Viewpoint by Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury*
DHAKA. 13 September 2023 (IDN) — Hillary Clinton in an interview with PBS, on 8 June 2016, claimed that no American lives were lost in the US intervention in Libya and hinted that “pre-existing rivalries” were the primary cause of the chaos that followed.
She said, “After due diligence, we came up with a way of supporting their efforts that did not cost a single American life. And we saved a lot of Libyan lives”.
Barack Obama’s Secretary of State apparently concealed the fact about US Ambassador Chris Stevens, US Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty, who were all killed in the Benghazi terrorist attack on 11 September 2012.
Clinton had initially blamed the Benghazi attack on an anti-Islamic YouTube video.
In the PBS interview, host Judy Woodruff asked Clinton: “We know that you, and you’ve talked about this, you encouraged the president to intervene in Libya in 2011. Recently President Obama said his worst mistake in office was probably failing to plan for the day after what he thought was the right thing to do in intervening there. How do you see your responsibility in that?”
Hillary Clinton replied: “Well, first of all, it’s important to remember where we were and why the president made the decision he did because this was a presidential decision.
“I have advised the president, sometimes he follows my advice, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he uses a combination of what he hears from his advisers. We were looking at a potential disaster as Gadhafi threatened to massacre large numbers of his population. The Europeans, our Arab allies were urging us to help them to try to prevent that.”
Several media reports concluded that US intelligence did not concur with Clinton’s rationale for invading Libya and in fact “had come to the opposite conclusion: that [Gadhafi] would not risk world outrage by killing civilians en masse even as he tried to crush the rebellion in his country”.
We are aware of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy and her frantic bids of hiding series of shocking truth about her dubious activities when she was Obama’s Secretary of State. Surprisingly, Obama administration and the state machinery had frantically tried to bury this matter with the ulterior agenda of saving Hillary Clinton from ending up in prison.
According to BBC, shortly before she was sworn in as secretary of state in 2009, Hillary Clinton set up an email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York. She then relied on this server, home to the email address hdr22@clintonemail.com, for all her work-related and personal electronic correspondence during her four years in office.
She also reportedly set up email addresses on the server for her long-time aide, Huma Abedin, and State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.
She did not use, or even activate, a state.gov email account, which would have been hosted on servers owned and managed by the US government.
Mrs Clinton’s email system became a national story the first week of March 2015, when The New York Times ran a front-page article on the subject. The article said that the system “may have violated federal requirements” and was “alarming” to current and former government archive officials.
It further said, with her email setup, she became the sole arbiter of what should and shouldn’t be provided to the government, made public via freedom of information requests or turned over to interested parties, such as the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
According to the State Department inspector general report, in 2010 Mrs Clinton told her deputy chief of staff that one of her concerns with email is that she did not “want any risk of the personal being accessible”.
An FBI investigation found that Mrs Clinton used “numerous personal devices” while in office and relied on several email servers. Clinton staffers told the FBI that they destroyed some replaced devices with a hammer while they could not account for others.
On 16 March 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30 thousand emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. More PDFs were made available on 29 February 2016, and a set of additional 995 emails was imported up to 2 February 2018.
Hillary Clinton’s “pay-to-play” policy
According to The Hill, during the combined two decades she served as a US senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before America’s most powerful political woman.
The pattern of political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the State Department even tried to execute a special agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of “pay-to-play” policy.
Still, the money continued to flow by the millions of dollars from foreigners and Americans alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in need of its help.
Lately, Hillary Clinton came up to defend Muhammad Yunus—her friend and a major donor of the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons have been projecting Yunus as a saviour of the poor and exerted their influence in getting him the Nobel Peace Prize as well as several awards in the United States. Although Yunus has been telling the world, his microfinance venture Grameen Bank was eliminating poverty in Bangladesh and many other countries in the world, Danish journalist Tom Heinemann, in his award-winning documentary—The Micro Debt’ has evidently proved—Yunus has been fooling the world through lies.
*Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is an internationally acclaimed multi-award-winning anti-militancy journalist, writer, research scholar, and Editor, Blitz, a newspaper publishing from Bangladesh since 2003. He regularly writes for local and international newspapers. Follow him on @Salah_Shoaib [IDN-InDepthNews]
Photo credit: Blitz Weekly
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