Reprinted from worldbeyondwar.org
Bernie Sanders may have been chivalrous when he told a beleaguered Hillary Clinton, "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails." But when it comes to actually reading some of Clinton's confidential exchanges, that's another matter.
In December 2014, Hillary Rodham Clinton began providing the State Department with personal emails sent or received during her tenure as Secretary of State. The final batch was released on February 29, 2016. The entire collection is now posted on the State Department's Public Reading Room and is searchable via this link.
But the collection is not complete. Clinton admits to having deleted 32,000 emails "deemed private." Among the missing are a number of politically charged emails sent to Secretary Clinton by a trusted colleague named Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal's emails were allegedly captured and copied by Marcel Lazar Lehel, an unemployed Romanian taxi driver better known as "Guccifer" and "Small Fume." In April of this year, Lehel became an instant celebrity after he was identified as the cyber-savvy interloper who had hacked into Clinton's official email account during her time as Secretary of State. (Lehel was recently awarded an all-expenses-paid trip from a Romanian prison to the US where he will spend his days in an American jail cell under 18-month extradition order.)
Guccifer's sudden celebrity may seem a bit odd, given the fact that he initially released Clinton's compromised communiques some time ago--back in 2013, to be precise.
Before Guccifer became tabloid-fodder in the West, he had already popped a number of eyes by sharing his disclosures with the Russian media organization RT ("Hillary Clinton's 'hacked' Benghazi emails: FULL RELEASE") on March 20, 2013. (A second bundle of Guccifer's Blumenthal-Clinton emails was released on March 22, 2013.)
Given the current frenzy over Guccifer and his revelations, it is remarkable that his headline-grabbing "leaks" went virtually unreported when he first twisted the spigot back in 2013. At the time, the mainstream media took little notice. The only "news outlets" to pick up on Guccifer's cyber-pranks were a few conspiracy sites like The Smoking Gun and Cryptome. [Note: You may experience trouble trying to access the Cryptome website.]
The tranche of Clinton's "damn emails" subsequently posted by RT included some pretty damning revelations. Perhaps none was more shocking than the disclosure that the deadly attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012--which took the life of US ambassador John Christopher "Chris" Stevens--was secretly financed by powerful figures in Saudi Arabia.
This information was contained within the text of four messages Secretary Clinton received from Blumenthal. It should be noted that Blumenthal was not an employee of the US State Department. He was an employee of the Clinton Foundation, earning salary of $10,000 a month as a consultant providing memo-worthy Intel to Secretary Clinton. On the side, Blumenthal also was serving an entrepreneurial role inside a Libyan company called Osprey that was hoping to reap lucrative medical and military contracts under the new post-Qadaffi government. (Since such business deals could require State Department approval, Hillary Clinton might be asked someday whether this relationship with Blumenthal posed a "conflict of interest.")
The Saudi's Role in the Benghazi Attack
One confidential memo dispatched to Clinton on February 16, 2013 bore the warning: "The following information comes from extremely sensitive sources and it should be handled with care." In this memo, Blumenthal included a lengthy report from an "individual with sensitive access" who, "speaking on condition of absolute secrecy" described the role of the Mokhtar Belmokhtar (a former Al-Qaeda fighter from Algeria who became the leader of the Al-Murabitoun militia) in a January 16, 2013 hostage-taking incident at an Algerian gas facility. (A four-day battle eventually freed 685 Algerian workers and 107 foreigners and left 39 foreign hostages dead).
Blumenthal's source then turned to the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi which was mounted by Ansar al Sharia, another radical militia. "This individual adds that this information provided by the French [intelligence] service indicates that the funding for both attacks originated with wealthy Sunni Islamists in Saudi Arabia. During July and August 2012, these financiers provided funds to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM) contacts in southern Europe, who in turn passed the money onto AQIM operatives in Mauritania. The money was used to recruit operatives and purchase ammunition and supplies."
"In a separate conversation," Blumenthal's memo continues, "Algerian DGSE [the state intelligence agency] officers note in private that Libyan intelligence officers tell them that the Benghazi attacks were funded by these financiers in Saudi Arabia."
Alleged Saudi funding of the attack in Benghazi is particularly troubling in light of the mounting suspicions that the 28 censored pages of Washington's official 911 report spell out the role that powerful officials in Saudi Arabia played in supporting the hijackers who brought down the World Trade Center towers in 2011. It is disturbing to discover that Hillary Clinton was informed of Saudi involvement in the death of Ambassador Stevens in 2013 and has opted to remain silent.
The Blumenthal memos make many references to the complex role of foreign intelligence--most prominently the CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)--both during Qaddafi's reign and after the unraveling of Libya's government.
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