Not much to say here. As The Intercept reports, Clinton and her hawkish aides and donors who are part of the military industrial complex, were all quite happy about a $30 billion arms deal for the repressive, misogynist Saudis, who went and used the equipment to destroy Yemen.
A few years earlier, as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton made weapons transfer to the Saudi government a “top priority,” according to her closest military aide.
And now, newly released emails show that her aides kept her well-informed of the approval process for a $29.4 billion sale in 2011 of up to 84advanced F-15SA fighters, manufactured by Boeing, along with upgrades to the pre-existing Saudi fleet of 70 F-15 aircraft and munitions, spare parts, training, maintenance, and logistics.
The deal was finalized on Christmas Eve 2011. Afterward, Jake Sullivan, then Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and now a senior policy adviser on her presidential campaign, sent her a celebratory email string topped with the chipper message: “FYI — good news.”
Of course it’s one big happy neocon family, united via revolving doors and money money money:
The congratulatory tone continues through the email chain with other officials, also with redacted names, calling the weapons deal “Great news!”
On December 26, Jeremy Bash, then-chief of staff at the Pentagon, sent the email string, titled “F-15SA Christmas Present,” to Sullivan, who sent it to Clinton with his own note at the top.
David Sirota and Andrew Perez have previously reported for theInternational Business Times that Clinton’s State Department was heavily involved in approving weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. As weapons transfers were being approved, both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Boeing made donations to the Clinton Foundation. The Washington Post revealed that a Boeing lobbyist helped with fundraising in the early stages of Hillary Clinton’s current presidential campaign.
Jeremy Bash is now managing partner at Beacon Global Strategies, a consulting firm that provides advice to Clinton on foreign policy while providing paid advice to the military contracting industry.
Thousands have died and been forced to flee Yemen as Saudi Arabia uses the weapons Clinton arranged for them to senselessly bomb a poor country in a proxy war.
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Update: to contextualize this, because many comments are seizing on “we’ve always sold arms to the Saudis”.
In fact, if you read the data, arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the 55 years from 1950->2005 totaled $67.8 billion.
The deal Hillary advocated and was inked in 2012 boosted that year’s total to $34.7 billion.
Even including FY 2006->2011 (another $11 billion total), FY 2012 was equal to nearly 50% of the previous 61 years of arms sales to the Saudis.
That is the historical context. That is the deviation from “long-standing policy.”