11/12/12 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm going to try this one more time here.
It's the great Marcy Wheeler, EmptyWheel.net.
Hi, Marcy.
Hey, Scott.
Okay, so all this David Petraeus stuff came out, the guy had an affair, he's the head of the CIA, he had to resign, all this happened Friday at news dump time.
And so all weekend long there's been all of these stories, back and forth, people trying to track just what point was the FBI doing what and who was emailing who from whose account, all this stuff.
And it just made me think, you know who's the world's greatest at separating the wheat from the chaff?
You, Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler.
So I know you've been reading this stuff, and I wonder what you think are the most important points that we should be paying attention to.
Is this like it seems to me, or is this like it seems, it's just a case of a woman scorned, picked a fight over email, and it snowballed into this big scandal, or is there more going on, or what do you think?
I think there may well be more going on.
One of the most interesting things that came out this weekend is a video that Paula Broadwell, the mistress, a speech she made at Denver University on October 26th, where she kind of suggests that the CIA had some prisoners, some Libyan militia prisoners in the CIA annex in Benghazi.
Yeah, Fox News is claiming to confirm that this morning.
And a single source, though, I think.
Yes.
In any case, that is a very interesting bubble, because, and I just put up a post at my site, if you look at the FBI investigation, and you look at the Benghazi response, particularly Petraeus's effort to start pushing back on an earlier Fox report from October 26th, so the same day that Paula Broadwell comes out and says, and oh, by the way, the CIA had prisoners in the annex, and that's why they didn't respond right away to the mission attack.
The investigation all of a sudden collapses onto the Benghazi pushback.
So, for example, Paula Broadwell is interviewed for the last time by the FBI on the same day that all of the CIA pushback comes out saying what Fox News said wasn't true.
So it actually seems like one of the things that's going on.
And remember, there were reports that Broadwell had classified information on her computer.
She said, Petraeus said, he didn't give it to her.
But the question is, if, in fact, it's true that the CIA had prisoners in Benghazi, where did she learn that?
And why was she in a speech basically saying, oh, poor David Petraeus, he can't speak to the press.
Well, let me tell you something that he can say to the press.
Why was she doing that?
And that actually repeats language you see later in this utterly ridiculous article that Scott Shane did on November 2nd, the same day that Paula Broadwell has her last FBI investigation.
And there's a lot of fluidity here.
I mean, people are like, I think it was the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal said, the FBI had only tentatively come to decide that they weren't going to make any charges on November 5th, so the day before the election.
That same day, Broadwell produced these ridiculous David Petraeus rules to live by, which seemed almost like that old Aspen letter that Scooter Libby sent to Judy Miller, this kind of public message to him on how he should respond.
But remember that when public people are being investigated for a crime, one of the ways that sometimes gets treated is they step down.
And although no charges are going to be filed, I think it's possible that there was classified information involved and or that this is just a really convenient opportunity for the Obama administration to get Petraeus to step down for the CIA really screwing up the Benghazi response.
Yeah.
You know, I saw Robert Perry.
That was his spin was that this is Obama is taking his opportunity to get rid of a guy who's really much more loyal to the Republicans and more specifically, even the neoconservatives.
And who Perry brought up how it was really Petraeus played a big role.
And we talked with Ray McGovern about this at the time, too.
He played a big role in that whole phony story about the Corpus Christi used car dealer who was going to hire a DEA Zetas drug cartel guy to blow up a restaurant to kill the Saudi.
Anyway, that whole ridiculous thing that was Petraeus that pushed that that confirmed it and said, oh, yeah, no, it is real and whatever.
And how that had really helped to ruin Obama's, you know, attempts to negotiate with the Iranians at the time and that maybe that was the purpose of it and that this is Obama's revenge.
Yeah.
And I think I mean, I think there are real questions about what CIA did in Benghazi.
So it's not it's not just that, but also remember that the Benghazi stuff, you know, there was the weird response that Mitt Romney had to Cairo and Benghazi in the first place.
But then about a month into around September 28th, not a month, like two weeks after the actual attack, there were solid reports that the GOP was going to try and make this into Obama's Jimmy Carter.
And there were I mean, the places where leaks were coming from were really fascinating.
And, you know, that story has yet to be told.
But I think that there are some people who are really out for Obama who are trying to help the Republicans make Benghazi into his Jimmy Carter.
It was a serious event.
I mean, you know, one of the one of the administration's most talented ambassadors got killed.
But at the same time, it was turned into a very convenient political event.
And it certainly is.
Petraeus was involved in any of that.
But even if you know, even if Petraeus didn't let me make a really minor point.
And I don't think this is what's driving it.
But one of the things that made FBI look really bad and state look really bad is that CIA would not hand over the video of the attack until weeks and weeks after they got it.
And that's the kind of thing that would really piss off the FBI and would really, you know, say, OK, now we're going to interview Petraeus.
So it is distinctly possible that one of the underlying things going on is all of the tensions.
And remember, no one really knows what this woman, Kelly, the woman who first complained about Paula Broadwell's emails back in early summer.
Nobody really knows what her role is because there has been different reporting on that.
But she at one point was reported to have a tie to the State Department.
So, you know, there's just a lot of really interesting turf battles that could be going on here.
The thing is, nobody really has sorted through it yet.
Although that would be pretty courageous for the FBI to go after the director of the CIA like that, right?
Just for vendetta reasons?
Well, and even better.
I mean, what your readers should get some real glee out of, because I certainly do, is that what got him, so at least according to public reports right now, is Broadwell sends anonymous emails to this other woman.
FBI investigates those anonymous emails to figure out who sent them.
They use all of this IT data, the same kind of stuff they're trying to use to prosecute WikiLeaks.
They use that kind of data to pinpoint Broadwell.
And then once they pinpoint her, they get into her email address and see these emails from somebody else that they couldn't pinpoint who turned out to be David Petraeus.
And that's how they got to Petraeus.
So what I personally love best about this is the entire big brother apparatus that the FBI uses to investigate normal people just brought down the CIA director.
Yeah, good times.
Well, now, so remember a couple of weeks ago that Wall Street Journal piece about, oh, it turns out that, and I guess anybody, you probably were already saying this, anybody who really thought about it would have known it, that whenever we say State Department in Libya, pretty much that means the CIA.
I mean, oftentimes they just use diplomatic cover in order to have immunity from prosecution, except for the noncommissioned whatever.
You know what I'm talking about.
Right, especially in Benghazi.
I mean, I think there's real stuff going on in Tripoli, but in Benghazi, that was the CIA's idea of pushback against Fox, was to admit that almost the entire Benghazi operation was CIA.
Now, that was sort of Daryl Issa had kind of unintentionally revealed that with a lot of his documents.
It became clear that the CIA, that State had maybe six people and there were another 25 people who weren't State.
So that was clear, but the CIA has now admitted that.
It may be what they were doing was a kind of limited release to say, oh, we were trying to track down weapons when, in fact, what they were doing was interrogation and detention of militia members.
And what's really interesting about that is some of the militia members, the purportedly good militia members appear to have not done what they had done on maybe 15 occasions before, which was come to the help of the Americans.
And I find that really interesting because it's one of the stories that I think is out there is that the CIA was training this militia that's supposed to be one of the good guys, and they ended up at least betraying us, at least not doing what they had done all these other times, at least letting the other militias attack us, at least.
And so it's another case, and this is actually one of the stories that David portrays his careers is he's been in charge of quote-unquote training armies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I don't know, the reports are that Qatar had the lead on training these militias in Libya, but every time these people we train end up attacking us.
We arm them, they attack us.
Right.
Yeah, and you're right that that is a huge scandal.
Aside from the fact that Republicans agree, you know, this is sort of like Beirut in 83, where you put a bunch of guys in a target zone, but with no force protection.
In that case, they had rifles with no bullets in them.
And I don't know if they would have been able to stop that truck, but at least they would have had a shooting chance.
In this case, you got all of these State Department and CIA guys there, but with no one ready to even come and fly a Reaper drone in their defense, relying only on, as you're saying, a local militia, you would think that they'd have learned their lesson that, you know, I'm not saying I'm for a detachment of Marines, but it seems like they would have learned their lesson that they need a detachment of Marines.
Right?
I mean.
Well, I think one of the issues is.
Armed ones.
I mean, yeah, no, I mean, but I think one of the issues, and this is something that Congress will never discuss, is how we nation-build.
You know, we had one model in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that's the one that General Petraeus has the entire press corps believing was successful when it wasn't, and that's that we train the Army and then leave, and it turns into a nation-state just on the basis of having an Army.
It doesn't work out that way.
So now we're in Libya, and we're trying a different way, which is we're trying to rather than us bringing in the Army in a big way, we want them to take the role from the start, and that's why we were relying on that militia for our security, and it still ends up the same way with militias attacking us.
And so it's not, you know, and I think there are probably reasons that will never get discussed.
Like you can't nation-build just by throwing money and neoliberalism at a problem.
You've got to build some kind of competence, and Americans have lost that kind of competence at this point.
We just outsource it.
You know, I sort of prefer the lie in a way that, hey, Libya was great.
I mean, once it's already a fait accompli and they shot the dictator in the side of the head on the side of the road and all of that, and it's already a done deal, I prefer the lie that, hey, it's a victory and nobody needs to pay attention to Libya ever again to, you know, you just can't nation-build by throwing money at the problem.
You have to send in the 3rd Infantry Division.
That's how they want to finish your sentence, right, is, see, we have to go ahead and give everybody a purple-fingered election and really train up their army, not outsource it to the Qataris, and then, you know, when they stand up, we'll stand down and all that kind of thing.
And that's what I'm afraid is you look at what a disaster Libya is now, and of course it's those politics that are trying to get away with the lie that everything's fine is sort of part of why they never sent enough force protection in the first place, because then they'd have to explain why they need so much force protection if the war worked out so well.
But I'm just afraid that, you know, the next logical step in the chain is we have to intervene more.
We can't leave it at that, because that is all loose ends and terrible.
Right, and I mean, one of the interesting things, and I take this as a marginally good sign, is they captured one of the suspects from Benghazi.
What happened was the Daily Beast reported on him contacting some al-Qaeda guys saying, look, we killed the ambassador.
Daily Beast reported on it.
He took off to go to Syria through Turkey.
So in other words, he took off to go to our next nation-building exercise or our next regime change exercise.
And that, to me, is the really big alert, because there have been allegations from day one that the rebels in Libya had ties to Syria.
The rebels in Libya just attacked us, and yet we're still, you know, either above or below the table giving arms to the same rebels in Syria, the same ones who just attacked us in Libya, who have ties to al-Qaeda.
So, you know, it really, after that, after that guy was arrested, then the State Department said, whoa, let's reorganize the opposition in Syria.
I don't know that we have the power to do that.
And there was a lot of pushback against Qatar and Saudi Arabia for whom they were arming.
But, you know, it's still this notion that we can play with Humpty Dumpty and we'll figure out some way to get him back together after we knock him all apart in regime change.
Right.
Just like in 2002.
They never wanted to talk about, and then what, at all.
Just trust us.
It'll be fine.
We're the most competent government in world history.
Once we get rid of Saddam, just, we've got to get rid of Saddam.
And that was it.
And if you try to talk about then what, got to get rid of Saddam.
That was all.
It's the same kind of thing.
And, in fact, in this case, we even have, I won't waste your time playing the clips of it, but I'm sure you've seen him and heard him, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both acknowledging that, yeah, we're on the side of our enemies in Syria, but what are you going to do?
Stop?
You know?
Right.
And the other big question, aside from how do you nation-build, how do you put some stability in these places so hundreds of thousands of people don't die again, is why is it that Qatar is arming these people who seemingly have ties to al-Qaeda?
They're supposed to be our allies, right?
So why is it that our allies are arming the people that we're supposedly in a global war on terror against?
Well, I think it's because they are our allies, and those guys are the most effective vanguard in the fight against Bashar al-Assad.
And so we've decided to take the side of our real enemies against a guy who doesn't need to be our enemy at all and used to torture people for us the day before yesterday.
And that's the other underlying thing is, you know, when Broadwell's comments about us holding prisoners first came out, I was like, well, maybe she's confused.
Maybe it came out funny and it was a reference to the rebels that we rendered to Qaddafi.
It doesn't sound like that.
I mean, as you said, Fox at least has one source saying, in fact, we were holding people prisoner there.
And if that's true, you know, again, we keep, like, the things we've done in Libya, because in addition to the people we rendered there, you know, they're one of the key subjects of torture, or even Sheikh al-Libi, that we tortured so that we could start the Iraq war, we sent to Qaddafi, and he was conveniently, this guy was conveniently suicided at a time when all of the torture investigations started focusing on how we use torture to lie our way into the Iraq war.
So it all comes, you know, it all comes back.
Yep.
All right.
Now, well, you know, that would explain the holding of prisoners there at that annex.
That would possibly explain why they've been stumbling all over themselves trying to get their lies straight about exactly what was going on and the degree to which that Innocence of Muslims video had anything to do with what happened there, that day and whatever, if they know that the real answer is, oh, well, we were holding some prisoners, you know, in the neighborhood at this safe house, and the local militia got wind of it and, you know, came to get their guys.
Well, and a point I've made before is that twice earlier in a year, militia members, once they kidnapped, another time they stopped at a roadblock.
People who probably worked at the annex the first time, well, one of the times was the South African contractors.
Another time there were two women who appeared to have worked at the annex.
So it's not, it doesn't appear like the militia were just coming, you know, just discovered this annex.
It appears very likely that they have known about the annex for a long time.
And now I've, I guess, seen rumors of this, but nothing concrete.
And I wonder whether you've seen anything, you know, quotable about Stevens, Ambassador Stevens, actually being in charge of funneling the fighters from the Libya war and some of their weapons, Qaddafi's old weapons, on to Syria.
And maybe that was part of their blind spot was, you know, one of his missions was recruiting these guys and sending them on to the next fight.
And it was some of those same guys that stabbed him in the back.
What do you think of that?
Well, at the very least, he was working closely with them.
I mean, I'm not sure whether, you know, I think one of the big questions is what's the role of Qatar here?
Because it's clear that they facilitated that.
Were they just a front for the CIA?
And if so, you know, what role did Stevens have?
But he was pretty close to these militia people.
And, you know, I think that that's something that deserves some serious questions about what role that was.
And really, you know, again, one of the things that has come out since it's become more clear this is a CIA op was that the CIA wasn't paying attention to the purportedly good guy militia.
They weren't paying attention to the February 17 Brigade.
They were paying attention to Ansar al-Sharia.
And when we've accused Ansar al-Sharia of leading this attack, they said, well, yeah, there were a bunch of militia involved.
And I've always thought that that was sort of meant to get people to look publicly at, say, February 17 Brigade and what they did or did not do in this case.
And at the very least, it seems like CIA was just ignoring or was oblivious to the fact that and again, this goes back to our intelligence failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It's like we think we're partners with these local people, and yet we are blind to how unhappy we make these purportedly partners.
You know, especially in Afghanistan, the case is so well documented that we're arrogant, that we don't have any respect for their culture, and yet we're surprised when they turn around and kill us.
Well, and in this case, the point is when you say CIA, you mean David Petraeus.
And then that was back to that Wall Street Journal article from a week ago or whatever about how he went to the movies that night.
And, you know, I don't know.
Then again, I saw or I guess I heard a clip.
And did not go to the funeral of the two CIA security guys.
Yeah, because they were trying to keep it deniable that they were CIA or whatever.
That was the story.
Right.
But, you know, I saw Michael Sawyer saying I forget now where he was quoting Petraeus from something.
Basically, in other words, saying it wasn't me that held back reinforcements, basically implying that it was the White House that did.
And so Sawyer was saying he thought that sounded like, you know, they were giving him the ax and making him take the fall.
And of course, now getting rid of him before he can go testify before the congressional hearing coming up.
Well, it sounds like he's going to be made to testify in any case.
They won't have him testify this week.
And that'll actually work out more interestingly, because you'll have the official CIA story with Michael Morell on whatever.
Is it Wednesday or Thursday?
And then they're going to bring Petraeus back and he's going to testify.
So, you know, I think at this point there's no chance that he will avoid testifying.
And maybe maybe he tried to.
I mean, again, one of the really fascinating ways that the Benghazi and the affair timelines coincide is this weird article from Scott Shane where, you know, was saying, well, David Petraeus really wanted to be president of Princeton one day.
And now with all the recriminations from Benghazi, it may not work out that way.
It you know, that that was that was right when Petraeus knew that there was this FBI investigation into into how he was dealing with your information.
Yeah, I read that guy, Andy Borowitz, the satirist said, yeah, you know, he cheated on his wife just to set himself up in this conspiracy so that he would have an out instead of taking the rap for Benghazi.
Like what a lucky break for him.
He was stabbing his wife in the back.
So he had this excuse to cut and run.
Yeah, or alternately, you know, what a lucky break that he was exposed.
You know, and again, you have to wonder why the FBI wasn't investigating more aggressively until after Benghazi.
Right.
But, you know, what how convenient was it that he had something that was legitimately a firing event just at the time that Benghazi was blowing up?
And, you know, who knows whether it's retaliation or an effort to keep him quiet?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm going to be keeping my eyeballs on your Web site.
I sure hope everybody else does, too.
The great blog at Empty Wheel dot net.
It's Marcy Wheeler.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it.
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