I don’t have a clue as to why you keep trying to poke me with a stick.”
=========================

ElaineM,

Can you:

1) explain what poking with a stick is? I am not familiar with that American term?
2) give a recent example of my doing so?

Not understanding, I can not offer to stop, nor apologize for what I don’t understand is the fault involved.

TPM Editor’s Blog

Jill Kelley, An Embarrassment to Honorary Consuls Everywhere

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/11/jill_kelley_an_embarrassment_to_honorary_consuls_e.php

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/13/jill_kelley_is_an_honorary_consul_of_south_korea

” Jill Kelley, the Tampa socialite connected to ISAF Commander John Allen and former CIA Director David Petraeus, is an “honorary consul” of South Korea, a diplomatic official with direct knowledge of the arrangement told The Cable.

“She is an ‘honorary consul’ of the Republic of Korea,” the official said. “She assumed this position last August thanks to her good connections and network.”

The position of honorary consul is symbolic and has no official responsibilities, the official said.

“She does not work as a real consul. They play a role to improve the relationship between the ROK and the U.S.,” the official said. “Jill Kelley helped to get support for [the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement] and she arranged meetings between the ROK Ambassador to Washington and local businessmen when the ROK Ambassador visited the Tampa area.”

There’s no implication that the South Korean government has anything to do with the growing scandal that involves Kelly, Allen, Petraeus, and Paula Broadwell, Petraeus’s biographer and alleged mistress. But her work on behalf of the South Koreans may explain some of the 20,000 to 30,000 pages of e-mails between her and Allen that the Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office is investigating now. “

“A military officer who is a former member of Petraeus’s staff said Kelley was a “self-appointed” go-between for Central Command officers with Lebanese and other Middle Eastern government officials.”

Some stories just suggest their own musical score.

Gen. Allen was concerned by that email and forwarded it to Ms. Kelley, the official with knowledge of Gen. Allen’s thinking said.

FBI agents conducted a consensual search at Ms. Broadwell’s home in Charlotte, N.C., Monday, though it was unclear why. Multiple government officials have said that while the FBI doesn’t believe Mr. Petraeus committed any crimes, they are still examining Ms. Broadwell’s conduct.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that the Pentagon received the information concerning Gen. Allen from the FBI on Sunday.

Some officials believe that if Gen. Allen’s account is proved true—that there was no physical relationship and that flirtation was mostly on the part of Ms. Kelley—his nomination to become NATO commander won’t be derailed. Gen. Allen will remain commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan while the facts are ascertained, Mr. Panetta said.” WSJ

“A former military officer told us that Kelley often sought to bypass protocol officers and make direct connections with the top generals such as David Petraeus, and General John Allen. She also courted their wives. Sources describe her as a prolific emailer and caller. One admiral instructed an aide: “You’ll have to manage her for me.”

Living in a million-dollar home, the Kelley’s seemed to perfectly blend social status, patriotism, and philanthropy. But records on file with the state of Florida show nine different court actions involving debts, mortgages, and a foreclosure.

Kelley’s powerful military connections surfaced in another court matter when she sought help for her twin sister, Natalie Khawam, in a bitter child custody fight.

General John Allen and former CIA Director and retired General David Petraeus signed letters to the court that bear four-star-general emblems and are dated five-and-a-half weeks ago.

“Natalie clearly dotes on her son,” wrote Petraeus. “It is unfortunate, in my view, that her interaction with her son has been so limited by the custody settlement.”

General Allen says the toddler shouldn’t be penalized by “limiting his expectations to experience the love, mentorship, and guidance of his mother.”

The judge in the case had a different view. He expressed “profound concerns about Ms. Khawam’s “extreme distortions” and “severe psychological deficits.” He called Khawam a “psychologically unstable person” with an “unsteady moral and ethical compass.”

CBS News spoke to Natalie Khawam’s lawyer, who didn’t address the judge’s comments directly, but allowed that any custody hearing involving children is an excruciatingly sensitive, painful, and personal proceeding. He also said he’s not representing her any more.”

The Pentagon said a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into Mr. Petraeus’s communications had revealed that Gen. Allen, now the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, exchanged numerous emails with Jill Kelley, the Florida woman who triggered the investigation. Ms. Kelley had complained to the FBI about receiving harassing emails that the agency later traced to a woman involved with Mr. Petraeus.

On Tuesday, people familiar with the case said that at one point in the summer, after the investigation began pointing to larger potential national security issues, Ms. Kelley tried to get the FBI to drop the matter. The people said she made the request because she was worried about the personal information being provided to investigators.” WSJ

http://www2.tbo.com/news/military-news/2012/nov/13/1/jill-kelley-asks-for-diplomatic-protection-from-co-ar-563651/

TAMPA –

“Upset at reporters and others outside her home, Jill Kelley has called police four times over the past two days, in one case requesting “diplomatic protection.”

In another instance, a man called 911 from the same address to complain.

…

“I am an honorary consul general,” Jill Kelley said in one call Sunday to a police non-emergency number. “I have inviolability. They should not be on my property. I don’t know if you want to get diplomatic, uh, protection involved as well. It’s against the law to cross my property. It’s inviolable.”

By the time of her fifth call, on Monday, the police knew the address and asked whether Kelley was complaining about media presence.

…

Jill Kelley’s personalized Florida license plate reads, “Honorary Consul, JK1.”"

Thanks for the updates.

*****

Gene.

Thanks for the circus theme song.

I don’t have a clue as to why you keep trying to poke me with a stick.

“The curious case of the Kelley family is explored by the Tampa Bay Times, where Jill Kelley’s social activities meant “the Kelley mansion became the place to be seen” for military personnel stationed nearby in Tampa.

But the Tampa Bay Times article also shows an unhappier side to life:

Just three months after they posed with David and Holly Petraeus, strands of Gasparilla beads hanging from their necks, the Kelleys were hit with a foreclosure lawsuit.

The suit, brought by Central Bank against the Kelleys and Kelly Land Holdings, centered on a three-story office building at 300 E Madison St in downtown Tampa. Court records show they owed the bank nearly $2.2m, including attorney fees.

In 2011, a judge ordered the property to be put up for sale.

And there’s more:

Since the Kelleys have been in Tampa, records show, one or both have been subjects of lawsuits nine times — including an $11,000 judgment against them that originated in Pennsylvania.

Ongoing cases, the court records show, include an indebtedness case from Chase Bank; a foreclosure case from Regions Bank; and a credit card case from FIA Card Services.

Not long after the couple arrived in Tampa, Jill Kelley and her identical twin sister, Natalie Khawam, appeared for a taping of the Food Network’s reality show, Food Fight.

The segment featured sibling rivalry, with the twins cooking off against two brothers.

12.33pm ET

Those US generals and CIA directors appear to have more time on their hands than you’d imagine. According to the New York Post, both David Petraeus and John Allen intervened in a child custody law suit involving Natalie Khawam, the twin sister of Jill Kelley.

The Post has copies of both letters the two men wrote to the court as character testimonials for Kelley’s sister – which reveal that Petraeus hosted both sisters and their families for Christmas dinner in 2011.

Soap opera and telenovela writers everywhere are throwing their hands up in dismay, complaining that there’s no way they can top this stuff.”

And then the DoD will hop into the cage and then Panetta will defect to Austrlia. He always did want to do it with a “roo”.

And then Congress reveals that the JCS have a service team with volunteers from girl’s colleges around the Pentagon.

Only a few hours rto a new day.

And the most interesting thing is how easy it is to turn up dirt on this “class” of people. You don’t
think that just these people are the only dirty ones?
Only Republicans are that stupid.

With 10K to 30 K emails between Gen Allen, our boy in Aghanistan, and this Ms Kelley, they must have a lot to talk about. What can be that interesting. Is it money or sex. My guess and that of journalists is sex. Cluster-forking as one called it.

Jill Kelley, Woman Who Sparked Petraeus Scandal, Ran Questionable Charity
Posted: 11/13/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/jill-kelley-charity-david-petraeus_n_2124213.html

Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — Tampa, Fla., socialite and military hostess Jill Kelley, one of the women at the center of the ever-expanding scandal that brought down former CIA Director David Petraeus, founded a questionable charity for cancer patients with her surgeon husband, Scott Kelley.

Based out of the couple’s mansion, the Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation claimed on its tax forms that it “shall be operated exclusively to conduct cancer research and to grant wishes to terminally ill adult cancer patients.”

From the records, it appears that the charity fell far short of its mission. While the origins of the seed money used to start the charity in 2007 are unclear, financial records reviewed by The Huffington Post reveal that the group spent all of its money not on research, but on parties, entertainment, travel and attorney fees.

By the end of 2007, the charity had gone bankrupt, having conveniently spent exactly the same amount of money, $157,284, as it started with — not a dollar more, according to its 990 financial form. Of that, $43,317 was billed as “Meals and Entertainment,” $38,610 was assigned to “Travel,” another $25,013 was spent on legal fees, and $8,822 went to “Automotive Expenses.”

The Kelleys also listed smaller expenses that appear excessive for a charity operating from a private home, including $12,807 for office expenses and supplies, and $7,854 on utilities and telephones.

Jill Kelley’s sister, Natalie Khawam, was listed as the only other officer of the charity. This past April, Khawam filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, listing more than $3.6 million in liabilities, including $53,000 owed to the Internal Revenue Service and $800,000 owed to her sister and brother-in-law.

Efforts to reach the Kelleys and Khawam were unsuccessful.

*****

New twists in Petraeus case: Another general accused of ‘inappropriate’ emails, ‘shirtless’ FBI agent taken off probe
By Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/twists-petraeus-case-another-general-accused-inappropriate-emails-162656131.html

1) CIA has no undercover officers to recruit agents in the Middle East.
2) CIA has only embassy-placed officers there.
3) CIA embassy officers are prime targets for disinformation for many reasons, economic, political, etc.
4) CIA needs places to detain and interrogate suspecs fingered by local disinfomation spreaders.

QED A tent in the desert will not do!

“(1) One of the claims made over the last week was that Broadwell, in public comments about the Benghazi attack, referenced non-public information – including that the CIA was holding prisoners in Benghazi and that this motivated the attack – suggesting that someone gave her classified information. About those claims, a national security reporter for Fox reported:

“that a well-placed Washington source confirms that Libyan militiamen were being held at the CIA annex and may have been a possible reason for the attack. Multiple intelligence sources, she also reported, said ‘there were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location.’”

Though the CIA denies that “the agency is still in the detention business”, it certainly should be investigated to determine whether the CIA is maintaining off-the-books detention facilities in Libya.”

They wrote their “intimate messages” as draft e-mails in a shared Gmail account, according to the AP, allowing them to see one anothers’ messages while leaving a much fainter data trail. When messages are sent and received, both accounts record the transmission as well as such metadata as the IP addresses on either end, something the two seemed to be seeking to avoid.

Petraeus and Broadwell apparently used a trick, known to terrorists and teen-agers alike, to conceal their email traffic, one of the law enforcement officials said.

Rather than transmitting emails to the other’s inbox, they composed at least some messages and instead of transmitting them, left them in a draft folder or in an electronic “dropbox,” the official said. Then the other person could log onto the same account and read the draft emails there. This avoids creating an email trail that is easier to trace.

The trick has achieved notoriety as a tactic of terrorists who are rightly wary of espionage.

It’s the sort of measure you take if you fear there’s a risk that someone will look in on you. And it’s been around for quite some time, which may be why the FBI investigators were not fooled by it.” Washington Post

Posted on November 12, 2012 by emptywheel

http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/11/12/scandal-surge-the-mid-summer-adjustment/

“This investigation turned into a cluster(f)uck back in July, when the principles all started acting in response to the investigation.

Nevertheless, it continued for four more months (continues even this evening, as FBI searches Broadwell’s house).”

WordPress?

“Put another way, having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.” -Glenn Greenwald (from his article today, link above)

From ap’s post above “Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?”

Now I don’t know if that’s going to stop it but I do believe it is starting to eat itself as Allen is now caught up in the mess.

The notes run along the same lines

“That the stars of America’s national security establishment are being devoured by out-of-control surveillance is a form of sweet justice”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/petraeus-surveillance-state-fbi

“So not only did the FBI – again, all without any real evidence of a crime – trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell’s emails (and possibly Petraeus’), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley.

This is a surveillance state run amok. It also highlights how any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.

But, as unwarranted and invasive as this all is, there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America’s national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: “Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?”

It is usually the case that abuses of state power become a source for concern and opposition only when they begin to subsume the elites who are responsible for those abuses. Recall how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman – one of the most outspoken defenders of the illegal Bush National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless eavesdropping program – suddenly began sounding like an irate, life-long ACLU privacy activist when it was revealed that the NSA had eavesdropped on her private communications with a suspected Israeli agent over alleged attempts to intervene on behalf of AIPAC officials accused of espionage. Overnight, one of the Surveillance State’s chief assets, the former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, transformed into a vocal privacy proponent because now it was her activities, rather than those of powerless citizens, which were invaded.

With the private, intimate activities of America’s most revered military and intelligence officials being smeared all over newspapers and televisions for no good reason, perhaps similar conversions are possible. Put another way, having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.

The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that – in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment – monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do. Just to get a flavor for how pervasive it is, recall that the Washington Post, in its 2010 three-part “Top Secret America” series, reported: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.”

Equally vivid is this 2007 chart from Privacy International, a group that monitors the surveillance policies of nations around the world. Each color represents the level of the nation’s privacy and surveillance policies, with black being the most invasive and abusive (“Endemic Surveillance Societies”) and blue being the least (“Consistently upholds human rights standards”):
surveillance

And the Obama administration has spent the last four years aggressively seeking to expand that Surveillance State, including by agitating for Congressional action to amend the Patriot Act to include Internet and browsing data among the records obtainable by the FBI without court approval and demanding legislation requiring that all Internet communications contain a government “backdoor” of surveillance.

Based on what is known, what is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations. What requires investigation here is not Petraeus and Allen and their various sexual partners but the FBI and the whole sprawling, unaccountable surveillance system that has been built.”

Guys, you have JOBS now, you have to grow UP now and act like grown-ups! You know, those guys who get to carry guns on TV? Like THEM! Hello Hello!

You know I was thinking you’d say that.

I was just going over those notes last night as a matter of fact.

From my experience it sounds pretty much like par for the course.

“WASHINGTON—A federal agent who launched the investigation that ultimately led to the resignation of Central Intelligence Agency chief David Petraeus was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors’ concerns that he had become personally involved in the case, according to officials familiar with the probe.

New details about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation handled the case suggest that even as the bureau delved into Mr. Petraeus’s personal life, the agency had to address questionable conduct by one of its own—including allegedly sending shirtless photos of himself to a woman involved in the case. ”

Wow. This is starting to sound a lot like the Keystone cops with sex.

Interesting find there, ap. Thanks.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578115410189757452.html

I can understand Obama not being told … you don’t tell the President something like this unless you a have course of action to recommend … not if you want to keep your job as DI.

What I find much more interesting is who was the FBI agent who blabbed the whole thing to Eric Cantor and maybe also Dave Reichert over a week before anyone in the Executive was notified?

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/11/the-eric-cantor-angle-on-petraeus-broadwell-affair/

What effect did that security breach have on the decision to tell the President? Was there a Petraeus coverup going on that got blown out of the water?

http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/2012/11/karl-and-paula.html

Again, FWIW.

On one item I wish she had directly addressed in a judgemental mode, and not as a information source.

The presence of a CIA annex, even if missioned for militia capture missions, should be better lead, and is certainly capable of materially adding to the defencse of the consulate compound.

Calling for a Delta Force for help screams for serious critque—at exactly which weak point I am not certain:
leadership, scenario planning, resourcing, simple lack of guts, failure-avoidance culture, etc.

My dislike for the ineffectualness of the CIA deepens.

It suits me fine and even others here, no names.

Because——-no President has had control of the CIA since before JFK and even there I would not venture to
name the President who could have controlled them.

The same is basically true for the FBI since Hoover’s time and even since his death.

One good reason is that in both these cases, their own chiefs have not had control, not even Hoover or H W Bush.

An OT is that this is true for most bureaucratic federal institutions of any size. They each see to their own interests and livelihood.

Do we need a name for all this? All these seemingly independent organizations which have definitely concealed inter-relations and agendas????

Take Foreign Policy, which I believe is the press/PR
organ for a conservative organization claiming to have the good of the nation as its goal.

That is just one of many organizations, from the flimsiet of fronts with emotionally appealing names, to hidden ones without known names.
An example would be the 143(?) member private empire discussed in the recent days.

My purpose, to fight the enemy, you must know him in all measures possible. How can we do this?

Surely as battle is certain there must be foundations, university institutes, etc who have analyzed the combatants on both sides, written studies, books, etc.
These works hopefully are available to us.
Are they?

And what nmee shall we use for the paraply which those of us believe is the central control function to convert the age of nation states to the age of commercial empires which has nullified the nation states’ sovereignity.

A name might help us keep concentrated on the concept that it IS controlled to a large degree, and it is money which rules, not the people. And that this is a real conspiracy.

Some of their meetings are declared but still secret in content, where some meetings function as contact points giving possibility of cooperation between parts that don’t usually do so.

Seeing the trees instead of the forest hampers us.

Why did Paula Broadwell think the CIA had taken prisoners in Benghazi?

Posted by Max Fisher on November 12, 2012 at 11:28 am

“I could be missing other possible scenarios, but all of these further raise the concern that, even if Petraeus did not allow classified intelligence to be compromised, his relationship with Broadwell may have heightened that very serious risk.

The full story of Broadwell’s access to Petraeus’s world at the CIA is still not clear, but it appears to have been intimate, perhaps problematically so. The Wall Street Journal now reports that FBI investigators found classified documents on her computer. That Petraeus’s relationship may have jeopardized sensitive intelligence would seem to remain the strongest case for his resignation.”

Excerpt:
According to the Times, approximately two weeks ago, F.B.I. investigators confronted Petraeus personally about the matter. After talking to him, they were satisfied that there were no breaches of national security or other crimes involved. It was then, the Times reports, that Petraeus certainly became aware of the investigation, if he had not known of it before. Interestingly, he did not offer his resignation at once, raising the question of whether he would have resigned at all if he hadn’t been asked to when the issue was about to become public. With the election two weeks away, and the C.I.A.’s potential intelligence failures in the fatal ambush of American’s diplomats in Libya a campaign issue, Petraeus surely recognized that if he resigned, the scandal would shake the Obama Administration, perhaps giving more fodder to its Republican critics in what appeared to be an extremely close election.

The Times uses the word “murky” to describe what happened next, and there are many puzzling aspects. But according to the Times, at the end of October, a week or so after the F.B.I. investigators confronted Petraeus, an unidentified F.B.I. employee took the matter into his own hands. Evidently without authorization, he went to the Republicans in Congress. First he informed a Republican congressman, Dave Reichert of Washington state. According to the Times, Reichert advised this F.B.I. employee to go to the Republican leadership in the House. The F.B.I. employee then told what he knew about the investigation to Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader. Cantor released a statement to the Times confirming that he had spoken to the F.B.I. informant, whom his staff described as a “whistleblower.” Cantor said, “I was contacted by an F.B.I. employee who was concerned that sensitive, classified information might have been compromised.” But what, exactly, was this F.B.I. employee trying to expose? Was he blowing the whistle on his bosses? If so, why? Was he dissatisfied with their apparent exoneration of Petraeus? Given that this drama was playing out in the final days of a very heated Presidential campaign, and he was taking a potentially scandalous story to the Republican leadership in Congress, was there a political motive?

According to the Times, Cantor said he took the information, and “made certain that director Mueller”—that is Robert Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.—“was aware of these serious allegations, and the potential risk to our national security.” This is a strange way to explain his contact with the F.B.I. on this matter, because it is almost inconceivable that director Mueller was not already aware that the bureau he runs had examined the e-mail account of the director of the C.I.A., and, further, confronted him in person. Such a meeting between the bureau and head of the C.I.A. would have been extraordinary, and it is fairly unthinkable that Mueller wouldn’t have been consulted. So what information was Cantor conveying when he got in touch with Mueller?

One obvious point of the call would have been to inform the F.B.I. director that Republicans on the Hill knew about Petraeus’s vulnerability, and also about the investigation. If the F.B.I. had ever entertained hopes of keeping it secret, the odds of doing so were fast diminishing. The same message would have become clear to Petraeus, who was due to testify in front of a House panel next week.

If Cantor spoke with Mueller on Halloween, as the Times chronology suggests, what happened between then and November 6th, which is when the F.B.I. reportedly informed James Clapper Jr., the Director of National Intelligence, about Petraeus’s extra-marital affair? The internal pressure must have been enormous on Petraeus during this period. Perhaps he tried to outlast the election in order to shelter Obama from the fallout of his own personal foibles. Perhaps the F.B.I. director, Mueller, who has a reputation for integrity, tried to keep the scandal from political exploitation by keeping it under wraps until Election Day. Cantor, too, appears to have kept quiet, despite the political advantage his party might have gained from going public. Why? It is possible that, because the investigation had national-security implications, those in the know needed to tread carefully for legal reasons.

” Broadwell, who attended the university’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, spoke at length of her career ambitions.

“My longterm goal had always been to become national security advisor,” she said.

That’s probably not going to happen now.” (Foreign Policy link, above)

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/12/juan_cole_real_petraeus_failure_was

“CIA director David Petraeus has resigned following revelations of an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, a married U.S. Army reservist. “This personal issue that cropped up that ruined his career at the end, I think, is very much a minor thing … compared to his big exploits in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says historian Juan Cole, who responds to the surprise departure of the former head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Petraeus retired from 37 years in the military to head the CIA last year. Over the weekend, new revelations suggested Broadwell had sent harassing emails to Jill Kelley, a 37-year-old from Florida and a family friend of Petraeus and his wife, Holly. The FBI launched an inquiry after Kelley said she had received vicious emails from the CIA director’s biographer. Its investigation revealed the affair and led agents to believe Broadwell or someone close to her had sought access to his email. On Sunday, Democracy Now! spoke to Cole about the significance of Petraeus’s resignation and about Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani activist who was shot in the head by a Taliban militant for demanding the right of girls’ education. Cole is professor of history at the University of Michigan, and his most recent book is “Engaging the Muslim World.” [includes rush transcript]”

JUAN COLE: … And the Project for the New American Century simply wouldn’t come to terms with that reality. And so, in many ways, General Petraeus’s career got ruined twice.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you mean, Project for a New American Century, PNAC? Explain what that is.

JUAN COLE: Well, the Project for the New American Century was thought up by the neoconservative movement in the late 1990s. They felt that the Soviet Union had fallen, the U.S. was now the sole superpower, what the French call a “hyperpower,” and that it could act with impunity. So if it wanted to invade and occupy Iraq and reformulate Iraq and put a government in and exploit Iraq’s natural resources, like the petroleum, that it could do so without opposition.

And while it is true that, you know, Russia and China didn’t interfere with the United States going into Iraq in that way, the Iraqi people did. The Iraqi people were educated, mobilized. You know, Iraq had had a big pharmaceutical and other industries, petrochemicals. They were wired. They were—they were educated, then networked. And they inflicted damage on the U.S. military all along the way, and it came both from Sunnis and from Shiites. Many Iraqis simply never accepted the idea of a foreign occupation of their country, and it failed.

The Project for a New American Century formulated as a proposition that the U.S. could be an empire on the old British model, that you could bring back the age of empire in that way. That crashed and burned, and it crashed and burned because people in the Global South are now mobilized, both politically and socially. And it was the lack of mobilization in the old 19th century empires, when people were in three—300 people in a village, and they weren’t literate, and they weren’t connected with each other—OK, then maybe the British Empire could exist. But that’s not the situation anymore. And what I’m saying is that Petraeus was sent to these countries by the Project from a New American Century. It was the big neoconservative thinkers who thought up these kinds of wars and these kinds of projects for occupation and reformulation of entire countries. And they are anachronistic. You can’t do this anymore. The age of the British Empire had passed.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re saying that the Project for a New American Century persisted under President Obama; he didn’t change it.

JUAN COLE: Well, I’m saying that, in some ways, the Afghanistan troop escalation or surge was one last iteration of some of that project to try to formulate Afghanistan in a way favorable to the United States before we then left.

And again, I should be clear, I don’t think that that’s what President Obama wanted. He went to the Pentagon and asked, “Give me three plans,” you know, an ambitious one, a less ambitious one and a minimal one. And they stonewalled him for nine months. And he was in a position where people in Washington were saying, “Well, what are you going to do? You’re president now. You need a plan.” And he went back to the Pentagon and said, “Well, where’s the plan?” And they said, “Well, we’ve got one for you, but the others are going to take a while.” So they kind of boxed him in to this troop surge.

AMY GOODMAN: And Petraeus’s role in that?

JUAN COLE: Petraeus was the one who boxed him in. So, Petraeus got what he wanted. But in my view, he got a failed policy.