Hillary Clinton as Damaged Goods

July 6, 2016

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/07/06/hillary-clinton-as-damaged-goods/

Exclusive: FBI Director Comey’s judgment that Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” but not criminal in her sloppy email practices leaves her limping to the Democratic nomination and stumbling toward the fall campaign, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Compared to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton presents herself as the well-qualified steady hand to manage U.S. foreign policy over the next four years, yet she has associated herself with a series of failed strategies and now faces an FBI judgment that she was “extremely careless” in protecting national security secrets.

A partial list of her dubious and dangerous judgments include voting for the catastrophic Iraq War, pushing for a misguided counterinsurgency “surge” in Afghanistan, embracing an anti-democratic coup in Honduras, undercutting President Obama’s efforts to peacefully constrain Iran’s nuclear program, devising the disastrous Libyan “regime change,” advocating a new invasion of Syria under the guise of creating “safe zones,” likening Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler, and – now according to FBI Director James Comey – failing to protect classified material from possible exposure to foreign adversaries.

Clinton admits that some of her judgments were “mistakes,” such as believing President George W. Bush’s blatant falsehoods about Iraq’s alleged WMDs and using a personal email server to communicate regarding her duties as Secretary of State. But arguably even more troubling is the fact that she doesn’t regard other of her official judgments as mistakes. Instead, she holds to them still or spins them in deceptive ways.

For instance, Clinton has never expressed regret about her support for the ouster of progressive Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, or her siding with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus against President Obama in mouse-trapping him into a foolhardy counterinsurgency escalation in Afghanistan, or her sabotaging Obama’s plan in 2010 to use Brazil and Turkey to convince Iran to surrender much of its refined uranium, or her propagandistic justification for bombing Libya in 2011 and leaving behind what amounts to a failed state, or her similar scheming for “regime change” in Syria that helped expand terrorist movements in the Middle East and has now destabilized Europe, or her reckless demonizing of Russia’s Putin and encouragement of a dangerous new Cold War.

In many of those cases, Clinton has not been called on to apologize or admit error because Washington’s neoconservative/liberal interventionist foreign-policy establishment marched in lock-step with the former Secretary of State. It turns out that if you move with the pack, you do enjoy relative safety even if your collective judgment is unsound. Usually, the people picking up the messy and blood-spattered pieces left behind by foolhardy policies are American soldiers and taxpayers whose opinions don’t matter much in the rarefied atmosphere of Officialdom.

The Worst News

Arguably, Comey’s July 5 statement terming Clinton’s use of an unsecured email server as “extremely careless” but not criminal was the worst possible news for the Democratic Party. A recommendation to indict Clinton might have compelled her to step aside and let the party nominate someone more likely to defeat Republican Donald Trump, but the lack of an indictment probably means that Clinton will persevere through the Democratic convention and go into the general election as damaged goods.

That outcome means she will be viewed by many voters as a privileged politician who was let off the hook while more poorly connected Americans would likely have ended up in prison.

Assessing Clinton’s sloppy use of a private email server – a process that she justified as a matter of personal convenience so she could keep her beloved Blackberry – Comey said laws may well have been broken and national security secrets may have been jeopardized to foreign governments though he couldn’t say for sure that her server was successfully hacked.

Explaining his reasoning, Comey said, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no responsible prosecutor would bring such a case.” Despite Comey’s recommendation, the ultimate decision still rests with Justice Department prosecutors.

But the impression that many Americans will get is that there is one set of rules for the “great and powerful” and another set for the rest of us, an extraordinarily damaging message in a political year of obvious voter discontent with the Establishment.

While there will be enormous pressure on responsible Americans not to elect the loose cannon known as Donald Trump, there are serious worries that Hillary Clinton may present her own enormous risks as President.

Will she surround herself with neocons and liberal hawks who will be eager to jam the American people into new and even more dangerous wars, including possibly the most reckless “regime change” of all, in Moscow?

Will she turn U.S. policies in the Middle East over to Israel’s right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu as she has implied in her desire to take the relationship to “the next level”? Will she display the same faulty warmongering judgment that she has demonstrated again and again, but without the temporizing influence of President Obama?

These are legitimate questions that Americans have the right to consider as they weigh which of the two highly unpopular standard-bearers to pick between. Even as Clinton has shifted her rhetoric toward a more populist style and given at least lip service to some of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s social issues, she has shown no moderation of her hawkish foreign policies.

That’s either because she’s trying to reel in the Republican neocons in the general election or because she truly believes in an interventionist approach toward the world. Either way, pro-peace Americans have reason to be concerned

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?’”; “Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon“; “Democrats Are Now the Aggressive War Party”; “The State Department’s Collective Madness”; and “Trading Places: Neocons and Cockroaches.”]

Hillary Clinton’s Wanton Disregard for US Laws and National Security

July 6, 2016

by Mel Goodman

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/06/hillary-clintons-wanton-disregard-for-us-laws-and-national-security/

There is a new poster child for the U.S. government’s double standard in dealing with violations of public policy and public trust—former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who will receive no punishment for her wanton disregard of U.S. laws and national security.  Clinton merely received a blistering rebuke from FBI director James Comey, who charged her with “extremely careless” behavior in using multiple private email servers to send and received classified information as well as using her personal cellphone in dealing with sensitive materials while traveling outside the United States.  Some of these communications referred to CIA operatives, which is a violation of a 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act to protect those individuals working overseas under cover.

A CIA operative, John Kiriakou, received a thirty-month jail sentence in 2014 for giving two journalists the name of a CIA operative, although the name never appeared in the media.  Kiriakou’s sentence was praised by CIA director David Petraeus, who faced his own charges for providing sensitive materials to his biographer, who was also his mistress. Petraeus lied to FBI investigators, who wanted to confront the general with felony charges.  The Department of Justice reduced the matter to a single misdemeanor, and Petraeus received a modest fine that could be covered with a few of his speaking fees.

The treatment of Clinton is reminiscent of the handling of cases involving former CIA director John Deutch and former national security adviser Samuel Berger.  Deutch placed the most sensitive CIA operational materials on his home computer, which was also used to access pornographic sites.  Deutch was assessed a fine of $5,000, but received a pardon from President Bill Clinton before prosecutors could file the papers in federal court.  Berger stuffed his pants with classified documents from the National Archives, and also received a modest fine.  Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez kept sensitive documents about the NSA’s surveillance program at his home, but received no punishment.

There is a similar double standard in dealing with the writings of CIA officials.  Critical accounts get great scrutiny; praise for CIA actions is rewarded with easy approval.  A classic case involved the memoir of Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., who destroyed over 90 CIA torture tapes and wrote a book that denied any torture and abuse took place.  The Department of Justice concluded that it would not pursue criminal charges for the destruction of the videotapes, although it was clearly an act to obstruct  justice.  A senior career lawyer at CIA, John Rizzo, who took part in decision making for torture and abuse, received clearance for a book that defended CIA interrogation at its secret prisons or “black sites.”

In addition to the velvet glove approach for Rodriguez and Rizzo, the authors of the torture memoranda at the Department of Justice—John Yoo and Jay Bybee—received no punishment for providing legal cover for some—but not all—of CIA torture techniques.  Even Yoo, now a faculty member at the University of California’s law school in Berkeley, conceded that CIA officers went beyond the letter of the authorization and should be held accountable.  Meanwhile, Kiriakou, the first CIA officer to reveal the torture and abuse program, was convicted and sentenced.

A CIA colleague from the 1970s, Frank Snepp, wrote an important book on the chaotic U.S. withdrawal South Vietnam with unclassified information, detailing the decisions and actions that left behind loyal Vietnamese.  Snepp had to forfeit his considerable royalties because the book wasn’t submitted for the agency’s security review.  More recently, however, former CIA director Leon Panetta presented his memoir to his publisher in 2013 without getting clearance from the CIA, and only at the last minute before the book’s distribution did it receive a cursory review.  Former director George Tenet received special treatment with his memoir, getting deputy director Michael Morell to intervene to reverse Publications Review Board decisions to redact sensitive classified materials from the director’s book.

All of these decisions point to a flawed and corrupt system that permits transgressions at the highest level of government, while the government pursues those at a lower level.  President Barack Obama’s legacy will include the fact that he irresponsibly used the Espionage Act of 1917 more often than all previous presidents over the past 100 years, and contributed to the demise of the Office of the Inspector General throughout the government, particularly at the CIA.  One of the key causes of the current hostility and cynicism toward politicians and the process of politics is the double standard at the highest levels of government.

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Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of “Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA,” “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism,” and the forthcoming “The Path to Dissent: A Whistleblower at CIA” (City Lights Publishers, 2015).  Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

Elie Wiesel: Poseur for Peace

July 6, 2016

by Joseph Grosso

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/06/elie-wiesel-poseur-for-peace/

An obvious and oft-sighted criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize is just how many of its recipients have virtually no connection to the cause of peace or its advancement. If anything, often it seems a reward for its negation. Henry Kissinger, recipient in 1973, would have to be the gold standard here. That very year saw Kissinger orchestrate the destruction of democracy in Chile, and that was only after the secret bombing of Cambodia was concluded. Of course, stretch it forward and backward a couple of years and Kissinger’s trail of destruction extends from Bangladesh to East Timor.

A few years later, Mother Theresa made an odd choice given the extra pain deliberately inflicted on the poor in her clinics and her support for Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties. And in 1994 the triumvirate of Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin can hardly be deemed inspiring. Barack Obama got the nod less than a year into his presidency. It’s a good bet there are many in Pakistan, Yemen, and Honduras that would question the wisdom of that selection.

The year 1986 saw the Nobel go to recently deceased Elie Wiesel. Wiesel was famous for his novel/memoir Night and for being, according to the Nobel Prize’s webpage, ‘the leading spokesman on the Holocaust’, therefore seemingly by definition an alleged spokesman on human rights. A quick scan through many of the obituaries written for Wiesel the past couple of days show this quote from his Nobel acceptance speech given prominent status:

I swore never to be silent whenever human beings

Endure suffering and humiliation. We must always

Take side. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

A noble sentiment indeed but not one that seemed to inspire Wiesel to live up to his peace prize, in fact evidence suggests Wiesel had a soft spot for war, at least war in the Middle East. Four years before giving his acceptance speech of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, where even an Israel commission found the Israeli military indirectly responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre, “I support Israel-period. I identify with Israel-period.” When asked to comment of the massacre: ‘I don’t think we should even comment’, then commenting he felt ‘sadness with Israel, not against Israel’ with nary a peep about the actual victims. Some years later Wiesel would be wheeled into the spotlight by the Bush administration to endorse the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. His statement at the time read: ‘Isn’t war forever cruel, the ultimate form of violence….And yet, this time I support President Bush’s policy of intervention when, as is this case because of Hussein’s equivocations and procrastinations, no other option remains’.

In the midst of another Israeli operation in Lebanon, this one in 2006, Wiesel stood in front of a crowd in Manhattan (along with then Senator Hillary Clinton) and declared “Israel defends herself, and we must say to Israel ‘Go on defending yourself.’” His final years didn’t slow him down. Wiesel took out a full page ad in newspapers across the country during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict fully supporting Israel’s effort (Human Rights Watch went on to document several instances of war crimes by the Israeli military) without a syllable about diplomacy except that ‘before diplomats can begin in earnest the crucial business of rebuilding dialogue…the Hamas death cult must be confronted for what it is’. That ad was criticized by a large group of Nazi holocaust survivors in a subsequent ad in the New York Times which stated ‘Furthermore we are disgusted and outrages by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and murder more than 2000 Palestinians, including hundreds of children.’

If being consistently hawkish on matters in the Middle East wasn’t enough for the press and governing elites to question Wiesel’s peace credentials, after all there aren’t too many wars the estates don’t get behind, it is hard to believe Wiesel wasn’t pushing his luck with some of his pieces in the Times over the years. Consider his 2001 piece Jerusalem in My Heart. Wiesel began with the following:

As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to intervene in Israel’s internal debates. I consider Israel’s destiny as mine as well, since my memory is bound up with its history. But the politics of Israel concern me only indirectly.

Strange as it was to be claiming neutrality not only in the face of his constant support for wars involving Israel and in light of his famous stand of neutrality as evil, Wiesel goes on in the same essay to renounce any such neutrality on the question of Jerusalem.

Now, though the topic is Jerusalem. Its fate affects not only Israelis, but also Diaspora Jews like myself. The fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is secondary; Jerusalem lives in me…That Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any other is understandable.

But for Jews it remains the first. Not just the first; the only.

This ode to fundamentalist thought, enhanced further by Wiesel pointing out that Jerusalem is mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible (a statement that ignores the fact that up to a fifth of Palestinians are Christians, and it’s worth asking how many times Jerusalem is mentioned in the Torah if this line of thought is to be pursued), is followed by the blatant lie, long universally known to be false, that “incited by their leaders 600,000 Palestinians left the country (in 1948) convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home”.

Wiesel then ended with a call to defer the question of Jerusalem until all other pending questions are resolved, perhaps for 20 years to allow “human bridges” to be built between the two communities- which would figure to leave the city completely in Israeli hands until these bridges are built or at least until the rest of the world accepts that it belonged there all along.

About five years later (August 21, 2005) Wiesel was at it again with a bizarre piece titled The Dispossessed. It was another putrid effort that spoke of peace while covertly praising the worst of Zionist mythology. The title referred to the last holdouts of Israeli settlements in Gaza and reading between the lines Wiesel hints that the evacuation, where the settlers received generous compensation packages from the government, had the aura of a pogrom.

The images of the evacuation itself are heart-rending.  Some of them unbearable. Angry men, crying women. Children led away on foot or in the arms of soldiers who are sobbing themselves.

Those “dispossessed” by Israeli soldiers were the hardcore remnant of a Greater Israel ideology more committed to fleeting territorial dreams than individual homes- most of the Gaza settlers saw the writing on the wall of left prior to the events Wiesel describes with such anguish. Of course Israel has long subsidized its settlements that have been declared illegal by the international community (including the U.S.). But of this remnant Wiesel reminds his readers: “Let’s not forget: these men and woman lived in Gaza for 38 years in the eyes of their families they were pioneers, whose idealism was to be celebrated”. Given the complete lack of interest Wiesel displays to Palestinian feelings on the same issue can it be reasonably assumed that Wiesel shares that same sentiment?

And here they are, obliged to uproot themselves, to take their holy and precious belongings, their memories and their prayers, their dreams and their dead, to go off in search of a bed to sleep in, a table to eat on, a new home, a future among strangers.

When Wiesel does turn to the Palestinians it is to criticize a lack of gratefulness in the face of noble Israeli concessions:

And here I am obliged to step back. In the tradition I claim,  the Jew is ordered by King Solomon “not to rejoice when the enemy falls”.  I don’t know whether the Koran suggests the same…I will  perhaps be told that when the Palestinians cried at the loss of their homes,  few Israelis were moved. That’s possible. But how many Israelis rejoiced?

After this demonization, ‘perhaps be told’ of ‘possible’ Palestinian suffering (and King Solomon may have been correct about not rejoicing when enemies fall but that isn’t quite how one recalls the conquering of the Canaanites as recorded by scripture), Wiesel again ends his essay with a call for a “lull” to allow “wounds to heal”- during which time Israel can presumably redraw the borders of the West Bank making a functional Palestinian state impossible. Again, like in the previous, essay he mentions the sadness he feels over Palestinian hatred of Jews; so much for neutrality.

All this reactionary thought, the worst of which would find few defenders outside the extreme Zionist right, didn’t make its way into Obama’s statement on Wiesel’s death (‘He raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry, and intolerance in all its forms’), nor did the fact that Wiesel opposed Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran (again with a full page ad in the Times). The Times itself conveniently overlooked the words Wiesel wrote for the paper in its very long obituary. If it is a timeless truism that the greatest gift modern marketing can bestow on anyone in its graces is the luxury of being judged by reputation and not by actual words and deeds, is it ever truer than for another Nobel ‘Peace’ prize winner?

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Joseph Grosso is a librarian and writer in New York City.