Saturday, November 10, 2012

Spies, Lies, and E-mail archives


According to the terms of our Official Junior Blogger’s License, it is no part of our brief  to follow the ins and outs of venery on the American political scene, a subject more than amply chronicled  in our own press.   We do on occasion, however (while taking a break from contemplating the infinite), as a service to those cooped-up in CONUS,  cast a glance across the Atlantic, towards such weighty intellectual matters as Mitteleuropäische depth-psychology, or, mm, French political sex.  It was thus that, anent the recent revelations regarding the forced resignation of the CIA director,

The collapse of the dazzling career of CIA Director David H. Petraeus was triggered when a woman with whom he was having an affair sent threatening e-mails to another woman close to him, according to three senior law enforcement officials with knowledge of the episode.
The recipient of the e-mails was so frightened that she went to the FBI for protection and help tracking down the sender, according to the officials. The FBI investigation traced the threats to Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and a Petraeus biographer, and uncovered explicit e-mails between Broadwell and Petraeus, the officials said.
When Petraeus’s name first surfaced, FBI investigators were concerned that the CIA director’s personal e-mail account had been hacked and security had been breached. But the sexual nature of the e-mails led them to conclude that Petraeus and Broadwell were engaged in an affair, the officials said.
The identity of the woman who received the e-mails was not disclosed.

our eye was caught by the following astute reader’s comment:

This is starting to resemble the Hollande-Royal-Trierweiler scandal in France …

But exactly!

Now, America does many things very well;  but in a couple of areas, France does surpass us, principally in the matter of cheese and political sex-scandals.  And you can read all about them in the following post, repeatedly updated as each mouth-watering detail leaks out:



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We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update 11 November 2012]  Let the land of ooh-la-la lead you on a trip down memory lane:

 
[Further update]  I really should just shut up and let it lie -- allow things to play out;  but it is all really just too juicy.  Extraordinary statements are reported and go unchallenged.  Thus, this:


Broadwell, a self-described soccer mom who lives with her family in a $900,000 house in Charlotte, N.C., is a high-octane achiever, a triathlete with degrees from West Point and Harvard. She holds the rank of major in the Army Reserve, and she said she held a top-secret "sensitive compartmented information" clearance, one of the highest.


 
Now, SCI is indeed a big deal  -- though somewhat less than it might sound:   it does not confer access to all comparments by any means (the way TS does open the door to anything TS) -- you have to be read-in one by one, compartment by jealously-guarded compartment, strictly on a time-limited need-to-know.  But anyhow, neither SCI, nor even TS, nor even straight-Secret is conferred simply because you're "a soccer mom who lives with her family in a $900,000 house ... a high-octane achiever, a triathlete with degrees from West Point and Harvard."  Such is the prose of post-bra-burning femininism, which now oozes through the media like a tide of oobleck, moistening the crevices of the credulous, but which cuts no ice at all with the steely-gaze guys who grudgingly hand out clearances.  These things are not awarded like party-favors, just because you're hot.
So, either she's lying, or there's a story here ...


[Metafurther update] (O I shouldn’t I shouldn’t … but they’re like Starburst, I cannot resist… quoting some of the amusing unselfcensored readers’ comments)

Men sleep with women and vice versa. The FBI needs to be informed.
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Gives whole new meaning to "embedded" journalist.
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If you google Ms Bonkwell, you will see images of her looking reasonably young and hot, and you will also see Mrs Petraus looking rather old and frumpy.  So it's easy to see what the temptation might have been,
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The root of the problem is that Holly morphed into a hobbit.
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Many PhDs have studied the issue and concluded that when one's spouse morphs into a hobbit, the non-hobbit spouse tends to go looking for other non-hobbits. It's science.








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