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by compared2what? » Sat Nov 17, 2012 12:32 am
by compared2what? » Sat Nov 17, 2012 12:35 am
by compared2what? » Sat Nov 17, 2012 1:30 am
by JackRiddler » Sat Nov 17, 2012 3:41 am
by compared2what? » Sat Nov 17, 2012 4:13 am
JackRiddler wrote:.
Although it should be said (much to our collective disappointment) that the shirtless picture now appears to have been a joke sent in an e-mail to many people, and not an attempt to seduce Kelley per se. Him at the firing range with a couple of dummies:
No matter what, the guy's going down forever as Shirtless. But does anyone remember who first pulled that detail out as though it was significant? Maybe it's significant, who that was.
.
by Nordic » Sat Nov 17, 2012 4:35 am
by elfismiles » Sat Nov 17, 2012 10:22 am
justdrew wrote:http://gawker.com/5840481/david-petraeu ... e-engineer
David Petraeus Is Probably Not Going to Marry This Taiwanese Engineer
by 2012 Countdown » Sat Nov 17, 2012 11:27 am
JackRiddler wrote:.
No matter what, the guy's going down forever as Shirtless. But does anyone remember who first pulled that detail out as though it was significant? Maybe it's significant, who that was.
.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 18, 2012 11:16 am
Petraeus scandal puts four-star general lifestyle under scrutiny
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Greg Jaffe, Published: November 17
Then-defense secretary Robert M. Gates stopped bagging his leaves when he moved into a small Washington military enclave in 2007. His next-door neighbor was Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, who had a chef, a personal valet and — not lost on Gates — troops to tend his property.
Gates may have been the civilian leader of the world’s largest military, but his position did not come with household staff. So, he often joked, he disposed of his leaves by blowing them onto the chairman’s lawn.
Among the new information uncovered by the Post’s Greg Jaffe and Anne Gearan, the Petraeus biographer was asked to leave her doctoral program at Harvard and apparently mistated her accomplishments at West Point.
“I was often jealous because he had four enlisted people helping him all the time,” Gates said in response to a question after a speech Thursday. He wryly complained to his wife that “Mullen’s got guys over there who are fixing meals for him, and I’m shoving something into the microwave. And I’m his boss.”
Of the many facts that have come to light in the scandal involving former CIA director David H. Petraeus, among the most curious was that during his days as a four-star general, he was once escorted by 28 police motorcycles as he traveled from his Central Command headquarters in Tampa to socialite Jill Kelley’s mansion. Although most of his trips did not involve a presidential-size convoy, the scandal has prompted new scrutiny of the imperial trappings that come with a senior general’s lifestyle.
The commanders who lead the nation’s military services and those who oversee troops around the world enjoy an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms and track their schedules in 10-minute increments. Their food is prepared by gourmet chefs. If they want music with their dinner parties, their staff can summon a string quartet or a choir.
The elite regional commanders who preside over large swaths of the planet don’t have to settle for Gulfstream V jets. They each have a C-40, the military equivalent of a Boeing 737, some of which are configured with beds.
Since Petraeus’s resignation, many have strained to understand how such a celebrated general could have behaved so badly. Some have speculated that an exhausting decade of war impaired his judgment. Others wondered if Petraeus was never the Boy Scout he appeared to be. But Gates, who still possesses a modest Kansan’s bemusement at Washington excess, has floated another theory.
“There is something about a sense of entitlement and of having great power that skews people’s judgment,” Gates said last week.
Among the Army’s general officer corps, however, there is little support for Gates’s hypothesis. “I love the man. I am his biggest supporter. But I strongly disagree,” said retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who served as Gates’s senior military assistant. “I find it concerning that he and others are not focusing on the effect on our guys of fighting wars for 11 years. No one was at it longer than Petraeus.”
Other veteran commanders concurred with Gates. David Barno, a retired three-star general who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan, warned in an interview that the environment in which the top brass lives has the potential “to become corrosive over time upon how they live their life.”
“You can become completely disconnected from the way people live in the regular world — and even from the modest lifestyle of others in the military,” Barno said. “When that happens, it’s not necessarily healthy either for the military or the country.”
Although American generals have long enjoyed many perks — in World War II and in Vietnam, some dined on china set atop linen tablecloths — the amenities afforded to today’s military leaders are more lavish than anyone else in government enjoys, save for the president.
Among the new information uncovered by the Post’s Greg Jaffe and Anne Gearan, the Petraeus biographer was asked to leave her doctoral program at Harvard and apparently mistated her accomplishments at West Point.
The benefits have not generated much attention among a public that has long revered its generals as protectors of the nation and moral beacons. And no general has been revered more than Petraeus, a fact that Mullen remarked upon at his retirement ceremony.
He joked that a woman approached him at a dinner party, eyed his medals and asked him if he was somebody important. “I’m the president’s top military adviser,” he replied.
“Oh my goodness, General Petraeus,” the woman said to Mullen. “I’m so sorry. I just didn’t recognize you.”
Petraeus cultivated his fame by grasping, before most of his comrades, how the narrative of modern warfare is shaped not just on the battlefield but among the chattering class back home. He invited book authors to accompany him, granted frequent interviews to journalists, fostered close relationships with Washington think tanks and embraced political leaders on both sides of the aisle. When President George W. Bush needed a savior for the foundering war in Iraq, he turned to Petraeus, making him the frontman for the troop surge in Baghdad. In the first six months of 2007, Bush mentioned Petraeus’s name 150 times in speeches.
Petraeus did not disappoint. Violence dropped in Iraq after he became the top commander there. He returned home as a celebrity. In 2009, he was asked to flip the coin at the Super Bowl.
He became an A-list guest at Washington parties. His stardom, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a collective guilt among civilians disconnected from the conflicts all helped to raise the profile for his fellow generals. It wasn’t just Jill Kelley, the Tampa woman who cultivated close relationships with him and other generals, including Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, by throwing lavish parties at her million-dollar house. Hostesses around the nation delighted at the presence of commanders in full-dress uniforms at social events.
The adulation fit their lifestyle.
“Being a four-star commander in a combat theater is like being a combination of Bill Gates and Jay-Z — with enormous firepower added,” said Thomas E. Ricks, the author of “The Generals,” a recently published history of American commanders since World War II.
Many of the gatherings have been genuinely altruistic; community and business leaders have pitched in to help raise money to support wounded troops and military families. But others, it seems, hoped a general or two sprinkled among canape-munching guests would bring elevated social status.
In some cases, the generals, who have spent much of their professional lives in cloistered military bubbles, have not employed the best judgment in cultivating relationships with those who enjoy the sparkle of stars on the shoulder. Allen exchanged hundreds — perhaps even thousands — of e-mails with Kelley over the past four years, a fact discovered in the FBI investigation into harassing messages sent by Petraeus’s former mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, to Kelley. The Defense Department is now investigating the messages Allen and Kelley exchanged.
Some retired generals have defended the benefits accorded to their active-duty brethren, noting that many of them work 18-hour days, six to seven days a week. They manage budgets that dwarf those of large multinational companies and are responsible for the lives of thousands of young men and women under their command.
Compared with today’s plutocrats, their pay is modest. In 2013, the base salary for a four-star general with at least 38 years of service will be almost $235,000, although federal personnel regulations limit their take-home pay to $179,700. Unlike top civilians in government, top generals also receive free housing and subsidies for food and uniforms. And when they retire, those who have served at least 40 years get an annual pension that is slightly more than active-duty base pay — this year it is $236,650.
Several generals noted that perks, such as planes, cars and staff aides, are constrained by hundreds of pages of rules designed to ensure that they are used only for government business.
But the frantic search for cuts to reduce the growth of government debt could soon put some of the four-star benefits at risk. When he was at the Pentagon, Gates wanted to trim some of the perks but ran into resistance. It was, he said, the “third rail” of the Defense Department.
“You don’t need a cadre of people at your beck and call in an age of austerity, unless you are a field commander in Iraq or Afghanistan,” a former top aide to Gates said on the condition of anonymity.
The travel practices of two theater commanders, which prompted Pentagon investigations this year, may further jeopardize the perks.
When he was former head of the U.S. Africa Command, Army Gen. William “Kip” Ward spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for private travel, including using military vehicles to shuttle his wife on shopping trips and to a spa, according to a report by the Defense Department’s inspector general. The report detailed lengthy stays at lavish hotels for Ward, his wife and his staff members — he billed the government for a refueling stop overnight in Bermuda, where the couple stayed in a $750 suite — and the use of five-vehicle motorcades when he traveled in Washington. The report also said Ward often took longer-than-necessary business trips to the United States, resulting in “exponential” increases in costs.
The current top U.S. commander in Europe, Adm. James Stavridis, also came under the scrutiny of the inspector general for using a military jet to fly to the Burgundy region of France for a dinner organized by an international society of wine enthusiasts. Stavridis defended the trip as an opportunity to meet with French military and business leaders.
He was cleared of wrongdoing by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus this month. Ward, however, was not so fortunate. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta announced last week that Ward would be demoted and forced to retire at a three-star rank. He also will have to repay the government $82,000, but he still will receive a $208,000-a-year pension.
Peter Feaver, a National Security Council official in the Bush administration, defended the generals’ need for perks and large staffs, noting that when they entertain foreign dignitaries they are bound by military standards of pageantry and protocol that don’t exist in the State Department.
“The military is trapped in an older cultural time warp,” Feaver said.
But he worried that the recent high-profile excesses could chip away at the military’s credibility. There’s a sentiment among the ranks that generals are out of touch, he said.
“This provides fuel for that kind of critique,” he said. “It can do damage to the institution.”
by seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 20, 2012 10:14 am
Menacing emails sent by David Petraeus’ ex-mistress Paula Broadwell to socialite Jill Kelley promised to make the apparent rival 'go away'
The notes Broadwell sent to Kelley were far more sinister than previously reported and seemed like the rantings of someone 'clearly unhinged,' a close friend of Kelley told The News.
BY MATTHEW LYSIAK IN TAMPA , JENNIFER H. CUNNINGHAM IN CHARLOTTE, N.C. AND BILL HUTCHINSON / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The menacing emails sent by David Petraeus’ ex-mistress to a Florida socialite promised to make the apparent rival “go away” and boasted of her friends in high places, the Daily News has learned.
The notes Paula Broadwell sent to Jill Kelley were far more sinister than previously reported and seemed like the rantings of someone “clearly unhinged,” a close friend of Kelley told The News Monday.
“This wasn’t just a catfight. Any normal person who got emails like that would have immediately called the police,” said the friend.
She said Kelley read her the emails when she called, panic-stricken and seeking advice in the days before the scandal became a stunning public spectacle and led to Petraeus’ resignation as CIA director.
The friend, who did not want to be identified, said Kelley saw the emails as death threats, specifically one in which Broadwell vowed to “make you go away.”
.....
by lupercal » Tue Nov 20, 2012 11:30 am
by hava007 » Wed Nov 21, 2012 12:08 am
by lupercal » Wed Nov 21, 2012 1:42 am
It's a pretty sorry business and you better believe Hilly is hating every minute of holding Bibi's hand in public and looking like a stooge. I think it's also very interesting that the UK isn't saying peep about Palestinians but they found plenty of time today to diplomatically recognize Syrian "rebels": 
by hava007 » Wed Nov 21, 2012 4:31 am
by JackRiddler » Fri Nov 23, 2012 12:15 am
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/21/ ... ason/print
November 21, 2012
Torture and Death Squads
Petraeus Fell for the Wrong Reason
by SHELDON RICHMAN
David Petraeus has fallen — but not as he should have. Before being disgraced by an extramarital affair, the retired four-star general and ex-CIA director should have been shamed out of public life for his horrendous military record in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Are we talking about the same David Petraeus who is said to have heroically saved Iraq with the famous surge and then salvaged a floundering military effort in Afghanistan?
That’s the one. But those “accomplishments” are merely the products of sharp public relations.
The fact is that Petraeus presided over the brutal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with torture, terrifying night raids, and violent sectarian cleansing. If Americans knew the truth — which the news media are uninterested in disclosing because it detracts from their narrative — they would not see heroism in David Petraeus. They would see the villainy of a man who carries out the orders of his imperial superiors and the ruthlessness with which the American empire treats whoever gets in its way. Alas, unfaithfulness in his marriage is the least of Petraeus’s offenses.
Journalist Eric Margolis, who has vast experience covering the Middle East, notes that
Petraeus and his fellow generals used every weapon in the US arsenal against Iraq’s eleven resistance groups (deceptively misnamed “al-Qaida” by Washington), including the mass ethnic cleansing of two million Sunni Iraqis, death squads, torture, and brutal reprisals.…
Petraeus was then sent to work his magic in Afghanistan before returning to Washington to head CIA. There, the brainy general, who had a knack for self-promotion and public relations, tried again to crush the Pashtun resistance by massive bombardments, billions in high tech gear, reprisals that wiped out entire villages, search and destroy missions.
What’s to show for all this? A quagmire, still with high levels of violence, that the U.S. military will be stuck in for at least another decade. Yes, President Obama says the troops will be out in 2014, but that does not mean all of them or that the entanglement will end then.
Another eminent journalist, Gareth Porter of the Inter Press Service, has mined the WikiLeaks revelations, which document that under Petraeus’s command, U.S. forces were ordered not to investigate Iraqi-on-Iraqi killings and torture. Worse, U.S. troops turned prisoners over to the Iraqis knowing that they would be tortured.
“The deeper significance of the order … is that it was part of a larger U.S. strategy of exploiting Shi’a sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the U.S. war,” writes Porter. “The strategy [developed by Petraeus] involved the deliberate deployment of Shi’a and Kurdish police commandos in areas of Sunni insurgency in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by WikiLeaks show.”
This was known as the El Salvador option: training and equipping death squads to eradicate undesirables. This was the period when sectarian violence and Sunni resistance to the U.S. occupation were at their height. Every day, large numbers of tortured bodies were found on Baghdad streets as vengeful Shi’a Muslims, backed by America and Iran, engaged in sectarian cleansing of the city. Porter notes that the Bush-Cheney-Petraeus strategy was “a major contributing factor to the rise of al-Qaeda’s influence in the Sunni areas. The escalating Sunni-Shi’a violence it produced led to the massive sectarian warfare of 2006 in Baghdad in which tens of thousands of civilians — mainly Sunnis — were killed.”
As Porter recounts, two years earlier the Civil Defense Corps in Sunni areas of Iraq “essentially disappeared overnight during an insurgent offensive” and Petraeus’s U.S. command turned to Shi’a and Kurdish police and military units to put down the resistance. Soon the U.S. order not to intervene in the abuse of prisoners was issued. “It was a clear signal that the U.S. command expected torture of prisoners to be a central feature of Iraqi military and police operations against Sunni insurgents,” Porter writes. From there the American force established and trained sectarian paramilitary squads for the dirty work, the first being the Wolf Brigade. “It did not take long for the Wolf Brigade to acquire its reputation for torture of Sunni detainees,” Porter writes.
That is David Petraeus’s legacy.
Sheldon Richman is vice president and editor at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) in Fairfax, Va.
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