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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on November 30, 2010
The Wikileaks documents show that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
has, as Voltaire said about the Bourbon kings of France, learned nothing and
forgotten nothing. Her request that American diplomats at foreign postings
and the United Nations gather personal data about their foreign counterparts
is eerily reminiscent of her use of private detectives to unearth negative
information on those who were politically inconvenient during the husband's
campaigns for president and his White House tenure.
At the time, I called these operatives, the "secret police." Now,
apparently, we call them the "diplomatic corps."
The Wikileaks documents show that you can not only not teach an old dog new
tricks, but you can't stop her from doing the ones she has always done.
The Wikileaks information indicates that Hillary - and her predecessor
Condoleezza Rice - instructed American diplomats to gather information about
"office and organizational titles; names, position titles and other
information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cell phones, pagers,
and faxes," as well as "internet and intranet 'handles'; internet e-mail
addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers;
frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant
biographical information."
The New York Times explains that this information could be used to develop
intelligence about the activities and whereabouts of foreign diplomatic
personnel.
Seems like old times. In the 1992 presidential campaign, the Clintons
retained private detectives to learn negative information about the women
who were accusing Bill of improper conduct so as to provide blackmail
material to cow them into silence. During his White House tenure, FBI files
on prominent Republicans somehow ended up on the desk of an operative who
was hired pursuant to Hillary's recommendation after a career as a bar
bouncer. Linda Tripp, whose efforts led to the denouement of the president's
affair with Monica Lewinsky, found the details of her personnel file
splashed all over the newspapers. A subsequent federal lawsuit found that
her file information had been released improperly and a U.S. District Court
judge levied a heavy fine on the government for the violation.
The fact that this current State Department covert operation was initiated
under Secretary Rice does not lessen Hillary's guilt for having pursued it.
Mrs. Clinton, not Miss Rice, has run for president and is presumed to
continue to be interested in the job. Her addiction to spies, dumpster
divers, sleuths, and negative research operatives have always been a cause
for concern.
The jury has been out on how well Hillary is performing as Secretary of
State. I have always been critical of her riding on her husband's name to
achieve fame and power. But when she was appointed Secretary of State,
clearly despite her husband rather than because of him, I felt it prudent to
withhold judgment. This is, after all, the first real job she has ever
gotten on her own.
So far, we don't see any huge achievements. But we do see some modest ones.
She has evidently succeeded in getting Russia to stop its sale of advanced
anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, arms which would have made an Israeli strike
at Iranian nuclear facilities impossible. She has also done a great deal to
strengthen sanctions against the Iranian government to the point where they
may really be biting. Bush's and Rice's failure to do so was a big black
mark against them in their records.
But these Wikileaks make one wonder if she has really learned anything at
all. She always goes for the jugular and loves the politics of personal
intimidation and destruction. It is because she is so well suited and adept
at this form of political combat that she was instrumental in her husband's
success in beating back the impeachment efforts that stemmed from his lies
under oath in the Paula Jones litigation about his affair with Monica.
Now she appears to have transformed the diplomatic corps into a spying
operation, giving us yet another intelligence gathering agency. But, in
doing so, she has undoubtedly alienated our allies and damaged our
diplomats' credibility. Who is going to leave his credit card unguarded
after a diplomatic lunch after hearing about the new Hillary spygate?
Maybe it was too much to hope for to have thought that she had grown in
office.
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