Imagine this being said by someone who had an insider track to the Director of the CIA:
"Well, just to create some context for those in the room. As you know, the ambassaador in Benghazi was killed along with a couple of security agents who happened to be CIA security, paramilitary forces. That just came out today in Fox News.
But the challenge has been the fog of war. And the greater challenge is that it's political hunting season, and so this whole thing has been turned into a very political sort of arena, if you will.
But the facts that came out today were that the ground forces there at the CIA annex, which is different from the consulate, were requesting reinforcements.
They were requesting the, what's called the CINC's in extremis force -- a group of Delta Force operators, our very, most talented guys we have in the military. They could have come and reinforced the consulate and the CIA annex that were under attack.
Now, I don't know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had actually, um, had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back. So that's still being vetted.
The challenging thing for General Petraeus is that in his new position, he's not allowed to communicate with the press. So he's known all of this -- they had correspondence with the CIA station chief in, in Libya. Within 24 hours they kind of knew what was happening.
But if you remember at the time -- the Muslim video, the Mohamed video that came out, the demonstrations that were going on in Cairo -- there were demonsrations in 22 other countries around the world. Tens of thousands of people. And our government was very concerned that this was going to become a nightmare for us.
So you can understand if you put yourself in his shoes or Secretary Clinton's shoes or the president's shoes that we thought it was tied somehow to the demonstrations in Cairo. And it's true that we have signal intelligence that shows the, um, the militia members in Libya were watching the demonstration in Cairo and it did sort of galvanize their effort. Um, so we'll find out the facts soon enough.
As a former intel officer it's frustrating to me because it reveals our sources and methods. I don't think the public necessarily needs to know all of that. It is a tragedy that we lost an ambassador and two other government officials. Um, and something -- there was a failure in the system because there was additional security requested. But it's frustrating to see the sort of political aspect of what's going on with this whole investigation.
Um, so the most recent news that came out was a Fox News report by Jennifer Griffin. I got it on a distribution list I'm on, and it has some pretty insightful stuff in it, if you want to look for it."
Well it was. By Paula Broadwell.How did she know the issues highlighted in red?
How did we not know them?
Was it pillow talk?
Also, there's an amazing article on Slate.com that discusses the net effect of a subordinate going gag-ga over a boss. I extend the Pillow Talk post in that direction for further reading. In part it reads:
"Precisely what happened next, when this mentor-protégé relationship turned into something else, is not clear. Many of Petraeus’ associates in Kabul, Afghanistan, wondered at the time if something was going on. Petraeus got along famously well with writers and journalists; he cultivated their trust, in part because he liked talking with them, in part because he saw press relations as a key ingredient of “information operations”—a classic military technique to shape the message of a campaign to civilian populations, both in the war zone and on the home front. (I was one of those reporters.) But Broadwell was allowed unusually close access. She was given a room at headquarters. On most early mornings, the two went on 5-mile runs together. Some, including myself, reasoned that this didn’t necessarily imply anything hair-raising: Petraeus went on 5-mile runs with lots of reporters and other visitors. Still, at least one of his assistants warned him to be wary of “appearances.”
Two other things about Broadwell that made her different from his usual crop of acolytes: She was very attractive, and, by all accounts, she went a bit ga-ga for the general. Her biography, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, is essentially a valentine to the man. In the process of courting him while writing it, she may have made herself irresistible."
Den
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