Tag: David Petraeus

  • CIA Director Petraeus Quits Over Affair

    CIA Director Petraeus Quits Over Affair

    David PetraeusCIA Director David Petraeus has resigned over an extramarital affair – which officials say was uncovered by an FBI investigation.

    According to his letter of resignation, General Petraeus asked President Barack Obama on Thursday to allow him to resign, and on Friday the president accepted.

    The general admitted he had shown “extremely poor judgement” in having an affair.

    “Such behaviour is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organisation such as ours,” he wrote.

    He had only been sworn in as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on September 6 last year.

    Prior to that, he was a four-star general with 37 years’ service in the US Army .

    His last assignments in the army were as commander of Isaf, the International Security Assistance Force, and commander of US forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

    The resignation took Washington’s intelligence and political communities by surprise, coming as a sudden end to the public career of the best-known general in recent years.

    Neither Gen Petraeus nor the CIA explained why he felt he had to step down over the affair, and whether his liaison presented a purely personal problem or raised security issues in his sensitive work as spy chief.

    The affair came to light as the FBI was investigating whether a computer used by the general had been compromised, the New York Times and other US media reported, citing government officials.

    In a statement released after the resignation was announced, Mr Obama hailed the “extraordinary service” of Gen Petraeus.

    “David Petraeus has provided extraordinary service to the United States for decades,” Mr Obama said.

    “By any measure, he was one of the outstanding general officers of his generation.”

    The president said the CIA’s Deputy Director Michael Morell would serve as acting director.

    “I am completely confident that the CIA will continue to thrive and carry out its essential mission,” Mr Obama said.

    Gen Petraeus has been married for 37 years to Holly, who he met when he was a cadet at the US Military Academy at West Point.

    Although the president made no direct mention of Gen Petraeus’ reason for resigning, he offered his thoughts and prayers to the general and his wife.

    He said Mrs Petraeus has “done so much to help military families through her own work. I wish them the very best at this difficult time”.

    The CIA has come under fire in recent weeks in the wake of the September 11 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

    Critics have questioned how much the intelligence agency knew about the likelihood and nature of the attack.

     

    Sky News

  • ‘CIA chief’s İstanbul visit aimed to restore Turkish-Israeli relations’

    ‘CIA chief’s İstanbul visit aimed to restore Turkish-Israeli relations’

    Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director David Petraeus, who recently paid an unannounced visit to İstanbul, came to the city improve relations between Turkey and Israel, Turkish media has claimed Today`s Zaman reported

    David Petraeus 050410 2

    Petraeus, whose program was kept secret due to security concerns, was initially thought to be in İstanbul to discuss the deteriorating situation in Syria and the fight against the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) with Turkish officials.

    However, some Turkish columnists including Fehmi Koru and Eyüp Can have claimed that the main topic of the discussions was Turkish-Israeli relations. Petraeus flew to Israel after his one-day visit to İstanbul, the columnists claimed, to achieve his goal of helping to restore the relations.

    The alliance between the Jewish state and Turkey, a mainstay of Washington’s influence in an unstable region, fell apart after the Israeli military raid in May 2010 of the Mavi Marmara ship headed for the blockaded Gaza Strip carrying humanitarian aid, which killed eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish American.

    Can, who writes for the Radikal daily, drew attention in his column on Thursday to the fact that Petraeus was accompanied during his İstanbul visit by US senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, who are known to be close to Israeli government.

    In apparent support for these claims about the aim of Petraeus’s visit, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said on Wednesday that the US was trying to mediate an end to the dispute, for which Turkey has set several demands including that Israel apologize for the Mavi Marmara deaths. Israel denied wrongdoing after the flotilla attack and offered statements of regret, rather than contrition.

    Israeli and Turkish officials had no comment on the report. But Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said on Tuesday he was open to taking a page from US diplomacy in crafting a statement to try to end an impasse with Ankara.

    The foreign minister compared the Mavi Marmara incident to one in which the United States mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in an air strike last November on the Afghan border. Following the strike, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said her country was “sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military” and that Washington was “committed to working closely with Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent this from ever happening again.”

    The foreign minister said Clinton’s statement could not be termed an apology, but was rather “an expression of regret on the killing of innocents.”

    “I say to you if this is the wording — if the Turks accept the American wording — I will certainly go with it. This is what I am willing to accept [in terms of an apology for the raid],” he told his party in a speech on Tuesday.

    The signal from the minister was significant because he had been among the Israeli leaders most vocally opposed to accommodating the Turks’ rapprochement demands.

    via ‘CIA chief’s İstanbul visit aimed to restore Turkish-Israeli relations’ – Trend.Az.