“Can’t we just drone this guy?”
That’s the suggestion then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently offered in 2010 regarding the appropriate Obama administration response to the damage done by documents released by WikiLeaks.
This isn’t the first time the whistleblowing website has leaked information on the Democratic presidential hopeful, but it is the first time that the material included Clinton’s suggestion for what the U.S. response should be to the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange (shown).
As for how Assange would have been assassinated, it would have been via a planned military drone strike, and Hillary Clinton — whether seriously nor not — recommended summarily executing Assange without any accusation of any crime, without any response by Assange himself, and without any due process whatsoever.
Six years later, Assange, reportedly fearing for his life, cancelled a presentation he was going to deliver this week from the Ecuadorian embassy’s balcony in London. He instead appeared via satellite, promising to produce new troves of documents over the next 10 weeks.
Truth Pundit, which reported Clinton’s 2010 comment this week, provides context:
Clinton’s State Department was getting pressure from President Obama and his White House inner circle, as well as heads of state internationally, to try and cutoff Assange’s delivery of the cables and if that effort failed, then to forge a strategy to minimize the administration’s public embarrassment over the contents of the cables. Hence, Clinton’s early morning November meeting of State’s top brass who floated various proposals to stop, slow or spin the Wikileaks contamination. That is when a frustrated Clinton, sources said, at some point blurted out a controversial query.
The story published by Truth Pundit (as described in the documents obtained and released by WikiLeaks) claims that the meeting where Hillary Clinton floated the possibility of killing Julian Assange in a drone strike got suddenly very serious after people caught on that Clinton was not kidding.
“The statement drew laughter from the room which quickly died off when the Secretary kept talking in a terse manner,” sources said, as reported by Truth Pundit. “Clinton said Assange, after all, was a relatively soft target, ‘walking around’ freely and thumbing his nose without any fear of reprisals from the United States.”
So, in case that wasn’t clear, the woman campaigning to be the president of the United States, the person with command and control of the American drone fleet and with the authority usurped by her predecessors to target and kill alleged enemies, considers “thumbing one’s nose at the United States” an offense punishable by summary execution.
This is the state of the rule of law and due process in the American empire. We do not accuse, we do not ask for explanations, we do not give “enemies” any opportunity to appear before an unbiased tribunal. We simply take note of the offense and then order that the offender by killed by a missile strike fired from a drone.
Of course, U.S. government-sponsored execution of Assange wasn’t the only solution offered by the State Department. Again, Truth Pundit puts a finer point on the various plans to purge Assange:
Following Clinton’s alleged drone proposal, another controversial remedy was floated in the State Department to place a reward or bounty for Assange’s capture and extradition to the United States, sources said.
Numbers were discussed in the realm of a $10 million bounty. A State Department source described that staff meeting as bizarre. One minute staffers were inquiring about the Secretary’s blue and black checkered knit sweater and the next minute, the room was discussing the legalities of a drone strike on Assange and financial bounties, sources said.
Immediately following the conclusion of the wild brainstorming session, one of Clinton’s top aides, State Department Director of Policy Planning Ann-Marie Slaughter, penned an e-mail to Clinton, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and aides Huma Abebin and Jacob Sullivan at 10:29 a.m. entitled “an SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re Wikileaks.”
“Nonlegal strategies.” How did that phrasing make it into an official State Department e-mail subject line dealing with solving WikiLeaks and Assange? Why would the secretary of state and her inner circle be discussing any “nonlegal strategies” for anything whatsoever? Against anyone? Shouldn’t all the strategies discussed by the country’s top diplomat be strictly legal only? And is the e-mail a smoking gun to confirm Clinton was actually serious about pursuing an obvious “nonlegal strategy” proposal to allegedly assassinate Assange? Numerous attempts were made to try to interview Slaughter and decipher her choice of e-mail wording; however, she could not be reached for comment. Insiders said Slaughter is keeping a “low profile” in Princeton, New Jersey until she is nominated for a position in Clinton’s cabinet if the Democrat is elected in November. Likewise, True Pundit attempted to contact Mills, Abedin, and Sullivan for their perspectives on this story. None commented on the record.
Nonlegal. That’s the word used by Hillary Clinton’s closest aide to describe the category of responses to Julian Assange’s overseeing of a batch of cables that made it perfectly clear just how corrupt Clinton and the Obama administration were and how they consider assassination a way to quiet WikiLeaks.
Hillary Clinton was not alone in her assassination suggestion, however. According to the information released by WikiLeaks, Vice President Joe Biden also supported the summary execution of the publisher turned political refugee.
Since June 2012, Assange has lived in asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Included in the information released early on October 4 was the commitment by WikiLeaks to release new documents “every week for the next 10 weeks” in celebration of its 10th anniversary.
Naturally, when the WikiLeaks document dump revealed Clinton’s call for a drone strike to assassinate Julian Assange, people associated with Clinton and the State Department suggested that the talk of ordering a drone strike to kill Assange was just a joke and that Hillary Clinton certainly never meant that comment as anything more than levity.
A joke? There is nothing funny about the cabinet officer charged with overseeing the foreign policy of the United States of America talking of targeting a person for execution without the slightest shred of proof of criminal activity or any reasonable suspicion whatsoever.
One wonders if documents were released wherein Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump jokingly suggests that one of his company’s competitors be whacked would they be so quickly dismissed and so universally disregarded by the media.
For now, it would seem that by publicizing the proposed death-by-drone scenario offered by Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange is safe.
The Clinton campaign hasn’t responded to requests for comment on the accusation that the nominee herself had thoughts of “droning” Julian Assange.
Clinton surrogates, such as the George Soros-owned Media Matters, however, call the claim “laughable,” and nothing more than an “oddball conspiracy” and a “fringe conspiracy theory” that even conservatives are embarrassed about.
Undeterred by the purported plot to put him on the drone strike kill list, Julian Assange seems determined to dump document after document onto the Internet, each one aimed at uncovering corruption and revealing the dark and deadly side of American political power.
