Hillary Emails, Gold Dinars
and Arab Springs
By F. William Engdahl
10 January, 2016
Buried amid tens of
thousands of pages of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's secret
emails, now being made public by the US Government, is a devastating email
exchange between Clinton and her confidential adviser, Sid Blumenthal. It's
about Qaddafi and the US-coordinated intervention in 2011 to topple the Libyan
ruler. It's about gold and a potentially existential threat to the future of
the US dollar as world reserve currency. It's about Qaddafi's plans then for
the gold-based Dinar for Africa and the Arab oil world.
Two paragraphs in a recently
declassified email from the illegal private server used by then-Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton during the US-orchestrated war to destroy Libya's Qaddafi
in 2011 reveal a tightly-held secret agenda behind the Obama Administration's
war against Qaddafi, cynically named "Responsibility to Protect."
Barack Obama, an indecisive
and weak President, delegated all presidential responsibility for the Libya war
to his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, who was an early backer of
an Arab "regime change," using the secret Muslim Brotherhood, invoked
the new, bizarre principle of "responsibility to protect" (R2P) to
justify the Libyan war, which she quickly turned into a NATO-led war. Under
R2P, a silly notion promoted by the networks of George Soros’ Open Society
Foundations, Clinton claimed, with no verifiable proof, that Qaddafi was
bombing innocent Libyan civilians in the Benghazi region. [1]
According to a New York
Times report at the time, citing Obama Administration senior sources, it was
Hillary Clinton, backed by Samantha Power, then a senior aide at the National
Security Council and today Obama's UN Ambassador; and Susan Rice, then Obama’s
ambassador to the United Nations, and now National Security Adviser. That triad
pushed Obama into military action against Libya's Qaddafi. Clinton, flanked by
Powers and Rice, was so powerful that Clinton managed to overrule Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, Tom Donilon, Obama's national security adviser, and
John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief, today CIA head. [2]
Secretary of State Clinton
was also knee-deep in the conspiracy to unleash what came to be dubbed the
"Arab Spring," the wave of US-financed regime changes across the Arab
Middle East,[3] part of the Greater Middle East project unveiled in 2003 by the
Bush Administration after occupation of Iraq. The first three target countries
of that 2011 US "Arab Spring"--an action in which Washington used its
"human rights" NGOs such as Freedom House and National Endowment for
Democracy, in cahoots as usual, with the Open Society Foundations of
billionaire speculator, George Soros, along with US State Department and CIA
operatives--were Ben Ali's Tunisia, Mubarak's Egypt and Qaddafi's Libya.
Now the timing and targeting
of Washington's 2011 "Arab Spring" destabilizations of select Middle
East states assume a new light in relation to just-released declassified
Clinton emails to her private Libya "adviser" and friend, Sid
Blumenthal. Blumenthal is the slick lawyer who defended then-President Bill
Clinton in the Monika Lewinsky and other sex scandal affairs when Bill was
President and facing impeachment.
Qaddafi's gold dinar
For many it remains a
mystery just why Washington decided that Qaddafi personally must be destroyed,
murdered, not just sent into exile like Mubarak. Clinton, when informed of
Qaddafi's brutal murder by US-financed Al Qaeda "democratic
opposition" terrorists, told CBS news, in a sick, joking paraphrase of
Julius Caesar, "We came, we saw, he died," words spoken by her with a
hearty, macabre laugh. [4]
Little is known in the West
about what Muammar Qaddafi did in Libya or, for that matter, in Africa and in
the Arab world. Now, release of a new portion of Hillary Clinton's emails as
Secretary of State, at the time she was running Obama Administration war on
Qaddafi, sheds dramatic new light on the background.
It was not a personal
decision of Hillary Clinton to eliminate Qaddafi and destroy his entire state
infrastructure. The decision, it’s now clear, came from circles very high in
the US money oligarchy. She was merely another Washington political tool
implementing the mandate of those oligarchs. The intervention was about killing
Qaddafi's well-laid plans to create a gold-based African and Arabic currency to
replace the dollar in oil trades.
Since the US dollar
abandoned gold exchange for dollars in 1971 the dollar in terms of gold has
dramatically lost value. Arab and African OPEC oil states have long objected to
the vanishing purchasing power of their oil sales, mandated since the 1970’s by
Washington to be solely in US dollars, as dollar inflation soared more than
2000% to 2001.
In a newly declassified
Clinton email from Sid Blumenthal to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dated
April 2, 2011, Blumenthal reveals the reason that Qaddafi must be eliminated.
Using the pretext of citing an unidentified "high source" Blumenthal
writes to Clinton, "According to sensitive information available to this
source, Qaddafi's government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver...
This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be
used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This
plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an
alternative to the French franc (CFA)." [5] That French aspect was only
the tip of the Qaddafi gold dinar iceberg.
Golden Dinar and more
During the first decade of
this century, Gulf Arab OPEC countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and
others, began seriously diverting a significant portion of the revenues from
their vast oil and gas sales into state sovereign wealth funds, many based on
the success of Norway's Oil Fund.
Growing discontent with the
US War on Terror, with the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and with overall US
Middle East policies after September 2001, led most OPEC Arab states to divert
a growing share of oil revenues into state-controlled funds rather than
trusting it to the sticky fingers of New York and London bankers as had been
the custom since the 1970's when oil prices went through the roof, creating
what Henry Kissinger fondly called the "petro-dollar" to replace the
gold-backed dollar Washington walked away from on August 15, 1971. The present
Sunni-Shi’ite war or clash of civilizations is in fact a result of the US
manipulations after 2003 in the region— “divide and rule.”
By 2008 the prospect of
sovereign control by a growing number of African and Arab oil states of their
state oil and gas revenues was causing serious concern in Wall Street as well
as the City of London. It was huge liquidity, in the trillions, they
potentially no longer controlled.
The timing of the Arab
Spring, in retrospect, increasingly looks tied to Washington and Wall Street
efforts to control not only the huge Arab Middle East oil flows. It is now
clear it was equally aimed at controlling their money, their trillions of
dollars accumulating in their new sovereign wealth funds.
However, as is now confirmed
in the latest Clinton-Blumenthal April 2, 2011 email exchange, there was a
qualitatively new threat emerging for Wall Street and the City of London
"gods of money," from the African and Arab oil world. Libya's
Qaddafi, Tunisia's Ben Ali and Mubarak's Egypt were about to launch a
gold-backed Islamic currency independent of the US dollar. I was first told of
this plan in early 2012, at a Swiss financial and geopolitical conference, by
an Algerian with extensive knowledge of the project. Documentation was scarce
at the time and the story remained in my mental back-burner. Now a far more
interesting picture emerges that puts the ferocity of Washington's Arab Spring
and its urgency in the case of Libya into perspective.
‘United States of Africa’
In 2009, Qaddafi, who was at
the time the President of the African Union, had proposed that the economically
depressed continent adopt the “Gold Dinar.” [6]
In the months prior to the
US decision, with British and French backing, to get a UN Security Council
resolution that would give them the legal fig-leaf for a NATO destruction of
the Qaddafi regime, Muammar Qaddafi had been organizing the creation of a
gold-backed dinar that would be used by African oil states as well as Arab OPEC
countries in their sales of oil on the world market.
Had that happened at the
time Wall Street and the City of London were deep into the financial crisis of
2007-2008, the challenge to the reserve currency role of the dollar would have
been more than serious. It would be a death knell to American financial
hegemony, and to the Dollar System. Africa is one of the world's richest
continents, with vast unexplored gold and mineral wealth, had been
intentionally kept for centuries underdeveloped or in wars to prevent their development.
The International Monetary Fund and World Bank for the recent decades have been
the Washington instruments to suppress African real development.
Gaddafi had called upon
African oil producers in the African Union and in Muslim nations to join an
alliance that would make the gold dinar their primary form of money and foreign
exchange. They would sell oil and other resources to the US and the rest of the
world only for gold dinars. As President of the African Union in 2009, Qaddafi
introduced for discussion to African Union member states Qaddafi’s proposal to
use the Libyan dinar and the silver dirham as the only possible money for the
rest of the world to buy African oil.[7]
Along with the Arab OPEC
sovereign wealth funds for their oil, other African oil nations, specifically
Angola and Nigeria, were moving to create their own national oil wealth funds
at the time of the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya. [8] Those sovereign national
wealth funds, tied to Qaddafi's concept of the gold dinar, would make Africa's
long-held dream of independence from colonial monetary control, whether of the
British Pound, the French Franc, the euro or the US dollar, a reality.
Qaddafi was moving forward,
as head of the African Union, at the time of his assassination, with a plan to
unify the sovereign States of Africa with one gold currency, a United States of
Africa. In 2004, a Pan-African Parliament of 53 nations had laid plans for an
African Economic Community – with a single gold currency by 2023. [9]
African oil-producing
nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for
their oil and gas. The list included Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Equatorial
Guinea, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tunisia, Gabon, South Africa, Uganda,
Chad, Suriname, Cameroon, Mauritania, Morocco, Zambia, Somalia, Ghana,
Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Cote d’Ivoire, plus Yemen which had just
made significant new oil discoveries. The four African member-states of
OPEC--Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, a giant oil producer and the largest natural
gas producer in Africa with huge natural gas reserves, and Libya with the
largest reserves--would be in the new gold dinar system. [10]
Little wonder that French
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was given the up-front role in the war on
Qaddafi by Washington, went so far as to call Libya a “threat” to the financial
security of the world. [11]
Hillary's 'rebels' create a central bank
One of the most bizarre
features of Hillary Clinton's war to destroy Qaddafi was the fact that the
US-backed "rebels" in Benghazi, in the oil-rich eastern part of
Libya, in the midst of battle, well before it was at all clear if they would
topple the Qaddafi regime, declared they had created a Western-style central
bank, "in exile."
In the very first weeks of
the rebellion, the rebel leaders declared that they had created a central bank
to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The rebel council, in
addition to creating their own oil company to sell the oil they captured
announced: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority
competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the
Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.” [12]
Commenting on the odd
decision, before the outcome of battle was even decided, to create a
western-style central bank to replace Qaddafi's sovereign national bank that
was issuing gold-backed dinars, Robert Wenzel in the Economic Policy Journal,
remarked, “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a
matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more
than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty
sophisticated influences.” [13]
It becomes clear now in
light of the Clinton-Blumenthal emails that those “pretty sophisticated
influences” were tied to Wall Street and the City of London. The person brought
in by Washington to lead the rebels in March 2011, Khalifa Hifter, had spent
the previous twenty years of his life in suburban Virginia, not far from CIA
headquarters, after a break with Libya as a leading military commander of
Qaddafi. [14]
The risk to the future of
the US dollar as world reserve currency, if Qaddafi had been allowed to
proceed--together with Egypt, Tunisia and other Arab OPEC and African Union
members-- to introduce oil sales for gold not dollars, would clearly have been
the financial equivalent of a Tsunami.
The Qaddafi dream of an
Arabic and African gold system independent of the dollar, unfortunately, died
with him. Libya, after Hillary Clinton's cynical "responsibility to
protect" destruction of the country, today is a shambles, torn by tribal
warfare, economic chaos, al-Qaeda and DAESH or ISIS terrorists. The monetary
sovereignty held by Qaddafi's 100% state-owned national monetary agency and its
issuance of gold dinars is gone, replaced by an "independent" central
bank tied to the dollar.
Endnotes:
[1] Jayshree Bajoria, Libya
and the Responsibility to Protect,
March 24, 2011 http://www.cfr.org/libya/libya-responsibility-protect/p24480
[2] Bob Dreyfuss, Obama's
Women Advisers Pushed War Against Libya, The Nation, March 19, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/article/obamas-women-advisers-pushed-war-against-libya/
[3] Hillary Clinton, US
Secretary of State, Remarks: Forum for the Future: Partnership Dialogue Panel
Session, Ritz Carlton, Doha, Qatar, January 13, 2011, accessed in http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2011/01/154595.htm.
[4] Corbett Daly, Clinton on
Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died," CBS News, October 20, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/clinton-on-qaddafi-we-came-we-saw-he-died/
[5] UNCLASSIFIED U.S.
Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05779612 Date: 12/31/2015,
RELEASE IN PART, Email from Sid Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton, France's client
& Qaddafi's gold April 2, 2011, https://www.foia.state.gov/searchapp/DOCUMENTS/HRCEmail_DecWebClearedMeta/31-C1/DOC_0C05779612/C05779612.pdf
[6] Ilana Mercer, Gadhafi a
gold bug? Finally, a believable conspiracy,
WND, August 25, 2011, http://www.wnd.com/2011/08/337881/#fQbTdeRLfVczxYqc.99
[7] Denise Rhyne, End of
African Gold Standard: The Oil-Dollar Relationship, October, 2011,
[8] Eleanor Whitehead, Rise
of the African sovereign wealth fund, 22 December 2012 ,
http://www.thisisafricaonline.com/Policy/Rise-of-the-African-sovereign-wealth-fund?ct=true
[9] Denise Rhyne, op. cit.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Alex Newman, Gadhafis
Gold money Plan Would Have Devastated Dollar, 11 November 2011, http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/markets/item/4630-gadhafi-s-gold-money-plan-would-have-devastated-dollar
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Chris Adams, Libyan
rebel leader spent much of past 20 years in suburban Virginia, March 26, 2011, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/middle-east/article24618421.html#storylink=cpy
Image
Strasse der Republik 17
Wiesbaden Hessen 65203
GERMANY
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.