Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Bill Clinton: Ambassador of Death

Kurt Nimmo | 22.04.2007 20:48 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | Terror War | World

How soon we forget. Bill Clinton, according to Edward S. Herman, “has gone beyond the Bush [Senior] record of criminality, and has brought to the commission of war crimes a new eclectic reach and postmodern style. A skilled public relations person, he has refined the rhetoric of humanistic and ethical concern and can apologize with seeming great sincerity for our earlier regrettable sponsorship and support of mass murder in Guatemala while carrying out similar or even more vicious policies in Colombia and Iraq at the same moment….

“Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday that if she is elected president, she would make her husband a roaming ambassador to the world, using his skills to repair the nation’s tattered image abroad,” reports the Associated Press. “I believe in using former presidents, particularly what my husband has done, to really get people around the world feeling better about our country,” Hillary said. “We’re going to need that. Right now they’re rooting against us and they need to root for us.”

Of course, we shouldn’t expect Clinton or a fawning corporate media to mention the reason why “people around the world” are “rooting against us.” It wouldn’t have anything to do with invading small, defenseless countries, would it? “The war in Iraq is a continuing drag on opinions of the United States, not only in predominantly Muslim countries but in Europe and Asia as well,” notes the Pew Global Attitudes Project. “And despite growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran—and in many countries much more often—as a danger to world peace.” More specifically, the United States is a danger to the Iraqi people, as the United States, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and published in the esteemed medical journal Lancet, are responsible for the death of over 650,000 Iraqis. Lest we forget, Hillary voted for the illegal invasion of Iraq, thus she is party to mass murder.

Back in 2003, another poll indicated Bill Clinton “ranks as this nation’s third best chief executive,” right behind Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. “Silly Clinton. All you did was provide peace and prosperity—why would we ever want that again?” remarked the “liberal bomb thrower” Oliver Willis upon the publication of the poll results.

How soon we forget. Bill Clinton, according to Edward S. Herman, “has gone beyond the Bush [Senior] record of criminality, and has brought to the commission of war crimes a new eclectic reach and postmodern style. A skilled public relations person, he has refined the rhetoric of humanistic and ethical concern and can apologize with seeming great sincerity for our earlier regrettable sponsorship and support of mass murder in Guatemala while carrying out similar or even more vicious policies in Colombia and Iraq at the same moment…. Clinton’s crimes range from ad hoc bombings to boycotts and sanctions designed to starve into submission, to support of ethnic cleansing in brutal counterinsurgency warfare, and to aggression and devastation by bombing designed to return rogues to the stone age and keep them there.”

On June 26, 1993, Clinton bombed Baghdad, supposedly in retaliation for an assassination attempt against his predecessor. Clinton’s raid killed eight people, including the renowned artist Layla al-Attar. Later, Clinton bombed Afghanistan and the Sudan, the latter targeting a pharmaceutical factory, a major source of medical drugs in that impoverished country. As Herman notes, in Yugoslavia Clinton and NATO targeted civilians “in houses, hospitals, schools, trains, factories, power stations, and broadcasting facilities.” According to Yugoslav authorities, “60 percent of NATO targets were civilian, including 33 hospitals and 344 schools, as well as 144 major industrial plants and a large petro-chemical plant whose bombing caused a pollution catastrophe. John Pilger noted that the list of civilian targets included ‘housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centres, theatres, museums, churches and 14th century monasteries on the World Heritage list. Farms have been bombed and their crops set afire,’” in other words, massive war crimes.

But all of this pales in comparison to Clinton’s complicity in genocide. “Bombs are merciful compared to what Clinton has done to the innocent children of Iraq, the most vulnerable of all, by maintaining ten years of the harshest sanctions in the history of mankind, begun on August 6, 1990, and kept in place at the insistence of the United States,” writes David L. Harten. “In 1989, the literacy rate [in Iraq] was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities,” Anupama Rao Singh, UNICEF’s senior representative in Iraq, told John Pilger in early 2000. “Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest.”

In 1996, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “567,000 Iraqi children had died as a direct consequence of economic sanctions,” and the following year UNICEF reported “that 4,500 Iraqi children under five were dying every month as a result of sanctions—induced starvation and disease.”

According to Shuna Lennon, in a paper presented to the International Law Association on February 29, 2000, Clinton’s “blockade/sanctions regime was illegal from its inception under the Geneva Protocol,” specifically the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions 1977, articles 48, 51, 54. “The blockade/sanctions regime is by its nature inherently illegal under the Geneva Protocol, for three reasons. First, it targets civilians in breach of Articles 48 and 51(2). Secondly, it constitutes indiscriminate attack, in breach of Article 51(3). Thirdly and most flagrantly, it employs starvation as a method of warfare, in breach of Article 54.” In addition to violating the Genocide Convention, Clinton’s medieval siege and embargo violated the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1950. In short, Bill Clinton is a war criminal by any standard and as such should face prosecution, not be assigned as his wife’s “roving ambassador,” that is if she is elected, excuse me selected to be president.

Finally, Hillary may as well appoint a Mob boss as her special ambassador. During the Clinton years, special prosecutors investigated the following: Bank and mail fraud, violations of campaign finance laws, illegal foreign campaign funding, improper exports of sensitive technology, physical violence and threats of violence, solicitation of perjury, intimidation of witnesses, bribery of witnesses, attempted intimidation of prosecutors, perjury before congressional committees, lying in statements to federal investigators and regulatory officials, flight of witnesses, obstruction of justice, bribery of cabinet members, real estate fraud, tax fraud, drug trafficking, failure to investigate drug trafficking, bribery of state officials, use of state police for personal purposes, exchange of promotions or benefits for sexual favors, using state police to provide false court testimony, laundering of drug money through a state agency, false reports by medical examiners and others investigating suspicious deaths, the firing of the RTC and FBI director when these agencies were investigating Clinton and his associates, failure to conduct autopsies in suspicious deaths, providing jobs in return for silence by witnesses, drug abuse, improper acquisition and use of 900 FBI files, improper futures trading, murder, sexual abuse of employees, false testimony before a federal judge, shredding of documents, withholding and concealment of subpoenaed documents, fabricated charges against (and improper firing of) White House employees, inviting drug traffickers, foreign agents and participants in organized crime to the White House. (See The Clinton Legacy.)

Of course, Americans have short memories, or are amnesiacs altogether, and most of them know nothing about Clinton’s record as a war criminal. For many Americans, all that matters is Clinton made them feel good because he is a more accomplished actor than his successor, the dysfunctional former alcoholic George W. Bush. In fact, last year, Bush referred to Clinton as “my new brother,” in part because of “shared experiences,” for instance killing off large numbers of Iraqis. Clinton “has found his surrogate family,” writes Peter S. Canellos for the Boston Globe. “He is part of a sprawling clan, legendary for its warmth and unity. It is a clan that is so accustomed to acquiring surrogate sons and daughters that adoption has become a part of its strength…. Clinton has become a member of the Bush clan,” or rather crime family.

Turn them upside down, they all look the same.

Kurt Nimmo
- Homepage: http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=840

Comments

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech