CIA director Petraeus stands down over affair



You shouldn't cheat on your wife, but what this has to do with his ability to direct CIA?

Well if you fall in the honey pot, cant a good looking Rusky get you to tell your secrets?

Easy.

To hold top level clearances, your record must be squeaky clean.
No criminal history, no excessive debts, do nothing that the opposition
can use as leverage against you. No drug or alcohol issues. No marriage,
affairs, relationships with foreign citizens.

While I don't know the details on his affair, it's basically seen as a trust
issue and they would likely replace him anyway. He knows this and just
decided to step down on his own terms before he was forced out.

The rules usually dont apply to top level folk.... he could have come clean, admitted the affair, patched things up with his wife and kept his job. Noone in either party wanted him out.

I personally suspect that this is a prelude to his own Presidential ambitions, 4 years is plenty of time to recover from a minor mistake that never blew up into a scandal. His timing of waiting until after election ensures that noone accuses him of partisanship.

In other words you cant be human.

Humanity is not typically a sought after quality in govt officials.

I'm more Interested in as to why the FBI was investigating Gen. Petraeus. Or if this is typical protocol after someone from the media has been Imbedded with the military.

Power games wouldn't surprise me.

A lot of people underestimate the degree to which the upper echelons of govt are Byzantine and Machiavellian.

The only thing you can be reasonably sure of in most cases, is that the media report does not reflect reality - or at the least, such a small piece of the total picture that the view is distorted.

Those rules pretty much apply to anyone holding ultra-high level clearances. Though, admittedly, they seem to be overlooked a bit the higher up on the food chain you sit.


If given the opportunity to posses a clearance again, I don't know if I would. Too much bullsh*t to deal with.

This whole Petraeus situation is weird. I wouldn't be surprised if he has an "accident" within the next 6 months.

It is weird - we are getting a glipse now, of some of the machinations involved.

All signs currently point to Eric Cantor, after getting wind of the affair, having an allied FBI agent frame the General's paramour for sending "harassing" emails. I find it very unlikely that she actually sent the emails. Possible? Sure. Likely? In this case, no.

Someone knew of an affair, and cooked up a scheme to get it exposed.

So Why? Thats a good question. The most common answer swirling around is the Libyan issue, but I do not think it had anything to do with it - this scheme far predates the Libyan episode.

There are three plausible reasons, in order:

1) Money. Some sort of contract for mega millions that we have not heard about, because its CIA stuff and they often at least try to keep their expenditures under wraps. The concept that Petraeus did not want to play ball with some major appropriations scheme or other, and that people standing to benefit seized upon a personal weakness to get him removed strikes me as the most historically common - and thus, without further information the most plausible.

2) Partisan politics. Whether the perpetrators thought that maybe the issue would come out before the election , thus giving the Dems the opportunity to somehow drop the ball and distracting Obamas campaign or not is questionable. Also, though striking a blow to a potential Petraeus Presidential run might be a desirable side effect, 3 years gives him time to recover - and it would have been much more effective to simply hold the knowledge close to the vest and have it disclosed during a Presidential Primary. Denying Obama a talented cabinet member would be a plus for many people.... but does not seem like strong enough motivation in of itself.

3) Unknown - something not considered here.

I put money as the most probable based on what is currently known. Though it is possible that Petraeus was simply an actual honest patriot and there were other schemes he was standing in the way of. Still, money far and away most likely at this point.

-

Also, though obviously the situation is strange... I am not certain that any accidents will befall the General. Taking out a General is a dicey proposition , even for the most powerful movers and shakers. The possibility of exposure, and even more dangerous - the possibility that loyal subordinates connect the dots is just too high. So we typically see that type of risky behavior in 2nd and 3rd world countries - a rash of high level deaths among the political and corporate elites would create too much "noise" and threaten entire crony parasitic ecosystems.

More likely, is to see the FBI agent at the locus of the issue disappear."Suicides" not uncommon in these types of situations, especially after he takes quite a bit of heat. Once that guy is gone, any credible evidence directly linking the powerful to the plot disappears. One FBI agent who got too obsessive over a case, then kills himself in a fit of career despair or mental instability unlikely to make more than a small blurb in the paper.