Why Sanders Supporters Won’t Back Clinton: The Gaddafi Emails

Bernie Sanders supporters are loathe to support Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons. Earlier stories on Inquisitr outlined several wide-sweeping reasons for this, from her willingness to slander a 12-year-old rape victim in 1975, to flip-flopping on virtually every issue during her Democratic primary race. Sanders supporters value honesty and integrity, and they feel Clinton has neither. Her time at the State Department as Secretary of State provides a wealth of reasons alone as to why she would make a poor Commander-in-Chief.

In 2014, former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter took Clinton to task for her hawkish foreign policy in an interview with Time. While praising John Kerry in his role as Secretary of State, Carter was less generous with Clinton in his assessment.

“…when Secretary Clinton was Secretary of State, she took very little action to bring about peace. It was only John Kerry’s coming into office that reinitiated all these very important and crucial issues.”

The Libya Regime Change

Hillary Clinton appears to believe that war makes good business. Hillary called Iraq a business opportunity, presumably for oil. For Libya, it was gold, power, and maintaining the Western status quo.

Before U.S.-led NATO forces destroyed Libya’s water irrigation systems, the United States created a narrative of Muammar Gaddafi as a brutal dictator who distributed Viagra to troops so they could rape women while snipers killed innocent children.

But those stories were fabricated. The truth appears to be that Gaddafi was killed to protect France’s colonial interest in the African continent.

According to Counterpunch, the Libyan leader had created an economically independent nation: its own water, food, oil and a state-owned bank backed by “143 tons of gold and a similar amount in silver” worth more than $7 billion.

Gaddafi had also created a system that used its own water, its own oil, and had gone from being a poor nation to a wealthy one. Housing was a human right under Gaddafi.

The Clinton emails released in January show that in 2011, former Bill Clinton staffer and long-time friend Sidney Blumenthal sent Secretary Clinton an email with the subject line “France’s client and Qaddafi’s gold.”

The email described how France’s President Nicholas Sarkozy as “leading the attack on Libya.” Five reasons for this attack prevailed, and not a single one had to do with humanitarian concerns.

• Get Libya’s oil.
• Ensure continued French influence in the region.
• Maintain French military power.
• Prevent Gaddafi’s influence in French-speaking Africa.
• Increase Sarkozy’s reputation in France.

The email also delineated to Clinton the vast reserves of Gaddafi’s gold and silver, which the Libyan dictator intended use to set up a Euro-like African currency. The pan-African currency would theoretically decrease Western control and influence in the region; a possibility France and the United States could not tolerate.

As reported in the previous story on Inquisitr, Clinton laughed at Gaddafi’s death, declaring in a CBS television interview, “We came, we saw, he died!”

U.S. and French-backed NATO intervention coordinated with rebel forces to depose Muammar Gaddafi. He was murdered in October, 2011, by rebels, along with his son Mutassim Gaddafi. The country has been in the throes of civil war and rebellion since.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department was directly involved in the regime change efforts. It was Clinton’s State Department under the Obama administration that spread false propaganda that Gaddafi was planning nefarious activities, because it was easier to pass off the violence as humanitarian in nature than it was to publicly admit Western countries didn’t want African nations to become financially independent.

No one really knows the fate of all of Gaddafi’s — or the Libyan bank’s — assets, but some have been located in U.S. banks. The Daily Beast reports those that were found in American banks were frozen. But, what happened to the rest of the Libyan dictator’s estimated $90 billion fortune? To this day, it remains a mystery.

A Benghazi Diversion Tactic?

Hacktivist group Anonymous reported that the emails had been scrubbed from the government’s Freedom of Information Act website, however, the group provided a link to a cached page. The revelations put a whole new light into the Benghazi, Libya, attacks and its subsequent investigation.

The Benghazi investigation may not have been completely fruitless after all. The course of the investigation resulted in uncovering the emails that show the real reason why Hillary Clinton helped to overthrow Gaddafi.

Republicans hammered Hillary Clinton about her role in the attack and why she failed to provide extra security for, or get Americans out of, the compound. The attack killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and several other Americans. The investigation went nowhere, and despite some conservative grumblings, has fallen mostly by the wayside.

Role of Hillary Clinton in Libya war exposed https://t.co/7LgAiUcuPD

— #SixthMassExtinction (@LivingOnChi) April 22, 2016

Yet, the revelation that Blumenthal and Clinton exchanged emails about France’s stake in the Libyan economy, and the details Blumenthal shared with Clinton about Gaddafi’s fortune, puts the entire Benghazi situation in an entirely new perspective. It leads to some very troubling conclusions about how Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration may have been complicit in the murder of a leader to protect France’s financial interests.

Sanders supporters bristle when confronted with admonishments that they must support Hillary Clinton to prevent a Republican from taking office. But the very fact that Clinton supporters must make this argument belies the very weakness of her candidacy. Her hawkish policies and propensity toward overthrowing established governments does little to assure voters that our country will not involve itself in foreign affairs or start civil wars.

[Photo by Sergei Grits/AP Images]