Let's talk about Kissinger
"The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer" - Henry Kissinger
First off, now that we've established that given the available options, a Clinton in the White House is much more preferable than a Trump (well, isn't anything preferable to Trump?), now let's talk about what we should be bracing ourselves for, once we've got a Clinton II at the helm (and I do mean the whole world). Just to provide some context, let me remind that Henry Kissinger was instrumental to the murder of literally millions of people:
"Kissinger... enabled dictators, extended the Vietnam War, laid the path to the Khmer Rouge killing fields, stage-managed a genocide in East Timor, overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government in Chile, and encouraged Nixon to wiretap his political adversaries."
This, in addition to Kissinger ordering the US air force to carry out "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia... Anything that flies on anything that moves". In other words, an explicit order for genocide.
And yet...
The Obama Administration Just Granted Henry Kissinger a Distinguished Public Service Award
Hillary Clinton Courts Henry Kissinger’s Endorsement Even After Meeting His Victims
Donald Trump Praises Dictators, But Hillary Clinton Befriends Them
Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace, Greg Grandin
Clinton's Kissinger praise goes back years
And none of the above is of big surprise, come to think of it - probably because the Clintons are well-known for their nation-building (read: imperialist) inclinations. Want some examples? OK, you asked.
The Clinton Record on Democracy Promotion
"Economic and security interests of various types, from access to national resources to regional security issues, still collide with U.S. interest in democracy in many places. The core strategic approach of U.S. policy under Clinton remains what it has been for decades, a semi-realist balancing of sometimes competing and sometimes complementary interests. Where democracy appears to fit in well with U.S. security and economic interests, the United States promotes democracy. Where democracy clashes with other significant interests, it is downplayed or even ignored."
Which is actually quite an understatement, because:
Human Rights & US Security Assistance, Amnesty International, 1996
"Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or 'disappeared', at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame."
Amnesty Details Aid To Nations With Poor Rights Record, AP, June 2, 1994
"The irony is that the Clinton administration supplies security assistance to countries with gross records of human rights abuses under programmes entitled 'building democracy' and 'promoting peace'", says Dr. William Schultz, executive director, AIUSA. "The US public will not tolerate tax monies(sic) used to murder innocent people in other countries. Amnesty International will continue to monitor and hold the U.S. government accountable for every dollar in security aid that contributes to human rights abuses."
In addition to Turkey and Colombia, AIUSA's report reviews the human rights records of Chad, Kenya, Malawi, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Egypt, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela."
On President Clinton's "Plan Colombia" in 1999 (arms, training, intelligence infrastructure), The Guardian reports:
"Western diplomats in Bogota confirm that the Colombian government has yet to present a coherent social investment programme. And, they say, few governments will be willing to climb aboard what is perceived as an American project to clean out its backyard."
Then, of course, there's a long-time Kissinger favorite:
Why Suharto Is In and Castro Is Out, New York Times
"Administration officials said the treatment of Mr. Castro, Mr. Jiang and Mr. Suharto was driven by very different litmus tests, a potent mix of power politics and emerging markets."
Mr. Suharto, who is sitting on the ultimate emerging market: some 13,000 islands, a population of 193 million and an economy growing at more than 7 percent a year. The country remains wildly corrupt and Mr. Suharto's family controls leading businesses that competitors in Jakarta would be unwise to challenge. But Mr. Suharto, unlike the Chinese, has been savvy in keeping Washington happy. He has deregulated the economy, opened Indonesia to foreign investors and kept the Japanese, Indonesia's largest supplier of foreign aid, from grabbing more than a quarter of the market for goods imported into the country."
"He's our kind of guy," a senior Administration official who deals often on Asian policy, said the other day."
US trained butchers of Timor, Guardian, September 19, 1999
"Washington trained death squads in secret while Britain has spent ?1m helping Indonesian army."
As Chomsky, that evil little commie gnome has said, "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."
I know, some would argue that Hillary Clinton is not the same as Bill Clinton, and her policies would not necessarily mirror his. Well, not so fast.
Why Did the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation?
It would take tremendous amounts of confirmation bias to assert that donations from some of the world's most repressive regimes are motived by a desire to merely aid the foundation's charitable work.
A Clinton administration provides continuity to the current Obama administration, so let's look into that as well. The US and UK are still a party to mass murder despite warnings from some officials that the US could be implicated in war crimes for supporting the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen that has killed more than 10 thousand civilians, according to government documents and the accounts of current and former officials. Here the "command responsibility" law may apply. According to the Saudi Foreign Minister, "British and American military officials are in the command and control centre for Saudi airstrikes on Yemen" and "have access to lists of targets." A prima facie case could easily be made (if anyone dares). After all, the US is still the only nation to have been found guilty for war crimes by the World Court. In 1986 the ICJ ruled that the US had violated international law in its terrorist war against Nicaragua.
Despite all the talk of freezing-cold relations with the Saudis, in fact the Obama administration has kept supplying political surveillance to the Saudi regime as a means of ensuring its "continuity". In Egypt, the tear gas canisters shot at protesters by Mubarak's police bore "Made in the U.S.A." labels. The Obama administration supported Mubarak right to the end until his rule could not be sustained any more because the military had turned against him - and even then, they plotted to replace him with Omar Soliman: "an equally loyal and even more brutal autocrat, most appreciated in Washington circles for helpfully torturing people on behalf of the Americans".
As The Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald writes, "The U.S. has long been devoted to tyranny in the region precisely to ensure that the widespread views of the public - which overwhelmingly view the U.S. and Israel as the greatest threats to peace - remain suppressed by U.S.-loyal tyrants."
You'll note that many of the links here have been from The Intercept. That same online publication launched a couple years ago and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and serving as a platform to report on the documents released by Snowden. It's kind of interesting that it just so happens that all these journalists, leakers, dissidents, and whistleblowers - Risen, Snowden, Assange, Ritter, Manning, Sterling, Kiriakou, and potentially Greenwald at some point - have either been sentenced to prison or have warrants for their arrest. The case of former CIA analyst John Kiriakou is especially fucked up:
"Five key political players enjoy ‘virtual impunity’ - while four lower-level figures are in prison or facing time."
Not to mention that many establishment figures (both Democrats and Republicans) have been on record, saying Assange should be assassinated.
But I digress. Here's yet another example of a Clinton coup, Kissinger-style.
Hillary Clinton’s Response To Honduran Coup Was Scrubbed From Her Paperback Memoirs "Critics argue the secretary of state’s efforts paved the way for the violence still plaguing Honduras. ... But the account Clinton offered of her response to the coup in her memoir Hard Choices was omitted from last year’s paperback edition."
"Grandin, who wrote about Clinton’s response to the 2009 coup in The Nation last week, told HuffPost that her work on Honduras should be a campaign issue and that the assassination of Caceres should force a “reckoning with history.”"
Another example of Hillary's Kissinger-style tunnel vision on Libya, which was essentially a war for oil (and by extension, the destabilization of the southern European periphery):
Secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan war
"Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli."
The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Gaddafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the US into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns."
WikiLeaks cables show that it was all about the oil
The list could go on forever. Kissinger (and Brzezinski, the mastermind behind the Grand Chessboard doctrine, which is essentially a nation-building neocon pipe-dream on steroids) has been whispering stuff into the ear of a number of presidents, including Clinton I, Obama, and it would be preposterous to assume that this wouldn't continue with Clinton II. It's curious that Kissinger never really held a public office after Nixon, and yet the touch of his long hand can still be felt all around US foreign policy.
I think these should be the issues that should be discussed during this election - not Bill's treatment of women, and his wife's alleged efforts to clean his shit behind him. If Trump really wanted to hurt her campaign, he could've focused there. He could've developed that Establishment Imperialist Hillary meme using actual facts, as opposed to lame soundbites. The fact that he isn't doing it, is speaking volumes about the true scenario of this election.
Rigged election, you say, Donald? Yes indeed - and YOU are part of this circus, too!
First off, now that we've established that given the available options, a Clinton in the White House is much more preferable than a Trump (well, isn't anything preferable to Trump?), now let's talk about what we should be bracing ourselves for, once we've got a Clinton II at the helm (and I do mean the whole world). Just to provide some context, let me remind that Henry Kissinger was instrumental to the murder of literally millions of people:
"Kissinger... enabled dictators, extended the Vietnam War, laid the path to the Khmer Rouge killing fields, stage-managed a genocide in East Timor, overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government in Chile, and encouraged Nixon to wiretap his political adversaries."
This, in addition to Kissinger ordering the US air force to carry out "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia... Anything that flies on anything that moves". In other words, an explicit order for genocide.
And yet...
The Obama Administration Just Granted Henry Kissinger a Distinguished Public Service Award
Hillary Clinton Courts Henry Kissinger’s Endorsement Even After Meeting His Victims
Donald Trump Praises Dictators, But Hillary Clinton Befriends Them
Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace, Greg Grandin
Clinton's Kissinger praise goes back years
And none of the above is of big surprise, come to think of it - probably because the Clintons are well-known for their nation-building (read: imperialist) inclinations. Want some examples? OK, you asked.
The Clinton Record on Democracy Promotion
"Economic and security interests of various types, from access to national resources to regional security issues, still collide with U.S. interest in democracy in many places. The core strategic approach of U.S. policy under Clinton remains what it has been for decades, a semi-realist balancing of sometimes competing and sometimes complementary interests. Where democracy appears to fit in well with U.S. security and economic interests, the United States promotes democracy. Where democracy clashes with other significant interests, it is downplayed or even ignored."
Which is actually quite an understatement, because:
Human Rights & US Security Assistance, Amnesty International, 1996
"Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or 'disappeared', at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame."
Amnesty Details Aid To Nations With Poor Rights Record, AP, June 2, 1994
"The irony is that the Clinton administration supplies security assistance to countries with gross records of human rights abuses under programmes entitled 'building democracy' and 'promoting peace'", says Dr. William Schultz, executive director, AIUSA. "The US public will not tolerate tax monies(sic) used to murder innocent people in other countries. Amnesty International will continue to monitor and hold the U.S. government accountable for every dollar in security aid that contributes to human rights abuses."
In addition to Turkey and Colombia, AIUSA's report reviews the human rights records of Chad, Kenya, Malawi, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Egypt, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela."
On President Clinton's "Plan Colombia" in 1999 (arms, training, intelligence infrastructure), The Guardian reports:
"Western diplomats in Bogota confirm that the Colombian government has yet to present a coherent social investment programme. And, they say, few governments will be willing to climb aboard what is perceived as an American project to clean out its backyard."
Then, of course, there's a long-time Kissinger favorite:
Why Suharto Is In and Castro Is Out, New York Times
"Administration officials said the treatment of Mr. Castro, Mr. Jiang and Mr. Suharto was driven by very different litmus tests, a potent mix of power politics and emerging markets."
Mr. Suharto, who is sitting on the ultimate emerging market: some 13,000 islands, a population of 193 million and an economy growing at more than 7 percent a year. The country remains wildly corrupt and Mr. Suharto's family controls leading businesses that competitors in Jakarta would be unwise to challenge. But Mr. Suharto, unlike the Chinese, has been savvy in keeping Washington happy. He has deregulated the economy, opened Indonesia to foreign investors and kept the Japanese, Indonesia's largest supplier of foreign aid, from grabbing more than a quarter of the market for goods imported into the country."
"He's our kind of guy," a senior Administration official who deals often on Asian policy, said the other day."
US trained butchers of Timor, Guardian, September 19, 1999
"Washington trained death squads in secret while Britain has spent ?1m helping Indonesian army."
As Chomsky, that evil little commie gnome has said, "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."
I know, some would argue that Hillary Clinton is not the same as Bill Clinton, and her policies would not necessarily mirror his. Well, not so fast.
Why Did the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation?
It would take tremendous amounts of confirmation bias to assert that donations from some of the world's most repressive regimes are motived by a desire to merely aid the foundation's charitable work.
A Clinton administration provides continuity to the current Obama administration, so let's look into that as well. The US and UK are still a party to mass murder despite warnings from some officials that the US could be implicated in war crimes for supporting the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen that has killed more than 10 thousand civilians, according to government documents and the accounts of current and former officials. Here the "command responsibility" law may apply. According to the Saudi Foreign Minister, "British and American military officials are in the command and control centre for Saudi airstrikes on Yemen" and "have access to lists of targets." A prima facie case could easily be made (if anyone dares). After all, the US is still the only nation to have been found guilty for war crimes by the World Court. In 1986 the ICJ ruled that the US had violated international law in its terrorist war against Nicaragua.
Despite all the talk of freezing-cold relations with the Saudis, in fact the Obama administration has kept supplying political surveillance to the Saudi regime as a means of ensuring its "continuity". In Egypt, the tear gas canisters shot at protesters by Mubarak's police bore "Made in the U.S.A." labels. The Obama administration supported Mubarak right to the end until his rule could not be sustained any more because the military had turned against him - and even then, they plotted to replace him with Omar Soliman: "an equally loyal and even more brutal autocrat, most appreciated in Washington circles for helpfully torturing people on behalf of the Americans".
As The Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald writes, "The U.S. has long been devoted to tyranny in the region precisely to ensure that the widespread views of the public - which overwhelmingly view the U.S. and Israel as the greatest threats to peace - remain suppressed by U.S.-loyal tyrants."
You'll note that many of the links here have been from The Intercept. That same online publication launched a couple years ago and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and serving as a platform to report on the documents released by Snowden. It's kind of interesting that it just so happens that all these journalists, leakers, dissidents, and whistleblowers - Risen, Snowden, Assange, Ritter, Manning, Sterling, Kiriakou, and potentially Greenwald at some point - have either been sentenced to prison or have warrants for their arrest. The case of former CIA analyst John Kiriakou is especially fucked up:
"Five key political players enjoy ‘virtual impunity’ - while four lower-level figures are in prison or facing time."
Not to mention that many establishment figures (both Democrats and Republicans) have been on record, saying Assange should be assassinated.
But I digress. Here's yet another example of a Clinton coup, Kissinger-style.
Hillary Clinton’s Response To Honduran Coup Was Scrubbed From Her Paperback Memoirs "Critics argue the secretary of state’s efforts paved the way for the violence still plaguing Honduras. ... But the account Clinton offered of her response to the coup in her memoir Hard Choices was omitted from last year’s paperback edition."
"Grandin, who wrote about Clinton’s response to the 2009 coup in The Nation last week, told HuffPost that her work on Honduras should be a campaign issue and that the assassination of Caceres should force a “reckoning with history.”"
Another example of Hillary's Kissinger-style tunnel vision on Libya, which was essentially a war for oil (and by extension, the destabilization of the southern European periphery):
Secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan war
"Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli."
The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Gaddafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the US into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns."
WikiLeaks cables show that it was all about the oil
The list could go on forever. Kissinger (and Brzezinski, the mastermind behind the Grand Chessboard doctrine, which is essentially a nation-building neocon pipe-dream on steroids) has been whispering stuff into the ear of a number of presidents, including Clinton I, Obama, and it would be preposterous to assume that this wouldn't continue with Clinton II. It's curious that Kissinger never really held a public office after Nixon, and yet the touch of his long hand can still be felt all around US foreign policy.
I think these should be the issues that should be discussed during this election - not Bill's treatment of women, and his wife's alleged efforts to clean his shit behind him. If Trump really wanted to hurt her campaign, he could've focused there. He could've developed that Establishment Imperialist Hillary meme using actual facts, as opposed to lame soundbites. The fact that he isn't doing it, is speaking volumes about the true scenario of this election.
Rigged election, you say, Donald? Yes indeed - and YOU are part of this circus, too!