National security and adultery

Every day brings more information and details about the former CIA Director General David Petraeus’ sex scandal. Let us remind that Petraeus resigned on November 9 after admitting to the fact of adultery. 60-year-old general started an affair with his biographer, 40-year-old Paula Broadwell, in 2011, two months after he occupied a post of CIA Director.

Petraeus called his behavior “unacceptable” for the head of the US intelligence service. Indeed, it is not befitting a person who has been married for 38 years, has two grown-up children, including his son, who headed a platoon in Afghanistan as a lieutenant.

Meanwhile, new details related to this case appear. Media already published information about a woman called Jill Kelley, who received e-mails with threats from Petraeus’ paramour. It was thanks to Kelley’s complaint that the FBI started an investigation which revealed that threats came from Broadwell, and then it turned out that the latter had an affair with Petraeus.

According to the media, 37-year-old Kelley lives in Florida, her family is friends with the Petraeus family. The press does not yet make any implications that she could have been Petraeus’ lover too. Meanwhile, Kelley and her husband admitted that they have friendly relations with David and his wife Holly and asked not to interfere in their private life at the current stage.

This is how the investigation of this serious scandal went.

At the beginning of the summer, Kelley complains to her friend who works for the FBI about the e-mails with threats.

At the end of the summer, FBI finds out that letters were sent by Broadwell and that she was Petraeus’ paramour.

The sudden collapse of the general’s career keeps agitating Washington. This sex scandal caused deep resentment in the Congress. American legislators consider it unacceptable that FBI did not inform them about the investigation promptly.

“We were not informed. It was like a bolt from the blue,” said the Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairperson of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Meanwhile, Republican Peter King, chairperson of the House Homeland Security Committee, said that he wanted to know why CIA informed the White House about the investigation on the Election Day. “Something does not fit here,” he stated.

For its part, the FBI says that it adhered to the established procedures, and that in the course of investigation, nothing implied that the national security could be threatened.

It should be noted that before being appointed as the CIA Director, General Petraeus oversaw all coalition forces in Iraq, and then in Afghanistan. Analysts call him one of the most outstanding American commanders of the last decade.

The Day addressed American experts with a request to comment on the ways this sex scandal is instructive for the US, as well as for other countries, and if a sudden collapse of the general’s career is worth keeping the American capital agitated.

Roger ARONOFF, editor of Accuracy in Media, Washington:

“Of course there is a long history of important political figures being exposed for having committed adultery. And in the case of most congressmen, and even a well-known former president (Clinton), they can survive the scandal. But the person whose job it is to be in charge of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, there is no way he could, or should, survive the indiscretion. This is not a moral judgment, but clearly he could easily be subject to blackmail. In addition, if he wasn’t clever enough to avoid detection, and left such an electronic trail, his professional judgment becomes highly questionable as well.

“It is tragic, in the Shakespearean sense, because he has so magnificently served his country in the past. And there are at least two more important elements to this story. One has to do with Benghazi. Now that he apparently won’t be testifying at congressional hearings this week, when will we be able to put him under oath to find out what he knew and when. When he issued a statement that the CIA had not ordered anyone to stand down, meaning the two former Navy SEALs who were killed along with Ambassador Stevens, was he suggesting that it was someone else who had ordered the reported stand-down?

“Which leads to the other major area of question. What did president Obama know and when did he know it, and was the resignation deliberately timed to come after the election, so as to save the president further embarrassment? It is not very believable that the FBI had been investigating this for months, but the President was never notified. FBI agents are reportedly outraged that Petraeus was allowed to stay in his job for months after it was known that he was in this compromising position, in order to help President Obama’s reelection chances.

“As far as what others conclude about America from this incident, people will say whatever they want to say. What were people saying about us reelecting Barack Obama? I guess it all depends on whether you thought he was doing good things for the country and the world, or doing a great deal of damage to both.”

Alexander MOTYL, professor of Political Science, deputy director of the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers-Newark,co-director of the Central and Eastern European Studies Program, Rutgers University, USA:

“On the one hand, a CIA Director does not have a right to be involved in any activity that could compromise him or give his enemies an opportunity to blackmail him. Thus, Petraeus’ resignation was necessary.

“On the other hand, media’s excessive reaction to this case is a symptom of two deep tendencies in the American society. The first one is profound puritanism, which is incorporated in the very culture and inherent to even the most liberal-minded society members. Everything seems to be allowed, but God forbid if you behave like that. The other tendency is the fading of boundaries between public and private lives, especially when it comes to politicians, celebrities, etc. This tendency is relatively new, it may root from the social and cultural changes that took place in the 1960s. As a result, purely private business becomes publicly important (as it was in the case of Clinton and Monica Lewinsky). In Europe, this boundary still exists, though, the serious scandals involving Strauss-Kahn and Berlusconi showed that the situation is changing there too. The general elimination of these boundaries is a possible consequence of the spread of various information technologies on the one hand, and mobilization, activization, and democratization of people on the other. If this is the case, the gradual unification of these spheres will continue.

“It is obvious that this case is not worth keeping the capital of the US agitated. But unfortunately, such hysterias always arise around scandals. Though luckily, these hysterical moments are short-lived: first, all the media are talking about the scandal, politicians are making loud statements, the involved person publicly repents (as Petraeus has already done), and then the case is forgotten in a couple of weeks, at least because another scandal is revealed. And after a certain withdrawal into private life, the person involved in the scandal is forgiven, they reappear in the public life and become rehabilitated. Just like it happened with Clinton, for example. You will see, this is not the end of Petraeus’ public career. This is just a break.”