Hillary knew she would unleash hell in Syria

WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive of 30 322 emails and various attachments on March 16, 2016. The emails were sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State.

This was followed by nearly 20 000 emails sent to and by members of the US Democratic National Committee, exposing the party leadership’s dismissive attitude towards Bernie Sanders. Finally, last month, WikiLeaks posted over 50 000 emails connected to John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and close associate of his wife, the Democratic presidential frontrunner.

The website confirms that some emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request, and the final PDFs were made available on February 29, 2016.

In one leaked letter sent in mid-December 2011 from Clinton’s top advisor Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton was warned about the approaching Syrian chaos. Blumenthal alerted Clinton to his friend David Lesch’s misgivings on the Syrian matter. Lesch is described as a “leading Syria expert in the US”, and said to be in contact with Syrian ambassador to UK, Sami Khiyami.

The conversation between the two men foretells the major calamity which has befallen Syria. They were both convinced that the support of various opposition groups in Syria would lead to a bloody civil war, and Blumenthal cautioned Hillary.

Khiyami noted the disruptive role the Qataris in Syria were playing and requested they be pressured to stop intervening.

Key parts from Lesch’s report include:

Returned from my trip to London yesterday. I met with the Syrian ambassador to UK, Sami Khiyami, […] Sami is a very interesting person. He is secular Sunni, very straightforward and forthright (for a Syrian official), and not a member of the Be th party. He was pretty frank with me, and I got the impression he believes he and his government could be on their way out, so no harm in telling it like it is. He was critical of Bashar al-Asad, although he still supports him as the best alternative, and he was incredibly critical of, even dismissive, of the security services, who he essentially said were too stupid to do anything right.

I asked him if he could tell President Obama or Secretary Clinton one thing, what would it be? His response was interesting. He said that he would vigorously ask the US to stop supporting groups such as the Syrian National Council b/c they have very little legitimacy or popularity in Syria. He strongly recommended showing outward support for the serious and respected Syrian opposition elements in Syria itself …

Sami said that it would not eliminate all of the opposition, since there are many wedded to the fall of the regime no matter what, but that it would draw enough support to isolate the radicals, who would whither away eventually, and create a critical mass to force the regime to follow through (especially with regional and international pressure holding its feet to the fire) and transition toward sharing power. Although it may be a bit self-serving, I happen to agree with him. The SNC and other opposition groups have very little if any traction inside Syria. Need to get guys like Kilo and Seif and the Local Coordination Committees in Syria on the same page with some sort of govt sanction, in combination with an end to violence. I think it is the only way this doesn’t end up in a bloody civil war.

He also added one more request: get the Qataris to stop causing so much trouble in Syria in a way that is leading toward militarization of the crisis. He said he would make a formal request to Bashar for me to see him within the next month or so. Yale University Press has asked me to write a very quick 100-120 page book on Syria and the Arab spring and Bashar al-Asad, with the final draft due in April, so it is under this pretext that I would be going. Not holding my breath on this, although Bashar seems more willing to talk to people now.

But Hillary Clinton ignored these warnings. The US continued to arm various militant groups, many of them connected to radical extremists in Syria and Iraq.

In yet another letter of the Podesta dump, John Podesta admitted that both Qatar and Saudi Arabia were helping ISIS. Podesta also mentioned that the US should exert pressure on these countries in order to stop the violence: “… we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region”.

In the same dump, it was however revealed that Bill Clinton had been receiving “expensive gifts” from the Qataris, an unsettling detail which would explain Hillary’s particularly slow response to Qatari meddling.

More evidence pointing to the contribution of the Obama administration and especially Hillary Clinton to the ensuing protracted conflict the Middle East can be read here.

Meanwhile, the Clinton camp “has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,” says Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder.

“Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange told RT in an exclusive interview.