Clinton’s National Security Strategy: Endless Wars of Aggression
By Stephen Lendman | June 16, 2016
Her deplorable record speaks for itself, publicly supporting all US wars of choice, naked aggression against nonbelligerent states, raping them, responsible for mass slaughter, destruction and appalling human misery.
Don’t let her deceptive rhetoric fool you. Urging escalated war on ISIS ignores its US creation along with likeminded terrorist groups – used as imperial foot soldiers.
America’s phony war on terror is a pretext for state terror, targeting sovereign independent nations worldwide, justifying homeland repression, turning planet earth into a battleground, risking its destruction.
The possibility of a Clinton presidency should terrify everyone. She deplores peace and stability, wants America leading aggressively in waging global wars – not to “defeat ISIS” or “disrupt and dismantle the growing terrorist infrastructure… around the world.”
To foster and facilitate it, help it spread, support it with US weapons, air power and ground forces, maintain a permanent state of war.
Russia and China are her prime targets of choice, wanting regime change by whatever methods it takes, her recklessness risking nuclear war. Her madness threatens humanity.
She urges stepped US military action against Syria, unilaterally imposed no-fly zones over parts of the country on the phony pretext of creating safe areas, US-controlled puppet rule replacing Assad.
She’s militantly pro-Israel/anti-Iranian, irresponsibly accusing its government of supporting terrorism, wanting its regional influence “counter(ed),” earlier saying “(w)e cannot view Iran and ISIS as separate challenges.”
She urges Congress “swiftly pass an updated authorization to use military force… The time for delay is over.”
She wants the nonexistent threat of homegrown terrorism addressed more aggressively, targeting “radical jihadism” and anyone opposing US imperial aims.
She supports full-blown tyranny replacing what remains of constitutional protections on the phony pretext of protecting national security at a time America’s only enemies are ones it invents.
Her disturbing response to Orlando shootings, saying “weapons of war have no place on our streets,” ignores her advocacy for using them aggressively against one sovereign state after another.
A Clinton presidency assures the horror of four more years of war, waged on humanity at home and abroad – risking a third global conflict with super-weapons able to end life on earth.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
Some 3,000 ‘Hezbollah-tied’ accounts await freeze
Press TV – June 11, 2016
As many as 3,000 more bank accounts, allegedly tied to the Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah, reportedly await freeze in the coming days under pressure from the United States.
Those to be affected include “employees, partners, customers affiliated with the party,” Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Friday, citing a source within Lebanon’s Central Bank.
On December 18, 2015, US President Barack Obama signed into law the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act.
The legislation says Washington will target those “knowingly facilitating a significant transaction or transactions for” Hezbollah or any individual, business or institution linked to the group.
As per the law, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has been tasked with releasing names of the entities it considers to be associated with the group.
Governor of Lebanon’s Central Bank Riad Salameh has so far ordered 100 accounts frozen in line with the Treasury’s instructions as any failure to abide by the law will result in US sanctions.
“If anyone is suspicious, there can be no leniency, even if the customers have millions of dollars, because the negative repercussions in not abiding by the [US] law will be catastrophic on the bank,” the source said.
Interviewed by the CNBC, Salameh recently said, “Our priority is to keep Lebanon on the international financial map, so we have taken a resolution that we will implement that US law in Lebanon, and we have put in place a structure to do this, to satisfy the objectives of that law.”
On Thursday, Hezbollah reacted to the remarks, saying Salameh’s position “shows that the monetary policy has lost its sovereignty.”
Hezbollah is credited with defending Lebanon against two wars launched by Israel, the US’s strongest ally in the region, in 2000 and 2006.
In recent months, Saudi Arabia, another staunch ally of the US, has also been targeting the resistance movement.
Earlier in the year, Riyadh imposed sanctions on four Lebanese firms and three individuals it accused of having links to Hezbollah, among its other measures against the movement.
Analysts say Hezbollah has come under such pressure due to its involvement in anti-terrorism military operations in neighboring Syria.
The resistance movement has been successfully helping the Syrian army fight Saudi-backed Takfiri militants in order to prevent the Syria conflict from spilling over to Lebanon.
US terror report on Iran a stupendous denial of Washington-Saudi terror reality
By Finian Cunningham | RT | June 7, 2016
Since 1984, the US has been labeling Iran a leading state sponsor of terrorism, a charge that was reiterated last week. However, global events explode Washington’s credibility and denial of reality.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, for example, this week reported that some 270 civilians were killed within 24 hours from shelling of Syria’s second city, Aleppo, by Al-Qaeda-affiliated terror groups.
Moscow said the surge in violence by these groups followed from the curbing of Russian air strikes at the request of Washington – purportedly to spare “moderate rebels” located in the same areas as Al-Qaeda terror brigades.
The latter include Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), both of which are internationally proscribed by the United Nations Security Council.
As noted by former British ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, the risible pretext of protecting “moderates” is a cynical cover for the unavoidable fact that the US is, in effect, siding with Al-Qaeda terrorism in Syria for the overthrow of the Assad government.
It has been reliably documented that the anti-government militia in Syria affiliated with Al-Qaeda, including Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, are supported materially and politically by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and NATO-member Turkey – all close allies of Washington.
Also in the news, just as the latest US State Department report came out pillorying Iran over terrorism, the United Nations condemned the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen for inflicting 60 percent of child deaths over the past year in the war-torn country.
The Saudi-led coalition includes the US and Britain which supplies warplanes and logistics for air raids purportedly aimed at defeating Houthi rebels who ousted the US-Saudi-backed regime in early 2015. The latest UN report also condemned the Saudi coalition for destroying hospitals and schools across Yemen, which had already been designated as the Arab region’s poorest country even before the US-Saudi military intervention began in March 2015.
Disgracefully, within days of the report being published UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon buckled under political pressure and removed Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners from a global blacklist of rights violations against children.
Nevertheless, while in Syria the terrorist campaign is being waged by Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups funded and weaponized indirectly by foreign governments. In Yemen a major part of the violence is attributable directly to the military forces of the same foreign governments. By any definition this is terrorism, either state-sponsored or state-directed.
In presenting its latest global terror report, the US State Department devotes the vast majority of its concern to the threat posed by Islamic State (also referred to as ISIL) and related Al-Qaeda franchises, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al Shabaab in Somalia.
“ISIL remain the greatest terrorism threat globally,” said the US State Department, adding: “ISIL-aligned groups have established branches in parts of the Middle East, North Africa, West Africa, the Russian North Caucasus , and South Asia.”
In the US press briefing at least 95 per cent of the content was connected to Al-Qaeda-linked terror groups. Only about five per cent dealt with Iran and its alleged sponsorship of terrorism.
After detailing ISIS terrorism, the State Department then makes the discrepant assertion: “The United States continues to work to disrupt Iran’s support for terrorism. Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism globally.”
If Iran is the “leading terror sponsor globally”, as Washington claims, then why is its latest global terror report preponderantly taken up with Al-Qaeda and various tentacle organizations?
Moreover, in the fleeting details on Iran in its report, the US bases its claim on the rather hackneyed allegation that “Iran continues to provide support to Hizballah [sic], Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various groups in Iraq and throughout the Middle East” as well as its support for “the Syrian regime.”
Iran scoffed at the allegations, saying that its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine is a legitimate alliance with liberation movements against US-backed Israeli state oppression.
As for Washington’s claim that Iranian support for Syria constitutes terror sponsorship, if it were a credible assessment then the US should at least be consistent in its logic and thereby should have included Russia in its latest terror report, given that Moscow is supporting the Syrian government militarily.
The US global terror report does not stand up to scrutiny. Its flagrant disconnect with reality betrays the study as having a political, or more bluntly, propaganda purpose.
The fact is that terrorist activity around the world is, by far, greatly more ascribed to Al-Qaeda-type groups. The US State Department says so itself. These groups are funded ideologically and logistically by Washington’s allies, principally Saudi Arabia. That connection of Saudi sponsorship of terror organizations has even been acknowledged previously by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the US Treasury Department, among other senior establishment sources.
Hezbollah’s, and by extension Iran’s, alleged involvement in terrorism is an equally politicized subject fraught with murky claims and counter-claims. The US and Israel designate Hezbollah as “terrorist” but the European Union and several European governments do not. Russia officially views Hezbollah as a legitimate political party, which is a member of Lebanon’s coalition government.
Washington’s antagonism to Hezbollah arises from a litany of alleged terrorist actions, including the bombing of a US marines barracks in Beirut in 1983, which killed 241 American troops – the single greatest US military loss since the Second World War.
Several US courts have convicted Hezbollah and Iran of involvement in the Beirut bomb massacre, as well as other atrocities in Lebanon. Hezbollah and Tehran reject many of these accusations. But even if there were some truth to the American claims, it could be reasonably argued that the actions constitute military combat, not terrorism. The US-backed Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and again in 2006 were themselves arguably acts of aggression, or state-terrorism.
Another disconnect in the latest US terror report highlighting Iran is the flurry of European trade agreements signed with Tehran since the conclusion of the international nuclear accord last year. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s trip to Finland last week was but the latest in a host of renewed European relations.
If Iran were such a terrorist pariah, as Washington asserts, would European governments really be courting Tehran with evident diplomatic respect?
It is estimated the US owes Iran upwards of $100 billion in assets frozen since the Islamic revolution in 1979. The US is also accused of dragging its feet on implementing sanctions relief under the terms of the P5+1 nuclear accord that came into effect on January 16 this year.
It seems obvious that one way for Washington to procrastinate on implementing the nuclear accord and the financial rewards due to Iran from unfrozen assets and European trade deals would be for the US to maintain its narrative accusing Iran of “sponsoring terrorism”.
Despite Washington’s narrative sounding increasingly hollow and in denial of its own documented links to global terrorism.
Hillary’s Foreign Policy Speech: Queen Galadriel Before Her Magic Mirror
By Gary Leupp | CounterPunch | June 6, 2016
Rachel Maddow, the famously progressive MSNBC show host, pronounced it “her greatest speech of the campaign.” Chris Matthews agreed, adding that it would “have a very strong appeal to the neocon movement.” He mentioned in particular Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and TV commentator, as someone likely to be impressed. “A very smart man,” opined Matthews, the conservative Democrat and “Hardball” host, causing the entire cosmos to shudder.
You’d think that that war in Iraq, which Kristol had tirelessly championed, had never happened. And that its results had been anything other than horrific for the entire Middle East.
Hillary Clinton’s fiery performance last Thursday night, intended to assert her credentials as a former secretary of state (with all the positive “experience” that’s supposed to entail), framed by no fewer than seventeen U.S. flags, was a strident reassertion of U.S. “exceptionalism” without apologies or even reflections on the recent past and her bloody role in it.
It was billed as a “major foreign policy address,” the sort of thing you might expect of a sitting president. And it was designed, of course, to make her look presidential, and to underscore her campaign’s declaration that she has the Democratic nomination all sewed up. But it was not in fact a foreign policy speech at all; Donald Trump is quite right to call it “a political speech” directed at him.
Maddow has occasionally shown signs of critical reasoning in her coverage of the U.S.’s imperialist wars. One has to wonder what she finds admirable in the speech. Because actually, Clinton said nothing new.
However unsubstantial, it was all over the news the next morning, competing with the stories about new fencing at the Cincinnati Zoo and Prince’s autopsy results. Meanwhile the networks systematically ignore the ongoing wars in Iraq and Syria generated by the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, and the European refugee crisis sparked by the regime-change wars in those countries as well as in Afghanistan and Libya. Like the monkeys adorning the Nikko Shrine, they see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
Some takeaway lines from the Clinton speech: “Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about Iran or its nuclear program.” It’s true that Trump is an uninformed blowhard and that Hillary in contrast knows a lot. She knows, for example, that the entire U.S. intelligence community, in two separate National Intelligence Estimates after 2003, concluded that Iran does not have a military nuclear program. She knows that the whole issue was hyped at the demand of the Israeli leaders who continuously demanded that the U.S. bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities (that in fact date back to the period of the Shah’s reign and supported by the U.S.’s “Atoms for Peace” program).
She also knows from experience the value of the Big Lie in obtaining mass acceptance for real or threatened military action.
Clinton has generally avoided specifics in discussing her plans for more war with one conspicuous exception: she has continuously stated that she strongly advocates a “no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors” in Syrian air space and on the ground in that country beset by civil war pitting a secular regime, mainly against terrorist and terrorist-aligned Islamist opponents.
For Hillary, Syria is the ideal battlefield: one that pits her vision of U.S. hegemony against both Russia (Syria’s patron and her main target) and the nebulous evil of Islamist terrorism in the world—on behalf of an imaginary middle force of democrats who will stay cozy with the U.S. and end support for armed groups opposing Israel.
Her plans are as much a recipe for war as the bogus humanitarian mission in Libya in 2011. They would, as estimated by former Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, require the deployment of 70,000 U.S. troops for their implementation.
In last week’s speech she was more circumspect. “We need to take out [ISIL’s] strongholds in Iraq and Syria,” she declared, “by intensifying the air campaign and stepping up our support for Arab and Kurdish forces on the ground. We need to keep pursuing diplomacy to end Syria’s civil war and close Iraq’s sectarian divide, because those conflicts are keeping ISIS alive. We need to lash up with our allies, and ensure our intelligence services are working hand-in-hand to dismantle the global network that supplies money, arms, propaganda and fighters to the terrorists.”
She didn’t mention that the money supplied to the terrorists is overwhelmingly from donors in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Gulf states closely allied with the U.S. Or that the current U.S. air campaign over Syria is, unlike that of Russia, illegal, opposed by the internationally recognized government in Damascus and lacking UN approval. Her “major foreign policy address” could not address such small details.
Hillary did not mention her own crowning achievement as secretary of state—the savage destruction of Libya involving the death of about 30,000 people, the unleashing of the ugliest forms of tribalism, and ISIL’s securing of a beachhead around Sirte—even once.
In contrast she made repeated references to NATO, well aware no doubt that most Americans aren’t clear at all about what that is but think it must be something good. Like the UN, or the International Red Cross. (I doubt that one in ten knows what the acronym stands for—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—or realizes that it has only been deployed well outside the North Atlantic region, in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and North Africa.)
“This is someone [Trump] who has threatened to abandon our allies in NATO,” Clinton thundered (as though the peoples of Europe had ever earnestly sought, or are begging to maintain that Cold War, specifically anti-Russian, alliance).
It’s true that Trump has—on occasion and inconsistently—labeled NATO “obsolete” and opined that it should have been dissolved years ago. Whether he truly believes this is unclear. As Hillary says, his “ideas are dangerously incoherent” and he can withdraw or deny such comments at any time. But Trump’s statements about NATO, however vague, are actually the most intelligent and welcome statements he’s made in the course of his campaign.
The fact is, beginning in 1999 at her husband Bill’s orders, the NATO alliance designed as a binding military pact uniting West European countries against the Soviet Union from 1949—that should have been dissolved in 1990 when the Warsaw Pact formed in response shut down—has relentlessly expanded to encircle Russia. That’s post-Cold War Russia, with a military budget about 7% of the U.S. figure. Some NATO leaders aim to ultimately swallow Ukraine—which just happens to have been part of the Russian state from the 1670s to the Bolshevik Revolution, when it was made a soviet socialist republic until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its economy including its munitions industry are inextricably interwoven with Russia’s; its eastern regions are peopled by ethnic Russians; it shares a 1,400 mile long border with Russia.
Does it not make sense that Moscow would see the incorporation of Ukraine, especially one headed by the current Russophobic leadership, into an anti-Russian military alliance as threatening and unacceptable?
Yet Hillary has been a ferocious advocate for the infinite expansion of the alliance, its wars that have produced dysfunctional U.S. client states (Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina) in the former Yugoslavia, and its provocative moves on Russia’s doorstep. But in her speech, avoiding any reference to that expansion—the key geopolitical change of the last quarter-century—she proclaimed: “Moscow has taken aggressive military action in Ukraine, right on NATO’s doorstep.” She never explains why that doorstep has advanced (despite Reagan’s promises to Gorbachev) to include Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania to begin with. Or why it has bordered Russia itself since the inclusion of the former soviet socialist republics of Estonia and Latvia, which share a 508 kilometer border with Russia.
The “military action in Ukraine” that she alludes to refers to separatists’ resistance to the U.S.-backed coup in February 2014, surely supported by Russia at some level, and surely by Russian public opinion, but you notice that the Pentagon has produced precious little evidence for large scale “military actions.” And the annexation of Crimea (Russian from 1783 to 1954, when it was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR within the old Soviet Union) was only a “military action” in that the 25,000 Russian troops stationed there by treaty were deployed to secure government buildings.
And do not expect Hillary to ever inform her audiences that Sevastopol on Crimean Peninsula is Russia’s only year-round ice-free port except Murmansk north of the Arctic Circle; that the Russian Black Sea Fleet has been headquartered there without interruption since 1783; and that the expulsion of the Russians and their replacement with NATO forces would constitute a truly existential threat to the Russian state.
It would in fact be hard to build a case convincing to the American people that all these countries need to be locked into an alliance with the U.S. and obliged to pay out 2% of their GDPs on military expenses in order to protect them from some imaginary Russian invasion. (From a rational standpoint, it would be precisely like persuading the Russian people that Moscow should head up an alliance including Canada, Mexico and Cuba to secure them against U.S. aggression.)
But the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine has been a pet project of the former Madame Secretary. Clinton chose as her Under Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, neocon and wife of the powerful neocon Republican pundit (John McCain advisor and recently declared Hillary supporter) Robert Kagan. Nuland already had a rich history of warmongering when she embarked on a plan to topple the elected government in Ukraine and replace it with one that would join NATO.
She boasted publically that the U.S. had spent $ 5 billion by 2014 in an effort to, as she put it so quaintly and dishonestly, “support Ukraine’s European aspirations.” The result was the coup in February 2014 and consequent civil war that has taken over 8,000 lives, including hundreds killed by the neo-fascist Azov Battalion which functions as a regiment of the National Guard.
The U.S. State Department echoed by the compliant media has methodically depicted these events as Russian interference, rather than the results of a U.S.-orchestrated “Color Revolution”-type regime change campaign. To anyone paying attention, the dishonesty, and the success of the propaganda prettifying the coup, is sickening.
Trump has, as Clinton notes, praised Vladimir Putin as someone to whom he’d award an A for leadership. She for her part calls him a “dictator,” a term she would never use for a U.S. ally such as Egypt’s Abdel Sisi or the Saudi king. She has compared the apparently popular president, who has deftly pushed Obama back from his 2013 threat to order a massive strike on Syria and cooperated in the conclusion of the Iran nuclear deal, to Hitler—an astonishing statement of historical illiteracy and propensity for sensationalism.
Hillary’s imperious message boils down to: We are the exceptional nation, which the world needs to maintain its “stability.”
“I believe in strong alliances; clarity in dealing with our rivals; and a rock-solid commitment to the values that have always made America great. And I believe with all my heart that America is an exceptional country – that we’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth. We are not a country that cowers behind walls. We lead with purpose, and we prevail.”
The peoples of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, know very well how “exceptional” a country the U.S. is, how seldom it “cowers behind walls,” how cheerfully and unapologetically it destroys countries using its “alliances”—even when the latter are jerry-rigged to provide a fig-leaf for what’s essentially unilateral action. Even when their member-lists are often padded with name-only participants such a tiny Pacific nations sometimes informed after the fact that they’re suscribers.
The youth of Iraq—93% of whom according to a recent poll view the U.S. as an enemy—know how U.S. “values” manifest themselves: in the form of “shock and awe” bombing, Abu Ghraib torture, Blackwater murders, and cowboy-managed “reconstruction” that in fact further divided and scourged an already ruined and humiliated country. There is nothing good that can be said about the war that Hillary so passionately supported, until it became politically impossible for her to continue to do so.
Madame Secretary looked regal Thursday night, in the worst way. She reminded me of the elfin Queen Galadriel, as played by Cate Blanchett, in The Lord of the Rings, in that scene where she stares into her magic mirror, sees a vision of the power of Sauron, and suddenly towers over Frodo, arms like dark hollows, arms flung high, and bellows:
“In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me, and despair!”
Trump and Clinton are both servants of the enchanted ring called Capital. It is not at all clear who is more darkly and fatefully bound, or whose foreign policy, applauded by more devoted followers, would be more terrible and cause the greater despair among the people of this planet.
In response to the warrior-queen awaiting coronation, Bernie Sanders has sadly avoided the whole question of U.S. imperialism. (Among other things, he never uses the term.) It’s as though he accepts Chris Matthew’s smug pronouncement, “The American people don’t care about foreign policy.” The best Bernie could do last week was to say: “… when it comes to foreign policy, we cannot forget that Secretary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in modern American history, and that she has been a proponent of regime change, as in Libya, without thinking through the consequences.”
Forgive me, Bernie—because I do of course hope you’ll win—but that comment was wimpish. Hillary’s Libya policy wasn’t a matter of not “thinking through consequences,” but a matter of calculated ruin of a modern state. It’s the difference from the “blunder” of accidental manslaughter and well-planned murder. (Recall how Madame Secretary cackled with hilarity after Col. Gadhafy was sodomized with a knife and assassinated in the desert by NATO’s friends.)
Like the CNN anchors who sometimes mention in passing Hillary’s “foreign policy blunders such as Libya,” Sanders cannot yet call out evil for what it is, but has to chalk it up to well-meaning mistakes lacking forethought.
But that level of criticism is the best the system can provide, the most it will allow. Mistakes were made. There were some intelligence flaws. There were blunders. To paraphrase Erich Segal’s Love Story: being the exceptional power means never having to say you’re sorry. You just acknowledge you fucked up, because hey, things like that happen. And let’s move on.
Had Bernie been the antiwar, anti-imperialist candidate throughout, rather than just repeating his (totally valid) tirade against Wall Street, he might have further sharpened his differences with Clinton. If he loses in California, and then betrays his following with a Clinton endorsement, he will be saying that more wars for regime change and more confrontation with Russia is worth some changes in party rules and some meaningless clauses on the party platform.
I would hope that any Bernie supporters (or anyone at all) who watched last night’s speech, or have read the on-line transcript, would buckle down on their opposition to this creature of Wall Street and the Democratic Party establishment. Better to vote not at all, if Clinton’s the nominee—and instead think about how best to topple whichever candidate wins.
The “billionaire class” that Bernie decries wants badly to suck you in. That’s why the party bosses praise Sanders for “bringing so many new young people into the process”—the better to eat you, my dear! They want you to love this queen, even as you despair of ever electing anybody better.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie
Better, surely, to destroy the Ring that is the rigged economy, rigged political process and murderous foreign policy that Hillary so personifies.
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion.
Hillary Clinton: Electing a Foreign Spy for President?
By James Petras | June 6, 2016
During her 4 years as Secretary of State of the United States (2009-2014), Hillary Clinton controlled US foreign policy. She had access to the most confidential information and state documents, numbering in the tens of thousands, from all of the major government departments and agencies, Intelligence, FBI, the Pentagon, Treasury and the office of the President. She had unfettered access to vital and secret information affecting US policy in all the key regions of the empire.
Today, Mme. Clinton’s critics have focused on the technical aspects of her violations of State Department procedures and guidelines regarding handling of official correspondences and her outright lies on the use of her own private e-mail server for official state business, including the handling of highly classified material in violation of Federal Records laws, as well as her hiding official documents from the Freedom of Information Act and concocting her own system exempt from the official oversight which all other government officials accept.
For many analysts, therefore, the issue is procedural, moral and ethical. Mme. Clinton had placed herself above and beyond the norms of State Department discipline. This evidence of her arrogance, dishonesty and blatant disregard for rules should disqualify her from becoming the President of the United States. While revelations of Clinton’s misuse of official documents, her private system of communication and correspondence and the shredding of tens of thousands of her official interchanges, including top secret documents, are important issues to investigate, these do not address the paramount political question: On whose behalf was Secretary Clinton carrying out the business of US foreign policy, out of the review of government oversight?
The Political Meaning and Motivation of Clinton’s High Crimes Against the State
Secretary Clinton’s private, illegal handling of official US documents has aroused a major FBI investigation into the nature of her activities. This is separate from the investigation by the Office of the Inspector General and implies national security violations.
There are several lines of inquiry against Mme. Clinton:
(1) Did she work with, as yet unnamed, foreign governments and intelligence services to strengthen their positions and against the interest of the United States?
(2) Did she provide information on the operations and policy positions of various key US policymakers to competitors, adversaries or allies undermining the activities of military, intelligence and State Department officials?
(3) Did she seek to enhance her personal power within the US administration to push her aggressive policy of serial pre-emptive wars over and against veteran State Department and Pentagon officials who favored traditional diplomacy and less violent confrontation?
(4) Did she prepare a ‘covert team’, using foreign or dual national operatives, to lay the groundwork for her bid for the presidency and her ultimate goal of supreme military and political power?
Contextualizing Clinton’s Clandestine Operations
There is no doubt that Mme. Clinton exchanged minor as well as major official documents and letters via her private e-mail system. Personal, family and even intimate communications may have been carried on the same server. But the key issue is that a large volume of highly confidential government information flowed to Clinton via an unsecured private ‘back channel’ allowing her to conduct state business secretly with her correspondents.
Just who were Secretary Clinton’s most enduring, persistent and influential correspondents? What types of exchanges were going on, which required avoiding normal oversight and a wanton disregard for security?
Clinton’s covert war policies, which included the violent overthrow of the elected Ukraine government, were carried out by her ‘Lieutenant’ Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a virulent neo-conservative holdover from the previous Bush Administration and someone committed to provoking Russia and to enhancing Israel’s power in the Middle East. Clinton’s highly dangerous and economically destabilizing ‘brainchild’ of militarily encircling China, the so-called ‘pivot to Asia’, would have required clandestine exchanges with elements in the Pentagon – out of the State Department and possibly Executive oversight.
In other words, within the Washington political circuit, Secretary Clinton’s escalation of nuclear war policies toward Russia and China required secretive correspondences which would not necessarily abide with the policies and intelligence estimates of other US government agencies and with private business interests.
Clinton was deeply engaged in private exchanges with several unsavory overseas political regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Israel, Honduras and Turkey involving covert violent and illegal activities. She worked with the grotesquely corrupt opposition parties in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil
Clinton’s correspondence with the Honduran armed forces and brutal oligarchs led to the military coup against the elected President Zelaya, its violent aftermath and the phony election of a pliable puppet. Given the government-death squad campaign against Honduran civil society activists, Clinton would certainly want to cover up her direct role in organizing the coup. Likewise, Mme. Clinton would have destroyed her communications with Turkish President Erdogan’s intelligence operations in support of Islamist terrorist-mercenaries in Syria and Iraq.
Secretary Clinton’s e-mail would have shown her commitment to the Saudis when they brutally invaded Bahrain and Yemen to suppress independent civil society organizations and regional political rivals.
But it is Clinton’s long-term, large-scale commitment to Israel that goes far beyond her public speeches of loyalty and fealty to the Jewish state. Hillary Clinton’s entire political career has been intimately dependent on Zionist money, Zionist mass media propaganda and Zionist Democratic Party operations.
In exchange for Clinton’s dependence on political support from the Zionist power configuration in the US, she would have become the major conduit of confidential information from the US to Israel and the transmission belt promoting Israel-centric policies within the US government.
The entire complex of Clinton-Israel linkages and correspondences has compromised the US intelligence services, the State Department and Pentagon.
Secretary Clinton went to extraordinary lengths to serve Israel, even undermining the interests of the United States. It is bizarre that she would resort to such a crude measure, setting up a private e-mail server to conduct state business. She blithely ignored official State Department policy and oversight and forwarded over 1,300 confidential documents and 22 highly sensitive top-secret documents related to the ‘Special Access Program’. She detailed US military and intelligence documents on US strategic policies on Syria, Iraq, Palestine and other vital regimes. The Inspector General’s report indicates that ‘she was warned’ about her practice. It is only because of the unusual stranglehold Tel Aviv and Israel’s US Fifth Column have over the US government and judiciary that her actions have not been prosecuted as high treason. It is the height of hypocrisy that government whistleblowers have been persecuted and jailed by the Obama Administration for raising concerns within the Inspector General system of oversight, while Secretary Clinton is on her way to the Presidency of the United States!
Conclusion
Many of Clinton’s leading critics, among them two dozen former CIA agents, have presented a myth that Hillary’s main offence is her ‘carelessness’ in handling official documents and her deliberate deceptions and lies to the government.
These critics have trivialized, personalized and moralized what is really deliberate, highly politicized state behavior. Mme. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not ‘careless in managing an insecure mail server’. If Clinton was engaged in political liaison with foreign officials she deliberately used a private email server to avoid political detection by security elements within the US government. She lied to the US government on the use and destruction of official state documents because the documents were political exchanges between a traitor and its host.
The 22 top secret reports on ‘Special Access Programs’ which Clinton handled via her private computer provided foreign governments with the names and dates of US operatives and proxies; allowed for counter-responses inflicting losses of billions of dollars in program damages and possibly lost lives.
The Inspector General Report (IGP) deals only with the surface misdeeds. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has gone a step further in identifying the political linkages, but faces enormous obstacles from Hillary’s domestic allies in pursuing a criminal investigation. The FBI, whose director is a political appointee, has suffered a series of defeats in its attempts to investigate and prosecute spying for Israel, including the AIPAC espionage case of Rosen and Weismann and in their long held opposition to the release of the notorious US-Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard. The power of the Zionists within the government halted their investigation of a dozen Israeli spies captured in the US right after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Clinton’s choice of conducting secret private communications, despite several years of State Department warnings to abide by their strict security regulations, is an indication of her Zionist power base, and not a mere reflection of her personal hubris or individual arrogance.
Clinton has circulated more vital top-secret documents and classified material than Jonathan Pollard.
President Obama and other top Cabinet officials share her political alliances, but they operate through ‘legitimate’ channels and without compromising personnel, missions, funding or programs.
The executive leadership now faces the problem of how to deal with a traitor, who may be the Democratic Party nominee for US President, without undermining the US quest for global power. How do the executive leadership and intelligence agencies back a foreign spy for president, who has been deeply compromised and can be blackmailed? This may explain why the FBI, NSA, and CIA hesitate to press charges; hesitate to even seriously investigate, despite the obvious nature of her offenses. Most of all it explains why there is no indication of the identity of Secretary Clinton’s correspondents in the various reports so far available.
As Sherlock Holmes would say, “We are entering in deep waters, Watson”.
Hillary Comes Out as the War Party Candidate
By Diana Johnstone | CounterPunch | June 3, 2016
On June 2, a few days before the California primary, Hillary Clinton gave up trying to compete with Bernie Sanders on domestic policy. Instead, she zeroed in on the soft target of Donald Trump’s most “bizarre rants” in order to present herself as experienced and reasonable. Evidently taking her Democratic Party nomination for granted, she is positioning herself as the perfect candidate for hawkish Republicans.
Choosing to speak in San Diego, home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, on a platform draped with 19 American flags and preceded by half an hour of military marching music, Hillary Clinton was certain of finding a friendly audience for her celebration of American “strength”, “values” and “exceptionalism”. Cheered on by a military audience, Hillary was already assuming the role to which she most ardently aspires: that of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.
Whenever Hillary speaks, one must look for the lies. The biggest lies in this speech were lies of omission. No mention of her support for the invasion of Iraq, no mention of the disaster she wrought in Libya, no mention of her contribution to pursuing endless death and destruction in the Middle East.
But she also lied in claiming partial credit for the Iran nuclear deal, which she had tended to block, and most profoundly in presenting herself as a champion of diplomacy. As Secretary of State, she blocked diplomacy that would have prevented or ended conflict, most notoriously concerning Libya, where even senior U.S. military officers were told to cut off their contacts with Gaddafi agents seeking a peaceful compromise.
The Washington Post reported prior to the speech that her campaign “hopes there are many more national-security-minded Republicans and independents who would vote for her, even grudgingly, rather than see Trump win the White House.”
The Washington Post noted that the state of California’s “defense industry and military bases lend a backdrop for her speech.” Indeed! Hillary Clinton is quite simply catering to the military-industrial complex, as she has been doing throughout her career. She is catering to the arms industry, which needs to keep the American people scared of various “threats” in order to continue draining the nation’s wealth into their profitable enterprises. She needs the support of military men and women who believe in all those threats invented by intellectuals in think tanks and editorial offices.
This is the core of the “national-security-minded” electorate that Hillary is targeting. She warned that Trump would jeopardize the wonderful bipartisan foreign policy that has been keeping us great and safe for decades.
In reality, such “national-security-minded” leaders as Dick Cheney and Clinton herself have led the United States into wars that create chaos, inspire enemies and endanger everybody’s national security. Despite the geographically safe position of the United States, it is that bipartisan War Party that has created genuine threats to U.S. national security by prodding the hornets’ nest of religious fanaticism in the Middle East and provoking nuclear-armed Russia by aggressive military exercises right up to its borders.
The basis of Hillary Clinton’s world view is that notorious “American exceptionalism” which Obama has also celebrated. If we don’t rule the world, she suggested, “others will rush in to fill the vacuum”. She clearly cannot conceive of dealing respectfully with other nations. The United States, she proclaimed, is “exceptional – the last best hope on earth.”
Not all people on earth feel that way. So they must be brought to heel. In practice, this “exceptionalism” means acting above the law. It means a unipolar world policed by U.S. armed forces. In practice, Hillary’s devotion to “our allies” means fighting wars in the Middle East for the benefit of Israel and of Saudi Arabia, whose arms purchases are indispensable for our military industrial complex. It means bombing countries and overthrowing foreign governments, from Honduras to Syria and beyond, in order to help them conform to “our values”.
Trump is groping clumsily, at times idiotically, toward a major shift in US foreign policy. He is ill-prepared for the task. If ever elected, he would have to fire the neocons and take on a whole new team of experts to educate and guide him. That would be something of a miracle.
But some of Hillary’s reproaches aimed at Trump’s “reckless, risky” foreign policy statements are not as self-evident as she assumes. For example, his statement that he would sit down to negotiate with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Is that really such a crazy idea?
North Korea is a small country, whose leaders call themselves “communist” but who are essentially a dynasty that emerged from the resistance against Japanese invaders in World War II. Their quarrel with South Korea stemmed from the domination of Japanese collaborators in that part of the country. That is practically ancient history, and today North Korea feels threatened – and is indeed threatened – by the everlasting U.S. military presence on its borders. A small isolated country like North Korea is not a real “threat” to the world. Even with nuclear weapons. Its much-vaunted nuclear weapons are clearly meant both to defend itself from attack and as a bargaining chip.
So would it be so terrible to sit down and find out what the bargain might be? Basically, North Korean leaders would like to make a deal to lessen the U.S. threat and bring their country out of isolation. Why not discuss this, since it could lead to the end of the “North Korean threat” which is artificial anyway?
Hillary’s reaction is typical. She boasts that her solution is to build up an expensive missile defense shield in Japan and increase everybody’s military buildup in the region. As usual, she goes for the military solution, ridiculing the notion of diplomacy.
Hillary Clinton’s speech will certainly sound convincing to the “national security minded” because it is so familiar. The same as George W. Bush but delivered with much greater polish. America is good, America is great, we must remain strong to save the world. This is the road to disaster.
Hillary Clinton is the clear candidate of the War Party.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
Tim Canova’s Statements Are Even More Pro-Israel than Wasserman Schultz
By Sam Husseini | May 31, 2016
Congressional candidate Tim Canova, a professor of law and public finance, is widely depicted as being a progressive challenger to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Wasserman Schultz of course chairs the Democratic National Committee and has rightly come in for lots of criticism on a host of issues.
Canova was recently endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Sanders, at the New York debate with Hillary Clinton in April had showed some minimal concern for rights of Palestinians, rare in U.S. politics, saying that Israel’s attack on Gaza was “disproportionate.”
Recently however, on MSNBC, Canova criticized Wasserman Schultz for being unreliable on a host of issues, then added: “even support for Israel, people don’t know where she stands.”
The subject of Israel doesn’t come up in many pieces on Canova, including his lengthy interview with Glenn Greenwald early this year.
As the Jewish Daily Forward recently noted: “when it comes to Israel and the Middle East, Canova is trying to take on Wasserman Schultz from the right.”
Canova’s website states he “visited Israel many times … returning to his former kibbutz as a volunteer time and again, and participating in workshops on citizenship, war, and counter-terrorism at Tel Aviv University.”
He’s also adopted an extremely anti-Iran position. Writes AP : “Despite the big fundraising haul, Canova faces a daunting task to defeat a strong Jewish Democratic incumbent in a district dominated by Jewish and Hispanic voters, where U.S. relations with Israel and Cuba are debated as often as jobs and the economy. … Canova supports ending the U.S. embargo on Cuba but believes it must be done ‘in stages.’ He said ‘trade liberalization needs political liberalization.’ He thinks the landmark Iran nuclear agreement was filled with ‘holes’ and that it was wrong to give Iran access to $100 billion in frozen assets.”
Canova has said: “I would like to see a Palestinian state, [but] to me, I don’t see how you have one as long as all of these neighbors of Israel still don’t recognize its right to exist … as long as Iran is still funding Hamas, [as long as] Saudi Arabia has telethons for families of suicide bombers!”
In contrast, apparently Saudi Arabia’s misogyny, authoritarianism, blood soaked interventions and invasions and fine with Canova. Well, the same would seem to be true regarding Israel’s bigotry and carnage.
I should note I use the term “pro-Israel” with implied scare quotes. An increasingly aggressive Israel could be “successful” in perpetuating oppression. And it could be disastrous for many, including many of the Jewish citizens of Israel.
The funny part is that I’ve promoted Canova on Institute for Public Accuracy news releases. But then again, unlike lots of folks, I try not to have a litmus test for people. I try to put people on news releases for what they’re best at. And Canova seems sharp and good on financial issues, so I use him on that without prejudice for how he is when it comes to Israel.
It often doesn’t work the other way. I’ve had odd looks for working with “rightwingers” on some issues. I find that there’s often a whole series of double standards associated with that. If you only want to work with people who agree with you across the board, fine. Do that. If you’re flexible about who you work with, fine, do that. But there’s something really wrong when people have a litmus test sometimes, but not others.
Fake “Humanitarians” and Fake “Leftists” taking Canada down the wrong path
Special Envoy of the UNHCR addresses the Security Council meeting on the continuing conflict in Syria. Credit: UN Photo/ Mark Garten/ flickr
By Mark Taliano | American Herald Tribune | May 30, 2016
There’s really no excuse for supporting the NATO/terror position. We’ve seen the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, now Syria, all built on lies, all beneath the guise of “humanitarian interventions”. Since people with any sense of historical memory can not legitimately plead ignorance, supporters of the terrorist invasion of Syria fall into the category of “fake humanitarians”. They aren’t “progressive” or “left” when they support the criminal violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Canadian peace activist Ken Stone, recently returned from Syria, expresses similar sentiments in his newly released book, Defiant Syria|dispatches from the Second Tour of Peace to Syria. He explains,
“The point for me is to ask why otherwise intelligent people can fall for such shit (referring to a 2015 New Internationalist magazine article: “The forgotten revolution of Syria”), and not once but repeatedly. It’s not as if Syria is the very first government targeted for regime change by the USA. It’s not that people are unaware of the fact that the first casualty of war is the truth … there is never a shortage of “leftists” in the West who can be either bought or convinced through incredible naivété, warped political outlook, or Eurocentric arrogance, that the motives of Empire are good.”
People such as Ken, who have visited Syria and have seen with their own eyes the devastation wrought by Western-supported terrorists against civilization, have less tolerance for the lies, the propaganda and the “fake humanitarians” who enable it all.
Stone doesn’t mince words when he describes some of his on-the-ground observations of Homs, Syria; observations fortified by his historical memory of NATO’s imperial destruction elsewhere:
To their detriment, the fake “humanitarians” and pseudo “leftists” are shielded from such on-the-ground realities.
In a later chapter, “Palmyra: Bride Of The Desert”, Stone also bemoans the self-proclaimed “leftists” who cast the Russians as “imperialists” and as guilty as the West in the war against Syria – conveniently forgetting that Russia is legally in Syria, while NATO is not:
“It’s true,” he writes, “that Russia is unfortunately no longer a socialist country. However, it doesn’t act like an imperialist country either. Mr. Putin consistently respects the sovereignty of other countries, such as Syria, and speaks up at the United Nations for the observance of international law, which the USA, priding itself as “the exceptional country” and the “sole indispensable country”, tramples on almost every day.”
This resonates with the author’s earlier piece, “Western Hegemony vs Russian Sanity”, and the “Saker’s” observations of the differences between the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model” and the “Russian Multi-polar Model”.
Sustainable evidence demonstrates, for example, that the current Russian multi-polar model respects the rule of international law, ideological and cultural pluralism, and the use of military force as a last resort.
The illegal Western war of aggression against Syria, on the other hand, is consistent with the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model” which defies the rule of international law, negates ideological and cultural pluralism, and uses military violence as a first resort.
The West’s invasion contradicts the rule of international law: Russia is in Syria legally, whereas the West is not; it negates Syria’s ideological and cultural pluralism and seeks to replace it with a Wahhabist stooge government or an assortment of stooge governments in balkanized states; and it demonstrates the West’s propensity to use military violence as a first resort – the invasion, after all, was planned well in advance.
Given the fact of the West’s criminality, consistent with the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperialist Model”, and the concurrent failures of the “fake humanitarians” and the fake “left” to reconcile themselves to evidence-based findings and historical memory, Stone reiterates some concrete steps that should be taken by those of us who support foreign policy trajectories consistent with peace and the rule of international law, rather than the current reality of war and barbarism.
Important steps would include normalizing diplomatic relations with Syria, ending illegal sanctions, withdrawing from all criminal military interventions against Syria, and withdrawing from NATO.
Canada needs to assert an independent foreign policy, and it needs to reject the current barbarity implicit in its status as a vassal appendage of the Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model. This is what Real Change would look like.
Mark is a retired high school teacher.
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Aaron Siri’s Book: Vaccines, Amen
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we’ve been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
And he does. … continue
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