Maybe this is the best place to post this and not GD. IMPORTANT!!!

[kelliekat44]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/civilian-analysts-gained-petraeuss-ear-while-he-was-commander-in-afghanistan/2012/12/18/290c0b50-446a-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html

Betrayus article.

[JDPriestly]

1. Please also post this in General Discussion.

This is shocking but confirms what I have long suspected.

Our military has its own rogue, shadow government on foreign and military policy.

The military bureaucracy is no longer subordinate to the civilian administration in many ways.

What is more, as we see in this article, individual generals can assemble their own rogue, shadow staffs.

Before we know these officially appointed officers with their unappointed staffs and their coterie of supporters and friends in Congress, the defense industry and the media may start fighting amongst themselves.

I am not predicting anything because hopefully we can stop this practice here and now, but this is certainly reminiscent but in modern terms of what happened in Rome as three generals faced off and one of them, Julius Caesar, became the dominant general and took over the government in Rome.

The military bureaucracy needs to be put in its place before it is too late.

The Founding Fathers knew the history of Rome very well. Reading the classics was the foundation of a good education at the time. Their familiarity with the history of Rome may have been one of the reasons that they did not want a standing army.

We are now stuck with a very large one -- and it appears that it may be the ticking time bomb in our so-called democracy.

This report is very disappointing.

I hope Obama does something about it. We definitely need to cut our military budget.

These people want to cut Social Security and unemployment insurance, even veterans' benefits in order to continue to fatten our bloated military budget.

They argue that reducing the deficit will increase the ratio of private to government spending in our economy. Seems to me that if you safeguard and maintain the military budget at the size it is and cut the programs you want to cut, you are actually increasing the ratio of government-related military spending compared to real civilian spending.

We will be increasing the ratio between the military portion of our private spending and the civilian portion, I think. Does anyone agree with me on this?

[KT2000]

2. yes this is important

Neocons essentially steering Patreus and the war that provides profits for their benefactors - defense contractors.
I guess we knew this was going on but the that it was so blatant is shocking.

[Festivito]

3. Are the Kagan investments questioned anywhere. Work for free. Make a mint.

Cui bono folks.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Key sentence: "The extent of the couple’s involvement in Petraeus’s headquarters was not known...

... to senior White House and Pentagon officials involved in war policy".

There is no way a general should be able to give anyone from outside the government or military top-level security clearances without everyone concerned knowing exactly what those people are being told, and what they're saying. That they head a right wing think tank just makes it worse.

[kelliekat44]

5. That's exactly my feeling. But yet to hear anything or any outrage about this from the WH or the

media.