A person who knows Broadwell and Petraeus said she stood out in Afghanistan as an "alpha woman" who was attractive, fit, smart and driven. It was not unusual for Petraeus to mentor younger soldiers and take an interest in scholarly work, said this person.

Broadwell has not responded to requests for comment.

It is not clear how much Holly Petraeus and Broadwell have interacted. In the book's acknowledgements, Broadwell gives "special thanks" to Holly, but no interviews are listed with her in the notes.

The book describes how Petraeus and Hollister "Holly" Knowlton, a student at Dickinson College, first met on a blind date in 1973 at a college football game at West Point, where Petraeus was a cadet. Holly's father, General William Knowlton, was the superintendent at West Point, and Petraeus found the "stature of Holly's family intoxicating," the book says.

Holly has been a dedicated military spouse who endured her husband's extended absences over the past decade, said Peter Mansoor, who was Petraeus' executive officer in Iraq from 2007 to 2008.

"They've been apart more time than they have been together, with him being overseas on five different deployments," Mansoor said. "She was a stalwart Army trooper through it all."

At the Senate hearing on confirmation of his appointment at the CIA in June 2011, some senators, including John McCain and Joe Lieberman, paid tribute to Holly, as did Petraeus.

"Holly was recently described as being bright, nice, small and a pit bull, someone you want in your corner," Petraeus said. "I've been blessed to have had her in my corner for some 37 years and 23 moves, and I appreciate the opportunity this afternoon to recognize her publicly."

Since January 2011, Holly Petraeus has led an office that advocates for military families at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Jean Ann Fox of the Consumer Federation of America, said Holly Petraeus has traveled all over the country to talk to service members and has a reputation for spending time with families and talking about her own experiences and observations as a military spouse.

"She has shined a light on a lot of problems that impact the military, and hopefully as time goes on, enforcement actions will help take care of some of that," Fox said.

A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau spokeswoman said Holly Petraeus remains a key leader at the agency and would have no further comment. She posted a Veteran's Day message on the bureau's website on Friday, the same day her husband's resignation became public.

Mansoor, trying to explain David Petraeus' behavior, said he believes he might have struggled with the social transition from his life in a military "cocoon" to his work at the CIA.

"I think that General Petraeus found himself a little bit isolated socially at the CIA and his manner of reaching out was through the person who made herself the most available to him and that was Paula Broadwell," Mansoor said.

Holly Petraeus is furious with her husband, said Mansoor. "He's going to do what he can to repair his relationship," he said.

(Additional reporting by David Adams, Emily Stephenson, Mark Hosenball, David Ingram, Saundra Amrhein and Dave Warner.; Editing by Mary Milliken and Christopher Wilson)

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/ ... 4Y20121113

oh lordy

The Freepers are doing a lot of digging. Here's the profile of Natalie's first husband (the bitter custody thing):
His name is

Grayson Paul Wolfe.

Founding Partner
Akkadian Private Ventures, LLC

January 2005 – Present (7 years 11 months)

Grayson is a founding partner of Akkadian Private Ventues, LLC and its affiliate companies. He has designed and executed developmental projects & transactions principally in the power, oil & gas and water sectors. In addition, he has been involved with project finance, private sector development, privitizations, infrastructure security, and capital markets projects.

Before starting Akkadian, he previously served as Director of Broader Middle East Initiatives and Iraqi Reconstruction and Special Assistant to the Chief Operating Officer at the Export-Import Bank of the United States. He was appointed to the bank by President Bush in June 2002.

Between January and August 2004, Grayson served as Manager of the Private Sector Development Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq. In this capacity he was directly responsible for implementing a wide range of initiatives to attract foreign direct investment and provide financing to Iraqi companies. During this time, Grayson worked extensively on the ground with senior Iraqi and Kurdish officials, and with the Ministries of Finance, Trade and Oil.

From 2001 to 2002 Wolfe worked for the law firm of Fleischman and Walsh, LLP, where he represented clients engaged in Homeland Security, Telecommunications & Intellectual Property matters. He served as a member of a seven-person team that worked with the North American Railroads and Chlorine Chemical Industries to develop a National Homeland Security Risk Analysis & Management Plan. This plan was adopted by the Class I Freight Railroad CEOs on Dec 6, 2001.

Wolfe served as Legislative Director & Counsel for members of Congress from 1999-2002. He has also served in numerous positions in presidential, federal & state political campaigns. Before this, he worked for Citicorp in Poland focusing on emerging markets & franchise development opportunities in Central and Eastern European countries.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014302405

[barracuda]

Apparently there's a soldier in all of us.



David Petraeus is in ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops II'

[justdrew]

Apparently there's a soldier in all of us.



David Petraeus is in ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops II'

released today IIRC

[Belligerent Savant]

.

http://gawker.com/5959971/did-an-anonym ... in-january

Look into the history of Paula Broadwell's Wikipedia page and there's not much to it before last Friday. That's the day Republican golden boy and former CIA director David Petraeus resigned as the nation's top spy amid allegations he was cheating on his wife with Broadwell, his biographer. Broadwell's page was so lackluster, in fact, that in February, one Wikipedia editor, Bgwhite, requested to delete it entirely, saying Broadwell was not notable.

In late January, however, there was something that turned up on Paula Broadwell's then-brand-new Wikipedia entry that is, in retrospect, very notable. On January 26, one day after Broadwell appeared on the Daily Show to tout her Petraeus book, Wikipedia editor Vanobamo, who edits a lot of Wikipedia pages pertaining to the Daily Show, created a page for Broadwell. While that was normal, things got odd less than an hour later, when an anonymous editor with the IP address 64.101.72.113 logged on and wrote of the ladder-climbing Broadwell, "Petraeus is reportedly one of her many conquests." It was the anonymous user's first and only Wikipedia edit, and it was deleted within an hour by editor Dsutton, who flagged it as "libel."

It turns out now, of course, that it might not have been libel at all. But was Broadwell's Wikipedia outing simply good guesswork by a Daily Show viewer out for a laugh, or was the person behind 64.101.72.113 actually privy to the secret that would eventually topple one of the U.S. government's brightest stars?

Blogger Milo Wendt, who discovered the Wikipedia strangeness earlier today, tried to trace the IP address, to no avail. When we ran it through the American Registry for Internet Numbers, we weren't able to come up with a name, but we got a company: Cisco Systems, Inc. What does that mean? It means that Cisco, the tech giant based in San Jose, was given that IP address, but anyone could have been using it, and it could have been ported to another location around the world.

Update: A tipster named Josh reminds us that Cisco, the company whose IP address is listed above, has provided the U.S. military with billions of dollars in hardware and software over the past decade. Considering that this scandal is inextricably linked to military operations, it's not a wild leap to assume a man or woman in uniform may have been behind the Wikipedia slip:

I used to be in the military and deployed twice to Iraq during that time. Your mention of Cisco Systems piqued my interest. Cisco Systems is the company that the military has contracted with to conduct all of its communication between the area of operations (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) and the United States. If deployed personnel want to videophone or call their loved ones (or post on Wikipedia in this case) back home it was on a Cisco operated telephone/computer. Since there seems to be trouble locating the IP address perhaps it's because the post was made from someone in the military, overseas, behind a firewall?

......

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wor ... on-e-mail/

Petraeus, first as a military leader and then as head of the CIA, lived on e-mail, according to reporters who have covered him in both roles. He was unusually accessible and often willing to talk as long as the terms were clear and the questions not too sensitive, firing off quick notes and lengthy missives late into the night and early the next morning. In his years in the military, his remarkable communicativeness and his skill with the medium were an asset, aiding his constant campaign to shape media coverage and to play up successes, as well as his own polished public image. Ironically, though he appears to have been quite careful in his e-mails to reporters, it was this same predilection for living on e-mail that helped expose his affair, and ultimately end his storied career.
This May, a few months into Petraeus’s affair with former military intelligence officer Paula Broadwell, the married mother of two used an anonymous account on Google’s popular Gmail service to send threatening notes to another woman, Jill Kelley. Kelley, it appears, likely knew Petraeus from his time heading Florida-based U.S. Central Command, where she volunteered planning social events. She also had a friend in the FBI, whom she told about the e-mails. Perhaps because the messages referenced Petraeus, by then the director of the CIA, which is institutionally sensitive to any potential that its officials could be exposed to blackmail or other threats, the FBI seems to have pursued the case aggressively.
FBI investigators picked up the data trail from there. They determined that the account belonged to Broadwell and her husband, in part by analyzing the metadata attached to the e-mails, which can help determine the location of the sender. The locations matched up with Broadwell’s travel schedule. From there, the FBI identified other e-mail accounts that had been accessed from the same IP address, which they secured a warrant to monitor. This included another anonymous account, apparently also Broadwell’s, from which she exchanged sexually explicit e-mails with a third anonymous e-mail account, also Gmail. This account, the FBI concluded, belonged to Petraeus, a discovery that led agents to confront both him and Broadwell.
Bringing his life into his e-mail account, and taking relative care doing it, were in character for Petraeus. Reporters who exchanged e-mails with him as a general and as CIA director described his messages as frequent and rapid – often responding within just a few minutes – but careful, neither to reveal sensitive information nor to rumple his carefully managed image and that of whatever war or agency he was leading at the time. That Petraeus would segregate this part of his life into a separate e-mail account underscores his familiarity with a medium that many of his contemporaries in the top reaches of government are not known for using often or particularly well.
Available day or night, stateside or halfway around the world, Petraeus was even wired when he was on the move. Driving through Washington in his armored SUV, he was known to keep two terminals open: one for classified information, one for an open Internet connection. Staff knew to build regular e-mail into his day, calling it “executive time.” During one visit to The Washington Post’s offices while still an active-duty general, Petraeus’s staff asked whether their boss could set up a computer in an empty room between meetings.
Even professionally, the ebbs and flows of his career could be tracked by his e-mail accounts. One reporter recalled, years ago and before Petraeus reached such heights in Washington, receiving occasional notes from the general’s personal e-mail – an AOL account. As he transitioned out of the military, where his love of the spotlight and ability with the press had accompanied his rise to political stardom, he appeared to adapt slowly to the CIA’s much more secretive culture. The Obama administration has also emphasized tight message control on national security matters. Sure enough, several months into his CIA tenure, the firehose of Petraeus e-mails seemed to slow into the trickle more typical for his post, the reporters said. Still, even retired from the military, the former general could often be reached at his Army e-mail account.

[seemslikeadream]

How Petraeus and Broadwell Used Their Counterterrorism Expertise to Hide Their Affair

NOV 13 2012, 12:13 PM ET
The pair used a trick "known to terrorists and teenagers alike."

As more details emerge about the event that can fairly be called L'Affaire Petraeus, we're learning more about how the former CIA director and his biographer conducted their relationship.

One of those ways? Craftily.

To conduct their communications over email, the Associated Press reports, Petraeus and Paula Broadwell established a joint email account. They then composed emails to each other without sending them -- saving the messages, instead, as drafts. That allowed them to access messages and reply to them ... to communicate via email without actually sending emails. Which meant that their messages would be relatively hard for outsiders to trace.

This is a pretty basic method of sub-rosa communication, to be sure. It is also rather brilliant. Which is perhaps why it is a favorite not only of teenagers trying to escape the gaze of meddling parents, but also of a group that is even more skilled at operating undetected: terrorists. Here, according to Frontline, is one of the "tricks" that members of al Qaeda and similar networks use to communicate covertly across the world:

One terrorist drafts a Web-based e-mail and instead of sending it, saves it to the draft folder, accessible online from anywhere in the world. The other terrorist can open the same account, read the message, and delete it.

Sounds familiar. Petraeus and Broadwell, both counterterrorism experts, put their knowledge to use: They put al Qaeda's system into a new, but equally sensitive, context. The ironies in that terrorism/infidelity connection are many, but one of them is this: The very thing that seems to have bonded the pair in the first place -- their shared insight into the workings of a world that is so foreign to most civilians -- is also what helped them to conduct their relationship. As members of the military, the two traded in secrets. It just happened that to be that some of the secrets they traded were sent, and received, in private.

[seemslikeadream]

FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation
That the stars of America's national security establishment are being devoured by out-of-control surveillance is a form of sweet justice

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 November 2012 09.46 EST

General John Allen, the US's leading military commander in Afghanistan, is being investigated over his 'communications' with Jill Kelley. Photograph: Jalil Rezayee/EPA
The Petraeus scandal is receiving intense media scrutiny obviously due to its salacious aspects, leaving one, as always, to fantasize about what a stellar press corps we would have if they devoted a tiny fraction of this energy to dissecting non-sex political scandals (this unintentionally amusing New York Times headline from this morning - "Concern Grows Over Top Military Officers' Ethics" - illustrates that point: with all the crimes committed by the US military over the last decade and long before, it's only adultery that causes "concern" over their "ethics"). Nonetheless, several of the emerging revelations are genuinely valuable, particularly those involving the conduct of the FBI and the reach of the US surveillance state.

As is now widely reported, the FBI investigation began when Jill Kelley - a Tampa socialite friendly with Petraeus (and apparently very friendly with Gen. John Allen, the four-star U.S. commander of the war in Afghanistan) - received a half-dozen or so anonymous emails that she found vaguely threatening. She then informed a friend of hers who was an FBI agent, and a major FBI investigation was then launched that set out to determine the identity of the anonymous emailer.

That is the first disturbing fact: it appears that the FBI not only devoted substantial resources, but also engaged in highly invasive surveillance, for no reason other than to do a personal favor for a friend of one of its agents, to find out who was very mildly harassing her by email. The emails Kelley received were, as the Daily Beast reports, quite banal and clearly not an event that warranted an FBI investigation:

"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. . . .

"'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 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. . . .

"When the FBI friend showed the emails to the cyber squad in the Tampa field office, her fellow agents noted 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."

That this deeply personal motive was what spawned the FBI investigation is bolstered by the fact that the initial investigating agent "was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors' concerns that he was personally involved in the case" - indeed, "supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter" - and was found to have "allegedly sent shirtless photos" to Kelley, and "is now under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal-affairs arm of the FBI".

[The New York Times this morning reports that the FBI claims the emails contained references to parts of Petraeus' schedule that were not publicly disclosed, though as Marcy Wheeler documents, the way the investigation proceeded strongly suggests that at least the initial impetus behind it was a desire to settle personal scores.]

What is most striking is how sweeping, probing and invasive the FBI's investigation then became, all without any evidence of any actual crime - or the need for any search warrant:

"Because the sender's account had been registered anonymously, investigators had to use forensic techniques - including a check of what other e-mail accounts had been accessed from the same computer address - to identify who was writing the e-mails.

"Eventually they identified Ms. Broadwell as a prime suspect and obtained access to her regular e-mail account. In its in-box, they discovered intimate and sexually explicit e-mails from another account that also was not immediately identifiable. Investigators eventually ascertained that it belonged to Mr. Petraeus and studied the possibility that someone had hacked into Mr. Petraeus's account or was posing as him to send the explicit messages."

So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell's physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime - at most, they had a case of "cyber-harassment" more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people - and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court.

But that isn't all the FBI learned. It was revealed this morning that they also discovered "alleged inappropriate communication" to Kelley from Gen. Allen, who is not only the top commander in Afghanistan but was also just nominated by President Obama to be the Commander of US European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (a nomination now "on hold"). Here, according to Reuters, is what the snooping FBI agents obtained about that [emphasis added]:


"The U.S. official said the FBI uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of communications - mostly emails spanning from 2010 to 2012 - between Allen and Jill Kelley . . . .

"Asked whether there was concern about the disclosure of classified information, the official said, on condition of anonymity: 'We are concerned about inappropriate communications. We are not going to speculate as to what is contained in these documents.'"

So not only did the FBI - again, all without any real evidence of a crime - trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell's emails (and possibly Petraeus'), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley.

This is a surveillance state run amok. It also highlights how any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.

But, as unwarranted and invasive as this all is, there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America's national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: "Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?"

It is usually the case that abuses of state power become a source for concern and opposition only when they begin to subsume the elites who are responsible for those abuses. Recall how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman - one of the most outspoken defenders of the illegal Bush National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless eavesdropping program - suddenly began sounding like an irate, life-long ACLU privacy activist when it was revealed that the NSA had eavesdropped on her private communications with a suspected Israeli agent over alleged attempts to intervene on behalf of AIPAC officials accused of espionage. Overnight, one of the Surveillance State's chief assets, the former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, transformed into a vocal privacy proponent because now it was her activities, rather than those of powerless citizens, which were invaded.

With the private, intimate activities of America's most revered military and intelligence officials being smeared all over newspapers and televisions for no good reason, perhaps similar conversions are possible. Put another way, having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.

The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that - in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment - monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do. Just to get a flavor for how pervasive it is, recall that the Washington Post, in its 2010 three-part "Top Secret America" series, reported: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."

Equally vivid is this 2007 chart from Privacy International, a group that monitors the surveillance policies of nations around the world. Each color represents the level of the nation's privacy and surveillance policies, with black being the most invasive and abusive ("Endemic Surveillance Societies") and blue being the least ("Consistently upholds human rights standards"):


And the Obama administration has spent the last four years aggressively seeking to expand that Surveillance State, including by agitating for Congressional action to amend the Patriot Act to include Internet and browsing data among the records obtainable by the FBI without court approval and demanding legislation requiring that all Internet communications contain a government "backdoor" of surveillance.

Based on what is known, what is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations. What requires investigation here is not Petraeus and Allen and their various sexual partners but the FBI and the whole sprawling, unaccountable surveillance system that has been built.

Related notes

(1) One of the claims made over the last week was that Broadwell, in public comments about the Benghazi attack, referenced non-public information - including that the CIA was holding prisoners in Benghazi and that this motivated the attack - suggesting that someone gave her classified information. About those claims, a national security reporter for Fox reported:

"that a well-placed Washington source confirms that Libyan militiamen were being held at the CIA annex and may have been a possible reason for the attack. Multiple intelligence sources, she also reported, said 'there were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location.'"

Though the CIA denies that "the agency is still in the detention business", it certainly should be investigated to determine whether the CIA is maintaining off-the-books detention facilities in Libya.

(2) I've long noted that Michael Hastings is one of the nation's best and most valuable journalists; to see why that is so, please watch the amazing 8-minute clip from last night's Piers Morgan Show on CNN embedded below, when he appeared with two Petraeus-defending military officials (via the Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes). When you're done watching that, contrast that with the remarkably candid confession this week from Wired's national security reporter Spencer Ackerman on how he, along with so many other journalists, hypnotically joined what he aptly calls the "Cult of David Petraeus".

[barracuda]

if they're counting the contents of e-mail in 'pages' I bet 50% of the pages are quotes of previous email. anyway you look at it though, that's a lot.

There's just no possible way all these emails are personal correspondence. These two were doing something besides cooing and pillow talk here. Business? National security stuff? Something.

[justdrew]

but HOW did they get access to the mails? Did they go to google and say, "we want to see" or did they just go to some system that taps and records all e-mail net traffic? Not sure any company is going to resist an "FBI investigation" - were warrants issued? Do they even need that anymore? I think not, IIRC.

[seemslikeadream]

but HOW did they get access to the mails? Did they go to google and say, "we want to see" or did they just go to some system that taps and records all e-mail net traffic? Not sure any company is going to resist an "FBI investigation" - were warrants issued? Do they even need that anymore? I think not, IIRC.

FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation

[barracuda]

but HOW did they get access to the mails? Did they go to google and say, "we want to see" or did they just go to some system that taps and records all e-mail net traffic? Not sure any company is going to resist an "FBI investigation" - were warrants issued? Do they even need that anymore? I think not, IIRC.

Don't forget - Jill Kelley called the feds herself. No warrant necessary. She opened the door to her email account for them, something I really can't understand in light of what appears to be her substantial relationship with John Allen.

[seemslikeadream]

but HOW did they get access to the mails? Did they go to google and say, "we want to see" or did they just go to some system that taps and records all e-mail net traffic? Not sure any company is going to resist an "FBI investigation" - were warrants issued? Do they even need that anymore? I think not, IIRC.

Don't forget - Jill Kelley called the feds herself. No warrant necessary. She opened the door to her email account for them, something I really can't understand in light of what appears to be her substantial relationship with John Allen.

Jill called a good friend who just happened to be a big Romney supporter (MSNBC) who just happened to be an FBI guy and then when this news wasn't being reported a call was made to 2 republican congressmen hoping to get the story out before the election

Generals backed Kelley's sister in court
By By ADAM GOLDMAN and JACK GILLUM, Associated Press – 16 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the latest twist of the David Petraeus sex scandal, court records indicate that the former CIA director and Gen. John Allen intervened last September in a messy custody dispute on behalf of Jill Kelley's sister.
Kelley is the woman who allegedly received harassing emails from Petraeus' biographer and paramour. She also is thought to have exchanged "inappropriate" communications with Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.
According to court records, both Allen and Petraeus wrote letters supporting Kelley's twin sister, Natalie Khawam, in her custody battle.
Allen met Khawam when he was deputy commander of U.S. Central Command in Tampa, where they attended social functions.
Petraeus resigned as CIA director after disclosures that author Paula Broadwell sent the emails to Kelley, who in turn went to the FBI.

[Elvis]

Source: Reuters

Jill Kelley is a fixture on the Tampa, Florida, military scene, volunteering for community relations work with foreign military officers and their families stationed at MacDill Air Force base.

That is an ideal way to spy on foreign military officers, isn't it?

It sure seems like there's something really fishy, maybe more than one thing, just under the surface of this story.

Just to note, it sounds like the Kelleys are in big debt, and who knows what other handles potential handlers might have on them.

Remember the poker games with prostitutes said to be attended by Porter Goss and others? That kind of thing is probably very common and, given the unfolding details, I can easily imagine something like that going on here, blended with espionage.

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Holly Knowlton comes from an interesting family (her father was West Point superintendent when she married Petraeus, who at the time was a cadet there); so far I haven't found a link to the notorious PR firm Hill & Knowlton, but that might be interesting.

[Elvis]

double post

[JackRiddler]

.

Here's the Times' (Scott Shane) play on the shirtless FBI man...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/us/ti ... nted=print

November 12, 2012

Motives Questioned in F.B.I. Inquiry of Petraeus E-Mails

By SCOTT SHANE and CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Is a string of angry e-mails really enough, in an age of boisterous online exchanges, to persuade the F.B.I. to open a cyberstalking investigation?

Sometimes the answer is yes, law enforcement officials and legal experts said Monday — especially if the e-mails in question reflect an inside knowledge of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

That was true of the e-mails sent anonymously to Jill Kelley, a friend of the C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, which prompted the F.B.I. office in Tampa, Fla., to begin an investigation last June. The inquiry traced the e-mails to Mr. Petraeus’s biographer, Paula Broadwell, exposed their extramarital affair and led Friday to his resignation after 14 months as head of the intelligence agency.

On Monday night, F.B.I. agents went to Ms. Broadwell’s home in Charlotte, N.C., and were seen carrying away what several reporters at the scene said were boxes of documents. A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case remains open, said Ms. Broadwell had consented to the search.

Some commentators have questioned whether the bureau would ordinarily investigate a citizen complaint about unwanted e-mails, suggesting that there must have been a hidden motive, possibly political, to take action. F.B.I. officials are scheduled to brief the Senate and House intelligence committees on Tuesday about the case.

But law enforcement officials insisted on Monday that the case was handled “on the merits.” The cyber squad at the F.B.I.’s Tampa field office opened an investigation, after consulting with federal prosecutors, based on what appeared to be a legitimate complaint about e-mail harassment.

The complaint was more intriguing, the officials acknowledged, because the author of the e-mails, which criticized Ms. Kelley for supposed flirtatious behavior toward Mr. Petraeus at social events, seemed to have an insider’s knowledge of the C.I.A. director’s activities. One e-mail accused Ms. Kelley of “touching” Mr. Petraeus inappropriately under a dinner table.

Now footsie's going to be a smoking gun. What game will the ruling class have left, once the surveillance state is complete?

“There was a legitimate case to open on the facts, with the support of the prosecutors,” said the official who described the search at Ms. Broadwell’s home. He added, “They asked, does somebody know more about Petraeus than you’d expect?”

Ms. Kelley, a volunteer with wounded veterans and military families, brought her complaint to a rank-and-file agent she knew from a previous encounter with the F.B.I. office, the official also said. That agent, who had previously pursued a friendship with Ms. Kelley and had earlier sent her shirtless photographs of himself, was “just a conduit” for the complaint, he said. He had no training in cybercrime, was not part of the cyber squad handling the case and was never assigned to the investigation.

But the agent, who was not identified, continued to “nose around” about the case, and eventually his superiors “told him to stay the hell away from it, and he was not invited to briefings,” the official said. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Monday night that the agent had been barred from the case.

Later, the agent became convinced — incorrectly, the official said — that the case had stalled. Because of his “worldview,” as the official put it, he suspected a politically motivated cover-up to protect President Obama. The agent alerted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who called the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on Oct. 31 to tell him of the agent’s concerns.

The official said the agent’s self-described “whistle-blowing” was “a little embarrassing” but had no effect on the investigation.

A ha! Official Story 2.1: The shirtless FBI guy had no effect on the investigation, except that he was the one who informed Cantor. Otherwise everything would have gone the same way. If true, also explains why Cantor knew and Feinstein didn't.

The hilarious part, if true, is that Shirtless confused protecting Petraeus with protecting Obama, when surely the opposite is the case. Perhaps this makes him a right-winger victimized by his own confusionism.

David H. Laufman, who served as a federal prosecutor in national security cases from 2003 to 2007, said, “there’s a lot of chatter and noise about cybercrimes,” and most of it does not lead to an investigation. But he added, “It’s plausible to me that if Ms. Kelley indicated that the stalking was related to her friendship with the C.I.A. director, that would have elevated it as a priority for the bureau.”

Orin S. Kerr, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in computer crime issues, said it was “surprising that they would devote the resources” to investigating who was behind a half-dozen harassing e-mails.

“The F.B.I. gets a lot of tips, and investigating any one case requires an agent or a few agents to spend a lot of time,” he said. “They can’t do this for every case, and the issue is, why this one case?”

Still, Mr. Kerr — a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s computer crimes and intellectual property section from 1998 to 2001 — said it was likely that several factors, in addition to the Petraeus connection, made the complaint stand out. Ms. Kelley was fairly prominent in Tampa social circles and had previously had dealings with the F.B.I. agent who took her complaint.

Moreover, he said, the F.B.I. has been putting more resources into investigating cyberstalking crimes in recent years.

A government official clarified on Monday that F.B.I. agents’ first interview with Ms. Broadwell — at which she is said to have admitted having had an affair with Mr. Petraeus, and voluntarily allowed agents to search her computer — took place in September. An earlier account had put that interview during the week of Oct. 21.

Before Ms. Broadwell spoke to the F.B.I. agents, Mr. Petraeus had learned that she had sent offensive e-mails to Ms. Kelley and asked her to stop, another official said. By the time agents interviewed the C.I.A. director during the week of Oct. 28, he was aware of the cyberstalking investigation and readily acknowledged his affair with Ms. Broadwell, the official said.

Mr. Petraeus’s former colleagues in the Obama administration have said little about the circumstances preceding his resignation. But on Monday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A. before Mr. Petraeus, criticized the F.B.I. for not informing members of the Congressional intelligence committees of its investigation.

“As a former director of the C.I.A., and having worked very closely with the intelligence committees, I believe that there is a responsibility to make sure that the intelligence committees are informed of issues that could affect the security of those intelligence operations,” he said on a flight to Australia.

His remarks were similar to those by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, on Sunday.

Mr. Petraeus’s former spokesman, Steve Boylan, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday that the C.I.A. director was “devastated” over the affair and its consequences.

“He deeply regrets and knows how much pain this causes his family,” he said.

Mr. Boylan, a retired Army colonel, said Holly Petraeus, Mr. Petraeus’s wife of 38 years, “is not exactly pleased right now.”

“Furious would be an understatement.”


Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting while flying on the secretary of defense’s plane between Honolulu and Perth, Australia.

And those of you looking for an Israeli angle will be thrilled to hear that the Khawams are Maronite Christians. Here's the current version of what is sure to be a burgeoning Wiki page on Jill Kelley:

Gilberte "Jill" Khawam Kelley (born January 1, 1975) is an American socialite and volunteer social liaison to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa Bay, Florida.[1] She is a key figure in the government investigation into inappropriate communications by U.S. Generals David Petraeus and John R. Allen.

Life and Career

Kelley's family are Lebanese-American Maronite Catholics who immigrated from Jounieh, Lebanon, in the mid-1970s.[2] She grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, and her parents owned a restaurant. She attended Allegheny University of the Health Sciences in the late 1990s, where she was undergraduate class representative. Kelley lived in the area until her mid-20s.[3] She has an identical twin sister named Natalie.[4]

Kelley was given an appreciation certificate recognizing her as an "honorary ambassador" to the coalition of countries at United States Central Command in Florida, but she has no official status and is not employed by the U.S. government. An official told the Associated Press that Kelley sometimes omits the term "honorary" and refers to herself as an ambassador.[3]

Personal life

She is married to cancer surgeon Scott Kelley and has three daughters.[2] They live in Tampa, Florida near United States Central Command headquarters and have frequently hosted glitzy parties for the area's military brass. According to the Washington Post, the Kelleys have been pursued by creditors since 2002 for failures to make payments.[5]

[justdrew]

forget mossad, but this whole thing is some lovely jiu jitsu

use the opponents strength against. because of his "worldview" ROFLMAO

hail Eris.