Monday, December 14, 2015

CounterCurrents: The Violent Crimes And Shady Dealings Of Hillary Clinton




The Violent Crimes And Shady Dealings Of Hillary Clinton
By Robert Barsocchini
14 December, 2015
Countercurrents.org
At the end of the year in which Hillary Clinton left her position as Secretary of State, 2013, the Obama regime's USA was voted, inWin/Gallup's global poll, as the greatest threat to peace in the world, with the runner-up, US-ally Pakistan, receiving three times fewer votes, and Russia receiving twelve times fewer votes.

This was largely due to multiple international crimes committed by the US, such as aggressive bombings and subversions of elected governments, which were co-schemed and staunchly advocated by Hillary Clinton, and ultimately ordered and perpetrated by Barack Obama.

While “respected conservative political commentator Norman Ornstein” writes in the American Academy of Arts and Sciencesjournal that the Republican Party is a “radical insurgency – ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise”, historian Roger Morris, PhD, in his best-selling examination of the Clintons and their sleazy and criminal deeds along their rise to power, finds that the Democratic Party, although in his opinion the “lesser of evils”, is “equally bereft, corrupt, and unable or unwilling to face itself.” (468-9)
In the spirit of hope and change, Hillary Clinton's violent crimes and shady dealings:
  • Hillary Clinton supported, in the 1980s, the US-proxy terrorist insurgency in Nicaragua known as the Contras.
  • Nicaragua pressed charges against the US at the International Court of Justice, which ruled in favor of Nicaragua and demanded the US pay approximately $18 billion in reparations for unlawful use of force, i.e. terrorism and aggression.  The US refused, and instead vetoed Security Council resolutions that both condemned its actions and called on all countries to adhere to international law. The US then increased its terrorism against Nicaragua, and did not issue notice to the world that it was now okay for other people to follow the US example and reject court rulings.
  • With Hillary Clinton as his close “partner in power”, Bill Clinton was likely involved in coordinating drug and gun shipments into and out of the US through a rural airstrip in Mena, Arkansas.  The federal government was running Contra operations from the airbase while Clinton was governor of that state. (see Morris)
  • Of the corruption of the ‘Clinton Foundation', Ken Silverstein notes in Harper's Magazine:
“…the Clintons have used their foundation for crass profiteering and influence peddling. If the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies do their jobs, the foundation will be closed and its current and past trustees, who include Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, will be indicted. That's because their so-called charitable enterprise has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich Clinton family friends.
“The Clinton Foundation is a professionally structured money-laundering operation” that operates a “dirty slush fund.”
“Its biggest donors include some truly wonderful people and countries. There are, to name a few, the torture-happy, terror-exporting government of Saudi Arabia; a foundation controlled by Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch accused of bribery and corruption; and Frank Giustra, a penny-stock artist who became filthy rich with the generous assistance of Bill Clinton. In 2008, a former Kazakh official told reporters that Giustra, who established the CGEP with Clinton, donated millions to the foundation after Clinton helped him purchase uranium deposits in Kazakhstan. (At the time, Giustra denied this claim, pointing out that he had been engaged in mining deals in Kazakhstan since the 1990s.)”
“The Clinton Foundation has received more than $1 billion over the years to purchase HIV/AIDS drugs for poor people in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. However, [it] … clearly spent far, far less than it took in. In fact, the unit's accounting practices were so shoddy that its license was revoked by the state of Massachusetts, where it was headquartered.”
“Democrats and Clinton apologists will write these accusations off as conspiracy mongering and right-wing propaganda, but it's an open secret to anyone remotely familiar with accounting and regulatory requirements for charities that the financial records are deliberately misleading.”
  • Hillary Clinton supported aggressive US invasions of or attacks against Haiti (1994, US-backed overthrow of Haitian democracy), Bosnia (1995 – see below. At the end of 2013, nearly half of Bosnia and Herzegovina – 49% – viewed US as greatest threat to world peace, with no other country coming close), and Kosovo (1999 – see below).
  • Hillary Clinton supported the Bill Clinton regime's illegal bombing of Yugoslavia, an act of aggression which Wesley Clark, the top US/NATO general involved, and who recently advocated interning “radicals” in the US, calculatedwould worsen, not improve, the conflict. As was reported at the time, the US, with Hillary Clinton's approval, “began bombing Yugoslavia with no consideration for the possible impact on the Albanian people of Kosovo.”
  • For her part, Hillary Clinton personally called Bill from Africa at the time and later reported of their conversation: “I urged him to bomb.”
  • As General Clark had warned, the illegal bombing campaign worsened the regional violence; it was followed by an increase in atrocities by both the besieged Serb and the US-backed KLA forces.
  • In the year before the US bombing, as documented in a British Parliamentary report, the conflict had died down and was only being sustained by members of the KLA who, on record, said they were staging attacks to try to induce a response from the Serbs and create a pretext for US/NATO to bomb, which would allow for further KLA conquest.
  • Thanks to the bombing, “Kosovo[,] with its massive U.S. army base, has become a global center of human, human-organ and narcotics trafficking…”
  • The US/NATO bombing, along with direct US support for importing foreign fighters into the region, helped create a base in the “heart of Europe” that has linked militant elements from the Middle East to Europe and contributed towards recent attacks there.
  • Amnesty International released a report which stated that NATO forces targeted civilian Serbian radio, killing civilians.
  • The bombing caused great damage to local civilians, including death, injury, severe pollution, including through the US use of munitions made out of radioactive nuclear waste, called “depleted uranium”.
  • Among many other locations, US/NATO detonated explosives in the Ministry of Education in Novi Sad, premises which administered social welfare programs.
  • Novi Sad residents point out that the irony that Novi Sad was so heavily targeted by US/NATO also lies in the fact that during the time of the bombing, the city was ruled by the local Democratic Opposition, which was against the Serb regime in Belgrade.
  • US/NATO continues to occupy the territory it conquered, which was formerly neutral and had resisted siding in the Cold War and joining NATO.
  • A staffer for Bernie Sanders noted at the time, after resigning in protest of Sanders' support for the aggression, that “a genuine humanitarian concern for the Kosovars would be evidenced in massive [US] emergency airlifts and a few billion dollars right now devoted to aiding the refugees”. US action, he said, instead supported the assertion (voiced by officials involved in the bombing) that “the goal of U.S. policy is not to save the Kosovars”, and carrying out bombings was “not a means of protecting the Kosovars”. Rather, he noted, the US/NATO were engaging in “deliberate selection of civilian targets, including residential neighborhoods, auto factories, broadcasting stations, and hydro-electric power plants”.
  • Well known to Hillary Clinton, similar or worse crimes than those cited by the US as its pretext for bombing Yugoslavia were simultaneously being carried out by the US itself and its clients/allies including Turkey, Indonesia, and Israel, with direct US participation.
  • For example, the Clinton regime supplied 80% of the weapons to Turkey to be used to ethnically cleanse the region of Kurds, and US arms shipments to Turkey increased during the height of Turkey's atrocities, which involved “every conceivable kind of torture and massacre”.
  • Hillary Clinton did not “urge” her husband to bomb any of the criminal states the US was supporting, or to bomb criminals in Washington for what they were doing. Like any good expansionist, she chooses to attack only those targets whose defeat will allow expansion of US military hegemony into as-yet unconquered areas, and omits/dismisses/excuses/justifies the crimes of the US and groups already under its thumb. (Ch. 4)
  • In 2000, Hillary Clinton said she favored continuing the illegal US embargo against Cuba.
  • Ricardo Alarcon, PhD, calls the illegal embargo the most “prolonged genocide in history”.
  • Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, has said of that blockade that the “U.S government practices genocide against the Cuban people”.
  • The blockade is opposed every year in a UN vote by every country in the world, aside from the US, Israel, and sometimes the “US territories” of Marshall Islands (which were largely vaporized and contaminated by US nuclear/human experimentation) and Palau.
  • This year, the vote against the illegal US embargo was 191 to 2 – the world against the US and Israel.
  • With the US isolated and threatened with being kicked out of important hemispheric organizations, Obama has finally begun to lighten US terrorism against Cuba, which he had originally increased.
  • With Clinton's direct involvement, after the invasion, the US restarted a gas pipeline project that it had trouble pushing through with the (originally US-backed) Taliban in power.  See below. US/NATO has now declared that its occupationof Afghanistan will continue indefinitely.
  • In 2001, Clinton called John Walker Lindh, a former US soldier who was tortured in US custody, a traitor for “supporting” the Taliban (see here).  She made this statement long before his trial (an ethical violation Obama also committed regarding Chelsea Manning).  However, research has revealed no record of Clinton condemning as traitors any of the many US government officials or corporate executives who, on record and openly under her husband's regime, supported the Taliban:
  • The US supported the efforts of oil company Unocal to cooperate with the Taliban to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan. Meetings were being held for that purpose up to September 11, 2001. There was also a telephone company interested in Afghanistan.
  • Unocal's pipeline project would have brought natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan by crossing through Afghanistan—a route purportedly preferable to alternative routes through Russia or Iran.
  • Unocal CEO John Imle estimated that the company spent between $15 and $20 million on its Central Asia gas pipeline (CentGas) project, including on efforts to lobby the Taliban
  • Unocal also equipped the Taliban with advanced technologies, such as satellite phones.
  • “…Unocal –– had very close relations with the Taliban. They took their leaders on junkets to their home bases, they gave them substantial help in the form of office equipment, and they gave medical treatment to many of their leaders. Unocal set up a training school for the Taliban in Kandahar.
  • “[W]hen a Clinton official was reminded that the Taliban persecuted women, he said, “We can live with that.”
  • “…a strong campaign [was] waged by rights activists in America, particularly the Feminist Majority led by Eleanor Smeal and Mavis Leno, which lobbied Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright very fiercely to stop the Unocal project and come out against the Taliban's repression of women. [But] the Clinton administration viewed the Taliban's rise favorably… [because, in addition to other strategic reasons] the U.S. wanted to build this pipeline. There was a lot of support from the Pentagon and the State Department for the Unocal effort.”
  • “…as it became clearer that Taliban policy-makers were beginning to lean toward Bridas [a non-US oil company] by late 1997, the Clinton administration responded by suddenly paying heed to human rights/women's rights groups who had been protesting Taliban conduct for the past two years. In November 1997, after years of relative quiet, Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly condemned the Taliban's treatment of women… [but] it was only when absolute [US] control of that oil was challenged that the Taliban regime was openly discredited…”
  • “[In] August 1998, … the US embassy bombings in East Africa (attributed to Usama bin Laden) prompted [Bill] Clinton to… call for the Taliban to expel Bin Laden. Interestingly, the latter's presence in Afghanistan since 1996 had not stalled the courtship of the previous years, despite being implicated in earlier acts of ‘terror'” (ibid)
  • The US had also been sanctioning Pakistan, but Clinton removed the sanctions to befriend Pakistan so the planned pipeline could run through its territory to the coast. (ibid)
  • Lindh's lawyers filed voluminous documents establishing that he is the only person ever prosecuted for supporting the Taliban, even though many firms and individuals had continued doing business with the Taliban after Bill Clinton issued the executive order Lindh was accused of violating.
  • Afghanistan was stable in the late 1970s and had featured strong women's rights until the US, as it did in Nicaragua, assembled a proxy army to conquer the country.  After intentionally contributing towards the deaths of about two million people (a high US official, Brzezinski, said the US wanted to give the USSR, which was backing the stable Afghan government, “its Vietnam”) and helping to bring the Taliban to power, then, when it was uncooperative, pushing it out of power and killing thousands, the US got an agreement from the US-installed Karzai regime to build gas pipelines running from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, to Pakistan's coast.  More info here.
  • However, the Taliban later came back to prominence, and then, as Obama's sec. of state, Hillary Clintonagain tried to get the Taliban to cooperate on the gas pipeline. (ibid)
  • As a person close to a VP of a major oil company told me, it is “hard to tell where oil companies end and governments begin.” Illustrating this dynamic, Hillary Clinton offered her personal guarantee of US government backing to Chevron to increase Chevron's credibility in pursuing the Afghanistan gas pipeline project:
  • “…both Chevron and Exxon-Mobil have expressed interest in TAPI [the pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan].”  However, Turkmenistan wanted a firm signal that the US government was committed.  That signal came from Hillary Clinton.  The president of Turkmenistan received “a letter backing Chevron's project from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” (quoted WSJ article here)
  • After Clinton guaranteed US government backing for Chevron to build the pipeline, Obama sent his own personal letter to the president of Turkmenistan, backing Chevron and “emphasizing a common interest in helping develop Afghanistan and expressing [his] support for TAPI [pipeline] and his desire for a major U.S. firm to construct it.” (WSJ)
  • In 2012, Obama boasted that “We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.”
  • As Secretary of State, Clinton backed a major escalation of the US invasion of Afghanistan.
  • With Clinton's encouragement, Obama escalated the invasion from 30,000 to 100,000 soldiers or more.
  • Of the 2,300 American soldiers who have died in the 12-year-old Afghan War, about 1,670 (or more than 70 percent) have died since Obama took office. Many were killed in the surge Gates, Petraeus and Clinton pushed for.
  • As noted, US/NATO plan to remain indefinitely.
  • Hillary Clinton supported and voted for the illegal US invasion of Iraq, a major crime of aggression and terrorism. The invasion resulted in the most deadly war for journalists in history, destabilized the entire region, inspired and allowed the creation and rise of ISIS, and has directly and indirectly killed somewhere from a million to 2 million or morepeople.
  • On October 11, 2002, Clinton voted in favor of the invasion, committing the “supreme crime”, as defined by the US.
  • “Former administration officials also tell TIME that Clinton was an advocate for maintaining a residual troop force after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq… ” – TIME
  • “As Obama [following Bush's timetable for withdrawal, created under Iraqi pressure] began withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, Clinton supported an effort to leave behind several thousand soldiers…” – TIME
  • At the height of the illegal US occupation of Iraq, the US bolstered its presence with private contractors. Even when the military began leaving, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was openly talking about establishing a private, State Department-run “army” of contractors to fight in Iraq.
  • Clinton claims she opposed the Iraq ‘surge', a euphemism for a massive escalation of the invasion, for purely political reasons, while personally supporting it, and even reportedly saying “The Iraq surge worked”, here.
  • Hillary Clinton supports torture, including freezing temperatures (inducing hypothermia) and waterboarding, which the US classes as a war crime but does not punish unless perpetrated by competitors(see here):
  • “This procedure [waterboarding] is recognized internationally as a cruel and inhuman method [of] torture, and the US itself sentenced a Japanese soldier to 15 years in prison on war crimes charges for using the technique [of waterboarding] against an American prisoner of war. It has been banned by US law and explicitly repudiated by the military in the latest Army Field Manual.”
  • “A nation that has so often carried out military aggression, wantonly attacked civilian populations and targets, destroyed entire societies, used weapons of mass destruction, and used its armed might to crush oppositional movements around the world – killing millions and displacing tens of millions more in the process – cannot be expected to shy away from torture and other atrocities as it routinely goes about its global business.” – Prof. Carl Boggs, “Crimes of Empire”, pg. 208. Cont'd:
Torture and other comparable forms of inhumane treatment have been explicitly outlawed since WW2.
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 5, states: “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhumane, or degrading punishment.”
Geneva Convention III, article 49, states: “prisoners of war must at all times be treated humanely” and (article 17) “no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever.”
These rules are to be applied uniformly, with no exceptions, and to be extended not just to members of armed forces but to militias, volunteer groups, resistance movements, and insurgencies.
The Convention Against Torture (1984) directs each state party to incorporate torture as an offense within its criminal law (Article 4).
The Rome Statutes of the ICC define torture and other abuses of prisoners as a war crime.
The US is a signatory to the UDHR, the Geneva Conventions, and the Convention Against Torture.
This has not deterred Washington from setting up its own outlaw regimen for treating prisoners and others under its control.
  • Hillary Clinton supports the illegal annexation of Palestine by Israel, which is opposed by the vast majority of states in the world (usually about 165) and supported only by the US, Israel, and a handful of other countries (usually about 5 to 7) including five US-dependent island nations. 
  • Israel's illegal bulldozing of Palestinian homes and replacement of them with Israeli homes went up over 75% in 2013. (More info.)
  • As with its illegal embargo of Cuba, the US is isolated in the world in preventing international law from being applied to Israel to make it stop ethnically cleansing and colonizing Palestine.
  • Every year the UN votes on the issue of Israel's colonization of Palestine, and the vote is virtually the whole world in favor of decolonization and Israel's return to its legal borders (pre-June, 1967).
  • Every major human rights organization agrees.
  • All 22 states in the Arab League agree.
  • In 2004, the highest legal body in the world, the International Court of Justice, issued a ruling and agreed that Israel must decolonize Palestine and return to its legal borders.  All fifteen judges agreed, including the judge from the US.
  • Hillary Clinton supported the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.
  • “We are here to show solidarity and support for Israel. We will stand with Israel, because Israel is standing for American values as well as Israeli ones.” – Hillary Clinto
  • The vast majority of the Lebanese killed were civilians; UNICEF estimates that 30% of those killed were children under the age of 13.
  • The United Nations Development Program initially estimated that Israel destroyed about 35,000 Lebanese homes.
  • After a UN ceasefire was negotiated, Israel saturated Southern Lebanese villages with 4 million cluster bombs (many of them provided by the US).
  • 1 million Israeli bombs failed to explode on impact, lingering as land mines that killed or maimed almost 200 people since the war ended.  As of 2011, munitions were still causing casualties and being cleared by volunteers.
  • Parts of southern Lebanon remained uninhabitable.
  • This is the second largest example of cluster bomb use, after the US use of cluster bombs against Iraq in the early 1990s.
  • Hillary Clinton's State Department “helped enable Obama's expansion of lethal drone strikes.  In fact, Clinton may have been the administration's most reliable advocate for military action.” – TIME
  • Use of drones (used by the US mainly to execute suspects without trial, including in “double-tap” strikes meant to kill first-responders, and often while people attend weddings and funerals) has been increased 300% since Bush, killing thousands, mostly civilians, though executing suspects without trial, and by blowing them up, is just as criminal.
  • The US's “Hell-Fire” drone rockets have a kill/injury radius of 60 feet.
  • Hillary Clinton supported the illegal US bombing of Libya, which destroyed the country. ISIS has now taken control of large areas.
  • The US said it was going to impose a ‘no-fly zone' over the country, but instead used that as a pretext for aggression. Bombing was a violation of the UN resolution.
  • “We came, we saw, he died.” – Hillary Clinton responding to the news of Muammar Gaddafi's execution at the hands of US-backed rebels. She then began laughing. At least one commentator has pointed out that her statement is areference to: “I came; I saw; I conquered”, a phrase popularly attributed to Julius Caesar, who supposedly used the phrase in a letter to the Roman Senate around 46 BC after he had achieved a quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela.
  • “The political grief Clinton has suffered over the September 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, comes with an ironic twist: the tragic episode might never have occurred [obviously would never have occurred] had Clinton not supported” illegally bombing Libya. – TIME
  • “Before the bombing, Libya was the richest country in Africa and on track to attain all the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). After the bombing it is likely Libya will not attain any of the MDGs and it has become a failed State.”
  • The bombing was also a violation of US law, as it was unauthorized by congress.
  • Hillary Clinton supports aggression against Syria, both overt and covert, with the goal of illegally overthrowing the UN-member government there:
  • US and Saudi-backed fighters have killed hundreds of thousands in Syria.
  • “She pressed Obama to arm the Syrian rebels, and later endorsed air strikes against the Assad regime”, while the US lied, saying it knew Assad had carried out chemical attacks.  She also supported US bombing of the Syrian government, “apparently undaunted by polling that showed more than 70 percent of Americans opposed to military action.” (Quote from Time)
  • Clinton teamed up with David Patraeus, John McCain and Lindsey Graham to push for arming terrorists in Syria.
  • Arming an insurgency to attack a UN member state is classed under international law as aggression, the supreme crime.
  • Hillary Clinton backed a fascist military dictatorship in a coup to overthrow Honduras's elected government in 2009.  
  • The coup, condemned by the entire world (except the US) in the UN General Assembly, succeeded “because of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama”.
  • “When a fascist putsch … overthrew at gunpoint the popular progressive democratic President of Honduras on 28 June 2009, and all countries of the world except Israel and the United States promptly declared the junta-installed government illegitimate, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to join all other nations in rejecting the fascist regime… Hillary Clinton supported the fascists.”
  • “…instead [of joining the entire world and condemning the coup], she joined with then-Senator Jim DeMint (now head of the Heritage Foundation and the chief sponsor of the political career of Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz) in propping up the fascist regime. Promptly Honduras descended into hell, suddenly having the world's highest murder-rate, and becoming a haven of narco-trafficking. What was Hillary thinking? She expressed contempt for Zelaya, but what was really happening here was that American international companies liked paying their Honduran contractors sub-human wages to workers at their plants in Honduras. The Honduran aristocrats owned those factories, and the U.S. aristocrats shared with them the profits from this “free-market” slavery. What did Hillary care about the ongoing terror, murders, and soaring narco-trafficking?”
  • “Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State… displayed a record of carrying out the policies that were being promoted by her lobbyist friends, when she did everything possible, early in President Obama's first term, to support U.S. funding for the fascist junta in Honduras that perpetrated a coup d'etat on 28 June 2009 overthrowing that nation's popular progressive democratically elected President, and who then installed their own regime, and promptly placed their country into a continuing violent terror that caused Honduras ever since to be the nation with the highest murder rate in the world. Hillary's lobbyist friend in that particular matter was Lanny Davis, who also is an occasional Fox News contributor.”
  • The US Department of State had prior knowledge of the coup. The Department of State and the US Congress funded and advised the actors and organizations in Honduras that participated in the coup. The Pentagon trained, schooled, commanded, funded and armed the Honduran armed forces that perpetrated the coup and that continue to repress the people of Honduras by force.
  • More info here, here, here (second link is to video that includes Honduran students holding tear gas cans with “Made in USA”)
  • Hillary Clinton signed an agreement committing $124 million tax dollars to the building of the Caracol sweatshop assembly park in the north of Haiti.
  • The agreement includes tax breaks for sweatshop bosses. Workers there are making the starvation wage of about $3.50 a day.
  • Has expressed support for US government control over the Internet:
  • “We're all going to have to rethink how we deal with the Internet. As exciting as these new developments are, there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function.” -Hillary Clinton
  • Denounced Edward Snowden's whistle-blowing as “outrageous”.
  • Also denounced China for not arresting Snowden, as if the US would arrest a Chinese or Russian whistle-blower seeking refuge in the US.
  • The Obama/Clinton regime waged what has been widely called a “war on whistle-blowing”, persecuting more whistle-blowers than all previous US presidents combined while classifying massive troves of government documents.
  • Cables leaked by Chelsea Manning reveal Hillary Clinton's “extreme hatred for democracy” (Noam Chomsky) and suppression of popular opinion.  
  • While 77% of Arabs, at the time of cable leak, viewed US and Israel as biggest threats to peace, only 10% viewed Iran as a threat, and 57% thought Iran should have nuclear weapons as a deterrent to invasion by the US and Israel. Yet, Clinton, illustrating her preference, championed and reported only the opinions of US-allied Arab dictators, and ignored the populations.
  • Hillary Clinton said of US-backed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, whom Amnesty International says used rape as a weapon, “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.”
  • Hillary Clinton ordered American officials to spy on high ranking UN diplomats, including British representatives.
  • Secret cables revealed that Mrs. Clinton, as Secretary of State, ordered diplomats to obtain DNA, iris scans, and fingerprints, as well as credit card and frequent flier numbers, passwords, and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications. It also included Internet and intranet usernames, e-mail addresses, web site URLs useful for identification, and work schedules. The targeted human intelligence was requested in a process known as the National Humint Collection Directive, and was aimed at foreign diplomats of US allies as well.  Further leaked material revealed that the guidance in the cables was actually written by the National Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency before being sent out under Clinton's name, as the CIA cannot directly instruct State Department personnel.
  • She issues threats of force against Iran, which are illegal under international law.
  • The US “cannot take any option off the table [this means violence up to and including nuclear bombings] in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran – that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons” – Hillary Clinton
  • Clinton voted for a symbolic non-binding amendment to label the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution as a “foreign terrorist organization,”… Democratic opponents criticized her for contributing to what they said was Bush administration saber rattling on Iran.
  • Regularly contributes to US propaganda efforts against Iran:
  • “If Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel what would our response be? I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. That's what we will do. There is no safe haven.” Hillary Clinton continued, “Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program [the one the UN and US spy departments say does not exist] in the next 10 years during which they may foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” Iran complained to the UN about her comments.
  • Clinton stated that Iran must prove its nuclear program is peaceful; this is a propaganda statement, as all evidence, including UN inspections, suggests Iran's program is peaceful. The statement also ignores that the US is and many of its allies are nuclear states, and that the US is in vast violation of nuclear weapons law, while Iran is not.
  • Clinton “acknowledged that the harsh US sanctions [against Iran] were intended to target and send the people of Iran a message”, i.e., she openly acknowledges collectively punishing civilians; imperio-terrorism.
  • The 1977 Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions prohibit any measure that has the effect of depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to its survival. Article 70 of Protocol I mandates relief operations to aid a civilian population that is “not adequately provided” with supplies and Article 18 of Protocol II requires relief operations for a civilian population that suffers “undue hardship owing to a lack of supplies essential for its survival, such as foodstuffs and medical supplies.”
  • Art. 70 of Additional Protocol I of Art. 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits interfering with delivery of relief goods to all members of the civilian population.

  • Above: Global military expenditures. Iran's are not high enough to be included on the chart.

  • Middle East expert Professor Juan Cole on the above graphic, titled “US Military Bases Encircle Iran”: “I had grabbed an earlier version of this graphic off a Democratic Underground bulletin board from 2005. It made the point that the United States, which professes itself menaced by Iran, rather has Iran encircled by military bases. I have tried to update the map a bit, though this area is a moving target and the map no doubt isn't perfect. It is expressive enough, however, of the reality. Iraq and Uzbekistan no longer have American bases, but the US military now has a refueling station in Turkmenistan.”
  • US is currently engaging in campaign of expansion of its approximately 1,400 already-existing foreign military bases. For comparison, Russia has about 12, and China zero. The second largest empire, the British Empire, at its height had 40.
  • In 2009/10, Hillary Clinton led the opposition to any negotiated settlement to end the US torment of Iran and instead pushed for further sanctions.
  • “To clear the route for the harsher sanctions, Clinton helped sink agreements tentatively negotiated with Iran to ship most of its low-enriched uranium out of the country. In 2009, Iran was refining uranium only to the level of about 3-4 percent, as needed for energy production. Its negotiators offered to swap much of that for nuclear isotopes for medical research.
  • In spring 2010, Iran agreed to another version of the uranium swap proposed by the leaders of Brazil and Turkey, with the apparent backing of President Obama. But that arrangement came under fierce attack by Secretary of State Clinton and was derided by leading U.S. news outlets, including editorial writers at the New York Times who mocked Brazil and Turkey as being “played by Tehran.”
  • The ridicule of Brazil and Turkey as bumbling understudies on the world stage continued even after Brazil released Obama's private letter to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva encouraging Brazil and Turkey to work out the deal with Iran. Despite the letter's release, Obama didn't publicly defend the swap and instead joined in scuttling the deal, another moment when Clinton and administration hardliners got their way.” – Robert Parry
  • Mercifully, Clinton now endorses Obama's campaign to lighten the US torture of Iran; “…not a day has passed since 1953 in which the U.S. was not harming Iranians.” – Prof. Chomsky
  • ““To right-wingers willing to look beneath what probably sounds to them like the same identical views of the Democratic candidates, it is pretty clear that Hillary Clinton is the most conservative.” – Bruce Bartlett, policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan; treasury official under President George H.W. Bush, from America's venerable conservative magazine, William Buckley's National Review”
  • “We also hear from America's premier magazine for the corporate wealthy, Fortune, whose recent cover features a picture of Clinton and the headline: “Business Loves Hillary”.”
  • “Back to 2013: In October, the office of billionaire George Soros, who has long worked with US foreign policy to destabilize governments not in love with the empire, announced that “George Soros is delighted to join more than one million Americans in supporting Ready for Hillary.”
  • Even the highly establishment and “pro-Democrat” publication Time says of Hillary Clinton, the “truth is impossible to deny. Clinton has demonstrated a well-documented willingness to use American military power overseas [ie commit aggression, imperio-terrorism]. Gates' book is just the latest evidence, along with previous reporting and original interviews with current and former Obama officials, of the strikingly hawkish voice Clinton offered during Obama Situation Room debates.  …In fact, Clinton may have been the [Obama] administration's most reliable advocate for military action. On at least three crucial issues—Afghanistan, Libya, and the bin Laden raid—Clinton took a more aggressive line than Gates, a Bush-appointed Republican.”
  • According to TIME, though it seems like a pro-Democrat-biased claim, Hillary Clinton may have to defend her militant extremism against some less-hawkish Republican opponents.  For example “a GOP nominee could bash Clinton for defying public opinion [and committing war crimes against] Afghanistan, Syria and Libya.”
  • In August, the New Republic asked the war and torture advocate Republican senator John McCain whom he would support in a matchup between Democrat Hillary Clinton and the Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a critic of American imperialism. McCain's answer: “Tough choice.”
  • In 2003, Hillary Clinton said she was “a strong believer in executive authority”.
  • This was also reflected in her staunch advocacy for carrying out aggression against Libya, an international crime, without even seeking approval from congress.
  • With Clinton as Secretary of State, the Obama regime vastly increased US sponsorship of Saudi Arabia.  
  • Saudi Arabia is the world's biggest supporter of militant Islamic groups such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a 2009 cable obtained by Wikileaks.
  • “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.” – Leaked 2009 paper signed by Clinton
  • Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most “significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” according to the Clinton cable.
  • Drew C. Bailey, a spokesman for the state department, declined to comment.
  • In 2010, the Obama regime signed a deal for the biggest weapons shipment in US history, 60 billion dollars' worth, to Saudi Arabia. The US was already, and has long been, the world's biggest arms trafficker.
  • On Keystone XL pipeline:
  • “TransCanada Corporation wants to build the Keystone XL Pipeline to carry oil from Alberta Canada's tar sands to two refineries owned by Koch Industries near the Texas Gulf Coast, for export to Europe; and Hillary Clinton has helped to make that happen.
  • Hillary Clinton says US military bases in the Middle East should be maintained without time constraints.  (Pp. 244)  
  • Some of Clinton's top 100 supporters from 2003 to 2008:
  • In 2005, Clinton said she supports Israel's illegal annexation wall.
  • Every global authority has declared the wall to be illegal if it cuts into Palestinian territory.
  • Even George W. Bush said of the wall in 2005, “I think the wall is a problem. And I discussed this with Ariel Sharon. It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and Israel with a wall snaking through the West Bank.”
  • Colin Powell in 2003: “A nation is within its rights to put up a fence if it sees the need for one. However, in the case of the Israeli fence, we are concerned when the fence crosses over onto the land of others.”
  • The Clintons presided over most of the US/UK-led genocide against Iraq carried out through sanctions in the 1990s and up to 2003 (the sanctions were in fact only one aspect).
  • The UN finds that the sanctions killed about 500,000 children under the age of five.
  • “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.” – Denis Halliday, after resigning as first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, to protest the sanctions, which he called deliberately genocidal. – The Independent, 15 October 1998
  • “I was instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide — a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.” – Denis Halliday
  • Halliday's successor, Hans von Sponeck, also resigned in protest of the sanctions, which he also referred to asdeliberate genocide.
  • Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq, resigned in protest of the sanctions two days after von Sponeck.
  • 70 members of US congress went further, calling the sanctions a campaign of “infanticide”, the intentional extermination of infants.
  • But Hillary Clinton stayed on board. “Her reaction [to the sanctions] can be summed in a single word. Silence.”
  • Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, took action, going on 60 Minutes to say, in response to the host's question about “five hundred thousand children” dying, that the sanctions were “worth it.” Albright hasbeen a “close friend of [Hillary] Clinton and serves as her top informal adviser” on foreign policy matters.
  • The US per capita equivalent of the number of Iraqis killed by these sanctions is so high it becomes ridiculous to write about. It is roughly somewhere from 7 to 25 million people, depending on the estimate of the number of people killed and which Iraqi and US population measurements should be used, and how population flux after initiation of the attack is taken into account. The US per-capita equivalent of the overall number of Iraqis killed by the US or with US complicity since approximately 1982 may be up to about 60 million, again depending on method of measurement.
  • “Iraq's main crime,” says Middle East expert Prof. Juan Cole, “appears to have been to be an oil state not compliant with US demands.” Despite the US's “violation[s] of the UN charter and its war crimes in Iraq, none of its high officials [have] faced prosecution. Some of them [such as Hillary Clinton] even have the gall to come on television from time to time to urge more killing.”
  • Former US attorney general Ramsey Clark says the “cruelty” inflicted by the US against Iraq is “unprecedented in history.” But most US citizens, thanks to a combination of propaganda and willful ignorance, have no idea what has been done.
  • Democracy Now says Hillary Clinton should be questioned on her role in sending weapons and sniper training, through the 1990s, to the US proxy dictator in Indonesia, General Suharto. Suharto was carrying out a genocide against the peasantry of East Timor, exterminating approximately one fifth to one third of the population. If Hillary Clinton didn't have a role, says DM, she should be asked why she didn't speak out publicly and protest what her husband was doing, a question that should be applied to many other of her husband's policies, including other genocides.
  • The US provided 90% of the weapons for the Indonesian massacre and occupation of East Timor, with US weapons shipments to Indonesian General Suharto escalating for rearmament during his worst atrocities.
  • In an interview shown at the above link, Bill Clinton, questioned about US East Timor involvement, inadvertently admits that US policy was to facilitate the genocide.
  • And this lecture for a brief summary of US involvement and the US media's suppression of information on the campaign.
  • Before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the US trained a militia leader named Paul Kagame at “Fort Leavenworth … the U.S. Army's ‘commander general staff college…where rising stars of the U.S. military and other places go to get training as they are on track to become generals. The training that they get there is on planning large scale operations. It's not planning small-scale logistic things. It's not tactics. It's about how do you plan an invasion. And apparently [Kagame] did very well.'”
  • Kagame and his US proxy army then, an eight year investigation suggests, assassinated the Rwandan president by bombing his plane. They then invaded Rwanda, ethnically cleansing and killing thousands.       The resultant violence is what the Western propaganda system calls the genocide of the Hutus against the Tutsis, but the minority, US-backed Tutsi proxy army led by Kagame, not the majority Hutus, took over the country, in a military operation that was clearly well-planned and coordinated. Since the Kagame/Tutsi conquest of Rwanda, the US/Western client has used the seat of power to invade the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing millions.
  • Professor Emeritus of Finance Edward Herman and journalist David Peterson find in their book The Politics of Genocide:
  • “The Pentagon has very actively supported these invasions of the DRC, even more heavily than it supported the RPF's drive to take Kigali [the capitol of Rwanda]. This support led to the killing of many thousands of Hutu refugees in a series of mass slaughters (ca. 1994-1997), and also provided cover for a greater series of Kagame-Museveni [the latter the US-backed Ugandan leader] assaults on the DRC that have destabilized life in this large country of perhaps sixty million people, with millions perishing in the process.”
  • This “process” has been “compatible with Western interests and policy, as it” has “open[ed] … the DRC to a new surge of ruthless exploitation of precious gems, rare industrial minerals, and timber by Western companies in a different kind of “resource war”—a fine illustration of “shock therapy” with murderous human consequences for the Congolese people. This plunder is the equivalent of “one tsunami every six months” for more than a decade, but with large gains for a small business and military elite. In a series of UN reports, which coined the phrase “elite networks” to denote the “politically and economically powerful groups involved in the exploitation activities” that lie at the heart of the DRC genocide, we read that “The war economy controlled by the three elite networks [Kinshasa, Kigali, and Kampala] operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo dominates the economic activities of much of the Great Lakes region….Years of lawlessness and a Government incapable of protecting its citizens have allowed the armed groups to loot and plunder the country's resources with impunity….They have built up a self-financing war economy centered on mineral exploitation”—and sales to the transnationals that manufacture the personal computers and cell phones of our everyday lives.
  • The U.S.-supported leaders Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni have undeniably been key actors in the terrible bloodbaths of the DRC. Considering their U.S. support, these were benign bloodbaths, in contrast with killings in Darfur or Kosovo. In research for our book, we found that in only seventeen items in the large number of newspapers we surveyed did someone refer to deaths in the DRC as “genocide.” This amounted to one “genocide” reference for every 317,647 deaths (based on an estimated 5,400,000 deaths for the period under consideration [investigative journalist, author, and documentarian Andre Vltchek puts it at 6-8,000,000]). When we contrast this with how the same newspapers treated, say, the nefarious bloodbath of the Kosovo Albanians that was attributable to an official enemy, where only twelve deaths were necessary to receive one “genocide” reference, the basic outline of the politics of genocide could not be made more stark or clear.
  • Very big lies about Rwanda are now institutionalized and are part of the common (mis)understanding in the West. In reality, Rwanda's Paul Kagame is one of the great mass murderers of our time, far surpassing Uganda's former dictator Idi Amin. Yet, thanks to the remarkable myth structure that surrounds him, he enjoys immense popularity with his chief patron in Washington…
  • According to the US/Western “myth structure, ‘The United States did almost nothing to try to stop [the Hutu genocide],' in Samantha Power's view, but instead ‘stood on the sidelines' as ‘bystanders to genocide.' But this is doubly false. What the United States and its Western allies (Britain, Canada, and Belgium) really did was to sponsor the U.S.-trained Kagame; support his invasion of Rwanda from Uganda and the massive ethnic cleansing prior to April 1994; weaken the Rwandan state by forcing an economic recession and the RPF's penetration of the government and throughout the country; and then press for the complete removal of UN troops. They did this because they didn't want UN troops to stand in the way of Kagame's conquest of the country, even though Rwanda's Hutu authorities were urging the dispatch of more UN troops. … Whenever the United States colludes in a genocidal process, Power pretends that U.S. guilt, at worst, comes from remaining a mere “bystander”; never from acting as an accomplice, let alone a perpetrator.”
  • As noted by Hilzoy, a professor of philosophy specializing in ethics, Hillary Clinton, who certainly possessed key insider knowledge of the Rwanda-related events as they were unfolding with the involvement of her husband's regime, evidently did nothing to try to convince her husband to stop the actions he was carrying out that contributed towards the devastation of Rwanda and the region.
  • Acknowledging how this makes her look, Clinton and her husband have since claimed that in fact she did try to press Bill “to intervene in Rwanda”. However, as Hilzoy notes, these claims come exclusively from Hillary Clinton and her husband, and are corroborated by no other source. Indeed, all known evidence is to the contrary. The Chicago Tribune, quoted by Hilzoy, notes: “Despite lengthy memoirs by both Clintons and former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, any advice she gave on Rwanda had not been mentioned until her presidential campaign.”  Indeed, Hilzoy finds, her claimed advocacy “left no trace in the world.”
  • But worse, the very claims made by the Clintons, that “not intervening” in Rwanda is one of Bill's biggest regrets and that Hillary tried to get him to “intervene”, themselves reveal the Clintons' continued dishonesty and complicity in the crimes: they did intervene, to ensure that the US proxy army could conquer Rwanda. By saying they should haveintervened, the Clinton's are 1) lobbying for future US interventions by dishonestly claiming that these massacres occurred because the US did nothing, when in fact the US assisted the massacres; and 2) lying to cover both their criminal intervention and the rivers of blood flowing from the Western government and corporate-backed slaughter of millions upon millions of Africans for their natural resources.
If Hillary Clinton could have been US president in 1800, she would have fit right in, as she does today.

And, dear god, Trump and the others would be worse.

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 Robert Barsocchini focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry.  Updates on Twitter. 

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