Hillary Clinton

[rockclimber]

I'm reading her autobiography right now. It's rather interesting.

[Jarno]

I think SLE.

Fairly certain...

[consentingadult]

ga naar bed, het is laat...

[Jarno]

ga naar bed, het is laat...

haha. ja ach, morgen vrij :-)

[Steve]

She's Ti ISTj. Introverted and Fe seeking. IJ seems to capture her well, and uh she is just not Ne.



duals, Fe ENFj and Ti ISTj:



Static and Se:

[olduser]

i like the young picture of her with bill where she is very poorly groomed. I think IJ for sure, but i consider ILI and LII.

[Park]

duals, Fe ENFj and Ti ISTj:

Those are acceptable typings. Alternatives I've considered are ENFj-ISFj and ENTp-ESFp, partly because of relationship dynamics that make more sense than duality.

[Rick]

haha. ja ach, morgen vrij :-)

has tu kain vaark zu tun?

[consentingadult]

has tu kain vaark zu tun?

No Rick, it's not German!

[Jarno]

has tu kain vaark zu tun?

ich hab vaark von montag bis dunderstag. immer vreitag vrij.

[Creepy-Cyclops]

ga naar bed, het is laat...

haha. ja ach, morgen vrij :-)

gu dà tha sibh dithis ag radh?

[consentingadult]

gu dà tha sibh dithis ag radh?

Is that scottisch?

we must have an Allo Allo thread!

[implied]

ga naar bed, het is laat...

is that go to bed, it's late?

[consentingadult]

is that go to bed, it's late?

Yes, it is. As in: clearly you are tired at 2 AM if you think Hillary is SLE

[silke]

ISTj seems fine for her, 1w2 sp/so.

Jenna Marbles does a nice impression of Clinton.

[Beautiful sky]

SEI final

[Tigerfadder]

I actually got no good view how she is as a person. I voted SEE

[Jarno]

I'm guessing SEE-Se, saw a documentary yesterday. i'm not sure though. and cigar bill seems See-Fi.

[Raver]

Se-LSI is what I think Hillary Clinton's type is. She tries really hard to be come across as emotional, but is very bad at it so it just comes out as fake.

[Jake]

LSI

[Kill4Me]

Pretty clear LSE. She's too engaging. Look at a picture of her and the eyes. The energy is extroverted positive. A very similar qualia to George w bush and Bill O'reilly. LSI holds in more, energy wise. The LSI is more bunkered down and reserved. Putin, Dick Cheney, Sammy Gravano, Stalin, Bill Bellichick. LSI shies away from conversation, words, smiling....its like bellichick's endorsement of trump, he did it by email. Hillary smiled a lot during the debates. Too much for any LSI. Google her name and look through her images. The energy is sloppy, the mobility of expression is not super minimal. then go google putin, cheney, gravano, stalin, bellichick....what do you see, nothing, a smile here and there but for the most part a stony unmoved disposition, a lack of desire to draw attention towards one self through any expression that might open up a pathway for connection with the interlocutor. the LSI face is extremely immobile and contains the most economic use of facial expressions. Hillary has wide elastic smiles in some pictures while simultaneously raising her eye lids to pop out her eyes at somebody or something.

she's the more compliant, establishment-oriented subtype of LSE, the LSE-Si.

[jessica129]

When will you guys learn that you cannot type sociopaths?

[Park]

When will you guys learn that you cannot type sociopaths?

The day Trump becomes president?

[strangeling]

The day Trump becomes president?

He is?

[Park]

He is?

Dunno.

[HERO]

From Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg; pages 190-2:

That violence was central to fascism is often an exaggerated point. Violence has been essential to nearly all revolutionary movements, save the few explicitly nonviolent ones. But the avant-garde fascists idealized violence as an end in itself, seeing it as “redemptive” and “transformative.” Mussolini talked about the power and importance of violence but committed far less of it than you might expect. Yes, his goons beat people up and there were a handful of killings, but mostly Mussolini liked the aesthetics of violence, the sound of brutal rhetoric, the poetry of revolutionary bloodshed. “For revolutions are insane, violent, idiotic, bestial,” he explained. “They are like war. They set fire to the Louvre and throw the naked bodies of princesses on the street. They kill, plunder, destroy. They are a man-made Biblical flood. Precisely therein consists their great beauty.” [Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, p. 62.]

Here again, the similarities to the New Left are striking. Violence suffused their political talk; physical violence merely punctuated it. Violence for the New Left and Fascists alike worked on numerous symbolic levels. It elevated the sense of crisis that revolutionaries crave in order to polarize society. Indeed, polarization was an identical strategic objective for the New Left and the Nazis. Forcing mainstream liberals to choose sides on the assumption that most would follow their sympathies to the left was the only way Hayden and others could usher in their revolution. That was what they meant by “bringing the war home.” (One of Rudd’s comrades who was killed in the Greenwich Village blast, Ted Gold, argued that the only way to radicalize liberals was to “turn New York into Saigon.”*) The Nazis similarly assumed that Germans who favored socialist economic policies but who rejected the idea of thralldom to Moscow would ultimately side with the National Socialists over the International ones. German Communists made a similar gamble, believing that Nazism would accelerate the historical march toward Communism. Hence, again, the German socialist mantra “First Brown, then Red.”

*Gold believed that an “agency of the people” would have to take over the United States once imperialism had been dismantled. When someone said his idea sounded like a John Bircher’s worst dream, Gold replied, “Well, if it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.” Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 399.


Somewhat paradoxically, support for violence—even violent rhetoric, as in Rudd’s fondness for expletives—helped radicals differentiate themselves from liberals, whom the hard left saw as too concerned with politeness, procedure, and conventional politics. When “moderates” at the Columbia takeover tried to dissuade a member of the “defense committee” at the Math Hall (where the most radical students were holed up), he responded, “You fucking liberals don’t understand what the scene’s about. It’s about power and disruption. The more blood the better.” At the march on the Washington Monument to end the war in 1965, Phil Ochs sang his contemptuous “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.”* Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals served as a bible for the New Left (and who later became one of Hillary Clinton’s mentors), shared the fascist contempt for liberals as corrupted bourgeois prattlers: “Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement ‘which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.’ They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit.” [Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, pp. 120-21.]

Substitute the word “fascist” for “radical” in many of Alinsky’s statements and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference: “Society has good reason to fear the Radical . . . He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives.” And: “The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.” In other words, they’re not people but dehumanized symbols. “Change means movement,” Alinsky tells us. “Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”

New Left violence also supported numerous other fascist themes, from the cult of unreason, the lust for action, the craving for authenticity—talk was cheap—to a sense of shame about the martial accomplishments of the older generation. Just as many Nazi youth missed the Great War and were desperate to prove their mettle to their parents and themselves, many in the New Left had “issues” with their parents’ participation in World War II (and for many Jews, their parents’ Holocaust ordeal). In addition, many radicals were desperate to prove they weren’t cowards for refusing to fight in Vietnam.



*I vote for the Democratic Party
They want the UN to be strong
I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts,
He sure gets me singing those songs.
And I’ll send all the money you ask for
But don’t ask me to come along.
So love me, love me, love me—
I’m a liberal.
(Gitlin, Sixties, p. 183.)


- Page 18:

A particular paranoia about the influence of the “Jewish lobby” has infected significant swaths of the campus and European left—not to mention the poisonous and truly ******ian anti-Semitic populism of the Arab “street” under regimes most would recognize as fascist. My point isn’t that the left is embracing ******ite anti-Semitism. Rather, it is embracing populism and indulging anti-Semites to an extent that is alarming and dangerous. Moreover, it’s worth recalling that the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany partially stemmed from the unwillingness of decent men to take it seriously.

There are other similarities between German and Italian Fascist ideas and modern American liberalism. For example, the corporatism at the heart of liberal economics today is seen as a bulwark against right-wing and vaguely fascistic corporate ruling classes. And yet the economic ideas of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Robert Reich are deeply similar to the corporatist “Third Way” ideologies that spawned fascist economics in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, contemporary liberalism’s cargo cult over the New Deal is enough to place modern liberalism in the family tree of fascism.


- Pages 22-3:

Liberalism, unlike conservatism, is operationally uninterested in its own intellectual history. But that doesn’t make it any less indebted to it. Liberalism stands on the shoulders of its own giants and thinks its feet are planted firmly on the ground. Its assumptions and aspirations can be traced straight back to the Progressive Era, a fact illustrated by the liberal tendency to use the word “progressive” whenever talking about its core convictions and idea-generating institutions (the Progressive magazine, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and so on). I am simply fighting on a battleground of liberalism’s choosing. Liberals are the ones who’ve insisted that conservatism has connections with fascism. They are the ones who claim free-market economics are fascist and that therefore their own economic theories should be seen as the more virtuous, even though the truth is almost entirely the reverse.

Today’s liberalism doesn’t seek to conquer the world by force of arms. It is not a nationalist and genocidal project. To the contrary, it is an ideology of good intentions. But we all know where even the best of intentions can take us. I have not written a book about how all liberals are Nazis or fascists. Rather, I have tried to write a book warning that even the best of us are susceptible to the totalitarian temptation.

This includes some self-described conservatives. Compassionate conservatism, in many respects, is a form of Progressivism, a descendant of Christian socialism. Much of George W. Bush’s rhetoric about leaving no children behind and how “when somebody hurts, government has got to move” bespeaks a vision of the state that is indeed totalitarian in its aspirations and not particularly conservative in the American sense. Once again, it is a nice totalitarianism, motivated no doubt by sincere Christian love (thankfully tempered by poor implementation); but love, too, can be smothering. In fact, the rage that Bush’s tenure has elicited in many of his critics is illustrative. Bush’s intentions are decent, but those who don’t share his vision find them oppressive. The same works the other way around. Liberals agree with Hillary Clinton’s intentions; they just assert that anyone who finds them oppressive is a fascist.


page 236:

The Methodist youth magazine motive—a major influence on the young Hillary Clinton—featured a birthday card to Ho Chi Minh in one issue and advice on how to dodge the draft in others.


- Pages 240-1:

A more practical irony of the transformation of American liberalism is that it had fallen into the pre-fascist logic of the Bismarckian welfare state. Bismark had pioneered the concept of liberalism without liberty. In exchange for lavish trinkets from an all-powerful state, Bismarck bought off the forces of democratic revolution. Reform without democracy empowered the bureaucratic state while keeping the public satisfied. Blacks in particular married their interests to the state and its righteous representatives, the Democratic Party. Blacks and the Democrats meet each other service for service, and so ingrained is this relationship that many liberal black intellectuals consider opposition to the Democratic Party to be, quite literally, a form of racism. Liberals also entered a Bismarckian bargain with the courts. Facing mounting disappointments in the democratic arena, liberals made peace with top-down liberalism from activist judges. Today liberalism depends almost entirely on “enlightened” judges who use Wilson’s living Constitution to defy popular will in the name of progress.

All of this is traceable back to the Kennedy assassination, in which a deranged communist martyred a progressive icon. In 1983, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, Gary Hart told Esquire, “If you rounded us [Democratic politicians] all up and asked, ‘Why did you get into politics?’ nine out of ten would say John Kennedy.” In 1988 Michael Dukakis was convinced (absurdly enough) that he was the reincarnation of Kennedy, even tapping Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate to re-create the “magic” of the Boston-Austin axis. In 1992 the high-water mark of the Clinton campaign was the Reifenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. John Kerry affected a Kennedy accent in school, went by the initials JFK, and tried to model his political career on Kennedy’s. In 2004 Howard Dean and John Edwards also claimed to be the true heirs of the Kennedy mantle. As did past candidates, including Bob Kerrey, Gary Hart, and, of course, Ted and Robert Kennedy. In 2007 Hillary Clinton said she was the JFK in the race.


pages 318-333 (Ch. 9—Brave New Village):

Hillary Clinton is a fascinating person, not because of her dull and unremarkable personality, but because she is a looking glass through which we can see liberal continuity with the past and glimpse at least one possible direction of its future. She and her husband have been like Zeligs of the liberal left, appearing everywhere, interacting with everyone who has influenced liberalism over the decades. Because she is smart and ambitious, she has balanced idealism with cynicism, ideology with calculation. This, of course, is true of a great many politicians. But to the extent Hillary Clinton deserves the fame and attention, it is because observers believe she has the insight, advisers, and institutional power to pick the winning combinations.

If Waldo Frank and J. T. Flynn were right that American fascism would be distinct from its European counterparts by virtue of its gentility and respectability, then Hillary Clinton is the fulfillment of their prophecy. But more than that, she is a representative figure, the leading member of a generational cohort of elite liberals who (unconsciously of course) brought fascist themes into mainstream liberalism. Specifically, she and her cohort embody the maternal side of fascism—which is one reason why it is not more clearly recognized as such.

What follows, then, is a group portrait of Hillary and her friends— the leading proponents and exemplars of liberal fascism in our time.


THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RECONSTRUCTION

Hillary Clinton is conventionally viewed by her supporters as a liberal—or by conservative opponents as a radical leftist in liberal sheep’s clothing; but it is more accurate to view her as an old-style Progressive and a direct descendant of the Social Gospel movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

Nothing makes this clearer than the avowedly religious roots of her political vocation. Born to a Methodist family in Park Ridge, Illinois, she always had a special attachment to the Social Gospel. She was an active member in her church youth group as a teenager and the only one of the Rodham kids to regularly attend Sunday services. “She’s really a self-churched woman,” the Reverend Donald Jones, her former youth minister and mentor, told Newsweek.

Jones was being humble. The truth is that he was a major influence, the most important person in her life outside of her parents, according to many biographers. A disciple of the existential German émigré theologian Paul Tillich, Jones was a radical pastor who eventually lost his ministry for being too political. Hillary wrote to Jones regularly while in college. When she moved to Arkansas, Clinton taught Sunday school and often spoke as a lay preacher on the topic “Why I Am a United Methodist” at Sunday services. Even today, Jones told Newsweek, “when Hillary talks it sounds like it comes out of a Methodist Sunday-school lesson.” [Kenneth L. Woodward, “Soulful Matters,” Newsweek, Oct. 31, 1994, p. 22. Jones has stayed involved in her life. During the Lewinsky scandal he reacquainted Clinton with a sermon of Tillich’s—“Faith in Action”—and served as a spiritual adviser during her 2000 Senate campaign.]

Jones bought Hillary a subscription to the Methodist magazine motive as a graduation present just before she went off to Wellesley. Spelled with a lowercase m for reasons no one but the editors probably ever cared about, motive in the late 1960s and early 1970s (when it folded) was an indisputably radical left-wing organ, as mentioned earlier.

Three decades later Clinton recalled for Newsweek that her thinking about the Vietnam War really changed when she read an essay in motive by Carl Oglesby. Newsweek chose to portray this as an endearing remembrance by a spiritual liberal, describing Oglesby as a “Methodist theologian.” But this description is highly misleading. [I can find no reference to Oglesby being a theologian of any kind. The title of his article, according to Newsweek, was “Change or Containment.” But it was actually “World Revolution and American Containment” and came from the SDS pamphlet by the same name. Oglesby co-wrote a book with an expert in liberation theology, Richard Shaull, called Containment and Change, which may be a source of the confusion. Clinton told Newsweek, “It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam War.” This seems unlikely since even if she’d been reading motive and nothing else, Oglesby’s article was hardly the first anti-Vietnam piece to appear in that magazine (it became known for advising young people on how to escape to Sweden to avoid the draft). In time Oglesby became something of a New Left libertarian, believing that the New Left and the Old Right were kindred spirits—or at least should be.] Oglesby, elected president of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1965, was a leading antiwar activist. His argument against Vietnam was theological only in the sense that liberal fascism is a political religion. Communist countries were good, according to Oglesby, because they were pragmatically trying to “feed, clothe, house and cure their people” in the face of persecution by a “virulent strain” of American imperialism and capitalism. Violence by oppressed peoples in the Third World or in the American ghetto was entirely rational and even commendable.*

*“I can no more condemn the Andean tribesmen who assassinate tax collectors than I can condemn the rioters in Watts or Harlem or the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Their violence is reactive and provoked, and it remains culturally beyond guilt at the very same moment that its victim’s personal innocence is most appallingly present in our imaginations.” It was Oglesby’s idea for the SDS to send “Brigades” to Cuba in solidarity with the regime. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993)


Hillary Clinton saw such radical politics as cut from the same cloth as her religious mission. After all, she was reading this material in an official Methodist publication given to her by her minister. “I still have every issue they sent me,” she told Newsweek. . . .



In many respects, Alinsky’s methods inspired the entire 1960s generation of New Left agitators (Barack Obama, for years a Chicago community organizer, was trained by Alinsky’s disciples). It’s worth noting, however, that Alinsky was no fan of the Great Society, calling it “a prize piece of political pornography” because it was simultaneously too timid and too generous to the “welfare industry.” Indeed, there was something deeply admirable about Alinsky’s contempt for both the statism of elite liberals and the radical chic of the New Left. “Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport?” he once complained.

Still, there’s no disputing that vast swaths of his writings are indistinguishable from the fascist rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s. His descriptions of the United States could have come from any street corner Brownshirt denouncing the corruption of the Weimar regime. His worldview is distinctly fascistic. Life is defined by war, contests of power, the imposition of will. Moreover, Alinsky shares with the fascists and pragmatists of yore a bedrock hostility to dogma. All he believes in are the desired ends of the movement, which he regards as the source of life’s meaning. “Change means movement. Movement means friction,” he writes. “Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.” But what comes through most is his unbridled love of power. Power is a good in its own right for Alinsky. Ours “is a world not of angels but of angles,” he proclaims in Rules for Radicals, “where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles.”

Hillary turned down Alinsky’s offer in order to attend Yale Law School. He told her it was a huge mistake, but Hillary responded that only by marching through America’s elite institutions could she achieve real power and change the system from within. This was a typical rationalization of upper-class college students in the 1960s, who prized their radical credentials but also looked askance at the idea of sacrificing their social advantages. It’s significant, however, that one of Hillary’s chief criticisms of Alinsky in her thesis was that he failed to build a national movement based on his ideas. But Hillary, more than most, did not give up the faith. She remained true to her radical principles. Thus at Yale—where she eventually met Bill Clinton—she quickly fell in with the leftist fringe.

There is an almost literary synchronicity to the overlapping of narratives and ideas at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bill Clinton was taught constitutional law by Charles Reich, the “Level III consciousness” guru. Reich, in turn, had served as a partner to the famed New Deal lawyer and intellectual Thurman Arnold—a disciple of the Crolyite liberals of the New Republic—who championed a new “religion of government.” In the 1930s critics saw Arnold’s work as one of the linchpins of American-style fascism. He went on to co-found the law firm Arnold, Fortas & Porter.

Hillary helped edit the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, which at the time was a thoroughly radical organ supporting the Black Panthers and publishing articles implicitly endorsing the murder of police. One article, “Jamestown Seventy,” suggested that radicals adopt a program of “political migration to a single state for the purpose of gaining political control and establishing a living laboratory for experiment.” An infamous Review cover depicted police as pigs, one with his head chopped off. The Panthers had become an issue on campus because the “chairman” of the Panthers, Bobby Seale, was put on trial in New Haven along with some fellow goons for the murder of one of their own. Hillary volunteered to help the Panthers’ legal team, even attending the trial to take notes to help with the defense. She did such a good job of organizing the student volunteers that she was offered a summer internship in the Berkeley, California, law offices of Robert Treuhaft, one of Seale’s lawyers. Treuhaft was a lifelong member of the American Communist Party who had cut his teeth fighting for the Stalinist faction in the California labor movement.

Hillary’s attraction to radical groups and figures such as the Black Panthers, Alinsky, and—according to some biographers—Yasir Arafat is perfectly consistent with liberalism’s historic weakness for men of action. Just as Herbert Croly could make allowances for Mussolini and countless others applauded Stalin’s “tough decisions,” the 1960s generation of liberals had an inherent weakness for men who “transcended” bourgeois morality and democracy in the name of social justice. This love of hard men—Castro, Che, Arafat—is clearly tied to the left’s obsession with the fascist values of authenticity and will. [As Allan Bloom wrote, “I have seen young people, and older people too, who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest of reasons.” He continued: “They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts.” Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 221.]

After law school, however, Hillary eschewed such radical authenticity in favor of pragmatism. She worked as a lawyer in Little Rock and as an activist within the confines of the liberal establishment, chairing the state-funded radical organ the Legal Services Corporation, as well as the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund. Before that she’d been a Democratic staffer for the House Judiciary Committee. Her marriage to Bill Clinton, arguably the most relentlessly dissected union in American history, need not occupy much of our time. Whatever their romantic feelings toward each other may have been or continue to be, reasonable people can agree that it was also a deeply political arrangement.

The most revealing aspect of Clinton’s career prior to her arrival in Washington was her advocacy for children. Clinton wrote important articles, often denounced by critics as advocating the right of children to “divorce” their parents. She never quite says as much, though it seems undeniable that she was pointing down that road. But the child-divorce debate was always a side issue. What is more important, Hillary Clinton’s writings on children show a clear, unapologetic, and principled desire to insert the state deep into family life—a goal that is in perfect accord with similar efforts by totalitarians of the past. This is hardly a view unique to myself or to the denizens of the American right. As the late Michael Kelly wrote in an influential profile of the then-new First Lady, she is the heir to “the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carry Nation to Dorothy Day . . . [T]he world she wishes to restore... [is] a place of security and community and clear moral values.”

The late Christopher Lasch came to a similar conclusion. Lasch, one of the most perceptive students of American social policy in the twentieth century, and no partisan right-winger, reviewed all of Clinton’s relevant writings for an article in the left-leaning journal Harper’s in 1992. The result is a sober (and sobering) discussion of Clinton’s worldview. Lasch dubs Clinton a modern “child saver,” a term critical historians apply to Progressives eager to insert the Godstate into the sphere of the family. While Clinton cavils that she wants the state to intervene only in “warranted cases,” her real aim, as she admits, is to set down a full and universal “theory that adequately explains the state’s appropriate role in child rearing.” To this end, she advocates the abolition of “minority status”—that is, the legal codification of what distinguishes a child from an adult. This would be a great Progressive leap forward in line with—Clinton’s words—“the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of married women.” Finally, “children, like other persons,” would be presumed “capable of exercising rights and assuming responsibilities until it is proven otherwise.”

Tellingly, Clinton focuses on Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 Supreme Court case that permitted three Amish families to keep their kids out of high school, defying mandatory attendance laws. Justice William O. Douglas dissented, noting that nobody ever asked the kids what they wanted. The “children should be entitled to be heard,” he declared. Clinton takes Douglas’s dissent and builds an argument claiming children should be “masters of their own destiny.” Their voices should be weighted more heavily than the views of parents in the eyes of courts. Observing that in order to become “a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer” a child must “break from the Amish tradition,” she concludes that a child “harnessed to the Amish way of life” would likely lead a “stunted and deformed” life. Lasch offers a devastating conclusion: “She condones the state’s assumption of parental responsibilities... because she is opposed to the principle of parental authority in any form.” Clinton’s writings “leave the unmistakable impression that it is the family that holds children back, the state that sets them free.” In Clinton’s eyes, Lasch concluded, “the movement for children’s rights... amounts to another stage in the long struggle against patriarchy.”

Since Plato’s Republic, politicians, intellectuals, and priests have been fascinated with the idea of “capturing” children for socialengineering purposes. This is why Robespierre advocated that children be raised by the state. ******—who understood as well as any the importance of winning the hearts and minds of youth—once remarked, “When an opponent says ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already . . . You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.’ ” Woodrow Wilson candidly observed that the primary mission of the educator was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. “There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day,” the feminist icon proclaimed, “than this new thought about the child... the recognition of ‘the child,’ children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership—the unchecked tyranny . . . of the private home.”

Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants). One of the core tenets of the early kindergartens was the dogma that “the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family.” The Progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning “fun,” “relevant,” and “empowering.” The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric is a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other Progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.

National Socialist educators had a similar mission in mind. And as odd as it might seem, they also discarded the Prussian discipline of the past and embraced self-esteem and empowerment in the name of social justice. In the early days of the Third Reich, gradeschoolers burned their multicolored caps in a protest against class distinctions. Parents complained, “We no longer have rights over our children.” According to the historian Michael Burleigh, “Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeantmajors... Denunciation of parents by children was encouraged, not least by schoolteachers who set essays entitled ‘What does your family talk about at home?’ ”

Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to ****** and his ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for “true Germans”), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist Progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both. The Chinese Communists under Mao pursued the Chinese way, the Russians under Stalin followed their own version of Communism in one state. But we are still comfortable observing that they were both Communist nations. ****** wanted to wipe out the Jews, Mussolini wanted no such thing. And yet we are comfortable calling them both fascists. Liberal fascists don’t want to mimic generic fascists or Communists in myriad ways, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision. In short, collectivists of all stripes share the same totalitarian temptation to create a politics of meaning; what differs between them—and this is the most crucial difference of all—is how they act upon that temptation.


THE FIRST LADY OF LIBERAL FASCISM

When Bill Clinton was elected president, his wife arrived in Washington as arguably the most powerful unelected—and unappointed—social reformer since Eleanor Roosevelt. She admitted to the Washington Post that she’d always had a “burning desire” to “make the world... better for everybody.” She had had this desire ever since the days when Don Jones showed her that the poor and oppressed didn’t have it as good as she did. And for Hillary, healing this social discord required power. “My sense of Hillary is that she realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition, which is that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good,” Jones told Michael Kelly. “You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate.” The echoes of Alinsky are obvious. Less obvious are the questions of who determines what the social good should be and by what means it should be achieved.

But Hillary didn’t frame her mission in overtly Christian terms save, perhaps, when speaking to avowedly Christian audiences. Instead, she fashioned the quintessential expression of liberal fascism in modern times: “the politics of meaning.” Now, when I say that the politics of meaning, and Hillary Clinton’s ideas in general, are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil. Nor do they sound fascist to modern ears—indeed, that is the whole point. Today we equate fascism with militaristic language and racism, but war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a great many of the metaphors for political discourse and for everyday conversation in general. So many of these words and phrases are part of the vernacular today that we don’t even realize their roots in battle and blood (“entrenched positions,” “storm fronts,” “hot shot,” and so on). Liberal fascism isn’t militaristic, but the same passions that prompted Progressives to talk in terms of “industrial armies” and “going over the top” for the Blue Eagle lurk beneath today’s liberal rhetoric. War was seen as a communal, unifying experience that focused the public’s mind on the common good and whose passions and discipline could be harnessed to socially “useful” ends. Today the modern left is in many ways openly antiwar and avowedly pacifist. But liberals still yearn nostalgically for the unifying experiences of the labor and civil rights movements. The language is obviously nicer, and the intent is objectively “nicer,” too. But at the most substantive level, the politics of meaning stands on Mussolini’s shoulders.

As for racism, there is a great deal of racism, or perhaps a more fair word would be “racialism,” in liberalism today. The state counts “people of color” in different ways from how it counts white people. Further to the left, racial essentialism lies at the core of countless ideological projects. Anti-Semitism, too, is more prominent on the left today than at any time in recent memory. Obviously, this is not the same kind of racism or anti-Semitism that Nazis subscribed to. But again, Nazi racism does not define fascism. Moreover, Nazi racism—quite in sync with Progressive racism, let us remember— was an expression of a deeper impulse to define the individual by his relationship to the collective.

Let me anticipate one last criticism. Some will say that Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning is old hat. Clinton hasn’t mentioned the phrase in years, swept under the rug by political expediency like the memory of her disastrous health-care plan. This would be a more salient critique if my aim was to offer anti-Clinton talking points for the 2008 presidential campaign. But that’s not my concern. What I find interesting about Clinton is her ability to illuminate the continuity of liberal thought. If what liberals thought and did in the 1920s is relevant today—as I believe it is—then surely what liberals thought and did in the 1990s is relevant as well. Moreover, there is no evidence that she’s been chastened ideologically. In her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, Clinton hardly backed off her radical views on children, even though those views were a political liability in 1992. She did, however, repackage her message in more palatable ways, thanks to the help of a ghostwriter.

Lastly, Clinton’s politics of meaning was arguably the most interesting and serious expression of liberalism in the 1990s, delivered at the apex of liberal optimism. Since Bush’s election and the 9/11 attacks, liberalism has been largely reactive, defined by its anti-Bush passions more than anything else. Hence, it seems worthwhile to investigate what liberals were saying when they were dancing to their own tune. In April 1993 Clinton delivered a commencement address to the University of Texas at Austin in which she declared, “We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”

The phrase “fills us up again” is particularly telling—in 1969 she had talked of how we needed a politics to make “hollow men” whole. She seems to be suggesting that without a social cause or mission to “fill” her, Hillary’s life (and ours) is empty and purposeless. Hillary has seemingly put pragmatic concerns ahead of everything else her whole life, but whenever she’s given a chance to express herself honestly, the same urges come to the fore: meaning, authenticity, action, transformation.

The politics of meaning is in many respects the most thoroughly totalitarian conception of politics offered by a leading American political figure in the last half century. Hillary’s views have more in common with the totalizing Christian ideologies of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell than they do with the “secular atheism” such Christian conservatives ascribe to her. But they have even more in common with the God-state Progressivism of John Dewey, Richard Ely, Herbert Croly, and Woodrow Wilson and other left-wing Hegelians. Hillary’s vision holds that America suffers from a profound “spiritual crisis” requiring the construction of a new man as part of a society-wide restoration and reconstruction effort leading to a new national community that will provide meaning and authenticity to every individual. Hers is a Third Way approach that promises to be neither left nor right, but a synthesis of both, under which the state and big business will work hand in hand. It is a fundamentally religious vision hiding in the Trojan horse of social justice that seeks to imbue social policy with spiritual imperatives.

To better understand the politics of meaning, we should consider the career of Clinton’s self-anointed guru, the progressive activist and rabbi Michael Lerner. Lerner was born to nonobservant Jews in New Jersey—his mother was the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party. A graduate of Columbia University in 1964, he received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, where he served as a teaching assistant to Herbert Marcuse and led the SDS. A fan of LSD, a “progressive drug,” he believed that taking the hallucinogen was the only way to truly understand socialism (the irony clearly escaped him). When his sister married a successful attorney, a number of prominent politicians attended the wedding. Lerner could not let such an opportunity slip by. He interrupted the festivities with a speech denouncing the guests as “murderers” with “blood on your hands” for not doing more to stop the war in Vietnam.

When Cupid aimed his arrow at him, he told his paramour, “If you want to be my girlfriend, you’ll have to organize a guerrilla foco first.” (A foco is a form of paramilitary cadre—much cherished in Marxist-Leninist theory—designed for lightning-fast insurrectionary strikes pioneered by Che Guevara.) When the two were married in Berkeley, they exchanged rings extracted from the fuselage of an American aircraft downed over Vietnam. The wedding cake was inscribed with the Weathermen motto “Smash Monogamy.” (The marriage lasted less than a year.) Lerner claims to have been a leader in the nonviolent wing of the New Left. While a professor at the University of Washington, he founded the Seattle Liberation Front, which he later claimed was a nonviolent alternative to the Weathermen. Nonetheless, he was arrested on charges of incitement to riot as one of the members of the “Seattle Seven.” The charges were eventually dropped, but not before J. Edgar Hoover dubbed him—no doubt hyperbolically—“one of the most dangerous criminals in America.”

In 1973 Lerner wrote The New Socialist Revolution, a clichéd ode to the glories of the coming socialist takeover. The rhetoric was quintessentially Mussolinian: “The first task of the revolutionary movement . . . is to destroy bourgeois hegemony and develop a radical consciousness among each of the potential constituencies for revolutionary action.” Over the years, Lerner’s thinking evolved. First, he became deeply interested in mass psychology (he’s a licensed psychotherapist), imbibing all the Frankfurt school nonsense about fascist personalities (conservatism is a treatable illness in Lerner’s view). Second, he became a rabbi. And while his commitment to progressive politics never waned, he increasingly became obsessed with the “spiritual” aspect of politics. Finally, he cast aside dialectical materialism in favor of attacking consumer materialism and the psychic pain it causes. In 1986 he launched Tikkun, an odd magazine dedicated in large part to creating a new social gospel with heavily Jewish and ecumenical biases.

After Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning speech, which was partly inspired by Lerner (who’d ingratiated himself with then-Governor Clinton), the radical rabbi psychotherapist went into overdrive, promoting himself as the house seer of the Clinton administration. He was to be the Herbert Croly of the new Progressive Era. Though many in the press recognized a hustler when they saw one, he nonetheless got the attention he wanted. The New York Times hailed him as “This Year’s Prophet.” When it became clear, however, that the politics of meaning sounded too much like New Age hokum, the press and the Clintons turned a cold shoulder. In response, Lerner released his opus, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism.

The book strikes one fascist chord after another. Lerner cites a long, familiar litany of progressive ideas and causes. He speaks about making the powerless more powerful, about throwing off the baggage of the past, about eschewing dogma and embracing national community, about rejecting the overly rational expertise of doctors and scientists. He waxes eloquent about the various crises—spiritual, ecological, moral, and social—afflicting Western bourgeois democracies that must be remedied through a politics of redemption. He also talks about creating new men and women—rejecting the false dichotomies between work and family, business and government, private and public. Above all, he insists that his new politics of meaning must saturate every nook and cranny of our lives by smashing the compartmentalism of American life. Morality, politics, economics, ethics: none of these things can be separated from anything else. We must have our metaphysics confirmed in every human interaction and encounter.

In this he unwittingly echoes ******’s beief that “economics is secondary” to the revolution of the spirit. Lerner writes, “If there were a different ethical and spiritual connection between people, there would be a different economic reality . . . And that is why meaning cannot be given lower priority than economics.” Needless to say, this is something of a departure from the Marxist materialism of his youth. Lerner’s preferred agenda would, of course, echo many of the guarantees from the Nazi Party platform of 1920, including equal rights, guaranteed health care, excessive taxes on the undeserving wealthy, and clampdowns on big corporations. A few relevant items from a 1993 article in Tikkun:

‘The Department of Labor should mandate that . . . every workplace should provide paid leave for a worker to attend 12 two-hour sessions on stress...

The Department of Labor should sponsor “Honor Labor” campaigns designed to highlight the honor due to people for their contributions to the common good . . .

The Department of Labor should create a program to train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives, and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring, and dedication to work.’


This is precisely the sort of thing that Robert Ley’s German Labor Front pioneered. The comparison is more than superficial. The National Socialist state, like the Progressive and Fascist ones, was based on the Hegelian idea that freedom could only be realized by living in harmony with the state, and it was the state’s duty to ensure said harmony. There were no private individuals. (Ley famously said that the only private individual in the Nazi state is a person asleep.)

http://lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Li...2007_496pp.pdf


From Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy—and How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them [2009] by Peter Schweizer; pages 46-8 (Ch. 3—THE CLINTON CRUSADE: How Democrats Made Credit a Civil Right):

“How in hell did we qualify?”—VICTOR RAMIREZ, A STUDENT WITH A SALARY OF $17,000 AND MORTGAGE RECIPIENT

For more than fifteen years, fair housing activists had been using the Community Reinvestment Act to compel banks to make increasingly risky loans. Using tactics of intimidation, delay, and public embarrassment, they had achieved stunning results. By 1990, some $5 billion had been shaken from banks through these tactics. But with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, what had been a nuisance and a low-level operation against banks would become a full-fledged effort to use the power of the state to shape the lending policies of banks, bringing them into line with the activist housing agenda.

From the beginning of his candidacy, Clinton had made home ownership for the poor and minorities a centerpiece of his urban policy. He mentioned the Community Reinvestment Act more than any other presidential candidate before or since. And with his election in 1992, activists discovered that they were no longer simply nipping at the heels of the financial establishment; they now had a friend in the White House who could dictate to that establishment. Clinton believed that millions of Americans were being held back by banks with too-stringent lending practices. This was manifestly (to him) not being done simply in the name of business soundness but was prima facie evidence of bigotry.

First Lady and political partner Hillary Clinton was also a strong ally. Not only did she embrace the agenda of spreading minority home ownership, she supported the Alinsky method of achieving it. During her time in the White House, she would raise money, attend events organized by an Alinsky affiliate, and lend her name to projects endorsed by Alinsky organizers in the White House several times. [Peter Slevin, “For Clinton and Obama, a Common Ideological Touchstone,” Washington Post, March 25, 2007.] This is hardly surprising, given her long-standing interest in community activism.

The Clintons would not simply pay lip service to these efforts. With the trademark hubris and impatience of his generation of liberal baby boomers, President Clinton would embark on a massive social engineering program that would, in the hallowed name of civil rights, dramatically undermine the lending standards of banks all over the country. He thereby set into motion a series of events that would shake the financial foundations of the country—and the world—sixteen years later.


Clinton and his team were part of a new wave of liberal activists turned political careerists who would rise to power with him. Highly educated technocrats—products of the “moderate” wing of the 1960s revolution who chose to work to change the system from within rather than seeking to destroy it—they also displayed a unique ability to square their raging personal ambition with high-minded social ideals, all the while excusing or overlooking their own hypocrisies and occasional venal sins.

These were not at all the same type of people as the community housing activists. Gale Cincotta, the tough-as-nails working-class Chicago housewife, would have had little in common with the Ivy League-educated members of Clinton’s inner circle. While Cincotta lived in the midst of the struggles of Chicago, members of the Clinton inner circle revolved into and out of lofty positions in government, business, and academia. With their elegant town houses and chauffeur-driven lifestyles, they wanted for very little.

What they did desire was the moral clarity and urgency of the civil rights movement, which had been the defining issue of their generation. Liberal boomers such as the Clintons and their friends had an abiding nostalgia for the drama and passion of the civil rights movement, and many were racked with guilt because they had either missed out on it or failed to participate. But they were also unwilling to give up their comforts or abandon the path of financial success. So they created a hybrid form of activism that would allow them to pursue their own goals while claiming the civil rights movement as their own by embracing the fair housing agenda. To this end, Clinton officials at HUD and DOJ teamed up with local activists to put the squeeze on U.S. banks.

Typical of the new breed of boomer liberal was Robert Rubin, who would serve as Clinton’s Treasury secretary. Not only would he be a major architect of Clinton’s economic policies, he would serve as a mentor to many of those who are now key members of President Barack Obama’s economic team.


https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...ks-2016-215774

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC

By DONNA BRAZILE
November 02, 2017


Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

…

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said.


Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

“No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”

“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”

The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.

I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.

When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.

Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.


When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.

The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

…

I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.

“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”

I discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I described how Hillary’s campaign had taken it another step.

I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.

Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were. The polls were unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own assessment?

I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I found a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials.


http://www.torontosun.com/2017/08/27...appened-hilary

Reliving the U.S. election: We already know 'What Happened,' Hillary

BY ADRIENNE BATRA
SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017


A few weeks ago, the title of Hillary Clinton’s book reliving the 2016 Presidential election was revealed. The memoir — What Happened (oddly a statement and not a question) — is yet to be released, but some excerpts were strategically leaked last week.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” obtained an audio of the former Secretary of State reading the book herself. She recounts a specific moment during the second debate against her Republican rival — now President — Donald Trump.

Here is Clinton in her own words:

“‘This is not okay,’ I thought. It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, ‘Well, what would you do?’ Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me. So back up.’ I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard. I wonder, though, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.”

Clinton’s overall observation of that evening once again demonstrates she has still not accepted her shocking defeat to Trump.

As for the GOP nominee “intimidating” her, candidates spend countless hours in debate preparation, planning for every scenario. That she wasn’t prepared to interact with Trump on the stage is her failure and not his.

In 2000 during a presidential debate — in the same town hall style Clinton describes in her excerpt above — former President George W. Bush had his personal space invaded by Vice-President Al Gore.

Bush simply nodded his head to the sudden intrusion, the audience laughed and it became a defining moment in the election. Bush’s instinct was a natural one — it wasn’t calculated or pre-conceived.

Had Clinton chosen her “option B,” akin to Bush, it would have been contrived and inauthentic — exactly how a large swath of the electorate viewed her.

And how about the breathtaking irony of Clinton referring to the president as a “creep”?

As author and political commentator Mark Steyn astutely observed of this excerpt “I thought she was describing her first date with her husband Bill.”

The same woman who said her “skin crawled” being around Trump is married to a man who was allegedly involved in at least three “unwanted sexual encounters” according to a 2015 article in the Washington Post.

The former Democratic nominee for president has been far too quick to blame everyone else for her election loss, rather than reflect on her own failings as a candidate. After she emerged from her post-election hiatus, Clinton said she lost because of: former FBI Director James Comey’s ill-timed letter, Russian hackers, the “bankrupt” Democratic Party, and of course, misogyny.

Her default of playing the victim card has become tiresome, and in part explains why she’s not in the Oval Office.

So please Mrs. Clinton, spare us your sanctimonious revisionist history.

We already know what happened.


http://freebeacon.com/culture/promin...oits-feminism/

BY: Sam Dorman
May 15, 2017

Camille Paglia is a woman of seeming contradictions. She’s a lesbian who thinks homosexuality is not normal, a Democrat who often criticizes the party’s 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, a self-described "transgender being" who calls sex changes for children "abuse," and a feminist who says abortion is "murder."

Decades after she burst onto the scene with her best-selling book Sexual Personae, Paglia is back with a timely commentary on sex and gender. Her recent book Free Women, Free Men argues, among other things, that feminism is "stunting the maturation of both girls and boys" and that "if women seek freedom, they must let men too be free."

Paglia talked to the Washington Free Beacon about a variety of topics including Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D., Mass.) alleged populism, Megyn Kelly's performance as a moderator during the first Republican presidential primary debate, and whether misogyny played a role in Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential bid.

You say in your new book that feminism’s "sex war" has stunted the maturation of both girls and boys. What do you think is the end result of that?

Second-wave feminism went off the track when it started to demonize men and blame them for all the evils in human history. It’s a neurotic world-view that was formulated in too many cases by women (including Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett) with troubled childhoods in unstable homes. First-wave feminism, in contrast, focused on systemic social problems that kept women in secondary or dependent status. My favorite period in feminism has always been the 1920s and 1930s, when American women energized by winning the vote gained worldwide prominence for their professional achievements. My early role models, Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, were fierce individualists and competitors who liked and admired men and who never indulged in the tiresome, snippy rote male-bashing that we constantly hear from today’s feminists. I am an equal opportunity feminist who opposes special protections for women. What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life. They have surrendered their own personal agency to a poisonous creed that claims to empower women but has ended by infantilizing them. Similarly, boys will have no motivation to mature if their potential romantic partners remain emotionally insecure, fragile, and fearful, forever looking to parental proxies (like campus grievance committees or government regulators) to make the world safe for them.

What impact, if any, do you think Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 had on feminism? Former Texas state senator Wendy Davis said Clinton faced a "misogynistic climate" during the election. Do you agree with this?

Misogyny played no significant role whatever in Hillary Clinton’s two defeats as a presidential candidate. This claim is such a crock! What a gross exploitation of feminism—in the service of an unaccomplished woman whose entire career was spent attached to her husband’s coat tails. Hillary was handed job after job but produced no tangible results in any of them—except of course for her destabilization of North Africa during her rocky tenure as secretary of state. And for all her lip service to women and children, what program serving their needs did Hillary ever conceive and promote? She routinely signed on to other people’s programs or legislative bills but spent the bulk of her time in fundraising and networking for her own personal ambitions. Beyond that, I fail to see how authentic feminism can ever be ascribed to a woman who turned a blind eye to the victims of her husband’s serial abuse and workplace seductions. The hypocrisy of feminist leaders was on full display during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which incontrovertibly demonstrated Bill Clinton’s gross violation of basic sexual harassment policy. Although I had voted for him twice, I was the only feminist at the time who publicly condemned Clinton for his squalid and unethical behavior with an intern whose life (it is now clear) he ruined. Gloria Steinem’s slick casuistry during that shocking episode did severe damage to feminism, from which it has never fully recovered.

In 2016, you said Donald Trump had a "swaggering retro machismo" that would give "hives" to people like Gloria Steinem. How do you foresee a President Trump impacting gender relations and perceptions of men in America?

First of all, I must emphasize that I am a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries and Jill Stein in the general election. Having said that, I will don my political analyst hat and say that Donald Trump’s retro style of confident masculinity (which dates from the Frank Sinatra/Hugh Hefner period) was surely a major factor in his victory and represents what was probably an inevitable and necessary course correction in American gender relations. The delirious excesses of unscientific campus gender theory, translated into intrusive government regulations by elite school graduates saturating the Obama administration, finally hit a wall with the electorate. The mainstream big-city media too have become strident echo chambers of campus gender dogma, as demonstrated by last year’s New York Times fiasco, where two wet-behind-the-ears reporters fell on their faces in trying to prosecute the Trump of his casino days as a vile sexist. I mercilessly mocked that vacuous article in my Salon.com column and stand by every word I wrote.

The Guardian asked in 2010 whether Nancy Pelosi was the most powerful woman in U.S. history. More than ten years after she became the first female Speaker of the House, how do you think Pelosi has furthered perceptions of women in positions of power and leadership?

Unlike Hillary Clinton, both Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein owe their national prominence to their own skills, tenacity, and achievement in the political world. I have repeatedly said that Feinstein, with her even temper, natural gravitas, and long experience with military affairs, should have been the first woman president. Pelosi, who emerged from a prominent political family in Maryland (her father was a U.S. Congressman and mayor of Baltimore, and her brother was also Baltimore mayor), has an amazing aptitude for deft insider maneuvering and bare-knuckles power plays, without ever losing that cool, unflappable persona, always so primly ladylike and stylish. She smiles and smiles—even as she shoves the stiletto in! Even when I’ve found her too predictably partisan, I have been continually impressed by her poise and aplomb. However, Pelosi herself, to some reports, has been frustrated by her difficulties in giving formal speeches, and perhaps this has held her back from running for president. The main point here is that we should have had our first woman president way back in the 1990s, but neither Pelosi nor Feinstein, the leading female candidates, chose to run, as even Elizabeth Dole bravely did. There is absolutely no mythical "misogyny" holding back American women from the presidency: for heaven’s sake, the U.S. has had women mayors, senators, and governors for decades now. But our money-grubbing presidential campaigns, which must cover an immense geography (far vaster than any European nation), are both too prolonged and too arduous for most women to want to tackle. Perhaps both Pelosi and Feinstein (unlike Hillary) are too happy and content in their personal relationships to want that kind of crazed derangement of their private lives.

Could you envision Elizabeth Warren running successfully as a populist candidate in 2020 against Donald Trump?

Elizabeth Warren, a smug Harvard professor, is no populist. She doesn’t have an iota of Bernie Sanders’ authentic empathic populism—but Sanders will be too old to run next time around. I tried to take Warren seriously during the run-up to the primaries, but her outrageous silence about Sanders’ candidacy when he was battling the corrupt Hillary machine made me see Warren as the facile opportunist that she is. She craftily hid from sight throughout the primaries—until Hillary won the nomination. Then all of a sudden, there was bouncy, grinning Warren, popping in and out of Hillary’s Washington mansion as vice-presidential possibilities were being vetted. What an arrant hypocrite! Warren stands for nothing but Warren. My eye is on the new senator from California, Kamala Harris, who seems to have far more character and substance than Warren. I hope to vote for Harris in the next presidential primary.

What do you think of Megyn Kelly and her decision to leave Fox News?

I long ago stopped watching TV news and chat shows because of the tedium of their hackneyed polarized politics and smarmy personnel. Hence the first time I ever laid eyes on Megyn Kelly was when she was narcissistically snorting and snickering on air in the ten-minute prelude to the first GOP presidential debate in August 2015. The nation’s selection of presidential candidates should be treated as serious business—not as a platform for adolescent exhibitionism by the TV hosts. Hence when the very first question to Donald Trump, as posed by Kelly, was "You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals," I thought it was grounds for Kelly’s instant termination from her job. The tenor of the entire national campaign, from that moment forward, was lowered by Kelly’s sloppy ad hominem crudity. Ironically, it was because of her unprofessional behavior at that first debate that I discovered the unsparing podcast commentary of Diamond and Silk, two pro-Trump African-American sisters in North Carolina who satirically lambasted Kelly the next day for her rudeness.

That one video by Diamond and Silk woke me up hard about Trump, whom I had already dismissed as a "carnival barker" in my Salon column. I suddenly saw Trump’s populist appeal—and from that moment forward, month after month, I felt the slow movement in the country toward him. As for Megyn Kelly, I have no idea what her appeal is. She seems shallow and self-absorbed—one of those glib types (not unlike Rachel Maddow) who has somehow been led to think she’s much smarter than she really is. As a college teacher with red pen in hand, I’m not impressed.

You say in the abortion chapter in your new book that pro-lifers have the "moral high ground" in trying to protect the innocent. Yet you've also argued that overcoming nature is a moral imperative and that we should "thwart nature’s procreative compulsions" through activities like abortion. How do you reconcile those two views?

In ethics, one of the many branches of philosophy invented by the ancient Greeks, we are usually faced not with a simple, reassuring scheme of right versus wrong but rather an often painfully conflicted choice between morally mixed options. I stated in Vamps & Tramps (1994): "Women’s modern liberation is inextricably linked to their ability to control reproduction, which has enslaved them from the origin of the species." However, as an atheist who nevertheless respects religion, I see and respect the contrary position. As I went on to say: "We career women are arguing from expedience: it is personally and professionally inconvenient or onerous to bear an unwanted child. The pro-life movement, in contrast, is arguing that every conception is sacred and that society has a responsibility to protect the defenseless."

Contemporary American feminism has distorted and desensitized itself by its inability or refusal to recognize the ethical weight of the pro-life position, which it routinely mischaracterizes as "anti-woman." In contrast, I wrote (again in Vamps & Tramps): "Modern woman has become an agent of Darwinian triage. It is or should be ethically troubling: abortion pits the stronger against the weaker, and only one survives." The inflammatory abortion issue has consumed far too much of feminism, to the point of monomania. I used to be a contributing member of Planned Parenthood, until I realized that it had become a covert arm of the Democratic party. If Planned Parenthood is as vital to American women’s health as feminist leaders claim, then why can’t it be removed from the violent political arena altogether and fully funded by wealthy liberal donors? Let the glitterati from Hollywood to Manhattan step up to the plate and put their money where their mouths are.

What do you think of 50 Shades of Grey and highlighting sadomasochism in a popular film?

Neither the original novel nor the two bland films of 50 Shades of Grey interest me in the least, because I was fortunately exposed during my college and graduate school years to far more sophisticated and substantive literature about sadomasochism, such as The Story of O and the collected works of the Marquis de Sade, then widely available in Grove Press paperbacks. It is intriguing, however, that at a time when feminist rhetoric blankets the culture, the tremendous worldwide success of 50 Shades of Grey seems to suggest that many women of all ages still secretly long for the old-fashioned sizzle of traditional polarized sex roles. In my first book, Sexual Personae (1990), based on extensive research into history, anthropology, and psychology, I correctly predicted the return of sadomasochism, a prophecy that seemed baffling at the time: "My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind." My long review-essay, "Scholars in Bondage," commissioned by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2013 and reprinted in my new book, dissects the current chic trend for academic studies of sadomasochism, which I find both faulty in scholarship and lacking in basic common sense.

You say you were never encouraged by "misguided adults" to believe that you were actually a boy or "that medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life." Do we have an obligation to not participate in or encourage someone’s gender dysphoria in adulthood, or just childhood?

My lifelong gender dysphoria has certainly been a primary inspiration for my entire career as a researcher and writer. I have never for a moment felt female—but neither have I ever felt male either. I regard my ambiguous position between the sexes as a privilege that has given me special access to and insight into a broad range of human thought and response. If a third gender option ("Other") were ever added to government documents, I would be happy to check it. However, I have never believed, and do not now, that society has any obligation to bend over backwards to accommodate my particular singularity of identity. I am very concerned about current gender theory rhetoric that convinces young people that if they feel uneasy about or alienated from their assignment to one sex, then they must take concrete steps, from hormone therapy to alarmingly irreversible surgery, to become the other sex. I find this an oddly simplistic and indeed reactionary response to what should be regarded as a golden opportunity for flexibility and fluidity. Furthermore, it is scientifically impossible to change sex. Except for very rare cases of intersex, which are developmental anomalies, every cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth sex for life.

Beyond that, I believe that my art-based theory of "sexual personae" is far more expansive and truthful about human psychology than is current campus ideology: who we are or want to be exceeds mere gender, because every experimental persona that we devise contains elements of gesture, dress, and attitude rich with historical and cultural associations. (For Halloween in childhood, for example, I defiantly dressed as Robin Hood, a Roman soldier, a matador, Napoleon, and Hamlet.) Because of my own personal odyssey, I am horrified by the escalating prescription of puberty-blockers to children with gender dysphoria like my own: I consider this practice to be a criminal violation of human rights. Have the adults gone mad? Children are now being callously used for fashionable medical experiments with unknown long-term results.

In regard to the vexed issue of toilets and locker rooms, if private unisex facilities can be conveniently provided through simple relabeling, it would be humane to do so, but I fail to see why any school district, restaurant, or business should be legally obligated to go to excess expense (which ultimately penalizes the public) to serve such a minuscule proportion of the population, however loud their voices. And speaking of voices: as a libertarian, I oppose all intrusion by government into the realm of language, which belongs to the people and which evolves organically over time. Thus the term "Ms." eventually became standard English, but another 1970s feminist hybrid, "womyn", did not: the populace as a whole made that decision, as it always does with argot or slang filtering up from ethnic or avant-garde subgroups. The same principle applies to preferred transgender pronouns: they are a courtesy that we may choose to defer to, but in a modern democracy, no authority has the right to compel their usage.

What do you think of Kate Upton?

Believe it or not, I had no idea who you were referring to! After consulting the Web, I realize that the lady in question is a lively but rather gawky, chipmunk-toothed Taylor Swift clone who gained fame as a Sports Illustrated cover model. In her gum-baring goofiness, she is somewhat reminiscent of model Margaux Hemingway, one of the "It" girls of the 1970s. But alas, Upton has never risen above the tide of banality to register on my radar screen.

There once was a time (during the resurgence of pro-sex feminism in the 1990s) when I never missed the luscious Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and enjoyed twitting feminist prudes by publicly celebrating it. But the great age of dynamic, distinctive super-models is long gone. My all-time favorite swimsuit model was Stacey Williams, an alluring brunette whom Sports Illustrated featured for a record eight years. Today, traces of Stacey’s sensual mystique can perhaps be seen in Chanel Iman Robinson, the half Korean, half African-American Victoria’s Secret model who has vivaciously adorned three annual swimsuit issues thus far.


https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/what-...trump-era.html

…Paglia’s displeasure over the election was largely reserved for the liberal Establishment, and for Hillary Clinton, whom she’s criticized lavishly for the last 20 years. “I like Hillary because she’s kind of a bitch,” Paglia said in a 1993 interview, but her assessment has since evolved. She now calls Clinton “a walking neurosis.” During the primaries, Paglia preferred Bernie Sanders — “an authentic leftist,” who brought her back to the 1960s. “That is what real leftists were like,” she told me. “They’re not post-structuralists with their snide, cool, elitist jargon.” In the general election, as a resident of Pennsylvania, she voted for Jill Stein.


https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/be...ton-residence/

Chinese Reportedly Hacked Hillary Server. During Same Time, 12 CIA Sources Reportedly Killed by China. Coincidence?

BY JOE SAUNDERS
AUGUST 29, 2018

Russian computer hacking might have been the least of Hillary Clinton’s security breaches.

The former secretary of state’s email scandal is back in the headlines, and its impact on American national security might have been even worse than Americans knew.

And deadly for American intelligence sources in China.

According to an exclusive Daily Caller News Foundation report, the unauthorized, unsecured computer server Clinton used while serving as the United States top diplomat — privy to some of the deepest secrets in the national security community — was penetrated by a Chinese firm “involved in collecting intelligence for China.”

As the exclusive DCNF report stated:

“The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.

“The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant ‘courtesy copy’ for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.”


In other words, an American secretary of state who felt entitled to work on her own amateurish computer system had exposed all of her correspondence to one of the country’s most powerful and dangerous rivals in world affairs.

And it’s possible that at least 12 operatives serving United States intelligence agencies paid for Clinton’s security breach with their lives.

According to a New York Times report from May 2017, a successful Chinese counterintelligence operation that started in 2010 “systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.”

“From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources,” The Times reported. “According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.”

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but 2010 was Clinton’s first full year as secretary of state.

Naturally, she would not have been in on every detail of covert CIA operations, but it’s entirely possible that Chinese intelligence services reading her correspondence in real time would be able to glean enough information to identify where the United States might have intelligence assets within China.

After a year of getting such information, it’s not hard to imagine the Chinese intelligence services having enough to take drastic, deadly action against sources helping their American rivals.

At any rate, a report that Clinton’s server had been thoroughly and professionally hacked by Chinese intelligence is circulating now, more than a year after The Times reported a disastrous breach in American intelligence operations taking place in China at the same time that the Clinton breach occurred.

It’s not a big stretch to put those two items together.

There are, of course, other possible explanations. Writing for Foreign Policy earlier in August, Zach Dorfman claimed that a faulty communications system was to blame — although the exact nature of that system was understandably left undescribed.

“The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the online environment was considerably less hazardous, and apparently underestimated China’s ability to penetrate it,” he wrote.

Dorfman also cited “former intelligence officials” who put the number of executions by the Chinese much higher than 12 — closer, in fact, to 30.

“When things started going bad, they went bad fast,” one of the former officials told Dorfman.

Nonetheless, the timing — and Clinton’s notorious history of playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to intelligence, security, classified information and foreign policy — give reason for pause.

Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state is infamous for many reasons, but her bungling of American diplomatic security that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, then lying shamelessly to the American people about what happened, is one of the worst.

Having her government email being hacked by Chinese intelligence, if there is even a tenuous connection with an operation that ended with a roll-up of American intelligence operations in China — and the deaths of 30-odd operatives working for American interests — is a disaster to rival that.

Russia, the United States’ other big rival on the world stage, has long been known to have been engaged in intelligence operations targeting the Democratic National Committee, and by extension, Hillary’s campaign.

But Russian hacking might have been the least of Clinton’s leaks.


https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37826098

US election 2016: What really happened with the Clintons in Haiti?

By Jude Sheerin
• 2 November 2016

Haiti protesters blame the Clintons for a litany of ills in their mother country

Donald Trump has said the work of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Haiti was a "disgrace". What really happened?

"The Clinton family, they are crooks, they are thieves, they are liars," says Haitian activist Dahoud Andre.

He has been leading protests outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign base in Brooklyn for the last two years.

He said protesters from his small activist group, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, will continue to level their allegations - so far all unproven - if the Democratic candidate wins the White House.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump raised the matter in the third and final presidential debate when he told Mrs Clinton: "I was at a Little Haiti the other day in Florida.

"And I want to tell you, they hate the Clintons, because what's happened in Haiti with the Clinton Foundation is a disgrace."

Mrs Clinton retorted that she was proud of the foundation's work, and pointed out her rival's namesake charity had spent money on a lifesize portrait of himself.

The Clintons' history with the world's first black republic dates back to their 1975 honeymoon, when they met a voodoo priest and visited a hotel where Ernest Hemingway once stayed.

Few could have guessed the two young Americans touring the attractions that December would one day wield such influence over the impoverished Caribbean island nation.

Mr Andre is not alone among his compatriots in blaming the once-and-perhaps-future first couple for a litany of ills in Haiti.

Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberte newspaper, told the BBC: "A lot of Haitians are not big fans of the Clintons, that's for sure."

"The fact the Clintons kind of took over things after the earthquake and did a pretty poor job of it translates to why the Haitians have a pretty dim view of them," he added.


Replicated mistakes

Mrs Clinton was Secretary of State and Mr Clinton was UN Special Envoy to Haiti when the January 2010 earthquake struck, killing an estimated 220,000 people.

Some $13.3bn (£10.9bn) was pledged by international donors for Haiti's recovery.

Mr Clinton was appointed co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), along with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.
________________________________________
But the IHRC found itself under fire as frustrations mounted at the slow pace of recovery.

Its mandate was not renewed by the Haitian parliament in 2011.

A US Government Accountability Office report discovered no hint of wrongdoing, but concluded the IHRC's decisions were "not necessarily aligned with Haitian priorities".

Mr Clinton's own office at the UN found 9% of the foreign aid cash went to the Haitian government and 0.6% to local organisations.

The bulk of it went to UN agencies, international aid groups, private contractors and donor countries' own civilian and military agencies.

For example, the Pentagon billed the State Department hundreds of millions of dollars for sending US troops to hand out bottled water and keep order on the streets of Haiti's ravaged capital, Port-au-Prince.

Jake Johnston, an analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonpartisan group that has studied the quake reconstruction, told the BBC "it's hard to say it's been anything other than a failure".

But he believes the State Department and IHRC simply replicated the mistakes of the whole foreign aid industry by chasing short-term gains instead of building longer-term capacity on the ground.

"They relied too much on outside actors," Mr Johnston says, "and supplanted the role of the Haitian government and domestic producers."


…Mrs Clinton's campaign has said she never did anything at the State Department as a result of donations to the Clinton Foundation.

But potential conflicts of interest have emerged.

After the earthquake, disaster capitalists flocked to the nation of 10 million people, which is about the size of the US state of Massachusetts.

Private contractors were eager to sell services, in what one US envoy described in a Wikileaks-disclosed diplomatic cable as a "gold rush".

In email exchanges with top Clinton Foundation officials, a senior aide to Mrs Clinton, who was then-secretary of state, kept an eye out for those identified by the abbreviations "FOB" (friends of Bill Clinton) or "WJC VIPs" (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs).

"Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC," wrote Caitlin Klevorick, a senior State Department official who was vetting incoming offers of assistance coming through the Clinton Foundation.

"Most I can probably ID but not all."

Ms Klevorick told ABC News she made the comments about Mr Clinton to help pin down whether would-be contractors had a history in Haiti or with disaster relief.

The emails, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Republican National Committee, have fuelled claims the Clintons were running a pay-to-play operation…

House Republicans are already laying the groundwork for a volley of congressional hearings into the Clinton Foundation in the event the Democratic candidate wins the White House in a week's time.

Possibly the most enduring criticism of the Clinton Foundation's work in Haiti stems from its signature project, a garment factory known as the Caracol Industrial Park.

The foundation, working with the Clinton State Department, helped arrange a US-subsidised deal with the Haitian government to build the $300m factory complex in 2012.

Several hundred farmers were evicted from their land to make way for the 600-acre manufacturing site, which produces clothes for retailers such as Old Navy, Walmart and Target.

South Korean textile giant Sae-A Trading Co, which is the main employer at the facility, subsequently donated between $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Mr Clinton declared 100,000 jobs would be created "in short order".

But the Caracol Industrial Park has created only 8,000 jobs.

Sae-A spokeswoman Karen Seo told the BBC: "The rate of job growth depends both on the efficiency in building facilities, as well as customer demand - including the long tail of the recession. Momentum is growing and we are optimistic."

In its defence, the Clinton Foundation - which has raised more than $2bn from over 330,000 donors since its 2001 launch - points to its A rating from philanthropic monitors.

Charity Watch says 88% of the Clinton Foundation's budget was spent last year on programme expenses.

But the watchdog's president, Daniel Borochoff, told the BBC the high mark was not intended to reflect whether Mrs Clinton kept donors to her family's foundation at appropriate arm's length, or provided favoured access as secretary of state.


Questions 'fester'

…In the Little Haiti neighbourhood of Miami that was visited by Mr Trump this September, the head of a local women's advocacy group has questions for Mrs Clinton.

Marleine Bastien, executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami, believes that Clinton-backed projects have helped global investors more than they have benefited poverty-stricken Haitians.

She told the BBC: "The more Secretary Clinton refrains from responding to the concerns and questions from the people of Haiti, this perception that she's trying to evade responding will continue.

"Instead of allowing these questions to linger and fester, why not come clean? The questions will not go away, they will continue."


from Bullies by Ben Shapiro; page 249:

In April 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Isarel that if it didn’t make concessions to the Palestinians, the Arab world might not lend it support in its fight against Iran going nuclear. This was a tacit threat. That threat became explicit the next month when supposed pro-Israel thugmaster Rahm “Dead Fish” Emanuel visited the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he told major AIPAC donors that “thwarting Iran’s nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.” In other words, the United States would let Iran go nuclear unless Israel ponied up to the Palestinian terror regime. [Arnaud De Borchgrave, “King Abdullah: Create Palestinian State or Risk War,” May 12, 2009, http://www.newsmax.com/deBorchgrave/...5/12/id/330049 ]

[The Exception]

How is Clinton SEE?

[Jarno]

who cares, who is hillary anyways. Trump is the new president, fuck yeah! Hillary go back into the kitchen fuck yeah!

[Persephone]

LSI works

[darya]

Yeah, LSI.

[Beautiful sky]

Yeah, LSI.

You lover don't you

[The Reality Denialist]

LSI... I think

[strrrng]

Ti-LSI 1w2 so/sp

[Jarno]

so she's likely lsi as i hear from everybody here. and billy was See? i can see how billy wanted other girls.

[HERO]

http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/t...s-greater.html

The literary critic George Steiner has provided the most authoritative resolution to the problem with his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which positions Tolstoy as “the foremost heir to the tradition of the epic” and Dostoevsky as “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare.” Isaiah Berlin considered the seemingly opposing qualities of the two authors in his enduring essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Nabokov argued in Lectures on Russian Literature that it was Tolstoy in a landslide, while America’s First Ladies have tended to give the nod to Dostoevsky: both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush cite The Brothers Karamazov as their favorite novel.


https://newrepublic.com/article/7034...rican-politics

How Dostoevsky Explains American Politics

BY JASON ZENGERLE (October 15, 2009)

“Avi Zenilman makes a great catch. Both Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton cite the Brothers Karamazov as their favorite piece of literature, but they took away completely opposite messages from it, with one reading it as an affirmation of faith and the other believing it's a testament to doubt. Any guesses as to who thought what.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us...ibya.html?_r=0

THE LIBYA GAMBLE: PART 1

Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall

The president was wary. The secretary of state was persuasive. But the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven.

By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE (FEB. 27, 2016)


By the time Mahmoud Jibril cleared customs at Le Bourget airport and sped into Paris, the American secretary of state had been waiting for hours. But this was not a meeting Hillary Clinton could cancel. Their encounter could decide whether America was again going to war.

In the throes of the Arab Spring, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was facing a furious revolt by Libyans determined to end his quixotic 42-year rule. The dictator’s forces were approaching Benghazi, the crucible of the rebellion, and threatening a blood bath. France and Britain were urging the United States to join them in a military campaign to halt Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, and now the Arab League, too, was calling for action.

President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late-night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.

In her suite at the Westin, she and Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at length about the fast-moving military situation in Libya. But Mrs. Clinton was clearly also thinking about Iraq, and its hard lessons for American intervention.

Did the opposition’s Transitional National Council really represent the whole of a deeply divided country, or just one region? What if Colonel Qaddafi quit, fled or was killed — did they have a plan for what came next?

“She was asking every question you could imagine,” Mr. Jibril recalled.

Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”

The Libya Gamble

An examination of the American intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s role in it.

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.

This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.


Hillary Clinton’s Legacy in Libya

As the secretary of state in 2011, Hillary Clinton pressed the Obama administration to intervene militarily in Libya, with consequences that have gone far beyond the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

From the earliest days of the Libya debate, Mrs. Clinton was a diligent student and unrelenting inquisitor, absorbing fat briefing books, inviting dissenting views from subordinates, studying foreign counterparts to learn how to win them over. She was a pragmatist, willing to improvise — to try the bank-shot solution. But above all, in the view of many who have watched her up close, her record on Libya illustrates how, facing a national-security or foreign-policy quandary, she was inclined to act — in marked contrast to Mr. Obama’s more reticent approach.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, her director of policy planning at the State Department, notes that in conversation and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly speaks of wanting to be “caught trying.” In other words, she would rather be criticized for what she has done than for having done nothing at all.

“She’s very careful and reflective,” Ms. Slaughter said. “But when the choice is between action and inaction, and you’ve got risks in either direction, which you often do, she’d rather be caught trying.”

The New York Times’s examination of the intervention offers a detailed accounting of how Mrs. Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms. The Times interviewed more than 50 American, Libyan and European officials, including many of the principal actors. Virtually all agreed to comment on the record. They expressed regret, frustration and in some cases bewilderment about what went wrong and what might have been done differently.

Was the mistake the decision to intervene in the first place, or the mission creep from protecting civilians to ousting a dictator, or the failure to send a peacekeeping force in the aftermath?

Mrs. Clinton declined to be interviewed. But in public, she has said it is “too soon to tell” how things will turn out in Libya and has called for a more interventionist approach in Syria.

Libya’s descent into chaos began with a rushed decision to go to war, made in what one top official called a “shadow of uncertainty” as to Colonel Qaddafi’s intentions. The mission inexorably evolved even as Mrs. Clinton foresaw some of the hazards of toppling another Middle Eastern strongman. She pressed for a secret American program that supplied arms to rebel militias, an effort never before confirmed.

Only after Colonel Qaddafi fell and what one American diplomat called “the endorphins of revolution” faded did it become clear that Libya’s new leaders were unequal to the task of unifying the country, and that the elections Mrs. Clinton and President Obama pointed to as proof of success only deepened Libya’s divisions.

Now Libya, with a population smaller than that of Tennessee, poses an outsize security threat to the region and beyond, calling into question whether the intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.

The looting of Colonel Qaddafi’s vast weapons arsenals during the intervention has fed the Syrian civil war, empowered terrorist and criminal groups from Nigeria to Sinai, and destabilized Mali, where Islamist militants stormed a Radisson hotel in November and killed 20 people.

A growing trade in humans has sent a quarter-million refugees north across the Mediterranean, with hundreds drowning en route. A civil war in Libya has left the country with two rival governments, cities in ruins and more than 4,000 dead.

Amid that fighting, the Islamic State has built its most important outpost on the Libyan shore, a redoubt to fall back upon as it is bombed in Syria and Iraq. With the Pentagon saying the Islamic State’s fast-growing force now numbers between 5,000 and 6,500 fighters, some of Mr. Obama’s top national security aides are pressing for a second American military intervention in Libya. On Feb. 19, American warplanes hunting a Tunisian militant bombed an Islamic State training camp in western Libya, killing at least 41 people.

“We had a dream,” said Mr. Jibril, who served as Libya’s first interim prime minister. “And to be honest with you, we had a golden opportunity to bring this country back to life. Unfortunately, that dream was shattered.”

On the campaign trail and in relentless congressional investigations, Republican critics have used a singular tragedy, the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the American diplomatic complex in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, as a hammer against the former secretary of state. And while attempts to pin blame on Mrs. Clinton have largely been frustrated, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has seized on her role in the larger narrative of the Libyan intervention; during a recent debate, he said he feared that “Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change.”

President Obama has called failing to do more in Libya his biggest foreign policy lesson. And Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the United Nations during the revolution, is deeply troubled by the aftermath of the 2011 intervention: the Islamic State only “300 miles from Europe,” a refugee crisis that “is a human tragedy as well as a political one” and the destabilization of much of West Africa.

“You have to make a moral choice: a blood bath in Benghazi and keeping Qaddafi in power, or what is happening now,” Mr. Araud said. “It is a tough question, because now Western national interests are very much impacted by what is happening in Libya.”

Rebel volunteers in Benghazi, Libya, in March 2011. Mrs. Clinton pushed President Obama to join allies in airstrikes in Libya, and eventually pressed for a secret program to provide arms to rebel militias.


A NEW WAR

It was late afternoon on March 15, 2011, and Mr. Araud had just left the office when his phone rang. It was his American counterpart, Susan E. Rice, with a pointed message.

France and Britain were pushing hard for a Security Council vote on a resolution supporting a no-fly zone in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from slaughtering his opponents. Ms. Rice was calling to push back, in characteristically salty language.

“She says, and I quote, ‘You are not going to drag us into your shitty war,’” said Mr. Araud, now France’s ambassador in Washington. “She said, ‘We’ll be obliged to follow and support you, and we don’t want to.’ The conversation got tense. I answered, ‘France isn’t a U.S. subsidiary.’ It was the Obama policy at the time that they didn’t want a new Arab war.”

In the preceding weeks, a series of high-level meetings had grappled with the escalating rebellion, and some younger White House aides believed the president should join the international effort.

But a far more formidable lineup was outspoken against an American commitment, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Tom Donilon, the national security adviser; and Mr. Gates, the defense secretary, who did not want to divert American air power or attention away from Afghanistan and Iraq. If the Europeans were so worried about Libya, they argued, let them take responsibility for its future.

“I think at one point I said, ‘Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?’” Mr. Gates recalled. Colonel Qaddafi, he said, “was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.”


Some senior intelligence officials had deep misgivings about what would happen if Colonel Qaddafi lost control. In recent years, the Libyan dictator had begun aiding the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda in North Africa.

“He was a thug in a dangerous neighborhood,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. “But he was keeping order.”

Then there was Secretary Clinton. Early in Mr. Obama’s presidency, she had worked hard to win the trust of the man who had bested her in a tough primary campaign in 2008, and she sometimes showed anxiety about being cut out of his inner circle. (In one 2009 email, she fretted to aides: “I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go?”)

Mrs. Clinton had cultivated a close relationship with Mr. Gates. Both tended to be more hawkish than the president. They had raised concerns about how rapidly he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. More recently, they had argued that Mr. Obama should not be too hasty in dropping support for Hosni Mubarak, the embattled Egyptian leader, whom Mrs. Clinton had known since her years as the first lady.

But they had lost out to the younger aides — “the backbenchers,” Mr. Gates called them, who he said argued that in the moral clash of the Arab Spring, “Mr. President, you’ve got to be on the right side of history.”

In Libya, Mrs. Clinton had a new opportunity to support the historic change that had just swept out the leaders of its neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. And Libya seemed a tantalizingly easy case — with just six million people, no sectarian divide and plenty of oil.

But the debate was handicapped by sketchy intelligence. Top State Department officials were busy trying to evacuate the American Embassy, fearing that the Libyan leader might use diplomats as hostages. There was no inside information on whether, or on what scale, Colonel Qaddafi would carry out his threats.

“We, the U.S., did not have a particularly good handle on what was going on inside Libya,” said Derek Chollet, a State Department aide who moved to the National Security Council as the Libya debate began. American officials were relying largely on news reports, he said.

Human Rights Watch would later count about 350 protesters killed before the intervention — not the thousands described in some media accounts. But inside the Obama administration, few doubted that Colonel Qaddafi would do what it took to remain in power.

“Of course, he would have lined up the tanks and just gone after folks,” said David H. Petraeus, the retired general and former C.I.A. director.

Jake Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s top foreign-policy aide at State and now in her campaign, said her view was that “we have to live in a world of risks.” In assessing the situation in Libya, he said, “she didn’t know for certain at the time, nor did any of us, what would happen — only that it passed a risk threshold that demanded that we look very hard at the response.”

So, after some initial doubts, Mrs. Clinton diverged from the other senior members of the administration.

The comparison with Mr. Biden was revealing. For the vice president, according to Antony J. Blinken, then his national security adviser and now deputy secretary of state, the lesson of Iraq was crucial — “what Biden called not the day after, but the decade after.”

“What’s the plan?” Mr. Blinken continued. “There is going to be some kind of vacuum, and how’s it going to be filled, and what are we doing to fill it?” Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous adage about Iraq — if “you break it, you own it” — loomed large.

More decisive for Mrs. Clinton were two episodes from her husband’s presidency — the American failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the success, albeit belated, in bringing together an international military coalition to prevent greater bloodshed after 8,000 Muslims were massacred in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war.

“The thing about Rwanda that’s important is it showed the cost of inaction,” said James B. Steinberg, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy through July 2011. “But I think the reason Bosnia and Kosovo figured so importantly is they demonstrated there were ways of being effective and there were lessons of what worked and didn’t work.”


‘WE WILL BE LEFT BEHIND’

On the same March afternoon when Ambassador Rice was telling her French colleague at the United Nations to back off, President Obama and his security cabinet were arrayed in the White House situation room. Speaking on the video screen from Cairo was Secretary Clinton, just arrived from Paris.

The day before, at lunch with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, she “was tough, she was bullish” on the idea of intervention in Libya — the “perfect ally,” recalled Mr. Sarkozy’s senior diplomatic adviser, Jean-David Levitte.

But now Mrs. Clinton did not directly push Mr. Obama to intervene in Libya. Nor did she make an impassioned moral case, according to several people in the room.

Instead, she described Mr. Jibril, the opposition leader, as impressive and reasonable. She conveyed her surprise that Arab leaders not only supported military action but, in some cases, were willing to participate. Mostly, though, she warned that the French and British would go ahead with airstrikes on their own, potentially requiring the United States to step in later if things went badly.

Dennis B. Ross, then a senior Middle East expert at the National Security Council, said he remembered listening to her and thinking, “If she’s advocating, she’s advocating in what I would describe as a fairly clever way.”

He recalled her saying: “‘You don’t see what the mood is here, and how this has a kind of momentum of its own. And we will be left behind, and we’ll be less capable of shaping this.’”

Mrs. Clinton’s account of a unified European-Arab front powerfully influenced Mr. Obama. “Because the president would never have done this thing on our own,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser.

Mr. Gates, among others, thought Mrs. Clinton’s backing decisive. Mr. Obama later told him privately in the Oval Office, he said, that the Libya decision was “51-49.”

“I’ve always thought that Hillary’s support for the broader mission in Libya put the president on the 51 side of the line for a more aggressive approach,” Mr. Gates said. Had the secretaries of state and defense both opposed the war, he and others said, the president’s decision might have been politically impossible.

Having decided to act, Mr. Obama questioned military leaders about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone, the Europeans’ favored military response. When they told him that it could not prevent a massacre, Mr. Obama directed his staff to draft a new, tougher United Nations resolution.

Late that night, Mr. Araud, the French diplomat, was astonished to get a second call from Ms. Rice: The United States would not only support intervention, but wanted United Nations support for more than a no-fly zone. Mr. Araud said the turnabout had so shocked him and his British counterpart that they at first suspected a trick.

There remained only one real obstacle: Russia could block a Security Council resolution with a veto. Mrs. Clinton had done her best to develop a relationship with Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, listening to his tales of tagging polar bears and tracking Siberian tigers.

“Her theory on Putin is, this is a person with some passions — if you get him going on those passions, your capacity to try and deal with him is improved,” one Clinton aide said.

But the relationship remained difficult, and the secretary of state sparred constantly with her Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, who, Mrs. Clinton wrote in her memoir “Hard Choices,” was initially “dead set against a no-fly zone.”

“We don’t want another war,” she told Mr. Lavrov, stressing that the mission was limited to protecting civilians.

“I take your point about not seeking another war,” she recalled him responding. “But that doesn’t mean that you won’t get one.”

In the end, Mrs. Clinton would acknowledge that Colonel Qaddafi himself had helped win over the Russians, by giving a fiery speech just before the Security Council vote calling his opponents “the rats” and vowing to hunt them “house by house, alley by alley.”

On March 17, 10 members of the Security Council voted for a resolution authorizing “all necessary means” to protect Libyan civilians. Five countries, including Russia, abstained.

Two days later, Mr. Sarkozy met with Mrs. Clinton and David Cameron, the British prime minister, at the Élysée Palace in Paris to discuss the next move. The French president emphasized that within a day or so, Colonel Qaddafi’s troops would be inside Benghazi, mingling with civilians, making it difficult or impossible to use air power against them.

Then he played his trump card. French fighter jets were already in the air, he said. But, he added, “this is a collective decision, and I will recall them if you want me to,” Mr. Levitte said. Mr. Sarkozy’s maneuver had abruptly pushed forward the timing of the operation, but for all of Mrs. Clinton’s irritation, she was not prepared to object.

“I’m not going to be the one to recall the planes and create the massacre in Benghazi,” she grumbled to an aide. And the bombing began.

FAILURES OF DIPLOMACY

About the time the air campaign began, Charles R. Kubic, a retired rear admiral, received a message from a senior Libyan military officer proposing military-to-military negotiations for a 72-hour cease-fire, potentially leading to an arranged exit for Colonel Qaddafi and his family.

But after he approached the American military command for Africa, Admiral Kubic said, he was directed to end the talks. The orders, he was told, had come from “outside the Pentagon,” though aides to both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton said the offer had never made it to their level. He was baffled by the lack of interest in exploring an option he thought might lead to a less bloody transition.

“The question that stays with me is, why didn’t you spend 72 hours giving peace a chance?” he said.

The answer, at least in part, was that the two sides had started from positions of mutual mistrust.

In the weeks leading up to the intervention, aides to Colonel Qaddafi had reached out to potential intermediaries, including Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who served as NATO commander under Mrs. Clinton’s husband, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and longtime Clinton friend. Diplomats representing the United Nations, the African Union and a half-dozen countries discussed the chances, however remote, of a political settlement. Even the Russian multimillionaire who headed the World Chess Federation got involved.

There was “envoy proliferation,” said Mr. Chollet, who monitored such exchanges from the National Security Council.

The Americans did not believe that the Libyans purporting to speak for the leader could actually deliver a peaceful transfer of power. Colonel Qaddafi, the Americans thought, would simply use a cease-fire as an opportunity to regroup.

“My view is that there was never a serious offer from Qaddafi to step down from power,” said Gene A. Cretz, who preceded Mr. Stevens as the American ambassador in Libya. “I firmly believe that none of those characters around him ever had the gumption to raise the issue with him personally.”

For the Libyan leader and his inner circle, episodes like the one Admiral Kubic described were proof that the Americans had no desire to negotiate, said Mohamed Ismail, a top aide to Colonel Qaddafi’s son Seif and frequent envoy to the West. “They just wanted to get rid of Qaddafi,” he said.

The Libyans saw the threatened intervention not as a noble act to save lives, as Mrs. Clinton portrayed it, but in far darker terms. After all, Colonel Qaddafi, fearing the fate of Saddam Hussein, had abandoned his nuclear program and was sharing intelligence with the C.I.A. in the fight against Al Qaeda. Mrs. Clinton herself had publicly welcomed one of the leader’s sons to the State Department in 2009.

Now Colonel Qaddafi saw deep treachery, ingratitude and mercantile revenge. He railed to anyone who would listen that he was Libya’s only bulwark against extremism, that without him the country would become a terrorist haven.

In a further complication, the United Nations Security Council had recently voted to refer the attacks on protesters to the International Criminal Court, so both the leader and his inner circle might face prosecution if he ceded power.

“We were open to power sharing, but the minute that happened it was hard to go forward,” Mr. Ismail said. A top American diplomat agreed, saying that the threat of prosecution “boxed Seif into a corner.”

Over the years, Mr. Ismail noted, Colonel Qaddafi had certainly found ways to offend nearly every country now allied against him. He had financed political opponents and been accused of plotting the murder of the Saudi king. And, Mr. Ismail said, he had recently reneged on oil and arms deals with the British and the French.

Then there was Lebanon and the matter of the missing Shiite cleric.

Back in 1978, a revered Lebanese imam, Moussa al-Sadr, had disappeared while visiting Libya. Lebanon suspected foul play, probably with government involvement. But the mystery had never been definitively solved.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Ismail confirmed the Lebanese suspicions. “We said he left to go to Italy,” Mr. Ismail said of Mr. Sadr. But that was a lie.

“He was killed,” Mr. Ismail said, offering a chillingly succinct explanation: “There was an argument with the leader.”

Mr. Ismail said he had learned of the cleric’s fate long after the fact, and stressed that Colonel Qaddafi’s family, including a son now imprisoned in Lebanon, had no involvement or knowledge.

The cleric’s body, he said, was thrown into the sea.

Colonel Qaddafi on March 2, 2011. Before being overthrown, he said that without him Libya would become a terrorist haven.

THE MISSION SHIFTS

Early on, President Obama had declared that Colonel Qaddafi had lost his legitimacy and had to go. But the president was careful to point out that this was the administration’s political position, not its military objective.

“We are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal, specifically the protection of civilians in Libya,” he said. Mrs. Clinton echoed that five days after the Security Council resolution was adopted. “There is nothing in there about getting rid of anybody,” she told ABC News.

The president directed the Pentagon to use its unique military capabilities to stop the feared massacre and, within 10 days, turn the operation over to European and Arab allies. An unnamed aide described this approach as “leading from behind,” handing the president’s Republican opponents an enduring talking point. But Mr. Obama was adamant that Libya would not become another protracted American war.

In fact, his limited goal was achieved far faster than planned. “We basically destroyed Qaddafi’s air defenses and stopped the advance of his forces within three days,” recalled Mr. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser.

But the mission quickly evolved from protecting civilians in Benghazi to protecting civilians wherever they were. As the rebellion swelled and bystanders became combatants, the endgame became ever more murky. The United States and its allies were increasingly drawn to one side of the fighting, without extended debate over what that shift portended.

“I can’t recall any specific decision that said, ‘Well, let’s just take him out,’” Mr. Gates said. Publicly, he said, “the fiction was maintained” that the goal was limited to disabling Colonel Qaddafi’s command and control. In fact, the former defense secretary said, “I don’t think there was a day that passed that people didn’t hope he would be in one of those command and control centers.”

Two of Mrs. Clinton’s top Libya advisers said in interviews that they had harbored misgivings about the intervention precisely because of fears that the coalition would not be able to stop short of regime change, with no ability to manage the aftermath.

One was Mr. Gordon, the assistant secretary. The other was Jeremy Shapiro, who handled Libya on Mrs. Clinton’s policy planning staff.

Mr. Shapiro said he had expressed his concerns to Mrs. Clinton’s top policy aide, Mr. Sullivan. “Once you get into a fight where we basically say, ‘We have to stop a madman from killing tens of thousands of people in his own country,’ how do you stop?” Mr. Shapiro said.

“Ultimately the logic becomes, Jesus, the Qaddafi regime is a real threat to civilians,” he added. “It required nothing to escalate to that. It would have required an amazing force of will not to.”

Practical military considerations also complicated Mr. Obama’s in-and-out strategy. Though he had directed that the United States provide only unique capabilities that its allies did not possess, that turned out to be quite a bit: a continuing supply of precision munitions, combat search and rescue, and surveillance, Mr. Petraeus said.

By April, the president had authorized the use of drones, and, according to a senior rebel commander, C.I.A. operatives began visiting rebel camps and “providing us with intercepts of Qaddafi’s troop movements.”

The incremental escalation ran against Mr. Obama’s instincts, and he did it reluctantly, said Mr. Ross, the former National Security Council official. Mrs. Clinton, he said, was less concerned that “every step puts you on a slippery slope.”

“Her view is, we can’t fail in this,” Mr. Ross said. “Once we have made a decision, we can’t fail.”

A makeshift bomb in a rebel fighter’s hand in Brega, Libya, in 2011. American intelligence officials were worried about what would become of the country if Colonel Qaddafi lost control of it.

ARMING THE REBELS

When Mr. Jibril and his Libyan entourage showed up in Rome in May to meet with Mrs. Clinton, they expected a 10-minute check-in. Instead, they talked for nearly an hour.

The opposition leaders had already given her a white paper setting out a spectacular future: Political parties would compete in open elections, a free news media would hold leaders accountable and women’s rights would be respected.

In retrospect, Mr. Jibril acknowledged in an interview, it was a “utopian ideal” quite detached from Libyan reality. But Mrs. Clinton had been enthusiastic, according to those in attendance, and now she wanted to talk in greater depth about how to turn the vision into reality.

“She said, and I remember this, ‘Let us brainstorm about Libya,’” said Mahmud Shammam, the rebel council’s chief spokesman.

The opposition leaders wanted something more immediate. They wanted weapons.

Despite hundreds of coalition airstrikes, the fighting was at a stalemate. Every time the rebels gained some ground, government forces retook it. The rebels seemed unable to get past Brega, an oil port on the way to Tripoli, and they hoped more sophisticated weapons from the Americans would tip the balance.

The secretary of state heard them out. She “was very patient, very charming,” Mr. Shammam said. “Always had a smile.” In the end, though, she demurred.

But back in Washington, where a low-grade panic over the stalled fighting was setting in, Mrs. Clinton pressed the rebels’ case, according to three senior White House officials and two State Department officials involved in the secret debate.

The American military involvement that Mr. Obama had hoped to curtail after 10 days had dragged on for months, and political support was waning. Some members of Congress were outraged over the administration’s failure to seek approval after 60 days, as the War Powers Act seemed to require.

Onetime advocates of the intervention, including Ms. Slaughter, the secretary’s former policy planning director, had grown disillusioned over the rebels’ human-rights abuses.

“We did not try to protect civilians on Qaddafi’s side,” said Ms. Slaughter, who at the time called for a deal in which Colonel Qaddafi would have turned over power to one of his sons.

The international coalition that Mrs. Clinton had stitched together was also unraveling. Russia accused the United States and its allies of a bait-and-switch, and the Arab League called for a cease-fire and settlement.

“Regime change — that was not our business at all,” Amr Moussa, who headed the organization at the time, said in an interview.

“There was a moment, around about June or July,” recalled Mr. Shapiro, the State Department’s Libya policy adviser, “when the situation on the ground seemed to settle into a stalemate and we weren’t sure we were winning, or at least winning quickly enough.”

Moreover, the United States’ strategy of letting other countries arm the opposition was backfiring, creating a regional power imbalance that could come back to haunt Libya if the rebels did win.

Throughout the spring, the administration had effectively turned a blind eye as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates supplied the rebels with lethal assistance, according to Mr. Gates and others. But Mrs. Clinton had grown increasingly concerned that Qatar, in particular, was sending arms only to certain rebel factions: militias from the city of Misurata and select Islamist brigades.

She could hardly tell Qatar to stand down if the United States was unwilling to step in with lethal assistance of its own, one State Department aide said, “because their answer would be, ‘Well, those guys need help — you’re not doing it.’” Her view, often relayed to her staff, was that to have influence with the fractious opposition and Arab allies, you had to have “skin in the game,” Mr. Ross said.

Former President Bill Clinton had publicly noted in April 2011 that the United States should “not rule out” arming the opposition, and in emails with Mr. Sullivan, her policy adviser, Mrs. Clinton discussed using private contractors to do just that. Mr. Ross, speaking generally, said she had frequently consulted her husband: “I’d say, ‘Here’s what I think we should do.’ She’d say, ‘That’s what Bill said, too.’”

Now Mrs. Clinton took what one top adviser called “the activist side” of the debate over whether to counter Qatar by arming more secular fighters.

“If you didn’t,” Mr. Ross recalled her arguing, “whatever happened, your options would shrink, your influence would shrink, therefore your ability to affect anything there would also shrink.”

But other senior officials were wary. NATO’s supreme allied commander, Adm. James G. Stavridis, had told Congress of “flickers” of Al Qaeda within the opposition. Mr. Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, argued that the administration could not ensure that weapons intended for “the so-called good guys,” as one State Department official put it, did not fall into the hands of Islamist extremists.

In fact, there was reason to worry. Mr. Jibril himself described in an interview how a French shipment of missiles and machine guns had gone awry. At a June meeting, President Sarkozy had agreed to “ask our Arab friends” to supply the Transitional National Council with the weapons, Mr. Jibril said. But, he said, the acting defense minister diverted them to a militia led by Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a militant Islamist who had once been held in a secret prison by the C.I.A.

Mrs. Clinton understood the hazards, but also weighed the costs of not acting, aides said. They described her as comfortable with feeling her way through a problem without being certain of the outcome.

President Obama ultimately took her side, according to the administration officials who described the debate. After he signed a secret document called a presidential finding, approving a covert operation, a list of approved weaponry was drawn up. The shipments arranged by the United States and other Western countries generally arrived through the port of Benghazi and airports in eastern Libya, a Libyan rebel commander said.

“Humvees, counterbattery radar, TOW missiles was the highest end we talked about,” one State Department official recalled. “We were definitely giving them lethal assistance. We’d crossed that line.”

Prompted in part by the decision to arm the rebels, the State Department recognized the Transitional National Council as the “legitimate governing authority for Libya.” Mrs. Clinton announced the decision on July 15 in Istanbul.

“That very day, our troops had started to get inside Brega,” Mr. Shammam recalled. “We told that to Mrs. Clinton, and she said — I remember her smiling — ‘Good! This is the only language that Qaddafi is understanding.’”


‘QADDAFI’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED’

One month later, Secretary Clinton appeared at the National Defense University with Leon E. Panetta, who had recently replaced Mr. Gates as defense secretary. She hailed the intervention as a case study in “smart power.”

“For the first time we have a NATO-Arab alliance taking action, you’ve got Arab countries who are running strike actions,” she said. “This is exactly the kind of world that I want to see where it’s not just the United States and everybody is standing on the sidelines while we bear the cost, while we bear the sacrifice.”

Mr. Panetta spoke of a “sense that Qaddafi’s days are numbered.” Six days later, on Aug. 22, the cumulative efforts of the international coalition bore fruit when exuberant rebels stormed the Qaddafi compound in Tripoli. The dictator was still at large, but his reign was over.

Mrs. Clinton’s old friend and political adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, who regularly emailed her political advice and vaguely sourced intelligence reports on Libya, urged her to capitalize on the dictator’s fall.

“Brava!” Mr. Blumenthal exclaimed. As always, he was thinking about Mrs. Clinton’s presidential ambitions. “You must go on camera. You must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment.” She should be sure to use the phrase “successful strategy,” he wrote. “You are vindicated.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us...y-clinton.html

A New Libya, With ‘Very Little Time Left’

The fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi seemed to vindicate Hillary Clinton. Then militias refused to disarm, neighbors fanned a civil war, and the Islamic State found refuge.

By SCOTT SHANE and JO BECKER (FEB. 27, 2016)

It was a grisly start to the new era for Libya, broadcast around the world. The dictator was dragged from the sewer pipe where he was hiding, tossed around by frenzied rebel soldiers, beaten bloody and sodomized with a bayonet. A shaky cellphone video showed the pocked face of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “the Leader” who had terrified Libyans for four decades, looking frightened and bewildered. He would soon be dead.

The first news reports of Colonel Qaddafi’s capture and killing in October 2011 reached the secretary of state in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she had just sat down for a televised interview. “Wow!” she said, looking at an aide’s BlackBerry before cautiously noting that the report had not yet been confirmed. But Hillary Clinton seemed impatient for a conclusion to the multinational military intervention she had done so much to organize, and in a rare unguarded moment, she dropped her reserve.

“We came, we saw, he died!” she exclaimed.

Two days before, Mrs. Clinton had taken a triumphal tour of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and for weeks top aides had been circulating a “ticktock” that described her starring role in the events that had led to this moment. The timeline, her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote, demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s “leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish.” The memo’s language put her at the center of everything: “HRC announces … HRC directs … HRC travels … HRC engages,” it read.

The Libya Gamble

An examination of the American intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s role in it.

It was a brag sheet for a cabinet member eyeing a presidential race, and the Clinton team’s eagerness to claim credit for her prompted eye-rolling at the White House and the Pentagon. Some joked that to hear her aides tell it, she had practically called in the airstrikes herself.

But there were plenty of signs that the triumph would be short-lived, that the vacuum left by Colonel Qaddafi’s death invited violence and division.

In fact, on the same August day that Mr. Sullivan had compiled his laudatory memo, the State Department’s top Middle East hand, Jeffrey D. Feltman, had sent a lengthy email with an utterly different tone about what he had seen on his own visit to Libya.

The country’s interim leaders seemed shockingly disengaged, he wrote. Mahmoud Jibril, the acting prime minister, who had helped persuade Mrs. Clinton to back the opposition, was commuting from Qatar, making only “cameo” appearances. A leading rebel general had been assassinated, underscoring the hazard of “revenge killings.” Islamists were moving aggressively to seize power, and members of the anti-Qaddafi coalition, notably Qatar, were financing them.

On a task of the utmost urgency, disarming the militia fighters who had dethroned the dictator but now threatened the nation’s unity, Mr. Feltman reported an alarming lassitude. Mr. Jibril and his associates, he wrote, “tried to avert their eyes” from the problem that militias could pose on “the Day After.”

In short, the well-intentioned men who now nominally ran Libya were relying on “luck, tribal discipline and the ‘gentle character’ of the Libyan people” for a peaceful future. “We will continue to push on this,” he wrote.

In the ensuing months, Mr. Feltman’s memo would prove hauntingly prescient. But Libya’s Western allies, preoccupied by domestic politics and the crisis in Syria, would soon relegate the country to the back burner.

And Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.

“Nobody will say it’s too late. No one wants to say it,” said Mahmud Shammam, who served as chief spokesman for the interim government. “But I’m afraid there is very little time left for Libya.”


‘WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?’

Media reports referred to Mrs. Clinton’s one brief visit to Libya in October 2011 as a “victory lap,” but the declaration was decidedly premature. Security precautions were extraordinary, with ships positioned off the coast in case an emergency evacuation was needed. As it turned out, there was no violence. But the wild celebratory scenes in the Libyan capital that day actually highlighted the divisions in the new order.

At a hospital, a university and government offices, Mrs. Clinton posed for photos with the Western-educated interim leaders and hailed the promise of democracy.

“I am proud to stand here on the soil of a free Libya,” she declared, standing alongside a beaming Mr. Jibril. “It is a great privilege to see a new future for Libya being born. And indeed, the work ahead is quite challenging, but the Libyan people have demonstrated the resolve and resilience necessary to achieve their goals.”

But everywhere Mrs. Clinton went, there was the other face of the rebellion. Crowds of Kalashnikov-toting fighters — the thuwar, or revolutionaries, as they called themselves — mobbed her motorcade and pushed to glimpse the American celebrity. Mostly they cheered, and Mrs. Clinton remained poised and unrattled, but her security detail watched the pandemonium with white-knuckled concern.

At the University of Tripoli, students were trampling wall hangings of Colonel Qaddafi that had been pulled to the ground, recalled Harold Koh, the State Department’s top lawyer, who had flown in with Mrs. Clinton on an American military aircraft. One grateful student pointed out the gallows where anti-Qaddafi protesters had been hanged, while others wondered what the United States might do to help win the peace.

“We know what the U.S. can do with bombs,” one student told Mr. Koh. “What else can you do?”

When Mrs. Clinton’s entourage finally departed, Gene A. Cretz, the American ambassador, wrote a relieved email to Cheryl Mills, the secretary of state’s chief of staff. The visit, he wrote, had been “picture perfect given the chaos we labor under in Libya.”

Mrs. Clinton certainly understood how hard the transition to a post-Qaddafi Libya would be. In February, before the allied bombing began, she noted that political change in Egypt had proved tumultuous despite strong institutions.

"So imagine how difficult it will be in a country like Libya,” she had said. “Qaddafi ruled for 42 years by basically destroying all institutions and never even creating an army, so that it could not be used against him.”

Early on, the president’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, had created a planning group called “Post-Q.” Mrs. Clinton helped organize the Libya Contact Group, a powerhouse collection of countries that had pledged to work for a stable and prosperous future. By early 2012, she had flown to a dozen international meetings on Libya, part of a grueling schedule of official travel in which she kept competitive track of miles traveled and countries visited.

Dennis B. Ross, a veteran Middle East expert at the National Security Council, had argued unsuccessfully for an outside peacekeeping force. But with oil beginning to flow again from Libyan wells, he was pleasantly surprised by how things seemed to be going.

“I had unease that there wasn’t more being done more quickly to create cohesive security forces,” Mr. Ross said. “But the last six months of 2011, there was a fair amount of optimism.”

Even so, the gulf separating the suave English speakers of the interim government from the thuwar was becoming more and more pronounced.

After decades in exile, some leaders were more familiar with American and European universities than with Libyan tribes and the militias that had sprung from them. Others, like Mr. Jibril, were suspect in some quarters because of previous roles in the Qaddafi regime. It was increasingly evident that the ragtag populist army that had actually done the fighting against Colonel Qaddafi was not taking orders from the men in suits who believed they were Libya’s new leaders.

“It should have been clear to anyone,” said Mohammed Ali Abdallah, an opposition member who now heads a leading political party, “that there were clear contradictions in the makeup of the opposition and that unity could not last.”

Jeremy Shapiro, who handled Libya on Mrs. Clinton’s policy staff, said the administration was looking for “the unifier — the Nelson Mandela.” He added: “That was why Jibril was so attractive. We were always saying, ‘This is the guy who can appeal to all the factions.’ What we should have been looking for — but we were never good at playing that game — is a power balance.”

Under the circumstances, Libya’s push for elections by July 2012, nine months after Colonel Qaddafi’s death, appeared to some to be premature. But the schedule fulfilled the opposition’s promises to the West and had the backing of competing factions.

“Suddenly you had people who belonged to political parties,” said Abdurrazag Mukhtar, a member of the interim government who lived in California for many years and is now Libya’s ambassador to Turkey. “The Muslim Brotherhood. Jibril. All these guys thinking, ‘Time for an election.’”

“But we were not ready,” he said. “You needed a road map for security first.”


‘FIERCE LIMITS’

By January 2012, there was an unmistakable drumbeat of trouble.

His popularity sagging, Mr. Jibril had stepped down as transitional prime minister. A prominent Muslim scholar had accused him of guiding the nation toward a “new era of tyranny and dictatorship.” In a deal struck between two powerful militias, he was replaced by Abdurrahim el-Keib, an engineering professor who had taught for years at the University of Alabama.

On Jan. 5, Mrs. Clinton’s old friend and adviser Sidney Blumenthal emailed her with the latest in a series of behind-the-scenes reports on Libya, largely written by a retired C.I.A. officer, Tyler Drumheller, who died last year.

The memo detailed the roiling tensions between Islamists and secularists over the role of Islamic law, fighting between rival militias associated with two different towns and four visits to Mr. Keib’s office by “angry militiamen” demanding concessions.

Mr. Keib, the email said, “believes that if he does not disarm the militias and meet their demands in the next six months, there is a good chance of increased fighting among rival groups that could lead to civil war.” Mrs. Clinton forwarded the message to Mr. Sullivan, her policy aide, with a single comment: “Worrying.”

Such alarming reports might have been expected to spur action in Washington. They did not.

After Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, with minimal violence and friendly interim leadership, Libya had moved quickly off the top of the administration’s agenda. The regular situation room meetings on Libya, often including the president, simply stopped. The revolt in Syria, in the heart of the Middle East and with nearly four times Libya’s population, took center stage.

Libya, Mr. Ross said, “was farmed out to the working level.”

The inattention was not just neglect. It was policy.

“The president was like, ‘We are not looking to do another Iraq,’” said Derek Chollet, then handling Libya for the National Security Council. “And by the way, the Europeans were all along saying: ‘No, no, no, we’re doing this. We got it. We believe in Libya. This is in our neighborhood.’”

So the president and the National Security Council set what one official called “fierce limits” on the American role: The United States would provide help only when it could offer a unique capability, only when Libya explicitly requested the services and only when Libya paid for them with its oil revenue. In practice, those conditions meant the United States would do very little.

And though the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, visited Libya together, they, too, were soon distracted, by re-election campaigns and economic worries.

The neglect was made easier by the Libyans themselves. Displaying both naïveté and nationalism, the interim leaders insisted, at least in public, that they wanted no outside interference. They were so wary of foreign troops that they refused to let the United Nations maintain a basic security force to protect its compound.

“They were very keen to take responsibility for their country,” Mr. Shapiro said. “And we were very keen to let them, for our own reasons. So there was a sort of conspiracy there.”

As the months passed and the factional fighting grew worse, Mrs. Clinton pressed for the administration to do more, asking the Pentagon, for example, to help train security forces. But she was boxed in by the president’s strictures and the Libyans’ resistance.

“It’s like you’re twisting yourself into a pretzel to try to say, ‘O.K., we won’t have boots on the ground, but we know we got to do something,’” Mr. Ross said.

Even modest proposals foundered. When Mrs. Clinton proposed sending a hospital ship to treat wounded Libyan fighters, the National Security Council rejected the idea, aides said.

But whatever her misgivings, Mrs. Clinton prized her relationship with the president and respected his authority to set policy. So she went along, as disciplined as ever.

‘LOST FROM THE BEGINNING’

Andrew Shapiro was trying to make the best of a bad situation. He had to explain what the United States was doing to secure the vast military arsenal that Colonel Qaddafi had left behind — a notable exception to the hands-off policy.

Speaking in Washington in February 2012, Mr. Shapiro, the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, described efforts to “galvanize an international response” to find and destroy arms caches. But he acknowledged that the $40 million program Mrs. Clinton had announced was not going as well as hoped, even when it came to the most worrisome weapons, the Manpads, shoulder-fired missiles capable of shooting down an airliner.

“How many are still missing? The frank answer is we don’t know and probably never will,” Mr. Shapiro said. “We cannot rule out that some weapons may have leaked out of Libya.”

The covert coals-to-Newcastle effort to arm the rebels during the revolution was the least of it. The dictator had stashed an astonishing quantity of weapons in the desert.

“We knew he had a lot, but he had 10 times that,” said Jean-David Levitte, then a top aide to Mr. Sarkozy.

While the C.I.A. moved quickly to secure Colonel Qaddafi’s chemical weapons, other efforts fell short. “There was one arsenal that we thought had 20,000 shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles, SA-7s, that basically just disappeared into the maw of the Middle East and North Africa,” recalled Robert M. Gates, the American defense secretary at the time.

A major stumbling block was that the Obama administration was negotiating with interim Libyan ministers as if they represented a unified government. In fact, they were often rivals, jockeying for power in advance of the elections.

“I know this sounds incredible, but for months and months and months on end we could not get anyone in authority in the government to just sign an agreement on anything, including our detailed offers of security assistance,” said Antony J. Blinken, then the top security aide to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “There was total paralysis.”

When it came to securing weapons, the Americans’ initial idea — to give the interim government assistance to buy them back itself — foundered when the Libyan ministers failed to carry out the program, several Libyan officials said.

So the State Department, working with the C.I.A., was left to try to strike its own deals with the militias. But there was little incentive to sell. As Mr. Shammam, the former spokesman for the interim government, put it: “How are you going to buy a Kalashnikov for $1,000? With a Kalashnikov, someone can make $1,000 a day kidnapping people.”


Where Weapons From Libya Have Been Found

Weapons have been trafficked out of Libya since 2011, especially through the country’s remote areas in the south. Many have turned up in regional conflict areas as far as Mali and Syria.

Worse, the program created an incentive for militias to import weapons to sell to the Americans, said Ali Zeidan, an adviser to the interim government who would inherit the problem in November 2012 when he became prime minister.

“If you want to buy weapons, you have to control the border,” Mr. Zeidan said, adding that the failure to do that led fighters to “sell them, get more and sell them again.”

Asked by a reporter that spring why it was so difficult for the United States to “get it right” when it intervened in the Middle East, Mrs. Clinton was still holding up Libya as a model of success. “I would take issue with the premise of that question,” said Mrs. Clinton, who declined to be interviewed for these articles.

But she was well aware of the deteriorating security situation.

In a February 2012 report, Amnesty International had called Libya’s militias “out of control.” The same month, Mr. Cretz, the American ambassador, warned in an email that the July elections would take place “in the context of militia control.”

“Continuing rivalries among the militias remain dangerous from the perspective of the havoc they can wreak with their firepower,” he wrote to Mrs. Clinton’s policy adviser, Mr. Sullivan, who sent it on to her.

In Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle, the boasting about her achievements in Libya had given way to a “nagging worry that it would go south,” one senior aide said. The aide recalled being instructed jokingly by Mr. Sullivan “to make sure that didn’t happen” before the American presidential election in November.

So when Libyans went to the polls on July 7, in what international observers characterized as a fair election with high turnout and little violence, Mrs. Clinton and other advocates of the intervention were relieved. In the wake of the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, voters had chosen Islamist-led governments. But in Libya, the winning coalition consisted of Western-friendly political parties led by Mr. Jibril.

The next month, with crowds in Tripoli chanting that the “blood of the martyrs will not be wasted,” power was handed over to the newly elected General National Congress, the first peaceful transition in Libya’s history.

Mrs. Clinton, who one aide said privately shared the worry that the country was not ready for elections, nevertheless congratulated the Libyans on “this historic milestone.”

“Now the hard work really begins to build an effective, transparent government that unifies the country,” she said.

But unity was already impossible.

“In a sense it was lost from the beginning,” said Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the United States and an early advocate of the intervention. “It was the same mistake you made in Iraq. You organize elections in a country with no experience of compromise or political parties. So you have an election, and you think that everything is solved. But eventually tribal realities come back to haunt the country.”

‘VERY SIMPLE DREAMS’

While the Americans struggled against weapons proliferation and hoped for the best, a former rebel officer took on the problem at the core of Libya’s predicament: disbanding the volatile forces that had ousted Colonel Qaddafi and helping the fighters find a place in a peaceful new Libya. The officer, M. Mustafa El Sagezli, would never meet Mrs. Clinton. But the outcome of his lonely campaign would decide to a considerable degree Libya's place in her record as secretary of state.

As deputy commander of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, one of the largest and most capable rebel militias, Mr. Sagezli had tried his best to look after his recruits. It was, he felt, an obligation that did not end with the revolution.

Shortly after Colonel Qaddafi was killed, Mr. Sagezli had gathered a group of fighters in Benghazi. A businessman with degrees from Utah State University and the London School of Economics, he knew the rebel militias had been organized along Libya’s deepest fault lines: tribal divisions, regional loyalties and differing stances on Islam’s proper role. Yet the country could not progress unless the militias were reintegrated into civil society and replaced by a regular army.

“What do you need?” he asked the fighters. “What are your dreams?”

Their modest answers surprised and encouraged him.

“Some were very simple dreams,” he said. “‘Help us get married.’ Some wanted a scholarship.”

The transitional government soon set up a Warriors Affairs Commission, headed by Mr. Sagezli. Many of the 162,000 former fighters it registered were illiterate and needed education. Some wanted to join a police force or a new army, but nearly half hoped to start small businesses.

Mr. Sagezli said he had taken a proposal to the transitional government: The Labor Ministry could help would-be businessmen, the Interior Ministry could train customs and police officers, the Defense Ministry would absorb others into a national army, and so on.

It was ambitious, but the government had plenty of money; Mrs. Clinton had worked hard to free up billions of dollars in Libyan assets that had been frozen by anti-Qaddafi sanctions. Her view, said one top aide, was that if the interim government “couldn’t rule by force, let them rule by finance.”

But instead of giving priority to demobilizing the militias, as an aide said Mrs. Clinton had hoped, the transitional regime simply began paying fighters salaries that many viewed as protection money. In one illustrative incident in May 2012, Kikla militiamen stormed the office of Mr. Keib, the interim prime minister, demanding back pay as gunfire filled the air.


[A militia group that had taken part in the Libyan revolution paying its members in March 2012. The money intended to help former fighters ended up strengthening the militias.]


“Don’t give them salaries for nothing,” Mr. Sagezli recalls begging. “Giving a commander money means giving strength to the militias, more loyalty for the commander, more armaments and more corruption. They never listened.” Instead, he said, “the politicians started bribing them to buy loyalty.”

With the July elections, precedent became political imperative.

In the run-up to the vote, a powerful militia shut down roads to press its demand that its eastern Libyan region have a greater say when the incoming Parliament drafted a constitution. The authorities capitulated, leaving the writing of the constitution for a second assembly to be elected later, with more seats from the east.

That, in turn, made it harder to disarm the militias, since each faction and town knew its weapons might be needed to protect its interests in the constitutional process. That was how the game would be played.

Mr. Zeidan, who became prime minister in November 2012, financed a few of Mr. Sagezli’s programs. But he continued to pay off militia leaders. Political parties aligned themselves with various commanders, and with no army or police force to carry out their will, the elected officials became increasingly dependent on the fighters extorting them.

Haig Melkessetian, a former American intelligence operative whose company provided security for European embassies in Libya, described militia rule as “anarchy — there’s just no other word for it.”

“We had to have five or six IDs to be able to pass, depending on the street,” he said.

Assassinations and “the worst kind of vigilantism” became commonplace, said Sarah Leah Whitson, who was tracking abuses in Libya for Human Rights Watch. One militia leader told her, “The G.N.C. may have had electoral legitimacy, but we have revolutionary legitimacy.”

Mr. Sagezli said he had discussed the difficulties with United Nations representatives and with the new American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens. “I kept asking them for support,” he recalled.

But if there was any pressure from American or European officials to stop the government payoffs, he said, “it wasn’t loud enough.”


‘THEY CREATED THE MONSTERS’

The American ambassador was hearing it from both sides.

Officials from Libya’s moderate governing coalition were demanding that the United States stop the wealthy nation of Qatar from sending money and arms to militias aligned with Libya’s Islamist political bloc. The Islamists, in turn, were accusing a rival gulf power, the United Arab Emirates, of providing similar patronage to fighters aligned with their political enemies.

The shipments violated a United Nations arms embargo. But Mr. Stevens told Mr. Abdallah, the Libyan party chief, that when he raised the issue with his Qatari and Emirati counterparts, he was met either with outright denials or with protestations that the shipments had gone through blessed official channels, namely government ministers aligned with various factions.

“When I go to the U.A.E., they say, ‘I’m dealing with the minister of defense — how much more official can I get?’” Mr. Abdallah recalled the ambassador saying.

It was bad enough that Libya’s elected officials lacked the will to force militias to lay down the arms they already possessed. Now, with Libya veering toward civil war, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — waging a broader war for influence throughout the region — were providing opposing militia commanders with back-channel resupply routes.

In Washington, though, it was the Islamists’ patrons, the Qataris, who were of paramount concern.

During the 2011 Libyan revolution, Mrs. Clinton had successfully pushed the administration to take a direct role in arming opposition groups, hoping that would persuade the Qataris to stop sending weapons to extremist rebel factions. Though that clearly had not worked, she explored a similar play as she wrangled with what to do about “the Qatar problem” in 2012, aides said.

Mrs. Clinton was already pushing for an aggressive American program to arm and train Syrian rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad. What if she could secure what one top aide called a “bank shot” deal in which the United States would provide assistance to certain of Qatar’s allies in Syria in return for Qatar’s dropping its support for Islamist militias in Libya?

But Mrs. Clinton’s activist streak ran up against President Obama’s deep wariness of further entanglement in the Middle East, and she lost the debate on arming the Syrian opposition. With no carrot to offer the Qataris, she asked aides to prepare a memo on how the United States might wield a stick.

Mrs. Clinton typically relied heavily on a tiny circle of close advisers. But facing a thorny problem, she sometimes convened a larger group, 15 or more aides, in her outer office, where her long sofa sat beneath a window with a view of the Lincoln Memorial.

“She really liked to get people to think through the what-if pieces — what if we do this, what are the consequences of doing that, and exploring alternatives,” said James B. Steinberg, her deputy secretary of state.

Some advisers suggested trimming military aid to Qatar or threatening to move American military assets elsewhere in the region. But Middle East hands at the State Department pushed back, saying that pressuring the gulf monarchy would only backfire. And the Defense Department strongly objected: It had a 20-year history of close cooperation with Qatar, which hosted critical American military bases.

In the end, there was no appetite for anything beyond quiet diplomacy. “We didn’t do nearly enough,” said Mr. Ross, who also explored ways to “raise the price” on Qatar, to no avail.

Only last year did President Obama rebuke the nations meddling in Libya, and by then it was too late.

“They created the monsters we are dealing with today,” Mr. Abdallah said, “which is these militias that are so empowered they will never subordinate themselves to any government.”


‘THINGS COULD NOT GO RIGHT’

On Aug. 8, 2012, a month after the elections, Mr. Stevens, the American ambassador, signed off on a cable sent to Washington titled "The Guns of August,” playing on the title of a classic history of the first days of World War I. It described Benghazi as moving “from trepidation to euphoria and back as a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape” and warned of “a security vacuum.”

No American official knew Libya better. He would pay with his life for his determination to see Libya’s tumultuous reality up close. A month after the cable was sent, Islamist extremists attacked the United States mission in Benghazi, and Mr. Stevens was one of four Americans killed.
In the assaults on the diplomatic compound and nearby C.I.A. annex, the most worrisome trends in the country came together: the feeble central government, the breakdown of law and order, the rise of militants and the months of minimal attention from Washington. Republicans quickly seized on the episode for what would become years of inquiries, hearings and fund-raising focused on Mrs. Clinton.

Still, in her last months at the State Department, Mrs. Clinton rode a wave of popularity, bolstered by an Internet meme called “Texts From Hillary.” Its emblem was a photograph of the secretary of state gazing through dark glasses at her BlackBerry. Few knew that it had been taken aboard the military transport plane taking her to Libya in those heady days after the dictator’s fall.

If the attempt to pin blame for the Benghazi attack on Mrs. Clinton would largely fail, the notion that the Libyan intervention was among her successes had become steadily more threadbare. Libya would not conform, either as cudgel or brag, to the needs of American politics.

As she exited the State Department in February 2013, factional violence, which would break into open civil war in 2014, was on the rise. The flow of refugees paying smugglers for a hazardous trip across the Mediterranean was swelling. And the Libyan chaos would give rise to two rival governments — one backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, the other by Qatar, Turkey and Sudan — providing sanctuary to extremists, soon to be joined by emissaries of the Islamic State.

The weapons that had made it so hard to stabilize Libya were turning up in Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt and Gaza, often in the hands of terrorists, insurgents or criminals.

In the fall of 2012, American intelligence agencies produced a classified assessment of the proliferation of arms from Libya. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” said Michael T. Flynn, then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We’ve not had that kind of proliferation of weapons since really the end of the Vietnam War.”

A cynical line would begin to circulate in Washington: In Iraq, the United States had intervened and occupied — and things had gone to hell. In Libya, the United States had intervened but not occupied — and things had gone to hell. And in Syria, the United States had neither intervened nor occupied — and things had still gone to hell.

It was a dark jest designed to shift blame from baffled American policy makers to a troubled region. But it raised a serious question about Libya: If overthrowing a hated dictator in a small and relatively rich country produced such epic troubles, was American intervention ever justified?

“It’s true that things went wrong,” said Mr. Sagezli, of the warriors commission. “But from a Libyan point of view, things could not go right. We had 42 years of Qaddafi’s rule, no infrastructure, a terrible education system, thousands of political prisoners, divisions among tribes, destruction of the army. When you have such a state, when you take out the dictator, it’s like taking the cover off the pot.”

Given that background, Ms. Whitson, who monitored Libya for Human Rights Watch, thought the United States’ failure to follow up was unforgivable.

“If you are going to carry out a military intervention to decapitate the government, you are making a commitment to the stability of that country over the long haul,” she said. “Doing nothing, as we did here? A bunch of eighth graders can agree that is not an approach that is going to work.”

The history that Mrs. Clinton often cited should have been instructive, Ms. Whitson said. “In Bosnia, yes, we intervened. But there’s been peacekeeping troops there for 20 years,” she said.

Strikingly, President Obama said in 2014 that such criticism was just, and that Libya had provided his biggest lesson in foreign policy.

He did not regret the intervention, he told Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist, because without Colonel Qaddafi’s overthrow, “Libya would have been like Syria, right? Because Qaddafi was not going to be able to contain what had been unleashed there.”

But Mr. Obama said the United States and its allies “underestimated the need to come in full force” after the dictator’s fall. The Libyan experience, he said, is “a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question: Should we intervene militarily? Do we have an answer for the day after?”

Libya, aides say, has strongly reinforced the president’s reluctance to move more decisively in Syria. “Literally, this has given him pause about what would be required if you eliminated the Syrian state,” a top adviser said.

Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, pushed for greater American involvement early in the Syrian civil war and has repeatedly called for a no-fly zone, a move Mr. Obama has so far rejected. The lessons of the Libya experience have not tempered her more aggressive approach to international crises.

While remaining political allies, the president and his former top diplomat have taken revealing shots at each other. In a rare flash of emotion after leaving office, Mrs. Clinton derided the president’s guiding principle in foreign relations: “Don’t do stupid stuff.”

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said in a 2014 interview with The Atlantic.


Last fall, frustrated with calls for greater American involvement in Syria, Mr. Obama dismissed them as “half-baked” and “mumbo jumbo.” Asked whether those labels applied to Mrs. Clinton’s proposals, the president denied it, not entirely convincingly.

When asked to defend her record on Libya, Mrs. Clinton has taken a line quite the opposite of her aides’ previous insistence on her central role in the intervention. “At the end of the day, this was the president’s decision,” she told a House committee in October.

She has said the military alliance that overthrew Colonel Qaddafi represented “smart power at its best,” but called Libya “a classic case of a hard choice.” Mostly, she has insisted that history’s judgment on the intervention, and her role in it, are not yet final.

“I think it sometimes shows American impatience,” she said in 2014, “that, ‘O.K., you got rid of this dictator who destroyed institutions. Why aren’t you behaving like a mature democracy?’ That doesn’t happen overnight.”

Yet if, for Mr. Obama, the Libyan experience has underscored doubts about the United States’ power to shape outcomes in other countries, it has demonstrated for Mrs. Clinton just how crucial an American presence can be.

“We have learned the hard way when America is absent, especially from unstable places, there are consequences,” she said at a House hearing on Benghazi in October, articulating what sounded like a guiding principle. “Extremism takes root, aggressors seek to fill the vacuum, and security everywhere is threatened, including here at home.”










http://spartacist.org/english/wv/1094/elections.html


Coming off the Democratic National Convention—where retired four-star Marine general John Allen roused the party faithful into jingoistic chants of “USA! USA!”—Hillary Clinton has been racking up endorsements from a veritable rogues’ gallery of U.S. imperialism’s leading warmongers, mass murderers and Dr. Strangeloves. In early August, 50 former top national security advisors to Republican administrations going back to Richard Nixon signed a letter declaring that their party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, “would be the most reckless President in American history.” What moved them to jump ship was not Trump’s flagrant racism, a card the GOP has been playing for decades, albeit somewhat more sotto voce.

Rather, these Republicans lost it when Trump opined that he would not necessarily support the Baltic NATO states if Russia attacked. For more than a decade, the U.S. imperialists have been provoking capitalist Russia, including through a military buildup of NATO forces on its borders. Now the Democrats and many Republicans are seizing on Trump’s stated affinity for Vladimir Putin to portray him as a Manchurian candidate, a puppet for the Russian president. In a 5 August New York Times op-ed piece titled “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton,” Michael Morell, former acting director of the CIA, put it baldly: “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

In contrast, Morell promotes Clinton’s qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism. He points to her role as an “early advocate of the raid that brought Bin Laden to justice” (i.e., murdered him and threw his body into the sea) and a consistent promoter of a “more aggressive approach” in Syria (i.e., bomb ’em back to the Stone Age). He salutes her willingness to “use force” and “her capacity to make the most difficult decision of all—whether to put young American women and men in harm’s way.” No wonder that she has for months been getting the support of several leading neocons who worry that Trump is an “unreliable” loose cannon. In short, Clinton is a proven, gold-plated war hawk.

Donald Trump is a dangerous demagogue, capable of saying and doing just about anything. And there is plenty for working people and the oppressed to fear as he incites a frenzy of “America First” chauvinist reaction among his supporters, who include the race-terrorists of the KKK and other fascists. It is this fear that the Democrats have cynically played on to get black people, immigrants, workers and the now-dejected youthful followers of Bernie Sanders to rally behind Clinton.

In the Democratic primaries, 77 percent of the black vote went to Clinton. Overwhelmingly, black people see the former party of the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South as the only option to defeat Trump. It was heartbreaking to see the mothers of Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and others killed at the hands of the cops or racist vigilantes on stage at the Democratic Convention for the coronation of a woman who reviled young black men as “superpredators” and backed her husband’s racist anti-crime bill and the destruction of welfare.

As always the labor misleaders offered their services, with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka also taking the stage to push the whopping lie that Clinton will “protect workplace rights” and “stand up to Wall Street.” The union tops’ allegiance to the Democrats is an old shell game. Their subordination of the interests of the working class to the party of their exploiters has left a trail of broken strikes, busted unions and the ongoing destruction of the livelihood of working people.

Meanwhile, as she tries to court Republicans, Clinton’s attentions are directed not to the traditional base of the Democrats but to wooing Wall Street and the generals, spies and other operatives of U.S. imperialism into her “big tent.” And she has been very successful. As Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford wrote in “Hillary Stuffs Entire U.S. Ruling Class into Her Big, Nasty Tent” (10 August):


“It’s a funky place to be—especially for the traditional Black, brown and labor ‘base’ of the party, now squished into a remote and malodorous corner of the tent, near the latrine, clutching the pages of a party platform that was never meant to bind anyone....

“She is the candidate of the imperial war machine, whose operatives have flocked to her corner in dread of Trump’s willingness to make ‘deals’ with the Russians and Chinese. She is the candidate of multinational corporations, which are perfectly confident she is lying about her stance on TPP and other trade deals. And she is the candidate of the CIA and its fellow global outlaws, who will thrive as never before with a president in the White House who cackles ‘We came, we saw, he died’ when the leader of an African country is murdered by Islamic jihadists supported by the United States.”









http://nationalinterest.org/feature/...disaster-16600

Hillary's Huge Libya Disaster: America has given up in Clinton’s wake. (by Charles R. Kubic) [June 15, 2016]

Prior to the February 17, 2011, “Day of Rage,” Libya had a national budget surplus of 8.7 percent of GDP in 2010, with oil production at 1.8 million barrels per day, on track to reach its goal of 3 million barrels per day. Currently, oil production has decreased by over 80 percent. Following the revolution, the Libyan economy contracted by an estimated 41.8 percent, with a national deficit of 17.1 percent GDP in 2011.

Before the revolution, Libya was a secure, prospering, secular Islamic country and a critical ally providing intelligence on terrorist activity post–September 11, 2001. Qaddafi was no longer a threat to the United States. Yet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly advocated and succeeded in convincing the administration to support the Libyan rebels with a no-fly zone, intended to prevent a possible humanitarian disaster that turned quickly into all-out war.

Within weeks of the revolution there were two valid cease-fire opportunities, one presented to the Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and a second opportunity presented to U.S. Africa Command for direct military commander negotiations to effect Gaddafi’s abdication, in which I was personally involved. Both opportunities were rejected and shut down by Secretary Clinton. Internal communications that went public last year revealed that on March 18, 2011, a colonel in JCS wrote, “. . . Due to the UNSCR, Libyan forces sped up ops to get to Benghazi, and will soon cease fire. As expected. Our contact will arrange a face-to-face meeting with Saif, or a skype/video-telecon to open communications if time does not permit. It will have to be with a high level USG official for him to agree. If there will be an ultimatum before any ops, the USG must be in communication with the right leaders and hopefully listen for any answer. A peaceful solution is still possible that keeps Saif on our side without any bloodshed in Benghazi.” However, on March 14, 2011 Secretary Clinton had already met with rebel leaders in Paris, including Mahmoud Jibril, number two in the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, and had committed to support their revolution.

Despite valid ceasefire opportunities to prevent “bloodshed in Benghazi” at the onset of hostilities, Secretary Clinton intervened and quickly pushed her foreign policy in support of a revolution led by the Muslim Brotherhood and known terrorists in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. One of the Libyan Rebel Brigade commanders, Ahmed Abu Khattala, would later be involved in the terrorist attack in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Articulating her indifference to the chaos brought by war, Secretary Clinton stated on May 18, 2013, to the House Oversight Committee and the American public, “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Secretary Clinton’s war actually did make a difference. It led to a very real and very tragic humanitarian disaster. Her bad judgment and failed policy resulted in the arming of terrorists, months of war and tens of thousands of causalities, the murder of the American ambassador and the deaths of three other brave Americans, continued civil war and the collapse of the Libyan economy, and a failed nation-state contributing to a tragic European migrant crisis. Clearly the Libyan disaster tops Secretary Clinton’s legacy of failure.


The revolution ended October 23, 2011, and Libya held its first democratic election on July 7, 2012. A second election was held on June 25, 2014. Despite efforts made by peaceful Libyan officials to establish a strong secular nation, radical Islamic elements rejected the election results and used military force to subvert the will of the Libyan people. As a direct consequence of the chaos caused by Secretary Clinton’s failed policy, there are now four entities competing for control of Libya: (1) the twice-elected democratic secular parliamentary government forced into exile in Tobruk by Islamist attacks, (2) the unelected radical Islamist-controlled government in Tripoli, (3) the savage ISIS terrorists who control the city of Sirte and (4) the UN-imposed Government of National Accord (GNA) recently placed ashore in abandoned buildings in Tripoli. The UN is attempting, with U.S. and European support, to impose a unity government (the GNA) that will include elements of sharia law in a new constitution. This approach was rejected twice by the Libyan people, who wanted a more secular government that is not founded in sharia.

The Libyan National Oil Company (NOC) continues to control limited commercial oil exports from certain oil fields through western ports. The democratically elected government in Tobruk has objected to the continued control of oil exports by the Islamist factions in Tripoli, and has recently established its own capability to export oil from an eastern port. However, to counter the Tobruk government, the UN recently imposed a unilateral embargo on an attempted eastern shipment of 650,000 barrels of oil. The UN embargo was lifted when contested by the UN representative of the elected Libyan government.

More recently the UN, with U.S. support, has threatened to impose travel and financial sanctions on Libyan politicians representing the elected government in Tobruk simply because they are resisting the authority of the UN-imposed GNA. And, in a truly absurd move, the United States is now considering authorizing arms shipments to the UN imposed GNA in Tripoli.

America can no longer continue to support Hillary’s legacy of failure in Libya. The United States needs to support democracy in Libya, not UN sanctions or arms shipments. And the United States should support Libyan efforts to provide internal security, critical to reestablishing full oil production and unimpeded export, in order to revitalize the failing Libyan economy. In doing so, the United States and Libya can together achieve peace—through economic and military strength.


http://www.globalresearch.ca/happy-f...xt-war/5538659

Happy Fifth Anniversary, Hillary Clinton, You’ve Destroyed Libya… We Await Your Next War (By Edward Curtin) [Global Research, July 29, 2016]

Convention confetti raining down on smiling faces should not conceal the bloody truth that trails Hillary Clinton. As the balloons rise to celebrate her triumph, her victims continue to fall.

Following the bidding of her oligarchic backers in the hidden government, she has always been fervently eager to lend her immoral authority to the massacre of foreign peoples and the destruction of their central governments. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Serbia, etc. – the list is as long as her moral turpitude is deep.

But as the “Queen of Chaos” is crowned and feted in the City of Brotherly Love, it is crucially important that we recall her role five years ago in the destruction of the African country that had the highest living standard on the continent, excellent health care, free education, good social services, etc. – Libya.

As Libya, according to plan, has descended into civil war and chaos (see Iraq, Syria, etc.) as a result of the 2011 “humanitarian intervention” instigated by Clinton and her ilk, it has disappeared from mainstream media propaganda. Out of sight, out of mind. It will reappear in the corporate press if the American/Nato aggressors decide to bomb the country again in alliance with their friend, the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, probably in support of the CIA-affiliated General Khalifa Haftar, who is presently wreaking havoc in eastern Libya with western support, as leaked tapes have shown. The time for that renewed bombing may be fast approaching, though it might be delayed for political reasons until after the presidential election.

In the popular mind, of course, Clinton is associated with the controversial events of September 2012 in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. As the Secretary of State, she was no doubt aware of Stevens’ work with the CIA organizing the transfer of the seized Gaddafi government weapons to Turkish ports. As the Italian historian Paolo Sensini writes in his eye-opening book, Sowing Chaos: Libya in the Wake of Humanitarian Intervention, “The arms were then transferred to the jihadi forces engaged in terrorist actions against the government of Syria under Bashar al-Assad.” While bi-partisan outrage over the Americans’ deaths was duly noted by the media and became a political football, the nature of Stevens’ work under Clinton and Obama received no mainstream media coverage, and the illegal and immoral wars against two countries continued apace.

But the Stevens’ issue pales in comparison to Clinton’s larger role in waging war on a sovereign nation for propagandistic “humanitarian” reasons. As with Iraq (Hussein) and Syria (Assad), she was a central player in the lies told about Mu’ammar Gaddafi to justify a war of aggression. Each in his turn was declared to be the new ******. In Gaddafi’s case, he was falsely accused of killing 10,000 people in Tripoli, having his soldiers use Viagra and rape as a matter of policy, and of being a bloody mad dictator intent on genocide. Rwanda and the Holocaust were elicited as warnings. President Obama justified the savage attack on Libya, fully supported by his Secretary of State Clinton, with the following lie: “We knew that if we wanted [sic] … if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” And he announced he was sending Clinton to London to meet with the Libyan “opposition” – aka terrorists.

The western media ran with these false accusations, as usual, as did Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, prominent Arab media. Like Iraq, Syria, and Serbia, it was another war of aggression based on lies, and Clinton was a primary player.

She was fully aware of developments in Libya from the start; knew that the rebels were Islamic militants armed and trained by the US, Britain, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE; knew that they summarily executed anyone they considered their enemies; knew that this war of lies was aimed at preventing Gaddafi from fulfilling his goal of economic independence, not just for Libya, but for the entire continent of Africa by introducing the gold dinar into Africa as common currency; knew, in short, that Libya had to be raped, its Central Bank destroyed, for its exploitation by western globalists. Thus her boss, Obama, in August 2011 confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank that Gaddafi had planned to use for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank. This is what Clinton termed “smart power at its best.” Under the pretext of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ Clinton supported the killing of tens of thousands and the destruction of an independent country to serve her masters.

Paolo Sensini characterizes the Democratic presidential nominee (and next president) perfectly:

Mrs. Clinton’s joyous exclamation on hearing the news of Gaddafi’s death sums up the recklessness and irresponsibility of an entire political class – an unrepentant class that has wreaked havoc around the world on a truly unprecedented scale.

When she thought cameras and microphones were off and exclaimed, “We came, we saw, he died,” she was speaking not just for herself but for the party and interests that she now represents.

“I’m with her,” says Michelle Obama.

“I am proud to stand with her,” says Bernie Sanders.

I wonder where the dead children of Libya stand.

But this is Hillary Clinton’s hour. Congratulations! Happy Anniversary!

We await your next war.

[Jarno]

...

Thanks dickhead for fucking up the thread. I'll report yo ass.

[DeleteMeModsPls]

I vote ISTj.

[Bertrand]

listening to hillary talk about TBK for an hour would make for a great postmodern art installation

[Tallmo]

LIE

[The Reality Denialist]

Gulenko types Clinton as SLE.