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  • 2016-10-13 (xsd:date)
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  • WikiLeaks Confirms Hillary Clinton Sold Weapons to ISIS? (en)
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  • Over the course of 2016, the WikiLeaks web site has published at least three archives containing leaked e-mails from high-ranking Democrats, and four Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffers were eventually fired over material contained in those leaked messages, including DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But the format in which WikiLeak publishes their data has led to frequent second- or third-hand reporting on what the leaks actually contain, with few readers actually examining the content directly. On 12 October 2016, WikiLeaks published a set of files dubbed The Podesta Emails, communications sent to and from Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta: As demonstrated in the tweet reproduced in the Example section above, a number of social media users asserted that the newest e-mail leak proved Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to ISIS. But finding exactly which e-mails in the dump established that Hillary Clinton had done such a thing proved elusive to those who went looking for them, such as one Quora user: The confusion stemmed from at least one undated article boasting a headline of WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS, which had been published well before the Podesta Emails dump was released by WikiLeaks: But the wording of the article didn't say that any e-mails demonstrated that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to ISIS; rather, it conveyed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's belief that Hillary Clinton and her State Department were actively arming Islamic jihadists. That information came from a 25 July 2015 Assange interview with Democracy Now! journalist Juan González, during which Assange referenced earlier e-mail leaks: Assange appears to have been asserting that leaked e-mails and cables showed that various actions undertaken by Hillary Clinton and others at the U.S. State Department had resulted in weapons flows to jihadists within Syria, including ISIS. One could certainly make the case (from material published by WikiLeaks and elsewhere) that during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, the U.S. provided weapons (either directly or indirectly) to various factions in Libya and Syria, that some of those weapons might have ended up in the hands of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, and that the latter was a foreseeable outcome of the former. But Assange did not say, nor have any revealed e-mails documented, that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS — that is, that Clinton deliberately and knowingly arranged for the United States to sell weapons to the jihadist militant group known as ISIS. Perhaps her role in shaping the United States' actions regarding the Libyan intervention and the ongoing Syrian civil war negligently allowed arms to fall into the hands of jihadists, but that's not the same thing as selling weapons to ISIS. (en)
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