The West’s Favored Autocrats

Lawrence Davidson

The United States has been, and continues to be, selective about which foreign strongmen it does and does not support. Among the latter, there have been Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (who was not as autocratic as publicly portrayed), Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. These are just a few of those recent rulers who have drawn the wrath of the “democratic” exemplars in Washington. That wrath often includes economic strangulation and CIA plots.

In the meantime, another group of autocrats is well tolerated by the U.S. Among this group are Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Egypt’s General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and various European rightwing politicos such as Viktor Orban of Hungary. Each of these strongmen shows little tolerance for dissent and a ready willingness to exploit racially tinged nationalism.

Why the Double Standards?

What is behind Washington’s double standards – its contrasting reactions to one set of regimes as against another? Often American politicians will talk about promoting democracy and claim that the dictators they support have a better chance of evolving in a democratic direction than those they oppose. It might be that these politicians actually believe this to be the case, at least at the moment they make these declarations. However, there is no historical evidence that their claims are true. This argument is largely a face-saving one. Other underlying reasons exist for the choices they make.

Here are a few of those probable reasons:

The friend/enemy of our friend/enemy is our friend/enemy.

In this scenario the primary friend of the U.S. is Israel and the primary enemy is Russia. The secondary friend/enemy countries are the decidedly undemocratic Egypt and Syria. Egypt became a friend of the U.S.once Anwar Sadat made a peace treaty with Israel in March of 1979. Syria, on the other hand, has always been hostile to Israel and it has remained an enemy state. No democratic motivation is to be found here.

Cold War positioning rationale.

After World War II Turkey became a “strategic asset” by virtue of its proximity to the Soviet Union and its willingness to house U.S. air bases and missile launchers. The repeated interference of the Turkish military in civilian politics was of no consequence to Washington. Present-day East European governments, increasingly autocratic in nature, seem to be considered by many in the Pentagon as “post Cold War” assets on the border of a Russia that never ceased to be an enemy. For a whole subset of Americans (militarists and neoconservatives) the Cold War never really did end.

Resource assets rationale.

Autocracies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait fall into this category. The U.S. assumes a role of a supportive ally in exchange for stable and affordable worldwide oil prices. Sunni suppression of Shiite and other minorities in these countries is immaterial. What happens if such resource-rich regimes do an about-face and are no longer cooperative with the United States? Well, you have your answer in Iran. Here the U.S. was once completely supportive of the Shah, but he was replaced by hostile ayatollahs in 1979. So friendliness has given way to tactics of economic isolation and CIA plots. Again, democracy has little to do with anything in these cases.

The classic left vs right rationale. 

Finally, there is the historically entrenched U.S. tradition that economically cooperative autocratic regimes are acceptable allies. “Cooperative” here means rulers who engage in friendly capitalist behavior: tolerate private enterprise and safeguard the property of foreign investors. Such an economic stance pre-dates the Cold War and has always been more important than political freedoms. Those who act this way, such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet or Argentina under its brutal regime of military rule, get a free pass when they suppress democracy and civil rights. However, other regimes, such as those in Cuba under Castro and Venezuela under Chavez are treated differently. In the case of Venezuela, democracy was in fact practiced, but because of its socialist-leaning economic policies, Washington tried very hard to destroy the country’s government. For those interested in the evolution of this classic U.S. foreign policy, its history is explained in detail in my book, Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest.

Democracy and the “Other”

By prioritizing traditional alliances, control of resources and economic ideology, the U.S. turns a blind eye to other aspects of autocratic behavior that contradict its own avowed values, thereby setting up a vivid display of foreign policy hypocrisy. An example is the issue of democracy and the “Other.” Since the 1960s the United States has been struggling with its racist impulses. That is, most of its population knows that discrimination against the “Other” is wrong. They can recognize it in the country’s voting laws, in the behavior of its police, and in the attitude of a political candidate like Donald Trump. Official steps, even if they are agonizingly slow and subject to periodic reversals, are taken to dampen down, if not overcome, such public biases. You would think that such a sensitivity would carry over into foreign affairs. Yet the opposite is true.

Many of the autocratic leaders the U.S. favors have risen to power, at least in part, through instilling fear of the “Other” – those who threaten the fantasies of an eternal national character, pure blood, and the status of a God-chosen people. For instance, Washington’s premier ally in the Middle East, Israel, is a state that, at best, can be described as an officially discriminatory democracy where bias against the “Other” (in this case the Palestinians and other non-Jews) is legally sanctioned.

In the case of Europe, the present rising popularity of the right wing and its authoritarian leaders is directly derived from a fear of the “Other.” This, in turn, has been stimulated by a refugee crisis that the United States and its allies helped to create. The destruction of Iraq was a catalyst that let loose forces that have also overwhelmed Syria and Libya and set in motion the deluge of refugees moving out of the Middle East and North Africa toward Europe. The U.S. government  accepts the anti-democratic rightwing autocrats who now exploit a fear of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons for which Washington is, in large part, responsible.

Conclusion

The end of the Cold War did not put to rest the West’s militaristic ideological forces. Indeed it gave them a boost. Those pushing “neoconservative” foreign policies are still well represented within U.S. government bureaucracies. Their policies are based on fantasies of “regime change” and remaking the world so it comes under the permanent influence of the United States. Democracy, however, is not now, nor has it ever been, the end game of this process.

Instead, U.S. foreign affairs have been designed to spread capitalist economic practices that facilitate the prosperity of its own “ruling” class. Along the way, the U.S, seeks resource reliability for itself and its trading partners, security for its traditional allies and strategic advantage over old enemies. In all these pursuits the United States has long ago contented itself with what Jonathan Freedland once called the “sonofabitch school of foreign policy.” In other words, Washington doesn’t care if its cooperating allies are murderers, corrupt thieves, racists and the like. They might be bastards of the first order, but it is OK as long as they are “our bastards.” Such is the company we keep.

The Obama Doctrine Is Ravaging The Middle East

Ramzy Baroud

Everyone seems to have a theory on how to obliterate ISIS, or ‘Daesh’. However, two points are rarely raised: one, concerning the origins of the group and the second, on whether there are genuine intentions to defeat it, in the first place.

We must boldly address the first to unravel the enigma behind the rise and growth of ‘Daesh’ – otherwise, how else can the group be dismantled.

We must contend with the second point before engaging in superfluous discussions about the most appropriate war strategy – that if war is, at all, the answer.

The questions are quite urgent yet, somehow, they are frequently overlooked, glossed over through some disingenuous logic or the blame is always placed somewhere else.

Now that the Americanshave launched yet another aerial war against Libya, purportedly to target ‘Daesh’ positions there, the discussion is being carefully geared towards how far the US must go to defeat the militant group?

In fact, “can airstrikes alone win a war without ‘boots on the ground’?” has morphed, somehow, to become the crux of the matter, which has engaged a large number of intellectuals on both sides of the debate.

US media gurus, split between two equally war-mongering parties, love to jump at such opportunities to discredit one another, as if waging wars in other countries is an exclusively local American affair.

Days are long gone when the US labored to establish coalitions to wage war, as it did in Kuwait and Iraq in 1990-91 and, to a lesser extent, again, in Iraq in 2003. Now, wars are carried out as a matter of course. Many Americans seen to be unware, or oblivious to the fact, that their country is actually fighting wars on several fronts, and is circuitously involved in others.

With multiple war fronts and conflicts fermenting all around, many are becoming desensitized. Americans particularly have, sadly, swallowed the serum of perpetual war, to the extent that they rarely mobilize in any serious way against it.

In other words, a state of war has become the status quo.

Although the US Administration of President Barack Obama has killed thousands, the majority of whom were civilians, there is no uproar nor mass protests. Aside from the fact that the Obama brand was fashioned to appear as the peaceable contrast to warmongering George W. Bush, there has been no serious change in US foreign policies in the Middle East in any way that could suggest that one president is ‘better’ than the other.

Obama has simply continued the legacy of his predecessor, unhindered. The primary change that has occurred is tactical: instead of resorting to massive troops’ buildup on the ground with an assignment to topple governments, Obama has used airstrikes to target whoever is perceived to be the enemy, while investing in whoever he deemed ‘moderate’ enough to finish the job.

Like Bush’s preemptive ‘war on terror’, Obama’s doctrine has been equally disastrous.

Obama’s wars were designed to produce little or no American casualties, since they were almost entirely conducted from the air and via unmanned drones operated by remote control, sometimes thousands of miles way. That approach proved less taxing, politically. However, it worsened the situation on the ground, and instead of ending war, it expanded it.

While Bush’s invasion of Iraq revived al-Qaeda and brought it to the heart of the region, Obama’s aerial wars forced al-Qaeda to regroup, employing a different strategy. It rebranded itself, from militant cells to a ‘state’, sought swift territorial expansion, used guerrilla warfare when facing an organized army or is bombed from the sky, and carried out suicide bombings throughout the world to break the morale of its enemies and to serve its propaganda efforts aimed at keeping the recruits coming.

Considering that enemies of ‘Daesh’ are themselves enemies of one another, the group is assured that its existence, at least for the foreseeable future, is tenable.

The truth is that ‘Daesh’ thrives on military intervention because it was born from previous military interventions. It is expanding because its enemies are not in unison, as each is serving agendas that are rarely concerned with ending war, but rather seeing war as an opportunity to realize political gains.

With this logic in mind, one cannot expect the US ‘Operation Odyssey Lightning’, which officially began on August 1 in Libya, to achieve any results that could end up in stabilizing the country.

How could such ‘stability’ be projected, if it were not the US and other NATO members’ war on Libya in 2011 that has largely dismembered a once rich and relatively stable Arab country? Indeed, it was the vacuum left by subsequent conflicts that invited ‘Daesh’ to Sirte and other areas. Now, the US – and other western powers, led by the French – are applying unwinnable war tactics to stave off a messy crisis they had created themselves when they waged an earlier war.

Even if ‘Daesh’ is driven out of Sirte, it will find some other unstable environment elsewhere where it will spawn and wreak havoc. Sirte, in turn, will, likely, fall back into a state of bedlam where various militias, many of whom were armed by NATO in the first place, turn their guns against each other.

Without a whole new approach to the problem, the conflicts will certainly keep multiplying.

According to airwars.org, which keeps track of the war on ‘Daesh’, 14,405 coalition airstrikes against the group have been carried out in Iraq and Syria through 735 days of a relentless campaign. An estimated 52,300 bombs and missiles were dropped, although the number must be much higher, since there are numerous strikes that are never claimed by any party, thus are not officially recorded, as such.

This, of course, does not take into account Russia’s own aerial bombardment, or any party that is not officially part of the Western coalition.

But what good did this do, aside from killing many civilians, destroying massive infrastructure and spreading ‘Daesh’ further into the abyss of other vulnerable Middle East and North African spots?

There are few voices in the US media and government that seem serious about changing the perspective completely on the Bush-Obama war on terror. Sensible calls by the likes of Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for President, that the root causes of terror must be addressed to end terrorism, rarely register in the halls of US government and Congress.

In January, the cost of the war on ‘Daesh’, as estimated by US Defense Department data has jumped by $2 million dollars a day to a total of $11 million. “The air war has cost the US about $5.5 billion total since it began in August 2014,” Business Insider reported. The escalation in Libya is likely to produce new, more staggering numbers soon.

Expectedly, this is a great time for business for those who benefit from war. Concurrently, the cycle of war and violence is feeding on itself with no end in sight.

“Hope in aerial bombardment as the prophylactic for peace is absurd,” Vijay Prashad, Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, wrote recently about the futility of airstrike wars.

“It has given us instability and chaos. Other roads have to be opened. Other paths ceded.”

I couldn’t agree more.

The real Reasons Behind Dilma Rousseff’s Impeachment

Abdus Sattar Ghazali


Brazil’s Senate voted on August 10, 2016 to hold an impeachment trial for the nation’s suspended president Dilma Rousseff, a process that could see her permanently removed from office. The vote in favor of trying Rousseff, who was suspended from the presidency in May, was 59 in favor, 21 against.

The Senate suspended Rousseff, the South American nation’s first female president, on May 12 over accusations of illegal accounting practices and fiddling the budget to mask a slumping economy.

Rousseff, 68, has likened the impeachment drive to a putsch by her political enemies.

The impeachment trial is set to open around August 25 – four days after the Olympics closing ceremony – and is expected to last five days, concluding with a Senate judgment vote.

David Miranda of Guardian wrote in April last that Corruption is just the pretext for a wealthy elite who failed to defeat Brazil’s president at the ballot box.

Citing the New York Times article of April 14, 2016, Miranda wrote: “60% of the 594 members of Brazil’s Congress” – the ones voting to impeach Rousseff  – “face serious charges like bribery, electoral fraud, illegal deforestation, kidnapping and homicide”.

By contrast, said the article, Rousseff “is something of a rarity among Brazil’s major political figures: she has not been accused of stealing for herself”.

Simon Romero and Vinod Sreeharsha of The New York Times quoted Mario Sergio Conti, a columnist for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo as saying: “She didn’t steal, but a gang of thieves is judging her.”

The New York Times provided detail of some of the corrupt Brazilian politicians who enjoy immunity because of their seat in Congress. The paper pointed out that the sweeping legal protections are enjoyed by about 700 senior officials, including cabinet ministers and every member of Congress.

Brazil’s corrupt politicians as named by the New York Times

– Eduardo Cunha, the powerful speaker of the lower house who is leading the impeachment effort, is going on trial at the country’s highest court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal, on charges that he pocketed as much as $40 million in bribes. Mr. Cunha, an evangelical Christian radio commentator and economist who regularly issues Twitter messages quoting from the Bible, is accused of laundering the gains through an evangelical mega church.

– Vice President Michel Temer, who takes over when Ms. Rousseff was forced to step aside, has been accused of involvement in an illegal ethanol purchasing scheme.

– Renan Calheiros, the Senate leader, who is also on the presidential succession chain, is under investigation over claims that he received bribes in the giant scandal surrounding the national oil company, Petrobras. He has also been accused of tax evasion and of allowing a lobbyist to pay child support for a daughter from an extramarital affair.

–  Ms. Rousseff’s opponents in Congress include Éder Mauro, who is facing charges of torture and extortion from his previous stint as a police officer in Belém, a crime­ weary city in the Amazon.

– Another congressman aiming to impeach Ms. Rousseff: Beto Mansur, who is charged with keeping 46 workers at his soybean farms in Goiás State in conditions so deplorable that investigators say the laborers were treated like modern ­day slaves.

– Paulo Maluf, 84, the former mayor who supports the president’s removal, spent weeks in jail a decade ago on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. But he was released under a law allowing people older than 70 to face such accusations at home. Then Maluf won a seat in Congress, giving him the privileged judicial standing that keeps nearly all senior Brazilian politicians with such privileges out of jail.

Despite Maluf’s claims in recent days that he could travel outside Brazil without being arrested, he remains wanted by Interpol for the case against him in the United States, according to the United States Justice Department. France also has an outstanding warrant for his arrest in a separate case involving organized money laundering.

–  As tempers flare over impeachment, some cite the example of Ivo Cassol, a senator from the Amazon. He was sentenced to more than four years in prison in 2013 by the Supreme Federal Tribunal on corruption charges related to contracts granted more than 15 years ago. Despite the ruling, Mr. Cassol remains in the Senate, keeping the high court’s decision at bay with appeals.

After so many Worker’s Party victories under heavy media bombardment, the political right in Brazil has realized that the popular vote is their greatest enemy, Joao Feres Jr, a professor of Political Secience at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, says adding:” So far they have succeeded in ousting Rousseff, thus cancelling the results of the 2014 presidential elections, a major deed. That is not enough, however. Now they are going to move on and try to maim Brazilian democracy in its structural elements.”

Noam Chomsky has described it a soft coup against Rousseff. He told the Democracy Now Radio: The elite detested the Workers’ Party and is using this opportunity to get rid of the party that won the elections. They’re not waiting for the elections, which they’d probably lose.

Pablo Vivanco, Director of teleSUR says, since 1998, numerous left-leaning governments have been elected to redistribute wealth and decision-making power. Not only has this led to inequality and poverty being slashed, but the political dynamics in those countries has shifted and the region has become more unified and independent. He says, the new strategy to stem the Pink Tide builds from the same objectives as those employed by the dictatorships of Pinochet, Videla and others: stop the left from being able to implement its program.

Rousseff’s impeachment is a blow against the BRICS

According to Eugene Bai, an expert in Latin America, the political drama in Brazil could result in the demise of the BRICS concept and troubles ahead for Russia’s economic relationship with its biggest trading partner in Latin America.

“The basis of all this are the political and economic interests of the Americans, who are not particularly pleased with what has been happening in Brazil over the last fifteen years, when the government was headed, and still is run, by Dilma Rousseff from the center-left Workers’ Party,” Vladimir Travkin, chief editor of Latin America magazine, was quoted by Eugene Bai as saying.

During the U.S. presidency of Barack Obama, Latin America was overshadowed by the Arab Spring, problems in Afghanistan and Ukraine, Travkin says. During that time, Brazil became an active member of the BRICS, and established long-term relationships, including economic and political ones, with Russia and China. The BRICS had become a new platform for discussions, which was an alternative to the current financial system based on the U.S. dollar. According Travkin, this seems to have caused great irritation in Washington.

In 2015, Rousseff paid a visit to the U.S., during which she was able to restart bilateral relations, significantly expanding mutual trade and cooperation in investment and infrastructure projects, Eugene Bai said adding: This trip alleviated the tensions between Brazil and the United States, which originated in 2013, when Rousseff had canceled a planned state visit to Washington after the U.S. intelligence agencies had been eavesdropping on her telephone conversations and reading her correspondence.

However, the political crisis in Brazil does not threaten only these projects, Bai says. It could turn into a strong blow against the BRICS, whose member states are also experiencing serious difficulties, due to the economic downturn in Brazil, as well as slowdowns in China and Russia.

The BRICS, an association of five major emerging national economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) was seen as one of the most promising global economic and trading unions a few years ago.

BRICS countries account for 46 percent of the world’s population – over 3 billion people, as of 2015 – making it the single largest bloc in terms of human capacity among global alliances. The scope of BRICS, combined with its increasing assertiveness as an economic power unto itself, has undoubtedly ruffled a few feathers in Washington and elsewhere in the West.

Eric Draitser of Mint Press argues that it should come as no surprise that major moves have been taken in the last 12 to 24 months to undermine each BRICS member nation and destabilize them through political and economic means. And it is no coincidence that those leaders shown smiling and shaking hands at recent BRICS summits are now either the targets of destabilization efforts and subversion – as in the cases of Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa – or are a target of a military and political charm offensive, as in the case of India. In each case, the United States and its allies benefit significantly from the latest developments.

One of the U.S. empire’s tried and true methods of destabilizing a targeted country is through manufacturing and promoting political scandals and/or political movements that appear oppositional but whose interests, whether consciously or not, align with the ruling establishment in the West, Eric Draitser says adding: Both of these elements are at play in Brazil, which has been moving toward increased economic, and consequently political, independence in recent years.

In Brazil, the government of Dilma Rousseff is facing a major destabilization campaign orchestrated by powerful right-wing elements in the country and their U.S. backers. Under the always convenient banner of “anti-corruption,” millions have turned out in the streets to demand the ouster of the twice-elected Rousseff government on the heels of a series of revelations about alleged corruption pertaining to the quasi-state, quasi-private Petrobras oil company.

According to the allegations, a number of leading political figures, some of whom are connected to President Rousseff and the Workers’ Party, have skimmed at least 3 percent of the billions in oil revenue from Petrobras, illustrating the still active tradition of corruption in Brazil.

The latest target is former President Lula da Silva, who was forcibly removed from his home in an ostentatious show of force by law enforcement authorities meant to humiliate the 70-year-old founder of the Workers’ Party. Because of his working class background, the former president was seen as the hope and pride of the left in Brazil, and the public removal from his home earlier this month sparked the latest round of protests.

“In short, despite all the fancy anti-corruption rhetoric, the assault on Rousseff’s leftist government is the result of a coordinated campaign by business interests tied to the U.S. Washington and Wall Street that see in Brazil a dangerous precedent in which a left-wing government sympathetic to and allied with Bolivarian movements in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and until recently, Argentina, was able to gain power and preside over an economic boom,” Eric Draitser concludes.

El Salvador refuses to recognize

President Salvador Sanchez Ceren of El Salvador announced on May 14  that his government would not recognize the government of Senate-imposed president Michel Temer in Brazil.

El Salvador is only the latest government to speak out against the parliamentary coup in Brazil. Other countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela have criticized Rousseff’s ouster, with the latter officially withdrawing its ambassador in protest as well.

Both the Union of South American Nations, known as UNASUR, and the Organization of American States have spoken out against the decision by the Brazil’s Congress to remove Rousseff from her post.

While the new government faced increasing isolation in Latin America, only Argentina’s Mauricio Macri publicly stating his support.

Egyptian dictator el-Sisi secures IMF loan and prepares onslaught against working class

Jean Shaoul

The US-backed Egyptian military dictatorship of General Abdullah Fattah el-Sisi has agreed a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to stave off the collapse of the country’s economy and shore up his regime.

The loan comes with draconian conditions, including subsidy cuts and new taxes, which will drastically worsen the impoverishment of the Egyptian working class. This can only be implemented through the barrel of the gun, which el-Sisi has indicated he will not hesitate to use on behalf of the Egyptian bourgeoisie and the major imperialist powers.

El-Sisi said he would not shy away from the reforms that previous rulers had shunned in a bid to avoid unrest, declaring, “The first attempt at real reform was in 1977.”

Riots broke out in 1977, after then President Anwar Sadat said he would end basic subsidies on wheat in return for a World Bank loan.

El-Sisi added, “The people's reaction caused the state to backtrack, and it has continued to delay [the reforms] till now. All the hard decisions that many over the years were scared to take: I will not hesitate for a second to take them.”

The Egyptian economy has been in a parlous state since the 2008 global financial crisis, fuelling massive social inequality that provided the impetus to the popular overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak by the Egyptian masses in 2011. In 2013, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf petro-monarchies, with Washington’s blessing, funded and orchestrated the bloody overthrow of the elected government of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Mursi by el-Sisi—who was defence minister in Mursi’s cabinet.

Since then, el-Sisi has imposed a brutal military dictatorship on behalf of the military, police and intelligence faction of the ruling class that has dominated Egyptian political and economic life since the 1952 Free Officers’ coup. He has ruthlessly targeted the military’s economic rivals, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, their bourgeois political opponents, liberal activists and the working class.

The junta has outlawed protests, imprisoned tens of thousands, sentenced hundreds to death and introduced a sweeping counter-terrorism law vastly expanding the authorities’ powers. Mass trials, mostly of Brotherhood supporters, failed to establish individual guilt. Several thousand have been tried in military courts. Torture and enforced disappearances are commonplace, with many detainees dying in custody from mistreatment.

At the same time, el-Sisi has carried out extensive military operations against Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula who have capitalised on the seething unrest among Egypt’s impoverished Bedouin, imposing a state of emergency, killing dozens of civilians, demolishing hundreds of homes and evacuating thousands of residents. But the security forces’ brutality, which has included curfews, detention without trial or even charges, the shutting down of cell phone and internet networks, and routine abuse, has only served to increase social tensions.

As Egypt’s economy continued to plummet amid political and social turmoil, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait bankrolled the military to the tune of $23 billion. Much of that disappeared into the military’s pockets. This includes profiteering from the expansion of the Suez Canal by the military’s own construction companies that failed to bring in the promised additional revenues.

Foreign currency receipts have fallen to just $15.5 billion. The Suez Canal has been badly hit by falling trade and declining demand for oil, tourism by security fears and remittances from millions of Egyptians working abroad by the worsening conflict in Libya. Further economic turmoil has resulted from attempts by the Gulf States to cut back on foreign workers in favour of their own citizens and the fall in the value of the Egyptian pound.

Egypt devalued its currency by 13 percent last March in an unsuccessful attempt to stem the rampant parallel or “black market.” The Egyptian pound has lost 60 percent of its value since 2011, and this, along with new import duties, has caused prices--particularly foodstuffs, medications and fuel--to rocket.

Inflation is now running at 15 percent a year and rising, in a country where 40 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day and wages have not kept up with inflation.

In announcing the $12 billion loan from the IMF, el-Sisi warned that he would not shirk from imposing tough economic measures on the Egyptian masses demanded by the IMF and the international banks. These include the removal of all subsidies on basic commodities, the introduction of a value-added tax, the slashing of public sector jobs, the privatisation of state-owned companies and a further devaluation of the pound.

Such measures will cause prices to soar, further fuelling poverty. El-Sisi also demanded Egyptians, especially “the great Egyptian lady,” cut down on their use of electricity and water. “Please... she can--with her presence in society and the family--decrease a lot the consumption of water and electricity, and other things that are a burden on the economy.”

None of this will hit his support base, the military, which has directly and indirectly increased its control of the economy since 2013, extending its reach into virtually every economic sector, including foodstuffs such as tomato paste and olive oil, consumer electronics, real estate, construction, transport and services.

The Egyptian Armed Forces (EAF) control umbrella organisations such as the Arab Organisation for Industrialisation, the National Services Projects Organisation (NSPO) and the Ministry of Military Production, and hold substantial stakes in many other semi-public or private companies, especially infrastructure and subcontracting, where it is able to take advantage of conscript labour. These in turn fund the army’s network to schools, healthcare, pensions and other social facilities, while numerous sinecures are reserved for senior EAF personnel as a form of pension provision.

The EAF controls much of the public land comprising 94 percent of Egypt’s area, including the coastline. The military is able to profit from land sales and tourist developments, which in turn have transformed it into the dominant player in the Egyptian economy at the expense of its commercial rivals. The military’s budget is a state secret, with military-controlled corporations receiving unknown levels of subsidies their competitors are denied.

At the same time, as announcing the IMF-dictated measures, el-Sisi is to give the army a 10 percent pension increase, one of several in the last few years.

Last March, in a bid to protect the military from anti-corruption investigations, el-Sisi issued a presidential decree sacking Hesham Geneina, who headed the Central Auditing Organisation. This came after the chief auditor told the media that government corruption, especially corrupt land sales, had cost the country about $76 billion in four years, or 5 percent of the country’s GDP a year. The sacking came the same day a high court forcibly retired 32 judges, accusing them of “intervening in politics” for allegedly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

This blood-soaked regime will enable the Egyptian bourgeoisie and international finance capital to dramatically intensify the exploitation of the working class. The US and European powers all supported el-Sisi’s regime--one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the world. They view it as a bulwark against a possible renewed uprising by the Egyptian workers, as a means of defending their own economic and geo-strategic interests in the region, and increasingly as the template for suppressing the growing domestic resistance to their unpopular policies of austerity and war.

Thyssen-Krupp Steel works council meeting prepares job cuts in Germany

Dietmar Henning

Around 250 works council officials from Thyssen Krupp’s steel division met at a conference last Friday in Duisburg, Germany. Representatives of the board of directors also participated.

The directors and the supervisory board, which includes leading officials from IG Metall and the works council, are currently discussing a comprehensive restructuring of the steel business, including the complete shutdown of plants and elimination of thousands of jobs. The complete halting of steel production by the Thyssen Krupp firm is also being considered.

The 28,000 workers in the company’s German plants, including 20,000 in North Rhein-Westphalia, hoped for information about the future of their plants and jobs. But the limited information released by the board, IG Metall and the works council only reinforced their worst fears.

For several months, Thyssen Krupp has been negotiating a merger with Indian steel company Tata. According to Manager Magazin, negotiations are focused on the Thyssen steel plant in the north of Duisburg where 13,000 workers are employed and Tata’s Dutch facility in Ejmuiden with 9,000 employees. The latter plant is located on the North Sea coast and produces crude steel, hot and cold rolled sheets of steel and strip products.

Fears are particularly strong in Thyssen Krupp’s smaller plants that they could fall victim to the fusion of the two companies and be closed. This is the case for the plants in the south of Duisburg, Dortmund, Kreuztal, Andernach and Bochum.

The shuttering of the Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann plant in Duisburg, which Thyssen operates jointly with the Salzgitter steel concern and French company Vallourec and employs more than 3,000 people, is allegedly being considered.

Thyssen Krupp Finance Director Guido Kerkhoff, who according to Manager Magazin is leading negotiations with Tata, indicated just a day prior to the Duisburg works council conference that there would be plant closures. At the presentation of third quarter figures, he refused to provide details about the talks with Tata, responding to the question of whether he could rule out plant closures by merely saying, “We have to put up with a period of uncertainty now.”

The chairman of the Thyssen Krupp board of directors, Heinrich Hiesinger, previously stated, “There will be restructuring with or without a partner.”

This is not only the case in Germany, but worldwide. Wolfgang Eder, president of the World Steel Association and CEO of Austrian steel company Voestalpine, has repeatedly urged the elimination of “overcapacity.” In Europe this amounts to between 30 and 40 million tons out of a total production of 166 million tons last year. The more than 85,000 jobs eliminated in the European Union since the 2008 crisis was nowhere near enough.

At Thyssen Krupp in Germany and Tata in Britain, tens of thousands more jobs are now to be done away with. In Taranto in southern Italy, the Ilva plant with 14,000 workers is awaiting a takeover. Eder believes that such takeovers must result in a “structural adjustment of capacity.” The current wave of mergers was a step toward introducing these adjustments. The awareness of the need for cuts was present, according to Eder. One could not avoid these measures. The protests against these moves were seen by him as “part of the process.”

Thyssen Krupp Steel boss Andreas Goss presented a graph to the works council meeting on Friday showing the workload of the different plants and indicating that the plants in Bochum, the south of Duisburg and the subsidiary Thyssen Krupp Rasselstein in Andernach (Eifel) are at risk.

If the heavy plate plant in the south of Duisburg closes, the future of the nearby Hüttenwerk Krupp Mannesmann facility would be under threat. Goss allegedly said, “If our steel business is to have a future, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that we have underutilized facilities and there is massive overcapacity in the market.”

Günter Back, chair of the central works council for the steel division, told local media that Thyssen Krupp head Hiesinger called on Goss to present a plan for the steel business by May 2017. A “value gap” of between €800 million and €1.5 billion had been talked about, and personnel costs alone were €200 million too high.

If one assumes an average gross wage of €50,000 to €55,000 per worker, this would mean the cutting of between 3,500 and 4,000 jobs, as well as thousands more at suppliers and service providers for the plants. Goss would not explicitly confirm that he would stick to the promise of no compulsory redundancies until 2020.

This was the promise with which the works council justified its acceptance of a wage cut, which was achieved above all with the introduction of a 31-hour week. The works council was punished as a result by the 13,000 workers at the large Thyssen Krupp plant in northern Duisburg at the last works council elections.

But IG Metall and the works council are continuing as before. They function as an industrial police force for the capitalists in their attacks on the workers. Only a few months ago, they demonstrated together with the steel corporations to demand the imposition of trade war measures against China, which is increasingly making its steel available on the world market.

In this way, they play German workers against their European and Chinese colleagues in the name of “defending steel-producing regions in Germany,” while at the same time they collaborate with the corporations to make them “competitive” at the expense of wages and jobs. They sabotage any effective resistance to the internationally operating corporations and prepare the way for further wage, job and benefit cuts.

The rumors of plant shutdowns and job cuts making the rounds in the local press, like the works council’s complaints about the board of directors, serve to intimidate and confuse the workers. The IG Metall representative for Duisburg-Dinslaken, Dieter Lieske, demanded “clarity from management”; the works council chair of the Thyssen Krupp Kreuztal plant (Siegerland), Axel Ganseuer, accused Chief Financial Officer Kerkhoff of being “inhumane”; and Oliver Möscheid, works council chief at the Hohenlimburg plant, said, “Somewhere will be hit, but nobody knows where.”

This is all for show. IG Metall and works council representatives have been sitting for decades on the supervisory board of the parent company and its steel subsidiary. On the supervisory board presidiums and most important committees of these bodies, they discuss all strategic decisions with the company directors, who, due to the system of co-determination, are not infrequently former IG Metall or works council colleagues. For example, the human resources director of Thyssen Krupp Steel, Thomas Schlenz, was previously a long-term works council chair at the parent concern.

IG Metall and works council officials were well aware of the company’s plans, but kept silent. Following the works council meeting on Friday, DerWesten.de reported that at a meeting with Thyssen Krupp CEO Hiesinger on June 2, it had already “become clear” to works council representatives “that the company boss certainly intended to close facilities or complete locations.” Despite this, they only informed workers about this meeting three weeks later, after Manager Magazin reported on the planned closures.

IG Metall and the works council are now warning of plant shutdowns. But such protests only serve to demoralize the workers. This is also the purpose of the “day of action” called by IG Metall for August 31 in front of Thyssen Krupp Steel’s headquarters in Duisburg at five minutes to 12 to “defend all locations.” This is an alibi demonstration which will do nothing to defend any of the plants.

On the same day, the supervisory board, chaired by Thyssen Krupp CEO Hiesinger and his deputy Detlef Wetzel (IG Metall), is to meet. The body also includes central works council chair Back, the works council chairs at the Dortmund (Sabine Birkenfeld), Duisburg-south (Werner von Häfen) and Bochum plants (Harald Pfennig). Also present will be Oliver Burkhard, former chair of IG Metall in North Rhein-Westphalia, who is now human resources director for Thyssen Krupp AG and represents the company on the supervisory board.

IG Metall and the works council will negotiate the conditions of the restructuring so as to present workers with a fait accompli. Behind the scenes, the horse-trading between works councils at each location to determine which plants will be closed is in full swing.

Only the unification of all steelworkers across facilities, countries and continents on a socialist basis, which places jobs and wages above the profit interests of the corporations, can successfully defend the living conditions of millions of steelworkers and their families.

Kremlin chief of staff dismissed amid continuing political turmoil in Russia

Andrea Peters

In a carefully scripted event on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted the resignation of his chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov. He is being replaced by Anton Vaino, a young and relatively unknown government insider of Estonian descent who was a deputy of Ivanov. The surprise move is one of a series of recent dismissals of leading officials with close ties to the Putin administration.

Ivanov, considered a close personal confidant of the Russian president, was placed in major government posts with Putin’s rise to power in 1999. He was Putin’s chief aide for more than four years. Prior to this, he was deputy chief of the Federal Security Services (FSB) and subsequently served as a deputy prime minister and defense minister. Ivanov was regarded as a rival of Dmitri Medvedev for the Russian presidency during the period in which Putin had to leave office due to term limits and effectively handed power to a caretaker.

As of August 12, Ivanov has been demoted to the position of special representative of the president of the Russian Federation on questions of conservation, ecology, and transportation. According to RIA Novosti, “In recent years in his work as head of the Kremlin administration, Sergei Ivanov devoted considerable attention to questions of ecology, actively supervising a program for the preservation of the population of far eastern leopards and, in connection with this, even met with the model, actress, and animal rights defender Pamela Anderson.”

The Kremlin and Ivanov himself insist that the move was voluntary and the fulfillment of Ivanov’s promised request to only serve till 2016. A special televised appearance with Putin appeared intended to quell rumors of a major rift. Ivanov will continue to serve on the country’s Security Council.

Press reports describe Putin’s new 44-year old chief of staff as a colorless technocrat who has never been implicated in political or financial scandals, although there are some tendentious claims that he has ties to Sergei Chemezov, an oligarch in the Russian defense industry and head of a major state-owned firm. Vaino has been active in the Russian government since 1996, when he served in the Russian embassy in Tokyo. After working for a couple of years on Asian matters for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in 2003 he entered the presidential administration.

The sudden changing of the guard in the Kremlin has provoked a flurry of speculation in press outlets, with commentators putting forward differing interpretations. Ivanov’s dismissal may be part of an effort to cut loose former close allies and bring in a new generation of less experienced but loyal servants, under conditions in which the Putin regime finds itself besieged by an unrelenting economic crisis, a burgeoning geopolitical conflict with the United States and looming parliamentary elections.

Despite something of a recovery in oil prices, the Russian budget continues to experience a shortfall greater than official predictions. The deficit, which stood at 3.3 percent of gross domestic product as of July 2016, is .3 percent higher than the upper limit called for by Putin at the start of the year. As a result, government officials have had to tap the country’s reserve funds more than expected. Russia remains mired in a recession that began in 2015. Although there has been a small uptick in wages in recent months and continued low unemployment rates, real incomes have not fundamentally recovered from a near 10 percent decline last year.

At the same time, the US is pursuing a relentlessly anti-Russian foreign policy, with last week’s provocations initiated by the US-backed stooge regime in Ukraine against Crimea being only the latest salvo. Washington has made clear its desire for regime change in Moscow and is preparing for war with Russia.

Parliamentary elections will occur in Russia on September 18. While the ruling United Russia (UR) party is expected to emerge victorious, deep social discontent exists within the country. In 2011, this boiled over into a major rebuff of UR candidates, allegations of electoral fraud, and the emergence of a protest movement.

It is within this context that the Kremlin has been systematically replacing key political and economic leaders. Putin has dismissed eight governors and presidential representatives from regions around the country and sacked top figures regarded as close friends, including the head of the Russian railways, Vladimir Yakunin, in August 2015 and the director of a major state bank, Vladimir Dmitriev, in February 2016. Oleg Belozerov, a relatively unknown 46-year-old logistics specialist and deputy transportation minister, was chosen to replace Yakunin as the director of one of the country’s essential pipelines for the movement of goods and people.

Noting the immense power and resources under the discretion of major state firms like those previously overseen by Yakunin, Nikolay Petrov, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, observed in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, “Some of these companies, like Gazprom and Russian Railroads, were like states-within-the-state.”

This spring Russia’s antinarcotics official, Viktor Ivanov, left office and in May, Kremlin security chief Evgeny Murov lost his post. Recently, police brought criminal charges against Andrei Belyaninov, the country’s chief customs officer, for alcohol smuggling. Television exposés revealed the allegedly corrupt and illegal dealings of this former insider, including the discovery of over $800,000 in Russian and foreign currency stashed away in his luxury home.

Putin has simultaneously replaced the governors of three regions—Yaroslavl, Kirov, Kaliningrad—the last of which is a geostrategically critical stretch of Russian territory sandwiched in between Poland and Lithuania. The Kaliningrad post was handed to the regional head of the FSB. The fired governor of Kirov oblast, Nikita Belykh, who was not a member of the governing United Russia party and maintained ties with the liberal opposition, is now facing corruption allegations.

Whether the Kremlin’s actions are defensive measures aimed at forestalling an internal rebellion against Putin’s rule, advance efforts to shore up the Russian president’s position before challengers emerge, or simply a “rotation” of the elite as some have suggested, is unclear. As the pressures facing it mount, the Putin government will be beset by continuing turmoil.

After brawl in town of Sisco, France launches campaign to ban burkini

Kumaran Ira

The Socialist Party (PS) mayor of Sisco on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica has banned the “burkini” body-covering swimsuit for Muslim women, after a fight erupted between Corsican villagers and three Muslim families of North African origin.

On Saturday afternoon, local youth were at the beach along with the Muslim families. The fight allegedly erupted when the Muslim men accused a tourist of taking pictures of his wife and threw a stone at the vacationer. Then, according to witnesses, “a Sisco teen recorded on his smart-phone the brawl between the father and the vacationer. He was then himself attacked and hit in the face. He and his friends then called adult villagers for help, and dozens came, there were insults and bottles and stones were thrown.”

The brawl left five people injured, including at least two badly bruised men of North African origin. Four were briefly hospitalized. Three cars belonging to the North African families were torched.

Well before the circumstances of the brawl were established, the French ruling elite seized upon this incident to launch a provocative and reactionary campaign to stoke up anti-Muslim hysteria. On Monday, Sisco mayor Ange-Pierre Vivoni issued a decree prohibiting the wearing of burkini on the beaches of his town. The decree was based on two similar bans, that of the French Riviera towns of Cannes and Villeneuve-Loubet, recently approved by France's administrative court.

The ban was the subject of an extraordinary intervention by national authorities and parties. Speaking to La Provence, Prime Minister Manual Valls (PS) said he would “support” mayors banning the burkini, which he called “incompatible with the values of France,” while Minister for Family, Children and Women’s Rights Laurence Rossignol (PS) defended the bans, stating that the burkini’s purpose is “to hide women’s bodies in order to better control them.”

The Vice-President of the neo-fascist National Front (FN), Florian Philippot, echoed PS attacks on Muslims. “It's not surprising, when the State does not respond to the actions of scum and Islamist violence,” he said, calling for “a general and absolute ban of the burkini on all French beaches.”

Vivoni imposed his ban based on unsubstantiated allegations that Saturday's incident was caused by women wearing burkinis. He claimed that the ban was necessary to protect the population. In fact, the ban aims neither to protect the population nor to defend women's democratic rights, but to attack democratic rights and encourage racism, orienting to Corsican-nationalist and far-right forces.

Vivoni justified the measure based on arguments from a right-wing protest on Sunday after the incident. Some 500 people gathered on Sunday in areas of Bastia that are home to a large North African community, shouting, “We’re going up there, because this is our home.” Citing allegations from a girl at the rally, Vivoni told AFP: “I confirm that women were bathing in burkinis … [which are] a fashion statement we see on all Corsica's beaches.”

Similarly, last month, the right-wing mayor of Cannes signed a decree denouncing burkinis as an incitement to terrorist violence and a threat to public order and hygiene. It stated, “Beach wear that ostentatiously indicates religious belief, under conditions where France and its religious institutions are targeted by terrorist attacks, threatens to create the risk of troubling public order (gatherings, riots, etc.) that we must prevent.” It imposed a €38 (US$42.90) fine for wearing a burkini.

Charges that Muslim women exercising their democratic right to dress as they please are inciting terrorist violence linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militia, and thus hostile to France, are baseless and dangerous lies. The relentless incitement of anti-Muslim sentiment, as the Sisco brawl itself shows, has raised ethnic and sectarian tensions in France to the boiling point.

It is the ruling elites in France and the other NATO powers that have incited Islamist terrorist forces as part of their wars for regime change across the Middle East and Africa. They fomented proxy wars, arming and financing Islamist militias and terrorist groups—first to topple the Libyan regime in 2011, and then to stoke a sectarian civil war in Syria that has claimed over 400,000 lives and forced over 10 million people to flee their homes.

The hypocrisy of the campaign against the burkini is staggering. US media have reported that the CIA is arming Al Qaeda-linked opposition militias near the Syrian city of Aleppo with anti-tank missiles and other high-tech weapons to attack Russian-backed Syrian government forces. Yet it is Muslim beachgoers, not the reckless actions of the NATO imperialist powers that are arming terror groups and threatening to provoke all-out war with Russia, that are denounced as threats.

Burkini bans are fundamentally opposed to secular principles and violate basic democratic rights. The European Convention on Human Rights' Article 9 on religious freedom states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”

The burkini ban is the outcome of over a decade of escalating attacks on Muslims' democratic rights in France. The conservative government of President Jacques Chirac imposed a headscarf ban in public schools in 2004, followed by a burqa ban introduced by right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy. These bans were supported by pseudo-left groups, including the New Anticapitalist Party, who then backed the imperialist wars in Libya and Syria as well as the lifestyle justifications for anti-Muslim hatreds such as the headscarf and burqa bans.

The current allegations that Muslim swimwear marketed by major clothing stores in Europe incites terrorism underscores the absurd and fraudulent character of these assaults on democratic rights, which have fanned reactionary, pro-FN sentiments in France.

“Since when did wearing a burkini, in most cases a loose fitting nylon version of a wetsuit, become an act of allegiance to terrorist movements?” Huda Jawad asked in the British Independent. “Do Marks & Spencer or House of Fraser know that their attempt to raise profits and exploit a gap in the over-saturated clothing market is selling and promoting allegiance to ISIS?”

The anti-burkini hysteria is aimed above all at the working class, and rising opposition to policies of war and social austerity imposed by the European Union and France's PS government.

The European bourgeoisie is seizing on recent terrorist atrocities, like last year's Charlie Hebdo and November 13 attacks in Paris and the March 22 Brussels attack—all carried out by forces known to European intelligence services—to impose police-state measures and authoritarian forms of rule. French President François Hollande imposed a state of emergency suspending basic democratic rights, and promoted policies associated to the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime, such as stripping French nationality from those supposedly linked to terrorism.

The French state of emergency was used principally to justify cracking down on and trying to ban this spring's protests against the draconian attacks on social conditions contained in the PS government's wildly unpopular labor law.

The only way forward for class-conscious workers is to oppose the bourgeoisie's attempts to divide the working class along religious and racial lines with reactionary policies such as burkini bans.

Hacker group releases malware codes attributed to National Security Agency

Nick Barrickman

On Monday, a hacker group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released malware files and code it claimed to have taken from hackers employed by the US National Security Agency (NSA). The codes, described by the group as a “state sponsor tool set” for spying and exploiting breaches in computer networks of foreign governments and companies, were released in two bundles--one a freely accessible trove and the other an encrypted bundle containing “the best files,” which would be auctioned to the public for $500 million.

“There is a lot of consensus among technical experts that the cybertools were indeed stolen from the NSA, most likely from an external command and control server created to launch hacking operations that couldn’t be traced back to the US,” former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker told NBC News.

The Shadow Brokers group claims to have taken its nearly 300 megabyte collection of malware from an NSA-affiliated hacker team known as the Equation Group. According to the Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs, the Equation Group is “a threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques.”

“How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons [sic]?” asks Shadow Brokers in a crudely worded statement on its web page, referring to the NSA. “We find cyber weapons made by creators of stuxnet, duqu, flame,” continues the statement.

The Equation Group is the maker of the Stuxnet worm, a computer virus that was used to infect Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, significantly hampering the latter’s ability to develop its energy sector. The New York Times reported that the exposed cache of malicious computer code was used “to break through network firewalls and get inside the computer systems of competitors like Russia, China and Iran.” The NSA has yet to comment on the evident breach of its security system.

The malware programs were mostly dated to June 2013, the month that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed massive illegal spying operations conducted by the US intelligence apparatus around the world. The NSA conducted a systematic revamping of its security protocol after Snowden made these revelations and many of the programs made available by the Shadow Brokers are considered obsolete today.

Both the Times and the Washington Post published prominent news pieces on Wednesday, two days after the leak, seeking, without presenting any factual substantiation, to attribute the breach to the Russian government. Both quoted from statements made on social media by Snowden, who said that “circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility.”

Snowden suggested the alleged Russian move was “more diplomacy than intelligence, related to the escalation around the DNC hack.” This was a reference to the campaign of the Democratic Party and much of the US media to blame the Russian government for last month’s leak of Democratic National Committee emails showing corrupt efforts by the party leadership to undermine the primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. The presidential campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the party establishment, with the tacit support of Sanders, have charged that the leaks amount to an intervention into the US election by Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed at tipping the result in favor of his agent, Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Snowden said the Russian government likely wanted to send “a warning that someone can prove US responsibility for any attacks that originated from this malware server,” and that this could prove damaging “particularly if any of those operations targeted elections.”

The acknowledgment by the corporate media of massive spying, hacking and cyber warfare by the NSA against governments and corporations all over the world underscores the hypocrisy of the current efforts to brand Putin and the Russian government as international pariahs and rogue forces for their alleged hacking into Democratic Party computer servers.

Other experts in cyber security have cast doubt on the claims of Russian involvement in the Shadow Brokers hacks. “There are so many unknowns here, and a lot of people in the hacking community don’t think this is the Russian government,” said journalist James Bamford, the author of authoritative books and articles exposing the illegal activities of the NSA. He told NBC News that “even the NSA probably doesn’t know who did this.”

Former NSA General Counsel Baker suggested that “the more disastrous and less likely scenario is that someone has hacked US infrastructure and extracted large files,” and likely has the ability to do so again.