One thing that has become apparent over the past two months is that the Obama administration fears disclosure of what really went wrong in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 when Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed during a terrorist attack. Shutting up fired CIA Director David Petraeus' mistress may have been part of that objective based on new reports about what she knows and what she's been saying about the Benghazi attack.
Little reported before now is the fact that Paula Broadwell, the married woman with whom Petraeus had been carrying on an illicit affair, spoke to an audience at her alma mater, the University of Denver, on October 26 where she revealed that Gen. Petraeus had told her that American officials were holding Libyan militia members as prisoners at a CIA annex building near the consular facility where Ambassador Stevens was killed during the September 11 attack. According to Broadwell's comments on October 26, American intelligence officials knew within 24 hours that the attack on the consulate may have been part of an effort to gain the release of the militia members being held at the CIA annex. Breitbart notes that the Obama administration had ordered in January, 2009 the closing of all secret interrogation camps abroad. Quoting from Broadwell's University of Denver comments, Breitbart reports:
“Now, I don't know if a lot of you have heard this but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner, and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try get these prisoners back, so that’s still being vetted,” Broadwell said during the question-and-answer session of her presentation when an audience member asked her to comment on Libya.
Broadwell, who was speaking at her alma mater about her biography of Petraeus, confirmed the Fox News report (Broadwell said Jennifer Griffin's report had "insightful information") that came out on the day of her speech that said the Obama administration denied Americans on the ground in Libya the security and help they requested, telling NAVY Seals in Libya who wanted to help U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans who were eventually murdered to “stand down.”
“The facts that came out today is that the ground forces there at the CIA annex, which is different from the consulate, were requesting reinforcements,” Broadwell said. “They were requesting the – it's called the CINC’s (Commander-in-Chief’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. “
Broadwell said the “challenging thing” for Petraeus was, as Director of the CIA, he was “not allowed to communicate with the press.”
“So he's known all of this – they had correspondence with the CIA station chief in Libya, within 24 hours they kind of knew what was happening,” Broadwell said . . .It's clear that Broadwell had gained this knowledge from her relationship with Petraeus, which was not at all helpful to the administration's previous public statements. The CIA, not surprisingly, is denying Broadwell's claim that it was holding militia members prisoner at the CIA annex. It claims she is confusing her facts with a Fox News report making a similar claim the same day that she spoke at the University of Denver. Now we know that Broadwell's reputation is being tarnished by Obama administration claims that the FBI learned of the investigation after it investigated threatening e-mails she had supposedly sent to another woman, Jill Kelley, who was also close to Gen. Petraeus. Investigative reporter Ron Kessler claims the threatening e-mail claim is being disseminated to throw off reporters about the truth behind how the FBI actually learned of Petraeus' relationship with Broadwell. He claims his sources tell him the relationship was discovered after e-mails on his military e-mail account were uncovered discussing with Broadwell something taking place under the desk, which investigators mistook as something corrupt as opposed to something of a sexual nature. FBI investigators later uncovered more than a thousand e-mails Petreaus had sent to Broadwell after she broke off the relationship according to Kessler in an effort to win her back.
“It is a tragedy that we lost an ambassador and two other government officials, and there was a failure in the system because there was additional security requested,” Broadwell said. “It's frustrating to see the sort of political aspect of what's going on with this whole investigation."Broadwell said "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" politicized.
UPDATE: This whole mess becomes more sordid the more details we learn. This Jill Kelley chick who supposedly received the threatening e-mails from Broadwell had somehow become very close friends with Petraeus and his wife about six years ago according to the New York Post. She had been given an honorary "Ambassador" title by our government for whatever work this woman who is married to a Tampa surgeon was doing on a volunteer basis for our government. Even more interesting is the fact that Kelley's family are immigrants from Lebanon. "Kelley and her twin sister, Natalie, are the youngest of four kids of Lebanese immigrants, Marcelle and John Khawam," the Post reports. Kelley — who has no government title — often called herself an “ambassador” after a coalition of countries at the military’s Central Command gave her an appreciation certificate calling her an “honorary ambassador.” "More recently, Kelley, a volunteer for the military, also boasted she was named 'honorary consulate general to South Korea' and attended a breakfast at the White House, according to the Tampa Bay Times." This is so disgusting.
Wouldn't reported consular arms dealing be something of a problem?
ReplyDeleteI've reported that before. Yes, our CIA is arming al Qaeda operatives to help overthrow Assad in Syria just like it did in Libya in removing Gaddafi. al Qaeda and bin Laden were invented by the CIA with our taxpayer dollars to build support for their made up war on terror. The so-called war on drugs is another CIA invention that has always been about eliminating the competition of the drug cartels.
ReplyDelete