For months now, the FBI has been investigating the way Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handled classified information to see if there is any evidence of criminal negligence.
According to new reports, some of the issues which are driving that investigation are more troubling than most citizens would ever have imagined. Clinton may well have sent emails from her cellphone that authorized the use of CIA-controlled drones to conduct assassinations in Pakistan.
The State Department established a highly confidential ongoing relationship with the CIA in 2011 in order to exercise oversight in the way the intelligence agency used armed drones to target individuals. Hundreds of civilians – in Pakistan and other countries – have been killed in US drone strikes over the past few years.
According to State Department officials, the overwhelming majority of assassinations proposed by the CIA met with State Department approval under Secretary Clinton. Only one or two attacks met raised objections from the State Department.
The key emails which have attracted the FBI’s interest were sent in 2011 and 2012. The communications originally went between the State Department in Washington DC and US diplomats posted to Pakistan. Approval of specific drone strikes was granted in some of the messages. Some of these messages were subsequently forwarded to Clinton’s personal email account. This account was housed on in her New York home, on a private server.
This information was recently published in The Wall Street Journal. The facts were verified by a collection of law enforcement officials and congressional staffers who were privy to details of the FBI investigation.
In January, the State Department relayed the news which would end up launching formal investigations: Clinton’s private email server contained 22 messages with top secret information in them. The content of those messages has never been made public.
On Thursday, White House staffers confirmed that describing the FBI’s probe into the Hillary Clinton emails as a “criminal investigation” was accurate. This information was released on the same day that President Obama gave Secretary Clinton his official endorsement in the 2016 presidential election.
Civilian deaths in the hundreds caused by US drone strikes have been verified in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other countries.
The US has conducted more drone strikes in Pakistan than in any other country. Arriving at unbiased casualty figures is difficult, but the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has gathered information suggesting that the death toll may be as high as 1,000 civilians, potentially including 200 children.
Exact numbers are difficult to establish due to the extreme secrecy of US drone operations. Even the total number of attacks is uncertain; at least 370 have been launched in Pakistan.
Pakistani officials first expressed their dissatisfaction with the US drone strikes in 2011. In response, the State Department asked the CIA to be more “judicious” in their timing of attacks. The targets being chosen were never questioned, only the times at which the intelligence agency decided to attack.
This modest request for changes to the drone program eventually led to the State Department’s oversight connection to the CIA. Intelligence officers started sharing upcoming attack plans with staffers at the embassy in Islamabad in 2011. This information was then relayed back to the US and the upper echelons of the State Department. This allowed Secretary Hillary Clinton and her staff to enjoy (at least in theory) the power to cancel drone assassinations.
The amount of advanced notice involved in a drone strike was generally very small. Many strikes were only passed to the State Department just 30 minutes prior to their execution. This is one justification the State Department offered to the FBI to explain the use of unsecured communications to relay top secret information. State Department officials (possibly including Secretary Clinton) used emails sent via smartphone to approve roughly a half a dozen drone strikes when they did not have access to the secure communications channels in their offices.
Information regarding the CIA’s drone activities is strictly controlled both inside and outside the government. Officials cannot discuss the strikes publically and all internal communications discussing them have to be protected by the strictest security protocols.
This overall level of secrecy makes the use of unsecured communications channels in the specific messages being investigated by the FBI that much more jarring according to the Journal’s sources.
While Clinton’s email problems have been a favorite topic of discussion for conservative American politicians and commentators, there are more important issues to consider as well.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill, a noted expert on the CIA’s drone program, said that political bias had seriously warped American reactions to the email scandal. Scahill theorizes that liberals would react far differently if the same acts had been carried out by a Republican. He also noted that few members of the public or the media have an accurate understanding of how information classification works.
The FBI should be interviewing Hillary Clinton sometime this summer regarding the emails. The WSJ’s sources said they believed criminal charges against the Secretary of State would be unlikely.
Mark Toner, the State Department’s spokesman, refused to address either the emails or the investigation.
Source http://www.salon.com/2016/06/10/fbi_criminal_investigation_emails_clinton_approved_cia_drone_assassinations_with_her_cellphone_report_says/
