by Glenn Greenwald
At Wednesday night’s
Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton attacked
Bernie Sanders for praising Fidel Castro in the 1980s, as well for standing
with Central Americans governments and rebel groups targeted by Ronald
Reagan’s brutal
covert wars. “You know,” said the former Secretary of State, “if the values
are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill
people for expressing their opinions, for expressing freedom of speech, that is
not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.”
To defend her remarks,
Clinton’s faithful Good Democratic supporters began instantly spouting
rhetoric that sounded like a right-wing,
red-baiting Cold War cartoon; in other words, these Clinton-defending
Democrats sounded very much like this:
Vehement opposition to
Reagan’s covert wars in Central America, as well as to the sadistic and
senseless embargo of Cuba, were once standard
liberal positions. As my colleague Jeremy Scahill, observing the reaction
of Clinton supporters during the debate, put it in a series of tweets: “The US
sponsored deaths squads that massacred countless central and Latin Americans,
murdered nuns and priests, assassinated an Archbishop. I bet commie Sanders was
even against Reagan’s humanitarian mining of Nicaraguan waters & supported
subsequent war crimes judgement vs. US. Have any of these Hillarybots
heard of the Contra death squads? Or is it just that whatever Hillary says must
be defended at all costs? The Hillarybots attacking Sanders over Nicaragua
should be ashamed of themselves.”
Let’s pretend for the sake of
argument that the horror expressed by Clinton and her supporters over
Sanders’ 1980s positions on Latin America was all driven by some sort of
authentic outrage over praising tyrants and human rights abusers rather
than a cynical, craven tactic to undermine Sanders using long-standing right-wing,
red-baiting smears. Is Hillary Clinton a credible voice for condemning support
for despots and human rights abusers? To answer that, let’s review much
more recent evidence than the 1980s:
Egyptian despot Hosni Mubarak:
Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad:
Clinton on Face the
Nation, 2011, arguing
that Qaddafi is worse than Assad:
There’s a different leader in
Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to
Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer. … There’s a
difference between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and
bombing and strafing your own cities, than police actions which frankly
have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see.
As PolitiFact noted,
Clinton phrased the “reformer” comment as something “members of Congress”
believe, but it was cited by her in order to favorably compare Assad to
Qaddafi: “Clinton’s choice to talk about those members’ opinions of Assad
without knocking them down suggests she may have found them credible.”
The Saudi regime:
Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu:
The right-wing coup government
in Honduras
Gulf tyrannies
As International Business
Times reported
last year, the Clinton-led State Department approved arms sales and
transfers to a slew of human-rights-abusing regimes, which also just so
happened to have donated large amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation:
The Saudi deal was one of
dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed
weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton
family philanthropic empire. … The State Department formally approved these
arms sales even as many of the deals enhanced the military power of countries
ruled by authoritarian regimes whose human rights abuses had been criticized by
the department. Algeria,
Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait,
the United
Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar all
donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to
buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for
a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to
violent crackdowns against political opponents.
War criminal and dictator-supporter Henry Kissinger:
It seems that, overnight,
Clinton and her supporters have decided that Sanders’ opposition to Reagan-era
wars against Latin American governments and rebel groups — a common
liberal position at the time — is actually terribly wrong and something
worthy of demonization rather than admiration, because those governments and
groups abused human rights.
Whatever else one might say about
this mimicking of right-wing agitprop, Hillary Clinton for years has been one
of the world’s most stalwart friends of some of the world’s worst despots and
war criminals, making her and her campaign a very odd vessel for demonizing
others for their links to and admiration of human-rights abusers.
