PART 2
- “[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.
- More on Lindh here and here.
- 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 Clinton again 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 more people.
- 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 Clinton
- 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.
- According to The New York Times, the deciding push to commit aggression against Libya came from Hillary Clinton.
- “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 a reference 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.
- More.
- 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.
- The US has been trying to install a puppet government in Syria since about 1948; it agreed with Britain “to use Arab extremists – including the Muslim Brotherhood – to effect regime change in Syria” in 1957, planned “another round of regime change in Syria” in 1991, and in 2006/7 began trying to stoke sectarian divisions and paranoia to promote an uprising against and violent overreaction by Assad, according to Wikileaks documents and US government sources like Wesley Clark.
- 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”)
- Documentary on the coup.
- 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.
Posted by Ainhoa Aristizabal — Unruly Hearts editor
UNRULY HEARTS 