In surveying the past eight years of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, four of which involved then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a disturbing pattern emerges. When it came to applying sanctions on nations charged with violating human rights, Obama chose to single out only those nations where either Europeans or, otherwise, white Caucasians were in leadership positions. However, when it came to applying similar sanctions on African countries led by brutal dictators, there was nary a peep from either Obama or Mrs. Clinton.
Obama and Clinton began pressing for sanctions against Russia after the 2009 death of Russian auditor Sergei Magnitsky. Under Clinton, the State Department, along with the U.S. Treasury Department, began drawing up a list of Russian officials to be sanctioned for the 2009 death in prison of Magnitsky, a less-than-sympathetic figure who was involved with a sketchy firm called Hermitage Capital Management.
Hermitage was under investigation by the Russian government for failure to pay taxes. Magnitsky was an auditor for the Firestone Duncan law firm, which was founded in Moscow in 1993 by two Americans. Hermitage had retained Firestone Duncan as its tax advisory firm and Magnitsky was assigned to conduct audits for Hermitage.
How could a tax evading U.S. investment firm in Moscow, co-founded by Bill Browder, the grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the Communist Party USA, obtain the personal interest of Hillary Clinton? It turns out that Hermitage Capital Management was a donor to the Clinton Foundation, which is at the center of a huge pay-to-play influence-peddling scandal during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.
It is noteworthy that Earl Browder was treated kindly during the anti-Communist Red Scare days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Browder was never prosecuted for espionage and he was expelled from the American Communist Party because he was not deemed trustworthy by his comrades. Current Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan, whose fingerprints are all over sanctions imposed on Russian leaders, admitted that in 1976 he voted for Browder’s successor as general secretary of the Communist Party USA, Gus Hall.
In fact, the American Communists were so riddled with CIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents that Brennan’s admission should not come as news to anyone. Nor should it be a shock that the CIA might be willing to engage the services of Browder’s grandson in Moscow. The Magnitsky Act, which appears to have more to do with attempting regime change in Russia, was directed against Russian law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges.
After the Obama-Clinton team enacted regime changes in North Africa and the Middle East, further sanctions were drawn up against the soon-to-be-ousted leaders of Tunisia and Libya. The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) issued a warning for banks to be in the lookout for money transfers from ousted Tunisian President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and their families.
After the commencement of the U.S.-led rebellion against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, the U.S. applied sanctions against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, his family, and senior Libyan officials, as well as the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation. Perhaps had the Qaddafi Foundation made a sizeable donation to the Clinton Foundation, as had Hermitage Capital, the Qaddafi family may have received a slight degree of consideration from Clinton at the State Department. However, after Qaddafi’s brutal assassination by U.S.-supported jihadist rebels in Sirte, Mrs. Clinton cackled with laughter, saying, «We came, we saw, he died!» Billions of dollars of Libyan assets were frozen by the Obama administration.
After the start of the Syrian civil war, Washington applied sweeping sanctions on the Syrian leadership, including President Bashar al-Assad and his family and top Syrian officials. Recently, as Washington found its jihadist allies losing on the battlefield in Syria, calls for increased sanctions against Assad and his government ministers and other officials grew louder from the «human rights» chorus aligned with Obama and Mrs. Clinton.
The U.S.-instigated and Saudi-backed regime change in Yemen and the subsequent civil war in the nation saw the U.S. apply sanctions against Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the Yemeni Zaidi sect of Islam, and former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son Ahmed Ali Saleh.
Under Mrs. Clinton’s term at the State Department, more «themed revolutions» were planned for Europe. The 2014 Euromaidan revolt in Kiev was partly the brainchild of Mrs. Clinton’s press spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who, upon Mrs. Clinton’s recommendation, became Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs under Secretary of State John Kerry in 2012.
After the retrocession of Crimea back to Russia and the declaration of sovereignty of eastern Ukraine’s republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, further U.S. sanctions, including asset freezes and visa bans, were applied against both Russian officials and officials of Crimea, Lugansk, and Donetsk, as well as former officials of the ousted Ukrainian government of democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych. U.S. sanctions also targeted the Russian firms Transneft, Lukoil, Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Surgutneftegas, Rostec and Sberbank. These were in addition to visa bans previously imposed against officials of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria.
The Obama administration also drew up plans to enact sanctions, including asset freezes and visa bans, against the democratically-elected governments of Macedonia and the Bosnian Serb Republic for daring to resist U.S. calls for regime change.
Iranian leaders and businesses had already experienced their share of punitive U.S. sanctions, all of which were encouraged by the Israeli-controlled neo-conservative machine in Washington that continued to call the shots after George W. Bush left office. Additional sanctions were imposed by Washington against members of the family of the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
At the same time the Obama-Clinton clique sanctioned leaders from Russia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, Obama continued to maintain warm relations with some of Africa’s most brutal dictators. Displaying naked racism for all the world to see, Obama never brought up «human rights» as Gambia’s dictator announced the death penalty against gays, declared his country to be an Islamic state, and imposed Islamic sharia law. Nor was there any criticism as Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan President Paul Kagame continued to oppress the political opposition in their countries and support secessionist rebels in neighboring Congo. In fact, Obama sent U.S. military troops to Uganda to oppress Christians and support Muslim jihadists in the neighboring Central African Republic.
Obama also supported kleptocratic regimes in Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Burkina Faso. The issue of sanctioning black African leaders, with the exception of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and his government and parastatal institutions and Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, never arose under Obama’s administration. It is also now known that a number of African nations that avoided U.S. sanctions for human rights violations were involved with the Clinton Foundation as donors or recipients. These included Nigeria, Lesotho, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Malawi, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Chad, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Liberia, Zambia, and Tanzania.
Obama and Mrs. Clinton will go down in history of singling out for «human rights» violations largely white European or Middle Eastern/North African Caucasian leaders and applying sanctions against them. However, when it came to some of black Africa’s worst human rights violators, Obama and the aspiring next president of the United States gave them a free pass.
