Her tenure at State was categorized by mindlessly bellicose rhetoric, and not a whole bunch of major accomplishments.<\/p>\n
One of the best examples of this, though it started a few months after Clinton left Foggy Bottom, was the negotiations to open up with Cuba, where the Obama administration had to keep the State Department in the Dark to prevent it from sabotaging negotiations<\/a>.<\/p>\n It wasn’t Clinton’s direct doings, but it was her people that the Obama administration had to deceive.<\/p>\n The most compelling case on a personal level is how Clinton’s mindlessly bellicose statements kept US citizens prisoners, detained, and abused in Iran<\/a>:<\/p>\n I rarely think about being a prisoner in Iran<\/a> anymore. I’ve been free for more than four years. It’s been a long time since the sounds of hard soles on a cement floor would remind me of my interrogator or I would suddenly need to bolt from a restaurant because I couldn’t take the throngs of people after so much time in a prison cell.<\/p>\n Last Saturday, I was dripping coffee on myself during an early morning drive when I heard that four Americans were being released<\/a> from Iran as part of a prisoner swap. Suddenly, my eyes welled up. I could feel the knot of excitement and confusion that had turned in my gut when my plane from Tehran hit the tarmac in Muscat, Oman, in September 2011. I pictured the way my and my friend Josh’s families looked small in the distance, their little hands waving, as we taxied toward them. I remembered the force that pulled me\u2014running!\u2014down the stairs of the airplane and how, at the bottom, I laughed and cried at the same time. Everyone else did too.<\/p>\n I was elated for these men and their families.<\/p>\n