7 4 Nov/Dec 2016
T
HE TITLE on the 2011 email was “tick tock on
libya” and its purpose seemed clear, even if it
was unstated. If Hillary Clinton secured the
Democratic party’s nomination for the 2016
presidential election then the email would be
retrieved from the archive and its contents flourished in
voters’ faces as evidence that because of the strong
stance she took on Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (among
other things) the former First Lady would make one hell
of a tough President.
The email was composed for her by Jake Sullivan who
had been one of Hillary Clinton’s key advisers during the
2008 primaries, and then had served as Director of
Policy Planning in her State Department, a post usually
reserved for high flyers. Sullivan has served as a senior
adviser during her battle against Donald Trump and was
widely earmarked for a senior post in a Hillary Clinton
White House.
In late August, 2011, his email was sent to Victoria
Nuland, the State Department’s resident neo-conserva-
tive who had fronted Clinton’s tough anti-Russian stance
on Ukraine, and to Cheryl D Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief
of staff in the State Department, a lawyer who had
helped defend Bill Clinton during
his impeachment trial and one of
the select group of female advis
-
ers known in Washington as
‘Hillaryland’. These were key
Clintonistas.
Mills forwarded the email to
Hillary Clinton who clearly saw it
as she replied two weeks later:
“Pls print for me”.
The email exchange provides a
fascinating glimpse not only into
how the Clinton team does its business but how, even
before Barack Obama had completed his first term in
office, she and her advisers were preparing a bellicose
image for her that could be brought into play for her 2016
White House bid.
Sullivan wrote (my additions in parenthesis): “this is
basically off the top of my head, with a few consultations
of my notes. but it shows S' (Secretary’s) leadership/
ownership/stewardship of this country's libya policy
from start to finish. let me know what you think. toria
(presumably an abbreviation of Victoria Nuland’s first
name), who else might be able to add to this?
Secretary Clinton's leadership on Libya: HRC has been
a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations,
at NATO, and in contact group meetings — as well as the
public face of the U.S. effort in Libya. She was instru-
mental in securing the authorization, building the
coalition, and tightening the noose around Qadhafi and
his regime”.
And of course that tightening noose would shortly
bring Gaddafi to a brutal death at the hands of an anti-
regime mob, putting into a more grisly perspective her
later unscripted boast to a TV interviewer after Clinton
landed in Tripoli, the triumphant General come to survey
her battlefield: “We came, We saw, He died!”.
Sullivan’s email then listed twenty-two examples of
Clinton’s leadership during the Libyan adventure, from
her decision in February 2011 to close down the Libyan
embassy in Washington to her efforts in building the mil-
itary and political alliance that would cause Gaddafi’s
demise, the following November.
US media change,
post-Trump
Scrupulous neutrality offered no
way of covering Trump, so many
journalists lost their nerve and
became Clinton ciphers
Wikileaks showed Clinton
prepared to claim ownership
of an ambitious foreign-
policy escapade, Libya, but
when it went sour, dropped it.
Mainstream media ignore this.
by Ed Moloney
US ELECTION
Nov/Dec 2016 7 5
As it turned out Clinton never could usefully
highlight Jake Sullivan’s talking points, for to
have done so would have been political suicide.
The overthrow of Gaddafi had disastrous conse
-
quences way beyond Libya’s borders, sparking
a civil war that has claimed some 40,000 lives,
assisting the rise of ISIS in North Africa and cre
-
ating Europe’s refugee and migrant crisis. The
problem for Clinton was that these outcomes
were predictable.
But there was worse to come. The violent
death of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Ste-
vens at the hands of jihadists in Benghazi, where
the anti-Gaddafi movement was born, raised
uncomfortable questions about Clinton’s failure
to heed warnings or provide adequate protection
for American diplomatic staff from the very
extremists whose activities her State Depart
-
ment had encouraged and welcomed.
The whole Libyan episode, from the aftermath
of Gaddafi’s fall to Stevens’ death, posed incon-
venient questions about Clinton’s lack of
judgement.
From being an achievement that could burnish
her claim to be a tough US president in her deal-
ings with foreign adversaries, Libya had become
a subject Hillary Clinton had to avoid at all costs.
And so, Libya has not figured at all on her cam-
paign trail.
Yet it was all there in Jake Sullivan’s email and
in Hillary Clinton’s approving request for a print
out, all the inquiring reporter needed to know
about how the Democratic candidate planned to
present her triumph in North Africa.
We know about the ‘tick tock on Libya’ email
thanks to Wikileaks which obtained - from whom
and exactly how we do not know for sure - a trove
of some thirty thousand emails that were hacked
from Clinton’s private email server. No-one from
the Clinton camp has questioned the authentic-
ity of the Sullivan email, or indeed any other
Clinton email made public by Wikileaks.
If ever there was a story crying out for media
coverage it was this one: a presidential candi-
date prepares to claim ownership of an ambitious
foreign-policy escapade but when the adventure
goes sour, drops it like a hot brick.
And since the candidate in question holds
hawkish views that many feared would, should
she have prevailed over Trump, intensify ten-
sions with Russia and China, is that not an even
more pressing reason to follow up the Wikileaks’
revelation?
If you Google the term ‘tick tock on Libya’, you
will get plenty of results, scores of them. But
nearly all of them are from social media sites,
blogs and the like, both right-wing and left-wing.
Search The New York Times, The Washington
Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles
Times, however, or many other mainstream
newspapers for any mention of the Sullivan
email and you do so in vain.
The established American media entirely
ignored the story.
For a long time it was much the same with
Donald Trump. Back in March 2015, according to
research conducted by the Pew Research Centre,
Trump’s support among Republican (GOP) voters
was so small it barely registered.
Although he had not yet declared himself a
candidate his hat had been thrown into the ring
by pollsters, not least because he had become
a fixture in GOP presidential primary contests, a
larger-than-life character who would add some
colour to the campaign’s early stages, milk it all
for publicity and then quietly retire only to re-
appear four years later.
Out of eleven potential starters, Trump ranked
tenth, with only one per cent support. In a field
distinguished by its dullness, the largest bloc of
Republican voters were undecided.
Trump did not declare his candidacy until mid-
June 2015 and did so with a speech that would
set the racist tone for the rest of his campaign.
Announcing his intention, if elected, to build a
wall to stop Mexican immigrants entering the
US, which would be paid for by the Mexican gov-
ernment, Trump called immigrants from that
country “rapists”, adding: “When Mexico sends
its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re
sending people that have lots of problems.
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime”.
The effect on his support was dramatic. Six
weeks later, by August 2015, he was the pre-
ferred choice of 27 per cent of GOP voters: he led
the field. A third of the undecideds of March 2015
had plumped for him and he took support from
most of the other candidates in the race, includ
-
ing GOP establishment favorites like Jeb Bush
and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who lost
between nine and 15 per cent of their support to
him.
Trump may not be
good for America,
but [he’s] damn
good for CBS

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