Thursday 22 September 2016

Red-Light Warning on Now, About Hillary Clinton



ERIC ZUESSE | 21.09.2016 | WORLD

Red-Light Warning on Now, About Hillary Clinton


Hillary Clinton, on September 19th, was endorsed for President, by the most historically important, intelligent, and dangerous, Republican of modern times.
She was endorsed then by the person who in 1990 cunningly engineered the end of the Soviet Union and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance in such a way as to continue the West’s war against Russia so as to conquer Russia gradually for the owners of US international corporations. The person, who kept his plan secret even from his closest advisors, until the night of 24 February 1990, when he told them that what he had previously instructed them to tell Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as the West’s future military intentions about Russia if the USSR were to end, was actually a lie.
He also told them that they were henceforth to proceed forward on the basis that the residual stump of the former Soviet Union, Russia, will instead be treated as if it still is an enemy-nation, and that the fundamental aim of the Western alliance will then remain: to conquer Russia (notwithstanding the end of the USSR, of its communism, and of its military alliances) — that the Cold War is to end only on the Russian side, not at all, really, on the Western side. (All of that is documented from the historical record, at that linked-to article.)
This person was the former Director of the US CIA, born US aristocrat, and committed champion of US conquest of the entire world, the President of the United States at the time (1990): George Herbert Walker Bush.
He informed the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend — as she posted it, apparently ecstatically, on September 19th, to her facebook page after personally having just met with Mr. Bush — «The President told me he’s voting for Hillary!!» She then confirmed this to Politico the same day, which headlined promptly, «George H.W. Bush to Vote for Hillary».
G.H.W. Bush is an insider’s insider: he would not do this if he felt that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t carry forward his plan (which has been adhered-to by each of the US Presidents after him), and if he felt that Donald Trump — Bush’s own successor now as the Republican US candidate for President — would not carry it forward. (This was his most important and history-shaping decision during his entire Presidency, and therefore it’s understandable now that he would be willing even to cross Party-lines on his Presidential ballot in order to have it followed-through to its ultimate conclusion.)
What indications exist publicly, that she will carry it forward? Hillary Clinton has already publicly stated (though tactfully, so that the US press could ignore it) her intention to push things up to and beyond the nuclear brink, with regard to Russia:
German Economic News was the first news medium to headline this, «Hillary Clinton Threatens Russia with War» (in German, on September 4th: the original German of the headline was «Hillary Clinton Droht Russland mit Krieg»), but the source of this shocking headline was actually Clinton’s bellicose speech that had been given to the American Legion, on August 31st, in which she had said:
Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election systems. So, we’ve got to step up our game. Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight to those who go after us. As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses.
Russia denies that it did any such thing, but the US even taps the phone conversations of Angela Merkel and other US allies; and, of course, the US and Russia routinely hack into each others’ email and other communications; so, even if Russia did what Clinton says, then to call it «like any other attack» against the United States and to threaten to answer it with «military responses», would itself be historically unprecedented — which is what Hillary Clinton is promising to do.
Historically unprecedented, like nuclear war itself would be. And she was saying this in the context of her alleging that Russia had «attacked» the DNC (Democratic National Committee), and she as President might «attack» back, perhaps even with «military responses». This was not an off-the-cuff remark from her — it was her prepared text in a speech. She said it though, for example, on 26 October 2013, Britain’s Telegraph had headlined, «US ‘operates 80 listening posts worldwide, 19 in Europe, and snooped on Merkel mobile 2002-2013’: US intelligence… targeted Angela Merkel’s phone from 2002 to 2013, according to new eavesdropping leaks».
But now, this tapping against Merkel would, according to Hillary Clinton’s logic (unless she intends it to apply only by the United States against Russia), constitute reason for Germany (and 34 other nations) to go to war against the United States.
Clinton also said there: «We need to respond to evolving threats from states like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea from networks, criminal and terrorist networks like ISIS. We need a military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats, and operate on short notice across every domain, not just land, sea, air and space, but also cyberspace».
She also said that the sequester agreement between the Congress and the President must end, because US military spending should not be limited: «I am all for cutting the fat out of the budget and making sure we stretch our dollars… But we cannot impose arbitrary limits on something as important as our military. That makes no sense at all. The sequester makes our country less secure. Let’s end it and get a budget deal that supports America’s military». She wasn’t opposing «arbitrary limits» on non-military spending; she implied that that’s not «as important as our military».
She was clear: this is a wartime US, not a peacetime nation; we’re already at war, in her view; and therefore continued unlimited cost-overruns to Lockheed Martin etc. need to be accepted, not limited (by «arbitrary limits» or otherwise). She favors «cutting the fat out of the budget» for healthcare, education, subsidies to the poor, environmental protection, etc., but not for war, not for this war. A more bellicose speech, especially against «threats from states like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea from networks, criminal and terrorist networks like ISIS», all equating «states» such as Russia and China, with «terrorist networks like ISIS», could hardly be imagined — as if Russia and China are anything like jihadist organizations, and are hostile toward America, as such jihadist groups are.
However, her threat to respond to an alleged «cyber attack» from Russia by «serious political, economic and military responses», is unprecedented, even from her. It was big news when she said it, though virtually ignored by America’s newsmedia.
The only US newsmedia to have picked up on Clinton’s shocking threat were Republican-Party-oriented ones, because the Democratic-Party and nonpartisan ‘news’ media in the US don’t criticize a Democratic nominee’s neoconservatism — they hide it, or else find excuses for it (even after the Republican neoconservative President George W. Bush’s catastrophic and lie-based neoconservative invasion of Iraq — then headed by the Moscow-friendly Saddam Hussein — in 2003, which many Democratic office-holders, such as Hillary Clinton backed).
So, everything in today’s USA ‘news’ media is favorable toward neoconservatism — it’s now the «Establishment» foreign policy, established notwithstanding the catastrophic Iraq-invasion, from which America’s ‘news’ media have evidently learned nothing whatsoever (because they’re essentially unchanged and committed to the same aristocracy as has long controlled them).
However, now that the Republican Party’s Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is openly critical of Hillary Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s neoconservatism, any Republican-oriented ’news’ media that support Trump’s candidacy allows its ‘journalists’ to criticize Clinton’s neoconservatism; and, so, there were a few such critiques of this shocking statement from Clinton.
The Republican Party’s «Daily Caller» headlined about this more directly than any other US ‘news’ medium, «Clinton Advocates Response To DNC Hack That Would Likely Bring On WWIII», and reported, on September 1st, that «Clinton’s cavalier attitude toward going to war over cyber attacks seems to contradict her assertion that she is the responsible voice on foreign policy in the current election».
The Republican Washington Times newspaper headlined «Hillary Clinton: US will treat cyberattacks ‘just like any other attack’», and reported that she would consider using the «military to respond to cyberattacks,» but that her Republican opponent had indicated he would instead use only cyber against cyber: «‘I am a fan of the future, and cyber is the future,’ he said when asked by Time magazine during the Republican National Convention about using cyberweapons». However, Trump was not asked there whether he would escalate from a cyber attack to a physical one. Trump has many times said that having good relations with Russia would be a priority if he becomes President. That would obviously be impossible if he (like Hillary) were to be seeking a pretext for war against Russia.
The mainstream The Hill newspaper bannered, «Clinton: Treat cyberattacks ‘like any other attack’», and reported that, «Since many high-profile cyberattacks could be interpreted as traditional intelligence-gathering — something the US itself also engages in — the White House is often in a tricky political position when it comes to its response». That’s not critical of her position, but at least it makes note of the crucial fact that if the US were to treat a hacker’s attack as being an excuse to invade Russia, it would treat the US itself as being already an invader of Russia — which the US prior to a President Hillary Clinton never actually has been, notwithstanding the routine nature of international cyber espionage (which Clinton has now stated she wants to become a cause of war), which has been, and will continue to be, essential in the present era.
The International Business Times, an online-only site, headlined September 1st«Clinton: US should use ‘military response’ to fight cyberattacks from Russia and China», and reported that a Pentagon official had testified to Congress on July 13th, that current US policy on this matter is: «When determining whether a cyber incident constitutes an armed attack, the US government considers a broad range of factors, including the nature and extent of injury or death to persons and the destruction of or damage to property. … Cyber incidents are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, and the national security leadership and the president will make a determination if it’s an armed attack».
Hillary’s statement on this matter was simply ignored by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Fox, CNN, The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Review, Common Dreams, Alternet, Truthout, and all the rest of the US standard and ‘alternative news’ reporting organizations. Perhaps when Americans go to the polls to elect a President on November 8th, almost none of them will have learned about her policy on this incredibly important matter.
Hillary’s statement was in line with the current Administration’s direction of policy, but is farther along in that direction than the Obama Administration’s policy yet is.
As the German Economic News article had noted, but only in passing: «Just a few months ago, US President Barack Obama had laid the legal basis for this procedure and signed a decree that equates hacker attacks with military attacks». However, this slightly overstated the degree to which Obama has advanced «this procedure». On 1 April 2016 — and not as any April Fool’s joke — techdirt had headlined «President Obama Signs Executive Order Saying That Now He’s Going To Be Really Mad If He Catches Someone Cyberattacking Us» and linked to the document, which techdirt noted was «allowing the White House to issue sanctions on those ‘engaging in significant malicious cyber-enabled activities’».
The writer, Mike Masnick, continued, quite accurately: «To make this work, the President officially declared foreign hacking to be a ‘national emergency’ (no, really) and basically said that if the government decides that some foreign person is doing a bit too much hacking, the US government can basically do all sorts of bad stuff to them, like seize anything they have in the US and block them from coming to the US». What Hillary Clinton wants to add to this policy is physical, military, invasion, for practices such as (if Russia becomes declared by the US President to have been behind the hacking of the DNC) what is actually routine activity of the CIA, NSA, and, of course, of Russia’s (and other countries’) intelligence operations.
It wasn’t directly Obama’s own action that led most powerfully up to Hillary Clinton’s policy on this, but instead NATO’s recent action — and NATO has always been an extension of the US President, it’s his military club, and it authorizes him to go to war against any nation that it decides to have been invaded by some non-member country (especially Russia or China — the Saudis, Qataris, and other funders behind international jihadist attacks are institutionally prohibited from being considered for invasion by NATO, because the US keeps those regimes in power, and those regimes are generally the biggest purchasers of US weapons). I reported on this at The Saker’s site, on 15 June 2016, headlining «NATO Says It Might Now Have Grounds to Attack Russia». That report opened:
On Tuesday, June 14thNATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s Article V «collective defense» provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country. …
NATO is now alleging that because Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton’s home computer, this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her US State Department communications to her unsecured home computer and of such a Russian’s then snooping into the US State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if the US President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the US, trigger NATO’s mutual-defense clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the US government in going to war against Russia, if the US government so decides.  
So, Obama is using NATO to set the groundwork for Hillary Clinton’s policy as (he hopes) America’s next President. Meanwhile, Obama’s public rhetoric on the matter is far more modest, and less scary. It’s sane-sounding falsehoods. At the end of the G-20 Summit in Beijing, he held a press conference September 5th (VIDEO at this link), in which he was asked specifically (3:15) «Q: On the cyber front, … do you think Russia is trying to influence the US election?» and he went into a lengthy statement, insulting Putin and saying (until 6:40 on the video) why Obama is superior to Putin on the Syrian war, and then (until 8:07 in the video) blaming Putin for, what is actually, the refusal of the Ukrainian parliament or Rada to approve the federalization of Ukraine that’s stated in the Minsk agreement as being a prerequisite to direct talks being held between the Donbass residents and the Obama-installed regime in Kiev that’s been trying to exterminate the residents of Donbass. Then (8:07 in the video), Obama got around to the reporter’s question:
And finally, we did talk about cyber-security generally. I’m not going to comment on specific investigations that are still alive and active, but I will tell you that we’ve had problems with cyber-intrusions from Russia in the past, from other countries in the past, and, look, we’re moving into a new era here, where a number of countries have significant capacities, and frankly we’ve got more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively, but our goal is not to suddenly in the cyber-arena duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms-races in the past, but rather to start instituting (9:00) some norms so that everybody’s acting responsibly.
He is a far more effective deceiver than is his intended successor, but Hillary’s goals and his, have always been the same: achieving what the US aristocracy want. Whereas she operates with a sledgehammer, he operates with a scalpel. And he hopes to hand this operation off to her on 20 January 2017.
This is what Hillary’s statement that «the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack» is reflecting: it’s reflecting that the US will, if she becomes President, be actively seeking an excuse to invade Russia. The Obama-mask will then be off.
If this turns out to be the case, then it will be raw control of the US Government by the military-industrial complex, which includes the arms-makers plus the universities. It’s the owners — the aristocrats — plus their servants; and at least 90% of the military-industrial complex support Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Like her, they are all demanding that the sequester be ended and that any future efforts to reduce the US Government’s debts must come from cutting expenditures for healthcare, education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, and expenditures on the poor; no cuts (but only increases) for the military. This is based on the conservative theory, that the last thing to cut in government is the military.
The Republicans used to champion that view (thus the «conservative» in«neoconservative»). But after Obama came into office, the Republican Party became divided about that, while the Democratic Party (under Obama) increasingly came to support neoconservatism. Hillary is now the neoconservatives’ candidate. (And she’s also the close friend of many of them, and hired and promoted many of them at her State Department.) If she becomes the next President, then we might end up having the most neoconservative (i.e., military-industrial-complex-run) government ever. This would be terrific for America’s weapons-makers, but it very possibly would be horrific for everybody else. That’s the worst lobby of all, to run the country. (And, as that link there shows, Clinton has received over five times as much money from it as has her Republican opponent.)
George Herbert Walker Bush knows lots that the ‘news’ media don’t report (even when it has already been leaked in one way or another), and the Clinton plan to destroy Russia is part of that. Will the Russian government accept it? Or will it do whatever is required in order to defeat it? This is already a serious nuclear confrontation.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
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