The state feeds on terror and ignores serious threats to society

Events in Woolwich yesterday show that the state is totally geared up for emergency action when it wants to be – committees meet, officials are called in, politicians focus their attention and insist something must be done.

One is entitled to ask why they can respond so strongly to a lone terrorist event when they are so entirely unable to react to long-term, serious threats to society – poverty, climate change, banking and tax corruption and youth unemployment to name a few? No committees met when it was reported last week that the concentration of CO2 has risen above 400 parts per million!

Cameron says the "British people" will "never buckle in the face of terror" and promised "terrorists will never win". But those who carried out yesterday's horrific attack and others like the Boston Marathon attack, were not aiming to win - they were aiming to die, and to strike a blow against their enemy as they did so.

Yet such acts of terrorism can no more “win” than the NATO powers can win their so-called war on terror. Instead, the world is now locked into a continuous conflict and the state adopts the rhetoric of “crushing” the terrorists, a rhetoric that is easily transferable to crushing all opposition.

The reaction of the state media shows the extent to which even intelligent journalists adopt distorted thinking in order to support the kind of imperialist and colonialist rhetoric that still colours so much public discourse in the UK. In an astonishing article on the BBC website, home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani says:

"For jihadists, it really comes down to the presence of soldiers - and an entire framework of belief that sees those personnel, whatever role they have been given under international law, as the enemy of Islam. That argument is often backed up with graphic images online of the suffering of ordinary women and children. It's all designed to whip up anger and a sense of burning injustice - the kind of injustice that leads people to be convinced that something must be done."

So women and children suffering in the Middle East and Afghanistan are just "images" and only serve to "whip up" a sense of burning injustice. They are not really burning injustices in themselves!  He goes on: "Now, most people who feel a sense of injustice obviously combat it in [sic] purely peaceful means. The point about terrorism is that the sense of injustice becomes a springboard for mental somersaults in the mind of someone who thinks that indiscriminate violence can create justice."

So "most people" obviously combat injustice by peaceful means? Would that include the troops sent to Mali by the French government? Or the first invasion of Iraq, after Saddam fell out with the West and invaded Kuwait? Or the second invasion, when, as Blair now admits, the goal was regime change? Or the invasion of Afghanistan in response to the attacks on the Twin Towers? Or illegal drone assassinations?

Of course not! These claim the sanction of “international law” and fighting to “preserve our way of life”, which, when it comes down to it, means sustaining corporate and financial power over ordinary people’s lives.

The last time the cabinet’s emergency unit Cobra was in almost continuous session was in 2011 when riots broke out in London and other cities – another outpouring of anger at burning injustice. On this occasion it was the injustice of police shooting a young black man and anger at the impact of the economic crisis being foisted on to the young and the poor.

The reaction was ruthless and the justice system was instructed by the government to repress those who were caught. First-time offenders were given long prison terms; young people got four years just for Facebook messages.  

Of course terrorism and rioting are not going to change the state of the world, or the state of the state. The state feeds on such acts and uses them to mobilise reactionary forces and reinforce repression against every community.

So the capitalist state is itself the problem, not the solution. It can never address the grievances that drive people to terrorism or to riot. Only when power is in the hands of ordinary people will the conditions exist for that to happen.

Penny Cole

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 

Spare us the hypocrisy over Gaddafi

The brutal and sorry end of the Gaddafi era in Libya has brought the expected, sickening outpouring of faked concern in Washington, London and Paris for building democracy in that country and a rewriting of history to suit Nato. Spare us the hypocrisy.

Nato has now bombed the National Transitional Council (NTC) into power. Even yesterday, although Gaddafi was reduced to a handful of supporters in Sirte, French warplanes attacked isolated vehicles trying to flee the area, in clear breach of the UN resolution limited to “protecting civilians”.

The strategic aim was not just access to oil, which Western powers have always had, but to corral the uprising against Gaddafi’s dictatorship and to gain a new foothold in the region in the wake of the Egyptian revolution.

The lynch-mob manner of Gaddafi’s death after his capture, the plans for a secret burial, show that the NTC regime has a great deal to hide, that it scorns any rule of law and has no intentions of ruling in a democratic way.

Gaddafi’s attempt at holding on to power after the uprising began in Benghazi, and the undoubted corruption of his extended family, coupled with authoritarian rule in recent decades, led to his downfall.

But for the West to crow about the end of a dictatorship stretching back to when he came to power in 1969 is nonsense. In the early period, oil revenue was directed towards education, healthcare and housing. Per capita income rose seven fold to one of the highest in Africa.

His regime became a target for the West because of his support for liberation struggles by Palestinians, Irish republicans and Saharan Africans. Tripoli was bombed by the US in 1986, killing one of his children. Gaddafi fought hard to implement the ideals of Pan-Arabism championed by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt.

With his concept of Jamahiriya – “state of the masses” or “republic of the masses”, he sought to foster a direct democracy in which the people would rule through local councils and communes.

Political and economic pressure on Libya increased after the downing of the Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie in December 1988 for which Libya was framed. Libya’s political and economic isolation produced a reactionary political turn.

The 1990s saw increased inequalities and loss of political freedom for ordinary Libyans. A nepotistic dynastic elite grew up in which the rich enjoyed freedoms denied to ordinary Libyans. Rights for opponents became non-existent, with political prisoners being shot down at the Abu Salim jail in 1996.

The sight of Gaddafi making deals over oil and immigration with oil-hungry authoritarians like Blair and Italian leader Berlusconi was particularly shocking. Gaddafi almost certainly became clinically depressed at the failure of his political aims and fell into the arms of world leaders who endorsed him until the uprising earlier this year.

If Gaddafi deserved his summary execution, as some say, where does that leave war criminals like Blair and Bush, whose 2003 invasion of Iraq was unlawful and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and Obama, whose administration uses drones to kill people illegally in Pakistan, and other Nato leaders, including Cameron, who conduct a murderous war in Afghanistan?

TNC leaders are not exactly the rabid pro-Western alliance Nato dreamt would emerge, containing discredited regime defectors, monarchists, militant Islamists and not a few opportunists. That's the new government of Libya. The people are going to have to overthrow them if they are to achieve any benefit from their revolution.

Now the struggle for democratic and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa merges with a global crisis of capitalism. The new Arab revolution has only just started and it will have to go beyond fair and free elections to find solutions to the pressing problems of soaring food prices, mass unemployment, poverty and inequality.

A World to Win editors

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