Federal agencies spy for corporate America

The United States is always awash with conspiracy theories, some more outlandish than others. But their source does not lie simply within the imagination of those who develop them. In fact, real, actual conspiracies by the American state constantly fuel people’s deep suspicions about their government. 

For the latest example, you have to look no further than the FBI’s secret war on the Occupy movement, whose activists were classed as “terrorists” and a threat to “homeland security”. Documents obtained by Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal the FBI collaborating with the Department for Homeland Security and using local branches of the Federal Reserve Bank in their illegal surveillance.

As to the fanciful notion that the FBI is there to protect its citizens against violent death, forget it. The FBI allowed a plot to murder Occupy activists in Texas with sniper rifles remain a secret until the heavily-redacted files were made public through a Freedom of Information request.

Even the right-wing John Birch Society is alarmed by the Obama administration-sponsored war on its own citizens. An article in its magazine notes: “According to analysts, in addition to exposing numerous violations of the Constitution, the newly released documents also offer a great deal of insight into the emerging ‘police state’ apparatus.”

Pullitizer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges is of a similar mind, although quite rightly he links the FBI-Homeland Security activities to a plot to silence critics of big business, which Occupy placed at the top of its agenda. Hedges says the FBI documents show how widespread surveillance is and amount to an “explicit warning by the security services to all who consider dissent”, adding: “Anyone who defies corporate power, even if he or she is nonviolent and acting within constitutional rights, is a suspect.”  

Government security services began monitoring Occupy activists before the high-profile camp in Zuccotti Park, New York. Documents obtained by the PCJF show, for example, that they were in attendance when activists met in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The 9.11 attacks spurred the Bush administration into creating a threatening security framework which the Obama White House has not only embraced but developed in new ways. The imminent appointment of John Brennan as head of the Central Intelligence Agency is a case in point.

Brennan, Obama’s principal counter-terrorism and security advisor, has made the use of targeted assassinations by drone attacks virtually an everyday event. They are considered illegal in international law. Brennan is a supporter of forms of torture and “extraordinary rendition”, by which suspects are kidnapped by US agents and flown to secret camps. No doubt Brennan will bring the CIA into closer focus with the FBI in the hunt for domestic opponents of the government.

At the heart of the Obama authoritarian state is a network of 77 “fusion centres” set up over the past decade. They were supposed to co-ordinate the “war on terror”. Instead, according to a recent according to a recent Senate report,  the centres pose a threat to civil liberties as well as producing a series of half-baked reports which were worse than useless.

So as Obama starts his second term, the illusions many held in his administration four years ago have all but disappeared. The state is there to protect capitalist corporations and big finance. And Obama is there to co-ordinate the work of the state, putting together an apparatus that resembles those of a police state.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, said in a statement: “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

As the struggles against massive inequality, unemployment and low wages gather pace, America’s capitalist state is tooling up for mass confrontation. The rights enshrined in the US constitution will have to be renewed through the creation of a more developed, revolutionary democracy. That much is clear.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Tories have Human Rights Act in their sights

The imminent appearance of the parliamentary commission’s report into a new Bill of Rights is giving the Tory right an opportunity to bray against what they call “a court sitting overseas” – the European Court of Human Rights.

For the Bill of Rights as is proposed is not about holding parliamentary lawmakers and the executive to account or guaranteeing basic democratic rights. No, quite the opposite. Behind the nationalist demagogy about “diktats from Brussels” and a purely “British” form of justice, is something quite different.

This is prime minister Cameron’s effort to appease the right wing in his Conservative party.  Their nationalism provides a cover for a visceral hatred for the idea of human rights in general and the European Court of Human Rights in particular.

Strangely enough, for the Union Jack-waving backwoods people who argue that the ECHR is a dictatorial “imposition” from Europe, it was the Tory Winston Churchill who helped establish the European Convention of Human Rights. The same Convention then led to the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights in 1959, as human rights lawyer Bill Bowring notes.

Despite this, it took four decades for the convention to be – and then only partially – incorporated into British law. This took place in 1998 under New Labour. But, to the anger of human rights lawyers, home secretary David Blunkett immediately “derogated” – i.e. opted out – of Article 5 of the Convention, which enshrines “the right to liberty and security of person”.

He did this as on the grounds that there was a terrorist threat and a public emergency in the UK following the 9/11 attacks on New York, which overrode any such individual rights.  New Labour’s derogation dovetailed neatly with the needs of the secret state – namely the heads of the military, the police and secret services – and last but certainly not least – the US Central Intelligence Agency’s own “war on terror”.

Two recent cases show why human rights legislation is hated by the right.  Asperger’s Syndrome sufferer Gary McKinnon avoided extradition to the United States on computer hacking charges under the Human Rights Act.  It took huge determination by McKinnon himself, his mother and lawyers to conduct  a ten-year legal campaign after initially losing appeals in the High Court and the House of Lords against his extradition. Last week, it was decided he would face no charges in Britain.

The case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri has taken almost as long.  El-Masri was seized by security officers in Macedonia on 31 December 2003 while crossing into Serbia. He held incommunicado for 23 days, turned over to the CIA and tortured.  It was only on December 13 last week that 17 European court judges provided him with any kind of redress.

The ECHR has held that his forcible disappearance, kidnapping and “rendition” in Skopje to the United States violated the most basic guarantees of human decency. He had never been charged with any crime. It was a case of mistaken identity but neither the CIA nor the US government admitted what happened.

The Commission for the Bill of Rights has already cited the “exponential increase” in the ECHR’s caseload as a threat to its viability. At that time the court had a backlog of 150,000 cases. The commission’s first proposal is that new screening mechanisms should be introduced to “reduce very significantly the number of cases that reach the Court”.

So the ECHR is facing a twin attack – from the Tories in Britain and from the backlog of cases as a result of the mounting attacks on human rights. The Bill of Rights under consideration is a Trojan horse which we should not make the mistake of accepting as a gift. Instead, we should fight for an Agreement of the People, a democratic constitution for the 21^st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Obama's Disposition Matrix decides who lives or dies

Lest anyone thinks that when the US and Britain withdraw troops from Afghanistan, that will end their military involvement, think again. The United States has a new doctrine of permanent war, using hi-tech remote weaponry like the dreaded drone.

The Obama administration has institutionalised the use of targeted killing by armed drones. In fact, the drone is Obama’s weapon of choice. Under his presidency, drones are killing people at seven times the rate under the previous Bush administration.

In the Matrix films, humans struggled against the machine. In the Disposition Matrix, the US government deploys machines to assassinate people on a hit list that is added to daily. And, deciding who will live and die is the man in the Oval Office himself, president Obama.

Except for those on the hit list in Pakistan. Here, life-and-death decisions are taken by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has abandoned spying to become a subsidiary of Murder Inc, whose headquarters is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC 20500, tel (202) 456-2121.

The Disposition Matrix is a database that officials describe as a "next-generation capture/kill list". But it is more than that, creating a blueprint for tracking, capturing, rendering and especially killing terrorism suspects. Thus the use of the term “disposition”.

Paul R. Pillar, the former deputy director of the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre, has stated that "we are looking at something that is potentially indefinite". And certainly illegal, within the framework of both the US constitution and international law.

There is no “due process”, no opportunity to answer charges. The last thing a victim hears is the sound of a missile arriving, shortly after being fired by an unmanned drone. The trigger is pulled in a US military base somewhere else.

A computer game this is not, however. Some estimates suggest that more people have been killed by US drones than the 3,000 plus who perished when the Twin Towers were brought down in 2001. Many of the victims are bystanders, family members or just people at a gathering wrongly identified as would-be terrorists.

According to Daniel Klaidman in his book, Kill or Capture, “the inability to detain terror suspects was creating perverse incentives that favoured killing or releasing suspected terrorists over capturing them."  That is why Osama bin Laden was executed as he was.

At the heart of the Disposition Matrix is Obama adviser John Brennan, who came to the job from the CIA. He is, the New York Times reported, the "priest whose blessing has become indispensable" to Obama. Last April, he publicly defended the policy of targeted killing. 

Under George W.Bush, Brennan served as top aide to CIA director George Tenet, where he defended the administration's use of extraordinary rendition and “enhanced interrogation”, aka torture.

Brennan is said to wield enormous power in shaping decisions on “kill” lists and the allocation of armed drones. The review process also allows the killing of individuals whose identities are unknown. Americans may also be listed as targets Indeed, one of the victims was US citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi.  

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has condemned the Disposition Matrix database, stating that "anyone who thought US targeted killing outside of armed conflict was a narrow, emergency-based exception to the requirement of due process before a death sentence is being proven conclusively wrong.” It has launched a legal challenge, claiming that the policy is unconstitutional.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter terrorism, Ben Emmerson and Christof Heyns, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, have described some American drone attacks as "war crimes".

That they certainly are. Calling for an end to policy of permanent war, Washington Post columnist  Fareed Zakaria cited a warning from James Madison, father of the US constitution:

 “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Over two centuries years later, Madison’s words should come home to haunt Obama as he presides over the death of the very same US constitution. 

Paul Feldman

Communications editor 

Why Ecuador stands shoulder to shoulder with Assange

Ecuador’s defiant decision to grant Julian Assange political asylum shows how far the country has come in shaking off shackles that not so long ago had reduced it to a plaything of the United States.

From 1960, the Central Intelligence Agency plotted and planned to destabilise the elected populist government led by José María Velasco Ibarra because it refused to break off links with Castro’s Cuba and crackdown on the left.

Philip Agee was a senior CIA officer in Ecuador during that period. Years later, after denouncing the CIA, he blew the whistle in a book called Inside the Company. Agee revealed how the CIA organised the infiltration of trade unions, political parties and social organisations at the highest levels in Ecuador. Where no suitable organisations existed, the CIA created them, complete with headed paper and committees.  

Agee's account shows how the CIA used bribery, intimidation, bugging and forgery. He spent four years in Ecuador penetrating Ecuadorian politics and, by his own admission, subverting and destroying the political fabric of an already wretchedly poor and unstable country.

“CIA financing of conservative groups in a quasi-religious campaign against Cuba and ‘atheistic communism’ helped to seriously weaken Velasco's power among the poor, primarily Indians, who had voted overwhelmingly for him, but who were even more deeply committed to their religion,” says William Blum in his Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.  

“CIA agents would bomb churches or right-wing organizations and make it appear to be the work of leftists. They would march in left-wing parades displaying signs and shouting slogans of a very provocative anti-military nature, designed to antagonize the armed forces and hasten a coup.”
 

A series of interventions by the armed forces that began in November 1961 culminated in a coup in July 1963 when the presidential palace in Quito was surrounded by tanks and troops. Civil liberties were suspended, leftists arrested and the 1964 elections cancelled. At the local CIA headquarters, champagne corks popped. It wasn’t until 1979 that civilian rule was restored.
 

Today’s president, Rafael Correa, has repudiated the country’s foreign debt and has placed the country in solidarity with other radical regimes in South America like Bolivia and Venezuela. The decision to give Assange asylum is consistent with Ecuador’s determination to assert its political independence from Washington.

The foreign minister’s statement that insists Assange is in danger from the United States (while rejecting the UK’s threat to storm its embassy) is well founded. Washington would like nothing better than to extradite Assange to the US to face trial for espionage alongside Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly collaborated with WikiLeaks.

Key figures have cleared the path. Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has denounced fellow citizen Assange for publishing previously secret cables that exposed America’s crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several senior US senators have called for Assange to be tried for publishing the cables sent by American embassies.

Washington's aim is to put Assange on show trial with Manning. By having them both in the dock at the same time, the US/FBI hope to "prove" a conspiracy between the two men and have them convicted for treason - with a sentence of life (until death) in jail.

Shortly after the dramatic video of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike which killed Iraqi journalists was released by WikiLeaks in 2010, Assange was in Sweden where he applied for residency. After sexual relations with two women, an arrest warrant was issued but soon withdrawn. He was questioned by police and allowed to leave the country. Within 10 days, the investigation was reopened by another prosecutor and upgraded to alleged rape. His residency request was denied soon afterwards.

Assange is not charged but wanted for questioning. Following his arrest in Britain last year, Assange volunteered to present himself for questioning at the Swedish embassy in London. This was rejected by the country’s right-wing government. Who can doubt then that if he reaches Stockholm, Assange will be questioned about the sex accusations and then handed over to the Americans who, by then, will have an arrest warrant?

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Obama plays God

When pro-establishment media start to be concerned about the excessive powers of the US president, it’s time for all of us to be on extra alert.

The scale of the drone warfare being escalated - by US General Petraeus and the Central Intelligence Agency on the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan becomes clearer just as a strike killed another 15 people yesterday. Pakistani authorities have protested at this, the eighth and deadliest strike over the last two weeks.

That the US military uses sci-fi method of conducting its wars is not new, of course. We saw “smart bombs” being used in Iraq to wipe out enemy installations, and supposedly avoid “collateral damage”.

But the intensive use of unmanned drones to target supposed al-Qaeda leaders and militants only began in earnest after the election of President Barack Obama.  At that time, the US military and its security machine discovered that the tactics of ground invasion followed by military occupation, which brought down the Taliban in the 1990s, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, simply did not work in post 9/11 Afghanistan.

And thus, under the Obama presidency, military policy has moved into a third phase seen by observers as  the “new and as yet only partially understood doctrine of secret, unaccountable and illegal warfare.”

An essential element is the use of drones, with more drone-operators now being trained than air-pilots. And why not? It’s the politician’s and general’s dream style way of making war. Your own forces are never put in harm’s way, while you can sit in a war-room and decide who the targets should be.

And there is a secret cabal consisting of Obama and his counterterrorism advisor John Brennan and the CIA who decide who shall live or die. on the borders of Afghanistan. Pakistan and Yemen. A New York Times editorial describes it as “a unilateral campaign of death”. The transformation of Obama – the former liberal law professor– into a man who “approves lethal action without handwringing” now seems complete.

Reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane have shown how http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?ref=opinion Obama’s aggressive counterterrorism has “baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike”.  They provide an insight into how the Obama administration takes on god-like powers over life and death:  

“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

“This secret ‘nominations’ process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

“....The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

“Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.”

The use of drones across national borders is rightly seen by many, including the Pakistani government, as not only violating its sovereign rights as a nation, but counter-productive. According to a recent poll, more than two thirds of Pakistanis regard the United States as an enemy. Senior military experts warn that the drone attacks create more extremists than they eliminate.  From “Infinite Justice” to “Enduring Freedom” – such a war can never win.  

But Obama’s efforts to gain the moral high ground in the “war on terrorism” shows that there is less and less to distinguish him from his opponents in the Republican Party.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Countdown to attack on Iran has started

As talks open in Turkey over Iran’s nuclear programme, there is increasing evidence that a countdown to an attack on the Islamic republic by Israel and the United States has begun behind the smokescreen of face-to-face meetings.

The negotiations between Iran, the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, seem designed to fail because there’s nothing on offer. A military strike in the autumn, on the eve of the American presidential election, is now openly being discussed in military circles.

A scenario similar to the one that proceeded the 2003 invasion of Iraq is unfolding. International law is being manipulated to justify a pre-emptive attack on Iran, even though there is no evidence that the country represents an imminent threat to either Israel or the US.

Anthony D'Amato, a professor of international law at Northwestern University in the US, claims that Iran says it wants to “to push the Israelis into the sea and that they are constructing nuclear weapons. That's enough for me to say that cannot be allowed. If the U.S. or Israel takes the initiative to block that action, it can hardly be said to be violating international law. It can only be preserving international law for future generations."

Other experts take a totally opposite view. But they can be easily ignored. After all, the Foreign Office’s most senior lawyer quit on the eve of the Iraq war after she submitted that it would an illegal act of aggression.

In fact, there is no evidence that Iran is actually building a nuclear bomb. Even the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad admit that. But just as in 2003, over the fabled but non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”, the facts are either being ignored or simply distorted.

Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since July 2009, which is responsible for verifying Iran’s nuclear programme, stands accused of pro-Western bias and of “over-reliance on unverified intelligence and of sidelining sceptics”. IAEA reports have becoming increasingly hostile, leading one former weapons inspector to comment:

“What we learned back in 2002 and 2003, when we were in the run-up to the war, was that peer review was very important, and that the analysis should not be left to a small group of people. So what have we learned since then? Absolutely nothing. Just like [former US vice-president] Dick Cheney, Amano is relying on a very small group of people and those opinions are not being checked."

President Obama is being driven by the powerful Zionist lobby to support an attack by Israel or face losing key votes in the November election. On the other hand, there is no appetite among American voters for another war. In a recent poll, only 20% strongly favoured an attack that could lead to an Iraq-type conflict.

Ultimately, the intention of Washington and its allies is to create conditions for what they hope will be regime change in Tehran. They know that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities in itself would be meaningless because they are buried deep below ground. Instead, they hope a military attack would lead to the downfall of the Iranian theocracy and its replacement by a pro-Western “democracy”.

Yet leading figures in the Iranian opposition feature in a video showing activists and intellectuals speaking out against an attack. They say it would strengthen the hand of the regime, which has brutally cracked down on its opponents.

Sadeq Zibakalam, who teaches at with Tehran University , says: "A military strike will not help the democracy and reformist movement at all because it will cause militarisation of the country. The military, the revolutionary guards and radical elements will increase their power."

None of this is of concern to the major powers. Just as in Iraq, the long-term “prize” is the opening up of markets to global corporations and investment banks who are struggling in the capitalist recession. With Iran far better armed than Iraq was, the potential for miscalculation leading to international war is immense.

The campaign to stop an attack on Iran should begin now. Regime change should begin at home.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Corporate version of the CIA exposed

Are the Yes Men – a group of anti-corporate activists who stage amazing stunts – just an insignificant bunch of pranksters? Those who control one of the world’s biggest spy companies and their corporate paymasters don’t think so.

The Global Intelligence Files, five million emails obtained by the Anonymous hacker group and released by WikiLeaks this morning, reveal that Dow chemical corporation paid an intelligence firm, Stratfor, to spy on the Yes Men.

Dow Chemical is the owner of Union Carbide, the company responsible for the 1984 gas disaster in Bhopal, India in which thousands died and more than half a million suffered terrible injuries. (Dow is also a sponsor of the London 2012 Olympics).

But snooping on the Yes Men is only the tip of Stratfor’s vast iceberg of espionage. Its tentacles around the world show that the CIA has a serious rival in the private sector. The company runs networks in governments and media companies especially those close to the Israeli government and Mossad. The latter are referred to within the company as the “Confed Fuck House”.

Stratfor, which is based in Texas, counts the US government plus other countries, and arms manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Ratheon amongst its paymasters. It trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in becoming “government Stratfors”.

WikiLeaks’ Global Intelligence Files are an email trail, tracking networks of informants who are paid through Swiss bank accounts and pre-paid credit cards. They include “government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world”. WikiLeaks has found Stratfor’s list of informants and evidence of secret deals with media organisations, including Reuters, plus records of many payoffs.

Knowing there is good money to be made by exploiting corporate fears about whistleblowers and leaked information, Stratfor has been anxious to exploit what it called the “leak focused” gravy train. “This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing,” writes one operative. But in the case of General Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s notorious ISI intelligence service, Stratfor generously provided complimentary membership.

Its noxious methods are clear: “You have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control,” CEO George Friedman wrote on 6 December 2011 on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant on the medical condition of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

They also reveal close cooperation with Goldman Sachs, whose managing director Shea Morenz joined Stratfor’s board of directors in 2011. He worked closely with Friedman to set up an offshore share structure which could use intelligence to “trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like”.

The emails, which are presently being analysed by media organisations and members of the public, point to the fears haunting those at the top of corporate and state trees. They include contain classified information about US government and Stratfor’s attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Assange remains under house arrest, where he has been since December 2010, fighting extradition to Sweden over alleged sex crimes. A decision from the UK Supreme Court on his extradition to Sweden is expected in March. Meanwhile, prosecutors in the US are still trying to pin him down under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Thanks to the socialised nature of today’s technologies and courageous whistleblowers, like Bradley Manning, it has become impossible to keep secret the vast web of connections between the corporations, intelligence agencies and political rulers. This latest cache should give confidence to all those seeking to end their rule.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

'No' to war on Iran

With evidence accumulating that Iran is not actually building a nuclear weapon, the sanctions and oil embargo imposed by the United States and Europe looks increasingly like the provocation that it is.

Behind the rhetoric, all sorts of interests are involved, political and economic, many of them connected to divisions emerging in the wake of a global recession that worsens by the day.

America, for example, does not used oil imported from Iran but the rising economic power of China does. So Washington will undoubtedly use the embargo to exert pressure on Beijing amidst a brewing trade and currency war.

President Obama is seeking re-election with the country’s cities, towns and rural communities enduring mass unemployment, homelessness, food stamps and poverty. Talking tough against Tehran is a useful diversion while brushing up Obama’s image as a man prepared to use the country’s military muscle.

Throw in the wild card of a weak Israeli government (which has fallen out with Obama) facing waves of social discontent and looking for any excuse to attack Iran, the danger signs are there. A miscalculation by either side could easily lead a full-scale war.

What you won’t find widely reported is the fact that intelligence and military agencies in the US and Israel don’t believe that Iran has made a decision to build a nuclear weapon.

Ray McGovern, retired CIA analyst and co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, says: “In recent days, that judgment has been expressed by high-profile figures in the defence establishments of the two countries – U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak.” He gives chapter and verse to back up his case. It is also a view shared by the Institute for Science and International Security.

But McGovern is concerned that the New York Times, which misled the world in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, is playing a similar role: “In this up-is-down world, America’s newspaper of record won’t even report accurately what Israel (or the CIA) thinks on this important issue, if that goes against the alarmist conventional wisdom that the neocons favour.”

He adds: “If Iran is not working on building a nuclear bomb, then the threats of pre-emptive war are not only unjustified, they could be exactly the motivation for Iran to decide that it does need a nuclear bomb to protect itself and its people.”

There is rhetoric on both sides. Iran doesn’t have the military capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, as it has threatened. Its navy is made up of a handful of small ships and would be obliterated within minutes of a confrontation with the American fleet on standby in the region.

The Islamic government is facing real economic difficulties as a result of the sanctions already in force. Unemployment and inflation have soared in recent months, while the currency, the Iranian rial, has lost 40% of its value against the US dollar within a year.
A huge black market is dominated by the Revolutionary Guards, who used wanton violence in the crackdown on street protests over the last couple of years.

Iran is surrounded by nuclear weapons in the shape of China, India, Pakistan and the American fleet. And, of course, Israel. The hypocrisy in the official denials that the Israelis have an arsenal of nuclear weapons is overwhelming. If all this was about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, where are the sanctions against Israel?

Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, is undoubtedly behind the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists over the past year. And prime minister Netanyahu doesn’t give a fig for Obama’s re-election prospects and could defy Washington with a pre-emptive strike this year.

In the end, the Iranians have a right to defend themselves. If nuclear weapons are a deterrent, and Israel has them, it is natural Iran should want one. The Iranian regime is reactionary and oppressive but is not an imperialist power. That’s why we have to say, no any attack on Iran by the US, Israel, Britain and France.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Torture exposes West's hollow claims about democracy

The indictment gets longer. Still wanted over the illegal invasion of Iraq, former prime minister Blair could be open to prosecution over New Labour’s secret collaboration with the Gaddafi regime, leading international lawyer Philippe Sands has suggested.

Ironically, in the wake of the Nato-backed regime change in Libya, it has become crystal clear that British intelligence agency MI6 collaborated in the “rendering” of alleged terror suspects by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and were complicit in their torture.

Under New Labour, M16 tipped off the CIA to help ensnare and transport two leaders of the anti-Gaddafi opposition back to Tripoli where they were promptly imprisoned and tortured. MI6 also told Libyan intelligence about opposition figures who lived in Britain, supplying it with emails and telephone numbers.

As early as 2003 Mark Allen, head of counter-terrorism at MI6, wrote to former Libyan foreign intelligence and then foreign minister, Moussa Koussa on the friendliest of first-name terms.

US human rights campaigners found letters in Koussa’s home showing how pleased Allen was about the “delivery” of Abedelhakim Belhadj then known by his nom de guerre Abu Abdallah Sadiq. Belhadj says that British intelligence officers were among the first to interrogate him when he arrived in Libya and was promptly imprisoned and tortured.

The CIA paid for Belhadj and his deputy, Abu Munthir and their families’

air trips from Malayasia and Hong Kong. But Allen played a double-game, telling Koussa that he would not share information obtained by torture with the CIA – and how he found this “amusing”.

“I have no intention of doing any such thing [sharing information]. The intelligence about Abu Abdallah was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful to you for the help you are giving us,” he wrote.

Mark Allen has since been knighted and is an advisor to BP.

UK Special Forces helped to train the Khamis Brigade run by one of Gaddafi’s sons. The elite SAS forces assisted Libyans in counter-terrorism techniques and surveillance between 2004 and 2009.

M16 also held counter-terrorism courses for them in 2006 to help them fight the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, then headed by Belhadj. The US had added this group to its list of banned terror groups in 2003. Ironically, Belhadj was one of the chief leaders in the overthrow of Gaddafi and is now head of the Tripoli Military Council which currently heads 8,000 troops. He has called for a full apology from Britain.

Although British diplomats tried to shred compromising documents before they fled Libya, they have been discovered in the residence of the British ambassador. They show how Labour PMs Blair and Brown wooed the Gaddafi family in terms of sycophantic flattery.

Using craven religious phraseology, Blair wrote in December 2006: “At this sacred time of harmony and reconciliation, recalling how our passionate God has mercy on mankind, I would like to express my personal wishes to you, to your family and to the Libyan people.”

But working with torturers in Libya was not enough for M16. While the British government made hypocritical noises about human rights in China, MI6 was cooperating with the notorious Chinese State Security Bureau: “We agreed that we would look at how we might engage the Chinese Services on the Islamic extremist target in China”, one letter says chillingly. It is well-known that the Chinese authorities have long been brutally repressing anyone campaigning for Uighur ethnic rights, denouncing them as Islamic terrorists.

Of course, when anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya were inspired by the Arab Spring to revolt, the Cameron-Clegg coalition changed the tune sung by Britain. But the same thinking lies behind this government: flatter the leaders, repress the opposition and above all - get the oil.

But as the evidence found in the ashes of the old regime prove, no amount of flattery or the torture of opponents can possibly guarantee this. Finally, what the revelations show is what we have always known – that fine words about “democracy” from the mouths of British governments are the height of hypocrisy – both at home and abroad.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Militarism comes to Obama's America

President Eisenhower, the general who led the D-Day operation in 1944, famously warned Americans in 1961 of the threat to democracy from an emerging “military-industrial complex”. He’d be astonished at what’s going on 50 years later, where a new kind of complex has a seat at the top table.

Its beating heart is a secretive intelligence network which is now reckoned to constitute a fourth arm of government – after the executive (president), judicial and legislative (Congress). According to the Washington Post, this world of smoke and mirrors comprises over 1,200 government agencies and almost 2,000 private companies in more than 10,000 locations across the country. Its annual budget is $80 billion. There are an astonishing 845,000 people with top secret clearance.

This is but one arm of globalised counter-insurgency warfare. Conn Hallinan, a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, a progressive US-based think tank, says: “The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. Public Enemy Number One. It formalised a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret.”

Congress is consigned to the role of spectator while the “situation room” at the White House takes over. Who can forget the photos of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton watching as special forces went into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden. Pakistan’s protests at the violation of its airspace were brushed aside.

Hallinan notes: “Although clandestine warfare is not new, the boldness of the bin Laden hit is. Certainly the people who planned the attack wanted to make a statement: We can get you anywhere you are, and impediments like international law, the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Charter be damned.”

The merging of intelligence and military operations in the US is about to take off in a big way. General David Petraeus, head of international forces in Afghanistan, is tipped to be Obama’s nomination as the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency after the present incumbent is confirmed as the administration’s new defence secretary.

In their analysis of the militarisation of America, William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel and Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, insist:

“Think of all this as a kind of mix-and-match version of war that increasingly integrates civilian branches of the government like the State Department, an ever more warlike CIA (once known as ‘the president’s private army’), the regular Army, Marines, and Air Force, ever-growing drone air power (split between an officially civilian intelligence agency and the military), and a secret combined military force of perhaps 20,000 special operatives.

In his article How the Military and the Civilian Are Blurring in Washington, Astore relates the “fairy tale” of a “fabled land”, a representative democracy whose foundational principles included civilian control of the military and a system of checks and balances. That has disappeared, says Astore:

“Instead, at the highest levels, what’s civilian and what’s military are increasingly difficult to tell apart as the two spheres blur and blend. Today, civilian control of the military is largely a principle without a meaning, while inside Washington’s Beltway, even with a scorecard it’s hard to tell the players apart. In the process, the military has gained a kind of unspoken and distinctly un-American primacy …

“There’s a word for this disease, even if after all these years it remains remarkably foreign to American ears: militarism. When Americans think of that word, they tend to conjure up images of fanatical jackbooted Nazis or suicidal Japanese kamikazes, and so the concept seems eminently dismissible. But militarism also describes a situation in which a country’s civil society and political culture are permeated to the point of dominance by military attitudes and values – an undeniable fact of life, I would argue, in America today.”

What is happening in America is a warning to people everywhere. The state is not just the plaything of the corporations but increasingly the military too. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, and markets become increasingly competitive, the lurch to full-blown militarism/nationalism will become more pronounced.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Pakistan's poor caught in the middle

The political and moral crisis wracking Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer concentrates all the ills of our 21st century world - but also demonstrates the need for a revolutionary alternative.

Divisions have reached civil war proportions over Taseer’s violent death in Islamabad’s fashionable Kohsar Market. Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) activists and opponents of religious fanaticism plus campaigners for democratic and economic rights are mourning Taseer as a courageous and cultured hero. He was close to the persecuted Bhutto family and suffered imprisonment when Pakistan was under martial law.

On the other side, Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer’s assassin, has a Facebook page dedicated to him and supporters are rallying for his release, showering him with rose petals as he gets taken to and from court. Qadri shot the man he was supposed to protect over 27 times because Taseer wanted to amend Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

But the religious powder keg could blind us to the deeper contradictions that are dividing the country. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is considered a frontline ally of America, sharing as it does, a long border with eastern Afghanistan, the stronghold of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

But the billions in military and civilian aid poured in by the Obama administration have failed to achieve either economic improvement or military success. The frustrations of millions of poverty-stricken people in the country are summed by comments given to a reporter by Arif Fasiullah, 35, from the central city of Multan: "There is no electricity, no gas, no jobs, and they are fighting one another. They do not pass any legislation. They just do dirty politics."

Pakistan, with a population of more than 180 million, faces chronic power failures that can last up to 16 hours per day in some areas during the scorching summer, and up to a third of its people lack access to clean drinking water. Average income per capita is less than $3,000 a year, and most adults have less than five years of schooling.

The International Monetary Fund, which has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars in loans to keep its economy afloat, has demanded the country implement significant changes, including deep cuts to its deficit and a revised general sales tax. These have proved highly unpopular.

Even as you read this, US war planes are continuing drone attacks on north-west Pakistan, which have killed four people in the last 24 hours, with a hundred raids carried out in 2010. Despite all the dollars and US efforts to keep Pakistan onside in the so-called war against terror, the relationship between the US spy agency, the CIA and Pakistan’s equally sinister Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the operation against south and north Waziristan has reached an all-time low.

It is the economic crisis of global capital which sparked the IMF’s demand that the government raise taxes. That led to an increase in petrol prices (since withdrawn) plus the sacking of a minister that caused the collapse of the parliamentary coalition just before the crisis over Taseer’s murder.

No wonder that reactionary religious leaders seek to cash in on cruel suffering of the majority. Those seen as favouring “western democracy” and supporting “the war against terror” can be rightly be denounced as maintaining the rule of a rich and corrupt elite while others suffer.

Neither the secular bourgeois “westernisers”, nor the military nor the Muslim establishment can take Pakistan an inch forward or resolve the extreme poverty that affects the majority. The development of a secular leadership campaigning for People’s Assemblies to challenge for political power is the issue of the day.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

US secret state out of control

If you think that the American state is all-knowing, all-powerful and always in control, you couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, some of the most sensitive areas of state activity are not actually under the control of federal employees at all but are in the hands of contractors answerable to shareholders.

A significant change in America’s state has placed private sector corporations at the very heart of military and intelligence operations, in a clear breach of the country’s federal rules. These state that contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions."

An effective merger between the secret state and corporations began after the 9.11 attacks. It has flourished to such an extent that no one in Washington can actually put a figure on the numbers involved. Senior members of the Obama administration have expressed their concerns, as well they might.

The scope of the changes is fleshed out by a two-year investigation by the Washington Post called Top Secret America. It estimates the number of contractors who work on top secret programmes at an astonishing 265,000 – almost a third of the total workforce.

There are about 2,000 companies working with 45 government organisations in hundreds of secret locations across America. More than a quarter of the firms came into existence after 2001.

The report warns: “What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest – and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.” The investigation shows that:

• Contractors can offer more money – often twice as much – to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them.
• Contractors cost an estimated 25% more to hire than federal workers.
• At the CIA, employees from 114 firms account for roughly a third of the workforce, or about 10,000 posts.
• Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan, helped snatch a person in Italy and interrogated detainees held at secret prisons abroad.
• Contractors kill enemy fighters. They spy on foreign governments and eavesdrop on terrorist networks.
• The defence secretary cannot find how out how many contractors work in the civilian side of his department.
• Most contractors do work that is fundamental to an agency's mission. As a result, the government has become dependent on them.
• The National Security Agency, which conducts worldwide electronic surveillance, hires private firms to come up with most of its technological innovations.
• The National Reconnaissance Office cannot produce, launch or maintain its large satellite surveillance systems, which photograph countries such as China, North Korea and Iran, without the four major contractors it works with.
• Each of the 16 intelligence agencies depends on corporations to set up its computer networks, communicate with other agencies' networks, and analyse information. More than 400 companies work exclusively in this area.

The merger between state and corporate interests is a process that has its origins in the period of intense globalisation that took off in the early 1980s. As capital gained its global wings, the capitalist state more and more became the facilitator of their interests. As the financial crash of 2008 demonstrated, the state is duty bound to save the system at any cost.

With the United States in the grip of a worsening economic crisis, and a presidency which is mounting difficulties as a result, the loyalty of the state to federal authorities under a weakened Obama administration is always going to be tested. With the secret state essentially out of control and increasingly driven by shareholder values, any attempt to cut costs or curb power is sure to provoke an unpredictable reaction.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Take a leaf out of Picasso's book

The view that, deep down, all that human beings are really interested is in looking after themselves is, commonplace and at the same time a truism. Yet it begs the question that in today’s society, individual interests and those of humanity as a whole also coincide.

Today’s correspondence of a super-heated and plundered planet with an explosive economic, financial and political crisis self-evidently cannot be solved on an individual basis, neither by the ruling classes nor by the rest of us.

But the more this becomes apparent, the more a view of humanity as simply creatures of greedy instincts is trundled out again and again. The purveyors of this jaded (but unscientific) notion perform a vital function. Hiding behind a facile cynicism, they conveniently naturally dismiss notions of revolutionary political change.

Previewing a pioneering exhibition opening this week at Tate Liverpool, Professor Alex Danchev (military historian of St Antony’s College who has turned to art history) is given space in that paper of organised cynicism, The Guardian, to conclude that “Pablo Picasso, a painter without peer, lived and died an egotist. A party of one was his ideal station”. Danchev misses no opportunity to stick the knife into the artist, accusing him of “gesture politics” and “posturing”.

Of course Picasso’s very persona was that of an extrovert showman who enjoyed throwing spanners into the works and making provocative and perplexing statements. But that in no way was in contradiction to his impassioned opposition to Fascism and Nazism, and his campaign against war, in particular nuclear war.

Picasso was the most controversial artist of the last century. Along with Georges Braque he revolutionised painting and the way we see the world. His view of the human body and the human condition continue to excite and intrigue. Due in part to the astronomical sums fetched by his work, his artistic prowess remains in the public eye.

But the curators of Picasso: Peace and Freedom have assembled a mass of evidence to show there was less well known side to the man – he was a political animal through and through. His painting Guernica, an outcry against the Fascist bombing of a village in the Basque country in 1937, retains its power to provoke and inspire. So much so that a replica of Guernica in the Security Council of the United Nations was covered up on the eve of the Iraq war as the United States and Britain lied their way to an illegal invasion in 2003.

Picasso joined the French Communist Party after the liberation of Paris in 1944, having lived through the dark years of the war and occupation. He stuck with the PCF despite, not because, of its Stalinist monstrosities. Almost unbelievably, Danchev portrays the artist as a “slavish” devotee of Stalinism when the opposite was the case. Picasso signed an open letter opposing the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

In staging this show, Lynda Morris and Christoph Grunenberg have thrown down a political gauntlet. They have assembled a mountain of evidence which challenges the view that Picasso’s politics were in some way secondary to his being as a person and an artist. The breadth and scope of his commitment to a host of causes, including racial equality, the campaign to prevent the execution of the Rosenbergs, against the death penalty and anti-Semitism is indisputable. Picasso has clearly come back to haunt those who seek to defend capitalism and its political institutions.

The depth of Picasso’s beliefs – and his conflicts with Stalinism - should inspire A World to Win’s Taking the Revolutionary Road conference this Saturday. In our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions we appeal to creative workers of all kinds to help end the prison of capitalist social relations. The Cold War may be well and truly over, but “the battle for Picasso’s mind” as the CIA dubbed it, goes on.

Corinna Lotz

Secretary

A World to Win

Picasso: Peace and Freedom is at the Tate Liverpool 21 May-30 August.

Extrajudicial murder by CIA drones

The slap on the wrist delivered to Israel yesterday by foreign secretary David Miliband over the use of fake British passport in the murder of a leading member of Hamas in Dubai should not obscure the fact that “targeted assassination” is a policy that Washington carries out in Afghanistan and Pakistan with London’s blessing.

Miliband had nothing to say about the actual killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by agents of the Israeli secret service Mossad, not even in a roundabout way that covered all eventualities. That’s because in private, New Labour and the US government support so-called “targeted assassinations” themselves – a policy that clearly violates international laws and could be considered a war crime.

Most days, for example, pilotless drones unleash a deadly attack on targets in Pakistan which, it should be remembered, is a sovereign state that has not given permission for its airspace to be violated by the United States in this way. This morning the BBC reported that missiles fired by a suspected US drone killed at least five people in north-west Pakistan's tribal region.

The missiles hit an area near Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan district, bordering Afghanistan, officials said. The identity of those killed is not yet known. Hundreds of people, including a number of militants, have been killed in scores of drone strikes since August 2008.

For every Taliban fighter or Al-Qaeda leader killed, many more civilians perish as the missiles come out of a clear blue sky to hit their village. Earlier this year, Pakistan’s leading newspaper Dawn reported:

“Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians. According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009. For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.”

The drone attacks were sanctioned by George W. Bush in 2008 and have actually been stepped up by his successor. More attacks have occurred in the first year of the Obama presidency than all years of his predecessor.

The programme is operated by the CIA spy agency and the targets selected by agents in front of computer screens at the agency’s HQ in Langley, Virginia, half a world away. No doubt it’s like a video game for the operatives while the CIA officially denies the very existence of drone killings because it’s a “covert” operation. New York University law professor Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions since 2004, says his requests for US legal justification for what are effectively extrajudicial executions are always denied.

In August last year, Khaista Khan, saw 12 charred bodies after US missiles struck a small hamlet in North Waziristan. He said: “Americans are cowards. They are afraid of fighting man-to-man in a battlefield and that is why they hit from the sky and run away. Many people who did not support the Taliban previously support them now because the Americans are killing innocent people.”

Apparently, 44 countries have unmanned aircraft for surveillance. There are only two countries that use the drones for killing people. One is the United States. The other is, naturally enough, Israel.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

September 11 - the real conspiracy

The real conspiracy over the September 11 attacks on the United States involves a determination by the authorities to cover up a report into the mismanagement, lack of analysis, bungling and infighting between the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. That much is clear from the small section of the report by the inspector of the CIA, John L. Helgerson that was declassified last night. His report was the first to recommend that top agency officials face a disciplinary review. The full report by the inspector general, totalling several hundred pages, remains classified. The executive summary that was released found neither “a single point of failure” nor a “silver bullet” that would have allowed the CIA to prevent the attacks. But the report did conclude that the agency’s resources devoted to counter-terrorism had been mismanaged, and that some had been redirected away from Al Qaeda toward other parts of the agency’s clandestine service. It cited “failures to implement and manage important processes, to follow through with operations, and to properly share and analyse critical data”.

Drawn up in June 2005, Helgerson accuses the CIA's top officials, including the then director, George Tenet, of failure to devise a strategic plan in advance of the attacks. The report castigates CIA officers who "did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner". The report reveals that information on the 19 hijackers was widely reviewed before 9/11 but was not followed up. "That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systematic breakdown. There was no coherent, functioning watch-listing programme," the summary says. As many as 60 people within the CIA read a cable referring to two of the hijackers before the event, yet the information was not shared with the parts of the organisation able to do anything about it. Helgerson even recommended an inquiry into whether disciplinary action should follow. This was ruled out by the CIA’s director at the time.

Far from being the all-powerful agency it is made out to be, the CIA has a history of being unable to see the wood for the trees. For example, it failed to detect the following historical events and processes: the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; the invasion of Suez by Britain, France and Israel the same year; the overthrow of the Shah of Persia in 1979; the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR later that year and the Soviet reform movement led by Gorbachev in the late 1980s. Notoriously, it funded and sponsored Al Qaeda to help the US in Afghanistan and was then unable to spot that Osama bin Laden had redirected the jihad towards the United States itself.

The weakness and incompetence of the American state revealed by the report contrasts with those who claim that September 11 was itself a conspiracy by the authorities, which was then used as a justification for the “war on terror” and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There are, of course, many unanswered questions about the attacks but none point to an act of self-destruction by a desperate US government. In a more general sense, the conspiracy theorists imply that the state is always one step ahead of everyone else, creating history in order to control it. The real story is more prosaic. We are, after all, talking about a state that couldn’t even deliver bottled water to the residents of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and whose armies in Iraq are tired, dishevelled and all but defeated.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

A World to Win