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Sunday, October 30, 2016

The Clinton Tapes Jewish Press Interview: Part II - The original story

Two additions to the Hillary Clinton interview with the Jewish Press in the previous post.

First, I forgot to post this tweet from last night.

I don't really buy the 'censored by Israeli press' part, but okay, let's put that out there.

What's more interesting is this - the original story written by interviewer Eli Chomsky in 2006.
The Jewish Press: Israel recently concluded its war against Hizbullah in what many consider to be a stalemated position. How do you see things right now?
Sen. Clinton: First, I don’t think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. If we were going to push for an election, we should have made sure we did something to determine who was going to win instead of signing off on an electoral system that advantaged Hamas.
That, to me, was a first step that led Hizbullah to take the actions that it took [killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers and firing missiles into Israeli population centers]. What has concerned me is that I don’t think our or Israel’s intelligence was very good at uncovering what Hizbullah had developed in the last six years.
Frankly, the American intelligence didn’t know how dug in Hizbullah was, how many rockets they had, where they were going to be launched from and what the range was.
I think, based on what I know, that a lot of damage was inflicted on Hizbullah’s capacity. But that capacity is not destroyed and has not disappeared. Thus, Hizbullah, the Syrians and the Iranians have been emboldened.
This was a problem of situational awareness and about what we were up against. This is a longer-term issue for us and for Israel as we try to figure out how we’re going to get a better grasp of what we’re up against.
The question relating to Gilad Shalit where Clinton equated Israel and Hamas (see previous post) didn't even appear in the 2006 story.

Hmmm.

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