From Consortium News
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh on March 30, 2012.
(Image by [State Department photo]) Details DMCA
Because of the failure of the corporate press to report fully on Hillary Clinton's policy failures throughout her career, it was difficult for voters to perceive how dangerous her presidency might have been, although many Democratic voters bolted to Bernie Sanders and enough Americans voted against her last November to give Donald Trump his narrow Electoral College victory.
In the following conversation with the legendary filmmaker and muckraking journalist John Pilger, we leap off from his recent article regarding Clinton's new book and her recent appearance on Australian Broadcasting (ABC).
In the interview, I delve with Pilger into the career of Clinton as a hawkish U.S. senator who continued her interventionism as Secretary of State, not only voting for the Iraq War in 2002 but protecting the 2009 coup in Honduras and pressing for the "regime change" war in Libya that turned the once-prosperous country into a failed state. She also chuckled at the news of the rape-murder of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Dennis Bernstein: Hillary Clinton has been featured on Australian Media to talk about her new book and apparently to blame anyone and everyone for the fact that she lost the election to Donald Trump.
John Pilger: Actually, the interview I wrote about was conducted in New York but it was broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on their flagship current affairs program called "Four Corners." The interviewer was someone with a reputation for hard-hitting interviews named Sarah Ferguson. I thought it was an extraordinary display of Clinton's attempting to justify herself after all these months.
When I was in New York recently I read quite a few interviews conducted by female reporters with Hillary Clinton in which she was portrayed as a feminist and therefore all else should be set aside if not forgiven. This was what came across in the Sarah Ferguson interview. It opens with "your pain seemed almost visceral, describe your pain to us." It was as if she were being invited to lie on a therapist's couch instead of being interviewed. This has run right through interviews with Clinton by women journalists. The whole question of identity politics has such potency now that a corrupt politician who deceived and abused the electorate can be held up as a martyr.
There is nothing in the interview, for example, about why she described ordinary Americans who might have voted for Trump as "irredeemable and deplorable." Nothing about how she earned from Goldman Sachs speeches a total of about $670,000, displaying the sort of greed that upset ordinary people in the US.
And of course there is the central issue of the emails leaked by WikiLeaks, which showed how involved Clinton has been with the whole violent, corrupt world of the Gulf and jihadism. The very people backing jihadism, especially Saudi Arabia, were donating large sums to the Clinton Foundation. All this is missing from this and other interviews. It shows how the power of identity politics can eclipse the facts. There was even a photograph I saw in New York of a reporter with her arm around Clinton, consoling her.
Dennis Bernstein: The feeling you get in watching this whole thing unfold is that this is a full-court press to distract from the content of the released emails.
John Pilger: It is very easy to distract attention from something if you simply don't mention it. I have always felt that the most virulent form of censorship is censorship by omission. The whole nefarious state of the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation is simply left out of these interviews. Hillary Clinton is able to plead a kind of special case for herself because she is a woman and a feminist.
Dennis Bernstein: After this interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company, the producer referred to Julian Assange as "Putin's b*tch."
John Pilger: The producer re-tweeted a troll message to advertise the interview with Clinton, and especially the component in which she defames Julian Assange. You have to remember, this is the state broadcaster in Australia, which is Julian Assange's country. Assange pointed out that the ABC's code was meant to prevent this kind of bias. It was a particularly bad interview but in a sense it was also a very typical one. It allowed a figure of great power and contention to say anything she wanted to say without challenge.
There was no mention of Libya in all of this. Libya was Hillary Clinton's invasion. It was Hillary Clinton who famously rejoiced on camera the gruesome murder of Colonel Gaddafi -- 40,000 people died in this criminal US and NATO invasion. None of this was mentioned, no solidarity with the women who died. There is no solidarity with the women who will suffer as a result of the coup in Honduras, which Clinton signed off on as secretary of state. Simply to make an exception of women like Hillary Clinton because she is a woman and would have been the first female president of the United States seems to me to be a very powerful form of censorship what we should be aware of.
Dennis Bernstein: Hillary Clinton laughed at Qaddafi's on-camera assassination. She thought that was funny. She bragged about sustaining the coup in Honduras over the opposition of all the presidents in Central America, which has now led to Honduras being the murder capital of the world.
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