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/

EmailGate and the Mystery of the Missing GAMMA

Last week’s Federal Bureau of Investigation release of materials relating to their investigation of Hillary Clinton has reignited the political firestorm surrounding EmailGate. How the Democratic nominee mishandled her emails while she was secretary of state is again front-page news, which is bad news for Hillary. Particularly because the FBI’s data dump demonstrates clearly that Clinton is either dumb or dishonest—and perhaps both.

Although Team Clinton has responded in their customary fashion, with lawyerly lies and evasions—nothing was “marked” classified, this is really about over-classification, classification is too complex for anybody to understand anyway—the FBI’s assessment has thoroughly debunked all of them. Hillary’s professed inability to even recognize classified information, thinking the “C” (for Confidential) meant alphabetical order, will now enter the pantheon of laughable Clinton infamy, alongside her husband’s debating the meaning of “is” while under oath.

The Bureau’s assessment establishes once and for all that there was classified information—and lots of it—on Hillary’s email server and bunches of Blackberries, many of which she lost. In fact, the FBI concluded that roughly 2,000 of her “unclassified” emails included information that was Confidential, the lowest level of classification.

The FBI examined 81 Clinton email chains, determining that they included classified information relating to the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, NSA, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency or NGA. In other words, Hillary compromised classified materials representing the full range of American espionage: human intelligence or HUMINT from CIA, signals intelligence or SIGINT from NSA, and imagery intelligence or IMINT from NGA...

http://observer.com/2016/09/emailgate-and-the-mystery-of-the-missing-gamma/

Clinton Emails: New Iran and Syria

The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.

 Negotiations to limit Iran's nuclear program will not solve Israel's security dilemma. Nor will they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program — the capability to enrich uranium. At best, the talks between the world's major powers and Iran that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May will enable Israel to postpone by a few months a decision whether to launch an attack on Iran that could provoke a major Mideast war. 

 Iran's nuclear program and Syria's civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. For Israeli leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of both countries. What Israeli military leaders really worry about -- but cannot talk about -- is losing their nuclear monopoly. An Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not only end that nuclear monopoly but could also prompt other adversaries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to go nuclear as well. The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today. 

If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself...

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328

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