Hillary Clinton and the Brutal Murder of Gaddafi

On October 20, 2011, Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a mob of NATO-backed ‘rebels’, after first being beaten and violated in the most barbaric fashion. History leaves no doubt that not only was the Libyan leader murdered on this day but Libya itself.

The regime-change crew who dominate Western governments have a long indictment sheet against their names. Since 9/11 they have wrought havoc and human misery on a grand scale in their determination to reshape and own a world that has never been theirs to own. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – Syria currently embroiled in a pitiless conflict for its survival as a secular, non-sectarian state – this is the miserable legacy of nations which speak the language of democracy while practising the politics of domination.

Of the aforementioned victims of Western imperialism, there is a strong argument to be made that Libya’s destruction constitutes an especially grievous crime. After all, in 2010, the year before it experienced its ‘revolution’, the United Nations Development Programme considered Libya a high development country in the Middle East and North Africa. In concrete terms this status translated to a literacy rate of 88.4%, a life expectancy of 74.5 years, gender equality, and various other positive indicators. In addition, Libya enjoyed 4.2% economic growth in 2010 and could boast of foreign assets in excess of $150 billion.

Compare this record to Libya in 2016. According to testimony provided by US Army General David Rodriguez to the US Senate Armed Services Committee in March, it is a failed state, with the general estimating it would take ‘“10 years or so” to achieve long-term stability in what is a “fractured society”’.

There is currently no single government or authority in Libya whose writ runs in the entire country. Instead three competing authorities control their own fiefdoms. The internationally recognized government is the Government of National Accord (GNC), led by Fayez al-Sarraj, is based in the capital, Tripoli. There is also the Government of National Salvation, led by Khalifa Ghwell, which is also based in Tripoli. The third centre of power, meanwhile, is located in Tobruk in the east of the country. It is headed by an anti-Islamist general, Khalifa Haftar, who leads the Libyan National Army (LNA). Economically, oil revenues, responsible for 90% of revenue under Gaddafi, have halved, violence is widespread, and since 2011 Daesh has managed to gain a foothold, though in recent months the terrorist organization has come under huge pressure in its stronghold of Sirte from forces representing the GNC...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/21/hillary-clinton-and-the-brutal-murder-of-qaddafi/

WARS, CONSPIRACIES AND SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL

As we head into the home stretch of the presidential campaign, ever-greater scrutiny will be directed at the candidates, their policy decisions and their political and personal connections. While both the war in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s handling of her private email server have been a focus of the media since the primaries, little has been made of how her emails shed light on the build-up and ultimate failure of the war in Libya.

At the center of those emails is Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton ally and aide.

Though it is not clear that any of the emails sent between them suggest illegal conduct, their correspondence raises serious ethical concerns — including the possibility that Blumenthal was pushing Clinton to support a war whose pursuit might end up benefiting him financially.

A Taste for Conspiracies

Blumenthal got his start in politics campaigning locally for John F. Kennedy in 1960. He left Chicago to attend Brandeis University, outside of Boston, and while there joined the anti-Vietnam war group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). After graduating, he became part of the circle of progressive journalists emerging in the Boston area in the 1970s.

He spent much of his career writing for The Washington Post and The New Yorker. He met the Clintons in 1987, but did not join the Clinton administration until Bill Clinton’s second term in 1996.

Over the years, Blumenthal was known for two things: his books about conspiracies behind the assassination of both President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. — and his loyalty to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In 2003, he wrote a book claiming that the Clinton White House had been the victim of serial right-wing conspiracies. Reviewing the book for The Nation, journalist Tom Wicker said it could sometimes be “detailed and fascinating” but failed to provide any dispassionate or objective account of the Clinton years...

http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/09/28/wars-conspiracies-sidney-blumenthal/

The US War on Terror Has Cost $5 Trillion and Increased Terrorism by 6,500%

(ANTIMEDIA) — On September 11, 2001, one of the most tragic events in recent American history took place. Close to 3,000 civilians lost their lives in horrific terror attacks that took place on American soil. Fifteen years later, it is time to ask the question: have our counterterror efforts helped to reduce the amount of terrorism in the world? Or at the very least, have they tried to make the world safer?

According to a report released by Dr. Neta Crawford, professor of political science at Brown University, spending by the United States Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Veteran Affairs since 9/11 is now close to $5 trillion USD. Before we have the chance to ask how a country that has racked up over $19.3 trillion USD in debt can spend $5 trillion USD on war, the focus of this article is to ask: What has all of this spending achieved?

As Reader Supported News reported at the end of last year, terrorism has increased 6,500 percent since 2002 (they probably should rename it “the war of terror”). In 2014, the outlet noted, it was reported that 74 percent of all terror-related casualties occurred in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Syria. As stated by Paul Gottinger, a staff reporter for Reader Supported News, out of the aforementioned countries, “only Nigeria did not experience either U.S. air strikes or a military occupation in that year.”

Omitted from that assessment is the fact that the U.S. has been meddling in Nigeria for some time now. Why wouldn’t they? Until recently, Nigeria was Africa’s largest oil producer, as well as the continent’s largest economy until last month.

Hillary Clinton herself refused repeated requests from the CIA to place Boko Haram, the al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked terror group wreaking havoc across Nigeria (statistically they are far more deadly than ISIS), on the U.S. official list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Further, it was Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya that helped catapult Boko Haram into the menace it is today. In 2009, Boko Haram was a small-scale group with very limited weaponry. Following the invasion of Libya and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan armories were looted, and much of the weaponry was sent over to Syria. However, Boko Haram was able to capitalize on these looted weapons and the instability that rippled throughout Africa following the NATO-led war in Libya. As Peter Weber stated in The Week:

“[Boko Haram’s weaponry] shifted from relatively cheap AK-47s in the early days of its post-2009 embrace of violence to desert-ready combat vehicles and anti-aircraft/ anti-tank guns.”

http://theantimedia.org/us-war-terror-5-trillion/

Hillary Clinton On Gaddafi: We came, We Saw, He Died

Hillary Clinton "We Came, We Saw, He Died" (Gaddafi)

Hillary Emails, Gold Dinars and Arab Springs

Buried amid tens of thousands of pages of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s secret emails, now being made public by the US Government, is a devastating email exchange between Clinton and her confidential adviser, Sid Blumenthal. It’s about Qaddafi and the US-coordinated intervention in 2011 to topple the Libyan ruler. It’s about gold and a potentially existential threat to the future of the US dollar as world reserve currency. It’s about Qaddafi’s plans then for the gold-based Dinar for Africa and the Arab oil world.

Two paragraphs in a recently declassified email from the illegal private server used by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the US-orchestrated war to destroy Libya’s Qaddafi in 2011 reveal a tightly-held secret agenda behind the Obama Administration’s war against Qaddafi, cynically named “Responsibility to Protect.”

Barack Obama, an indecisive and weak President, delegated all presidential responsibility for the Libya war to his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, who was an early backer of an Arab “regime change,” using the secret Muslim Brotherhood, invoked the new, bizarre principle of “responsibility to protect” (R2P) to justify the Libyan war, which she quickly turned into a NATO-led war. Under R2P, a silly notion promoted by the networks of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Clinton claimed, with no verifiable proof, that Qaddafi was bombing innocent Libyan civilians in the Benghazi region.

According to a New York Times report at the time, citing Obama Administration senior sources, it was Hillary Clinton, backed by Samantha Power, then a senior aide at the National Security Council and today Obama’s UN Ambassador; and Susan Rice, then Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, and now National Security Adviser. That triad pushed Obama into military action against Libya’s Qaddafi. Clinton, flanked by Powers and Rice, was so powerful that Clinton managed to overrule Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, and John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief, today CIA head.

Secretary of State Clinton was also knee-deep in the conspiracy to unleash what came to be dubbed the “Arab Spring,” the wave of US-financed regime changes across the Arab Middle East, part of the Greater Middle East project unveiled in 2003 by the Bush Administration after occupation of Iraq. The first three target countries of that 2011 US “Arab Spring”–an action in which Washington used its “human rights” NGOs such as Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy, in cahoots as usual, with the Open Society Foundations of billionaire speculator, George Soros, along with US State Department and CIA operatives–were Ben Ali’s Tunisia, Mubarak’s Egypt and Qaddafi’s Libya.

Now the timing and targeting of Washington’s 2011 “Arab Spring” destabilizations of select Middle East states assume a new light in relation to just-released declassified Clinton emails to her private Libya “adviser” and friend, Sid Blumenthal. Blumenthal is the slick lawyer who defended then-President Bill Clinton in the Monika Lewinsky and other sex scandal affairs when Bill was President and facing impeachment...

http://journal-neo.org/2016/03/17/hillary-emails-gold-dinars-and-arab-springs/

Wiki: Sidney Blumenthal

Sidney Stone Blumenthal (/ˈbluːmənθɔːl/; born November 6, 1948) is an American journalist, activist, writer and former political aide. He is a former aide to President Bill Clinton; a long-time confidant to Hillary Clinton; and a journalist, especially on American politics and foreign policy. He was editor of several departments and wrote for several publications including The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. After 2000, he published several essays critical of the administration of President George W. Bush.[1][2][3][4] He is the father of Max Blumenthal, a journalist and political activist...

...Blumenthal joined the 2008 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign as a "senior advisor" in November 2007.[17] While on a trip to advise Clinton on her presidential campaign, Blumenthal was arrested for driving while intoxicated in Nashua, New Hampshire, on January 7, 2008. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor DWI charge.[18]

After her January 2009 appointment as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton wanted to hire Blumenthal. However, Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked his selection due to lingering anger among President Barack Obama's aides over Blumenthal's role in promoting negative stories about Obama during the Democratic primary.[8] According to a report in the New York Times, "Emanuel talked with Mrs. Clinton ... and explained that bringing Mr. Blumenthal on board was a no-go. The bad blood among his colleagues was too deep, and the last thing the administration needed, he concluded, was dissension and drama in the ranks. In short, Mr. Blumenthal was out."[8]

Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton, earned about $10,000 a month as a full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation. During the 2011 uprising in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi, Blumenthal prepared, from public and other sources, about 25 memos which he sent as emails to Clinton in 2011 and 2012, which she shared through her aide, Jake Sullivan, with senior State Department personnel. In the form of intelligence briefings, the memos sometimes touted his business associates and, at times contained inaccurate information.[19][20]

The tabloid New York Post asserted that Blumenthal's "intel was shoddy, with basic errors like mixing up Libyan politicians with similar names. In one instance, Blumenthal asserted that a businessman named Najib Obeida was among 'the most influential' of the Libyan prime minister's new economic advisers—without mentioning that Blumenthal was advising a group of contractors courting Obeida as a potential business partner."[21]...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Blumenthal