Syria no-fly zone would mean ‘killing a lot of Syrians’ – leaked Clinton speech
U.S.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton © Brian Snyder /
Reuters
Amid
the increasingly hawkish approach the US government has taken towards
the Syrian government, it has been clear for its strategists that a
no-fly zone over Syria would mean mass civilian casualties, leaked
quotes from a 2013 Hillary Clinton speech have shown.
One
of the problems with the no-fly zone, which Western hawks have long
insisted should be imposed over Syria, would be the need to “take
out” the
country’s “very
sophisticated” air
defenses, Hillary Clinton noted in a Wall Street speech posted by
WikiLeaks in the latest trove of classified mails.
“To
have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many
of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if
they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—
you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians,”Clinton
admitted.
WikiLeaks
on Friday opened a Pandora’s box of emails leaked from the account
of Clinton’s campaign chairman, unleashing thousands of messages
with excerpts of her paid speeches for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley,
Deutsche Bank and others in between her job as secretary of state and
the current presidential campaign.
Syria
proved to be a hot topic for Clinton in 2013. During her speech for
Deutsche Bank, she was asked by an audience member whether she would
support US airstrike or boots on the ground in Syria, and if there
was indisputable evidence that the Syrian government used chemical
weapons on its people.
“Well,
you've asked a very, very difficult question,” Clinton
replied,“because
we obviously talked about this at great length, and both the United
States and Europe, as well as Israel, have said that's a red line.
And if there is indisputable evidence, then there is the stated
commitment to take action.”
“What
that action is and what would work is extremely difficult to plan and
execute,” she dded.
Clinton
asserted the US had some “potential” interests
in Syria, the leaked document shows.
Clinton then justified Syria being “a national interest” by what she claimed was a possibility of it becoming “a training ground for extremists, a launching pad for attacks on Turkey, Jordan, the non-tetarian[sic] elements in Lebanon and, eventually, even in Israel.”
Another challenge mentioned by Clinton was for the West to“develop covert connections with the Syrian opposition to gain insight,” she said during the 2013 speech to Goldman Sachs.“So the problem for the US and the Europeans has been from the very beginning: What is it you – who is it you are going to try to arm? And you probably read in the papers my view was we should try to find some of the groups that were there that we thought we could build relationships with and develop some covert connections that might then at least give us some insight into what is going on inside Syria.”
Clinton
said she actually favored “more
robust, covert action trying to vet, identify, train and arm cadres
of rebels” in
Syria, adding that things have been “complicated
by the fact that the Saudis and others are shipping large amounts of
weapons—and pretty indiscriminately.”
Clinton
also said she has heard advice about Syria to “let
them kill themselves until they get exhausted, and then we’ll
figure out how to deal with what the remnants are,” according
to another quote from the Jewish United Fund Advance & Major
Gifts Dinner in 2013. She called it “a
very hands-off approach.”
“With today’s WikiLeaks revelations we are finding out who Hillary Clinton really is, and it’s not hard to see why she fought so hard to keep her transcripts of speeches to Wall Street banks paying her millions of dollars secret,” the Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus said in a statement.
“The truth that has been exposed here is that the persona Hillary Clinton has adopted for her campaign is a complete and utter fraud. How can Bernie Sanders and many like-minded Democrats continue to support her candidacy in light of these revelations?”
Meanwhile, on Friday the Obama administration accused Moscow of being behind the hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers in June.
"Earlier today the US government removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump's candidacy," Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin said. "We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange, who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton."
The
Russian Foreign Ministry called the US allegations "nonsense."
"This whipping up of emotions regarding 'Russian hackers' is used in the US election campaign, and the current [US] administration taking part in this fight is not averse to using dirty tricks," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Saturday in comments posted on the ministry's website.
"There is no proof whatsoever for such grave accusations," Ryabkov said. "They are fabricated by those who are now serving an obvious political order in Washington, continuing to whip up unprecedented anti-Russian hysteria," he added.
"This whipping up of emotions regarding 'Russian hackers' is used in the US election campaign, and the current [US] administration taking part in this fight is not averse to using dirty tricks," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Saturday in comments posted on the ministry's website.
"There is no proof whatsoever for such grave accusations," Ryabkov said. "They are fabricated by those who are now serving an obvious political order in Washington, continuing to whip up unprecedented anti-Russian hysteria," he added.
Hillary Spills Top Secret Intelligence During Paid Speech to Goldman Sachs
The recently WikiLeaks dump of Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta’s personal emails exposed the “missing” transcripts of the former Secretary of State’s speeches to Wall Street and suggest that she may have violated laws pertaining to confidential information by spilling the beans about state secrets to the nation’s top banks.
8
October, 2016
Repeating
a common refrain from her campaign and the public record,
Clinton told the crowd that "I was in the small group that
recommended to the President that he go after bin Laden."
It was then that Clinton's narrative switched up from what was
previously known by the public regarding the effort to bring
the infamous terrorist mastermind to justice with many
in the US public led for years to believe that the
United States received a tip by somebody who stopped by at
the embassy — but the root of the intelligence that
captured Bin Laden was a wiretap.
"The people who were the
analysts and collectors and good old-fashioned spies who were
gathering bits and pieces of information, some of them
from cell phone conversations, I will tell you, and then all
of a sudden putting this matrix together and saying this guy
used to protect Bin Laden," said Clinton. "He just
made a phone call. He said this in a phone call. We need
to figure out where he is. Then we need to follow
him."
"That is how we found the compound in Abbottabad,"
explained Clinton. "It didn't happen because somebody walked
into our embassy and said, you know, there is a suspicious
compound in Abbottabad that you guys should take a look at."
Hillary Clinton in private speech: Bin Laden was discovered as a result of phone intercept, not walk-in https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails//fileid/927/180 …
These statements during a paid speech before the wealthy
exposed vital US national secrets about the means and methods
used to apprehend the world's most wanted terrorist and laid
open to a select few information that was almost certainly
of confidential nature begging the question whether Clinton
violated the law or was lying to the audience and about her
ultimate role in the effort to take down Bin Laden.
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