By Joe Deleplaine
On October 19, 2016, at the third and final U.S. Presidential debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, the following contentious exchange took place between debate moderator, Chris Wallace and Democratic Party Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.
“Secretary Clinton,” Chris Wallace asked, “in a speech you gave to a Brazilian bank, for which you were paid $225,000, we’ve learned from the WikiLeaks that you said, ‘My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.’ Is that your dream, open borders?”
Clinton responded, “You are very clearly quoting from WikiLeaks and what’s really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans, they have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the Internet. This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly, from Putin himself, in an effort to influence our election… We’ve never had anything like this happen in any of our elections before.”
[http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119039] [http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-october-16-2016-n667251]
Clinton’s response –setting aside its deliberate inaccuracies for a moment– raises critical issues which need to be addressed. Most urgent among them, the U.S. government’s increasingly militaristic, anti-Russia hostilities.
Last week, President Obama ordered Russia to be “officially” investigated by both the National Security Agency and Homeland Security, in response to Clinton and the DNC’s unsubstantiated claims. This week, Vice President, Joe Biden, went further, declaring the U.S. will launch a cyber attack on Russia as “retaliation”. In addition to threats, the U.S. is encircling Russia’s borders with increasing numbers of U.S. soldiers and military firepower.
Bear in mind that, to date, neither Clinton nor any U.S. agencies have presented any evidence legitimizing Clinton’s claims of “Russian interference” in U.S. elections or the DNC’s emails being “hacked by Russia”.
In contrast, the U.S. government has done both –and far worse– historically, including: the massacring millions of indigenous people worldwide and well as within its own borders; the funding, arming and training of death squads around the world; the continued torturing of people and the continued “hacking” and data collection of innocent people domestically and outside the U.S. The latter being revealed most recently through information made public by the Snowden, Assange and Manley leaks.
Most brutal of all, however, is the long history of the U.S. using its military to maintain murderous dictatorships worldwide. Here’s a woefully incomplete list, beginning with the Duvaliers in Haiti; Chile’s Augusto Pinochet (after assassinating democratically-elected (AS: president, and delete comma) , Salvador Allende); Congo’s Joseph Sese Seko Mobutu (after assassinating the country’s democratically-elected President, Patrice Lumumba); Angola’s Jonas Savimbi; Iran’s so-called “Shah”; Nicaragua’s Somoza; the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo; and the current Saudi family.
Examples of “cyber-sabotage” include the so-called “Stuxnet” attack carried out first by the George W. Bush administration, then escalated by the Obama Administration. This culminated in 2012 when a thousand Iranian nuclear centrifuges were targeted and destroyed by a combined “hack” carried out by the U.S. and Israeli governments [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html]. The attack was unnecessary, destroying equipment used to purify uranium. Iran was not building nuclear weapons, unlike the U.S. and Israel. This U.S. “hack” was, however, an unprovoked act of war. Then again, so is the U.S. assassinating other countries’ leaders.
Given this history, when Secretary of State, John Kerry, in early October, demanded the U.N. investigate Russia for “war crimes” in Syria [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/john-kerry-russia-syria-assad.html] while, at the same time, U.S. bombs were killing Syrian civilians, it is more than simply hypocritical, it’s a call to action for working people –united, here and internationally– to demand an immediate end to all U.S. aggressions.
Left unchecked, the U.S. can very quickly push its anti-Russian aggression to the point where Russia and the U.S. are actively shooting each other’s planes and missiles out of the skies over Syria. As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern noted on RT’s “Loud and Clear”. [https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/201610181046435797-exposed-how-newsweek-fabricated-a-putin-trump-conspiracy-theory/] That is, unless –and until– the U.S. is forced to back down, cooperate with other countries and ease tensions between itself, China and Russia.
Historically the only force capable of doing this has been –and continues to be– a united front of working and oppressed people domestically and internationally. The same force targeted by U.S. violence and imperialism. The only force, in fact, that’s consistently beaten the imperialists. Regardless of whether Trump or Hillary wins the presidency, continue to unite, organize and fight back for working people!