The Convenient Resignation of General Petraeus

by Robert Spencer


Apparently overcome with guilt over an extramarital affair, General David Petraeus abruptly resigned as director of the CIA Thursday. A suddenly socially conservative Barack Obama accepted his resignation Friday, as Petraeus explained in a statement made public Friday afternoon (the time when all stories that the administration wants to bury are released). But Petraeus’s statement simply didn’t hold water — not only because it assumed an Obama as strait-laced as Pat Robertson, but also because it comes just after the House Foreign Affairs Committee asked him to testify in its investigation of the Benghazi jihad attack and subsequent Obama administration cover-up. 

“Yesterday afternoon,” Petraeus wrote, “I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position as D/CIA. After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation.”

Parson Obama, that well-known moral crusader who praised Ted Kennedy as an “extraordinary leader” and Barney Frank as “a fierce advocate for the people of Massachusetts and Americans everywhere who needed a voice,” may indeed have been so indignant over Petraeus’s affair that he accepted his resignation with alacrity. On the other hand, maybe his willingness to see the last of Petraeus had something to do with the statement that the CIA issued on October 26: “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”

This came after Fox News had reported that same day that “sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command — who also told the CIA operators twice to ‘stand down’ rather than help the ambassador’s team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.”

But if it wasn’t Petraeus who ordered that no help be given to Ambassador Chris Stevens and his staff when jihadists attacked the embassy, the order would have had to come from someone who outranked even the director of the agency. Thus Petraeus’s denial that the order had come from him pointed the finger directly at Barack Obama. And while the mainstream media buried that fact before the election, probably the House Foreign Affairs Committee would have asked Petraeus just who did give the order.

For surely it was just a coincidence that Petraeus resigned on Thursday, the very same day that Fox News reported that the Foreign Affairs Committee was planning to call him to testify at their Benghazi hearings, along with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Matt Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Surely that had nothing to do with Petraeus’s decision to submit his resignation. This couldn’t have had anything to do with his quitting. It is much more likely indeed that suddenly, just as the news that he was going to be summoned to testify came in to his office, Petraeus was overcome with remorse over his affair, and decided – although apparently the affair began some time ago, since there were rumors about it while he was still in Afghanistan – that Thursday was the day, right then and there, to come clean and resign his position.

The preposterousness of this scenario is obvious. And the convenience of the timing for Barack Obama cannot be overlooked. Now Petraeus will not be testifying at the House hearings, and so, barring a subpoena, the primary witness to who ordered the CIA to stand down in Benghazi has been removed.

The transparently flimsy justification given for the resignation is also troubling, reminiscent as it is of the charges that Stalin suddenly brought against his former friends and comrades in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, when overnight heroes of the revolution became hated class enemies. That a Democrat administration as socially to the Left as Obama’s would use a charge of adultery as an excuse to remove a hitherto respected public official already strains credulity well beyond the breaking point. It also has more than a whiff of totalitarian-style denunciations and purges. Will a show trial follow?

And the worst part of all this is that the election is over, the opposition to Obama is reeling and toothless, and clearly the man believes that he can behave this way without worrying about any accountability. And he is probably right.

Robert Spencer

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/robert-spencer/the-convenient-resignation-of-general-petraeus/

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