US Interior Department issues first oil drilling rules in US Arctic Seas

Gary Joad

On July 7, the Obama Interior Department issued the first US Arctic Ocean petroleum exploration drilling rules in history applying specifically to the remote Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in the Arctic Ocean’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) north and northwest of Alaska.

The government will require petroleum explorers to submit a set of advanced plans for addressing drilling and spill accidents, including having capping stacks and spill containment domes on hand, documentation for ice formation and weather forecasting capabilities, and to post a spare relief drilling platform in the vicinity of the active rig in case of a primary well blowout.

The timing of the announcement is significant. It comes under conditions where the oil industry has no immediate plans for exploration or drilling in the Arctic Ocean. It is thus largely for show, aimed at obscuring the abysmal environmental protection record of the Obama administration, the Democratic Party, and its presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

The Washington Post reported last week that Royal Dutch Shell had already announced the suspension of exploration operations in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas late last year, followed shortly by a similar announcement from Statoil, Norway’s global oil and gas giant, that it would for the present not explore offshore for sources in the Alaskan Arctic. The Post also noted that Obama’s Interior Department cancelled two drilling lease sales in the Alaskan Arctic Ocean last year for lack of interest on the part of petroleum company bidders.

As the Hill online edition noted last Thursday, “The standards...come despite the fact that no company is using offshore rigs to drill in Arctic federal waters, no company has any imminent plans to drill, and numerous companies have abandoned their drilling lease rights.” The Interior Department rules apply only to exploration, not production, loading and shipping, and only in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.

As Shell’s American media spokesman Curtis Smith remarked last week, “...it’s worth noting we still have no plans to conduct exploration activities offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future.”

Given the fall in oil prices by some 70 percent from June, 2014 the New York Times on June 2 reported that presently drilling for oil is not profitable anywhere in the United States. The Times also noted that ExxonMobile recently announced record low quarterly profits and was subsequently stripped of its AAA credit rating.

The Times also pointed out that scores of oil companies have gone bankrupt in recent years, many decommissioning a majority of their rigs, and laying off a quarter-million workers, half of them in the United States. The article also cited industry predictions that prices of over $100/barrel would not likely return soon.

The Wall Street Journal noted the muted response of the industry to Interior’s announcement, quoting Erik Milito of the American Petroleum Institute. “This is an unfortunate turn by this administration and will continue to stifle offshore oil and natural gas production.” The spokesman merely offered a mild complaint about the impact on the industry of compliance with Interior’s rules, estimated at a 10-year cost of $2 billion, a mere pittance by oil company standards.

The Obama administration issued permits to Royal Dutch Shell in August of 2012 for exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea, and despite the company’s predictions of a banner profit year, Shell sustained one setback after another, as reported by Thinkprogress.org.

Responding to the Interior’s Department’s new rules announcement, the CBD’s oceans program Director Miyoko Sakashita said, “Arctic drilling can’t be made safe, period. These rules endanger wildlife and people both, with the false hope that companies can drill in these treacherous waters without spilling. President Obama should take his cue from the history of major, destructive oil spills during his tenure and protect Alaska’s coast and our climate by halting all new offshore leases.”

Sakashita is referring of course to the administration’s series of decisions before, during and after BP’s Deepwater Horizon 2010 catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, which exploded and burned on April 20 that year, killing 11 workers and gushing some 200 million gallons of crude into the sea over the course of almost three months.

Despite this, federal agencies issued some 1,200 or more hydro-fracking permits for an estimated 631 platform wells in the Gulf of Mexico from 2010-2014. The government also permitted the dumping tens of billions of gallons of extremely toxic fracking wastewater into the Gulf and exempted some 300 of the fracking jobs from environmental impact assessments.

Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) noted that the Interior Department’s own study estimated the risk at 75 percent of a sizable and significant oil spill under the hostile climate, sea and environmental conditions present in the Arctic Ocean.

Despite efforts costing some $5 billion Shell’s drilling sites choked up with ice and sustained multiple technical failures and permit violations while finding no significant oil or natural gas. Then on New Year’s Eve, Shell’s Kulluk drilling platform ran aground near Kodiak, Alaska, “a fiasco that required a 500-plus person response effort led by the Coast Guard, working for more than a week in dangerous conditions to secure the rig.” After assessing the damage to its equipment, Shell was forced to announce February 27, 2013 that it would not drill that year in that region.

Thinkprogress reports that Shell twice lost control of its Arctic rigs, failed to receive US Coast Guard certification for its oil spill response barge, and had its spill response equipment being tested in Puget Sound “crushed like beer cans.” Shell was cited for “multiple safety and environmental violations, which the Coast Guard referred to the US Justice Department to assess for potential civil or criminal charges.”

TP also noted the lack of the most basic infrastructure in the Arctic that would be needed in case of emergencies, “such as roads, major airports, ports, hospitals, and adequate facilities to house and feed responders. The nearest permanent Coast Guard facility is more than 1,000 miles away in Kodiak, Alaska, and the United States currently operates just one functional icebreaking vessel...” TP also notes that the Alaskan Arctic is “characterized by extreme cold, extended seasons of darkness, hurricane-strength storms, and pervasive fog--all affecting access and working conditions.” Further, there are very substantial gapes in the scientific knowledge of the Arctic that would allow for the adequate preparation for safe petroleum exploration in that challenging environment.

The insurance giant Lloyd’s of London issued a caution of “unique and hard-to-manage risk(s)” to potential Arctic Ocean petroleum clients. The German bank WestLB announced in 2011 that it would refuse financing for Arctic seas exploration, saying “the risks and cost are simply too high.” The French oil and gas giant Total SA, the fifth largest in the world, announced it would not bid for leases because an accident would be a “disaster.”

UK parliamentary debate buries Iraq War inquiry

Robert Stevens

The report by Sir John Chilcot into the 2013 Iraq War begins by stating, “In 2003, for the first time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom took part in an opposed invasion and full‑scale occupation of a sovereign State – Iraq.”

But no consequences are intended to flow from this criminal act. The inquiry was given no legal powers by the then Labour government of Gordon Brown who commissioned it seven long years ago.

The World Socialist Web Site noted that the report was damning and provided a “devastating confirmation of the illegal character of the war and the criminal role of those officials, both British and American, who organized and led it”—above all then Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, US President George W. Bush and their inner circles.

On the release of the 2.6 million-word report just 10 days ago, MPs were unable to respond immediately as they were only given access to it three hours earlier. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said that, given its importance, he would make provision for two full days of debate in parliament the following week.

In the event, this week’s parliamentary debate demonstrated that the ruling elite have no intention of allowing the war’s architects to be brought to justice. The vast majority of parliament’s 650 MPs responded with a big “So what?” as they absented themselves from the debate. On the first day, only 40 to 50 MPs bothered to show up, with sometimes as few as 15 to 20 MPs present for day two. In the course of the entire two days only around 50 MPs spoke.

It was not until the end of the second day that front bench members of both parties were even obliged to speak in order to make “wind-up speeches.” Neither newly appointed Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, nor, more significantly, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn participated. The media took the same approach. No national newspaper, including the Guardian, produced a full report of the two-day debate . With the exceptions of MPs from the Scottish National Party (SNP) and a few others, who made vague calls for Blair to be called to account, the debate consisted largely of MPs defending the actions of the Labour government and the Tory opposition who backed them in voting for war.

When 81-year-old Labour MP Paul Flynn spoke in the Business of the House session that proceeded day two, he said, “Chilcot has given its verdict. It is a thunderous verdict of guilty not just for one man but for this House, the previous Government, the Opposition and three Select Committees. We are guilty, and are judged guilty, of commanding our valiant troops to fight a vain, avoidable war…”

In response, other Labour MPs present walked out in protest.

During the debate, MPs stressed again and again that the main “lesson” from the Chilcot report was that it should not be used to prevent British troops being sent to war again. Labour MP Margaret Beckett, a Blair government Cabinet member who voted for the Iraq War and consistently voted against any inquiry into the war, complained of how the “public are being given the impression…that the intelligence services and the then Prime Minister knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction and deliberately misled the House. That is not true and was never true.”

Labour MP Hilary Benn is another supporter of the Iraq war who is playing a leading role in the ongoing right-wing coup to remove his party leader, Corbyn. Last December, Benn led 60 Labour MPs, in support of the Conservative government, to vote for bombing in Syria after they were allowed a free vote to do so by Corbyn.

Benn warned that the Chilcot report must not be used to prevent Britain going to war in further imperialist adventures. Citing the United Nations Responsibility to Protect, he said, “That principle says that state sovereignty is not absolute and the international community has a responsibility to act in certain circumstances.”

The debate was summed up for Labour by its Shadow Defence Secretary, Corbyn appointee Clive Lewis. Lewis graduated as an infantry officer from the elite Sandhurst Military Academy in 2006 and in 2009 was sent to Afghanistan for three months. With unintended irony, he described the debate as being “in the very highest and noblest traditions of our country... One can tell how good a debate has been when Members find themselves nodding vigorously, no matter from which side of the House the points are being made. I think that that has happened quite a lot over the past two days.”

Lewis was careful to praise the contributions of Beckett and Benn in the debate. He too used the occasion to insist that Chilcot’s criticism of the Iraq war must not act as an impediment to the predatory aims of British imperialism. Speaking in praise of a Tory MP who had similar “anxieties,” he stated that a “holistic approach to defence in both soft and hard power” was required and warned, “that the continual budget cuts to the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] undermine our ability not just to respond to global security threats, but to pre-empt them.”

“I am not a pacifist,” he stressed. All that was required in future was “the highest standard of proof for taking our country to war.”

The Chilcot report has served its purpose for the ruling elite, who always intended it as the basis for them to finally wash their hands of Iraq and move on.

This is underscored by the fact that the government is refusing to release confidential advice senior officials gave to Gordon Brown about the remit of the Chilcot’s inquiry, explaining why Chilcot was unable to rule on whether the 2003 war was illegal. The advice is being withheld despite an information tribunal ruling ordering its release. Despite this, Chilcot stated that the legal case for UK military action was “far from satisfactory.”

Nothing was heard of the declared plan of Tory MP David Davis, backed by the SNP’s Alex Salmond, to present a motion to parliament accusing Blair of misleading and being in contempt of parliament. This motion was supposed to have been presented to Parliament’s Speaker, John Bercow, on Thursday. However, Davis made no mention of the motion in his contribution to the debate the previous day.

Even if the motion is presented, it must first be accepted by the Speaker for it to be debated in parliament before the summer recess on July 22.

For his part, Corbyn has refused to call Blair a war criminal or even to expel him from the party. He has said only that he would “probably” support Davis’s motion. If such a motion were debated, most of Corbyn’s party would oppose any attempt to hold Blair to account. Emily Thornberry, Corbyn’s shadow foreign secretary and a “human rights” lawyer, said in the debate that any action against Blair would turn parliament into a “kangaroo court.”

In bid to save proxy forces in Syria, US discusses pact with Russia

Thomas Gaist

United States Secretary of State John Kerry met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow Thursday evening for discussions over a US-Russian military pact in relation to Syria. The pact had been proposed by the Obama administration in early July.

The Obama administration is, in words at least, holding out the offer of a common front against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. The White House proposal includes the establishment of a joint US-Russian command center, located in the US-allied Kingdom of Jordan, which would run “integrated operations,” supposedly coordinating military and intelligence operations in Syria.

Since Russia launched its bombing campaign in Syria in September 2015, Washington has accused it of focusing on the so-called moderate opposition, elements armed and funded by the CIA and US regional allies, who are in most cases in alliance with the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate and encamped directly alongside it. Moscow’s repeated requests for the Pentagon to provide coordinates for the so-called moderates so that it could avoid striking them have until now invariably been rejectedIn exchange for the proposed American collaboration, Russia would scale back its bombing campaign, insist that Assad end most operations by the Syrian Air Force and accept a military cooperation agreement that would give Washington some degree of control over the targeting of Russian strikes.

In comments to media, the two, Kerry and the Russian president, issued dubious assurances that an agreement, in some form, is at hand. Putin expressed “hope” that “progress” and “possible headway” would emerge from the talks.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to make some genuine progress that is measurable and implementable and that can make a difference in the course of events in Syria,” Secretary Kerry said.

Whatever promises are made by the White House, it is impossible to believe that the US will engage in a serious joint bombardment with Russia against Al Nusra. Such a campaign would devastate the leading anti-Assad formation, closing the book on the insurgency fomented against Damascus by Washington.

According to Faisal Itani of the Atlantic Council, “combined attacks against Nusra would effectively end the Syrian opposition, cementing Mr. Assad’s grip on power.”

The Nusra group has functioned as an instrument of the US war plan since the beginning of the imperialist-orchestrated insurgency in 2011. Al Nusra has emerged as “one of the most effective anti-Assad forces,” and the proposed deal would “bring American firepower to bear against the strongest anti-Assad military force and a sometime partner of Washington’s allies,” the New York Times reported on Friday.

The White House proposals represent a tactical maneuver, aimed at salvaging the remnants of the anti-Assad forces, the backbone of which is composed of ISIS and the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra fighters.

Nonetheless, the fact that the Obama administration has offered such a deal is significant in itself, powerfully underscoring the disastrous position of the American-backed forces on the ground. The Russian-backed Syrian military is tightening the noose around the American-backed opposition forces, and Syrian Army units are encircling opposition militias inside the key city of Aleppo, trapping hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process.

A US-Russian coordination pact would enable Washington to manage and constrain the Russian air campaign, in a last-ditch effort to preserve some portion of the opposition until after the upcoming 2016 US elections. Once the political hurdle of the election has passed, a newly installed presidential administration will have a free hand to escalate the war, renewing the push against Damascus through fresh deployments of US ground troops and an intensified air campaign.

Whatever the twists and turns in its short-term policy, the American ruling class will never willingly accept the re-stabilization of the Assad government or indeed the consolidation of any Russian-aligned regime in Damascus, which Washington views as an obstacle to US hegemony in the Middle East.

Factions of the US elite clearly remain committed to the violent overthrow of Assad, and deeply hostile to any compromise with the Putin government. As the Times noted Friday, the Obama plan “has generated deep unease at the Pentagon and in some quarters of the State Department.”

Incomes declining or stagnant for the vast majority in “rich” countries

Gabriel Black

A significant majority of the population in 25 of the world’s most advanced countries experienced declining or stagnating incomes between 2005 and 2014, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report released this month.

An estimated 540 million to 580 million people, 65 to 70 percent of the population of those countries, had real incomes that were flat or fell during this period. These countries, whose total population is 800 million, account for half of the world’s economic output.

Never before in the post-World War II period has such a large section of workers in the advanced capitalist countries faced such a decline or stagnation in income. In contrast, during the period between 1993 and 2005, the study estimates that only 2 percent of the population in the same countries experienced similar conditions.

The authors of the study are clearly concerned about the political impact of this unprecedented change, particularly on the new generation of the working class. Hence the study’s title: “Poorer than their Parents: Flat or Falling Incomes in Advanced Economies.”

The study points out that the sharp decline in wage and salary income was only partly offset by government transfer payments, with the result that some 20 percent of the population in the countries studied saw an actual decline in real income during the decade ending in 2014. The mechanisms varied from country to country, from the Swedish welfare state spending to the extended unemployment benefits and food stamps provided in the United States, although these have largely expired.

The study warns that declining economic growth makes the continuation of such transfer payments increasingly problematic: “Over time, declining earning power for large swaths of the population could limit demand growth in economies and increase the need for social spending and transfer payments, even as tax receipts from workers with stagnating incomes limit capacity to fund such programs. The impact could be more than purely economic, however, if the disconnect between GDP growth and income growth persists.”

In the cautious bureaucratic jargon of the McKinsey researchers, “more than purely economic” carries a freight load of meaning: it signifies the recognition by this business think tank that the deterioration of working-class living standards has revolutionary implications.

The McKinsey study examines dramatic changes in the social standing of broad swathes of the population which undergird the growing social crisis worldwide. The reports’ authors make warnings for their policy-maker and business-leader readership. They write, “Without a return to much stronger GDP growth in advanced economies—and potentially even if GDP growth were to accelerate—the trend will likely persist, as a result of deep shifts in demographics and labor markets.” They conclude that “not advancing” could have “corrosive social and economic consequences.”

The report warns that this sharp reversal for the vast majority of the population will only deepen if current economic trends continue. Should the rate of economic growth fail to increase, McKinsey predicts that 70 to 80 percent of the population in the same countries, the bottom 7 to 8 deciles of income earners, will be worse off or the same as they are now in a decade. Even if economic growth returns to its rate prior to 2008, up to 40 percent of the population in advanced countries will be worse off or the same in 2025.

The researchers at McKinsey based their findings on a detailed study of six countries: the United States, Sweden, the UK, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, then projected the results over 25 countries. In contrast to researchers such as Thomas Piketty, who have focused on income inequality, the authors tracked the earnings of income brackets over time. For example, they traced if the bottom five percent of earners had a lower or higher average income between 2005 and 2014. Using this data they then projected it onto 19 countries at similar levels of economic development.

In four of the six countries that formed the basis of the study, 70 percent or more of the population had lost income or remained stagnant. In Italy, wracked by economic crisis, 97 percent of the country lost income. In the United States, 81 percent lost income or stayed the same.

Together, the six countries saw an average five percent decline in the share of their national GDP that went to wage workers (in Britain, the decline was sharpest, at 13 percent). The report highlights that the workers’ share of GDP declined despite growing labor productivity, which has traditionally led to income gains.

The lowest decile of income earners in several countries experienced the sharpest decline in their living standards. In France, the bottom decile of earners lost 20 percent of its income during this period. Italy had about the same rate. In Sweden, despite faring better than the other countries more generally, the lowest decile of the country made 15 percent less than they did in 2005.

In France, Italy and the United States, the researchers had more detailed data that allowed them to track the difference in income changes for different generations. They concluded that in these three countries “less-educated workers, and especially younger ones, have been most affected.” The recession and “weak recovery in some of the countries have led to persistently high levels of youth unemployment, preventing young people across advanced economies from launching careers.”

In the United States, the only section of the population that did not lose or stagnate in income level was the upper-middle class, the 80th to 95th percentile of the population, which made significant gains. (The figure for the top 5 percent showed a drop, but this is likely a statistical anomaly, tied to decisions to hold onto stock portfolios rather than sell them, which would be necessary to record the whopping capital gains delivered by the soaring stock market).

The McKinsey report is one of a series of recent studies depicting record inequality and stagnating or deteriorating living standards for the broad mass of society. It reflects the deep blows the ruling class has struck against workers, of all backgrounds and nationalities, in the past eight years.

In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis global economic growth slowed considerably. The International Monetary Fund and other leading global financial bodies warned that the world had entered into a period of unprecedented stagnation in which traditional forms of macro-economic stimulus, namely cheap credit and quantitative easing, were no longer effective. The leading capitalist countries continue to provide some of the lowest interest rates in history to the major banks and corporations. Far from improving conditions for working people, or returning the economy to pre-crisis conditions of investment and growth, the cheap-interest rate regime has led to a new gigantic bubble which dwarfs 2008. When this bursts, corporations will not just be at risk but governments too, who have taken on considerable debts to keep the system afloat.

Throughout this process the ruling class has pushed “structural reform” as their banner. Structural reform means, in plain English, taking away the retirement, benefits, wages, and health care that working people rely on to survive. Many companies, such as the American auto manufacturers, have been able to wrestle billions in new profits from this. However, the attacks have not gone far enough to restore these companies, and the banks they answer to, to pre-2008 growth. They also have the contradictory effect of destroying the consumer demand necessary for expansion, exacerbating the economy’s reliance on credit and further inhibiting production growth.

Military faction attempts coup in Turkey

James Cogan

A faction of the Turkish military is attempting to carry out an overnight coup and oust the government headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Fighting between rival military and police units has been reported in both Istanbul, the country’s economic centre, and Ankara, the political capital. At least 42 people are dead and an estimated 1,000 wounded. State news agencies are reporting that more than 750 people have been arrested.

The coup instigators, who appear to represent a wing of the military and state apparatus that has been sidelined by Erdogan and fears being marginalised even further, declared in a statement that their actions were seeking to “reinstate constitutional order, human rights and freedoms, the rule of law and the general security that was damaged.” Erdogan, who was on holiday at a Black Sea resort, used a FaceTime video call to a live news broadcast on CNN Turkey to denounce the putsch and call for “people to gather in squares and airports” to defend his government.

A WSWS correspondent reported that, in the working class suburbs of Istanbul, “thousands of people are in the streets” in opposition to the coup and that he could hear jets in the air and gunfire nearby. Near Ankara, Turkish air force F-16 jet fighters shot down a helicopter operating in support of the attempted putsch. The Turkish parliament building in Ankara has been bombed by the rebels.

It appears, at this point, that the coup is failing. It has been opposed by a large section of the armed forces, the main Turkish business federation, and, most significantly, by the Obama administration, which issued a statement in Washington in support of the Erdogan government. Army units backing the coup are reportedly withdrawing from the streets, while pro-government forces have retaken control of the main state television broadcaster, TRT.

Regardless of whether the coup is crushed quickly, or Turkey is plunged into a more protracted civil war, the unfolding events are testimony to the generalised breakdown taking place internationally in the political institutions and mechanisms of bourgeois rule. Country after country is descending into turmoil under the impact of the intractable global economic crisis, historic levels of social inequality and the devastating consequences of the military agenda of US imperialism and its allies to dominate the oil-rich Middle East and undermine Russian and Chinese influence in every part of the world.

The coup in Turkey is taking place in the context of the fall-out from the “Leave” vote in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and a political crisis in the United States over police killings and the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican Party's presidential nomination. It follows the extension of emergency rule in France, an accelerating drive by NATO toward military confrontation with Russia and immense tensions in Asia, after an international court ruling that China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea are invalid. There is no question that the uncertainty produced by global instability plays a major role in what appear to be the reckless, even desperate, actions being taken in ruling circles around the world—including the calculation by a faction of the Turkish military that the only way to stabilise bourgeois rule in the country was to overthrow Erdogan’s regime.

Erdogan’s Islamist-based Justice and Development Party (AKP) has held government since 2002. It has presided over a massive economic expansion based on the deregulation and opening up of the country and its labour force as a base for low-cost production for transnational corporations. The capitalist elite has enriched itself enormously, with the top 1 percent of the population increasing its share of national wealth from 39 percent in 2002 to 54 percent by 2015. The working-class and rural poor, however, have seen their living standards decimated. Even official statistics show that 22.4 percent of Turkish households earn less than the poverty line of $1,626 a month. Unemployment stands at 10.8 percent, or some three million people, while another three million workers have left the country to seek jobs in other areas of Europe.

At the same time as social contradictions have grown, Turkey has been profoundly destabilised by the collaboration of Erdogan and the AKP with the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and their central role in supporting the US-led civil war in Syria against the Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad by Islamist militias, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 

The Syrian war has become a debacle for the Turkish ruling elite. Thousands of Islamist militants have used the country as a transit point to join the fighting against Assad, while millions of people displaced by the carnage have flooded over the borders from Syria seeking refuge. In neighbouring Iraq, ISIS used the manpower and weaponry it gained with Turkish assistance to attack the pro-US government in 2014, prompting Washington to launch a war against the very Islamists it had been arming and to demand Turkish support. Russia’s intervention to shore up the Assad regime has led to open military clashes, with the Turkish air force shooting down a Russian aircraft, posing the prospect of all-out war between Ankara and Moscow.

From Ankara’s standpoint, the greatest concern about developments in Iraq has been that the Kurdish regional authorities have utilised the crisis to vastly expand their territory, occupying the oil-rich Kirkuk region and giving aid to Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, who have carved out a de-facto autonomous region on Turkey’s border.

To divert internal social tensions and pre-empt renewed unrest among Turkey’s Kurds, Erdogan has carried out a brutal crackdown on Kurdish-based political parties and the Kurdish population as a whole. Adding to the instability, ISIS, which had legitimately viewed Erdogan as a tacit ally, has retaliated against what it views as a betrayal, by calling on its supporters to conduct terrorist attacks inside Turkey. Economic growth in the country has slowed dramatically, under the impact of the global slump and political uncertainty, and is expected to decline even further over the coming year.

The attempted overnight coup by sections of the Turkish military will only raise the intensity of already explosive social and class antagonisms to fever-pitch. The critical question, amid the crises and bloody infighting within the capitalist class, is the intervention of the working class to assert its own independent interests. In Turkey, as in every country around the world, what is paramount is the unity of workers of all ethnic and religious backgrounds in the fight for a socialist and internationalist solution to the failure of capitalism.

US releases Saudi documents: 9/11 coverup exposed

Bill Van Auken

The public release Friday afternoon of a section of the Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks, which had been kept secret for 13 years, has provided fresh evidence of a deliberate coverup of the role played, not only by the Saudi government, but US intelligence agencies themselves, in facilitating the attacks and then covering up their real roots.

The 28-page segment from the report issued by the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” provides abundant and damning evidence of extensive Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers—15 out of 19 of whom were Saudi nationals—in the period leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

The Obama White House, the CIA, the Saudi monarchy and the corporate media have all tried to portray the documents—released on a Friday afternoon to assure minimal exposure—as somehow exonerating the Saudi regime of any culpability in the 9/11 attacks.

“This information does not change the assessment of the US government that there’s no evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi individuals funded al-Qaeda,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary said Friday, boasting that the main significance of their release was its proof of the Obama administration’s commitment to “transparency.”

In reality, the 28 pages have been kept under lock and key since 2002, with only members of Congress allowed to read them, in a Capitol Hill basement vault, while prohibited from taking notes, bringing members of their staff or breathing a word of their content.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, maintained this secrecy for several reasons. First, it was concerned that the documents would jeopardize its relations with Saudi Arabia, which, after Israel, is Washington’s closest ally in the Middle East, a partner in bloody operations from Afghanistan to Syria to Yemen, and the world’s biggest buyer of American arms.

Even more importantly, it was concerned that the 28 pages would further expose the abject criminality of the US government’s role in facilitating the attacks of 9/11 and then lying about their source and exploiting them to justify savage wars of aggression, first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq. These wars have claimed over a million lives. The false narrative created around the September 11 attacks remains the ideological pillar of the US campaign of global militarism conducted in the name of a “war on terror.”

Media reports on the 28 pages invariably refer to the absence of a “smoking gun,” which presumably would be tantamount to an order signed by the Saudi king to attack New York and Washington. The evidence is described as “inconclusive.” One can only imagine what would have been the response if, in place of the word “Saudi,” the documents referred to Iraqi, Syrian or Iranian actions. The same evidence would have been proclaimed an airtight case for war.

Among those who were involved in preparing the report, John Lehman, the former secretary of the navy, directly contradicted the official response to the release of the previously censored section. “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he said. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”

Similarly, former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who chaired the committee that carried out the investigation, suggested that the information released Friday was only the beginning. “I think of this almost as the 28 pages are sort of the cork in the wine bottle. And once it’s out, hopefully the rest of the wine itself will start to pour out,” he said.

What clearly emerges from the newly-released document, which is titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters,” is that there were multiple indications of funding and support for the 9/11 hijackers and Al Qaeda in general, but that investigations were either shut down or never initiated because of the close ties between Washington and the Saudi monarchy, and between US and Saudi intelligence.

“While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi government,” the document begins. It cites FBI sources as indicating that some of these individuals were “Saudi intelligence officers.”

It goes on to indicate that FBI and CIA investigations of these links were initiated solely in response to the Congressional inquiry itself. “[I]t was only after September 11 that the US government began to aggressively investigate this issue,” the report states. “Prior to September 11th, the FBI apparently did not focus investigative sources on [redacted] Saudi nationals in the United States due to Saudi Arabia’s status as an American ‘ally.’”

The report focuses in part on the role of one Omar al-Bayoumi, who was described to the FBI as a Saudi intelligence officer, and, according to FBI files, “provided substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi after they arrived in San Diego in February 2000.”

The inquiry report deals with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar only from after they arrived in California, and says nothing about the circumstances under which they were allowed to enter the country in the first place. Both were under CIA surveillance while attending an Al Qaeda planning meeting in 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and placed on a “watch list” for FBI monitoring if they came to the United States. Nonetheless, the two men were allowed to enter the United States on January 15, 2000, landing at Los Angeles International Airport, eventually going to San Diego. From then on, they were permitted to operate freely, attending flight training school in preparation for their role as pilots of hijacked planes on September 11, 2001.

Al-Bayoumi, the report establishes, “received support from a Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense,” drawing a paycheck for a no-show job. The report states that the company also had ties to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

According to the report, al-Bayoumi had previously worked for the Saudi Civil Aviation Association and, in the period leading up to 9/11, was “in frequent contact with the Emir at the Saudi Defense Ministry responsible for air traffic control.” Phone records showed him calling Saudi government agencies 100 times between January and May of 2000.

FBI documents also established that the $465 in “allowances” that al-Bayoumi received through the Saudi military contractor, jumped to over $3,700 shortly after the arrival of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. During this period, al-Bayoumi initially allowed the two future hijackers to stay in his apartment before finding them their own place—with an informant of the San Diego FBI—cosigning their lease and advancing them a deposit and the first month’s rent.

The report states that FBI investigations following 9/11 indicated that al-Bayoumi had “some ties to terrorist elements.” His wife, meanwhile, was receiving a $1,200 a month stipend from Princess Haifa Bint Sultan, the wife of Prince Bandar, then the Saudi ambassador to the US and later head of Saudi intelligence.

Also named in the document as a likely Saudi intelligence agent is one Osama Bassnan, who lived across the street from the two hijackers in San Diego and was in telephone contact with al-Bayoumi several times a day during this period. He apparently placed the two in contact with a Saudi commercial airline pilot for discussions on “learning to fly Boeing jet aircraft,” according to an FBI report. Bassnan’s wife also received a monthly stipend from Princess Haifa, the Saudi ambassador’s wife, to the tune of $2,000 a month. As well, the FBI found one $15,000 check written by Bandar himself in 1998 to Bassnan. The report states that FBI information indicated that Bassnan was “an extremist and supporter of Usama Bin Ladin,” who spoke of the Al Qaeda leader “as if he were god.”

Appearing before the Congressional inquiry in October 2002, FBI Executive Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Pasquale D’Amuro reacted with undisguised cynicism and contempt when asked about the payments from the Saudi ambassador’s wife to the wives of the two reputed intelligence agents involved with the 9/11 hijackers.

“She gives money to a lot of different groups and people from around the world,” he said. “We’ve been able to uncover a number of these... but maybe if we can discover that she gives to 20 different radical groups, well, gee, maybe there’s a pattern here.” Spoken like a man who believes he is above the law in defense of a figure that he clearly sees as untouchable.

Among other material in the report was the recounting of an FBI interrogation of Saleh al-Hussayen, a prominent Saudi interior ministry official, who stayed in the same Virginia hotel as three of the hijackers the night before the 9/11 attacks. While he claimed not to know the hijackers, the FBI agents “believed he was being deceptive.”

According to the report, al-Hussayen “feigned a seizure” and was released to a hospital, which he left several days later, catching a flight back to Saudi Arabia without any further questioning. During the same period, nearly 1,200 people, with no links to the attacks, were being rounded up and held incommunicado on little more evidence than that they were Arab or Muslim.

Also in the report was the fact that a phone book belonging to Abu Zubaydah, the Al Qaeda operative who is still held at Guantanamo after extensive torture at the hands of the CIA, was found to contain the unlisted numbers of companies that managed and provide security for Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar’s residence in Colorado, as well as that of a bodyguard at the Saudi embassy who, the report states “some have alleged may be a [words redacted].”

Redactions of this sort recur throughout the document in relation to individual Saudis, suggesting their membership in some sort of secret service whose name must remain unmentioned. This is only part of what the secret material still conceals. Members of the inquiry’s staff reportedly protested angrily over the failure to clearly present the evidence of Saudi involvement, leading to the firing of at least one staffer.

If the government is determined to continue to shield such Saudi connections, it is undoubtedly because they would expose the involvement of the US intelligence agencies themselves in the events of 9/11.

If such whitewashes are required, it is because elements within the US government were aware that Al Qaeda was preparing an operation on US soil, turned a blind eye to it and even facilitated it because they knew it could be used as a pretext to carry out longstanding plans for aggressive war in the Middle East.

The release of even the limited material on the Saudi-US-9/11 connection is a devastating exposure of the criminals in the US government, from George W. Bush on down, and the lies they employed to engineer wars that have devastated the lives of millions.

These new facts demand a thorough, impartial and international investigation, as well as the indictment and arrest of top level officials, both American and Saudi. Only a powerful intervention of the international working class, on the basis of a socialist program, will see these war criminals brought to justice.

UK: Children referred for “deradicalisation” under “anti-terrorist” strategy

Tom Pearce

Figures published this week by the National Police Chiefs’ Council reveal that in 2015, 3,994 people in Britain were referred under the Conservative government’s counterterrorism “Prevent Strategy” to the Channel programme. Channels’ remit is to protect “vulnerable people from being drawn into terrorism.”

Of the nearly 4,000 people referred, 1,319 of these came from the education sector.

The figures follow those reported by the Times that since July 2015, 1,041 schoolchildren have been referred for “deradicalisation” to the “Channel” programme. This equates to more than five children per day being referred in England and Wales.

This is the outcome of teachers being forced to implement the Prevent Strategy. The £40 million programme was first introduced as a result of the 2005 London terrorist bombings.

Ostensibly aimed at countering the supposed threat of religious radicalisation, it centred on monitoring “vulnerable” Muslims who could be radicalised. There has been widespread criticism in the teaching profession that by targeting the Muslim community, government policy has alienated them, while creating wider anti-Muslim sentiment.

Sky News reported, based on a response to its Freedom of Information request, that in September 2015 “the number of under-18s referred was 133, of whom 43 were recorded as Muslim, and there were 99 under-16s, of whom 29 were Muslim; In October the number of under-18s referred was up to 216, of whom 79 were Muslim, and there were 160 under-16s, of whom 65 were Muslim; in November the number of under-18s referred reached 378, of whom 117 were Muslim, and the number of under-16s was 298, of whom 95 were Muslim.”

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government reviewed the Prevent Strategy in 2011. In a foreword, Home Secretary Theresa May, who is now the Conservative prime minister, justified the policy, stating, “Intelligence indicates that a terrorist attack in our country is ‘highly likely’. Experience tells us that the threat comes not just from foreign nationals but also from terrorists born and bred in Britain.”

In 2014, the Prevent Strategy led to the introduction of “British values” in the school curriculum. The Ofsted inspection criteria for judging schools also entrenches these values for all British citizens to follow. This includes the promotion of British “democracy” and the “rule of law,” under conditions in which civil liberties are under a sustained offensive.

The parliamentary undersecretary of state for schools, Lord Nash, claimed the policy was to “tighten up the standards on pupil welfare to improve safeguarding, and the standards on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils to strengthen the barriers to extremism.”

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 added “prevent duty” to the responsibility of schools, colleges and universities. It states, “The Prevent duty [is] to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.”

Since July 2015, teachers have been legally obliged to report any suspected extremist behaviour to police. This has turned teachers into a spying agency for the authorities with children as young as four being referred to police, leading to great unease among teachers.

Some students are afraid to discuss any issue that may compromise themselves to authorities and this has had a detrimental effect on their relationships with teachers and schools. As a result, in March 2016, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) voted to reject the UK government’s “prevent duty.”

In combination with schools, “prevent duty” has also been rolled out across society in hospitals, universities and other public sector settings nationwide. Since the start of the 2015 academic year, increasing numbers of youth have been questioned over their religion, political affiliation and actions.

Basic democratic rights, including freedom of speech, are being eroded as referrals have increased in the past year, rising month on month. There have been 6,306 referrals of young people since 2007, but a quarter were made in the last year alone. The figure currently stands at 577 for under-18s, with no limit on how young the child may be.

Political views expressed by youth are also being suppressed. In February, Rahmaan Mohammadi was questioned by antiterrorism police at home when he was 16 because he wore a “Free Palestine” badge to his school in Luton. He had also asked for permission to fund raise for children affected by the Israeli occupation. According to reports, the youth said police warned him not to talk about Palestine in school, and that staff members had approached his 14-year-old brother and pressured him to tell Rahmaan to “stop being radical.”

In another case, revealed in January, police quizzed a 10-year-old Muslim boy after he mistakenly wrote that he lived in a “terrorist house”, rather than a “terraced house.”

The BBC reported that the boy’s family were left shocked by the incident and demanded an apology from both the school and police. The boy’s cousin said, “You can imagine it happening to a 30-year-old man, but not to a young child. If the teacher had any concerns it should have been about his spelling. They shouldn’t be putting a child through this. He’s now scared of writing, using his imagination.”

In other examples, a 15-year-old boy was referred to police after clicking on the UK Independence Party web site in the classroom to research immigration. A student who mentioned “eco-terrorism” when discussing the environment in a geography lesson was talked to alone by members of staff at another school.

When the policy was first introduced into schools, there was no resistance from teaching unions to the idea that teachers would have to report their own students to the police if necessary.

In contrast, teachers have been opposed to the policy, and at the NUT conference in March, delegates voted to reject the Prevent Strategy over concerns that it causes “suspicion in the classroom and confusion in the staffroom.” One of the delegates said the Prevent training given to many teachers was “crude and often involves loads of stereotypes.”

Across the UK, teachers have experienced training from a wide range of organizations as part of implementing Prevent. One teacher delegate said that the senior leader who led the training was clearly uncomfortable, and that staff were shocked by what they were being asked to do in the name of safeguarding children in their care.

In a statement after the conference, Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, only called for a “a review of the strategy”, adding, “The NUT is calling on the government to involve the profession in developing alternative strategies to safeguard children and identify risks posed to young people.”

Likewise, in May, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn called on the government to reform the Prevent Strategy. This was after Europe’s human rights watchdog urged the government to engage with Muslim communities and warned that elements of Prevent contributed to the spread of “extremism.” Corbyn did not call for the scrapping of Prevent, instead reassuring the powers that be, “We will of course support strong measures to give the police and security the services and resources they need but we will also support checks and balances to ensure powers are used appropriately.”

As well as fostering divisions among workers and youth, the repression of freedom of speech and democratic rights via Prevent is bound up with the suppression of opposition to the government’s entire reactionary agenda. This is critical for the ruling elite as they seek to impose even greater attacks on living standards, and slash the right to health, education and housing.

Unicef report reveals 250 million children are victims of war

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The new “Unicef report, 2016—Assisting Refugee Children,” detailing the fate of children in war zones and those forced to flee, was released at the beginning of this month. It describes the horrific consequences, for children and young people around the world, of wars and civil wars lasting years and even decades.

According to estimates made by Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency founded 70 years ago, there have not been so many children suffering the consequences of conflicts, crises and natural catastrophes since the Second World War. The report points out that some 250 million girls and boys, one in nine children, are forced to grow up in conflict zones.

Even more children are threatened by natural disasters such as droughts, floods and epidemics. The extent and impact of these catastrophes is intensified by a lack of infrastructure, health care and effective assistance measures.

Conflict zones refer to countries and regions that have been destroyed by war or civil war, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and others that have been exposed to persistent military clashes. During 2015 alone, 16 million babies were born in conflict regions.

The Unicef report documents several facts about children in these conflict regions:

* Globally, 75 million children between the ages of three and 18 cannot attend a kindergarten or school, or learn only irregularly, due to ongoing crises or catastrophes.

* An average of four schools or hospitals become targets of armed attacks every day. In Afghanistan, 164 attacks on schools were registered in 2014, along with 67 in Iraq. In Nigeria, the terrorist group Boko Haram has destroyed more than 1,200 schools since the beginning of its insurgency, and murdered over 600 teachers.

* During 2015, Unicef registered 1,500 severe violations of the rights of children in Syria, and this was only the tip of the iceberg. In 60 percent of cases, children were killed or injured by bombs in densely populated residential areas. One-third of all victims were killed on the way to school.

* Many children in war zones have been unable to attend school for years, because their schools have been destroyed, the route to school is too dangerous, or there has been a lack of money for books and pens. In Syria and the surrounding region, only one-half of all refugee children were placed in a school last year.

The terrifying situation in Syria and neighbouring countries, where millions of Syrian families have fled war and civil war, forms one of the main areas of Unicef’s work. A report in March this year explained, “Millions of Syrian girls and boys under five know nothing but war and flight.” During this period, 3.7 million Syrian children were born. The plight of 2 million children was particularly stark, because they only received humanitarian aid infrequently. A further 2.4 million children have fled to other countries in recent years, and 300,000 were born during such journeys.

Unicef’s documentation of the children impacted by war, civil war and flight is truly shocking, amounting to a devastating indictment of both the capitalist system and the imperialist powers responsible for war and its consequences.

In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and neighbouring countries, the poverty and hardship facing millions of children and young people are the direct product of US-led wars, supported by various European powers, for a quarter century. Entire societies have been, and continue to be, systematically destroyed.

In Africa, the deterioration in the conditions of life for millions of people—including children and young people—is caused by the competition between imperialist powers for control of the region and the exploitation of its natural resources. Germany is one such power. It is participating in an ever growing list of military interventions, including in Mali and off the coast of Libya.

At its press conference in Berlin, Unicef used the release of its report to launch a large-scale fund-raising campaign and to appeal to the warring parties and governments to protect the rights of children. The organization also demanded that children be able to attend school in crisis regions and, in an appeal directly aimed at the German government, declared, “Protection and education for refugee children must also be guaranteed in Germany.”

Gerd Müller (Christian Social Union-CSU), minister for economic cooperation and development, was the German government’s representative on the podium. He stated, “We cannot allow children and young people to become a lost generation in any crisis region around the world.” The German government supported Unicef in 2015 with €250 million, so that it could establish leisure activities in refugee camps in northern Iraq, such as football games and theatre workshops, and set up emergency schools.

Given the disastrous situation confronting 250 million children and young people throughout the world, the contribution of €250 million is not only contemptuously low, but Müller’s statement is both cynical and hypocritical.

German imperialism and the German army are currently either directly or indirectly involved in a large number of military interventions in the Middle East and North Africa. In February 2014, Berlin and Washington also played a key role in the right-wing coup in Kiev, which forced close to 2 million people to flee, and the German government is now deeply implicated in war preparations against Russia.

Moreover, Germany is playing a leading role in sealing Europe’s borders to deter refugees fleeing the horrific conditions created by these wars from entering. It negotiated the dirty deal with Turkey and pushed for sealing, by military means, the routes over the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.

Last but not least, the inhumane treatment of those refugees who have made it to Germany plays no small role in deterring others from even trying. Unicef’s demand that “protection and education must also be guaranteed for refugee children in Germany” would be unnecessary if refugees were accommodated humanely in the country, rather than being confined to sports halls, airport hangars and factory buildings for months on end in appalling conditions.

Repeated restrictions to the right to asylum over recent months, along with the declaration of the Balkan countries as “safe countries of origin,” are further aspects of the German government’s callous treatment of refugees. Their result has been the eviction of thousands of children and their families, many of whom have lived in Germany for years, or were even born in the country, from their schools and homes, confined to deportation centres and deported out of the country.

The intolerable and often life-threatening conditions facing hundreds of millions of children underscore the urgency of constructing an international antiwar movement based on the working class and directed against the capitalist system.

Report exposes deaths in US immigrant detention centers

Khara Sikhan

At least 31 migrants have died in US immigration detention centers since 2012. Recently released case reviews from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on 18 of those deaths show a clear pattern of abusive treatment and substandard medical care. According to an independent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), 16 of the reviews showed “evidence of substandard medical practices.”

The immigration detention procedures documented by HRW are easily comparable in their brutality to those of a criminal detention center. The correctional officers ignore patient complaints of pain and discomfort, and the medical staff ignore basic procedures. Those interned are treated as criminals instead of refugees fleeing drug cartels, state repression, and bitter poverty in their home country.

Migrants held in US detention centers face weeks and months of fear, despair, and outright cruelty. They are effectively forced to withhold their true medical history and avoid complaints about their conditions, from fear of facing retaliation from immigration officers in the form of sped-up deportation or exorbitant medical bills.

The investigation reports read similarly in their brutal treatment of detainees. Manuel Cota-Domingo entered the United States from Guatemala on December 8, 2013, and was captured by US Border Patrol. Cota-Domingo had blister packets of medicine identified as diabetes medicine, which were taken away from him. The detention center ignored basic medical procedures as well as clear symptoms of medical issues. Within 15 days, on December 23, Cota-Domingo succumbed to diabetic ketoacidosis and pneumonia, and died at the age of 34.

Clemente Mponda entered the United States from Mozambique on a student visa. Mponda had a history of depression and exhibited paranoid thoughts to nurses when turned over to ICE. He was placed repeatedly in segregation, sometimes as punitive action, even with the warnings of poor mental health. Mponda threatened to commit suicide if he was not released, and after 15 months in detention, Mponda was found dead at 27 as a result of toxic overdose of mental health medication.

Responsibility for the conditions in immigration detention centers lies squarely with the Obama administration. Its draconian immigration “reform” policies resulted in a record-setting 1.5 million deportations during his first term alone. By 2013, the Obama administration was deporting 1,000 people per day. Today, his administration has deported over 2.5 million people, a record above all of the deportations of the 20th century combined.

There are about 11 million undocumented people living in the United States, and 71 percent are from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico. These refugees are driven to the United States by the conditions in their home countries, which are devastated by US-backed austerity, the international drug trade and exploitation by major corporations, allowing rampant violence and unending poverty to grip their societies.

In 2009, the Obama administration backed a coup d’etat against Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya, after Zelaya proposed small increases in Honduras’s minimum wage. In 2010, Obama signed into legislation a $600 million bill to militarize the US-Mexico border. The bill included the use of predator drones, and thousands more border patrol agents.

Since 2014, migration from Central America has surged amid increasing violence. The Obama administration has responded by increasing spending on border surveillance, capture and detention, particularly of children who were traveling alone.

In 2014, Obama endorsed the Southern Border Program created by Mexican President Peña Nieto, which set up an operation to capture migrants traveling through northern Mexico from Central America and torture, beat, extort, kidnap, and kill them. The Obama administration has given over $3 billion to arm and militarize Mexican security forces against these migrants.

Hillary Clinton was a central figure overseeing these mass deportation policies, as Obama’s secretary of state. The Clinton Presidential campaign postures as pro-immigrant, but Clinton’s record shows her support and participation in the policies of mass deportation, including the deportation of children, and increased militarization of border patrol. The records of Obama and Clinton are clear signs that the Democratic Party is not a “lesser evil” when compared to the same noxious nationalism of Donald Trump.

The conditions and trials of the refugees entering the United States are virtually blacked out from media coverage and concealed from public scrutiny. The plight of the migrants, held in inhumane and squalid conditions inside the most advanced capitalist economy in the world, is a damning indictment of the present political and economic setup, which is characterized by the complete subservience of both big business parties to the profit interests of the financial elite.

White Paper 2016: Another step in the revival of German militarism

Johannes Stern

On Wednesday, the German federal cabinet adopted the long announced “White Paper 2016 on German Security Policy and the Future of the Bundeswehr.” The 144-page text replaces the white paper of 2006 as Germany’s official foreign policy doctrine and marks a new milestone in the country’s return to aggressive foreign and military policies.

The new white paper sets itself far-reaching goals: the domestic deployment of the Bundeswehr (German military), the expansion of foreign operations independent of Germany’s postwar allies, a European foreign and defence policy dominated by Germany, and a massive build-up of the Bundeswehr.

In the section “Deployment and Role of the Bundeswehr in Germany,” it states that “in order to assist the police in effectively managing emergency situations, the armed forces may, in certain conditions, perform sovereign tasks and exercise powers of intervention and enforcement.”

In other words, the ban on military operations within Germany as well as the separation between the police and the army, embedded in the constitution after the experiences of the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship, is effectively repealed. These principles had been repeatedly softened since the adoption of emergency laws in May 1968, but the use of the army in police operations has until now been illegal in Germany.

Parliamentary consent, also established by the constitution, will be further undermined. In chapter 8 of the white paper, the section “Legal Framework” states, “the number of deployments and missions necessitating immediate and resolute action has grown.” The “practice of parliamentary consent has stood the test of time,” the paper goes on, but “in view of Germany’s increased responsibility for security, we must be in a position to meet these challenges, if necessary by deploying armed German forces.”

The foreword from the pen of Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) makes clear that after suffering defeats in two world wars followed by years of foreign policy restraint, Germany is once again preparing itself for worldwide military operations free from constraints and for military conflicts within Europe itself.

Merkel writes: “The world of 2016 is unsettled. We in Germany and Europe are seeing and feeling the impact of a lack of freedom and of crises and conflicts. We are experiencing that peace and stability are not a matter of course even in Europe.”

The Chancellor’s conclusion: “Germany’s economic and political weight means that it is our duty to take on responsibility for Europe’s security in association with our European and transatlantic partners […] We must stand up even more for our shared values and demonstrate even greater commitment to security, peace and a rules-based order than we have done to date.”

The invocation of Germany’s greatness and the call for more German “responsibility” and “leadership” in Europe and in the world is a recurring theme of the white paper.

In the very first chapter, the section “Germany’s Role in the World and Approach to Security,” states, “Germany is highly interconnected with the rest of the world and—due to its economic, political and military significance, but also as a result of its vulnerabilities—has a responsibility to actively participate in shaping the global order.”

“Germany is increasingly regarded as a key player in Europe,” the section continues, and is “prepared to provide a substantial, decisive and early stimulus to the international debate, to accept responsibility, and to assume leadership.” This includes “a willingness to contribute to the management of current and future security and humanitarian challenges.”

The third chapter is entitled “Germany’s Strategic Priorities” and leaves no doubt that in reality “security and humanitarian challenges” means the geopolitical and economic interests of German imperialism.

“Our economy relies as much on the secure supply of raw materials and on secure international transportation routes as it does on functioning information and communication systems. Securing maritime supply routes and ensuring freedom of the high seas is of significant importance for an exporting nation like Germany.” The country must therefore “work towards ensuring the unhindered use of ground, air and sea lines of communication as well as of space and the cyber and information domain.”

A central point of the paper is the pursuit of greater foreign policy independence for Germany. While the white paper speaks of “deepening European integration and strengthening transatlantic partnership,” it also says: “At the same time, our ability to respond in an international—and particularly European and transatlantic—context is based on a clear national position.”

In particular, “Ad hoc cooperation” will continue to “gain significance as an instrument of international crisis and conflict management.” Germany will “take account of this development and, in cases where it can protect its interests in this way, will participate in ad hoc cooperation and initiate it with its partners.”

Wherever Germany works together “with its partners” in NATO or in the realm of a joint European defence policy, it lays claim to more leadership. “NATO’s European pillar is growing in significance,” says the paper. The European member states are “called upon to assume greater responsibility, also in terms of a more balanced form of burden sharing. Germany in particular has taken on a special responsibility in this regard.”

The white paper explicitly welcomes “the European Union’s new global foreign and security policy strategy” which was introduced by EU High Commissioner for Foreign Policy Federica Mogherini at the first EU summit without British participation on July 4 in Brussels. It will “make a significant contribution to strengthening the EU’s capacity to act in the domain of foreign and security policy.” “From the very beginning, Germany has played an active role in supporting the development of this new strategy,” boasts the paper.

As a “long-term goal,” Germany is striving to achieve “a common European Security and Defence Union.” In the medium term, a “permanent civil-military operational headquarters” is required with “civil-military planning and command and control capability.” Only in this way could the “political weight of the countries of Europe” be maintained in the long term along with the “security interests of the EU” in view of “geopolitical shifts and global demographic developments.”

As the central instrument of German foreign policy, the Bundeswehr will see its personnel and budget significantly upgraded. In addition to the increase in the military budget for 2016 and 2017, a “reliable continuation of this direction in funding will be required in the years ahead in order to take into account capability maintenance, increases in equipment in line with tasks and structures, and the necessity of establishing new capabilities, while ensuring the staffing and running of the Bundeswehr.”

Running parallel to the militarization of foreign policy, civil and social life are again being prepared for war. In the section “Promoting Security and Resilience: A Whole-of-Society Endeavour,” the paper explains: “National security is not only a task of the state, but increasingly a joint task of the state, industry, the scientific community, and society. A common understanding of potential risks is the basis on which to build whole-of-society resilience.”

The German government will “render its approach to national security more comprehensive by continuously identifying and adapting areas requiring protection; further developing civil defence planning (maintenance of state and government functions, civil protection, supply, support of the armed forces) with the goal of harmonising crisis management procedures; institutionalising a whole- of-society discussion on future security requirements at the Federal Academy for Security Policy.”

The White Paper 2016 marks a new high point in a real conspiracy to revive German militarism, which was initiated by President Gauck, Foreign Minister Steinmeier (SPD) and Defence Minister Von der Leyen (CDU) at the 2014 Munich Security Conference. As in the earlier strategy paper, “New power, new responsibility: Elements of a German foreign and security policy for a changing world,” the original template for the new German foreign and great power politics, leading German journalists, academics, military figures, business representatives and politicians of all parties in the German parliament had a hand in preparing it.

An official publication from the Ministry of Defence entitled “Path to the White Paper,” states that “especially noteworthy are the numerous events hosted by political parties, churches, trade unions and organizations under the auspices of the white paper and whose results were a cornerstone in the process of its formation.”