Tag Archives: Petraeus

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David Petraeus –

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– A Prefect Avatar for America’s Corrupt Ruling Class

Remember this guy? He’s a bud of Mattis, they called them Warrior Monks. LOL. That’s a joke. They are nothing more than high ranking retired military officers who climbed the ladder of success by BS-ing folks with their bravado and secretly sucking down gallons of Kool Aid. Neither of these “Warrior Monks have ever pulled a trigger except at the range. Before or after reading this post please go to my post of 19 June entitled “Mattis & Petraeus – Warrior Monks?” and read about what this scum did and was caught.. He should be stripped of his retirement and spending the rest of his life, in prison for what he plead guilty and got a p-lea bargain. If any of us did what this POS did, guess where we’d be? Unbelievable. Our country does not hold these high ranking scumbags accountable for anything — absolutely nothing. As I have said before, Lady Justice no longer wears a blindfold.

Below is a Warrior Monk, do you honestly think either of these hotshots ever looked like this Warrior?

General David Petraeus, for many years (decades?) lauded as the greatest and most successful soldier of his generation, just insulted, in terms paradoxically both implicit and vicious, the men who made both his military renown and his post-military success and wealth possible.

“The most significant terrorist threat in the United States is not actually from Islamist extremists, it’s from right-wing terrorists in our own country,” he recently said to a gathering of elites.

This assertion, in a sense, is unremarkable given that it has become a common ruling-class talking point. It’s a lie, of course. Your own senses tell you so. When was the last time you even heard of a “right-wing” terror attack, much less one that actually inflicted mass casualties?

Sure, the ruling class and its propaganda arm tell you that they happen all the time, but they’re lying. They don’t lie merely by predicting waves of rightist violence that never materialize—though they do predict that, often.

Remember all those “warnings” of right-wing terror that would rock America in the event of a Trump loss? Allegedly violent Trump supporters have an even stronger case than mere loss to be angry, given the fishiness of the election and their belief that it was stolen. And yet none have so much as broken a window, much less committed any acts of terror. The one major demonstration in Washington, D.C. was entirely, not “mostly,” peaceful—that is, until leftist thugs showed up to beat on the marchers. Beatings which the same people who, naturally, never apologized for being wrong about imminent right-wing violence just as naturally never mentioned.

Nor does the ruling class merely lie by saying that every act of violence by the melanin-challenged is somehow connected to Nazism—though of course they do say that, daily. They also insist, risibly, that violence manifestly committed by people who are neither white nor on the Right is nevertheless perpetrated by the white Right. Witness, in only the most recent and egregious example, the repeated attempts to attribute 2020’s Antifa-BLM riots to “white supremacists.”

Don’t trust your own eyes and ears? How about “data”? Terrorism expert Timothy Furnish has found since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Islamic terrorists have murdered just under 28,000 people worldwide. The global death toll over the same period from every act of violence even plausibly—that is to say, not necessarily—connected to “white supremacy” is 346. Or 1.5 percent of the Islamist butcher’s bill. This is the “grave, urgent threat” that David Petraeus insists poses the greatest danger to our country.

Petraeus may be lying from conviction. Certainly, all his peers in the ruling class believe, or profess to believe, that native-born whites are uniquely evil and hell-bent on killing their fellow citizens. And it can be hard to tell genuine ruling class belief from merely useful cant. Yet there’s no doubt that this particular lie is useful—to them. It’s one of the key ways in which the ruling class libel and smear dissent against their rapacity and misrule. So Petraeus has an interest in saying what he said, whether he believes it or not.

Who Does Petraeus Think Made Him a Success? 

Who is David Petraeus? Currently, he’s a partner at KKR, one of the world’s two or three most important private equity firms. What is “private equity”? The charitable way to describe that activity is the buying up of failing or underperforming companies and making them more profitable via a ruthless imposition of focus and efficiency. The less charitable description is “vulture capitalism”: hunting down value, wherever it may be, and stripping it out of even successful companies by closing facilities, laying off workers, outsourcing production and any other move that might reduce costs and (further) enrich the firm’s new owners.

Whatever you may think of private equity—salutary driver of market discipline or greedy despoiler of the American heartland—the fact remains that David Petraeus is not a private equity investor nor an analyst capable of restructuring even the smallest company. He’s a former military officer—a capable one, by all accounts—now getting rich from the profits of private equity by trading on his former service and (especially) his domestic and foreign government contacts.

Which is what makes the lie especially egregious coming from Petraeus’s lips. Why is David Petraeus famous? That is, apart from getting fired from the CIA over an extramarital affair and receiving a slap on the wrist for illegally sharing classified information with his mistress? His prior claim to fame, the one that won him his current job and stature, was to have successfully presided over the Iraq “Surge” of 2007, in which a bloody, three-year insurgency was finally quashed.

How was the Surge accomplished? In part by spreading around an enormous number of American greenbacks to buy off local militias. But also, in part, via “COIN,” or counter-insurgency warfare doctrine, a body of thought and practice revived from its post-Vietnam oblivion by David Petraeus. (This is another pillar of Petraeus’ fame; a so-called “soldier-scholar,” he has a Ph.D. from Princeton.)

One tenet of COIN as reimagined, and implemented, by Petraeus is that soldiers attempting to pacify an insurgency must show their “virtue” to the local population by taking risks, i.e., exposing themselves to danger. This is not, to say the least, what soldiers are ordered to do in nearly all other combat situations. But many thousands followed this particular order.

Again, whatever you may think of the Iraq war—nobly-intended tragedy, pointless adventure, deep state conspiracy—or the Surge, there can be no doubt that Petraeus’s success was achieved on the backs of American soldiers—many of whom lost their lives, and many more others, limbs, to achieve it.

Where did those soldiers come from? The overwhelming majority of American service members who volunteer for dangerous combat roles grow up in red, rural, conservative America: the South, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Mountain West. The majority are also, not to put too fine a point on it, white—exactly the demographic that the ruling class has in its targeting sights when it lies about the alleged threat from “right-wing terrorists.”

Why the Need to Insult?

It’s no exaggeration to say that, without these proto “right-wing terrorists” and the milieus from which they emerge, the United States military would have no combat units at all. To say the least, woke transsexual gender studies majors from the blue coasts are not showing up in droves, or even singly, to Officer Candidate School or basic training. Neither are the children of the upper, upper middle, and increasingly the middle classes.

The military, at least for its combat missions, is more reliant than ever on that part of America that the ruling class openly despises. What would it do without them? Stop fighting constabulary wars? Either that or scour the rest of the country to recruit men far less committed to the mission, and probably less good at their jobs, than those who volunteered to fight the post 9/11 wars and made the Surge a success.

Why insult these people, then? Why denigrate their families, faith, and communities by insinuating that the places from which they come are breeding grounds of terror, violence and hate? For, from where else may we assume this alleged “right-wing terrorist threat” originates? Portland? Santa Monica? The Upper West Side?

Either Petraeus really believes what he said or he said it because he knows it’s what his ruling class paymasters want to hear—and especially want to hear from professional talking heads like David Petraeus. We can assume Petraeus knows the latter; he’s not a stupid man. Is this, therefore, a case where interest and belief coincide? Or was he, perhaps unthinkingly, selling out the brave men he used to command and whose success made his reputation and caused his great good fortune and wealth?

I don’t know the answer. Either way, the incident is revealing—not about what the ruling class thinks of us; we already knew that. It is instead revelatory of how insincere is their unctuous, ubiquitous praise of our men in uniform, of the sentiment behind all those incessant repetitions of “thank you for your service.”

There are many reasons to wonder how long the ruling class can keep recruiting stalwart young men to fight its wars—not least being our best-and-brightest’ s inability to win seemingly anywhere or even to define victory. Expressions of contempt such as the one uttered recently by David Petraeus are, however small by comparison, another such reason.

Michael Anton is a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a former national security official in the Trump Administration. He formerly wrote under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus when he was a senior editor of American Greatness. The is the author, most recently, of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.

Originally posted 2020-12-07 09:37:54.

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Recognize this Fellow?

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I’m sure some of you will recognize him, but most won’t. It is a portrait of Benedict Arnold, and you should know the story. If you don’t, you slept through your American history classes. I’d bet many HS kids today don’t know who he is or the story behind his fame.

I’ve included photos of current day generals that best need watching and watched very carefully. Sadly, I have even included our current CMC as I firmly believe he is part of all this gang of scum by destroying the Marine Corps from the inside. Can’t speak for the other services, but feel justified to speak for my Corps. Sadly, I am embarrassed to say that of this crop of six POS, four of them are Marines. That is really sad.

Study their photos carefully for I believe you will be seeing and hearing a lot about these scumbags in the near future. Please listen to the video posted below the scums photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A very well qualified Retired Colonel to speak at what he sees with the scums pictured above. Please watch it for the sake of your country and share it. And remember, keep you powder dry and handy!!

Did I nail Mattis correctly or what, and to think of the flack I got from Marines, mostly young enlisted to whom Mattis directed his BS.

Originally posted 2020-09-12 10:09:14.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Mattis & Petraeus – Warrior Monks?

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Or traitors to our country?  The harder I honestly try to get off my Mattis diatribe and move on to other items of equal disgust, the more I inadvertently find information that move these two deeper into the do-do.

While my initial problem was with Mr. Mattis, the more I read the more I understand Mattis the “Warrior Monk” general was not all he was cracked up to be. Both these generals were in my professional Marine opinion are total frauds driven by egos as large as the Pentagon. Currently, I consider both to be a danger to our country, of course, Colin Powell and several other so-called “generals” fit the mold as well. One must remember their age and when they came up through the ranks. But I’ll let you decide after reading this well-thought out oped below. Trust me fellow Americans, it is worth the read.

The following Op-Ed was written by Fred Gavin (USMC retired).

Generals Mattis and General Petraeus collaborated and published the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 3-24 on counterinsurgency operations (COIN) in 2006; it later became Joint Publication 3-24. The publication contained the lessons the generals learned from nearly 19 years of operations in Afghanistan and 16 years in Iraq.

 

 

 

 

 

These prolonged operations, which failed to develop strategic effectiveness in the internal defenses of either nation, sadly resulted in the vast majority of senior Pentagon, Congressional, and defense industry leaders adamantly supporting the status quo, urging that the U.S. continue to stay the course and have our tax dollars and military invested in the Middle East indefinitely.

Petraeus began promoting his work with a speech tour, which included Harvard University, describing his Iraq experiences. Harvard is where Petraeus first met Paula Broadwell while she was a graduate student at Harvard University, a U.S. Army reserve officer, a wife, and a mother of two children. The two would later develop a prolonged extramarital affair as Petraeus valued Broadwell’s offer to write a biography, peculiarly titled, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”

Petraeus retired from the Army in July 2011 swiftly accepting an appointment as the Director of the CIA. He was sworn into office by Vice President Joe Biden on 6 September 2011 with his wife of 37 years, Holly Petraeus, by his side. During his 14 months as the CIA Director, Petraeus became the subject of an FBI criminal investigation. The FBI found that the spy director provided unauthorized releases of large amounts of classified national security information and simultaneously had an extramarital affair with Lieutenant Colonel Paula Broadwell beginning in November 2011. (This was during the time in which Broadwell was completing the fatefully titled “All-In” biography on Petraeus.) The FBI investigation uncovered that both Petraeus and Broadwell attempted to avoid the discovery of their crimes by using the same Gmail account to relay messages by leaving draft messages to each other and making calls on burner phones.

The FBI investigation discovered Broadwell’s personal computer to contain over 300 occurrences of classified information. In the fall of 2012, Petraeus denied to FBI investigators having shared classified information with anyone and signed a form upon his resignation from the CIA confirming he had no classified material. Later the FBI seized eight volumes of classified national security information from his home. Petraeus pled guilty to misdemeanor offenses of compromising national security information in a plea bargain, thus avoiding a public trial.

After Petraeus pled guilty to his crimes, he assumed teaching positions with the City University of New York, Harvard University, Yale University, continued to advise the White House, attained board membership at both Optiv, and OneStream, and became partner and Chairman of KKR Global Institute.

General David Petraeus (Defense.gov.)

In 2005, while then-Lieutenant General James Mattis (call-signs “Chaos” and “Mad-Dog”) commanded the Marine Corps’ Combat Development Command, he began to jointly develop the COIN manual with Petraeus. The COIN or as it was later termed “Petraeus doctrine” focused on winning the “hearts and minds of the population” by employing actions on the battlefield, as Mattis stated, of, “First do no harm.”

On 1 Feb 2005, Chaos attended the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association forum held at the San Diego convention center where he made racist comments, contradictory of his COIN doctrine’s “hearts and minds… first do no harm,” to 200 attendees including San Diego’s KNSD television reporters. He stated, “Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling. You go into Afghanistan, you’ve got guys who slapped women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.” There has never been any evidence substantiating Mad-Dog ever shooting anyone or brawling as his tough talk proclaimed.

Nevertheless, on 4 March 2007, 13 months after Mattis’s macho statements the first-ever Marine Special Operations Task Force was brutally ambushed by the Taliban employing a suicide car-bomber, snipers, and multiple echelons of jihadists firing automatic weapons at close range. The Marines, as Mad-Dog would have undoubtedly expected from his previous press statement in San Diego, quickly counter-attacked and destroyed the Taliban, immediately reported the incident to the command center from the ambush site in less than 10 seconds, returned to their base, and treated their one casualty. Only 20 minutes after the ambush, the international press reported that the Marines killed innocent, unarmed Afghan civilians including women, children, and elderly. The Taliban-controlled village from where the ambush was launched along the Afghan-Pakistan border immediately coordinated large scale riots. The rioters pressured the Afghan Provincial Governor Sharzai and the Afghan President Hamid Karzai to take swift action that led a U.S. Army general to expel the entire Marine Special Operations Task Force only one day after his own appointed U.S. military investigator began his investigation. By that point, the investigator had questioned only 10 US Marines and no Afghans.

After the Marines were expelled, the U.S. preliminary investigation continued for three more weeks. It ultimately led to the matter being referred to the U.S. Marine Corps’ jurisdiction. Mad-Dog Mattis was appointed as the military Convening Authority to determine through a criminal investigation if the allegations of homicide were legitimate. Chaos’s investigators uncovered, through interviews and sworn statements from the Marines on the patrol, that the Marines were ambushed by a suicide car-bomber at point-blank range and were attacked by multiple jihadists, on which the Marines returned fire and killed. The Marine Special Operations Task Force commander, who was also on the patrol, provided a polygraph confirming that the Marines were ambushed starting at 9:03 am on an open road where they remained for five minutes before moving from the ambush site and that he did not observe any civilians killed that morning. His statement corroborated the same comments of all the other 29 personnel from the patrol.

After the receipt of the exculpatory polygraph and unanimous testimonies of the patrol’s Marines, Chaos decided to commission 45 criminal investigators and a team of four prosecuting attorneys who aggressively conducted illegal interrogations of U.S. Marines. One interrogation threatened to unlawfully deport one Marine’s mother to Mexico if an NCIS prepared false statement, which would incriminate seven accused Marines of homicide, was not signed.

Regrettably, the Marine was coerced into signing NCIS’s statement. He later admitted, during the trial, that the NCIS statement was a false statement that he signed under duress during this Gestapo style interrogation, (see ABC video at 4:30 mark). Mad-Dog’s torment, created from unprecedented dog piling of seven criminal investigators and prosecuting attorneys per one Marine, caused permanent damage to the seven Marines’ health, families, and careers. Meanwhile, Mattis obeyed the direction of his superiors which accelerated the approval for his fourth star and transfer of assignment just prior to the tricky trial. The seven Marines who were falsely accused of killing 19 Afghan civilians endured a three-week-long trial.

The verdict came an unprecedented four months later. It was sent only to one media source at the Associated Press on a Friday evening at the start of a four-day military weekend over Memorial Day. Chaos’s successor, as the convening authority for the case, clouded the verdict by not using any legal terms of “innocent” or “not guilty” to clarify the case. Instead, the ambiguous phrase of, “the Marines acted appropriately” led to eight years of multiple media reports claiming that the Marines got away with murder. This led to many international courts and organizations to demand that the Marines be retried.

In 2013, while Chaos served as the Commander of the U.S. Central Command (all U.S. forces assigned to the Middle East), he took the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with Elizabeth Holmes, a 29-year-old, Stanford University dropout. Holmes was the founder and CEO of Theranos, a Silicon Valley biotech startup, and America’s youngest self-made female billionaire. As time showed, Holmes exploited Chaos’s willingness in order to falsely claim Theranos’s ability to swiftly conduct blood tests on U.S. troops on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Chaos showed favor towards Holmes and while serving as an active-duty four-star general Mad-Dog distorted the truth saying that his efforts were “legal” and forcefully attempted to coerce Pentagon officials to adopt Holmes’s blood-testing technology prior to it gaining FDA approval — which it later failed to get.

“How do we overcome this new obstacle? I have tried to get this device tested in theater asap, legally and ethically…this appears to be relatively straight-forward yet we’re a year into this and not yet deployed.” — Gen. Mattis email to the Pentagon while serving on active duty as the CENTCOM Commander.

Worse yet, Chaos was cautioned by his military legal representative, before his retirement from the Marines, against immediately accepting a board membership with Theranos in 2013. Mad-Dog ignored his attorney’s recommendation to wait out the “cool-off” period for senior military leaders. He immediately accepted Holmes’s board position. Mad-Dog continued to perpetuate Theranos’s false technology by stating to the Washington Post in December 2015 that he, “had quickly seen tremendous potential in the technologies Theranos develops, and I have the greatest respect for the company’s mission and integrity.”

In late 2015, Federal regulators began investigating Theranos over suspicions of the validity of the company’s testing and for misleading investors. Regulators found that Theranos falsely claimed its technology was used, “on the battlefield in Afghanistan.” As regulators began investigating, Theranos’s investors retreated and Theranos quickly cut its staff by 40 percent. Although he was never Airborne qualified, Mattis’s timing for his “golden parachute” escape from the charring Theranos was impeccable. On 1 December 2016 Mad-Dog accepted an appointment to become the Secretary of Defense.

Mattis, like Petraeus, never demonstrated the moral courage to speak out while in uniform regarding his strong opposition to the war in Iraq; Mad-Dog’s own book, “Call sign Chaos” describes how he vehemently opposed the war in Iraq. Immediately after military retirement, Mattis was also a board member for a large defense firm, General Dynamics, where he persuasively advocated in the beltway for increasing defense spending in the Middle East.

Chaos battled President Trump for two years while serving as the Secretary of Defense, urging Trump to remain completely invested in the Middle East indefinitely. This became a pivotal issue leading Mattis to quit and later be fired by the President. Mattis wasted no time in returning again to other high paying defense industry board memberships and positions advising, teaching and lobbying for General Dynamics, the Hoover Institute, and becoming an advisor to the United Arab Emirates. Mad-Dog continues to influence power brokers in the beltway to heavily increase U.S. defense forces and big-ticket programs in the Middle-East.

As in 2005-2006, both Petraeus and Mattis recently coordinated their efforts by writing judgmental articles of the Trump Administration that were published in The Atlantic in June 2020. Contrary to their own Counterinsurgency strategy, their most recent editorials promote sedition from their self-promoting perspectives as inerrant and selfless military experts. Petraeus and Mattis, who both remain unrepentant to the American people for their unethical actions, argue that their enlightened positions are inclusive and oppose divisiveness — except that their personal and public history proves otherwise.

Petraeus argues that his prior ignorance while training or visiting seven U.S. Army bases named after Confederate leaders is not an excuse for tolerating bases named after racists. He does not acknowledge his lack of courage or integrity over these “systemic racist” Army programs which provided his ill-gotten gain over 37 years. He continues to also further identify such problems as Fort Benning’s location being on “former Native American territory that became the site of a plantation,” without putting any skin in the game in the form of providing any resolutions: For example, giving the bases’ land back to Native Americans, selling the military equipment for reparations to former slaves. or offering his entire military retirement salary to immediate family members of indentured servants all of whom were exploited throughout American history and provided him with his woke unwarranted privileges. No. Rather, with just approximately 150 days before the upcoming Presidential election, Petraeus and Mattis acting as 21st century Che Guevaras piously describe America and our President as racist, evil and deranged, while they and their views are selfless, sound, and virtuous.

Mad-Dog’s Atlantic editorial falsely re-writes American military history through stating,

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

Mattis’s repetitive and self-promoting wisdom, which comes from his 7,000 volume library — something that is overstated in the media who genuflect to their beloved “Saint James Mattis” — overlooked the 1st Marine Division as two of its ground combat battalions were deployed to Los Angeles in 1992 during the riots. They provided active-duty Marines who effectively protected American lives and property without Chaos’s contempt or protest. Just like Petraeus, Mattis never demonstrated courage or integrity while in uniform by protesting any, “violation of the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.” It is clear to see the conflict of interest in Chaos’s public revolt against the President who opposes endless funding of defense programs that Mattis aggressively advocates for the Middle East forever wars. After all, his financiers at General Dynamic lavishly reward him for it.

Chaos’s contempt of a “bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside,” is akin to the false propaganda he peddled to the Pentagon as a board member at Theranos. In 2016-2018, Secretary of Defense Mattis approved multiple security operations using U.S. Armed Forces to support the President of the United States. Chaos’s predecessor, Secretary Ash Carter, did the same for President Obama with his employment of U.S. Navy SEALs on state roads and waters during his multiple vacations to Hawaii and across the Nation. These precedents run contrary to the historical facts undoubtedly known by the so-called “Warrior Monk” and his 7,000 book library.

Mattis’s analogy below of America’s current state being compared to the Nazi regime more accurately depict his own corrupt actions as a military leader with nearly unlimited power who allowed Gestapo tactics of “Divide and Conquer” in an effort to illegally imprison his own innocent Marines and deport their families for fighting the Taliban after being severely attacked.

The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court… “The Nazi slogan for destroying us… was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’”

The late Congressman Walter Jones sponsored House Resolution 21 (H.Res. 21) on 3 Jan 2017 during the 115th Congress urging the Commandant of the Marine Corps to bring “equal justice” to his Marines by publicly stating that the Marine Special Operators were not at fault for the 4 March 2007 ambush in Afghanistan. A second initiative requesting the Marine Special Operators who were falsely accused be awarded the Marine Special Operator Insignia was also submitted to the Pentagon. These matters were under Mad-Dog’s immediate control while serving as the Secretary of Defense in 2017-2018. He had a two-year opportunity to demonstrate his courage by rectifying his errors of approving illegal interrogations in his attempt to imprison his own innocent Marines. Mattis’s newly found courageous public comments could, as he stated, “unite” by bringing these heroes out of the shadows and back into the folds of the Corps, but his inaction shunned his own Marines.

These facts above are to caution all Americans of senior military leaders whose self-serving actions contradict their carefully coordinated righteous words. These retired senior military leaders are dutifully obeying their defense industry financiers by coordinating a seditious revolution and re-manufacturing history. Their true agenda, which they are being paid to peddle, is an overthrow of the government and its replacement with more willing leaders who will double-down on their endless failed Middle East military escapades.

Well, what have you decided, please comment.

Originally posted 2020-06-19 14:19:44.