3 ms·
I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the deference they
by 001sky 13y ago
I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the deference they enjoy due to politicians worrying about that too?
There is an argument[1] that this may have been what took out General Patreaus. It was no coincedence he was removed from the Army and put into the CIA post just prior to catching Bin Laden [2,3]. Patreus would have received all of the credit, not Obama. But we know that the prep work for Bin Laden involved building a replicate of the abbatobad compound in the US, etc. so was well underway under the leadership of Patreus, not Panetta. Obama was very wary of Patreus entereing the 2012 elections, and would have been a much more credible candidate than any republican. In the end, Patreus was of course done in by someone snooping through his gmail. Wether or not he was also the victim of a parallel construction, in how that came about, we'll never know.
[1] ie, Informal line of resoning or logic. In this case, circumstantial.
[2] edit: The move was orchestrated and announced earlier in the spring. viz: On April 28, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he had nominated Petraeus to become the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
[3] Bin Laden: Died May 2, 2011 (aged 54)
Abbottabad, Pakistan 34°10′9″N 73°14′33″E
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoProviding citations for the coordinates of Bin Laden's death ... really?
- TeMPOraL 13y agoI actually quite like that; it's a nice touch.
- griffordson 13y agoIt has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt since there is no documentation and no named sources, but in July Jack Murphy reported that his sources in the CIA told him that the "seventh floor" at CIA wanted Petraeus out and used his affair to do it. And that Clapper and Petraeus had a heated meeting where Petraeus was informed that he would be resigning. http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_killing_of_ambassador http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_kil... The fact that we can't be sure that he wasn't being blackmailed with something even more scandalous demonstrates the problem perfectly. There is no reason to believe that he was, but you can't say it is impossible now that we have documentation proving their capabilities. That is why this sort of dragnet mass surveillance is so dangerous to a democracy. It undermines the legitimacy of the political process.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mtgx 13y agoI'm quite certain Petraeus has been removed for a different reason than we were told. They can't trust him for having an affair? Give me a break. If he was on their side they wouldn't have ratted him out like that. And you can be certain that FBI agent didn't go to the media on his own, but had to ask his higher-ups about it first.