July 14 2016
While Hillary Clinton runs
ads criticizing Donald Trump for praising dictators, Clinton herself has a
history of alliances with strongmen in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Honduras.
Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s top
foreign policy adviser, warned
last week that Trump’s “praise for brutal strongmen knows no bounds.” The
Clinton campaign released a video compilation of Trump’s comments about North Korean
dictator Kim Jong Un, Russian President Vladamir Putin, and former Iraqi and
Libyan dictators Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.
At a California
rally, Clinton accused Trump of trying to become a dictator himself. “We’re
trying to elect a president,” said Clinton, “not a dictator.”
Practically speaking, however,
the choice voters will face in November will be between a candidate who praises
dictators and a candidate who befriends them.
Clinton has described former
Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and his wife as “friends of my family.” Mubarak
ruled Egypt under a perpetual “state
of emergency” rule that involved disappearing and torturing
dissidents, police
killings, and persecution
of LGBT people. The U.S. gave Mubarak $1.3 billion in military aid per
year, and when Arab Spring protests threatened his grip on power, Clinton warned
the administration not to “push a longtime partner out the door,” according to
her book Hard Choices.
After Arab Spring protests
unseated Mubarak and led to democratic elections, the Egyptian military, led by
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, staged a coup. El-Sisi suspended the country’s 2012
Constitution, appointed officials from the former dictatorship, and moved to
silence opposition.
Sisi traveled to the U.S. in
2014 and met with Clinton and her husband, posing for a photo. The Obama
administration last year lifted
a hold on the transfer of weapons and cash to el-Sisi’s government.
Meanwhile, repression in Egypt
continues to escalate. By the government’s own admission, it has imprisoned more
than 34,000 people – and sentenced
huge numbers to die. Amnesty International released a report
Tuesday documenting forced disappearances and torture by the el-Sisi regime,
including one account of a 14-year-old who was kidnapped by government forces
and raped repeatedly with a wooden stick to extract a confession.
El-Sisi continues to receive $1.3 billion in military
aid each year from the Obama administration.
Egypt is far from the only
military dictatorship that Clinton has supported. During her tenure as
secretary of state, Clinton approved tens
of billions of dollars of weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia – including
fighter jets now being used to bomb Yemen. Clinton played a central role in
legitimizing a 2009 military
coup in Honduras, and once called Syrian dictator
Bashir al-Assad a “reformer.” And in return for approving arms deals to gulf
state monarchies, Clinton accepted tens of millions of dollars in donations
to the Clinton Foundation.
Clinton has also boasted about
receiving advice from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was notorious for his support of dictators. According to records from the National
Security Archive, Kissinger oversaw a plot to assassinate the Chilean President
Salvador Allende and install the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet.
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