(Clinton.news) As the FBI delves deeper into likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s improper – and probably illegal – use of a private email server to conduct official business as head of President Obama’s State Department, reports have noted that she used her unsecured cell phone to approve drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries.
As reported by Sputnik News, a recent FBI report found that, from 2011-2012, Clinton used her cell phone to approve strikes that killed as many as 1,000 civilians as well as targets on the CIA’s list of suspected terrorist operatives. That figure includes as many as 200 children in Pakistan alone, the news site reported.
It continued:
The drone strikes, conducted in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and other countries, were the CIA’s responsibility. However, an extremely high number of civilian casualties eventually made some Pakistani officials stand up against the drone strikes, which led to the US State Department choosing intervene. In fact, the State Department criticized the CIA’s timing of the attacks. No objections to the choice of targets were made.
This created a situation where State Department officials were being notified by the CIA before attacks were actually carried out – sometimes just a half-hour or so. But that means that Clinton and her aides essentially were the ones who ordered them to be carried out.
The real issue, however, is that according to the FBI in many instances Clinton’s aides forwarded notifications to her through her personal email server, which she kept in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. – which is how the FBI managed to catch on to the whole email scheme in the first place.
Because of an often short time frame for Clinton to react – the CIA had set up a channel whereby the State Department would have a hand in deciding on which targets to hit with drone strikes – notifications of pending attacks had to be routed through Clinton’s unsecured network. Had she been using government-issued servers – with cyber protection – such information would have been far less likely to have been out in the open, making the arrangement much more secure.
This is important because the CIA’s drone program operates at the highest levels of security and secrecy. Some believe that many in the agency may not have known about Clinton’s use of an unsecured private email server when they were transmitting highly sensitive attack and targeting information to her smart phone.
“The use of a smartphone, in combination with home personal email server, is in fact mishandling of classified information – basically a crime, some argue,” Sputnik News reported.
We’ll see what the FBI says – eventually.
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