by Robert Parry
Parry provides background on the Feb. 18 statement by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (see item below) and what PCJF learned ferreting out then-Secretary Clinton’s personal emails from five years ago, when Ray got beaten up right in front of her while she speaking at George Washington University. The newly available emails were among those ordered released by a U.S. District Court. They were not turned over to PCFJ when it sought emails related to incident on Feb. 15, 2011; instead, they were kept out of public view. Ray’s offense was standing up silently and turning his back on Clinton as she spoke – for which he was brutalized, muscled out of the auditorium, arrested, and jailed by “the organs of state security.”
The embedded links in Parry’s article do much to fill out the story – on the chance you missed the Washington Post’s banner coverage of the incident (sorry for this “sick-joke” attempt at humor). Not even the striking irony of Ray’s violent removal directly before multiple TV cameras and many journalists, while Clinton spoke of the need to respect dissent, was deemed newsworthy – by the Post or anyone else in the Fawning Corporate Media.
The links in Parry’s article are worth clicking – particularly the one that takes you to an article by Ray, originally published on Feb. 23, 2011 and titled Standing Up To War and Hillary Clinton
This article discusses how:
-In 2010 then-Secretary of State Clinton sabotaged a promising nuclear deal with Iran that had been negotiated by the leaders of Turkey and Brazil at the President Barack Obama’s personal request;
-As secretary of state, Clinton shaped Washington’s dishonest “honest broker” role between Israel and the Palestinians;
-Clinton seemed never to have encountered a war that she didn’t immediately embrace on behalf of some geopolitical justification. As for the troops, her attitude seemed similar to her patron, Henry Kissinger, who has been quoted as saying that soldiers are “just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”
Missing from the “Standing Up To War and Hillary Clinton” article (because it hadn’t happened yet) was Clinton’s ill-conceived promotion of the idea of attacking Libya – the purpose of which, as she later inadvertently admitted, was to “regime-change” Gaddafi. This merits mention – if only because she is promoting the same hare-brained approach to Syria.
In short, against the advice of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Joint Chiefs, and many others, Secretary of State Clinton persuaded President Obama to impose a “no-fly zone” over Libya. In March 2011, U.S. and British warships and submarines fired over 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles at 20 integrated air and ground defense systems in Libya; U.S. stealth bombers flew non-stop from the US to drop forty bombs on a major Libyan airfield; and other US aircraft searched for Libyan ground forces to attack. But, alas: a la Iraq, the State Department lacked a workable post-hostilities plan. Libya is now in shambles.
Despite how the Libyan adventure turned out, Clinton now espouses a “no-fly zone” over Syria, much of which is already a shambles. Her oft-repeated precondition that “Assad must go” before substantive negotiations on Syria accounts largely for the unconscionable delay in launching the fledgling international talks now under way.