Snowden calls for support for A Manifesto for Truth

While the Guardian is targeted by the state for publishing Greenwald’s articles exposing mass surveillance of its citizens, with few public figures coming forward to defend the paper, in Germany the response is different.

A campaign is under way to offer whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum and the weekly magazine Der Spiegel has published Snowden’s Manifesto for Truth a week after it was revealed that chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile had been bugged by the United States.

Green Party deputy Hans-Christian Ströbele last week met with Snowden in Moscow, where he is holed up following Russia’s granting of temporary asylum.

Snowden’s statement warned that the NSA and its counterparts were setting the political agenda. “At the beginning, some of the governments who were exposed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented smear campaign. They intimidated journalists and criminalised the publication of the truth,” Snowden writes.

"Today we know that this was a mistake, and that such behaviour is not in the public interest. The debate they tried to stop is now taking place all over the world.”

A growing number of public figures are calling for their country to grant Snowden political asylum. They include: leading Christian Democrat (Angela Merkel’s party) Heiner Geissler, writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger; actor Daniel Brühl, novelist Daniel Kehlmann, entrepreneur Dirk Rossmann,  feminist activist Alice Schwarzer, German Football League president, Reinhard Rauball and musician Udo Lindenberg. Writer Ferdinand von Schirach has praised Snowden’s action, saying it is a citizen’s duty to disobey an unjust state.    

Enzenberger has compared Snowden’s predicament with that of Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, the original “man without a passport”, who during the 1930s was finally offered asylum in Mexico while on the run from Stalin’s assassins.  

Meanwhile, in Britain, if you’ve been leaked some information about the state’s covert activities against its own citizens and you plan to publish some articles about it, you can fall foul of anti-terror laws because you “are promoting a political cause”.

That’s the chilling implication of the justification put forward by the Metropolitan Police for detaining David Miranda at Heathrow for nine hours last August. Miranda is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has used material supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden to expose mass surveillance by British and American spy agencies.

Section 7 of the 2000 anti-terror legislation is drawn so widely that it can catch anything in its net. Purportedly aimed at militant Islamists promoting their cause online and in pamphlets, it was pointed at Miranda when he arrived in Britain.

In documents referred to prior to this week’s judicial review of his detention, the Met had it both way in their justification for holding Miranda. First, “intelligence” is cited that Miranda was “likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security”.

Then the police say that disclosure of the material “is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause”. On those grounds alone, the alleged actions fall within the definition of terrorism, the “justification” adds.

Astonishing but true.

This framing, as Greenwald has warned, equates legitimate journalism with acts of terrorism. It is therefore a huge threat to the very notion of free speech and investigative journalism. Not only that, it is based not on any evidence of alleged criminality but on the security forces “judgement” on what a targeted individual could do or “have the potential” of doing.

Once more the notion of “pre-crime”, foretold in the Tom Cruise’s sci-fi film Minority Report, comes back to haunt.

So much so that Conservative MP Dominic Raab has broken ranks with his political masters, Home Secretary Teresa May and Prime Minister David Cameron by questioning police tactics. Their total backing for MI5 Chief Andrew Parker and GCHQ spooks is fronted by Tory backbencher Julian Smith, who has accused newspapers who publish Snowden’s revelations of “treason”.

The repercussions of Miranda’s arrest show that the ConDemns, with the connivance of the non-opposition in the form of One Nation Labour, will stop at nothing to ensure the illegal and criminal activities of its surveillance state. 

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win

Scandal of German state's cover for far right

News of an astonishing catalogue of wanton failures by Germany’s intelligence agency, the Bundesverfassungschutz – Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfS) – is sending shock waves through the country.

Details of a 30-page confidential investigation was commissioned for the German government and sent to the state authorities just before Christmas have been revealed by Der Spiegel magazine. They document how a murderous neo-Nazi terror group known as the Zwickau cell was well-known to the authorities and could have been stopped years ago.

Right-wing terrorism in post-unification Germany is nothing new. Germany was wracked by a spate of killings between 2000 and 2007 in which eight people were killed by two members of the terror group which called itself the National Socialist Underground. The men, Uwe Bohnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, later shot themselves after a failed bank robbery.

What is new is the sharp increase in acts of right-wing violence over the past year – from 300 to 9,800. But the neo-Nazis are not only targeting people of foreign descent, gays and the homeless. Recent months have seen some 100 attacks on members of Germany’s Left Party, including its leader Gregor Gysi.

Lists of names and addresses of Left Party officials were found amongst the Zwickau cell terrorists. The Left Party’s security policy spokeswoman, Ulla Jelpke, has seen her Dortmund office attacked by paving stones, graffiti, acid and steel balls fired through the window.

The exposure of the intelligence service’s failings, has brought to the surface a truly shambolic situation within the German state itself. Even mainstream media are asking how much of the state’s blind eye to right-wing terrorism is due to bungling and how much to protection from within the security agencies themselves.

Far from being a secret, the activities of the neo-Nazis in the former east Germany states of Saxony and Thuringia were closely monitored by the state.

But due to distrust between different branches of the German state and lack of action by local prosecutors, far right terrorists in groups like the Thuringian Homeland Protection and Jena Comradeship continued their bank robbing and murdering people of foreign descent.

As long ago as 1997, the Thuringian state sold a luxury mansion to a far right group of holocaust deniers and some accuse the Thuringian section of the state intelligence service of disrupting police investigations into the terror cells. The head of Thuringia’s state branch in Erfort, Helmut Roewer, was suspended in 2000 for a “range of irregularities” and a confidential report said that some sections of the agency had “failed completely” during his period in office.

Der Spiegel has long been known for exposing murky aspects of Germany’s state – but matters are now so bad that even authorities themselves are expressing shock at the scale of the inaction, bungling and bureaucratic infighting.

The president of the BfS, Heinz Fromm, who has headed the agency since 2000, professed shock in an extraordinarily apologetic interview with the Tagespiegel newspaper. He said the agency had transferred its attention from the far right to Islamic terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, but claimed not to know why investigations into neo-Nazis were halted in 2001.

Despite the state running 130 paid informants within Germany’s chief neo-Nazi organisation, the National Democratic Party (NPD) and within the Thüringer group itself, the security services failed to prevent the National Socialist Underground group’s terror activities.

Jorge Ziercke, head of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has said that public confidence in the rule of law has been “shaken to the core” while opposition parties in the Bundestag are calling for a parliamentary investigation.

But the Zwickau scandal is only one sign that the relations within the German state are under stress. Even the long-standing cosy relationship between Das Bild newspaper and Angel Merkel’s ruling CDU party is showing signs of breaking down. With German capitalism fighting a desperate rearguard action to prevent a collapse of its cherished eurozone project, the divisions within the state indicate a deep turbulence in ruling class circles.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

London banks in doomsday planning

Reports that London-based global banks are playing “war games” to work out what to do if a country quits the eurozone or the currency collapses, is a stark indication that the financial crisis is out of control. Survival is the only item on the agenda as meltdown looms.

The scenario planning coincides with rising political tensions across Europe, with the Franco-German alliance seeking to sideline Britain. Der Spiegel has dubbed Britain the “sick Empire” in advance of today’s meeting between chancellor Merkel and prime minister Cameron. Other right-wing papers and members of her ruling party have stoked up old enmities between the two countries.

Merkel and French president Sarkozy want, it seems, to make Frankfurt and not London the pre-eminent financial centre in Europe. It is hard to see how that squares with the deepening crisis of the euro itself, with Spain and other countries facing unsustainable interest rates on new loans.

Traders are selling bonds (fixed-term loans) as fast as they can. No one wants to be holding Spanish, Italian or anyone else’s debt when the music stops. And stop it will, with

Terry Pratt of IG Markets remarking that Spain’s difficulties are “the latest blow to the common currency, which is now looking ever more moribund as each day passes”.

According to the Bank of England, UK banks do about half their lending outside Britain, with Europe accounting for about a third of the total. But it’s their ability to absorb large losses that is in the spotlight. Their exposure to France and Germany alone is equal to 130% of their core capital. At least one lender has Italian exposure equivalent to 54% of capital, according to the Financial Times.

And then there are indirect exposures which no one seems to be able to total up. A UK-based bank may have lent to an overseas hedge fund which in turn is tied up in Greek or Italian bonds. Hence the “war games”, with the FT reporting:

It is Friday night, after stock markets have closed across Europe, and there is some shocking news: Greece has pulled out of the euro. By the time markets reopen on Monday morning, UK banks must be prepared for the worst. How dangerous could this be for other eurozone governments and banks? What would it mean for customers? Investors? Would funding markets freeze instantly? These are some of the war-game scenarios UK bankers are acting out – often in real time over a weekend – as they plan for some grim possible consequences of the eurozone debt crisis.

A new credit crunch is well under way, with inter-bank lending crucial to sustaining the financial system, drying up. As in 2008, the fear is of lending to another institution and then finding they can’t pay it back. This only adds to growing liquidity problems and the UK authorities are apparently monitoring funding levels twice daily.

Not all the FT’s readers are sympathetic about the plight of the banks, with one writing: “Looks like the bank's bonus pools are finally under threat owing to the destruction of the real economy through excessive leverage, reckless mortgage lending based on fraud and deceit, financial speculation and looting. The sooner the banks are nationalised, bonus pools used to invest in the real economy and bank management put in jail the better.”

The question is, how do we achieve that goal? Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has again committed his party to building a “responsible capitalism” and the parliamentary system is a proxy for corporate and financial power. While the bankers do doomsday planning, a strategy for a new political and economic democracy ought to be top of our agenda.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor