Am I the only one pissed off at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attacks on Bernie Sanders regarding gun control?
Whatever one thinks of HRC’s gun control position vs Sanders’s, she really shouldn’t be preaching gun control to anyone when her actions as Secretary of State are reviewed, particularly with regard to Libya.
We see Obama’s tears while discussing gun deaths in the USA (which are of course tragic), but Obama, Clinton and others have been causing untold deaths of innocents throughout the Mideast — droning, supplying weapons (more on that below), and, scandalously, participating in the Saudi genocidal actions in the Yemen.
Let’s focus on Hillary and Libya: From the last email dump on New Year’s Eve, numerous emails dealing with Libya were revealed, many of them from her BFF and private intelligence service pal Sid Blumenthal. (Remember that he is also on the Clinton Foundation payroll… a busy fellow.)
What we learned is that the anti-Qaddafi elements in Libya that the Western alliance was supporting (under Clinton as SoS) contained within them AQ and other radical group members. As Robert Parry reports:
However, in the emails to Clinton, Blumenthal conveyed the actual reality – that these supposedly innocent anti-Gaddafi rebels in the east indeed included jihadist elements. He wrote: “Sarkozy is also concerned about continuing reports that radical/terrorist groups such as the Libyan Fighting Groups and Al Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) are infiltrating the NLC [the rebel’s National Transitional Council] and its military command.
“Accordingly, he [Sarkozy] asked [a] sociologist … who has long established ties to Israel, Syria, and other nations in the Middle East, to use his contacts to determine the level of influence AQIM and other terrorist groups have inside of the NLC. Sarkozy also asked for reports setting out a clear picture of the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the rebel leadership.”
Blumenthal added: “Senior European security officials caution that AQIM is watching developments in Libya, and elements of that organization have been in touch with tribes in the southeastern part of the country. These [European] officials are concerned that in a post-Qaddafi Libya, France and other western European countries must move quickly to ensure that the new government does not allow AQIM and others to set up small, semi-autonomous local entities — or ‘Caliphates’ — in the oil and gas producing regions of southeastern Libya.”
In other words, the danger of Islamic terror groups exploiting the power vacuum that the Obama administration and its Western allies were creating inside Libya was well understood in March 2011, but the supposed “R2P” mission pressed ahead nevertheless.
--What Hillary Knew about Libya
Also based on the Blumenthal emails, Brad Hoff describes “Hillary’s Death Squads” in Libya:
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.
Garry Leech in CounterPunch attacks Obama (justifiably) for his gun control hypocrisy, but these same words could be directed at Hillary:
In the first five years of Obama’s presidency, according to the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, more than 2,500 people were killed by US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The study claims that as many as 951 of these deaths were civilians and that as many as 200 of the victims were children. And those 200 dead innocent children are just for starters. Who knows how many more children Obama has killed in those four nations during the past two years? Or how many hundreds or thousands have been killed by US bombing strikes in Iraq, Syria and Libya during his two terms in office.
During his speech, Obama struggled to hold back tears while empathizing with “every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun. Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad.” But while the deaths of American children are truly tragic—and should make people mad—are they any more tragic than the deaths of innocent children in other parts of the world? Their families also never imagined that their loved ones would be taken from them by a US bomb or missile.
And it’s not only the deaths of children killed directly by the US military that I am referring to. What about those killed by the regimes that we supply weapons to? Israel used US weapons to kill more than 1,500 Palestinian children between 2000 and 2013, which averages out to one child killed every three days. And the carnage wrought by US weaponry isn’t restricted to children. The US-backed Colombian military has become the primary human rights violator in that country’s armed conflict. According to Human Rights Watch, it has been responsible for at least 3,000 civilian deaths since 2002.
--The Hypocrisy of Obama’s Gun Control Crusade
A reminder: Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State during many of those years, and is on record as being one of the proponents of these policies. I urge all Kossacks to read Leech’s full column.
Finally, for further hypocrisy — Hillary accepts campaign donations from companies invested in the guns industry, as described by Andrew Perez and David Sirota:
But the leading Democrats’ image as staunch opponents of the gun industry isn’t the whole story. Some of Obama’s and Clinton’s biggest political benefactors are firms with a financial stake in the sale of guns and ammunition. And neither Obama nor Clinton has joined the growing push —backed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio— to pressure institutional investors to divest from firearms firms.
According to Nasdaq records, campaign finance reports and Securities and Exchange Commission filings reviewed by International Business Times, executives at the financial firms and hedge funds that hold some of the largest ownership stakes in firearms and ammo manufacturers have donated more than $15 million to the Democratic National Committee as well as to Obama and Clinton’s respective reelection campaigns and super PAC. Those firms have also spent $4.1 million on donations to the Clinton Foundation and speaking fees to the Clinton family.
--Barack Obama And Hillary Clinton Donors Profit From Gun Industry
Here is one piece of data from the link above:
- Executives at Goldman Sachs have collectively been among Clinton andObama’s top Senate contributors, as has Morgan Stanley in Clinton’s case. Those two firms were both among the top 10 institutional shareholders of gunmaker Smith & Wesson in September. Goldman is also listed as the single largest shareholder for ammunition company Vista Outdoors, and Morgan Stanley is also listed as a top shareholder of Sturm & Ruger and the Olin Corporation.
I’m waiting with bated breath to hear Hillary rant and rage against her buddies at Goldman Sachs regarding gun control as much as Team Clinton is against Sanders.
In the meantime: anyone else as disgusted by the hypocrisy as I am?