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Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

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#1 ·
Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Firstly, this is an excellent interview, quite well worth your time (it runs about 27 minutes): http://scotthorton.org/interviews/2016/01/05/1516-brad-hoff/ Yes the talk show host Scott Horton is an advocate of a libertarian foreign policy, but Brad Hoff, the guest, is the source of almost all of the information here, all of which is quite fascinating to hear. As Hoff notes, concerns over Gaddafi's gold seem to be what most directly inspired the conflict.

In the above interview Mr. Hoff recommends the Maximilian Forte 2012 book, Slouching Toward Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa. I read this a few months after it was first published and it was downright revelatory, examining the remarkable extent to which the NATO intervention, which was cloaked in the language of humanitarianism, was actually built by the propagation of misinformation, half-truths and innumerable falsehoods. None of this is to say that Muammar Gaddafi was some sweet fairytale prince--he was ruthless, but much of what NATO and the U.S. State Department suggested was true about his regime and the "humanitarian crisis" was bogus. As Forte displays through assiduous evidence-gathering, a whole network of unscrupulous and barely-known NGOs assisted the U.S. and French governments to push along the drumbeat for war. Highly recommended.

Here is a link to a fine article by Brad Hoff: http://www.globalresearch.ca/hillar...ecutions-coveting-libyan-oil-and-gold/5499358

Some pertinent excerpts:

Hillary’s Dirty War in Libya: New Emails Reveal Propaganda, Executions, Coveting Libyan Oil and Gold
The New Year’s Eve release of over 3000 new Hillary Clinton emails from the State Department has CNN abuzz over gossipy text messages, the “who gets to ride with Hillary” selection process set up by her staff, and how a “cute” Hillary photo fared on Facebook.

But historians of the 2011 NATO war in Libya will be sure to notice a few of the truly explosive confirmations contained in the new emails: admissions of rebel war crimes, special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, Al Qaeda embedded in the U.S. backed opposition, Western nations jockeying for access to Libyan oil, the nefarious origins of the absurd Viagra mass rape claim, and concern over Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves threatening European currency.

Hillary’s Death Squads

A March 27, 2011 intelligence brief on Libya, sent by long time close adviser to the Clintons and Hillary’s unofficial intelligence gatherer, Sidney Blumenthal, contains clear evidence of war crimes on the part of NATO-backed rebels. Citing a rebel commander source “speaking in strict confidence” Blumenthal reports to Hillary [emphasis mine]:

Under attack from allied Air and Naval forces, the Libyan Army troops have begun to desert to the rebel side in increasing numbers. The rebels are making an effort to greet these troops as fellow Libyans, in an effort to encourage additional defections.

(Source Comment: Speaking in strict confidence, one rebel commander stated that his troops continue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries captured in the fighting…).

While the illegality of extra-judicial killings is easy to recognize (groups engaged in such are conventionally termed “death squads”), the sinister reality behind the “foreign mercenaries” reference might not be as immediately evident to most.
Continuing:
There is however, ample documentation by journalists, academics, and human rights groups demonstrating that black Libyan civilians and sub-Saharan contract workers, a population favored by Gaddafi in his pro-African Union policies, were targets of “racial cleansing” by rebels who saw black Libyans as tied closely with the regime.[1]

Black Libyans were commonly branded as “foreign mercenaries” by the rebel opposition for their perceived general loyalty to Gaddafi as a community and subjected to torture, executions, and their towns “liberated” by ethnic cleansing. This is demonstrated in the most well-documented example of Tawergha, an entire town of 30,000 black and “dark-skinned” Libyans which vanished by August 2011 after its takeover by NATO-backed NTC Misratan brigades.

These attacks were well-known as late as 2012 and often filmed, as this report from The Telegraph confirms:

After Muammar Gaddafi was killed, hundreds of migrant workers from neighboring states were imprisoned by fighters allied to the new interim authorities. They accuse the black Africans of having been mercenaries for the late ruler. Thousands of sub-Saharan Africans have been rounded up since Gaddafi fell in August.

It appears that Clinton was getting personally briefed on the battlefield crimes of her beloved anti-Gaddafi fighters long before some of the worst of these genocidal crimes took place.
Terrifically informative article: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16051349 The losing pro-Gaddafi side is clearly being mistreated by the Western proxy forces which have taken over in Gaddafi's place.

As The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago,
“Officials said there was agreement that the United States and its allies needed to find ways of shoring up Libya’s new government of national accord – established just this week with help from the United Nations but stuck, as of now, in a hotel in Tunis. France, General Dunford said, will work closely with the United States Africa Command on a plan.”
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/23/w...an-military-action-on-isis-in-libya.html?_r=0

The U.S. and Western powers have enshrined the "government of national accord," which was not voted for by anyone in Libya, but what is truly happening is what has always happened by virtue of natural power paradigms: Tripoli in the west and Tobruk in the east are the twin towers of power in Libya. The United Nationals-approved Tobruk Parliament has rejected "the government of national unity."

The UN fundamentally created Libya in the aftermath of World War II, and now is in its sorry state, cut up into different parts, all holding little else but antipathy for one another. The junta in the eastern sector is controlled by the brutal General Khalifa Hifter, who was essentially incubated by the Central Intelligence Agency, having defected to the U.S. after he was held responsible in Libya for having blundered in the operation of the regime's efforts to invade Chad, kept in a Falls Church, Virginia home to be as close as possible to his CIA handlers in Langley, Virginia. Hifter's star was once again ascendant thanks to the triumvirate of warmongering: Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, the three of them guiding Barack Obama's moves, the most significant of which was the U.S. intervention in Libya. Of course, Hifter still had enemies in his homeland, most notably Abdul Fattah Younis, who he had assassinated in the summer of 2011. The Egyptian and Saudi and United Arab Emirate regimes have all backed the CIA entity, Hifter, with both financial aid and arms. It took Hifter only a matter of days to dominate the eastern sector of the country.

The Tripoli regime is a all but name a proxy organ for the regimes of Turkey and Qatar, typically referred to as "Libya Dawn." Libya Dawn despises General Hifter, seeking his termination--partly out of simple revenge for the years of repression and maniacal sadism he wantonly displayed while a top lieutenant for Gaddafi. The other main tenets of Libya Dawn are that they demand the complete adoption of full Sharia law, and they have formed a deadly alliance with the ever-expanding terror network Ansar al-Sharia, the group culpable for the killing of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

As Bill Van Auken writes at the World Socialist Web Site,

A little less than five years after launching a war against Libya on the “humanitarian” pretext of preventing a supposedly imminent massacre, the United States and its European allies are preparing a new military assault against the oil-rich North African country under the bloodstained banner of the “war on terrorism.”

Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook confirmed Wednesday that Washington is “looking at military options” in relation to Libya and acknowledged that US special operations troops are operating on the ground there in a bid to “get a sense of who the players are, who might be worthy of US support and support from some of our partners as we go forward.”

The Pentagon spokesman’s remarks echoed earlier comments by the US military’s senior commander. “It’s fair to say that we’re looking to take decisive military action against ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] in conjunction with the political process” in Libya, Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last Friday. “The president has made clear that we have the authority to use military force.”

As for the presence of special operations troops, that story too was no secret, though largely blacked out by the corporate media. A photograph posted on the Facebook page of the Libyan air force last month showed about 20 American commandos dressed in civilian clothes and carrying automatic weapons. According to the caption that accompanied the photograph, the Libyan forces in charge of the air base “refused their intervention, disarmed them and forced them off Libyan lands.”

Pentagon officials confirmed the incident, while telling NBC News that similar US units have been “in and out of Libya” for “some time now.”

The “human rights” pretext foisted on the public in 2011 and the “terror” pretext being employed today are equally fraudulent. They are both designed to conceal the predatory objectives of military interventions carried out with the aim of imposing US semi-colonial hegemony over countries and regions sitting on top of vast energy resources—in Libya’s case the largest oil reserves on the entire African continent.

It is, however, a measure of the uninterrupted growth of American militarism and the corresponding degradation of American democracy that, while in 2011 Obama delivered a televised speech to the nation providing his phony justifications for the war and then secured a UN Security Council resolution as a legal fig leaf for naked aggression, in 2016 a Marine Corps general casually remarks that he has the authority to launch a new war whenever he sees fit.

In 2011, the story was put out that Libya’s longtime ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, was on the brink of carrying out a wholesale massacre of “peaceful political protesters” in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Only Western intervention could save lives, Obama and his NATO allies insisted, and there was no time to waste.

These assertions were echoed and amplified by an entire coterie of pseudo-lefts. Some of them, like the French New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) embellished upon the arguments of the imperialist powers, insisting that the defense of the “Libyan revolution” was the paramount issue. In the words of the NPA’s prominent spokesman, academic Gilbert Achcar, “You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.”

Similarly, the University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, whose “left” credentials stemmed from his rather qualified opposition to the Iraq war, declared, “To make ‘anti-imperialism’ trump all other values in a mindless way leads to frankly absurd positions.” For emphasis, he added, “If NATO needs me, I’m there.”

With such support, US imperialism and its European allies, invoking the neocolonialist doctrine of “R2P” (responsibility to protect), turned the UN’s resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to prevent the bombardment of Benghazi into a carte blanche for a war for regime change that saw massive US-NATO bombardments, the deaths of some 30,000 Libyans and the lynch mob torture and murder of Gaddafi in October 2011.
Link to the full story: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/29/pers-j29.html

Indeed, the Pentagon is now looking into how the American military can combat ISIS, a group whose rise in Libya directly correlates with the U.S. intervention and its many sad aftereffects.

The aforementioned New York Times story quotes "former top National Security Council official" Ben Fishman:

On ISIS in Libya, we have to be more assertive. We have to increase bombing of ISIS while we are working to support the new unity government.
What will the American regime do to deal with the messy conditions of the now de facto failed state of Libya? Is the Obama administration now to play the role of "The Man With No Name" in A Fistful of Dollars--or, if we go back to the Akira Kurosawa original tale, the nameless ronin or samurai played by Toshirô Mifune, setting the opposing sides against one another--after having created the very conditions it is purportedly seeking to now better? With Libya Dawn growing in stature every month and General Khalifa Hifter performing one shape-shifting metamorphosis after another depending on the prevailing political winds of the country, will the CIA cut their own pet loose? Will more alliances with Ansar al-Sharia become part of the plan, in order to appeal to the plurality of Salafist Jihadists who honeycomb multiple sides of the civil war? And with ISIS forming numerous high-profile alliances to protect itself, what does the U.S. risk by the "increase" in "bombing" the terror group?

Let us hope that someone, somewhere, is giving this more thought now than was paid to it when the intervention was undertaken five years ago. Yet if Hillary Clinton's emails are any indication--and there seems little reason to take them as anything but--the most thought that goes into these interventions is the propping of cover stories, and the propagating of lies.
 
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#11 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

America loves spending money on failed wars and states and failed social programs. People still think Hilary's emails weren't a big deal, as I been asking.. how is she not in court and instead running for President? It makes no sense! Obama and Bush have set America back for decades with their asinine foreign policies, wars, scandals and social programs. This is not going to end well!
 
#12 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

America loves spending money on failed wars and states and failed social programs. People still think Hilary's emails weren't a big deal, as I been asking.. how is she not in court and instead running for President? It makes no sense! Obama and Bush have set America back for decades with their asinine foreign policies, wars, scandals and social programs. This is not going to end well!
Hillary is not in prison because of the fact the Democratic party is scared shitless of Bernie Sanders running for president. Bernie is to the Dems what Trump and Cruz are to the GOP...not one of them and can't be controlled.

Ironic how three of the world's hot spots for tensions right now are from decisions made by the United Nations. It was the UN who created Israel, as well as split the old Indian Empire and colony of Britain into India and Pakistan. Now, Libya, created by the UN after WWII.

Obama and Bush, to me, really messed up by half-assing involvement. While Iraq was a mistake, it was compounded by just being half-hearted about the whole thing. All these stupid rules led to the point where someone couldn't sneeze in the wrong direction without fear of a court-martial. Let the troops do their job without a lot of bureaucratic red-tape. Stop pandering to the rest of the world as they wring their hands. Do their job, kick ass, take names, and get out. Libya was the same way, Obama sends a few planes in for a couple of bombing raids and then says, "I did something." You didn't do shit, Mr. President. If you're not going to use our military to actually do their job then don't send them at all.
 
#13 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

There was a definite fear over how severely affected the Dollar would be if Gadhafi's suggested plan of a Gold Dinar implemented as an African currency payment for Oil (as opposed to US Dollars) would've been back in '10-'11.
The potential after-effects would've been hugely devastating to the economy of the Dollar and there was a fear that Arabs & Middle Eastern Oil based countries would've supported Gadhafi's currency plan which would essentially leave USA needing to resort to Gold while dramatically affecting the trade value of the US dollar.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/markets/item/4630-gadhafi-s-gold-money-plan-would-have-devastated-dollar

In a nutshell
“In 2009 — in his capacity as head of the African Union — Libya's Moammar Gadhafi had proposed that the economically crippled continent adopt the ‘Gold Dinar,’” noted Ilana Mercer in an August opinion piece for WorldNetDaily. “I do not know if Col. Gadhafi continued to agitate for ditching the dollar and adopting the Gold Dinar — or if the Agitator from Chicago got wind of Gadhafi's (uncharacteristic) sanity about things monetary.”

But if Arab and African nations had begun adopting a gold-backed currency, it would have had major repercussions for debt-laden Western governments that would be far more significant than the purported “democratic” uprisings sweeping the region this year. And it would have spelled big trouble for the elite who benefit from “freshly counterfeited funny-money,” Mercer pointed out.

“Had Gadhafi sparked a gold-driven monetary revolution, he would have done well for his own people, and for the world at large,” she concluded. “A Gadhafi-driven gold revolution would have, however, imperiled the positions of central bankers and their political and media power-brokers.”

Adding credence to the theory about why Gadhafi had to be overthrown, as The New American reported in March, was the rebels’ odd decision to create a central bank to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The decision was broadcast to the world in the early weeks of the conflict.

In a statement describing a March 19 meeting, the rebel council announced, among other things, the creation of a new oil company. And more importantly: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”

The creation of a new central bank, even more so than the new national oil regime, left analysts scratching their heads. “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising,” noted Robert Wenzel in an analysis for the Economic Policy Journal. “This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences,” he added. Wenzel also noted that the uprising looked like a “major oil and money play, with the true disaffected rebels being used as puppets and cover” while the transfer of control over money and oil supplies takes place.

Other analysts, even in the mainstream press, were equally shocked. “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power?” wondered CNBC senior editor John Carney. “It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”

Similar scenarios involving the global monetary system — based on the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, backed by the fact that oil is traded in American money — have also been associated with other targets of the U.S. government. Some analysts even say a pattern is developing.

Iran, for example, is one of the few nations left in the world with a state-owned central bank. And Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, once armed by the U.S. government to make war on Iran, was threatening to start selling oil in currencies other than the dollar just prior to the Bush administration’s “regime change” mission.

While most of the establishment press in America has been silent on the issue of Gadhafi’s gold dinar scheme, in Russia, China, and the global alternative media, the theory has exploded in popularity. Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow, however, may never be known for certain — at least not publicly.
 
#17 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

I am reactivating this thread because developments demand that course of action:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...n-helm-rampage-fanatics-Sirte-stronghold.html
@AryaDark @Batko10 @BruiserKC @CamillePunk @Deadpool @Miss Sally @scrilla @spikingspud and many others, I'm sure, find this fascinating, if almost painfully predictable:

A mysterious red-bearded Chechen commander is reported to be leading the ISIS fight in Libya.

Local intelligence reports said a convoy of 14 cars protected by armed vehicles entered the ISIS stronghold of Sirte on the Libyan coast on Monday night.

Among them is believed to be the Chechen commander, Georgia-born Abu Omar al-Shisani, who has recruited many foreign fighters to the terror group, including some Britons.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-fanatics-Sirte-stronghold.html#ixzz40LhxLVZU

Al-Shishani, 30, real name Takhan Tayumurazoch Batirashvili, recruited British jihadist Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS executioner known as Jihadi John, is now one of the world's most wanted terrorists.

Although it has been repeatedly reported that he has been killed in U.S. air strikes in Syria or captured by Iraqi forces, the mysterious al-Shishani remains as elusive as ever.

His presence in Libya follows the movement of a number of ISIS commanders away from Syria, where they are facing twin targeting by American and Russian aircraft.

Al-Shishani carved out a barbaric reputation in northern Syria where he led a brigade of foreign fighters responsible for a series of beheadings and operations involving suicide bombers.

This week the new ISIS commanders in Sirte wasted no time in establishing their particular brand of terror in the Libyan city.

The possible sighting of al-Shishani follows Libyan intelligence reports of the arrival of a mysterious new ISIS leader who uses the alias ‘Abu Omar'.

In the weeks leading up to the arrival of the Libya-bound ISIS force, a number of suspected spies were arrested and then publicly crucified...

British fighters are also thought to be among the influx of foreign fighters to Libya...

Hussain, 27, sent a message to followers which read: ‘Come to Libya, come to Nigeria, and be part of those who build the Khilafah [Islamic caliphate] with your skulls, bones and blood.'

Later he specifically encouraged fighters to choose Libya.

A number of battle-hardened British jihadists fighting in region first took arms against Colonel Gaddafi in 2011 before switching to Syria.

At least two British jihadists have recently reportedly been killed in fighting for ISIS in Libya. And Emwazi himself was reported to have spent time in there before he was killed in a drone strike in Raqqa last year.

Western intelligence estimates that the group's fighters in the country now number between 5,000 and 6,500.

To counter the threat America and Britain are considering military action against the jihadists before the ISIS advances become irreversible.

The formation of the Islamic State branch in Libya was a ‘deliberate and strategic' move by the group's leadership in Syria, meant to leverage the chaos in the country to its advantage, concluded a report published this month by security consultants, the Soufan Group.

‘Ever since it took control of Sirte in May, the Islamic State has staged high-profile executions and posthumous crucifixions; with rumours of direct foreign military intervention in the works, it is probable there will be a noticeable rise in killings of accused spies,' said the report.
Almost incalculable, the billions spent by the U.S. regime in Libya. The country in utter chaos and sectarian war. The results? A new base of operations for ISIS.

The words which should be showered upon the departing Obama administration, courtesy of the Precocious Miami Heat Fan:

 
#9 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

The US fucked up so hard with Iraq. It's the worst foreign policy decisions ever. It didn't seem like they could do worse than Vietnam, but they certainly did and exponentially worse.
This is heartbreakingly accurate, and as horrendous as that intervention has proven to be (quite predictably so, too), the same U.S. imperial regime has sought opportunity after opportunity for yet more disastrous interventions. Afghanistan is presently on the brink, according to NATO itself. The Afghan economy--never exactly the most reliable institution--is on the precipice of being in utter shambles as disparate war lords seek self-autonomy, apart from the U.S.-supported regime in Kabul. It's truly astonishing to consider, after a decade and a half of the "War on Terror." According to all data compiled by the Mercatus Center, which examined as much information as possible from the Congressional Research Service, by fiscal year 2015 the "War on Terror" since 2001 has cost U.S. taxpayers a little over $1.7 trillion.

The points presented by @The Ultimate Warrior and @SpeedStick have considerable merit as well. :lol
 
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#27 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

@Batko10 @Miss Sally @samizayn @spikingspud

Newly revealed Hillary Clinton emails display just how she was the ringleader on behalf of the misbegotten intervention in Libya: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/em...rticle/2583731

Excerpt:

…in one exchange from October 2011, Clinton's aides discussed an upcoming article titled "Clinton's key role in Libya conflict" that indicated Clinton personally persuaded President Obama to approve the use of military force to overthrow Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The conversation between Philippe Reines, a longtime Clinton spokesman, and aides Jake Sullivan and Cheryl Mills was partially redacted by the State Department.

"Clinton, ignoring the advice of the State Department's lawyers, convinced Obama to grant full diplomatic recognition to the rebels," read an excerpt from the unpublished Washington Post story Reines sent to Clinton in 2011.

The story indicated Clinton actively sought to "secure crucial backing from Arab countries" before stepping into the civil conflict.
These findings stand in direct contradiction to what Hillary keeps saying now on the campaign trail:

…when pressed on the issue in the first Democratic debate last year, Clinton defended the intervention by arguing European allies were "blowing up the phone lines begging us to help them" and that the U.S. "had the Arabs standing by our side saying, 'we want you to help us deal with Gadhafi.' "
She was the overriding architect of the disaster which the U.S. has wrought in Libya, yet today she denies her own role:

… emails made public over the course of the past nine months have painted a picture of a secretary of state eager to take credit for her "leadership" and "ownership" of the Libyan engagement.
 
#29 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

@AryaDark @Batko10 @birthday_massacre @CamillePunk @CookiePuss @The Dazzler @Miss Sally @Reaper @samizayn @scrilla @spikingspud

Simply outstanding article, so masterfully written and researched that I had to post it here...

By Nicolas J. S. Davies: http://davidstockmanscontracorner.c...&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ReviveOldPost

Hillary Clinton And The Dogs Of War—-She Never Gives Peace A Chance

by Consortium News • February 22, 2016


A poll taken in Iowa before the presidential caucus found that 70 percent of Democrats surveyed trusted Hillary Clinton on foreign policy more than Bernie Sanders. But her record as Secretary of State was very different from that of her successor, John Kerry, who has overseen groundbreaking diplomatic breakthroughs with Iran, Cuba and, in a more limited context, even with Russia and Syria.

In fact, Clinton’s use of the term “diplomacy” in talking about her own record is idiosyncratic in that it refers almost entirely to assembling “coalitions” to support U.S. threats, wars and sanctions against other countries, rather than to peacefully resolving international disputes without the threat or use of force, as normally understood by the word “diplomacy” and as required by the UN Charter.

There is another term for what Clinton means when she says “diplomacy,” and that is “brinksmanship,” which means threatening war to back up demands on other governments. In the real world, brinksmanship frequently leads to war when neither side will back down, at which point its only value or purpose is to provide a political narrative to justify aggression.

The two main “diplomatic” achievements Clinton gives herself credit for are: assembling the coalition of NATO and the Arab monarchies that bombed Libya into endless, intractable chaos; and imposing painful sanctions on the people of Iran over what U.S. intelligence agencies concluded by 2007 was a peaceful civilian nuclear program.

Clinton’s claim that her brinksmanship “brought Iran to the table” over its “nuclear weapons program” is particularly deceptive. It was in fact Secretary Clinton and President Obama whorefused to take “Yes” for an answer in 2010, after Iran agreed to what was originally a U.S. proposal relayed by Turkey and Brazil. Clinton and Obama chose instead to keep ratcheting up sanctions and U.S. and Israeli threats. This was a textbook case of dangerous brinksmanship that was finally resolved by real diplomacy (and real diplomats like Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif) before it led to war.

That Clinton can peddle such deceptive rhetoric to national prime-time television audiences and yet still be considered trustworthy on foreign policy by many Americans is a sad indictment of the U.S. corporate media’s coverage of foreign policy, including a willful failure to distinguish between diplomacy and brinksmanship.

But Michael Crowley, now the senior foreign affairs correspondent for Politico, formerly with Timeand the New Republic, has analyzed Clinton’s foreign policy record over the course of her career, and his research has shed light on her Iraq War vote, her personal influences and her underlying views of U.S. foreign policy, all of which deserve serious scrutiny from American voters.

The results of Crowley’s research reveal that Clinton believes firmly in the post-Cold War ambition to establish the U.S. threat or use of force as the ultimate arbiter of international affairs. She does not believe that the U.S. should be constrained by the UN Charter or other rules of international law from threatening or attacking other countries when it can make persuasive political arguments for doing so.

This places Clinton squarely in the “humanitarian interventionist” camp with her close friend and confidante Madeleine Albright, but also in underlying if unspoken agreement with the “neocons”who brought us the Iraq War and the self-fulfilling and ever-expanding “war on terror.”

Neoconservatism and humanitarian interventionism emerged in the 1990s as parallel ways to exploit the post-Cold War “power dividend,” each with its own approach to overcoming legal, diplomatic and political obstacles to the unbridled expansion of U.S. military power. In general, Democratic power brokers favored the humanitarian interventionist approach, while Republicans embraced neoconservatism, but their underlying goals were the same: to politically legitimize U.S. hegemony in the post-Cold War era.

The most self-serving ideologues, like Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland, soon mastered the nuances of both ideologies and have moved smoothly between administrations of both parties. Victoria Nuland, Dick Cheney’s deputy foreign policy adviser, became Secretary Clinton’s spokesperson and went on to plan the 2014 coup in Ukraine. Robert Kagan, who co-founded the neocon Project for the New American Century with William Kristol in 1997, was appointed by Clinton to the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board in 2011.

In the Clinton White HouseKagan wrote of Clinton in 2014, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

In her husband’s White House in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton was not an outsider to the foreign policy debates that laid the groundwork for these new ideologies of U.S. power, which have since unleashed such bloody and intractable conflicts across the world.

In 1993, at a meeting between Clinton’s transition team and Bush’s National Security Council, Madeleine Albright challenged then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell on his “Powell Doctrine” of limited war. Albright asked him, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

Hillary Clinton found common ground with Albright, and has likewise derided the Powell doctrinefor limiting U.S. military action to “splendid little wars” like the invasions of Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, apparently forgetting that these are the only wars the U.S. has actually won since 1945.

Hillary Clinton reportedly “insist(ed)” on Albright’s nomination as Secretary of State in December 1996, and they met regularly at the State Department during Bill Clinton’s second term for in-depth foreign policy discussions aided by White House and State Department staff. Albright called their relationship “an unprecedented partnership.”

With Defense Secretary William Cohen, Albright oversaw the crystallization of America’s aggressive post-Cold War foreign policy in the late 1990s. As UN Ambassador, she maintained and justifiedsanctions on Iraq, even as they killed hundreds of thousands of children. As Secretary of State, she led the push for the illegal U.S. assault on Yugoslavia in 1999, which set the fateful precedent for further U.S. violations of the U.N. Charter in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria.

James Rubin, Albright’s State Department spokesman, remembers strained phone calls between Albright and U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook during the planning for the bombing of Yugoslavia. Cook told Albright the U.K. government was having problems “with its lawyers” because attacking Yugoslavia without authorization by the U.N. Security Council would violate the UN Charter. Albright told him the U.K. should “get new lawyers.”

Like Secretary Albright, Hillary Clinton strongly supported NATO’s illegal aggression against Yugoslavia. In fact, she later told Talk magazine that she called her husband from Africa to plead with him to order the use of force. “I urged him to bomb,” she said, “You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?”

After the U.S.-U.K. bombing and invasion, the NATO protectorate of Kosovo quickly descended intochaos and organized crime. Hashim Thaci, the gangster who the U.S. installed as its first prime minister, now faces indictment for the very war crimes that U.S. bombing enabled and supported in 1999, including credible allegations that he organized the extrajudicial execution of Serbs to harvest and sell their internal organs.

On Clinton’s holocaust reference, the U.S. and U.K. did carpet-bomb Germany at the height of the Nazi Holocaust, but bombing could not stop the genocide of European Jews any more than it can have a “humanitarian” impact today. The Western allies’ decision to rely mainly on bombing throughout 1942 and 1943 while the Red Army’s “boots on the ground” and the civilians in the concentration camps died in their millions cast a long shadow on today’s policy debates over Syria, Iraq and Libya.

War is always an atrocity and a crime, but relying on bombing and drones to avoid putting “boots on the ground” is uniquely dangerous because it gives politicians the illusion that they can wage war without political risk. In the longer term, from London in the Blitz to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to Islamic State and drone victims today, bombing has always been the surest way to provoke righteous anger, stiffen resistance and reap a whirlwind of blowback.

The 140,000 bombs and missiles the U.S. and its allies have rained down on at least seven countries since 2001 are the poisonous seeds of a harvest of intractable conflict that is still gathering strength after 14 years of war.

The Clinton administration formalized its illegal doctrine of unilateral military force in its 1997Quadrennial Defense Review, declaring, “When the interests at stake are vital … we should do whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power. U.S. vital national interests include… preventing the emergence of a hostile regional coalition … (and) ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.”

Arguments based on “vital interests” are dangerous precisely because they are politically persuasive to the citizens of any country. But this is precisely the justification for war that the U.N. Charter was designed to prohibit, as the U.K.’s senior legal adviser, Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, explained to his government during the Suez crisis in 1956. He wrote, “The plea of vital interest, which has been one of the main justifications for wars in the past, is indeed the very one which the U.N. Charter was intended to exclude.”

Senator Clinton’s Iraq War Vote

Sixteen years after the bombing of Yugoslavia, bombing to “prevent holocausts” and wars to “defend” ill-defined and virtually unlimited U.S. interests have succeeded only in launching a new holocaust that has killed at least 1.6 million people and plunged a dozen countries into intractable chaos.

As Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee wrote of his colleagues who voted to authorize war on Iraq in 2002, “Helping a rogue President start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment…”

As the results of that decision keep spinning farther out of control, it seems increasingly remarkable that U.S. officials who authorized a war based on lies with millions of lives in the balance still have careers in public policy. If it costs Clinton another presidential nomination, that is a small price to pay when weighed against the holocaust she helped to unleash on tens of millions of people.

But what if her vote for an illegal and devastating war was not a momentary “lapse of judgment”, but was in fact consistent with her views then and her views now?

As the Bush administration lobbied senators to support the Iraq AUMF in 2002, Senator Clinton hadseveral private chats with Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, an old friend from Yale Law School. An unnamed Bush official, possibly Hadley, told Michael Crowley, “I was kind of pleasantly surprised by her attitude.”

But Albright’s former assistant James Rubin was not surprised by Clinton’s vote on Iraq. He found it consistent with the position of the Clinton administration and Albright’s State Department that U.S. “diplomacy” must be backed up by the threat of military force.

“I think there is a connection to her vote,” Rubin told Michael Crowley, “which is recognizing that the right combination of force and diplomacy (sic) can achieve America’s objectives. Sometimes, to get things done – like getting inspectors back into Iraq – you do have to be prepared to threaten force.”

But this evades the critical question of U.S. obligations under the U.N. Charter, which prohibits the threat and use of force. Senator Levin introduced an amendment to the Iraq AUMF bill that would have only authorized the use of force if it was approved by the U.N. Security Council. Senator Clinton voted against that amendment, making it clear that she supported the threat and use of force against Iraq whether it was legal or not.

Clinton has defended her vote on the basis of providing a credible threat of force to back up the call for inspections, in keeping with her long-standing preference for threats and brinksmanship over diplomacy. But the problem with threats of force is that they often lead to the use of force, as we have now seen repeatedly since the U.S. has embraced this aggressive and illegal approach to international affairs.

This is exactly why the U.N. Charter prohibits the threat as well as the use of force. The absolute priority of world leaders in 1945 was peace, and so the U.N. Charter prohibited both the threat and use of force, based on bitter experience of how the one so easily leads to the other.

The fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy since the 1980s has been to renounce peace as an overriding priority and to politically legitimize U.S. war-making. The U.S. has therefore, without public debate, abandoned FDR’s post-WWII “permanent structure of peace” based on the U.N. Charter. The U.S. also withdrew from the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, after it found the U.S. guilty of aggression against Nicaragua in 1986, and it likewise rejects the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court.

U.S. government lawyers now pass off political arguments as legal cover for aggression, torture, killing civilians and other war crimes, secure in the knowledge that they will never be forced to defend their legally indefensible opinions in impartial courts.

When President George W. Bush unveiled his illegal “doctrine of preemption” in 2002, Sen. Edward Kennedy called it, “a call for Twenty-first Century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.”

But the same must be said of this entire decades-long effort by the Clintons, Bushes, Albright, Cheney and others to liberate the U.S. military industrial complex from the restraints placed upon it by the rule of international law.

Secretary of State – Iraq and Afghanistan

Hillary Clinton’s actions as Secretary of State were consistent with her role working with her husband and Madeleine Albright in the 1990s, and in the Senate with the Bush administration, to fundamentally corrupt U.S. foreign policy.

Robert Gates’s book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, has provided revealing insights into Clinton’s personal contributions to White House foreign policy debates on the vital issues of Obama’s first term, in which she was always the most hawkish of Obama’s senior advisers, more hawkish than his Republican Secretary of Defense.

At Clinton’s first “town hall” with foreign service officers at the State Department, Steve Kashkett of the American Foreign Service Association asked Clinton how soon the State Department’s deployment of 1,200 staff to the massive U.S. occupation headquarters in Baghdad would be reduced “to that of a normal diplomatic mission” to ease critical understaffing at other U.S. embassies all over the world.

Clinton instead launched a “civilian surge,” doubling the already overweight State Department deployment in Baghdad to 2,400. When the Iraqi government refused to allow 3,000 U.S. troops to remain in Iraq to protect the embassy staff – and Clinton had wanted even more than that – she hired 7,000 heavily-armed mercenaries to do the job instead.

As Clinton doubled down on the failed U.S. effort to control a puppet government in Iraq whose courageous people’s resistance had already made U.S. military occupation unsustainable, she was also keen to put the lives of more U.S. troops on the line in the even longer-running quagmire in Afghanistan.

When President Obama took office, there were 34,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but only 645 had been killed in seven years of combat. A Pew poll found that only 18 percent of Afghans surveyedwanted more U.S. troops in their country.

Secretary Clinton backed Obama’s first decision to commit an additional 30,000 troops to the war. Then, in mid-2009, General Stanley McChrystal submitted a request for a second increase of 40,000 troops. He also submitted a classified assessment that a genuine campaign to defeat the Taliban and its allies would require 500,000 U.S. troops for five years, acknowledging that neither 65,000 nor 105,000 troops could possibly achieve that.

Clinton supported McChrystal’s request and was eager to match it with a State Department “civilian surge” like the one in Iraq. Among Obama’s other advisers, Vice President Joe Biden opposed any further escalation, while Secretary Gates recommended a smaller increase of 30,000 troops, which was what Obama ultimately approved.

When Obama and his aides debated the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Clinton was again the most hawkish, arguing for no reduction in troop strength until 2013. In a typically arbitrary political compromise, Obama split the difference between Clinton and the doves and ordered the first withdrawals to begin in September 2012.

By the time the U.S. “combat mission” ended in 2014, 2,356 U.S. troops had met their deaths in the “graveyard of empires.” In 2016, the Taliban and its allies control more of Afghanistan than at any time since 2001, as they fight to expel the 10,000 U.S. troops still deployed there.

A complete withdrawal of foreign troops has always been the Taliban’s first precondition for opening serious peace talks with the government, so the 2009-10 escalations, which Clinton backed to the hilt, served only to kill 1,711 more Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans, prolonging the war and undermining diplomacy in the futile hope of saving a corrupt regime of U.S.-backedwarlords and drug-lords.

President Obama’s latest plan, to keep at least 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, ensures that the war will continue into the next administration, even as Islamic State begins to move into another failed state already devastated by more than 60,000 U.S. bombs and missiles.

Secretary of State – Libya and Syria

President Obama’s advisers were even more divided over launching a new war to overthrow the government of Libya. Despite Secretary Gates telling a Congressional hearing that the first phase of a “no-fly zone” would be a bombing campaign to destroy Libyan air defenses, a Pew poll found that, while 44 percent of the public supported a “no-fly zone,” only 16 percent supported “bombing Libyan air defenses.” Even after being caught with its pants down over Iraq, the U.S. corporate media has not lost its talent for confusing Americans into war.

Secretary Gates wrote in Duty that he was so opposed to U.S. intervention in Libya that he considered resigning. President Obama was so undecided that he called his final decision a “51-49 call.” The other advocates for bombing were U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Council staffers Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power, so Secretary Clinton was the most senior, andalmost certainly the decisive voice in sealing the fate of Muammar Gaddafi and the people of Libya.

Despite a U.N. resolution that authorized military force only to “protect civilians,” the U.S. and its allies intervened to support forces who were explicitly fighting to overthrow the Libyan government. NATO and its Arab monarchist allies conducted 7,700 air strikes in seven months, while NATO warships shelled coastal cities. The rebel forces on the ground, including Islamist fundamentalists, were trained and led on the ground by Qatari, British, French and Jordanian special forces.

In their short-sighted triumphalism over Libya, NATO and Arab monarchist leaders thought they had finally found a model for regime change that worked. Seduced by the blood-drenched mirage in the Libyan desert, they made the cynical decision to double down on what they knew very well would be a longer, more complicated and bloodier proxy war in Syria.

Only a few months after a gleeful Secretary Clinton hailed the sodomy and assassination of Gaddafi,unmarked NATO planes were flying fighters and weapons from Libya to the “Free Syrian Army” training base at Iskenderum in Turkey, where British and French special forces provided more training and the CIA and JSOC infiltrated them into Syria.

Secretary Clinton and French President Nicolas Sarkozy assembled the Orwellian “Friends of Syria” coalition that undermined Kofi Annan’s 2012 peace plan by committing more funding, arms and support to their proxy forces instead of pressuring them to honor Annan’s April 10th ceasefire and begin negotiations for a political transition.Residents of Aleppo were shocked to find their city invaded, not by Syrian rebels, but by Islamist fighters from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt. Despite the already brutal repression of the Syrian government, a Qatari-funded YouGov poll in December 2011 found that 55 percent of Syrians still supported their government, understanding that the alternative could be much worse.

When Annan finally got all the countries involved to sign on to the Geneva communique on June 30, 2012, providing for a new ceasefire and a political transition, he received assurances that it would quickly be formalized in a new U.N. Security Council resolution. Instead, Clinton and her allies revived their precondition that President Assad must resign before any transition could begin, the critical precondition they had set aside in Geneva. With no possibility of agreement in the Security Council, Annan resigned in despair.

Almost four years later, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed in an ever more convoluted and dangerous war, now involving the armed forces of 16 countries, each with their own interests and their own relationships with different proxy forces on the ground. In many areas, the U.S. supports and arms both sides.

Turkey, a NATO member and major U.S. arms buyer, is attacking the YPG Kurdish forces who have been the U.S.’s most effective ally on the ground against Islamic State. And the sectarian government to whom the U.S. handed over the ruins of Iraq is sending U.S.-armed militias to fight U.S.-armed rebels in Syria.

Obama’s and Clinton’s doctrine of covert and proxy war, by which they still tout drone strikes, JSOC death squads, CIA coups and local proxy forces as politically safe “tools” to project U.S. power across the world without the deployment of U.S. “boots on the ground,” has destroyed Libya, Yemen, Syria and Ukraine, and left U.S. foreign policy in an unprecedented crisis.

Hanging over this escalating, out-of-control crisis is the existential danger of war between the U.S. and Russia, who together possess 14,700 nuclear weapons with the destructive power to end life on Earth as we know it. With her demonstrated, deeply-held belief in the superiority of threats, brinksmanship and war over diplomacy and the rule of law, surely the last thing the world needs now is Hillary Clinton playing chicken with the Russians while the fate of life on Earth hangs in the balance.

Based on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ record in Congress, his prescient floor speech during the Iraq War debate in 2002 and his campaign’s position statement on “War and Peace”, he at least understands the most obvious lesson of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, that it is easier to unleash the dogs of war than to call them off once they have tasted blood. Incredibly, this makes him almost unique among U.S. leaders of this generation.

But there are real flaws in Sanders’s position statement. He cites “vital strategic interests” as a justification for war, dodging the thorny problem that international disputes typically involve “vital strategic interests” on both sides, which the U.N. Charter addresses by requiring them to be resolved peacefully without the threat or use of force.

And instead of pointing out that Clinton’s brinksmanship with Iran risked a second war in 10 years over non-existent WMDs, he repeats the canard that Iran was “developing nuclear weapons” before the signing of the JCPOA in 2015.

Sen. Sanders has launched an unprecedented campaign to challenge the way powerful vested interests have corrupted our elections, our political system and our economy. But the same interests have also corrupted our foreign policy, squandering our national wealth on weapons and war, killing millions of people and plunging country after country into war, ruin and chaos.

To succeed, the Sanders “revolution” must restore integrity to our country’s role in the world as well as to our political and economic system.

Source: Hillary Clinton and the Dogs of War – Consortium News
 
#19 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Almost incalculable, the billions spent by the U.S. regime in Libya. The country in utter chaos and sectarian war. The results? A new base of operations for ISIS.
Libya has had 'terrorist cells' clashes with France for years, back in '13 was one of the most devastating as the rebels attacked the French Embassy in Tripoli as 'payback' for 'interfering' in the Mali kidnapping
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/04/201342355231592873.html
historically, the Libyan first major allies retaliation was back in '86 after Libyan agents in the East/West political battles had bombed a German nightclub causing a few hundred casualties including a US stationed officer. USA retaliated by air strikes on Tripoli's airfield, Naval training camps and Barracks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_United_States_bombing_of_Libya

Other attacks in Libya aimed at the French Embassy was a car-bomb in '13, the Benghazi compound attack in '12, among many recent attempts often aimed at French Embassy or US bases.
This '11 article covers the history as far back as '80s : https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110323-libyas-terrorism-option

An interview with the Libyan Information Minister was very accusatory towards the West sharing a belief that the 'cells' have as motive for their actions



France has bases in Niger that has been used to strike out against any 'cells' attempting to travel in & out of Libya's borders and has reinforced their bases in Mali, Chad, Mauritana and Burkina Faso since late '14 - early '15.

This article has background on Abu Omar al-Shisani
http://eaworldview.com/2013/11/syria-analysis-story-insurgent-leader-omar-chechen-means/

The Wall Street Journal version

Cullison says that Abu Umar is Tarkhan Batirashvili: “Born to a Christian father and Muslim mother, he served in an intelligence unit of the Georgian army before opportunities dried up at home and he left for holy war.”

Cullison, who interviewed people claiming to be Umar /Tarkhan’s relatives and two of his (anonymous) former army commanders, says that he grew up as a shepherd boy in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, “living in a brick hut with no plumbing in the village of Birkiani”. His long-standing campaign against Moscow began as he helped Chechen rebels cross secretly into Russia and sometimes joined the fighters on missions against Russian-backed troops.

After leaving high school, Umar /Tarkhan joined the Georgian army, winning plaudits for his handling of weapons and maps and joining a special reconnaissance group. He was eventually promoted to sergeant in a new intelligence unit, spying on Russian tank columns during Georgia’s 2008 five-day war with Moscow.

In 2010, Umar /Tarkhan’s life changed when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and confined to a military hospital for several months. He was deemed unfit for the military and discharged.

Unable to get a job with the local police and suspected of helping
Islamist fighters inside Russia, he was sentenced to three years in prison in September 2010. When he was released after 16 months, he left Georgia.

Umar /Tarkhan’s father says his son left for Istanbul, where an older brother had gone months earlier, because he had “no job, no prospects”. While his father says Umar /Tarkhan intended to join an Islamist force fighting inside Syria, he disappeared until this spring when he emerged in promotional videos for Jaish al-Muhajirin wal Ansar.
The BBC Arabic Version

In Batal Shishani’s version for BBC Arabic — published some days before Cullison’s, on November 13 — we learn that BBC Arabic “spoke with a Chechen who served with him (in the Georgian Army), who said he was “a young man sober, sane, considered such by all who knew him, nothing in his character that demonstrated anything extreme or something like that”.

The BBC Arabic version says that it managed to access a file from Abu Umar’s military service, from the Georgian Defense Ministry, via a middleman who asked not to be identified.

The military file revealed that Tarkhan Batirashvili was born in 1968 in the village of Barkiyana in the Pankisi Gorge. He served his compulsory military service between 2006 and 2007. After he finished his service in the disputed region of Abkhazia between Russia and Georgia, in early 2008 he signed a contract to join the Georgian army in a sniper battalion.

The file seen by BBC Arabic says that Tarkhan fought in battles with the Georgian Army against Russia during the five-day war in 2008, and was promoted to the rank of sergeant because of his performance, but he was never rewarded. Instead, because of a health conditions — he contracted tuberculosis in 2010 — he was discharged from service in June that same year.

In September 2010 Tarkhan was imprisoned on charges of buying and storing weapons. He was sentenced to three years, but was released to his deteriorating health, before the end of his sentence.

Some who knew him said that he then traveled to Turkey, and from there to Syria, which had begun experiencing armed conflict. Assisted by his military experience, he gained a leadership position with armed groups in Syria.

BBC Arabic also talked to residents of the Pankisi Gorge, one of whom, named as Abdullah, described Umar as “a good person”. An imam of a nearby village described him
as a “balanced man, and a noble one, and I love him so much. Umar and others with him have gone in the way of Allah to Syria to support the oppressed there, and the protection of their rights.”
If anything his tactical skills, knowledge and weapons training were a factor besides his long-standing involvements from '10-present.

While this conflicting article from Dec '15 has Russia saying of US forces capturing Al-Shishani that were denied by US
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/war-isis-daesh-warlord-abu-omar-al-shishani-reportedly-captured-kirkuk-1535122
 
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#20 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

An extremely fascinating post, @spikingspud! Thank you for sharing!
 
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#21 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

As much as I dislike Hillary, if it wasn't her it would be someone else. Libya wouldn't have been possible without the media selling the lies. Most people still blindly trust them.
 
#22 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Astonishingly packed and hugely informative video, @The Dazzler. No question that Gaddafi's efforts to introduce this gold currency had a great deal to do with the genuine rationale for the U.S. intervention in 2011.
 
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#2 · (Edited)
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

pls add in tl;dr versions pls

Is this about how Hillary is a money grubbing sociopath?


If it's about ISIS then WWIII is going down over this at some point. Those crazy fanatics will get a nuke at some point. They're nuts enough to use it. They benefit from humanity going back to the Stone Age.
 
#3 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

pls add in tl;dr versions pls

Is this about how Hillary is a money grubbing sociopath?


If it's about ISIS then WWIII is going down over this at some point. Those crazy fanatics will get a nuke at some point. They're nuts enough to use it. They benefit from humanity going back to the Stone Age.
:lol

I can't imagine a more just outcome than Hillary Clinton being sentenced to prison, but that realization makes it seem indubitable that she'll be the next president.

Hope such a nuclear attack does not happen. You're definitely right about ISIS thriving through the aftermath of such scenarios.
 
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#4 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

While the illegality of extra-judicial killings is easy to recognize (groups engaged in such are conventionally termed “death squads”), the sinister reality behind the “foreign mercenaries” reference might not be as immediately evident to most.
aka me. Elaborate for us please m8, are they out-and-out saying these were American (CIA-backed?) forces?
 
#5 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

aka me. Elaborate for us please m8, are they out-and-out saying these were American (CIA-backed?) forces?
As with Syria, yes. Most commonly referred to as "rebel forces," supported by the U.S. government.
 
#10 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Does this become something that the current administration starts as its on the way out? This way it leaves the mess for the next President to clean up?

Benghazi is something that everyone really dropped the ball on.
 
#14 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Does this become something that the current administration starts as its on the way out? This way it leaves the mess for the next President to clean up?

Benghazi is something that everyone really dropped the ball on.
Definitely so. The Obama administration is doing the same with Afghanistan. NATO and other sources are revealing that it's as failed a state as ever, and that it's breaking up into many fiefdoms, rather predictably. Terrorists and Taliban fighters are taking much of it over, all over again. That will fall to the next president to figure out.

America loves spending money on failed wars and states and failed social programs. People still think Hilary's emails weren't a big deal, as I been asking.. how is she not in court and instead running for President? It makes no sense! Obama and Bush have set America back for decades with their asinine foreign policies, wars, scandals and social programs. This is not going to end well!
Could not have said it better.

There was a definite fear over how severely affected the Dollar would be if Gadhafi's suggested plan of a Gold Dinar implemented as an African currency payment for Oil (as opposed to US Dollars) would've been back in '10-'11.
The potential after-effects would've been hugely devastating to the economy of the Dollar and there was a fear that Arabs & Middle Eastern Oil based countries would've supported Gadhafi's currency plan which would essentially leave USA needing to resort to Gold while dramatically affecting the trade value of the US dollar.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/markets/item/4630-gadhafi-s-gold-money-plan-would-have-devastated-dollar

In a nutshell
Tremendous and illuminating. Thank you for sharing this pertinent information.
 
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#15 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

I'm just saying for all the bombings the US and its allies do you would most of isis and these other terrorist groups would all pretty much be dead by now


and you would think with the US's pretty much open border policy toward illegal mexicans some of these terrorist would sneak in that way
 
#16 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

I'm just saying for all the bombings the US and its allies do you would most of isis and these other terrorist groups would all pretty much be dead by now
Most of the bombings are aimed at strategic targets like oil depots rather than civilians/ISIS members so as to disable their ground attacks and some targets do include suspected buildings where the Leaders are at but majority is resource bombings.
 
#25 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

As for the rest of your post about the war in Iraq being half-assed and all this "kick ass, take names" nonsense sounds ridiculous considering a million people got killed there mostly innocent. Only a few thousand American forces got killed there. More American soldiers have committed suicide since coming home than died in combat in Iraq. It's the most one sided war of all time. So if that's not kicking ass and taking names what is. Please explain yourself.
Well said, imo this is why Military tactics have moved away from stationing large bases of US (and other nations) in the Middle-East because of the impact it has mentally and for the huge amounts of innocent civilian deaths. Instead the safer tactic chosen by Military are air-strikes and drone-strikes alongside local region Arab armies and other rebels willing to fight for the Western cause simply because of less risk on civilian deaths and the savings cost at home-soil for treating soldiers who suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome or worse mental afflictions.
It may sound all good and Patriotic saying go kick ass but when there is an unwillingness to deal with the consequences suffered by countless soldiers and the rising cost of Military where finances aren't readily available (btw all the budget savings being made by reducing social benefits etc for the last 5years+ which recoups Billions or even Trillions in the US case goes right back for the Defense budget among others at the expense of society)
 
#28 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Minimizing the risk to troops and to lessen the civilian death count I'm perfectly fine with. The problem is in this politically correct world we live in, people howl at soldiers needlessly when they have one of the most politically incorrect jobs in wartime. Dubya didn't have a plan on how to handle things after the fall of Baghdad and was so worried about winning the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq (didn't work in Vietnam, either, BTW) that he put all sorts of restrictions on our troops. When Obama took office, it became even worse. I had friends that served in Iraq that were not allowed in some cases to even draw their weapons. They seriously faced court-martials for doing so. Our leaders were more worried about people liking America than letting the troops do their job.
Tbf minimizing the use of troops in Middle-East serves 2 important purposes, the promise made back when troops were stationed in Afganistan to mentor & train rebels was a temporary plan with the intention to withdraw once training was complete and this decision was down to the general all around public feeling where the consensus was the troops had achieved their aims and were overstaying (during training) at an expense that was causing frustration. This attitude I agree was similar to historical opinion on Vietnam.
The other big issue was the troops were based within a volatile culture that would inadvertantly clash purely over personal beliefs and way of life, besides the propaganda flying around that created an unfair opinion of the regions, the challenge was knowing the divide between Rebels, 'cells' and general public opinion of innocent civilians. When accidental deaths were becoming consistent it's natural the local civilians would have as much frustrating anger at the Troops as they did for 'cells' or Rebels. They were in a no-win situation losing out everyday within a region they once felt safe in yet when the arrival of the Troops came not only did they have to endure Western beliefs (which they naturally couldn't relate to) they also had to endure the ravages of war.
All this created a hatred & mistrust by some areas which was damaging towards the reputation of the role of the troops. They were trying to fight a war that wasn't wanted or supported so the only Military solution was to pull back troops to halt all the negativity and concentrate instead on aerial or other local Rebels/Arab Armies since it would be cost-effective and removes all the public glare of innocents deaths.

(And this is me avoiding all the rogue troops who were torturing, raped, abused and killed for 'fun')
 
#30 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Hilary is a war mongering loon. Her her very existence in this Presidential Campaign shows the American public how corrupt Politicians and the Government really are. If they found a stack of bodies in her backyard I still think she would be able to be President despite her being a serial killer.
 
#31 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Simply outstanding article, so masterfully written and researched that I had to post it here...

By Nicolas J. S. Davies: http://davidstockmanscontracorner.co...=ReviveOldPost
Fascinating read which struck clarity in the concluding parts of the article after earlier parts showed a startling revelation I was unaware of which ultimately shows USA's clear intentions regardless of NATO's/U.N.'S legalities

The fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy since the 1980s has been to renounce peace as an overriding priority and to politically legitimize U.S. war-making. The U.S. has therefore, without public debate, abandoned FDR’s post-WWII “permanent structure of peace” based on the U.N. Charter. The U.S. also withdrew from the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, after it found the U.S. guilty of aggression against Nicaragua in 1986, and it likewise rejects the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court.

U.S. government lawyers now pass off political arguments as legal cover for aggression, torture, killing civilians and other war crimes, secure in the knowledge that they will never be forced to defend their legally indefensible opinions in impartial courts.

When President George W. Bush unveiled his illegal “doctrine of preemption” in 2002, Sen. Edward Kennedy called it, “a call for Twenty-first Century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.”
The article paints US & Western political aims as essentially war-mongering while finding ways to prolong the use of Troops stationed in Afghanistan long after originally agreeing to withdraw!

By the time the U.S. “combat mission” ended in 2014, 2,356 U.S. troops had met their deaths in the “graveyard of empires.” In 2016, the Taliban and its allies control more of Afghanistan than at any time since 2001, as they fight to expel the 10,000 U.S. troops still deployed there.

A complete withdrawal of foreign troops has always been the Taliban’s first precondition for opening serious peace talks with the government, so the 2009-10 escalations, which Clinton backed to the hilt, served only to kill 1,711 more Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans, prolonging the war and undermining diplomacy in the futile hope of saving a corrupt regime of U.S.-backed warlords and drug-lords.

President Obama’s latest plan, to keep at least 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, ensures that the war will continue into the next administration
, even as Islamic State begins to move into another failed state already devastated by more than 60,000 U.S. bombs and missiles.
Then, for Libya & Syria, they 'appease' public opinions with votes on if to progress from 'troops on ground' to air-stikes/drones and even when the results were outrageously low the decision was carried forward with the intention to overthrow Libyan Government.

Despite Secretary Gates telling a Congressional hearing that the first phase of a “no-fly zone” would be a bombing campaign to destroy Libyan air defenses, a Pew poll found that, while 44 percent of the public supported a “no-fly zone,” only 16 percent supported “bombing Libyan air defenses.” Even after being caught with its pants down over Iraq, the U.S. corporate media has not lost its talent for confusing Americans into war.

Secretary Gates wrote in Duty that he was so opposed to U.S. intervention in Libya that he considered resigning. President Obama was so undecided that he called his final decision a “51-49 call.” The other advocates for bombing were U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Council staffers Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power, so Secretary Clinton was the most senior, andalmost certainly the decisive voice in sealing the fate of Muammar Gaddafi and the people of Libya.

Despite a U.N. resolution that authorized military force only to “protect civilians,” the U.S. and its allies intervened to support forces who were explicitly fighting to overthrow the Libyan government. NATO and its Arab monarchist allies conducted 7,700 air strikes in seven months, while NATO warships shelled coastal cities. The rebel forces on the ground, including Islamist fundamentalists, were trained and led on the ground by Qatari, British, French and Jordanian special forces.
What's ironic is the more these 'emails' are exposed it eerily mirrors an equally famous US exposure that I read of after seeing it referred to in a documovie. That scandal occurred in the mid 70s for Richard Nixon - Watergate. The similarities are unbelievably close its like a modernized reboot to point fingers of blame for wars.
 
#32 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Outstanding post, @spikingspud, and I completely agree. Though if anything this is an even more serious situation than Watergate, which was essentially about a third-rate break-in, a practice which had been exercised by numerous twentieth century U.S. presidents.

The U.S. regime seeking to continue its hegemony is hardly surprising, honestly, but for the culpable parties to be caught in such red-handed fashion is certainly remarkable.

Hillary Clinton is now invoking post-World War II Germany and Japan as the model for Libya, to keep the U.S. there in perpetuity.
 
#33 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Thanks DesoRow though Watergate parallels with this current Clinton Email exposure because of the secret tapings which lead to exposure by Alexander Butterfield's testimony which lead to the termination of the voice-activated use of Nixon's personal tapings due to the widespread interest & demand for release of the Tapes which contained personal discussions by Nixon and the White House admin (and was monitored by Secret Service) covering many political issues at the forefront of the public's minds as far back as Vietnam.
Frustratingly it became infamous over the '18.5 minutes' missing and caused all kinds of speculations while succeeding in downplaying interest in exposure of over 3,000hrs of important worldwide discussions & meeting arrangements which staggeringly lead to only 5% of the Tapes ever being exposed and transcribed back then until the 'smoking gun' scandal where Nixon requested a halt in investigation of the 'break-in' and attempted to reverse the FBI's attempts at gaining access to the Tape's recording around the times of the break-ins but Nixon failed and was considered to be 'obstructing justice'.
Since the Federal Government's seizure of all the Tapes, Nixon spent decades attempting to gain rights back of the Tapes since it 'violated Constitutional Rights during his position and was an invasion of his privacy'. Ironic considering current events of 'eavesdropping' worldwide though considering the vast personal data gathered during Watergate what's to say this wasn't the precursor towards initiating this worldwide phone/internet 'spying'.
Oddly, since the exposure Nixon's voice-activation technique had never been reused and now all subsequent Presidents now rely on a button-activated recording method. Nixon's Estate finally won the rights to his Tapes 25years later but they are now in the National Archives and readily available for viewing by the Public.

Another reason for the comparison is Hilary Clinton et al could easily have maintained a similar stance as Nixon concerning Constitutional Rights violations and invasion of privacy especially during a period where Internet Laws are being revamped.
 
#34 ·
Re: Brad Hoff on Hillary Clinton's Emails Shedding Light on the "Dirty War" in Libya... And Now the Pentagon Seeks to Fight the Purported Next Battle

Thanks DesoRow though Watergate parallels with this current Clinton Email exposure because of the secret tapings which lead to exposure by Alexander Butterfield's testimony which lead to the termination of the voice-activated use of Nixon's personal tapings due to the widespread interest & demand for release of the Tapes which contained personal discussions by Nixon and the White House admin (and was monitored by Secret Service) covering many political issues at the forefront of the public's minds as far back as Vietnam.
Frustratingly it became infamous over the '18.5 minutes' missing and caused all kinds of speculations while succeeding in downplaying interest in exposure of over 3,000hrs of important worldwide discussions & meeting arrangements which staggeringly lead to only 5% of the Tapes ever being exposed and transcribed back then until the 'smoking gun' scandal where Nixon requested a halt in investigation of the 'break-in' and attempted to reverse the FBI's attempts at gaining access to the Tape's recording around the times of the break-ins but Nixon failed and was considered to be 'obstructing justice'.
Since the Federal Government's seizure of all the Tapes, Nixon spent decades attempting to gain rights back of the Tapes since it 'violated Constitutional Rights during his position and was an invasion of his privacy'. Ironic considering current events of 'eavesdropping' worldwide though considering the vast personal data gathered during Watergate what's to say this wasn't the precursor towards initiating this worldwide phone/internet 'spying'.
Oddly, since the exposure Nixon's voice-activation technique had never been reused and now all subsequent Presidents now rely on a button-activated recording method. Nixon's Estate finally won the rights to his Tapes 25years later but they are now in the National Archives and readily available for viewing by the Public.

Another reason for the comparison is Hilary Clinton et al could easily have maintained a similar stance as Nixon concerning Constitutional Rights violations and invasion of privacy especially during a period where Internet Laws are being revamped.
Ah, yes, I see the parallels you are drawing now. Yes, it is a fascinating "redux" of sorts playing out with Hillary Clinton and emails serving as the analogue to Richard Nixon and the tapes.

What was revealed by the FBI analysts back last summer was that many of the emails were "wiped" off of Hillary's private server as well as discovering who had access to it and whether outsiders had tried to hack it. The comparisons to the Nixon tapes subsequently became far more substantive, as you note. Of course, the comparisons ignited howls of indignation from all of the likely Clinton defenders such as their chief counselor, James Carville, who was ranting against all of the "stupid media people" for asking questions "over a pile of garbage." He sounded quite a bit like the Nixon minion Ron Ziegler dismissing concerns of the Washington Post about Watergate.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton shares with Richard Nixon the penchant for secrecy, and keeping tallies of who her enemies were long ago and are today, as well as an inability to alter course even while the damage continues unabated.

The Alexander Butterfield testimony has always remained fascinating for the reasons you enumerate above!

 
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