Petraeus did what?

This Fox News story on Benghazi is perplexing.  Catherine Herridge, who has done yeoman's work on the story from day one, is reporting that certain House members are claiming CIA Director David Petraeus sold them a bill of goods in closed testimony in the days immediately after the attack..

Newly declassified testimony shows at least five Republican lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee suggested former CIA Director David Petraeus provided bad information, or even misled them, after the 2012 Benghazi attack when he blamed an obscure Internet video and downplayed the significance of mortar attacks that night.

Very interesting. Why?  Because the previous narrative was that Petraeus was speaking truth to power in front of Congress on the matter.   Not only that, but the highly contested "CIA talking points" formulated ahead of UN Ambassador Rice's TV blitz on the Sunday talk shows indicated some displeasure from the Director because...

Petraeus was, according to Hayes, shocked to see references to “al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists” etc. mysteriously gone from the rewritten talking points. Which we already knew, kinda sorta, based on what Peter King revealed about Petraeus’s closed-doors testimony to the House Intelligence Committee last November.

Now suddenly we find out Peter King is saying he thinks the general was deceiving them?  And Mike Rogers is saying he wasn't straight with them, the same Mike Rogers who was the first to say it was a planned attack not a response to a You Tube clip?  Somewhere along the way the same guy decided it wasn't worth pursuing anymore and authored a dismissive report he knew the left-media would seize to make the GOP look like a pack of nutty conspiracists. 

Meanwhile it's still a mystery as to why General Petraeus suddenly disappeared into the ether following his initial involvement.  Maybe it has something to do with his subsequent shameful departure from CIA as the president won reelection.  Somehow his Deputy Mike Morell took over as the face of the event after the first week, the same guy who told Congress he didn't know who changed the talking points after he'd changed them.  He subsequently bailed out and landed a cushy consulting job with ex-Hillary staffers.

As Sharyl Attkisson asked in her book, it's logical to ask whether Petraeus was compromised at the time due to the investigation into his extra-marital affair.  As of 9/11/12, it appears the FBI knew about the affair, as did Eric Holder (former congressman Eric Cantor was informed by an FBI agent in October). Who else knew during the week after the attack?  Maybe Trey Gowdy will stumble across something, if they let him.

While we wait it's worth pointing out that the State Department was weirdly mum when asked about this report the other day (emphasis added):

Abd al-Baset Azzouz, the alleged leader of al-Qaida in Libya accused of involvement in the 2012 murder of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, was captured in Turkey, according to media reports. A Turkish daily reported that Azzouz, an al-Qaida operative who allegedly headed the terrorist organization's Libya branch, and was involved in the murder of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens in a raid on the embassy in 2012, was arrested two weeks ago and extradited to the U.S.

Damn!  Well, there's some disagreement on where he was taken, but why would the administration miss an opportunity to trumpet the capture of another Benghazi suspect?  Hmm, could it be this..

The suspect, also known as Abdulbasit Azuz, was designated a "global terrorist" in September by the U.S. State Department. The department said in a notice that Azzouz "committed or poses a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States." British media outlets have reported that he oversaw hundreds of al-Qaida recruits at a training camp in eastern Libya. Eastern Libya is a nexus of training grounds for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which splintered from al-Qaida, according to David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command.

As stated over and over on this blog--ISIS (AQI) fighters were involved in Benghazi at the same time we were aiding them to fight Assad in Syria, before they got out control and started lopping off heads.  So it's a little inconvenient to admit that this recent capture was sent to Libya in 2011 to start an AQ cell, which turned into an attack on our embassy.  But yeah, for the most part this Benghazi stuff is just a phony scandal that has been officially dismissed by the Rogers report. We must get back to the national conversation on race, which became important after the mid-terms.