Gareth Porter — How CIA and Allies Trapped Obama in the Syrian Arms Debacle

The title is a bit misleading. The buck stops at the Oval Office, and then President was too weak to be able to resist pressure and act in the best interests of the United States, not to mention in accordance with international law. The devil made me do it excuse don't pass the smell test. The blame rests on the president, and he should be tarred with it.

However, this backgrounder does illustrate the power of the US deep state in running US foreign and military policy, regardless of the president's lead. This reads like court intrigue in the age of monarchies.

The American Conservative
How CIA and Allies Trapped Obama in the Syrian Arms Debacle

And why it ultimately benefitted terrorists like Al Qaeda

Gareth Porter

Zaid Jilani, Alex Emmons, Naomi LaChance — Hillary Clinton’s National Security Advisers Are a “Who’s Who” of the Warfare State

Surprised? Her nickname isn't "Killary" for nothing. A vote for HRC is a vote for more war abroad and an ever increasing national security (police) state domestically. Because "terror." Who is terrorizing whom exactly?

The welfare state has been replaced by the warfare state.

The Intercept

Hillary Clinton’s National Security Advisers Are a “Who’s Who” of the Warfare State

Zaid Jilani, Alex Emmons, Naomi LaChance

Xinhua — Former CIA director says U.S. should establish enclaves inside Syria

So much for the US respecting national sovereignty.

Xinhua News
Former CIA director says U.S. should establish enclaves inside Syria

Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef — Petraeus: Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS

To take down the so-called Islamic State in Syria, the influential former head of the CIA wants to co-opt jihadists from America’s arch foe.

What could possibly go wrong? Didn't the US drive Russia out of Afghanistan by funding Osama Bin Laden and the "freedom fighters" that morphed into Al Qaeda? Heck they are former allies.

The Daily Beast
Petraeus: Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS

Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef

RT — Petraeus may not get jail time for talking to a journalist, but Sterling and others did

Smackdown of US double standard of justice, naming names and circumstances.

Those who make the rules also make the exceptions.

Or is this RT just being "anti-Western"?

RT
Petraeus may not get jail time for talking to a journalist, but Sterling and others did

Peter Maass — Petraeus Plea Deal Reveals Two-Tier Justice System For Leaks

David Petraeus, the former Army general and CIA director, admitted today that he gave highly-classified journals to his onetime lover and that he lied to the FBI about it. But he only has to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor that will not involve a jail sentence thanks to a deal with federal prosecutors. The deal is yet another example of a senior official treated leniently for the sorts of violations that lower-level officials are punished severely for. 

According to the plea deal, Petraeus, while leading American forces in Afghanistan, maintained eight notebooks that he filled with highly-sensitive information about the identities of covert officers, military strategy, intelligence capabilities and his discussions with senior government officials, including President Obama. Rather than handing over these “Black Books,” as the plea agreement calls them, to the Department of Defense when he retired from the military in 2011 to head the CIA, Petraeus retained them at his home and lent them, for several days, to Paula Broadwell, his authorized biographer and girlfriend. 

In October 2012, FBI agents interviewed Petraeus as part of an investigation into his affair with Broadwell — Petraeus would resign from the CIA the next month — and Petraeus told them he had not shared classified material with Broadwell. The plea deal notes that “these statements were false” and that Petraeus “then and there knew that he previously shared the Black Books with his biographer.” Lying to FBI agents is a federal crime for which people have received sentences of months or more than a year in jail.
Under his deal with prosecutors, Petraeus pleaded guilty to just one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information, a misdemeanor that can be punishable by a year in jail, though the deal calls only for probation and a $40,000 fine. 

As The New York Times noted today, the deal “allows Mr. Petraeus to focus on his lucrative post-government career as a partner in a private equity firm and a worldwide speaker on national security issues.”....

The Intercept

Petraeus Plea Deal Reveals Two-Tier Justice System For Leaks

Peter Maass

Robert Parry — Neocons: The ‘Anti-Realists’

America’s neocons, who wield great power inside the U.S. government and media, endanger the planet by concocting strategies inside their heads that ignore real-world consequences. Thus, their “regime changes” have unleashed ancient hatreds and spread chaos across the globe, as Robert Parry explains.

Empire-building in the name of freedom, human rights, democracy and the American way.

Parry see President Obama as a reluctant (spineless) realist, who goes along to get along. I am not so sure he is not a card-carrying neocon that sometimes talks like a realist. But practically speaking, there is no discernible difference in behavior.

Consortium News
Neocons: The ‘Anti-Realists’

Robert Parry

Carl Bernstein — Why the US media ignored Murdoch's brazen bid to hijack the presidency

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

In the American instance, Murdoch's goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.

Thus in the spring of 2011 – less than 10 weeks before Murdoch's centrality to the hacking and politician-buying scandal enveloping his British newspapers was definitively revealed – Fox News' inventor and president, Roger Ailes, dispatched an emissary to Afghanistan to urge Petraeus to turn down President Obama's expected offer to become CIA director and, instead, run for the Republican nomination for president, with promises of being bankrolled by Murdoch. Ailes himself would resign as president of Fox News and run the campaign, according to the conversation between Petraeus and the emissary, K T McFarland, a Fox News on-air defense "analyst" and former spear carrier for national security principals in three Republican administrations.

The Guardian (UK)
Why the US media ignored Murdoch's brazen bid to hijack the presidency
Carl Bernstein (yes, <i>that</i> Bernstein. Shades of "Deep Throat"?)
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

Woodward and Bernstein still on the job.

All this was revealed in a tape recording of Petraeus's meeting with McFarland obtained by Bob Woodward, whose account of their discussion, accompanied online by audio of the tape, was published in theWashington Post – distressingly, in its style section, and not on page one, where it belonged – and, under the style logo, online on December 3.

The take-away.

Murdoch and Ailes have erected an incredibly influential media empire that has unrivaled power in British and American culture: rather than judiciously exercising that power or improving reportorial and journalistic standards with their huge resources, they have, more often than not, recklessly pursued an agenda of sensationalism, manufactured controversy, ideological messianism, and political influence-buying while masquerading as exemplars of a free and responsible press. The tape is powerful evidence of their methodology and reach.

The Murdoch story – his corruption of essential democratic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic – is one of the most important and far-reaching political/cultural stories of the past 30 years, an ongoing tale without equal. Like Richard Nixon and his tapes, much attention has been focused on the necessity of finding the smoking gun to confirm what other evidence had already established beyond a doubt: that the elemental instruments of democracy, ie the presidency in Nixon's case, and the privileges of free press in Murdoch's, were grievously misused and abused for their own ends by those entrusted to use great power for the common good.