Clinton

[Digby]

Our latest intervention in Libya clearly hasn't worked as hoped, but for all the mistakes involved I'd not label the actions racist, and too it seems very unlikely there was any sort of plan to colonise the region. Again it feels like Rowan starting with the narrative, and then somehow trying and failing to make that fit with reality.

[rowan]

Who in hell are England and France to invade Libya anyway? That's racist Neo-Colonializm, pure and simple, from two of history's most warmongering nations. But the truth is they were simply doing their NATO master's bidding for them (as Turkey is doing in Syria now), because the USA had already lost so much credibility after the invasion of Iraq for oil. There was no reason to invade Iraq, there was no reason to invade Libya. There was, however, a need for foreign intervention during the genocide in Rwanda - but it never came.

So intervention failed in Rwanda but you criticize the Libyan intervention? You do realize that the policy o western intervention came from Rwanda? You do recall the issues around Benghazi?

I'll allow multi-award-winning journalist John Pilger to answer that one:

The Nato attack on Libya, with the UN Security Council assigned to mandate a bogus “no fly zone” to “protect civilians”, is strikingly similar to the final destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999. There was no UN cover for the bombing of Serbia and the “rescue” of Kosovo, yet the propaganda echoes today. Like Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi is a “new Hitler”, plotting “genocide” against his people. There is no evidence of this, as there was no genocide in Kosovo. In Libya there is a tribal civil war; and the armed uprising against Gaddafi has long been appropriated by the Americans, French and British, their planes attacking residential Tripoli with uranium-tipped missiles and the submarine HMS Triumph firing Tomahawk missiles, a repeat of the “shock and awe” in Iraq that left thousands of civilians dead and maimed. As in Iraq, the victims, which include countless incinerated Libyan army conscripts, are media unpeople.

In the “rebel” east, the terrorising and killing of black African immigrants is not news. On 22 May, a rare piece in the Washington Post described the repression, lawlessness and death squads in the “liberated zones” just as visiting EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, declared she had found only “great aspirations” and “leadership qualities”. In demonstrating these qualities, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the “rebel leader” and Gaddafi’s justice minister until February, pledged, “Our friends… will have the best opportunity in future contracts with Libya.” The east holds most of Libya’s oil, the greatest reserves in Africa. In March the rebels, with expert foreign guidance, “transferred” to Benghazi the Libyan Central Bank, a wholly owned state institution. This is unprecedented. Meanwhile, the US and the EU “froze” almost US$100 billion in Libyan funds, “the largest sum ever blocked”, according to official statements. It is the biggest bank robbery in history.

[kk67]

There's also the fact that the only African leader who thought Gaddafi's Libya should have a leading role in Africa was Gaddafi.

He had some great billboards depicting himself as the sun rising over Africa. Africa noticed, however, that it was very much second choice after the Arab world stopped paying Gaddafi any real attention.

Indeed.To an extent, even the west didn't see him as much of anything, other than an opportunity to sell second hand stuff (thanks Tony Blair).

None of the Arab states supporting the no fly zone wanted regime change. And they were his economic competitors.

[rowan]

I really don't know how much more stupid people can be than to believe the same old rhetoric time after time after time - that 'We are going in there to save them from themselves!' The white man saving the non-white, the Christian nation saving the non-Christian, and always in parts of the world richest in resources that we covet, or else of vital strategical importance. That's been around since the colonial age and it's barely altered at all in the neo-colonial age - which is racist by definition.

Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten".

The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew... that if we waited one more day," said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.

For Obama, David Cameron and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".

Following Nato's attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, "confiscated $30 billion from Libya's Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency".

The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

http://johnpilger.com/articles/why-the- ... -the-issue

[Digby]

I'll allow multi-award-winning journalist John Pilger to answer that one:

The same PIlger as supports the alleged rapist Assange? Doesn't this feel a bit like when you note people didn't want certain actions against Libya, and those were people like Mugabe?

[kk67]

Gold backed Dinar,......gold that Libya had been stockpiling for exactly this plan.
Then comes the crash and he has to die.

This is how economics works.

[Sandydragon]

Carpet bombing of Libyan cities did not happen. That is a lie, pure and simple. In fact, British bombing raids were called back if there was an excessive risk of collateral damage.

And anyone who has seen the mass graves in areas of the former Yugoslavia will know damn well that genocide in that area was a fact.

[rowan]

I'll allow multi-award-winning journalist John Pilger to answer that one:

The same PIlger as supports the alleged rapist Assange? Doesn't this feel a bit like when you note people didn't want certain actions against Libya, and those were people like Mugabe?

This is clear evidence of the extent to which you have been brainwashed by the media and turned into an unthinking zombie. No woman has accused Assange of rape. The two women involved have repeatedly said that nothing happened and expressed their irritation at being dragged into this obvious attempt at character assassination. But you would readily embrace this blatant propaganda, and dismiss the views of one of the most respected, experienced and courageous journalists in the world, because you are obviously resentful of a man who had the courage to bring to light American war crimes.



While I periodically have written commentaries dissecting and pillorying news articles in the New York Times to expose their bias, hypocrisy half-truths and lies, I generally ignore their editorials since these are overtly opinions of the management, and one expects them to display the elitist and neo-liberal perspective of the paper’s publisher and senior editors.

That said, the August 17 editorial about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has spent four harrowing years trapped in the apartment-sized Ecuadoran embassy thanks to a trumped-up and thoroughly discredited political rape “investigation” by a politically driven Swedish prosecutor and a complicit right-wing British government, moves far beyond even the routine rampant bias and distortion of a Times editorial into misrepresentation and character assassination. As such it cries out for criticism.

Headlined “A Break in the Assange Saga,” the editorial starts off with the flat-out lie that “Ecuador and Sweden finally agreed last week that Swedish prosecutors could question Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has been holed up since 2012.”

The casual reader fed only corporate media stories about this case might logically assume from that lead that such an interview has been held up by a disagreement of some kind between Ecuador and Sweden. In fact, Ecuador and Assange and his attorneys have stated their willingness to allow Swedish prosecutors to come to London and interview Assange in the safety of their embassy for several years now. The prosecutor in Sweden, Marianne Nye, who has been pursuing Assange all that time like Ahab after his whale, has not only never taken up that offer, but by her refusal to go to London in all this time, demanding instead Assange’s enforced presence in Stockholm, has allowed any possible rape charges, if any were even appropriate, to pass the statute of limitations. The paper doesn’t mention this. Nor does the editorial mention that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Working Group on Arbitrary Detention last February found that Assange is effectively being held in arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish governments, and called for his release, and for the lifting of British government threats to arrest him and extradite him if he leaves the safety of the embassy.

The paper fails to mention the important point that there are no rape charges pending against Assange, and never were. Swedish prosecutor Nye, at one point, was trying to build a case that Assange committed a rape in 2010 by proceeding to have sex with a woman (she had invited him to stay in her house for the night and to sleep with her), after his condom had allegedly broken during consensual intercourse — a circumstance that in most countries would not qualify for a rape charge. (The woman by her own account later went out to buy breakfast for Assange, and subsequently tweeted boasts about having bedded him, but later took those down.) A second woman, who also had consensual sex with Assange the same week has said her complaint was only made in order to make Assange take an AIDS test, which he subsequently did, and she subsequently dropped her complaint. Although no formal legal charge of rape was ever filed against Assange, Sweden succeeded years ago in getting an overly enthusiastic Interpol to issue an unusual “red alert” warrant for him, which led to his arrest in Britain and to his seeking asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy. None of this important history got mentioned in the Times editorial.

The Times claims Assange’s real reason for not wanting to go to Sweden to undergo questioning is that he “presumed: that extradition there would also lead to his extradition from Sweden to the United States to face charges over the Chelsea Manning leaks” about US war crimes in Iraq.

This sentence leaves the same casual reader to assume that Assange is just being paranoid. Unmentioned is the fact that throughout Assange’s whole ordeal, the US Justice Department has possessed a sealed and active indictment charging Assange with espionage — a charge which, if ever brought to trial, could result in his being sentenced to life in prison in some US maximum-security hellhole, or worse. That is not paranoia. It is what the US does to perceived enemies of the state, who are generally prevented by the courts from offering genuine defenses, such as a First Amendment argument in Assange’s case. Also unmentioned is the fact that Sweden has never promised not do make such an extradition to the US after questioning him.

The Times, which enthusiastically published articles based upon many of the very leaks that Assange brought to light via Wikileaks, including Pvt. Manning’s devastating in-flight video of a US attack helicopter slaughtering innocents in Baghdad (as the pilot and gunner laugh), cites others who have “accused” Assange, “even those who have hailed his exposes of government secrets,” of being “reckless with personal information,” and of “using leaks to settle scores.” As an example of “those” people, the editorial cites film director Alex Gibney, who authored a Times Op-Ed piece. It doesn’t note that Gibney’s claim to fame was producing a documentary film on Wikileaks that was little more than a fact-challenged hit piece on Assange.

As evidence of Assange’s alleged lack of principles, the Times cites Wikileaks’ release of recently hacked Democratic National Committee emails disclosing the DNC’s efforts to throw the party’s nomination to Hillary Clinton, and to undermine and destroy the campaign of her rival, Bernie Sanders. The release, the Times writes archly, came “days after Mr. Assange’s denunciation of Hillary Clinton and just before she was officially named the Democratic presidential nominee.”

Now hold on there. The Times during the course of this primary season, repeatedly used its supposedly unbiased news pages to ignore, ridicule and redbait Sanders, while repeatedly declaring Clinton the likely nomination winner, even as she lost primary after primary. It joined in a corporate media stampede to declare the race over before the June 7 primary in which California and six other jurisdictions had yet to vote in primaries that could have still handed the victory to Sanders. Meanwhile, the Times is known to have held stories from publication in the past that could have been devastating to President George W. Bush back in his 2004 race against John Kerry. These concerned evidence of a hitherto unknown massive warrantless spying campaign on American citizens by the National Security Agency, and even a fully written and edited report that Bush had likely cheated in his three debates with Kerry. Both were held until after Bush was re-elected, and the latter article was never published by the Times.

Is that what the Times was suggesting a “principled” Assange should have done with information he had in his possession exposing a corrupted DNC working for Clinton? Withhold it from publication?

Apparently so.

The real issue here is not Assange’s principles, which have always been about giving Americans and the rest of the peoples of the world access to secret information that is being improperly hidden from them by people in power, but is rather the lack of principles at the New York Times, which seems long ago to have forgotten that the role of the so-called Fourth Estate is supposed to be openness, and, as Joseph Pulitzer put it, “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”

Instead, the Times, with its sycophantic news pieces blaming Russia, on the basis no evidence, of being behind the DNC hack, and of being an aggressive threat to the sovereignty of eastern European nations, with its gentle reporting on Clinton, which glides over the epic corruption at her and husband Bill’s Clinton Foundation, and with its one-sided coverage of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories on the West Bank and the decades-long Israeli siege of Gaza, is little more than a propaganda organ of Washington.

It is symptomatic of this propaganda role that the Times sees nothing wrong with the Justice Department’s finding no cause to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her willful violation of the Freedom of Information Act and of State Department regulations in handling all her communications as Secretary of State on a private server in her own home, and sees nothing wrong in Attorney General Loretta Lynch rejecting an FBI request to investigate corruption at the Clinton Foundation, but at the same time, finds it perfectly acceptable for that same Justice Department to have a four-year active secret espionage indictment sitting ready on the shelf to file against journalist Assange, should prosecutors manage to get their hands on him.

Maybe that’s because the Times is unhappy that Assange and Wikileaks have been doing what the Times is so clearly unwilling to do: aggressively pursue real journalism that matters.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/19/ ... s-assange/

[kk67]

Carpet bombing of Libyan cities did not happen. That is a lie, pure and simple. In fact, British bombing raids were called back if there was an excessive risk of collateral damage.

And anyone who has seen the mass graves in areas of the former Yugoslavia will know damn well that genocide in that area was a fact.

There wasn't a reason to enter Libya. You f*ck with the middle east and you pay the price.
You extend the middle east and you can go f*ck yourself.

[kk67]

Carpet bombing of Libyan cities did not happen. That is a lie, pure and simple. In fact, British bombing raids were called back if there was an excessive risk of collateral damage.

And anyone who has seen the mass graves in areas of the former Yugoslavia will know damn well that genocide in that area was a fact.

Nato performance is very gentle.

[Digby]

This is clear evidence of the extent to which you have been brainwashed by the media and turned into an unthinking zombie. No woman has accused Assange of rape. The two women involved have repeatedly said that nothing happened and expressed their irritation at being dragged into this obvious attempt at character assassination. But you would readily embrace this blatant propaganda, and dismiss the views of one of the most respected, experienced and courageous journalists in the world, because you are obviously resentful of a man who had the courage to bring to light American war crimes.

I didn't bother reading most of your post because as with so many of them it's just too boring to carry on reading copious amounts of unhinged ranting. However, I do find it disturbing you or anyone could conclude there's no charge of rape, or indeed conclude there was no rape. The Swedish legal system does operate a little differently in this area, and additionally I really wouldn't care to tell some who's been subject to assault where the boundaries of rape begin. As to the two women saying nothing happened, well they're reported to have said a number of things, and I could well believe they've often wished the intrusion into their lives would go away.

On the leaks I'm not sure what prompts you to conclude I'm resentful as I didn't know I'd ever made a comment about them on here, so forming a tentative conclusion would seem specious, forming a view I'm 'obviously resentful' is back into unhinged territory. For the record I take a mixed view on the leaks, the public should get to learn a lot of the information that was put out which would likely have never been released in the ordinary way, and where that's just embarrassing or even damning of national governments I really don't care, however where the leaks put people at risk, or individual personal details have been made available as information was just dumped en masse without sufficient scrutiny I find the action to be irresponsible and indeed abhorrent, the latter isn't the action of an experienced and courageous journalist it's an abnegation of journalistic responsibilities and the act of a selfish attention seeker.

[rowan]

You called a man a rapist when there is no accusation against him and not the slightest shred of evidence, then claim that "foming a tentative conclusion would seem specious."

Julian Assange's only crime is that he leaked information about American war crimes and a whole lot more dirty laundry from around the world. That's what journalists should be doing; not simply relaying the propaganda of their masters, teaching people to hate one another and beating the drum for war - as 98% of the mainstream media in America did prior to Bush & Blair's invasion of Iraq.

John Pilger, an Australian, has twice been named Britain's international Journalist of the Year and has won countless other awards for his on-the-ground reporting from countless war zones since cutting his teeth in Vietnam in the 1960s, and many more for his numerous books and, more recently, his documentary films - a number of which have themselves received awards. It is doubtful that there is a more widely respected, experienced and courageous journalist alive in the world today.

Digby, on the other had, is a guy on a chat board.

[Digby]

I specifically did not call him a rapist, I called him an alleged rapist. There is a distinction, it's an important one, and if you're reacting to my calling him a rapist then you're mistaken and there was no need for your reaction.

[rowan]

Alleged by who? The women involved never formally accused Assange of any crime and the Swedish prosecutors dropped all their charges years ago. Even the United Nations has declared that he is under arbitrary detention. This has been a clear case of character assassination by the US of a man who exposed their war crimes and other dirty laundry (which as a journalist is actually his job). & you choose to refer to him as that 'alleged rapist' - even after the charges have been dropped and his detention has been ruled unlawful! This would be the equivalent of referring to Nelson Mandela as that 'alleged terrorist,' which only an apologist for the Apartheid system would do. & then you wonder what all the fuss is about??

[jared_7]

I'll allow multi-award-winning journalist John Pilger to answer that one:

The same PIlger as supports the alleged rapist Assange? Doesn't this feel a bit like when you note people didn't want certain actions against Libya, and those were people like Mugabe?

This is clear evidence of the extent to which you have been brainwashed by the media and turned into an unthinking zombie. No woman has accused Assange of rape. The two women involved have repeatedly said that nothing happened and expressed their irritation at being dragged into this obvious attempt at character assassination. But you would readily embrace this blatant propaganda, and dismiss the views of one of the most respected, experienced and courageous journalists in the world, because you are obviously resentful of a man who had the courage to bring to light American war crimes.

Mate, why do you bother? Its like arguing with an official government press release, independent thought doesn't come in to it.

Just give up.

[Sandydragon]

Alleged by who? The women involved never formally accused Assange of any crime and the Swedish prosecutors dropped all their charges years ago. Even the United Nations has declared that he is under arbitrary detention. This has been a clear case of character assassination by the US of a man who exposed their war crimes and other dirty laundry (which as a journalist is actually his job). & you choose to refer to him as that 'alleged rapist' - even after the charges have been dropped and his detention has been ruled unlawful! This would be the equivalent of referring to Nelson Mandela as that 'alleged terrorist,' which only an apologist for the Apartheid system would do. & then you wonder what all the fuss is about??

Makes you wonder why he doesn't just hand himself over to the Swedish authorities then? This talk of being extradited to the US is a nonsense, the EU arrest warrant doesn't work like that.

[Digby]

Alleged by who? The women involved never formally accused Assange of any crime and the Swedish prosecutors dropped all their charges years ago. Even the United Nations has declared that he is under arbitrary detention. This has been a clear case of character assassination by the US of a man who exposed their war crimes and other dirty laundry (which as a journalist is actually his job). & you choose to refer to him as that 'alleged rapist' - even after the charges have been dropped and his detention has been ruled unlawful! This would be the equivalent of referring to Nelson Mandela as that 'alleged terrorist,' which only an apologist for the Apartheid system would do. & then you wonder what all the fuss is about??

Makes you wonder why he doesn't just hand himself over to the Swedish authorities then? This talk of being extradited to the US is a nonsense, the EU arrest warrant doesn't work like that.

If the charges were dropped I'd assume he wouldn't even need to go to Sweden. So if charges were dropped by the authorities that would perhaps mean dropped with new charges entered, which could be for any number of reasons, but to have dropped and entered new charges or something of a similar ilk isn't the same as dropped.

[Sandydragon]

Alleged by who? The women involved never formally accused Assange of any crime and the Swedish prosecutors dropped all their charges years ago. Even the United Nations has declared that he is under arbitrary detention. This has been a clear case of character assassination by the US of a man who exposed their war crimes and other dirty laundry (which as a journalist is actually his job). & you choose to refer to him as that 'alleged rapist' - even after the charges have been dropped and his detention has been ruled unlawful! This would be the equivalent of referring to Nelson Mandela as that 'alleged terrorist,' which only an apologist for the Apartheid system would do. & then you wonder what all the fuss is about??

Makes you wonder why he doesn't just hand himself over to the Swedish authorities then? This talk of being extradited to the US is a nonsense, the EU arrest warrant doesn't work like that.

If the charges were dropped I'd assume he wouldn't even need to go to Sweden. So if charges were dropped by the authorities that would perhaps mean dropped with new charges entered, which could be for any number of reasons, but to have dropped and entered new charges or something of a similar ilk isn't the same as dropped.

My understanding is that the original charges were dropped, but then reviewed and reinstated. The Swedish court of appeal upheld the reinstatement, but downgraded one of the charges to a lesser form of rape.

The Swedish statue of limitations has meant that the lesser crimes can no longer be investigated, but apparently, the rape crime remains open until 2020.

[Digby]

Makes you wonder why he doesn't just hand himself over to the Swedish authorities then? This talk of being extradited to the US is a nonsense, the EU arrest warrant doesn't work like that.

If the charges were dropped I'd assume he wouldn't even need to go to Sweden. So if charges were dropped by the authorities that would perhaps mean dropped with new charges entered, which could be for any number of reasons, but to have dropped and entered new charges or something of a similar ilk isn't the same as dropped.

My understanding is that the original charges were dropped, but then reviewed and reinstated. The Swedish court of appeal upheld the reinstatement, but downgraded one of the charges to a lesser form of rape.

The Swedish statue of limitations has meant that the lesser crimes can no longer be investigated, but apparently, the rape crime remains open until 2020.

It's a bit bonkers the limitation counts down when he's refusing to discuss the case.

[rowan]

There's no case to discuss. The women never accused him of rape. That was a fabrication which has not been dismissed solely due to pressure from Washington. The US also had Mandela on its terrorist watch-list until 2008, when he was 90-years-old. That was to cover their own tracks in supporting the Apartheid regime. But if you had continued to referred to Mandela as an alleged terrorist at that time you would have immediately been identified as an apologist for the Apartheid regime. Similarly, anyone continuing to refer to Assange as an alleged rapist, when no such accusations have ever existed and all other charges had long since been dropped, is without question an apologist for the war crimes he exposed.

[jared_7]

There's no case to discuss. The women never accused him of rape. That was a fabrication which has not been dismissed solely due to pressure from Washington. The US also had Mandela on its terrorist watch-list until 2008, when he was 90-years-old. That was to cover their own tracks in supporting the Apartheid regime. But if you had continued to referred to Mandela as an alleged terrorist at that time you would have immediately been identified as an apologist for the Apartheid regime. Similarly, anyone continuing to refer to Assange as an alleged rapist, when no such accusations have ever existed and all other charges had long since been dropped, is without question an apologist for the war crimes he exposed.

Assange and Wikileaks release official documents, not opinion pieces. His affairs and the "case" against him couldn't be more irrelevant. However, I'm not surprised it was raised as an attempted strawman.

[Digby]

There's no case to discuss. The women never accused him of rape. That was a fabrication which has not been dismissed solely due to pressure from Washington. The US also had Mandela on its terrorist watch-list until 2008, when he was 90-years-old. That was to cover their own tracks in supporting the Apartheid regime. But if you had continued to referred to Mandela as an alleged terrorist at that time you would have immediately been identified as an apologist for the Apartheid regime. Similarly, anyone continuing to refer to Assange as an alleged rapist, when no such accusations have ever existed and all other charges had long since been dropped, is without question an apologist for the war crimes he exposed.

By charges dropped do you mean those charges for which too much time has now passed by dint of his hiding in an embassy and refusing to acknowledge the legal process. And to say the women never accused of him of rape is false, they may not have convinced him of rape as per your definition of the crime, but that's not the same as the Swedish legal systems case law, and it's certainly not the same thing as the experience and views of the woman involved. I'd prefer though not to speculate on the views of the women involved as whatever has been put into the media is almost certainly at best not a full picture, and and worst fabrication

Jared does raise a reasonable point though that the charges don't impinge overly on the leaks. What I found odd, and unpleasantly odd, about the journalist who supported Assange was his support for Assange rather than just the release of documents, when it's not even remotely clear there's no case to answer.

[rowan]

That's because the multi-award winning, highly experienced investigative journalist, war correspondent, author and documentary film-maker you refer to knows Julian Assange's case inside out, whereas you clearly don't, because it is in fact true (contrary to your personal denials) that the women involved in the case did not even accuse Assange of sexual harrassment, let alone rape, and have expressed their irritation publicly at being dragged into an obvious smear campaign. Pilger, by the way, has devoted much of his life to bringing the cause of the victims to light, from the Vietnamese and Cambodians in the sixties, to the East Timorese and Central Americans in the eighties, to the people of the Middle East in the current century, and also, of course, the aboriginal people of his homeland. So it you find him 'unpleasantly odd' that undoubtedly reflects a great deal more upon you than him.

[Digby]

The comments I've seen from the women could be construed as sexual assault, and perhaps even rape, though I acknowledge now I don't have much if any familiarity with UK law in this area and certainly not Swedish. What the truth of the matter is I don't know, declaring any position as 'fact' though wouldn't only seem but is absurd. Hiding in an embassy rather than going and discussing the matter isn't a good look however, mind in saying that Swedish prosecutors refusing to come and talk to him here also wasn't a good look.

[rowan]

Anyway, to get this thing back on track, just read an interesting article about Hillary here:

Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is even more of a war hawk than her Republican counterparts, the U.S. newspaper of record says in a new report.

“How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk,” a long-form article published this week in the New York Times Magazine, details how Clinton’s hyper-hawkish “foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone,” based on what one of her aides calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.”

Clinton’s extreme belligerence “will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election,” the Times explains, noting “neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.”

In the 2016 presidential campaign, the report concludes, “Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.”

The almost 7,000-word piece in the New York Times, which endorsed Clinton, details how, as secretary of state, Clinton pressured President Obama to take more aggressive military action in a variety of conflicts, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Syria and more.

Early in her career, Clinton cultivated her hawkish reputation on the Senate Armed Services Committee, where she was “looking to hone hard-power credentials,” the Times writes. Eventually, she “become a military wonk.”

One of the biggest influences on Clinton was Jack Keane, a retired four-star general whom the Times describes as “a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex” and “the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”

Keane took an immediate liking to Clinton and took her under his wing. He tutored her on Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and more.

Clinton asked Keane to be a formal policy adviser, yet he refused — not because he opposed her, but rather because he would not endorse any candidate.

Keane was one of the architects of the 2007 Iraq surge, in which President George W. Bush ordered an additional 20,000 soldiers to be deployed to Iraq. At the time, with her forthcoming first presidential campaign, Clinton said she was against the surge. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates later revealed in his memoirs that Hillary had told him her opposition was a strictly political move, a disingenuous attempt to get more votes from a war-weary public.

Clinton went on to privately admit to Keane in 2008 that she thought the surge was successful and had been a good idea. As secretary of state, she pressured the Obama administration to keep more troops in Iraq.

The Times story explores Clinton’s close relationship with the military. One of the many military officials Clinton befriended was Army Gen. Buster Hagenbeck, who turned out to be even less hawkish than she is. The general warned Clinton that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would be like “kicking over a bee’s nest.” It’s safe to say Clinton did not heed his warning.

She also befriended former general and CIA Director David Petraeus, infamous for his links to torture and death squads. In 2014, Petraeus insisted Clinton would “make a tremendous President.” A year later, he proposed that the U.S. government use “moderate” members of al-Qaeda to fight ISIS.

No longer needing to moderate her views for election, Clinton did not miss the next opportunity to support a troop surge. In 2009, the Obama administration was debating sending more soldiers into Afghanistan. The president and Vice President Biden were wary of an expansion. Clinton sided “with Gates and the generals,” the Times reports.

“She gave political ballast to their proposals and provided a bullish counterpoint to Biden’s skepticism.” In February, less than a month into office, President Obama announced a troop surge in Afghanistan.

The story features numerous other anecdotes that provide a glimpse into just how hawkish Clinton is.

In the Obama administration’s first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, Clinton made her bellicosity loud and clear. She firmly rejected any political concessions to Russia and declared “I’m not giving up anything for nothing.”

“Her hardheadedness made an impression on Robert Gates, the defense secretary and George W. Bush holdover,” the Times reports. Gates “decided there and then that she was someone he could do business with.”

Clinton worked closely with the Bush-era defense secretary. “Clinton strongly seconded” some of his hawkish foreign policy ideas, the Times notes, recalling Clinton had belligerently insisted to her aids “We’ve got to run it up the gut!”

Even after 18 months, the Times recalls Clinton’s staff was “still marveled at her pugnacity.”

“I think one of the surprises for Gates and the military was, here they come in expecting a very left-of-center administration, and they discover that they have a secretary of state who’s a little bit right of them on these issues — a little more eager than they are, to a certain extent. Particularly on Afghanistan,” a former intelligence analyst told the Times.

In Afghanistan, the site of the longest conventional U.S. war since Vietnam — a place where today, despite 15 years of U.S. military occupation, violence is escalating at record levels — Clinton pressured the Obama administration to send more soldiers in.

With her hawkishness, Clinton “contributed to the overmilitarizing of the analysis of the problem” in Afghanistan, an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Times.

A foreign policy strategist who advised Clinton on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department told the Times “Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy establishment.” Like Reagan and Kennedy, Clinton fervently believes “in asserting American influence.”

The strategist added: “Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into ‘any dark corner of the world.'”

When the civil war in Syria broke out in 2011, Clinton acted on these views. She pressured the Obama administration to take a more militaristic approach, to arm and train even more rebels than it did, the Times reports.

This is consistent with an August 2014 interview in the Atlantic, in which Clinton blithely wrote off diplomacy in the war in Syria, instead calling for backing the “hard men with the guns.”

This is the kind of “hard-edged rhetoric about the world” Clinton uses, as the Times describes it. The report notes that Clinton has long “channeled [the] views” of her father, “a staunch Republican and an anticommunist.”

The article barely acknowledges Clinton’s leadership in the disastrous 2011 NATO war in Libya, mentioning the country just once. Yet, in February, the New York Times Magazine already devoted roughly 13,000 words to covering Hillary’s uniquely hands-on role in the catastrophic regime change operation.

The almost 7,000-word story also mentions Bernie Sanders only one time, and reduces his campaign to a “progressive insurgency.”

There is no question that Clinton is more hawkish than her opponent. The Vermont senator is not a peacenik, having backed the devastating U.S. war in Afghanistan, and the NATO bombing of Serbia before that. Yet Sanders has injected rare anti-war ideas into the mainstream Democratic debate.

Sanders has steadfastly criticized U.S. regime change policies on numerous occasions; called out Clinton for her support for the wars in Iraq and Libya; blasted the former secretary of state for her insistence that that the U.S. further militarily intervene in Syria; and insisted, contrary to Clinton, that the U.S. must not blindly defend Israel, instead taking a “neutral” position that respects the dignity of the Palestinian people.

Furthermore, both of the leading Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, “are more skeptical than Clinton about intervention and more circumspect than she about maintaining the nation’s post-World War II military commitments,” the Times says.

Trump claims he opposed the Iraq War and wants the U.S. to spend less on NATO, the article notes, while Cruz opposed arming and training Syrian rebels in 2014 and has previously supported Pentagon budget cuts.

The gen­eral election might therefore “present voters with an unfamiliar choice,” the Times concludes: “a Democratic hawk versus a Republican reluctant warrior.”



https://www.salon.com/2016/04/27/democr ... ublicanse/