Have Monsanto and the Biotech Industry Turned Natural Bt Pesticides Into GMO “Super Toxins”?

Jonathan Latham

Is the supposed safety advantage of GMO crops over conventional chemical pesticides a mirage?

According to biotech lore, the Bt pesticides introduced into many GMO food crops are natural proteins whose toxic activity extends only to narrow groups of insect species. Therefore, says the industry, these pesticides can all be safely eaten, e.g. by humans.

This is not the interpretation we arrived at after our analysis of the documents accompanying the commercial approval of 23 typical Bt-containing GMO crops, however (see Latham et al., 2017, just published in the journal Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Reviews).

In our publication, authored along with Madeleine Love and Angelika Hilbeck, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), we show that commercial GMO Bt toxins differ greatly from their natural precursors. These differences are important. They typically cause GMO Bt proteins to be more toxic. Worse, they also cause them to be active against many more species than natural forms of Bt toxins.

SUBUNITS OF CRY1 CRYSTALS SHOWING THE DNA CORE

Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dow, are the principal makers of GMO crops intended to kill pests. The vast majority of these GMO insecticidal crops, which include GMO corn, GMO soybeans, and GMO cotton, are engineered to contain a family of protein pesticides called Bt toxins. Such crops may contain up to six different Bt transgenes.

Bt toxins get their name from the bacterial species from which they are originally derived, Bacillus thuringiensis. Biotech seed companies and government officials commonly refer to GMO Bt toxins (which are also called Cry toxins) as “natural”. Commonly also, they state that GMO versions are identical to the Bt toxins used in organic agriculture or in forestry.

But, as we found, GMO Bt toxins are clearly distinct from natural Bt toxins and those used in more traditional farming methods:

1) Whereas natural Bt toxins are insoluble crystals with complex structures built around a DNA molecule (see illustration), all GMO Bt toxins are soluble proteins (with no DNA).

2) Many GMO Bt toxins are truncated proteins.

3) Parts of Bt toxins are often combined to make hybrid GMO molecules that don’t exist in nature.

4) GMO Bt toxins often have added to them synthetic or unrelated protein molecules.

5) Some are mutated to replace specific amino acids.

6) And far from least, all GMO Bt proteins studied by us were additionally altered inside plant cells. It seems that the GMO crop plant itself invariably creates changes in Bt toxins.

Thus, not a single one of the 23 Bt commercial lines that we analysed was identical to natural or historically used versions of Bt toxins. All had at least two of the above categories of alterations, but most had many more. To call GMO Bt proteins natural, as biotech companies standardly do, is therefore misleading and scientifically wrong.

Biological and toxicological significance

The biological meaning of these alterations is not discussed in the commercial applications that we studied. However, we found it can be inferred, at least in part, from a theoretical understanding of the toxicity of natural Bt proteins.

It is first necessary to note that the natural Bt molecules produced by B. thuringiensis are non-toxic crystals. The actual toxicologically active protein is a much smaller soluble fragment. To get from one to the other the crystal must first be eaten, then dissolved, then processed by the gut enzymes of a target organism, all in a precise sequence. The exact physiological and enzymatic conditions required for each step are particular to each toxin and quite rare in nature. This requirement for exacting conditions is, in large part, where the toxicological specificity of natural Bt toxins originates.

Once processed in this way, the much smaller but now activated toxin molecule attaches to receptors in the gut and makes holes in its membranes. This causes the victim to be digested from the inside by the contents its own gut, which includes B. thuringiensis.

This complex mechanism of toxicity can be conceptualised as the sequential removal of a series of inhibitory structures that act like the safety catch on a gun or the sheath on a sword. Processing prevents premature or inappropriate toxicological activity such as the making of holes in the bacteria’s own membranes.

The key inference from this understanding is that GMO developers, by solubilising or shortening Bt toxins, have removed some or all of the inhibitory structures that make natural versions safe for most organisms.

Thus, the standard theory of Bt toxin activation implies that, by creating Bt toxins that are more similar to the toxicologically active form, GMO developers are doing two things. First, they are making each Bt protein more active towards known target species. More worryingly, they are making them potentially hazardous towards an entirely new, though largely unknown, range of organisms. So, while the public explanation for using GMO Bt pesticides is that their toxicity is limited to a few species, this rationale is being undercut by placing them into GMO crops.

Theory only goes so far, however. There is another way to ascertain the effects of the changes made to commercial Bt toxins. That is to measure them. As we show, there are indeed published papers reporting that GMO Bt toxins are more toxic than natural Bt toxins. For example, co-author Angelika Hilbeck has shown that a Bt toxin called Cry1Ab is unexpectedly toxic to neuropteran insects (Hilbeck et al., 1998). US researchers separately showed that the GMO corn MON810 unexpectedly affected caddisflies, whereas non-GMO corn did not (Rosi-Marshall et al., 2007). Other researchers have shown that fewer than 14 pollen grains can kill swallowtail butterflies. These and other results strongly suggest that GMO Bt toxins can behave very differently than natural ones.

Patenting supertoxins

A third way to determine the effects of changes made to Bt proteins is to find a patent in which the developer describes in detail the alterations they have made to a commercial Bt toxin, and the increase in potency that resulted from these alterations.

In US Patent No. 6,060,594 Monsanto describes how they made mutations in a natural Bt toxin called Cry3b that made this natural toxin into, in their own words, a “super toxin” (English et al., 2000). One such super toxin was subsequently introduced to make the commercial GMO corn MON863. Another was used to make GMO corn MON88017. The Bt toxin in MON863 was, according to the patent, 7.9-fold more active than the natural version. These enhanced toxins, claimed the patent, “have the combined advantages of increased insecticidal activity and concomitant broad spectrum activity.”

This finding compellingly supports our contention that altered GMO toxins are more potent in their toxicity and effective against a broader range of species. But Monsanto curiously omitted this information when it applied for a regulatory exemption from EPA for the toxin in MON863. Instead, Monsanto argued that that the Bt protein in MON863 was toxicologically equivalent to the natural Bt protein precursor.

This is a resurfacing of the historic contradiction that has marked biotechnology since its inception. Claiming to be identical to old methods when safety is the issue and novel when the question is patents. It would surely be interesting to sit down EPA and the Patent Office together at the same table.

But that is still not all. As mentioned briefly above, all Bt toxins are further altered–by the plants into which they have been introduced. This creates unique toxin molecules that differ even further from natural ones. The biological explanations for these alterations are not clear, they may be specific to individual transgene insertion events, or the cause may be biochemical processing of the Bt toxin inside plant cells. But whatever that explanation, these alterations also may enhance the toxicity of the Bt molecule or alter its range of affected organisms.

To understand this point better it is important to appreciate that all commercialised GMOs represent unique genetic events. Each event has been specifically selected for pesticidal effectiveness in the greenhouse of the developer from among thousands of other, presumably less effective, breeding lines. This selection step creates the probability that a commercial GMO will have unique and unexpected toxicological properties that are responsible for that effectiveness.

Implications and inferences

Our analysis is of importance for many reasons. First, are the real world ecological implications. According to our estimations, a series of independent alterations are creating enhancements in Bt protein toxicity. If each individual enhancement gives rise to a many-fold increase in toxicity, which, according to industry data it often does, then the cumulative effect is likely to be very large.

(This is particularly so when the vast quantities of Bt toxins present in each GMO crop field are considered. Not only are Bt proteins present in every cell of each GMO plant, but stacked GMO crop varieties increasingly have many different Bt transgenes. It is easy to imagine that GMO Bt crops may be having large effects on agricultural ecosystems.)

Second, there is a lesson here surely for new generations of biotechnologies. What our paper shows is that government regulators across the globe have opted to assume that Bt toxins, no matter how much they have been altered, whether accidentally or on purpose, have a toxicological profile that is unchanged.

Such an interpretation is highly convenient for applicants wanting to roll out potent novel toxins, but it is useless for protecting public health and the environment. Such disregard of the scientific evidence, laid out in full by us for the first ever time, is part of an unfortunate wider pattern–which we have been documenting–of adoption by GMO regulators of industry-friendly theoretical frameworks and interpretations.

It is the question for our times. How to integrate science into decision-making but ensure it is applied rigorously and impartially and therefore in the public interest?

The India-China Face Off

Brian Cloughley

In this era of widespread nuclear capabilities it is important that admirals and generals should refrain from commenting forcefully on international affairs in public.

It is expected that such as the Commander of US forces in the Pacific, Admiral Harris, will continue to threaten China by saying such things as “We will cooperate when we can but we will be ready to confront when we must,” while the chief of US European Command and NATO’S Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Scaparrotti, will carry on declaring publicly that “we are returning to our historic role as a warfighting command” in order to increase tension with Russia, but it is possible that Moscow and Beijing just laugh at that sort of thing. (Incidentally, what was Scaparrotti’s vast array of military muscle doing before it returned to warfighting?)

Generals and admirals should certainly pay close attention to world developments, because it is essential for their country’s security and planning that they and their staffs should analyze the situation along national borders and in other areas of strategic significance ; but making statements to the world at large about going to war with specific countries is not the responsibility of the military, and the observation on September 6 by India’s army chief, General Bipin Rawat, that China is his nation’s “northern adversary” was confrontational to the point of irresponsibility.

The nuclear arsenals and readiness states of India and China — and neighboring Pakistan — are formidable and threatening, and in such circumstances intemperate pronouncements on international policy by public figures are best avoided.

The day before the General made his comment, the international BRICS summit meeting in Beijing, attended by five national leaders, including President Xi of China and India’s Prime Minister Modi, had ended with a positive declaration that the gathering “fostered the spirit of mutual respect and understanding, equality, solidarity, openness, inclusiveness and mutually beneficial cooperation.”  The political heads of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa declared they shared a desire for “peace, security, development and cooperation,” but the chances of any advance by China and India towards compromise and harmony were somewhat blunted by the Indian army commander’s announcement that China was “flexing [its] muscles” by “salami slicing, taking over territory in a very gradual manner, testing our limits or threshold.”

On September 5 the leaders of India and China had a discussion described by the Indian side as “forward-looking” with emphasis on “peace and tranquility in border areas.” It was stated they desire “closer communication between the defense and security personnel of India and China” which now might seem to be a forlorn hope, given General Rawat’s stark warning next day that not only is there likelihood of conflict with China, but that it would probably extend to war with Pakistan.

The General said that “Whether these [border] conflicts will be limited and confined in space and time, or whether these can expand into an all-out war along the entire front with the Western adversary [Pakistan] taking advantage of the situation developing on the Northern border [with China], is very much likely.” He seemed to be setting the stage for further confrontation between Beijing and Delhi at the very time that tension had eased a little,  following a nasty military face-off in their disputed border region. As reported on September 7 in the Guardian newspaper, “India last week agreed to pull troops from the disputed Doklam plateau high in the Himalayas, where Chinese troops had started building a road. The 10-week standoff was the two nations’ most protracted in decades, and added to their longstanding strategic rivalry.”

The Washington Post noted that “In India, news outlets painted Monday’s [August 28] stand-down as a win for Indian diplomacy,” which was a polite way of saying that India’s media treated the agreement as an out-and-out victory for India.  The Economic Times, for example, boasted that “New Delhi, which stood firm amid Beijing’s relentless provocation, sent out a message that it would stand by a friend [Bhutan] in times of crisis and in the process strengthened its partnership with Asian countries, particularly in South and Southeast Asia,” and the Hindustan Times headlined “Unmistakable message: Doklam showed India can dig in heels, stand up for ally.”

This is not what China wanted to hear, and its media riposted in robust terms, with the difference, of course, that it speaks with the voice of central authority, unlike that of India, where, even if its press and TV are on occasions infantile to the point of absurdity (they’ve learned a lot from Britain and America), they are totally independent. The message came through from both sides that although they had agreed to defuse the potentially disastrous situation, they were not going to admit for an instant that they were the slightest bit in the wrong ; and although the actors may have withdrawn to the wings for the moment, the stage was set for further drama.  General Rawat’s comments were more than noises off, because nobody could ignore the words of such an important national figure.

One indication of China’s disapproval of India’s stance was cancellation of a minor military ceremonial function on October 1.  Since 2005 there have been two meetings annually between the armed forces of India and China at five posts along their frontier, but this time the Chinese government did not issue an invitation to the Indian side for such a get-together.  By such seemingly trivial actions are high displeasures made known, and it can be expected that there will be other and more significant indications that China has no intention of giving up its claims to territory it considers belong to it. As General Rawat told the media on August 26, two days before the Doklam dispute petered out, “Let’s say this stand-off gets resolved, but our troops on the border should not feel that it cannot happen again. Such instances are likely to increase in future . . .  My message to the troops is to not let down the guard.”

China and India have never been comfortable neighbors, and recent events have shown that their relationship continues to be precarious.  Mutual distrust is understandable, given their history of confrontation along what is called the ‘Line of Actual Control’ dividing territory clamed by both countries, but in more recent times it has become apparent that India is not only allying itself with the United States, but is pursuing an anti-China policy it hopes will be regarded with US approval. That this is proving successful was shown by a report on October 4 in India’s Tribune newspaper that “The Trump administration on Wednesday threw its weight behind India’s opposition to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), saying it passes through a disputed territory [Pakistan-administered Kashmir] and no country should put itself into a position of dictating the Belt and Road initiative.”

Instead of drawing closer together, as optimistically hoped by most leaders of the BRICS in their advocacy of “mutually beneficial cooperation”, it appears that India is drawing away from China and has tied its flag to the mast of an increasingly confrontational United States.  Although the Delhi government seems reluctant to engage in direct military cooperation with the Pentagon (no US bases in India, for example), it is no coincidence that the first visit to India by a senior member of the Trump administration was that of General Mattis, the defense secretary, on September 25-27.

India has signaled that it’s in for the long haul along the Line of Actual Control by establishing a new 90,000-strong army corps in the region, building strategic roads, and developing a network of airfields in the forward areas to support advanced combat aircraft and heavy transports. China has also increased its military presence, and is not going to accept anything other than an Indian climb-down concerning border region claims. The chances of conflict are high and getting higher, and no doubt China has noted that, as reported by The Hindu on September 24, “the US has already become India’s top defense supplier with the sale of three Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules aircraft, 10 C-17 Globemaster and 12 P-8 Poseidon aircraft from Boeing, as well as 22 AH-64 Apache and 15 CH-47 Chinook helicopters. US and India also signed a deal worth $750 million in December 2016, under which the government will be buying 145 M777 Howitzer guns for the Army. America is now pushing India to buy around 100-150 F-16 Block 70 combat aircraft produced by Lockheed Martin as well as around 20 Sea Guardian drones.”

In the end it all comes down to money for military sales, and there’s nothing like international confrontation for boosting the morale and share prices of the US military-industrial complex. But it would still be advisable for General Bipin Rawat and his colleagues to guard their tongues. The India-China standoff is a serious matter, and it shouldn’t be allowed to escalate, no matter the profit involved.

Underground in Raqqa

Patrick Cockburn

Shortly before the siege of Raqqa began in June, Islamic State officials arrested Hammad al-Sajer for skipping afternoon prayers. Hammad, who is 29, made a living from his motorbike: he carried people and packages, charging less than the local taxis. IS had arrested him a number of times before – mostly for smoking cigarettes, which were banned under IS rule – but he had always been released after paying a fine or being lashed. Attendance at prayers was compulsory and he had missed the Asr, the afternoon prayer, because a passenger had made him wait while he went into his house to get money for his fare after a trip to Raqqa’s old city. Hammad expected to be fined or lashed, but this time he was sentenced to a month in prison. Except it turned out not to be prison. On his first morning, ‘militants blindfolded us and took us in a vehicle to a place that seemed to be inside the city because it took no more than ten minutes to get there.’

Hammad and the other prisoners, all of them local men, were taken to an empty house. In one of the rooms there was a hole in the floor. Rough steps led down about sixty feet before the tunnel flattened out into a corridor, which was connected to a labyrinth of other tunnels. A fellow prisoner, Adnan, told Hammad that IS had started work on what was effectively a subterranean network a year and a half earlier. In other words, construction began in 2015, after IS’s spectacular run of victories ended and it started its long retreat in the face of Kurdish offensives backed by coalition firepower. To escape the aerial bombardment, IS decided to disappear underground, digging immense tunnel complexes underneath its two biggest urban centres, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, to help it defend itself when the final assaults came.

Few people in Raqqa knew the extent of the excavations going on beneath their feet – not even Hammad, who rode his motorbike around the city every day. The entrances were always in districts from which local inhabitants had fled or been evicted. ‘When we got into the tunnels we were amazed,’ Hammad remembers. ‘It was as if an entire city had been built underground.’ IS must have needed an army of workers to build it – but then there were large numbers of prisoners and jobless labourers to draw on. The prisoners were told as little as possible about what they were doing: anyone who asked a lot of questions was punished. Hammad saw rooms with reinforced concrete walls and ceilings, and what looked like boxes of ammunition piled up on the floor. When he asked about the boxes, he says, one of the guards ‘hit me on my back with a piece of cable and said: “Don’t poke your nose into things. This is not your business. Do your job and keep quiet.”’ The foreign fighters on duty were silent and unapproachable, but some of the guards were locals and occasionally talked to the diggers during the ten-hour working day. ‘Sometimes they joked with us because they were bored and tired,’ he says. One day he asked one of them what all this hard work was for. ‘This great construction will help the lions of the caliphate to escape,’ he said (the ‘lions’ were the IS emirs and commanders). ‘They have a message to deliver to people and they should not die too soon.’

IS officials used prisoners to work on the tunnels when they could, but they also hired labourers. One of these was Khalaf Ali. When IS seized the city in 2014, he was selling cigarettes in the street. ‘I was picked up by some militants who took me to a commander,’ he says. ‘They did not take me to prison, but they confiscated my boxes of cigarettes and said that if I sold cigarettes again, they would put me in prison and I would get thirty lashes.’ He started spending his days in a local square with other unemployed men; they would wait for a car or truck to stop and offer them odd jobs – moving furniture, mending broken doors or windows. In April 2016, Khalaf was sitting in the square with the others when an IS security man said he wanted to talk to them. At first they were nervous, but the official said they could have work if they registered their names at an IS office. When they showed up at 7 a.m. the following day, they were told they had to agree to certain conditions: ‘We must not talk about what we were doing in public as it was one of the caliphate’s secrets and, if we violated this condition, they would kill us as traitors.’ They were blindfolded and driven a short distance to an empty house, where the blindfolds were removed. It wasn’t the house Hammad had first been taken to: here, there were no stairs, just a sloping tunnel about 150 feet long, which took them around sixty feet underground.

‘We entered an area that looked like a residential complex,’ Khalaf remembers. ‘There were many rooms: some under construction, others finished, with concrete walls.’ The labourers used trolleys to move the excavated soil to a certain point in the tunnel, where other men, whom he didn’t know, took charge of moving it up to the surface to be dispersed. The various teams of workers were forbidden to talk to one another. Khalaf’s team was responsible for moving furniture, including sofas and beds, to completed rooms. ‘There was electricity, though not in every room, and the corridor had lights.’ As the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) advanced towards Raqqa and the American bombardment intensified, IS doubled wages from $4 to $8 a day, though money was deducted if the IS officials were dissatisfied with the quality of the work. Once Khalaf asked an IS militant who had first had the idea of building these underground complexes. He was told that it was ‘our brothers in faith’: ‘in Afghanistan,’ the militant said, ‘many attacks were repelled and failed because of the tunnels.’

Hammad and Khalaf, who didn’t know each other, escaped separately from Raqqa during the first weeks of the siege. Hammad fled in the early morning with a group of men, moving from house to house whenever there was a break in the fighting. They took advantage of a tactical retreat by IS fighters to run towards the Kurdish-led forces, stopping every ten minutes to hide behind walls and the wreckage of houses until they reached safety. The SDF questioned them to make sure that they weren’t IS infiltrators, and then took them to a camp for displaced people at Ain al-Issa, north of Raqqa. Khalaf’s journey out of Raqqa was even riskier: after a number of people in his neighbourhood were killed, he and thirty others decided to try to escape from the city guided by SDF radio broadcasts. Even so, Khalaf says, they were sometimes trapped inside a house by the fighting for several days. ‘Finally we fled, but we lost some of our friends,’ he says. ‘We saw their bodies lying there as we ran, but everybody was afraid of snipers so we couldn’t go back for them.’

The siege of Raqqa, a small city on the Euphrates with a population before the war of less than 300,000, has now been going on for four months. IS fanaticism is one reason it hasn’t fallen sooner, but that alone wouldn’t be enough to stop the SDF, with the might of American airpower behind it. The network of tunnels connecting up bunkers, hideouts and hidden escape routes is the key to the resistance. IS fighters are able to move swiftly underground, shifting positions before they can be detected and eliminated by bombing or shellfire. As in Mosul, the only way for the attackers to advance without sustaining heavy losses has been to call in coalition airstrikes so intense that much of the city has already been destroyed. The Kurdish general commanding the SDF, Mazlum Kobane, was quoted on 26 September as saying that his forces now hold 75 per cent of Raqqa, but there are still some 700 IS fighters and 1500 pro-IS militiamen in the city centre. They can probably hold out for weeks or even months, using the same skills in urban warfare that IS demonstrated during the siege of Mosul. A combination of snipers, suicide bombers, mortar teams, mines and booby traps slow down and inflict damage on the enemy. For IS, eventual defeat is inevitable, but they remain dangerous: last month a group of IS fighters in SDF uniforms killed 28 SDF men in a surprise attack.

Still, tactical agility won’t be enough to save the caliphate, which is now being overwhelmed on multiple fronts. Islamic State’s great strength came from the way it combined religious cult and war machine; its weakness was that it saw the whole world as its enemy, which meant that it would always be outnumbered and outgunned. Without allies and dealing only in violence, it led an unlikely alliance of states normally hostile to one another to find common cause against it, and engage in a degree of reluctant co-operation. As IS comes close to losing its power, old rivalries and divisions are beginning to re-emerge – but in a political landscape significantly reshaped by the war with IS.

A decision IS took three years ago – after its columns had won speedy victories over the Iraqi and Syrian armies and captured much of eastern Syria and western Iraq – helped to set the stage for the next phase of the conflict: instead of keeping up the pressure on the demoralised forces of the central governments in Baghdad and Damascus, IS diverted its forces to make war on the Kurds in both Iraq and Syria. In August 2014, it launched a surprise attack on the Iraqi Kurds which almost reached their capital, Erbil, and in September it started a prolonged assault on the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani. Quite why IS did this remains a mystery: it’s possible that it was acting with the encouragement of Turkey, which was alarmed by the growing strength of the once marginalised Syrian Kurds. Whatever the explanation, the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq unexpectedly found themselves, much to their political benefit, in the front line of an international campaign against IS. The Peshmerga in Iraq and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria were suddenly awarded support from the most powerful air force in the world. Turkey had been prepared to see Kobani fall to IS, but the city was saved by intense US airstrikes, though 70 per cent of its buildings were left in ruins. The US had been desperately seeking reliable ground troops in Syria and found them in the YPG, which took control of much of the southern side of the Syrian-Turkish border. In Iraq, the Kurds used the defeat of the Iraqi army in northern Iraq at the time of the fall of Mosul to seize the ‘disputed territories’ outside the boundaries of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), thereby expanding the Kurdish-controlled area by 40 per cent.

***

Kurdish leaders in Syria and Iraq have long wondered, mostly in private, whether they would be able to retain their political and military gains once IS was on the road to defeat. Early last year, Muhammad Haji Mahmud, a senior Peshmerga commander, told me that the war with IS had brought great benefits to the Iraqi Kurds: ‘We have become a regular army, rather than a guerrilla force; are supported by US and European air power; can buy weapons openly; and are praised internationally for fighting terrorism.’ His big fear was that the Kurds wouldn’t ‘have the same value internationally’ once Mosul was liberated and IS defeated. Nor did he think they would have the strength to hold onto the disputed territories without international support. In Syria, too, Kurdish leaders worry that they are over-extended and too reliant on the Americans, who may stop supporting them diplomatically and militarily once Raqqa and the last IS strongholds have fallen. Turkish intervention is one threat; another is the Syrian army, which – with Russian air cover – has surrounded IS at Deir Ezzor and will now want to advance to take the oilfields further east. Developments in Iraq and Syria often mirror each other: the Syrian army captured East Aleppo in December 2016 and the Iraqi army took Mosul seven months later. The trend in both Iraq and Syria has been for the military power of the central government to bounce back – which poses a mounting threat to Kurdish separatism.

Now that the outcome of the war with IS is no longer really an issue, the conflict in the region is turning towards confrontation over the powers, and even the existence, of the two Kurdish quasi-states: the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, and what the Syrian Kurds call Rojava, in the north-east corner of Syria. In 2012, following the uprisings of the Arab Spring, the Syrian army withdrew from Kurdish cities and towns in the area, and what to all intents and purposes is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, which had been fighting a guerrilla war in Turkey since 1984, took over. As a US military ally against IS from 2014, the Syrian Kurds field an army about 50,000 strong. Their fighters are now moving into eastern Syria, where they will confront advancing troops of the Syrian army. A collision is probable and its outcome uncertain, but for the Kurds it is fraught with danger, since they can’t know what American policy towards them will be under Trump.

However, the first real post-IS crisis for the Kurds has come not in Syria but Iraq. The non-binding referendum on independence for the Iraqi Kurds held on 25 September was opposed by the UN, US, UK, France and Germany as well as by regional powers including Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The last three promised retaliation against the KRG if the vote was held, a threat that its president, Masoud Barzani, interpreted as a bluff. It turned out to be a very real threat and within days of the referendum, Baghdad had closed Iraqi airspace to international flights out of Erbil and Sulaimaniyah. The Iraqi government held joint military manoeuvres with Turkey and Iran and is threatening to take control of the KRG’s borders. The Kurds’ overwhelming vote for their own independent state has had the effect of highlighting the scale of the obstacles to their self-determination. Iran, Turkey and the Iraqi government are now united as never before and in a position to enforce a blockade on the KRG; there is a limit to what the Kurds can do by way of retaliation.

‘The Kurdish leadership in Iraq doesn’t really have any military or diplomatic options,’ says Omar Sheikhmous, a veteran Kurdish leader who believes the KRG has badly overplayed its hand. Barzani’s decision to hold a referendum – driven primarily by intra-Kurdish political divisions – may come to seem a serious miscalculation. Before the poll, Barzani rejected compromise proposals from the US and its European allies while Kurdish leaders underestimated the likelihood of Turkey and Iran following through on threats that had proved hollow in the past. Sheikhmous had warned me before the vote that the Kurdish leadership in Iraq could be about to ‘throw away all they had won over the previous twenty or thirty years’. He compared the referendum with other classic blunders in Iraqi history, such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when he entirely misjudged how other powers would respond. KRG leaders wrongly believed that Turkey and Iran wouldn’t want to jeopardise their sizeable economic interests in Iraqi Kurdistan by objecting to the vote. But neither Turkey nor Iran can countenance the prospect of independence for Iraqi Kurds since it would inflame their own Kurdish minorities. Turkey’s reaction was especially hostile: the Kurds, Erdoğan said, ‘are not forming an independent state, they are opening a wound in the region to twist a knife in’. Barzani had cultivated good relations with Erdoğan, who now says that the relationship is finished: the KRG, ‘to which we provided all support, took steps against us, it will pay the price’. In future, he says, Turkey will deal only with the Iraqi government. Iraqi Kurds are hoping the US will once again come to their rescue by mediating between them and their opponents: they say the roads into Kurdistan are still open and that nothing has yet changed on the ground. The KRG may survive its present isolation but the risk is growing that the Kurdish quasi-states will go the same way as the caliphate.

Germany: Public prosecutor drops investigation into NSA spying

Justus Leicht & Peter Schwarz 

The massive spying operation on German citizens and millions of innocent people carried out by US and British intelligence agencies, together with the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), will have no legal consequences. The Federal Prosecutor General dropped the investigation last week.

The surveillance practices of the secret services were disclosed four years ago by former CIA employee Edward Snowden and was headline news in Germany for months. Now the Federal Prosecutor General has justified the end of the investigation in a statement of only two paragraphs.

It states that his own investigations, as well as those conducted by a parliamentary committee of enquiry into the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA), “have provided no reliable evidence for activities aimed against the Federal Republic of Germany by an intelligence agency (§ 99 of the penal code) or any other criminal offences.” There was no evidence that “US or UK intelligence agencies systematically and massively monitored German telecommunications and Internet traffic.”

This is an obvious lie. The huge amount of data made public by Edward Snowden, plus additional research by journalists and the parliamentary committee of enquiry launched in March 2014, uncovered a wealth of material documenting illegal and massive surveillance. And this despite the fact that the work of the parliamentary committee was hampered by censored and falsified files, missing statements and numerous other forms of harassment, including the spying on the committee itself.

It has been substantiated that the NSA, over a period of 10 years, stored more than 10 million Internet data units and 20 million—on some days up to 60 million—phone calls a day from Germany during its Eikonal operation. Along with spying on millions of innocent citizens, the collected data was used for economic espionage and the monitoring of high-ranking European politicians.

However, the NSA did not have to use secrecy or force to gain access to the German telecommunications networks. This access was provided by Germany’s foreign secret service, the BND, which tapped phone lines, passed the data onto the NSA monitoring centre in Bad Aibling and worked closely with the US intelligence agencies in evaluating the data.

Even the approximately 800,000 selectors (IP addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, etc.) examined by the BND over a period of 10 years and updated several times a day originated from the NSA. The data included information over high-ranking officials from the French government and the European Commission, as well as companies such as EADS (Airbus). Nevertheless, the BND passed the material onto its American partner.

According to a report in Zeit Online in May 2015, the BND captured 6.6 billion metadata a month and passed on up to 1.3 billion to the NSA. One hand washed the other. The BND, with the help of the NSA, was able to circumvent the constitutionally protected secrecy of telecommunications. In exchange, the US intelligence services gained valuable data. In October last year the Federal Constitutional Court effectively gave its blessing to this practice by deciding that the German government did not have to hand over the selector lists to the parliamentary committee of enquiry.

The German government not only knew about the illegal espionage activities of the NSA and BND, it supported them. In April 2015, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung cited documents submitted to the parliamentary committee of enquiry confirming that the German chancellor’s office knew that the NSA intended to spy on the populations of Germany and Europe, and let it happen. The Bildnewspaper quoted one source: “They said, ‘We need information from the Americans, that’s how it goes, we do not want to endanger our cooperation.’”

It is against this background that one has to judge the dropping of all charges by the Prosecutor General. There is no genuine separation of powers at the highest level of the German judiciary. The Prosecutor General himself states on his official web site: “The Federal Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice is not part of the judiciary. Organisationally, he belongs to the executive.” He is a “political official” who must fulfil his tasks in accordance with the views and objectives of the federal government and can be placed in temporary retirement at any time without further explanation.

This means that, in this case, the German government, which controls both the secret services and the Prosecutor General’s office, is investigating itself. There is no democratic control. The secret services which, in terms of organisation and personnel, have their roots in the corresponding bodies of the Nazi Third Reich, represent a state within the state. Even parliamentary committees only receive access to material which the executive permits.

The Prosecutor General does not regard its duty to be the investigation of legal and constitutional violations by the secret services, but rather to cover up for them. This has already been demonstrated during the trial in Munich of the neo-Nazi terror gang, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), in which the Prosecutor General is leading the prosecution.

During the four-and-a-half year trial, all sorts of minor details relating to the personal life of the main defendant, Beate Zschäpe, have been thoroughly investigated. But all attempts by joint plaintiffs to shed light on the role played by intelligence service agents and informers and the police in the activities of the NSU were ruled as inadmissible by the Prosecutor General.

Although it is now clear that more than two dozen informers and undercover agents were operating in the environment of the NSU, in its concluding plea the prosecutor’s office dismissed accusations that such agents had played an active role in the construction and cover-up of the NSU as “unfounded speculation by so-called experts” and “will o’ the wisp” fantasies.

The NSA-BND scandal has already had consequences for the federal government and the German parliament. They have now created a legal basis for what were up to now illegal espionage operations. In June and October 2016, they expanded the powers of the BND. It is now permitted retrieve all data from telecommunications networks with international traffic, also inside Germany.

The web site Netzpolitik.org commented: “The most important consequence is that all the illegal practices of the BND, which have come to light through the work of the parliamentary committee, have been subsequently legalized. The BND now has many more opportunities and money to expand its mass monitoring.”

The secret services, which hitherto shunned publicity, now feel emboldened to undertake a public relations campaign. Last week the heads of the BND, the Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution (domestic security, BfV) and the Military Intelligence Service (MAD) jointly addressed a public meeting of the German parliamentary control board. After answering some questions formulated in advance, they all demanded more powers.

Their catalogue of demands includes easier access to messenger services such as WhatsApp or Telegram, the capacity to “hack back” (i.e., cyber attacks), etc. BfV chief Hans-Georg Maaßen also requested access to IP addresses from people who watched videos from certain foreign servers. BND President Bruno Kahl and his MAD colleague Christof Gramm reported a job growth of 10 percent in their agencies.

Echoing Maaßen, Kahl complained about the lack of legal cover for certain IT operations, which are “technically possible”: “When the reconnaissance is completed to the point where hostile structures and causes are identifiable, it would make sense to shut down the source of the attack.” In addition, the BND still needed judicial approval to deploy trojans to conduct telecommunication monitoring and online searches, a power recently approved for the police.

The massive tooling up of the secret services has long since shattered the framework of democratic norms and legality and increasingly assumes the form of an authoritarian police state. This is an international phenomenon that can be observed in all developed capitalist countries—in the US, France and, most recently, Spain. It can only be understood as the reaction of ruling elites to the profound crisis of capitalist society. The ruling class is preparing to forcibly suppress all social and political opposition.

UK government refuses funds for unsafe tower blocks post-Grenfell

Robert Stevens

Thousands of people nationally are living in buildings that are unsafe, in both the public and private sector, due to the criminal inaction of local and central government.

Following the Grenfell Tower fire, it was revealed that in England alone at least 228 high-rise buildings, over 18 metres in height, were potential death traps. They all have the same or similar aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding that was a central factor in a small kitchen blaze in a fourth floor flat that engulfed the entire 24-storey building.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, with an estimated 30,000 buildings—of all types and sizes—throughout the UK possibly having similar cladding.

After the fire, the Conservative government was forced to instruct councils and housing associations to compile lists of buildings that were deemed unsafe. The government claimed that money would be forthcoming for cash-strapped councils—whose budgets have been slashed, in some cases by 50 percent over the last decade—to complete remedial work.

This was a lie. Councils are faced with bills that run into the tens of millions of pounds to remove and replace flammable cladding. In addition, no money has been made available to help fund the installation of sprinkler systems, despite fire brigades insisting they are essential to prevent the spread of fires in tower blocks.

Even a tower block adjacent to Grenfell Tower has been revealed as unsafe. An investigation by the LBC Radio station, in which Chartered Surveyor and fire safety expert Arnold Tarling inspected the building, found “insecure rubbish chutes running all the way up the building; fire escapes with doors so heavy and stiff, they were inaccessible to disabled people; and fire doors that are flammable.”

According to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), 31 local authorities have demanded funding from the government for carrying out remedial work. A Guardian article reported that the DCLG is in talks with just six authorities while “others had been invited to provide further information about how the work they wished to undertake was essential.”

In the city of Salford, north west England, the Labour-run council has borrowed £25 million to fund the removal of flammable cladding from nine tower blocks that tests found had “no flame retardant properties.” The council has contacted the government regarding providing funding for the work without success.

Thousands of high-rise blocks in the UK do not have sprinkler systems installed, as fitting them has only been legally required since 2007, and only then in new-build high-rises over 30 metres tall, in England. The legislation did not apply to older blocks. It is estimated that just 2 percent of tower blocks in England have sprinkler systems.

Following Grenfell, fire brigades nationally have insisted that retroactively fitting sprinklers systems in all high-rises was necessary to prevent future catastrophes. Last month, Paul Atkins, a fire safety expert who will present testimony at the Grenfell Inquiry, told the BBC, “If they’d [the Grenfell residents] had a sprinkler system the fire would have been deluged before it got to the cladding. … To date no-one has ever died in a fire with a sprinkler system in the household, so the proof’s in the pudding. You’ve got a 99 percent chance of surviving.”

According to Atkins, installing a sprinkler system in Grenfell Tower would have cost between £500,000 and £700,000.

According to the Guardian, at least four councils—Westminster, Croydon and Wandsworth in London and Nottingham in the east Midlands—have been refused central government money to fund sprinkler systems. Nottingham council proposed to install sprinklers in 13 towers at a cost of £6.2 million. Demonstrating the criminal disregard of the ruling elite for the safety of thousands of social housing residents, they were told bluntly by Housing Minister Alok Sharma that money would not be forthcoming as “The fire safety measures you outline are additional rather than essential.”

Post-Grenfell, the government instructed local authorities and housing associations to carry out surveys on the safety of buildings under their control, but private sector owners of high-rises were not compelled to do so. Private owners of developments less than 18 metres tall are exempt from any responsibility.

In June, the DCLG said it was merely “offering private owners of residential buildings [in England only] an opportunity to test cladding on blocks over 18 meters high …” A letter sent to private owners stated, “If you wish to take up this offer, then you will need to submit samples for testing” and “Cut out two samples of at least 250x250mm in size from each location sampled.” Such samples were then to be sent to a testing centre in a jiffy bag!

All political parties are implicated.

Scotland is run by a Scottish National Party (SNP) administration, and for decades before that by Labour Party local authorities.

Last month, it emerged that combustible cladding had been installed on many private high-rise blocks in the city of Glasgow, with residents living there not informed.

At first 57 blocks were identified as unsafe, before this figure was reduced to 19 without explanation. It was only at the end of September that residents in the 19 blocks were even informed that they were living in buildings with combustible cladding.

SNP-run Glasgow City Council has refused to publicly identify either the original 57 blocks or the 19. However, last week the Evening Times reported that three of the privately-owned blocks are located at Glasgow Harbour. Two of the towers contain 273sqm of cladding and another smaller block, 37sqm.

In 2005, following the 1999 Irvine Tower fire, regulations were passed by the Scottish government, then under Labour control determining that all materials used for “external cladding and associated cavities” were required to be non-combustible and the entire system should inhibit the spread of fire. However, this condition was not imposed on tower blocks built and clad prior to that date—meaning that the safety of many tenants and property owners in social housing and privately-owned blocks remain threatened.

In Slough, the council has been forced to take over the freehold of privately-owned Nova House—at an unknown cost to the public purse—after it failed two safety tests. The block houses 200 residents and has combustible ACM cladding. It is estimated that the cost of making the building safe is £1 million with the council stating that the previous private owner, Ground Rents Estates 5 Limited, did not have “the capacity to do what is needed …”

Since September 27, a fire engine has been permanently stationed—at the council’s expense—in the car park next to the block.

As with Grenfell Tower, it appears that cost cutting was involved in the cladding process, as the original cladding intended for the building that would have passed safety checks was not used.

Nearly four months since the Grenfell Tower fire, and a month since the government inquiry into the inferno began, not a single person has been charged let alone arrested for a crime in which scores perished.

The Metropolitan Police have not said a word about its “criminal investigation” since September 19 when it said officers would continue working in the tower into the New Year and only open another police operation into Grenfell when that was finished.

Hundreds of survivors of the fire remain in temporary accommodation, with just 10 households out of 203 permanently rehoused.

Trump threatens to jettison NAFTA, as trade disputes intensify

Roger Jordan & Keith Jones

With Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau standing at his side, US President Donald Trump repeated Wednesday his threat to pull the US out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Following a brief White House meeting with Trudeau, that was overshadowed by escalating Canada-US trade tensions, Trump said that if the US-initiated talks to “modernize” NAFTA failed, his administration would scuttle the 23 year-old trade pact. “It’s possible we won’t be able to make a deal,” said Trump, adding “I think Justin (Trudeau) understands this, if we can’t make a deal, it will be terminated and that will be fine.”

Trudeau, whose Liberal government has bent over backwards to develop a closer working relationship with the Trump administration in the hopes of maintaining Canadian big businesses’ privileged access to the US market, subsequently acknowledged that NAFTA is perilously close to collapse. “We’re ready for anything,” he told a press conference later Wednesday.

Whether the Canada-US-Mexico trade agreement is ultimately refashioned or unravels, the negotiations over NAFTA 2.0 have already demonstrated that the world capitalist crisis that exploded in 2008 has entered a new stage, marked by a turn to “beggar thy neighbor” economic nationalist and protectionist policies, which as in the 1930s are fueling explosive inter-imperialist and great-power rivalries.

The Trump administration, in keeping with its reactionary “America First” agenda, is seeking to reorganize NAFTA to make it a more explicitly North American protectionist economic bloc, firmly under Washington’s domination. In the name of “fair trade,” US negotiators are demanding massive concessions from Mexico, including the elimination of its $50 billion-plus trade surplus with the US. Canada, as exemplified by the recent US Commerce Department decision imposing countervailing and dumping tariffs of 300 percent on Bombardier C-Series jets, is also facing a host of unpalatable demands.

But Trump’s chief target is America’s main global economic rivals—China, Germany, and to a lesser extent, Japan. US negotiators are very much approaching the NAFTA negotiations from the standpoint of making it a better platform from which to vie for markets, resources and profits around the world. In the midst of the NAFTA talks, Washington has launched a series of trade actions expressly targeting Germany and China, including ordering an investigation into whether steel and aluminum imports are imperiling US “national security.”

This aggressive drive goes hand in hand with the further escalation of the US military-strategic offensives in the Middle East and against Russia and China, including in recent weeks repeated threats on the part of Trump and US Defense Secretary James Mattis to “annihilate” North Korea, a close ally of Beijing.

Canada has dramatically expanded its military-security partnership with the US over the past quarter century, as Washington has sought to offset the erosion of American global economic predominance through a series of ruinous wars. This is because Canada’s imperialist elite calculates that it can best assert its own increasingly important global interests in alliance with Washington and Wall Street.

To virtual unanimous applause from the Canadian media and political establishment, Trudeau has sought to demonstrate to Trump and his cabinet of generals and billionaire cronies that Canada is the America’s staunchest ally. This has included steps to further align Canada’s military and security policies with those of Washington, by announcing a 70 percent hike in military spending by 2026 and agreeing to a US request to “modernize” NORAD (the North American Aerospace Command).

Significantly, Trudeau did not rule out striking a bilateral trade pact with Washington should the NAFTA talks fail, after Trump publicly raised the possibility when he appeared with the Canadian prime minister at the conclusion of their meeting.

Although the issue has been all blacked out in press coverage of their talks, Trump hinted the two countries would deepen their security-military cooperation as he went into his meeting with Trudeau. The US President, who last week likened a dinner with high-ranking military officers as the “calm before the storm,” remarked that in addition to defense, “I guess we’ll also be discussing mutual offense, which people don’t mention too often.”

Throwing Mexico under the bus

The suggestion of a bilateral Canada-US trade pact prompted Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico’s former ambassador to the US, to bluntly state, “Some of us in Mexico think that on several occasions our Canadian friends have come close to throwing us under the bus.”

NAFTA’s demise would accelerate the rise of protectionism around the world, further fueling tensions between the major powers and paving the way to global trade war and military conflicts.

However, NAFTA’s fate is by no means sealed. Substantial sections of the corporate elite in both the United States and Canada want to retain it, seeing it as the best means to continue to ratchet up the exploitation of the working class and compete on the global stage with their main rivals. Over 300 US state and local chambers of commerce addressed an appeal to Trump Monday, urging him not to withdraw from NAFTA.

Thomas Donohue, head of the US Chamber of Commerce, sharply criticized the negotiating tactics being pursued by Trump administration officials in the talks, describing some of the US demands as “poison pills” designed to scuttle any deal.

One of these proposals would grant American companies sweeping access to government procurement contracts in Mexico and Canada, while making any US procurement contracts won by Canadian and Mexican firms conditional on US companies being awarded similar-sized procurement contracts in the home country of the company involved.

US officials also want a hike in the percentage of cars and other vehicles that must be produced in a NAFTA country to qualify for tariff-free access, from the current level of 62.5 percent to 85 percent. In addition, 50 percent of a vehicle would have to be produced in the US.

Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, acknowledged the hard line adopted by Washington in comments this week, suggesting that government procurement and auto content demands were nonnegotiable. Said Ross, “I think that you will find we will get increased percentages in the rules of origins and I think you’ll find the car companies will adapt themselves to it.”

US negotiators are also expected to demand a so-called sunset clause that would cause NAFTA to expire after five years if all three countries do not agree that it continue, an idea strongly attacked by business groups for the uncertainty it would create for investors.

Washington’s aggressive drive to bolster US big business at Canada’s expense constitutes a huge crisis for the Canadian bourgeoisie, given the importance of its strategic partnership with Washington and dependence on the US market. Fully three-quarters of Canada’s exports go to the US.

Not only are Washington and Ottawa at loggerheads over NAFTA and the trade action that Boeing, America’s largest export earner, initiated against Bombardier. Following on from the actions taken by the previous Obama administration, the US Commerce Dept. has imposed tariffs of more than 20 percent on Canada’s softwood lumber producers.

At their Wednesday meeting, Trudeau told Trump that in retaliation for the tariffs on Bombardier, Canada is scrapping a planned purchase of Boeing Super Hornet fighter jets and will instead buy used FA-18 fighters from Australia. Provincial governments aligned with Trudeau, including Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in Ontario, have threatened to impose “buy Ontario” provisions in retaliation for any US measures against Canada.

While in Washington, Trudeau held a meeting with the House Ways and Means Committee, hoping to secure support of key US Congressmen for maintaining NAFTA and, in the event that proves impossible, for a bilateral trade deal. According to reports of the gathering, committee members urged Trudeau to lift restrictions on dairy and poultry imports, and the prime minister pushed back by citing US government programs to support agriculture.

Divisions between Washington and Mexico City are even more pronounced. Mexican officials, according to media reports, increasingly appear to be accepting the likelihood that they will be expelled from NAFTA. “Mexico is much bigger than NAFTA. We have to be prepared for the different scenarios that could come out of this negotiation,” Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray Caso told the Mexican Senate Tuesday.

NAFTA has been used by US and Canadian big business, and their junior partners in Mexico, to pit workers against each other in a race to the bottom.

The unions have been complicit in this, systematically suppressing the class struggle and imposing wage and benefit cuts and speed-up in the name of saving “American” or Canadian jobs.”

Now with the commercial struggle intensifying, the pro-capitalist unions are lining up behind their respective governments and ruling elites to support trade measures aimed at pushing more of the burden of the economic crisis onto “foreign” workers.

The AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers, and Canada’s Unifor have all embraced Trump’s call for “fair trade” and are tirelessly peddling the fraudulent claim that Trudeau and Trump, notorious for his anti-Mexican chauvinism, can be pressured into reaching a deal that will advance workers’ interests.

Unifor has taken this to its logical conclusion in the current strike by 2,800 GM CAMI workers in Ontario. While refusing to fight for any of the workers’ just demands for an end to two-tier wages and other concessions, it is appealing to the corporate giant to guarantee Mexican workers be laid off first in the event of a downturn.

Whether a compromise is reached or the trade pact collapses, the deepening crisis of NAFTA exemplifies the ever-widening breakdown of world capitalism and underscores the urgency of workers across North America adopting a socialist internationalist strategy. Workers—Canadian, Mexican and American—must assert their common class interests in opposition to all sections of big business, their political hirelings and their agenda of pushing the brunt of the crisis onto working people through job and wage cuts, the dismantling of public services, and war.

This requires making the objective unity of workers in all three countries a conscious strategy, the unification of their struggles, and the fight for workers’ government in Ottawa, Washington and Mexico City that would use North American economic integration to raise the economic well-being and cultural level of the population, not maximize profit for a tiny, rapacious elite.