Keeping the faith, by contrast, Cliff Kincaid of GOPUSA argues that Petraeus is being martyred by the Obama Administration in some mysterious fashion that includes blaming Rep. Eric Cantor for doing nothing with his tip from the originating FBI agent other than pass it on to the FBI head office:
"
a national security scandal that could have stopped President Obama's
re-election campaign dead in its tracks. But the potentially devastating
"October Surprise" was hushed up by Republicans. Although all the details are not yet available and new
disclosures are coming every day, it appears that the scandal involves the CIA
director leaking classified information to his mistress and the FBI not holding
David Petraeus accountable for his immoral and illegal conduct. In short, it is
the worst scandal of the Obama Administration and makes the third-rate burglary
in the Watergate scandal look minor by comparison.
How
Badly Could Obama Feel About This Loss?
It's hard to see how President Obama could regret having a charismatic, ambitious, self-serving, independent rival like Petraeus taken off the board before his second term begins. But to conjure up a conspiracy theory in which the President plotted and schemed to oust his CIA chief would seem to require a belief that Obama is somehow a secret liberal, or something better.
The evidence seems clear that President Obama is devoted to the CIA's assassination-by-drone program and was very much in favor of Petraeus' plan for "the conversion of the CIA into even more of a paramilitary organization than it has ever been before," as Greenwald asserted.
This seems wholly consistent with the Petraeus record, of which some of the highlights have been:
- promoting fictitious WMDs as part of the Bush administration's effort to lie the country into war in Iraq;
- promoting warmed-over winning-hearts-and-minds counter-insurgency theory from Viet-Nam, for application to Iraq and Afghanistan, where it was just as effective;
- promoting ethnic cleansing in Iraq;
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