Sat, 11/05/2016 - 9:27am — Thaumlord-Exelbirth
Thaumlord-Exelbirth's picture

Probably have to engrave every inch of surface. n/t

Need a damn big memorial...

This is a truly great article, which I'd term a definite must-read, even if sanity breaks are required; might want to read in full at source if whatever device used allows for this. Some of this earlier stuff showing her pathology isn't mentioned often enough, probably because of having been crowded out by the flood of horrendous actions following, and there are a number of important details of which I do not recall having heard before. It's huge, as it has to be to encompass the stream of documented horrendous disasters/criminal/unethical acts which so comprehensively demonstrate that Hillary's values are antithetical to the very concept of democracy and of America.

Personally, I can't stomach finishing it until I've caffeinated further - what she and those she associates with and admires have done and advocated for rivals the madman Hitler's thwarted attempt at global take-over; no wonder some try to avoid comparisons to the Nazi's being made by the pretense that 'it can't happen here' when it already is occurring right before our eyes.

https://www.sott.net/article/317730-A-comprehensive-look-at-Hillary-Clin...

A comprehensive look at Hillary Clinton's disastrous and destructive foreign policy resumé
Gary Leupp
Counterpunch
Tue, 03 May 201
... Hillary's hawkishness was already clear during her stint as Bill Clinton's "First Lady" from January 1993 to January 2000. Hillary was not your typical First Lady, embracing an uncontroversial cause and centering her public appearances around it. (She did famously advocate for health system reform, failing in her efforts.) She was Bill's principal advisor, and quite likely the more bellicose of the pair.

The belligerency was directed principally against vulnerable, crisis-ridden Russia. Clinton came to office just thirteen months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and eighteen months after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. (Recall that the latter had been formed in 1956 to counter NATO, which had been formed seven years earlier as an anti-Soviet military alliance and just expanded to include West Germany.)

NATO had never been deployed in war. (In retrospect Europe during the Cold War seems remarkably peaceful and stable.) When the Clintons came to office, Russia was governed by President Boris Yeltsin—an alcoholic buffoon perhaps best known for ordering the army in 1993 to bombard the Duma building after the parliament rejected his unconstitutional order for it to dissolve. Until he stepped down at the end of 1999, Yeltsin presided over a period of precipitous economic decline, general misery and military weakness. The Clintons exploited this.

As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Clinton's predecessor George H. W. Bush had told Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for the USSR's acceptance of German reunification as a NATO member state, NATO would not expand "one inch" further east. When the Warsaw Pact dissolved it was expected that NATO, now irrelevant, would follow suit.

Instead, 1990 NATO redefined itself. In its London Declaration in July the alliance noted that the Soviet threat had receded but that "regional instability" now "posed new threats to regional peace." In other words, NATO would now be Europe's policeman. The Clintons were fully on board this new program. Why not, in the changed circumstances, use NATO to project U.S. power more broadly throughout the once divided continent? ...

... Clinton insisted on dispatching NATO air forces to pound Serbian positions in Bosnia, resulting in a ceasefire followed by the U.S.-dictated "Dayton Agreement" of November 1995. This produced the utterly dysfunctional state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, divided into Bosniak, Croatian and Serbian states. For a time the U.S. stationed forces at Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia.

Following this first time display of its regional police power, NATO expanded on March 12, 1999 to include Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. (Ironically, the Soviet-backed leaders of these countries in 1956 had been most supportive of the idea of an anti-NATO fact, fearing as they did a remilitarized West Germany.) NATO had expanded much more than one inch, and Russia was understandably upset. Twelve days after this NATO planes were again bombing Yugoslavia—at Hillary's urging, as we will see.

Once again sensationalistic charges of genocide were used to justify NATO action. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had (foolishly, in deference to Serbian nationalism) revoked the autonomous status of the Serbian province of Kosovo. Regarded as the historical Serbian homeland, it had become overwhelmingly inhabited by ethnic Albanians. The Kosovar Albanians like the Slovenians, Croats, Bosniaks and Macedonians before them sought to secede from the Yugoslav state entirely. The Kosovo Liberation Army (once frankly characterized by U.S. diplomats as a terrorist organization) responded to Milosevic's move by attacking state police, causing Belgrade to send in military forces that killed both militants and unarmed civilians.

Madeleine Albright (Forerunner of Madame Secretary Clinton)

The U.S. secretary of state at this time was Hillary Clinton's good friend Madeleine Albright. (Recall how Albright recently, in February, in championing Hillary's presidential campaign, controversially declared that there was "a special place in hell for women who don't vote for women.") This is the person who had told 60 Minute's Lesley Stall in May 1996 that the "price" of causing the deaths of half a million Iraqi children due to UN sanctions Washington refused to lift had "been worth it."

Because Albright is so similar to Clinton, and so politically close to her, it's worth discussing her record at length here as it pertains to the First Lady years.

Albright is almost surely the person who had told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton, at a White House breakfast in 1998, "What we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event—something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world." According to Shelton's memoir, his interlocutor (a cabinet member) then asked, "Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough—and slow enough—to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?"

Gen. Shelton, incensed, replied that it could be done "as soon as we get your ass qualified to flying it," causing the official to back off. (But isn't it interesting that the general was so appalled about a fellow cabinet member's indifference to human life—including the life of a U.S. pilot—-that he included this incident in his book?)

The dishonesty and inhumanity of Bill Clinton's secretary of state were again manifest in the U.S. reaction to violence in Kosovo. In April the U.S. State Department claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovars had been killed by Serbian forces in acts of ethnic cleansing in the province. Defense Secretary William Cohen used a 100,000 figure. After the war researchers concluded that from 2,500 to 10,000 Kosovars and Serbs were in fact killed—perhaps 1,500 after NATO began to bomb. The chairwoman of the British Parliaments Balkans committee, Labour MP Alice Mahon, stated in October "When you consider that 1,500 or more civilians were killed during the NATO bombing, you have to ask whether the intervention was justified."

While a campaign of disinformation not dissimilar in some ways to that preparing public opinion for the coming Iraq War in 2003 proceeded apace, Albright organized a gathering of U.S., Russian, Yugoslav and Kosovar representatives in Rambouillet, France. The Kosovars included an obscure figurehead who has since disappeared and leaders of the KLA since implicated in drug smuggling and worse crimes.

At the meeting Albright gave Belgrade an ultimatum: either withdraw forces from Kosovo, accept the stationing of 30,000 NATO troops in the province; allow NATO forces unhindered passage through the whole of Yugoslavia (at this point, whittled down to Serbia and Montenegro)—essentially a demand for military occupation; and accept NATO troops' immunity from prosecution under Yugoslav law—or be bombed mercilessly until you surrender.

No government could accept these terms. Belgrade and Yeltsin's Russia rejected them, appalled at their arrogance. Even the foreign minister of key NATO member France opined that the U.S. was behaving like an "hyper-puissance"—more than a superpower, a hyper-power.

A Republican official later told a think tank that a certain "top official" had explained the U.S. position as follows: "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need bombing, and that's what they're going to get." This was probably again Albright speaking, expressing the concept of statesmanship that prevails within the Clinton circle.

Even Henry Kissinger commented at the time, "The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, and excuse to start bombing. Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form."

From March 24 to June 10, NATO—lacking any UN mandate, and confronting opposition from most of the world, including the populations of many NATO states—did the unthinkable. It bombed a European capital for the first time since 1945. This war crime produced, according to Human Rights Watch, around 500 civilians deaths. Others put the civilian death toll as a result of the bombing of Yugoslavia (excluding the province of Kosovo) at up to 5,700.

The bombing ended when Russia mediated an agreement whereby Belgrade would do what it had already promised to do: withdraw its forces from Kosovo. But it still did not agree to NATO occupation of the whole country. The U.S., having wreaked havoc, accepted a deal it could have accepted before the bombing. It established Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the largest U.S. army base outside the U.S. And in 2008—having long accepted the fact that Kosovo remained a province of Serbia under international law, the U.S. and many of its allies recognized Kosovo as an independent state. (Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described Kosovo as a "sui generis" case.)

Russia, now under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, expressed outrage at this move at the expense of a traditional Slav ally, warning that if the U.S. could do that, Russia might accept the claims of independence of the breakaway Georgian republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (as it since has).

Today Kosovo's main exports are economic refugees and heroin from Afghan opium. It is one of the most corrupt societies on earth, and a failed state. Naturally it has applied for NATO membership. What role did Hillary play in all this? She boasts about it, in interviews and in her memoir. While traveling in Africa in March 1999, she called Bill and, as she declares: "I urged him to bomb."

One must also mention the Clintons' bombing of Iraq in December 1998. Recall that Albright was agitating for war at this time, suggesting a staged U-2 incident. Iraq had acceded to intrusive visits of UN arms inspectors since the end of the first Gulf War but suspended cooperation in January 2008 charging (validly) that the UNSCOM inspectors included spies for the U.S. Diplomatic intervention by UN chief Kofi Annan restored the inspections regime. But when inspectors demanded access to Baath party headquarters in August, Baghdad balked. President Clinton then used this as a pretext to bomb Iraq as his predecessor had.

Clinton first ordered the UN inspectors out (so as to escape the immanent bombing campaign), falsely telling the world that Saddam had expelled them. Dozens of civilians were killed in the three-day otherwise inconsequential mission.

In the interim (October 31) Bill Clinton signed the neocon-authored Iraq Liberation Act declaring it U.S. policy to "support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime." This directly paved the way to the law authorizing the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Senate Years (2001-2008)

Hillary Clinton was an unremarkable senator, sponsoring 363 bills, only three of which (inconsequential ones at that, renaming or designating historic sites) became law. She sat on five committees, including the Armed Services Committee. In her latter capacity she garnered the designation (in 2005, from the Village Voice) of "Mama Warbucks." She was commended by fellow committee member (and fellow hawk) Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich, as "very competent, very professional, very intelligently moving towards the center, very shrewdly and effectively serving on the Armed Services Committee."

Curiously, in her recent book Hard Choices, she says almost nothing about her Senate years. As Byron York in the Washington Examiner puts it, "Clinton was a lackluster, team-player senator. There was just one big moment in her career as a lawmaker—her vote to authorize U.S. forces to go to war in Iraq—and it's one many of her supporters would like to forget."

She was not just a supporter, she was an avid supporter and a strong proponent of now discredited lies. In a speech on the Senate floor in 2002 she declared: "I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt. Saddam Hussein is a tyrant who has tortured and killed his own people, even his own family members, to maintain his iron grip on power. He used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds and on Iranians, killing over 20,000 people."

And: "In the four years since the inspectors left [she doesn't mention that they left because Bill Clinton told them to, before he bombed], intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members... "

Hillary began backing off on her vote to authorize war in 2005 but didn't truly repudiate it until the political requirements of the campaign against Obama forced to confess error as late as 2008.

Madame Secretary (2009-2012)

The newly elected President Obama, thinking to emulate the example of Abraham Lincoln (who had appointed his archrival William H. Seward in the 1860 Republican primaries) chose his rival Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state after his own election. He perhaps came to regret it, and has implicitly criticized her recommendations for war in Syria and her role in the (disastrous) NATO destruction of the Libyan state in 2011. But compared to her insignificant record (her vaunted "experience" to support her current power aspirations) as senator, her history as Madame Secretary is rich.

This after all was her main gig, her main opportunity to show her stuff. What she showed was the same old propensity to use military force and threats. She was encouraged in this by her newfound friend Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and associated with the secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia in 1970; the 1971 "tilt towards Pakistan" in which U.S. arms were used to slaughter civilians in what became Bangladesh; the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972; the coup that brought down President Allende in Chile in 1973; the bloody Indonesian seizure of East Timor in 1975, etc. He is widely perceived in the world as a war criminal.

But Clinton has written that while secretary of state she "relied on [Kissinger's] counsel. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels." Clinton has even praised Kissinger's most recent book, concluding a laudatory review with this paean to his wisdom: "America, [Kissinger] reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging peoples and societies, the sources of legitimacy, not governments alone." ...

This psychopath - and the Bush initiated corporate coup she promoted and which Obama is attempting to shove through directly after the coronation - must be stopped and accountability must be imposed upon those involved in this massive network of corruption in order to clean it out.

Let the government fall - ideally into prison, as individually merited - as the world can survive this, as it certainly won't survive this also being 'left to stand as a done deal' to be fixed in some distant future we'll no longer have.