Just back from the 50-minute session in which Brian Williams of NBC interviewed Gen. David Petraeus of Central Command. My task is to write up a summary, which I'll start doing as soon as I am done with this.

The Executive Summary, however, is this: while there was no big breaking news in this session, in the form of an announcement, revelation, or error suitable for inclusion in the papers tomorrow or on Williams' newscast tonight, the discussion as a whole was extremely valuable and worth paying attention to when the full transcript goes up on our site. I'll update this post with a link when the full session is available. Meanwhile, Matt Cooper has provided many real-time nuggets from the session on our live-blog site.

Why was it valuable? Because Williams asked (often at some length) enough questions, about a wide enough range of topics, to give Petraeus a chance to display a combination of big-picture perspective and detailed knowledge, and to spell out the connections between the two, as well as a connection among a variety of inescapably connected areas and problems: Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, and so on.

As I look through the notes, I may re-discover some "hard news" nugget I missed in real-time high-speed transcription (I find that I have typed >3700 words). But if you should somehow inexplicably miss that followup post, make do with this message: Find the webcast when you have time to pay attention, and pay attention.