The Power of Julian Assange

May 24, 2019 by Barbara With

On November 5, 2016, Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange gave an interview with his partner John Pilfer to address the content of the Hillary Clinton emails that Wikileaks had published. The general election was three days away, and Assange spoke of the enormity of what was uncovered in those emails.

The leaked emails showed that that Saudi Arabia and Qatari governments were funding ISIS as they were giving millions to the Clinton Foundation while Clinton is Secretary of State. During that time, the State Department approved massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis paid Clinton’s foundation in a pay-to-play scheme, Clinton brokered the deal to sell arms to the Saudis, who then armed ISIS and al-qaeda forces. In essence, the United States, as directed by Clinton, was supplying the arms that our “enemies” were using to kill our own people.

International Business Times also did an investigation into this pay-to-play:

Hillary Clinton and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in March 2012. Photo: Medium

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.

The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.

American defense contractors also donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and in some cases made personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements. Such firms and their subsidiaries were listed as contractors in $163 billion worth of Pentagon-negotiated deals that were authorized by the Clinton State Department between 2009 and 2012.

• U.S. forces kill two Reuters journalist
• U.S. helicopter gun down 12 citizens in Bagdad
• U.S. Iraqi security forces torture prisoners with electrocution, beatings, burning and rape
• Hillary Clinton orders American diplomats to spy on U.N. officials
  

  The documents on WikiLeaks describing human rights abuses in Iraq may implicate British as well as US forces, a human rights lawyer has said. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

• Obama and GOP work together to kill probe into Bush torture
• U.S. stops court cases of Guantanamo prisoners
• Obama lies about torture
• U.S. pressures Germany not to prosecute CIA officers in Yemeni torture
• U.S special forces are working inside Pakistan
• Reveal the dangers of the Afghanistan war: killing of hundreds of civilians, NATO commanders are fueling the insurgency, and Taliban attacks have soared