The Scarlet Woman Shows Her True Colors (Rev 17:4)

 
Clinton didn’t learn from Iraq

First Posted: 11:28 am – October 28th, 2015 – 264 Views
Medea Benjamin – Contributing Columnist

As the first Democratic presidential debate drew to a close, moderator Anderson Cooper posed a question to Hillary Clinton: How might her presidency differ from Barack Obama’s?

Clinton smiled. “Well, I think it’s pretty obvious,” she replied to rapturous applause. “Being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we’ve had.”

Indeed, a Hillary Clinton presidency would shatter the glass ceiling for women in the United States. But it would also leave intact the old boys’ military-industrial complex that’s kept our nation in a perpetual state of war for decades.

Clinton, it seems, failed to learn anything after supporting the disastrous Iraq War, which plunged a huge swath of the Middle East into chaos and cost her the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Instead of embracing diplomacy, she continued to champion ill-conceived military interventions as secretary of state.

In 2011, when the Arab Spring came to Libya, Clinton was the Obama administration’s most forceful advocate for intervening to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. She even out-hawked Robert Gates, the Pentagon chief first appointed by George W. Bush who was less than enthusiastic about going to war in Libya.

Ironically, the political grief Clinton has suffered over the subsequent attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, which killed four Americans, might never have occurred if Clinton had opted against intervening in Libya’s civil war.

While House Republicans recently spent 11 hours relentlessly drilling Clinton about Benghazi and her personal email account, the larger disaster by far is the postwar chaos that’s left Libya without a functioning government, overrun by feuding warlords and extremist militants.

Clinton favors greater military intervention in Syria’s civil war, too. In her presidential bid, she’s joined hawkish Republican senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham in supporting the creation of a no-fly zone over the country.

That puts her at odds not only with President Barack Obama, but also with her Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders, who warned that it could “get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending U.S. entanglement in that region.”

Clinton did end up supporting the administration’s Iran nuclear deal, but her support came with a history of bellicose baggage.

Back in 2008, for example, she warned that Washington could “totally obliterate“ Iran. During that presidential campaign, she chided Obama as “naïve” and “irresponsible” for wanting to engage the country diplomatically.

Even after the nuclear agreement was sealed, she struck a bullying tone: “I don’t believe Iran is our partner in this agreement,” Clinton insisted. “Iran is the subject of the agreement.” She added that she “won’t hesitate to take military action” if it falls through.

Contrast Clinton with the more moderate Secretary of State John Kerry. It’s no wonder Obama’s two signature foreign policy achievements — the Iran deal and the groundbreaking opening of diplomatic ties with Cuba — came after Clinton left.

There was a very telling moment about Clinton’s attitude during the debate when Cooper asked, “Which enemy are you most proud of?”

Alongside the NRA, Republicans, and health insurance companies, Clinton listed “the Iranians” — which could mean either the Iranian government or the nation’s 78 million people. In either case, it wasn’t a very diplomatic thing to say while her successor and former colleagues are trying to chart a new, more cooperative relationship with Iran.

When it comes to war and peace, it might not matter too much if a Republican or Hillary Clinton wins the White House. In either case, the winner will be the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about.

An Odd Statement From The Scarlet Woman (Revelation 17:4)

 
Hillary Clinton: death penalty used ‘too frequently’ in the US

Lauren Gambino in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Ed Pilkington in New York
Wednesday 28 October 2015 17.42 EDT

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton does not support abolishing the death penalty, but questioned the frequency with which it is applied.

At a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Clinton said the federal government needs to take a “hard look” at capital punishment, which she said has been “too frequently applied” in an “indiscriminate way”.

“I do not favor abolishing however, because I think there are certain egregious [cases] that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty,” Clinton said in Manchester on Wednesday.
Clinton qualified her support of the death penalty by explaining that it should be used only in “very limited and rare” circumstances.

“We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently applied and very, unfortunately, often times in a discriminatory way,” Clinton said.

Her remarks on the death penalty, though cautiously phrased, amount to a rare foray by Clinton into a subject that she has generally sidestepped. In 1976, as a young lawyer in Arkansas, she was part of a team that successfully fought to keep an intellectually disabled person, Henry Giles, from the death chamber.

Her passionate stance against execution in that case contrasted strongly with that of her husband Bill Clinton, who boosted his tough-on-crime credentials in the 1992 presidential election by refusing to grant clemency to a condemned man, Rickey Ray Rector.

Hillary Clinton’s own views have been hard to pin down in recent years given her prolonged silence on the issue. In her bid for the New York seat in the US Senate in 2000, she said that she gave her “unenthusiastic support” to capital punishment – a hedged position similar to the one she expressed on Wednesday that did not please the liberal wing of the Democratic party.

Clinton’s latest comments come against the backdrop of a nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs, the result of a European-led boycott, that has refreshed the debate over the death penalty and raised important constitutional questions about what constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment”.
The scarcity of lethal drugs has forced states to scramble to obtain alternatives, leading several states to resort to using untested cocktails as a means of executing condemned prisoners.

She also noted that several states are “beginning to pull back from either applying the death penalty or narrowing the scope of the cases where it can be applied”.

“I think we have to be smarter and more careful about how we do it,” Clinton said.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination for president are both opposed to the death penalty. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s closest challenger in the race, has said he is strongly opposed to the death penalty.

In response to Clinton’s remarks on Wednesday, Martin O’Malley said capital punishment is “fundamentally at odds with our values”.

“The death penalty is racially biased, ineffective deterrent to crime, and we must abolish it,” said O’Malley, who as governor of Maryland abolished the death penalty in the state in 2013. “Our nation should not be in the company of Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in carrying out the majority of public executions.”

Khamanei: The Master Of Hypocrisy

IRAN: HYPOCRISY, HUNGER, AND HANGINGS



01 January 2015
By INU staff

INU-Evidence against Iran’s interest in cooperation with the US comes from the highest levels of Iranian power. In the wake of recent protests in response to the deaths of several African Americans at the hands of police officers, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei co-opted Twitter hashtags related to the protest movement in order to make hypocritically disparaging remarks about the US’s treatments of its minorities.

This hypocrisy was highlighted on The Christian Science Monitor on Monday reported upon Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent tweets that have co-opted hashtags for US protests in order to decry US police brutality while ignoring the far more commonplace and institutionalized brutality and repression in Iran.

The Monitor notes that Khamenei’s commentary met with critical responses and ridicule by many Twitter users, who countered the co-opted #BlackLivesMatter hashtag with alternatives appropriate to the situation in Iran, including, #AllLivesMatter, #KurdishLivesMatter, #WomenLivesMatter.
Writing in News Blaze on Wednesday, the National Council of Resistance of Iran called upon the world community to help save the life of Alireza Rasouli, who it says has now been on a hunger strike for 47 days and has been denied medical treatment for cancer and osteoporosis, as well as malnutrition.

The same article also highlights the condition of Benham Ebrahimzadeh, another political prisoner on hunger strike, this one since December 2. Ebrahimzadeh has reportedly been denied warm clothing and exposed to the winter cold in an effort to curtail his protest.

The NCRI also points out that 59 prisoners in Karun Prison began a coordinated hunger strike on December 21, in protest against poor conditions and denial of medical treatment.

These issues of prisoner mistreatment are closely connected to the liberal application of the death penalty in Iran, which is the source of additional criticisms of the regime’s human rights abuses. On this point, Breitbart cited the NCRI on Wednesday as a source of information on the volume of recent executions.

At least nine individuals were reportedly hanged on Christmas Day in Iran, helping to bring the estimated total number of execution to at least 707 for the year 2014, according to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. These numbers far exceed the volume of executions said to have taken place under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.