Gen.. David Petraeus will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein told Politico. But the exact schedule has not been set for his testimony.

High-level officials at the FBI and the Justice Department were notified in the late summer that agents had uncovered what appeared to be an extramarital affair involving CIA director David Petraeus, the New York Times reports.

“But law enforcement officials did not notify anyone outside the F.B.I. or the Justice Department until last week because the investigation was incomplete and initial concerns about possible security breaches, which would demand more immediate action, did not appear to be justified.”

“You know what, somebody the other day said to me that this is as bad as Watergate. Well, nobody died in Watergate. But this is either a massive cover-up or an incompetence that is not acceptable service to the American people.”

— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), in an interview with Face the Nation, on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.

A White House official tells The Cable that Vice President Joe Biden “speaks only for himself and President Barack Obama, and neither man was aware that U.S. officials in Libya had asked the State Department for more security before the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi.”

Biden has come under fire for saying at Thursday night’s debate, “We weren’t told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there.”

NBC News reports Mitt Romney said today, “The vice president directly contradicted the sworn testimony of State
Department officials. He’s
doubling down on denial.”

Eli Lake: “In the days following the killing of the U.S. ambassador and two ex-Navy SEALs, President Obama and top State Department officials portrayed the attack as a spontaneous reaction to an Internet video depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammad as a lascivious brute…”

“Now there is mounting evidence that the White House’s initial portrayal of the attacks as a mere outgrowth of protest was incorrect — or, at the very least, incomplete. The administration’s story itself has recently begun to shift… telling Congress on Wednesday that the attackers may have had links to al Qaeda and Carney characterizing the incident as a ‘terrorist attack.'”

Four U.S. Army soldiers “killed a former comrade and his girlfriend to protect an anarchist militia group they formed that stockpiled assault weapons and plotted a range of anti-government attacks,” the AP reports.

“The prosecutor said the militia group had big plans. It plotted to take over Fort Stewart by seizing its ammunition control point and talked of bombing the Forsyth Park fountain in nearby Savannah, she said. In Washington state, she added, the group plotted to bomb a dam and poison the state’s apple crop. Ultimately, prosecutors said, the militia’s goal was to overthrow the government and assassinate the president.”

“An onslaught of bombings and shootings killed 93 people across Iraq on Monday, officials said, in the nation’s deadliest day so far this year,” the AP reports.

“The attacks come days after the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq declared a new offensive and warned in a statement that the militant group is reorganizing in areas from which it retreated before U.S. troops left the country last December. Al-Qaida has been seeking to re-assert its might in the security vacuum left by the departing Americans, seizing on Baghdad’s fragmented government and the surge of Sunni rebels in neighboring Syria to sow instability across Iraq.”

The suicide bomber who blew up a bus full of Israeli tourists this week was reportedly a Swedish citizen who had been held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp from 2002 to 2004, the Times of Israel reports.

“He’s the most dangerous president we have ever had on national security.”

— Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), in an interview with the Daily Beast, claiming President Obama has “revealed the methodologies we use” and has been “purging the FBI files of anything that could be considered anti-Islamic.”

Vice President Joe Biden went off-script with a deeply personal moment with family members of fallen service members. It’s definitely worth watching.

[Read more…]

“Of course, even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.”

— Mitt Romney, quoted by Politico, on whether he would have given the order to go after Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Bill Clinton cuts a very powerful video extolling President Obama as commander in chief.

[Read more…]

A federal judge refused to order the Obama administration “to release photos and video of the U.S. military operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan almost a year ago and the al Qaeda leader’s burial at sea,” Reuters reports.

Time has a fascinating look at the White House decisionmaking that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. One of the biggest challenges was confirming that the al Qaeda leader was actually at the Abbottabad compound.

“Most of the actions the CIA could take to increase its confidence about the target would also unavoidably increase the odds that bin Laden or Pakistani intelligence officers would learn that the U.S. had discovered his whereabouts. More-advanced drones could provide better overhead photography of activity in the compound, but what if one crashed, as an RQ-170 did in Iran seven months later? A broadsheet of options included everything from surveilling the neighborhood with a miniaturized UAV that resembled a bird (so convincing that one was attacked by an eagle) to analyzing local sewage for genetic markers.”

Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw the CIA’s once-secret interrogation program, says in a new book that he ordered the destruction of videos showing waterboarding because he “was tired of waiting for Washington’s bureaucracy to make a decision that protected American lives,” the AP reports.

He describes sending the order in November 2005 as “just getting rid of some ugly visuals.”

Mohammad Ashan, a mid-level Taliban commander in Afghanistan, visited a police checkpoint with a wanted poster bearing his own face and demanded the $100 finder’s fee referenced on the poster, the Washington Post reports.

He was arrested on the spot.

“You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.”

— Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by National Review, on the raid President Obama ordered to kill Osama bin Laden.

David Ignatius reports one of the documents taken from Osama bin Laden’s compound by U.S. forces the night he was killed instructed “special cells” in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus.

Said the al Qaeda leader: “The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency… Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour… and killing him would alter the war’s path.”