Blood on their hands: Libya’s boat refugees and “humanitarian” imperialism

Johannes Stern & Bill Van Auken

The horrific death toll of African and Middle Eastern refugees and migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe is a damning indictment of all the major imperialist powers, and most particularly the United States.

The American president, Barack Obama, and his former secretary of state, Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, have blood up to their elbows. They set the present catastrophe in motion through brutal wars for regime change waged under the hypocritical and discredited banner of “human rights.”

At least three more boats packed with refugees from North Africa and the Middle East were reported to be in distress in the Mediterranean on Monday, with a minimum of 23 more people said to have drowned.

This adds to the many hundreds of people, perhaps 1,400, who have lost their lives over the past week in a desperate bid to escape military violence by the US and its European allies, civil wars stoked by Washington and the European Union, and pervasive poverty exacerbated by the machinations of imperialism in the region.

On Monday, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said distress calls had been received from an inflatable life raft carrying 100 to 150 migrants and a second boat with some 300 people aboard. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said a caller reported that 20 people died when one of the vessels sank in international waters.

In a separate incident, at least three migrants, including a child, died when a boat, apparently coming from Turkey, ran aground off the Greek island of Rhodes. Video footage showed the wooden boat, with people crowded on the deck, heaving in the Aegean Sea just off the island. Eyewitnesses told the local radio station that there were many Syrians, but also people from Eritrea and Somalia.

The latest drownings follow the deaths of close to 950 people on Sunday in the sinking of a refugee boat off of Libya. According to the Italian Coast Guard, the completely overloaded boat capsized about 130 miles off the Libyan coast.

“We were 950 people on board, including 40 to 50 children and 200 women,” a survivor from Bangladesh told the Italian news agency ANSA. Many people were trapped in the hold of the ship and drowned under horrible circumstances. “The smugglers had closed the doors and stopped them leaving,” said the man.

Over 500 more people died the previous week in two separate sinkings of boats attempting to reach Europe across the Mediterranean.

Since the beginning of the year, at least 1,700 people attempting to immigrate to Europe have died in transit, 50 times the number for the same period last year. According to the IOM, the number of people dying in the attempt to reach the shores of Europe rose by more than 500 percent between 2011 and 2014.

Of course, 2011 was the year that the US and its NATO allies, principally France and Britain, launched their war for regime change in Libya, under the fabricated pretext that they were intervening to prevent a massacre by the government of Muammar Gaddafi in the eastern city of Benghazi.

This “humanitarian” mission initiated a six-month US-NATO bombing campaign that killed at least 10 times the number who died in the scattered fighting between government troops and armed rebels that had preceded it. This imperialist intervention, which utilized Islamist militias with ties to Al Qaeda as its proxy ground forces, left Libya descending rapidly into chaos and destruction.

Nearly two million Libyan refugees—more than a quarter of the population—have been forced to flee to Tunisia to escape an unending civil war between rival Islamist militias and two competing governments, one based in Tripoli and the other in the eastern city of Tobruk. According to the web site Libya Body Count, some 3,500 people have been killed just since the beginning of 2014—three years after the US-NATO intervention.

The escalating barbarism in Libya has included mass executions. The latest, made public in a video released Sunday by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was of some 30 Ethiopian migrants. This follows by less than two months the similar mass beheadings of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians at the hands of ISIS, which has seized Libya’s eastern port city of Derna as well as parts of the city of Sirte.

There were no such mass sectarian murders in Libya before the US-NATO war for regime change, nor for that matter did Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias exist as any more than a marginal force. These elements were promoted, armed and backed by massive airpower after the major imperialist powers decided to topple and murder Gaddafi and carry out a new rape of Libya.

The disastrous consequences of this predatory neocolonial intervention are now undeniable. It is only one in a growing number of imperialist wars and interventions in the oil-rich Middle East and North Africa that have destroyed entire societies and turned millions into refugees. These include the wars in Iraq, Syria and now Yemen, as well as interventions by the imperialist powers or their regional proxies in Mali, Somalia and Sudan.

According to Amnesty International, the escalating conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have “led to the largest refugee disaster since the Second World War.” Amnesty estimates that 57 million people have been forced to flee worldwide in the last year, 6 million more than in 2012.

The American press, led by the New York Times, writes of refugees fleeing poverty and violence in the Middle East and North Africa without so much as mentioning the actions of the United States and its European allies that have caused the humanitarian catastrophe. What is unfolding in the Mediterranean is not a tragedy; it is an imperialist war crime.

Why the Rafale Deal Must be Welcomed

Amit Gupta


While the naysayers and conspiracy theorists in India have already begun their spin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken the correct decision to buy 36 off-the-shelf Rafales from France rather than wait for the interminable negotiations with Dassault for licensed production to reach a conclusion. For several reasons, the off-the-shelf buy is in the best interests of broader Indian defence and economic policy.  

In the field of arms sales, there is a growing sense of “India fatigue” because of the lengthy delays that mark Indian weapons procurement. The officials at the British Aerospace joke that it took one-fifth of the first 100 years of flight to sell the Hawk trainer to India. In this day and age when corporations have to show continuous profits, such lengthy negotiations tend to put off prospective sellers. This is especially true when other countries such as Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states can take quick decisions to make multi-billion dollar arms purchases. An off-the-shelf purchase made sense, therefore, since it made India a more attractive market for international arms companies.  

This in turn has broader implications for India’s economic policy, which depends on external investments to kickstart various sectors of the domestic economy. In order to acquire such investments, however, the Modi government had to show that it was willing to take steps to change the perception amongst foreign investors that India was a difficult place to do business in. A rapid transformation of the Indian economy is also important for Modi, for if he cannot deliver economic benefits to India’s increasingly impatient youth bulge, he is likely to lose the next general election.  

Secondly, those who complain about how Modi has torpedoed the “Make in India” have to have a serious reality check about what, realistically can be made in India given the country’s technological level and its track record in arms production. Indian arms production efforts have been marked by tall claims that are not matched by corresponding results. Instead, the country’s arms producers have not been able to absorb existing technologies and develop a higher level of weapons systems. Thus, despite close to 60 years of arms production in the country, the indigenous arms producers have been unable to develop a power plant for an aircraft, tank, or ship. The Tejas fighter and the Arjun tank both depend on imported power plants. 

Furthermore, India does not have the necessary machinery or technology to domestically produce the Rafale.  India would have had to import these production capabilities and this was the reason the price of the domestically-produced Rafale was skyrocketing.  Nor was it possible to get Dassault to guarantee the quality and reliability of the aircraft that were being produced by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), since the French company could not realistically guarantee the end product when it did not have supervisory control over the factory. 

Also, HAL has a terrible record for producing aircraft as it normally makes up to eight aircraft a year.  Given how the Rafale deal called for the domestic manufacture of 108 planes, it would have taken HAL close to 14 years to complete the order and this would not have allowed the Indian Air Force (IAF) to rapidly modernise its fleet—which was the rationale for buying the Rafale in the first place.

Lastly, the Rafale purchase has opened up the possibility of buying aircraft from elsewhere since it will free up funds to buy an off-the-shelf plane in place of the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft.  HAL has spent decades to deliver what is considered an unsatisfactory aircraft to the IAF.  It will take the mid-2020s before HAL produces the Tejas Mark 2, the plane that the IAF actually wants.  Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parikkar has opened up the debate on this possibility by letting the executives at HAL know that if they cannot deliver more planes quickly, India will go for an external supplier. Finally, it fired a shot across the bows of HAL and shook the aircraft manufacturer’s complacency that the government would always allow the company maintain its jobs program. 

The Rafale deal, therefore, should be welcomed rather than second-guessed by arm chair strategists and politicians who are putting false nationalistic pride over hardcore and pragmatic security decisions.  

Colonial Science And Sustainability

Jan Wareus

“Oscar Reutersvärd 1997 - ‘Follow the Groove”

“A perfect metaphor for our situation – progress and sustainability can’t meet!”

We live in times when semantics are changing and texts are full of abbreviations. So, now I’m told that COAD is chronic obtrusive air-ways decease. The plague miners and stone-pit workers even share with people smoking too many Cohibas and Davidoff pipe tobacco. However, we all share the COED – chronic obstructive economic decline! With enormous consequences for both rich and poor, both developed and developing countries.

We are now at a point when our entire civilization has entered what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the twilight of illusion”. We are at a point at which the end of a forever growing industrial economy is nothing but a short historical process, clearly and visibly declining. To make this understood, we have to search for a realistic understanding of the troubled future ahead of us and a meaningful way of responding to it. That’s my reason for this writings and extremely important for what we flippantly label “so called economists”. In my opinion, we are all “so called” : town planners, architects, engineers……..you may fill in the blanks! But we have professional ethics (or should have) and let’s look ahead!

Our civilization is on head-on collision with our planetary limits of growth and this is often, and unfortunately, treated as an economical/technical problem that can be corrected by reading a neo-colonial answer book. But doing so, we are following the same trajectory of overshoot that terminated so many other civilizations in the past. What we are experiencing now is a permanent economic decline and precisely what many scientists pointed out about peak oil and the finite resources many decades ago – it will not necessarily be a sudden collapse, a slow decline for industrial societies but quicker for African countries, knocking on the progress door.

And, contrary to intelligent thinking, the faith in limitless progress is the basis for most national budgets, for economical writers in our papers -“so called economists” according to some local writers, here. In general, we seem to be totally unaware that we are on a slope, a decline, with economical failures – a crisis here and a crisis there (power, water, education here, regional catastrophes and wars there) with oil, gas and resources always in the background.

Consequently, it cannot be disputed that we are on a downward trajectory as a civilization – those of us who still have a job are struggling to hang on to them, those who have lost their jobs are struggling to stay fed, clothed and housed and there are many, many young ones that will never have an outsourced job with a salary. This is the situation and why the so called “industrial countries” (now often called post-industrial) - the triad of US, EU and Japan especially act as they are doing and we see consequences here in Africa. Reason – there was no “trickle down” from the top to the bottom (as neo-liberal paradigms promised) and it will never be.

But it is no longer necessary to speculate what kind of future the end of cheap, abundant energy era will bring to the industrial world and the countries that are hoping to mirror their old status. The package has already been delivered and the hope the aspiring developing countries had in their legitimate right to become industrialized is fading quickly.

Now’s the time to rethink – globalization was a one-way road to bring resources to the post-industrial nations, a “kiss-of-life” for the neo-colonial powers. In this situation it is futile to hope that non-industrial nations will follow the same trajectory as the now post-industrial nations did, once upon a time (e.g. building factories, hiring workers with salaries enough to be consumers, providing services and generating ample profits). We can now see that it wasn’t forever self-sustaining there and it will never, ever happen here.

So, are we forced for the nearest future to “digging holes” and exporting our (also finite) untreated resources raw -copper, coal and other stuff from the earth? Many western as well as Eastern countries seemingly think so, and are often discouraging African nations so called beneficiation and process their natural resources prior to export. And when possible beneficiation is there, it’s easy to kill for the big ones – now we hear we’re too lazy and spoiled by huge salaries! What’s up but creating more Moment 22’s?

I guess I’m quite clever, now! What is Moment 22 all about but swallowing the tail, bit by bit? Let’s note the following regarding what most developing countries have been through:

• Destruction, the Terra Nullius concept – destroy cultures and get vacant land (the initial stage of colonialism – from 1750 and still ongoing);
• Dual Laws – one for colonialists another for ingenious people – a money saver!
• Introducing colonial “sciences” –proving there are Subject people to Master ones – mostly Aryans/Caucasians;
• Economical neo-colonialism – globalization, free-trade, de-regularization of laws and cutting domestic expenses.

Consequently, I cannot but understand the situation that most developing countries are in today. There was hardly any coherent alternative to the massive neo-liberal economic concept from western development institutions and charitable donors for newly independent developing countries then. The “hidden” conditions were just as important as the job was for new architects and town planners.

But there were serious consequences when the developing countries applied this kind of outdated, high cost, western, somewhat outdated technology (an inheritance from the colonial powers, I insist) – mostly concerning infrastructure and utility service that we more or less copied from the west. Obviously not considering the problems developed countries had with aging infrastructure networks and service delivery and the end cost for it when energy became expensive that disappeared when “eternal progress” was less than 8% a year.

By the late 60-ies it was obvious that the infrastructure sector was falling apart in the west – maintenance was neglected and cost of delivery escalated quickly - esp. after the first oil bubble burst in early 70-ies. There were huge external costs never assumed, and environmentalists started their whistle-blowing. For some economists things were written on the wall – for example E F Schumacher (with his famous book “Less is Beautiful”) advised that developing countries must find ‘an appropriate technology’ approach and localized production and delivery of service’. But the ‘appropriate’ development authorities were handcuffed by its former colonial masters. And the western infrastructure warehouses were full of stuff to send to new “independent” countries often almost gratis. The producing of outdated, conventional stuff could go on and supporting the workers at home. This approach is still in full swing. And developing countries were ever so grateful until they had to pay the full price. I know this game – when I was young, the welfare people got water and power almost gratis, e.g. pensioners like my grandmother (even a flushing toilet). But 25-30 years later, the situation changed and people started to pay real costs – and it worked quite well for a city of about the size we had, then. Of course – problems escalate logarithmically for BIG cities but my point is – lets forget about them. We are heading for SMALL cities.

Thus, we have outdated (and not appropriate) infrastructure and service delivery systems in Africa and elsewhere among developing countries - more than century old infrastructure models from densely populated European countries even in sparsely populated areas in Africa – chaos created!

When I arrived to Gaborone in early 1979, Gaborone had its own electricity plant. The delivery plant moved about 400 km north of the City. And we are losing 1/3 of its energy on the way back here and another 1/3 lost in imperfect western wiring in the consumer’s home. And now we must pay for it!

When we experience power and water on/off and blocked sewers, we mustn’t put all the blame on our utilities and its staff. The technology was wrong for a start and not appropriate – leading me to realize that the physical planning was also very wrong. But on this, I remember that Gaborone was never meant to be more than for 25-30,000 people. And then more “gaborones” needed to be built and connected with communications. To me, that had been appropriate planning!

In short – we jumped onto the wrong train a few stops from the end station. There is an immense task for planners and utilities in the close future.

There’s more to say about an African experience. We’ll see!

A Beginner's Guide To Indian Commodity Future Markets

Neeraj Mahajan & Kavaljit Singh

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Skyrocketing food prices in 2007 and 2008 sparked riots in more than 40 countries and provoked a heated debate in academic and policy circles regarding the role of commodity futures markets in aggravating food price rise. In India, too, the government banned futures trading in several agricultural commodities in 2008 to control food inflation.

The Guide explains the rapidly changing and complex world of commodity futures markets with special emphasis on the Indian markets. It connects the dots, showing how the futures markets operate in India and globally. It aims to enhance the layman’s understanding of the intricacies of commodity futures markets in a historical and theoretical context.

The Guide provides concrete examples to show how the Indian commodity futures markets are manipulated by a few big players who enrich themselves at the cost of farmers and small traders. It reveals how systemic corruption and frauds take place frequently in the Indian markets due to inherent weakness of the institutions responsible for making and enforcing regulations. In gripping detail, it describes some of the recent scandals that have shaken the public’s trust and confidence in commodity markets.

With chapters spotlighting how specific frauds were perpetuated in the Indian and global markets, the Guide provides well-documented evidence of how the commodity futures markets are moving away from their avowed objectives of price discovery and price risk management in an efficient and orderly manner. It offers specific policy recommendations to improve the regulation and supervision of commodity futures markets.

Written from a public interest perspective, the Guide attempts to engage citizens, farmers, parliamentarians, market practitioners, policymakers, academicians and journalists with an interest in the area of commodity derivatives markets in general and Indian markets in particular.

“One major obstacle to governments being held accountable for acting on financial speculation on food markets is that this area largely escapes democratic scrutiny, due to its technical nature, its specific jargon, and the fact that most experts are linked to the financial services industry. A Beginner’s Guide to Indian Commodity Future Markets aims to correct this: I welcome its publication as a tool to encourage this much-needed public debate.”

– Olivier De Schutter, Former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2008-2014)

“The Guide provides useful insights into the workings of commodity futures markets. In easily understandable language, it seeks to educate the people on how to steer clear of this dangerous financial bobby trap. It shall be of interest to anyone interested in commodity derivatives trading which has become a virtual casino.”

– Kamal Nayan Kabra, Chairman of the Forward Markets Review Committee (1993-94)

Eurasia as We Knew it is Dead

Pepe Escobar

Move over, Cold War 2.0. The real story, now and for the foreseeable future, in its myriad declinations, and of course, ruling out too many bumps in the road, is a new, integrated Eurasia forging ahead.

China’s immensely ambitious New Silk Road project will keep intersecting with the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union (EEC). And that will be the day when the EU wakes up and finds a booming trade/commerce axis stretching from St. Petersburg to Shanghai. It’s always pertinent to remember that Vladimir Putin sold a similar, and even more encompassing, vision in Germany a few years ago – stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

It will take time – and troubled times. But Eurasia’s radical face lift is inexorable. This implies an exceptionalist dream – the U.S. as Eurasia hegemon, something that still looked feasible at the turn of the millennium – fast dissolving right before anyone’s eyes.

Russia Pivots East, China Pivots West

A few sound minds in the U.S. remain essential as they fully deconstruct the negatives, pointing to the dangers of Cold War 2.0. The Carnegie Moscow Center’s Dmitri Trenin, meanwhile, is more concerned with the positives, proposing a road map for Eurasian convergence.

The Russia-China strategic partnership – from energy trade to defense and infrastructure development – will only solidify, as Russia pivots East and China pivots West. Geopolitically, this does not mean a Moscow subordinated to Beijing, but a rising symbiotic relationship, painstakingly developed in multiple stages.

The BRICs – that dirty word in Washington – already have way more global appeal, and as much influence as the outdated G-7. The BRIC New Development Bank, ready to start before the end of 2015, is a key alternative to G7-controlled mechanisms and the IMF.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is bound to include India and Pakistan at their upcoming summer summit in Russia, and Iran’s inclusion, post-sanctions as an official member, would be virtually a done deal by 2016. The SCO is finally blossoming as the key development, political/economic cooperation and security forum across Asia.

Putin’s “greater Europe” from Lisbon to Vladivostok – which would mean the EU + EEC – may be on hold while China turbo-charges the its New Silk Road in both its overland and maritime routes. Meanwhile, the Kremlin will concentrate on a parallel strategy – to use East Asian capital and technology to develop Siberia and the Russian Far East. The yuan is bound to become a reserve currency across Eurasia in the very near future, as the ruble and the yuan are about to rule for good in bilateral trade.

The German Factor

“Greater Europe” from Lisbon to Vladivostok inevitably depends on a solution to the German puzzle. German industrialists clearly see the marvels of Russia providing Germany – much more than the EU as a whole – with a privileged geopolitical and strategic channel to Asia-Pacific. However, the same does not apply as yet to German politicos. Chancellor Angela Merkel, whatever her rhetoric, keeps toeing the Washington line.

The Russian Pipelineistan strategy was already in place – via Nord Stream and South Stream – when interminable EU U-turns led Moscow to cancel South Stream and launch Turk Stream (which will, in the end, increase energy costs for the EU). The EU, in exchange, would have virtually free access to Russia’s wealth of resources, and internal market. The Ukraine disaster means the end of all these elaborate plans.

Germany is already the defacto EU conductor for this economic express train. As an export powerhouse, its only way to go is not West or South, but East. Thus, the portentous spectacle of an orchestra of salivating industrialists when Xi Jinping went to Germany in the spring of 2104. Xi proposed no less than a high-speed rail line linking the New Silk Road from Shanghai to Duisburg and Berlin.

A key point which shouldn’t be lost on Germans: a vital branch of the New Silk Road is the Trans-Siberian high-speed rail remix. So one of the yellow BRIC roads to Beijing and Shanghai boasts Moscow as a strategic pit stop.

That Empire of Chaos …

Beijing’s Go West strategy overland is blissfully free of hyperpower meddling – from the Trans-Siberian remix to the rail/road routes across the Central Asian “stans” all the way to Iran and Turkey. Moreover, Russia sees it as a symbiosis, considering a win-win as Central Asian stans jump simultaneously aboard the EEU and what Beijing dubs the Silk Road Economic Belt.

On other fronts, meanwhile, Beijing is very careful to not antagonize the U.S., the reigning hyperpower. See for instance this quite frank but also quite diplomatic interview to the Financial Times by Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang.

One key aspect of the Russia-China strategic partnership is that both identify Washington’s massively incoherent foreign policy as a prime breeder of chaos – exactly as I argue in my book Empire of Chaos.

In what applies specifically to China and Russia, it’s essentially chaos as in divide and rule. Beijing sees Washington trying to destabilize China’s periphery (Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang), and actively interfering in the South China Sea disputes. Moscow sees Washington obsessed with the infinite expansion of NATO and taking no prisoners in preventing Russia’s efforts at Eurasian integration.

Thus, the certified death of Russia’s previous geopolitical strategy. No more trying to feel included in an elite Western club such as the G-8. No more strategic partnership with NATO.

Always expert at planning well in advance, Beijing also sees how Washington’s relentless demonization of not only Putin, but Russia as a whole (as in submit or else), constitute a trial run on what might be applied against China in the near future.

Meet the Imponderables

All bets are off on how the fateful U.S.-China-Russia triangle will evolve. Arguably, it may take the following pattern: The Americans talk loud and carry an array of sticks; the Russians are not shy to talk back while silently preparing strategically for a long, difficult haul; the Chinese follow a modified “Little Helmsman” Deng Xiaoping doctrine – talk very diplomatically while no longer keeping a low profile.

Beijing’s already savvy to what Moscow has been whispering: Exceptionalist Washington – in decline or not – will never treat Beijing as an equal or respect Chinese national interests.

In the great Imponderables chapter, bets are still accepted on whether Moscow will use this serious, triple threat crisis – sanctions, oil price war, ruble devaluation – to radically apply structural game changers and launch a new strategy of economic development. Putin’s recent Q&A, although crammed with intriguing answers, still isn’t clear on this.

Other great imponderable is whether Xi, armed with soft power, charisma and lots of cash, will be able to steer, simultaneously, the tweaking of the economic model and a Go West avalanche that does not end up alienating China’s multiple potential partners in building the New Silk roads.

A final, super-imponderable is whether (or when, if ever) Brussels will decide to undertake a mutually agreed symbiosis with Russia. This, vs. its current posture of total antagonism that extends beyond geopolitical issues. Germany, under Merkel, seems to have made the choice to remain submitted to NATO, and thus, a strategic midget.

So what we have here is the makings of a Greater Asia from Shanghai to St. Petersburg – including, crucially, Tehran – instead of a Total Eurasia that extends from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Total Eurasia may be broken, at least for now. But Greater Asia is a go. There will be a tsunami of efforts by the usual suspects, to also break it up.

All this will be fascinating to watch. How will Moscow and Beijing stare down the West – politically, commercially and ideologically – without risking a war? How will they cope with so much pressure? How will they sell their strategy to great swathes of the Global South, across multiple Asian latitudes?

One battle, though, is already won. Bye, bye Zbigniew Brzezinski. Your grand chessboard hegemonic dream is over.

The Government/Corporate Debate on Encryption

Alfredo Lopez

A debate, going on in the quasi-private and well-catered halls of government-corporate collusion, has reached the post-smoldering stage. It’s now a virtual forest fire in full public view.

It pits government spies against corporate cannibals and is about the often misunderstood and somewhat tedious issue of encryption.

Like so many “raging debates” among the powerful, this one is more important to most of us not for what is being said but what is assumed.

To believe the corporate PR releases (and some media reports), the two sides are debating the balance between protecting our rights and protecting our lives. In fact, the debate is more about how to effectively manage spying: the government says it wants companies to give it the codes to crack all encryption while the companies are devising ways to make sure the government has a court order, or inter-agency collaboration, before doing that.

Nobody is saying the obvious: cracking encryption to steal data is unconstitutional and illegal and this debate is taking place at a moment when massive movements of protest are convering the streets of our cities organized through social media and cell-phone communications. In a sense, this is the fight over how they’ll cross the line we can’t let them cross.

The term “encryption” is now ubiquitous. Most of us have heard it, many understand it in principle but few know much about.

Encryption, used for a very long time in secret communications, is the substitution of the letters and numbers in a message with other letters, numbers and symbols. That substitution “scrambles” the message making it impossible to read and appearing to be nonsense. You then use a “key” that relates every letter and number you’re seeing to a real letter or number. When the key is applied, the intended message is readable.

That’s how it works in war and espionage, on radios and pieces of paper. On computers, the key that you use can be very large and the scrambling can be insanely complex and multi-tiered.

If you use encrypted email, for example, people can’t read your email without the key or without going through an enormous and lengthy process of expert decryption. Your data is not absolutely protected but it’s extremely hard to read and very time-consuming to decipher.

Most people don’t encrypt their email. In fact, gmail users will find it extremely difficult to use encryption because Google, other popular providers too, make it tough. This pleases the government because it is now collecting all data flowing across the Internet and is using powerful software to analyze that data, identify “suspect” content (applying a list of thousands of “trigger words” to the message content) and pulling data sent by individuals on their watch-lists. It’s a spy’s orgy.

Message encryption puts a damper on their party by making what the government collects unreadable and useless. So, with good reason, the NSA and other spy agencies hate it.

Their reaction has become frantic with the spread of cell-phone technology. For a very long time, cell phones, now the most popular communications technology in the world, were sold without any encryption software and, since the great majority of users don’t even think to encrypt the data they transmit, the cell was a spy’s dream come true.

The problem now, however, is that companies like Google or some of the cellphone manufacturers are becoming concerned about the mass data capture, feeling discomfort about being spied on themselves and concerned about being the subject of mass citizens’ action. The huge success of the Net Neutrality campaign, a grass roots effort that wasn’t given a chance two years ago, has had a sobering effect on much of the tech elite.

So, earlier this year, Apple began encrypting the data on its market-dominating iPhone. Soon after, other companies began doing the same, particularly those serving the Android market. It’s only a matter of time before the entire industry makes encryption automatic and this encryption requires no real user involvement: it all happens automatically between two devices and nobody else can see what’s being sent or stored.

That’s the debate. The government people, mainly the NSA, FBI and some in Congress, believe that corporations should provide the investigators with a key to crack all encryption on their cellphones and other communications devices: a kind of Internet Rosetta Stone. That would mean that all companies would use one common encryption scheme with a built-in “backdoor” so that, with the magic key, all encryption disappears. They claim they need that access to foil crimes, terrorism and all varieties of nefarious conduct.

The corporations are pushing back. “We don’t know how to build a trap door in these systems, which is only available to the good guys,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. “If we put a trap door in our system, first we would have to disclose it, because people would find out anyway, and second, some evil person, in addition to the good guys, would figure out a way to get in it. And I think the whole trust of this model is really broken.”

Instead, the companies say encryption keycodes should be withheld from the government without court order or should be “distributed” — a system under which several government agencies would each have a piece of the key code and would need a court-ordered collaboration to unlock the encryption code.

That’s the argument and it’s an important one because the NSA will soon develop regulations about cell-phone encryption and the Congress might actually start passing laws. Once that happens, the companies are going to fold.

So important is this debate that the White House has sponsored special conferences on the issue, including one at Stanford University earlier this year.

“…this is a public conversation that we should end up having,” President Obama said after that Stanford conference. “I lean probably further in the direction of strong encryption than some do inside of law enforcement. But I am sympathetic to law enforcement because I know the kind of pressure they’re under to keep us safe. And it’s not as black and white as it’s sometimes portrayed.”

That depends on what black and white you’re reading because if you read the black and white letters of the Constitution, you can easily identify the position that’s missing in this debate.

Both the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution make absolutely clear that the government cannot do mass data capture. There is no fuzziness about that in the document’s wording. Data from citizens can only be captured with a court-approved search warrant and then only when the object of the data seizure is specifically described in the warrant.

But as whistle-blower Edward Snowden and a bunch of other techies who’ve “blown the whistle” on government spying have told us, our government pays no attention to any of that. Tapping computer network and Internet connections, servers and cell-phone text and data connections, the NSA and cooperating agencies simply take everything. They gobble up every single message you send, if they can, and then sift through it to determine whether they should be storing and analyzing it. After first lying, NSA officials have now admitted that this is the case.

Privacy, the constitutional principle written to protect movements and citizen organizing (among other things), has been washed down the legal drain.

The only protection we have is to encrypt what we send and constitutionally we have an absolute right to do so. But that argument is missing in this debate.

Instead, this debate is about how companies can best protect themselves against citizens’ rage. If they require a court order for decryption of cellphones and computers, they can then turn shrug and plead helplessness when activists confront them about it. This is precisely what Google officials do when confronted about their massive turnover of data. They simply argue that the government has issued them thousands of National Security Letters — legally-binding documents that require no court action, demand information, must be obeyed and can’t even be disclosed in public.

What the companies are really saying is that they want public relations cover when they collude with government spies.

On the other hand, some companies are now arguing that the demand for decryption should come from more than one agency. They envision distributing partial keys to various agencies which would only work when those agencies put them together. This bizarre form of “protection” would easily be defeated by government agencies working together, which they already do. That doesn’t protect us; it just makes the government more efficient and coordinated in its spying on us.

The NSA and FBI position — the universal special key or “backdoor” alternative — is a horror story of even greater dimensions. It would force a uniformity in encryption code which would seem to defeat the whole idea — encryption works because it’s not uniform. But that wouldn’t matter because, if they have this key, there is no encryption.

While there is certainly crime and terror in the world, there is absolutely no evidence that any terrorist attack has been thwarted by data-capture. Terrorists know they are being watched; only the most naive would use the Internet to make their plans. As for other crimes, we have laws and law-enforcement agencies to do that work. We don’t need spying, and we certainly can’t tolerate it domestically where it is clearly in violation of the law.

But this may not be about crime and terror at all. In 2011 when activists in San Francisco planned protests over the police shooting of a handcuffed and subdued man named Charles Blair Hill in the BART subway system, BART officials simply shut off all cell phone service in several of their stations. They effectively close down the protests by doing that.

If the government can easily capture all cellphone data in this country, how much information would it have about the many protests, campaigns and actions that social justice organizers plan and lead? Put another way: Why are they debating this now, a time in which massive actions are taking place against police misconduct, the denial of water, housing and minimum wage and working conditions? All of these actions depend on the use of cell-phone communications for organizing and mobilizing. With encryption, the people who know about these plans would be the people doing the planning…and not some police or spy intent on stopping or manipulating the protests.

That’s important context that some might call over-reacting speculation. But the bottom line is that encryption is in place, in part, to prevent the government from reading what we’re writing. Activists don’t need much of an explanation about why that’s necessary. It’s written in the Constitution which, in this debate, has been shredded like an NSA memo.

Why Cuba Won’t Extradite Assata Shakur

Matt Peppe

As negotiations continue between the governments of the United States and Cuba over the normalization of relations, the U.S. State Department has claimed Cuba is willing to discuss the extradition of political refugee Assata Shakur. While it may seem that Cuba would gladly make such a seemingly minor concession in return for the promise of normalized relations, this would greatly underestimate the Cuban government’s commitment to upholding its principles. Shakur need not worry that Cuba will cave for expediency’s sake and send her back to the country she escaped from after being harassed and persecuted for years.According to The Guardian, a State Department spokesman said Cuba had agreed to discuss fugitives, including Shakur, whose original name was Joanne Chesimard. She was granted political asylum by Cuba in 1984 after escaping from prison in New Jersey five years earlier.

Shakur was convicted in 1977 of first-degree murder in the death of New Jersey Trooper Werner Foerster. Her conviction came despite the facts presented at trial that her fingerprints were not on any weapon at the scene; her hands had no gun powder residue; and she was shot twice while her arms were raised, which paralyzed her right arm and would have made it impossible to fire a gun.

The murder charge followed years of allegations against Shakur of murder, kidnapping and bank robbery. Between 1973 and 1977 Shakur was brought to criminal trial seven times: three resulted in acquittals, three were dismissed without trial, and one was declared a mistrial. Authorities were desperately throwing any charges they could at Shakur without evidence to back them up, smearing her as a domestic terrorist in an attempt to discredit her political beliefs.

As they had with other groups like Communists, Puerto Rican nationalists, Native American activists and members of the anti-war movement, the FBI targeted Shakur and other members of the Black Panthers for their political affiliations as part of the illegal COINTELPRO surveillance campaign.

In 1979, a seven member delegation from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights visited Shakur in prison and reported that of the victims of COINTELPRO “who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions … one of the worst cases is that of Assata Shakur, who spent over twenty months in solitary confinement in two separate men’s prisons subject to conditions totally unbefitting any prisoner.”

The UN delegation determined that “she has never on any occasion been punished for any infraction of prison rules which might in any way justify such cruel and unusual punishment.”

In an open letter to the Pope in 1998, Shakur wrote: “I was captured in New Jersey in 1979 after being shot with both arms held in the air, and then shot again from the back. I was left on the ground to die, and when I did not, I was taken to a local hospital where I was threatened, beaten and tortured. In 1977 I was convicted in a trial that can only be described as a legal lynching.”

The State Department represented last week that Cuba was “open to talks” about revoking her refugee status and sending her back to the U.S.

“We see the re-establishment of diplomatic relations and the reopening of an embassy in Havana as the means by which we’ll be able, more effectively, to press the Cuban government on law enforcement issues such as fugitives. And Cuba has agreed to enter into a law-enforcement dialogue with the United States to resolve these cases,” said Jeff Rathke, a State Department spokesman.

The State Department may believe that if they can get Cuban officials to sit down at the table with them, they will simply be able to bully them into handing over Shakur, who was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List two years ago.

Even though President Obama has announced his intention to remove Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (which they had been added to in 1982 at the same time Iraq was removed), the economic war against Cuba remains firmly in place. The economic sanctions, condemned nearly unanimously as illegal in the United Nations for 23 straight years, are written into laws of Congress such as the Helms-Burton Act and the Cuban Democracy Act.

American officials may assume they can use the embargo, which has cost Cuba more than $1 trillion, as leverage against Cuba to force them to extradite Shakur. Such thinking would be a foolish mistake.

While the Cuban government rightfully wishes for an immediate end to the embargo, there are principles they will not forsake to make it happen. For Cuba, the issue of refugees is a matter of sovereignty. After being a colony of Spain for hundreds of years, then a neo-colony of the United States for more than 60 years more, the value Cuba places on their sovereignty cannot be overstated. Revolutionary leaders such as Fidel and Raúl Castro were, and are, fervent nationalists.

In this context, one should view any demands that Cuba would perceive as an infringement on their sovereignty. The Guardian article states that Cuban officials did not return a call for comment, but Josephina Vidal, Cuba’s head of North American affairs, “recently ruled out any return of political refugees.”

Indeed, just five days after the December 17 announcement that the two countries intended to normalize relations, Vidal was asked specifically if returning fugitives would be on the table in negotiations.

Vidal told the Associated Press that “every nation has a sovereign and legitimate rights to grant political asylum to people it considers to have been persecuted… That’s a legitimate right.” She also said that this had been explained to the U.S. government in the past.

While its possible that this stance could have changed in the last four months, it would be a dramatic break from the words and deeds of the Cuban government since the beginning of the revolution in 1959.

Raúl Castro told the National Assembly of People’s Power in 2013 that while Cuba wants better relations with the U.S. they would not succumb to U.S. demands to change their economy.

“If we really want to move our bilateral relations forward, we’ll have to learn to respect our differences. If not, we’re ready to take another 55 years in the same situation,” he said.

The comments by Vidal and Castro could be interpreted as empty bluster, or as a way to save face while privately planning to sacrifice the principles they publicly profess. But a look at the actions of Cuban politicians and officials since the revolution show they have simply never operated this way.

Most notably, in 1974 Fidel Castro decided to send thousands of Cuban troops to Angola to protect the nascent revolutionary MPLA government from falling to the racist South African army. The South Africans had invaded Angola with a force of about 8,000 soldiers seeking to overthrow the MPLA and install a puppet government friendly to the apartheid regime.

Despite being in the midst of talks with the Ford administration about normalization of relations, Castro decided to carry out the fight against apartheid and for the liberation of Africans who had suffered centuries of colonial domination. Not getting involved in Angola may well have meant an end of the embargo and the omnipresent hostilities against Cuba. Regardless, Castro decided not to turn his back on Angola and leave the MPLA to suffer what would have been an inevitable defeat.

For 15 years, Cuba maintained a military presence in Angola to see their mission through to the end, despite the ire and hostility of successive American administrations. When Jimmy Carter assumed the Presidency he was open to relations with Cuba, but set a precondition of the removal of Cuban troops from Angola.

Historian Piero Gleijeses, author of two comprehensive books on the Cuban intervention in Southern Africa, wrote in an open letter to President Obama last year: “Castro refused to bow to Carter’s demands, which meant that he sacrificed the possibility of normalization with the United States (and the lifting of the embargo) in order to protect Angola from the apartheid regime.”

One could argue that economic conditions are considerably worse in Cuba today than they were 30 years ago, or that the right to grant asylum is not as important to Cuba as fighting apartheid was, so Cuba may not be as willing to directly defy Washington. Both arguments may be true, but in the 1970s and 80s Cuba had been badly victimized by a combination of economic warfare, subversion and terrorism. These severely damaging hostilities may have ended with an agreement with the U.S., but Cuba refused to sacrifice its principles.

Then as now, Cuba would not be intimidated by threats, interference, subversion or sabotage by any country – especially the United States. People like Chris Christie, who The Intercept described as “visibly apoplectic” when talking about Shakur, will have to learn to live with the fact that you cannot always bully someone into surrendering their rights to get what you want.

In the War Zone of Eastern Ukraine

Roger Annis

I have just returned from participating in a four-day reporting tour to the city of Donetsk and the countryside that lies between Donetsk and the Russian city of Rostov to the south and east. I was part of a media tour group organized by Europa Objektiv, an initiative of citizens in Russia and Germany working to provide information about the war in eastern Ukraine to writers and journalists.

Our tour group consisted of writers and filmmakers from Canada, the United States, Italy, Holland, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. We learned a great deal about the political, economic and social situation in the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

For me, perhaps the most important part of the tour was the insight gained into the political aspirations of the leading social and political forces of the movement for political autonomy of these regions. The most difficult part was seeing the very harsh conditions which people living close to the ceasefire demarcation line with Ukrainian armed forces are suffering.

I will be writing a series of articles about the visit in the coming days and weeks. One place where they will all be compiled and easily accessible is on my author page on the website which I help to edit: The New Cold War; Ukraine and beyond and in CounterPunch.

The following is an overview of what I will try to bring to readers.

The Political Outlook of the Novorossiya Movement and the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk

The term “separatist” or “pro-Russia separatist” is a false as well as pejorative description of the pro-autonomy movement in eastern Ukraine. This I already believed. What we learned is that the movement is not “separatist” at all. And it is pluralist. The final political outcome of the autonomy struggle in eastern Ukraine will be determined by the course of political events and a democratic process, not by a pre-determined goal, still less by assumptions by hostile outsiders.

Many people in eastern and southern Ukraine favour the creation of what they term ‘Novorossiya’, a political entity conforming to the historical arc of territory sweeping from eastern Ukraine across southern Ukraine to Odessa in the southwest. But is this to be a contiguous territory? Will it be a distinct or even independent political entity? What about future relations with Ukraine?

The one answer to these question held by everyone we encountered is that the Ukraine of oligarchs, of war and of monist Ukrainian language and culture that would discriminate against others must end. That is a precondition to future relations with or within Ukraine. Apart from that, all political options are open. For many, a decentralized and federated Ukraine would be just fine, provided it is democratic and not run by oligarchs, and provided it can live in peace with its neighbours, particularly with Russia.

Our delegation met with Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandr Kofman of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Acting Minister of Information Elena Nikitina. We also met members of the Novorossiya Parliament. I will bring you their views in my forthcoming articles.

Social and Economic Prospects

Our delegation had a meeting with the director of the finance and budget committee of the Donetsk People’s Republic. A comprehensive economic plan for the republic is in preparation. We learned there is a very strong anti-oligarch and social egalitarian determination amidst the autonomy movement in eastern Ukraine.

A nascent banking system has been established in the two republics by nationalizing the banks of the billionaire bankers, notably the Privat Bank of the rightist oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. The grocery distribution and retail systems have been nationalized, as have electricity generation and supply. Industry, notably the large metallurgical holdings of Rinat Akhmetov, has not been nationalized and it is unlikely this would or should be done in any immediate future. Akhmetov’s enterprises provide employment to thousands and they are paying taxes to the people’s republics. At the same time, the days of oligarchs dominating government (including being appointed as provincial governors) are over.

The currency situation is difficult due to Ukraine’s economic blockade. Four currencies are legal or de facto tender—the Ukrainian hryvnia, Russian ruble, Euro and U.S. dollar.

The Humanitarian Situation

Our delegation saw the two extremes of Donetsk city. In the center of the city (a very beautiful city center, located on the Kalmius River and full of green spaces, public art and attractive buildings) there is little visible war damage. Shops are reasonably full of provisions. But in the outskirts of the city, particularly near the ceasefire demarcation line, residential districts have been heavily damaged by the shellings and ground forays by Ukrainian armed forces and extremist militias. The provision of humanitarian aid is uneven. (See here maps of the demarcation lines in eastern Ukraine and a listing of the damages to the territory caused by Kyiv’s ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’.)

Due to the escalation of shelling in the past several weeks, adults and children are once again spending nights underground in dank and cramped basement shelters. We toured one neighbourhood near the shattered Donetsk airport as shells were falling a few kilometers away. The resumption of daytime shelling is new. Residents are distraught and angry. They condemn the shelling and wonder why the large countries of Europe let it happen. They expect that their most immediate needs should be met by humanitarian aid. Governing authorities as well as countless citizen volunteers and agencies, including from Russia, are working mightily to meet humanitarian needs. But the needs are many and the resources are limited.

The people old enough to remember the German Nazi invasion of World War Two (80 years of age or older) told us they cannot believe they are re-living the nightmare of their childhoods. This generation of citizens of the former Soviet Union call themselves “children of war”. I suppose they are beginning to call themselves “the elders of war”.

In a background briefing provided to our delegation in Moscow, we learned of the two reports that have been published by the Foundation for the Study of Democracy on the widespread use of torture by Ukraine forces in this war. I will devote a specific forthcoming article to this subject. (Here is the first report, issued on Dec. 24, 2014, and the second report, issued on March 1, 2015.)

Ukraine has imposed an economic blockade on Donetsk and Lugansk, including cessation of payment of old age pensions and other social benefits since last June. One piece of good news while we were in Donetsk is that the new government is in a position to assume payment of old age pensions as of April 1. We talked to elderly people lined up at the branches of the new banking system to receive their pensions. They were happy to be receiving payment, finally, but none too happy with the war that finds them in such a lineup.

Realistically, the string of killings in the streets of Kyiv recently of journalists and opposition politicians does not bode well for peace in the short term.

Personal Reflections

I have never before traveled in a war zone. (Two visits to Haiti almost qualify as a war zone, but not quite.) Our safety and personal protection were paramount in the plans of tour organizers. We never once felt endangered.

We were emotionally disturbed at times by what we were seeing and hearing. The most difficult was to see the poor and elderly people living with shelling going on around them and nowhere to go for complete safety and peace of mind.

Something I did not expect to see were the large numbers of schools, hospitals and medical centers that were damaged by shelling.

One large school we stopped to observe had every window blasted out. It was a solid building, structurally sound. A colleague commented, “They sure knew how to build solid public buildings during the Soviet era.” As I walked around the schoolyard, I began to notice large numbers of metal fragments. I bent down to look and discovered they were shards of ghastly-looking shrapnel, some the size of fingers. Shrapnel lying everywhere on a school ground? In Europe in the year 2015? It was too much, a rough end to a long day already packed with emotional reactions to things heard and seen. More than a few tears were shed as we boarded our vehicle to head back to our hotel for the night.

An Open Letter to Fidel Castro

Ron Jacobs

Greetings Comrade Fidel,

In recent days there have been a number of media outlets reporting a statement from the US State Department claiming that the Cuban government and the United States government are opening discussions concerning the potential removal of Cuba from the US State Department’s list of “terrorist” nations. Included in these news articles is the suggestion that one of the issues being discussed is the return to the United States of various US revolutionaries and radicals currently in exile in Cuba. As you are well aware, many of these individuals are in Cuba as a result of their determined militant resistance to the racist imperialism that defines the modus operandi of the US government and its military and law enforcement apparatus.

I believe I am expressing the sentiments of many US residents (and many more world citizens) when I write that I hope this statement from the US State Department is nothing more than wishful thinking on their part. There can be no amount of money, trade, or recognition that could possibly explain a betrayal by the Cuban government of its accepted understanding with exiles like Assata Shakur that would send them back to the hellholes of United States prisons. The level of compromise such an action would project can only be equated with surrender to Washington’s neoliberal capitalist monolith of war and death.

It is quite true that we live in dismal times. Those governments attempting to create some kind of social justice for the majority of their peoples find themselves constantly on the defensive. Meanwhile, supposed democratic socialists and social democrats get elected on promises suggested by the labels they campaign under only to surrender to the aforementioned neoliberal capitalist hegemon at the first opportunity. As we have seen most obviously in Ukraine, Venezuela and Brazil, well-funded and greedy defenders of the capitalist order collude and conspire with their corporate masters in world capitalist headquarters to destroy these governments and replace them with regimes loyal to capital. In what clearly ranks as a new height of audacity, these groups and individuals manipulate the media and pretend to the world that they lead popular movements and are the true representatives of their nation’s people, despite the fact of their continued inability to get elected in fair and free elections.

For many of us old and new to the struggle for a socially just world–a world that by definition opposes imperialism, most forms of capitalism and all egregious forms of capitalist accumulation, war, sexism and racism–Cuba stands as an example of a possible present and a desired future. The educational system, health care system, and the numerous other elements and programs that contribute to the overall well-being of the Cuban people serve as examples for enlightened people everywhere. The domination of our current world by the worst of the capitalist class has as its goal the destruction of such examples.

I do not have to warn you about the dangers of negotiating with Washington, DC. The only consistent truth in the history of US diplomacy, from the treaties made with various Native American peoples to the statements made in 1990 regarding the eastward expansion of NATO and beyond, is that very little of what Washington agrees to can be trusted. Reparations were promised to Vietnam after the end of US hostilities with that nation; they have never been paid. The broken treaties between Washington and Native American nations are bloodied with the corpses of Native Americans who trusted the words on the treaties only to be killed because they did so. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman made numerous promises of forty-acre land grants to the freed former slaves in the US South during and after the US Civil War. Virtually none of these promises were kept.

I could continue with examples of Washington’s deceitful dealings with numerous Latin American nations, but I believe the point is made. Cuba knows this history much better than me. I am but an observer of the US’s perfidy. Cuba is its victim and one of its most enduring opponents. Living in the belly of the beast creates a scenario that provides many means of denial. Too many former US radicals have succumbed to those means. Meanwhile, several of those who were willing to give their lives in the struggle noted above do not have the opportunity to succumb. They live out their lives in prison or exile, serving as examples of what commitment truly means. Others live in prisons of society’s making, fighting the demons of poverty, substance abuse, and the neverending hopelessness of a culture where everything has a price but nothing has any value separate from that price.

The history of Cuba ever since those long ago days in 1953 at the Moncada Barracks serves as an inspiration to the millions around the world who still believe that fighting the beast of US imperialism and capitalist injustice is a worthy fight. So do those North American revolutionaries you and your people have so graciously granted exile to. Their freedom should not be up for negotiation.

In solidarity,

Ron Jacobs