The FBI’s Forgotten Criminal History

James Bovard

President Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey last May spurred much of the media to rally around America’s most powerful domestic federal agency. But the FBI has a long record of both deceit and incompetence. Five years ago, Americans learned that the FBI was teaching its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This has practically been the Bureau’s motif since its creation in 1908.

The bureau was small potatoes until Woodrow Wilson dragged the United States into World War I. In one fell swoop, the number of dangerous Americans increased by perhaps twentyfold. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it easy to jail anyone who criticized the war or the government. In September 1918, the bureau, working with local police and private vigilantes, seized more than 50,000 suspected draft dodgers off the streets and out of the restaurants of New York, Newark, and Jersey City. The Justice Department was disgraced when the vast majority of young men who had been arrested turned out to be innocent.

In January 1920, J. Edgar Hoover — the 25-year-old chief of the bureau’s Radical Division — was the point man for the “Palmer Raids.” Nearly 10,000 suspected Reds and radicals were seized. The bureau carefully avoided keeping an accurate count of detainees (a similar pattern of negligence occurred with the roundups after the 9/11 attacks). Attorney General Mitchell Palmer sought to use the massive roundups to propel his presidential candidacy. The operation took a drubbing, however, after an insolent judge demanded that the Justice Department provide evidence for why people had been arrested. Federal judge George Anderson complained that the government had created a “spy system” that “destroys trust and confidence and propagates hate. A mob is a mob whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers, and the vicious classes.”

After the debacle of the Palmer raids, the bureau devoted its attention to the nation’s real enemies: the U.S. Congress. The bureau targeted “senators whom the Attorney General saw as threats to America. The Bureau was breaking into their offices and homes, intercepting their mail, and tapping their telephones,” as Tim Weiner recounted in his 2012 book Enemies: The History of the FBI. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was illegally targeted because the bureau feared he might support diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia.

Hoover, who ran the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, built a revered agency that utterly intimidated official Washington. The FBI tapped the home telephone of a Supreme Court clerk, and at least one Supreme Court Justice feared the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately discussed cases. In 1945, President Harry Truman wrote in his diary, “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction…. This must stop.” But Truman did not have the gumption to pull in the reins.

The bureau’s power soared after Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950, authorizing massive crackdowns on suspected subversives. Hoover compiled a list of more than 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be seized and locked away at the president’s command. Hoover specified that “the hearing procedure [for detentions] will not be bound by the rules of evidence.” “Congress secretly financed the creation of six of these [detention] camps in the 1950s,” noted Weiner. (When rumors began circulating in the 1990s that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was building detention camps, government officials and much of the media scoffed that such a thing could never occur in this nation.)

From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. FBI agents also busied themselves forging “poison pen” letters to wreck activists’ marriages. The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstores’ “clientele”).

The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts,” as a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI took a shotgun approach to target and harass protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal,” the Senate report observed. That report characterized COINTELPRO as “a secret war against those citizens [the FBI] considers threats to the established order.” COINTELPRO was exposed only after a handful of activists burglarized an FBI office in a Philadelphia suburb, seized FBI files, and leaked the damning documents to the media. The revelations were briefly shocking but faded into the Washington Memory Hole.

FBI haughtiness was showcased on national television on April 19, 1993, when its agents used 54-ton tanks to smash into the Branch Davidians’ sprawling, ramshackle home near Waco, Texas. The tanks intentionally collapsed 25 percent of the building on top of the huddled residents. After the FBI pumped the building full of CS gas (banned for use on enemy soldiers by a chemical-weapons treaty), a fire ignited that left 80 children, women, and men dead. The FBI swore it was not to blame for the conflagration. However, FBI agents had stopped firetrucks from a local fire department far from the burning building, claiming it was not safe to allow them any closer because the Davidians might shoot people dousing a fire that was killing them. Six years after the assault, news leaked that the FBI had fired incendiary tear-gas cartridges into the Davidians’ home prior to the fire’s erupting.

Attorney General Janet Reno, furious over the FBI’s deceit on this key issue, sent U.S. marshals to raid FBI headquarters to search for more Waco evidence. From start to finish, the FBI brazenly lied about what it did at Waco — with one exception. On the day after the Waco fire, FBI on-scene commander Larry Potts explained the rationale for the FBI’s final assault: “These people  had thumbed their nose at law enforcement.”

Terrorism

FBI counterterrorism spending soared in the mid to late 1990s. But the FBI dismally failed to connect the dots on suspicious foreigners engaged in domestic aviation training prior to the 9/11 attacks. Though Congress had deluged the FBI with almost $2 billion to upgrade its computers, many FBI agents had ancient machines incapable of searching the web. One FBI agent observed that the bureau ethos is that “real men don’t type…. The computer revolution just passed us by.” The FBI’s pre–9/11 blunders “contributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists,” according to a 2002 congressional investigation. Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft groused that “the safest place in the world for a terrorist to be is inside the United States; as long as they don’t do something that trips them up against our laws, they can do pretty much all they want.” Sen. Richard Shelby in 2002 derided “the FBI’s dismal recent history of disorganization and institutional incompetence in its national security work.” (The FBI also lost track of a key informant at the heart of the cabal that detonated a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center in 1993.)

The FBI has long relied on entrapment to boost its arrest statistics and publicity bombardments. The FBI Academy taught agents that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth.” After 9/11, this doctrine helped the agency to entrap legions of patsies who made the FBI appear to be protecting the nation. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest.

In the Liberty City 7 case in Florida, FBI informants planted the notion of blowing up government buildings. In one case, a federal judge concluded that the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles” in order to make a “terrorist” out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”

The FBI’s informant program extended far beyond Muslims. The FBI bankrolled a right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five years prior to his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges. We have no idea how many bloggers, talk-show hosts, or activists the FBI is currently financing.

The FBI’s power has rarely been effectively curbed by either Congress or federal courts. In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs declared that the FBI’s power terrified Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out [against the FBI] … has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny…. Our society cannot survive a planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.” Boggs vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union report warning that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character” — a charge that supporters of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would have cheered last year.

Is the FBI’s halo irrevocable? The FBI has always used its “good guy” image to keep a lid on its crimes. It is long past time for the American people, media, and Congress to take the FBI off its pedestal and place it where it belongs — under the law. It is time to cease venerating a federal agency whose abuses have perennially menaced Americans’ constitutional rights. Otherwise, the FBI’s vast power and pervasive secrecy guarantee that more FBI scandals are just around the bend.

CIA in Afghanistan: Operation Phoenix Redux?

Matthew Hoh

These CIA teams in Afghanistan are not just reminiscent of the Operation Phoenix program in Vietnam, the death squads of Central America and the Shia torture and murder militias of Baghdad, they are the direct descendants of them. The CIA is continuing a long tradition of utilizing savage violence by indigenous government forces, in this case along sectarian/ethnic lines, in an attempt to demoralize and ultimately defeat local populations.

The results will assuredly be the same: war crimes, mass murder, torture and the terrorization of entire communities of men, women and children in their own homes. This will lead to more support for the Taliban and a deepening of the war in Afghanistan. The CIA should ask itself, where has this worked before?

This escalation by the CIA in Afghanistan fits into the broader war campaign of the United States in the Muslim world as the United States, despite its protestations of wanting negotiations and ultimately peace, turns areas not under the control of its proxy government into large swathes of free fire zones as it punishes and attempts to subjugate populations not under its control.

Iraq’s campaign in the Euphrates and Tigris River valleys, the Kurdish campaign in western Syria and the Saudi and UAE campaign against the Houtis in Yemen have been devastating and vicious assaults on populations, critical infrastructure and housing, that coupled with nighttime commando raids that terrorize entire villages and neighborhoods, look not to bring a political settlement, reconciliation or peace, but rather subjugate, along ethnic and sectarian lines, entire population groups to achieve American political desires in the Muslim world.

This CIA program of using Afghan militias to conduct commando raids, the vast majority of which will be used against civilians despite what the CIA states, falls in line with American plans to escalate the use of air and artillery strikes against the Afghan people in Taliban-held areas, almost all of whom are Pashtuns.

Again, the purpose of this campaign is not to achieve a political settlement or reconciliation, but to brutally subjugate and punish the people, mostly rural Pashtuns, who support the Taliban and will not give in to the corrupt American run government in Kabul.

Decertifying the Iran Nuke Deal: Trading History for Hysteria

Jennifer Loewenstein

Many Americans are outraged that President Donald Trump has chosen to decertify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran (JCPOA). It is a belligerent, aggressive, and stupid move. We are embarrassed and ashamed of having a president so ignorant of world affairs and so indifferent to the deadly consequences our actions could have across the globe. Trump is taking us in a uniquely dangerous direction.

Should the US Congress follow Trump’s lead, it will be our moral obligation to reject and reverse its decisions. In order to stem the tide of destruction, other nations must take independent action, unite to oppose the madness taking hold of the United States, and join together with those Americans who know that this government neither represents us nor understands what is in our best interests. What has become an urgent international scenario, taking center stage in world news, was nevertheless foreseeable and preventable. This crisis grew out of a history deliberately blotted out of American historical memory, across successive generations, with the complicity of its public education system, its media establishment, and consecutive political administrations based in Washington DC.

Had our history with Iran been based on trust, fairness, and cooperation it is improbable that we would be facing the crisis that threatens us now.

There is no national collective memory of our duplicitous and self-aggrandizing foreign policy toward Iran. An apology for our behavior would hardly suffice, though it might at least serve as a beginning.

In 1953 when, with the UK, the Americans ousted democratically elected president Mossadiq from power, replacing him with Mohammad Reza Shah there was no outcry from within the government or its citizenry against so a blatant an act of treachery. On the contrary US businesses celebrated their 40% oil concessions and the virtual undoing of Mossadiq’s effort to nationalize Iranian oil. American control and power in the region grew, as Britain’s declined.

Under the increasingly tyrannical leadership of the Shah, Iran’s dependence on Western investments and arms sales grew. As the Iranian people’s dissent to the Shah’s regime flowered, the CIA and Israel’s Mossad stepped in to create, fund, and train members of SAVAK, the notorious state secret police. Our leadership was fully aware that SAVAK was responsible for torture, imprisonment, beatings, and executions of those who dared speak out against the Shah’s policies of repression. Even as President Jimmy Carter came to office ostensibly championing universal human rights, this focus was farcical as US entrenchment in Iran expanded.

The United States’ government turned Iran into its bodyguard in the Gulf, leaving it to monitor the region on our behalf as it waged bloody war on Vietnam and Cambodia. Although there were positive exchanges among US and Iranian citizens — in education, technology, and mutual understanding — these were overshadowed by economic downturns and a shrinking middle class as outside nations profited from Iran’s rich natural resources. Our plunder became your despair. Widespread civil unrest spread across the country leading almost inevitably to the overthrow of the Shah’s regime and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In November 1979, Iranian citizens took 52 Americans hostage in the US embassy in Tehran for 444 days. Americans were shocked and outraged, but it would have come as no surprise to those who remembered or took part in the coup that overthrew Mossadiq. It was hatched in that very same embassy. We did not tremble remembering our 1953 betrayal of democratic Iran in order to create a client regime whose purpose would be to further perceived US national security interests – because this “crisis” was recorded in a vacuum; one with no context or history.

We preferred instead to paint Iran as our own ‘Great Satan’; to ensure its devastation during the eight year-long Iran-Iraq War in which a young Donald Rumsfeld welcomed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein into the charmed circle of American allies — as long as he didn’t step out of line. When, in the course of the bloodiest war of the 20th century, Iraq used mustard gas against Iranian soldiers, the US denied it as propaganda. Only when Saddam Hussein gassed the Iraqi-Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing over 5000 people, did the truth emerge — including information that the Americans supplied Iraq with the materials necessary to produce chemical weapons. Using chemical weapons to wipe out a small city did not threaten our alliance with Iraq. Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was the far greater crime for us. It threatened a precarious regional stability we nurtured for our own benefit.

How ironic it is to realize that the early stages of Iran’s nuclear weapons’ program began with the training of Iranian physicists in laboratories of universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the reign of the Shah.

Today, as anti-Iranian and Islamophobic sentiment in the United States spreads, our xenophobic, barely literate president openly encourages it. The “Iran Deal” Trump bellows, is an “embarrassment” and “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” Sadly, Trump is unable to see that he is the international embarrassment; one of the worst and most toxic presidents the United States has ever elected. Considering the American leaders only of the last two decades, this is a scathing commentary, indeed.

Some of us understand that what the centers of power in the United States genuinely fear is an independent Iran whose influence is growing across the Middle East. Multiple IAEA inspections, reports, and independent organizational investigations of the JCPOA have certified and re-certified the Iran’s compliance with the treaty.

Lost in the bickering over which sanction should come next or what constraint should be added to the ‘plan of action’ to curb undoubted ‘sinister’ plans by the Islamic Republic was Tehran’s call, years ago, for a nuclear weapons’ free zone in the Middle East. This call was drowned out by Israel’s categorical NO, followed by hysterical denunciations of the nuclear weapons Iran doesn’t have —that nevertheless pose an existential threat to the region’s only nuclear armed superpower.

No one would expect a JCPOA agreement in which Israel were subjected to regular inspections by the IAEA; in which Israel’s people and economy would suffer under the burden of heavy, relentless sanctions; in which Israeli hegemony in the Middle East was allowed to continue because no other power would be allowed to build nuclear weapons. Scandalously false accusations of Tehran’s strategic intensions allow Israel to justify (yet again) its obscene arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons stockpiles. Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu openly desires a military strike on Iran. His Saudi counterpart and de facto ally, desires the same thing.

What has so far kept both of these nations from attacking Iran with state-of-the-art military technology largely manufactured in, and then sold by, the United States, is the small thread of sanity among world leaders and among the ‘cooler’ heads of the US military and political establishments that still prevails.

This thin thread of sanity has failed miserably so far to protect the people of Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Under the Trump administration, it could snap altogether. A simple solution would be for an international JCPOA on how to contain the United States, curb its bullying, defuse its sanctimonious threats, and undo its grotesque perception of itself as a beacon of Enlightenment to be appreciated and deferred to by all other nations. How else will we stop the existential threat to the world posed by this mighty nuclear monster?

Rolling Back The Tide of Pesticide Poison, Corruption And Looming Mass Extinction

Colin Todhunter

An anthropogenic mass extinction is underway that will affect all life on the planet and humans will struggle to survive the phenomenon. So claims Dr Rosemary Mason in a paper (2015) in the Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry. Loss of biodiversity is the most urgent of the environmental problems because this type of diversity is critical to ecosystem services and human health. Mason argues that the modern chemical-intensive industrialised system of food and agriculture is the main culprit.

New research conducted in Germany supports the contention that we are heading for an “ecological Armageddon” – similar to the situation described by Mason. The study shows the abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years. The research data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany and has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture as it seems likely that the widespread use of pesticides is an important factor.

Cited in The Guardian (see previous link), Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study, says, “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life… If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

In the same piece, it is noted that flying insects are vital because they pollinate flowers. Moreover, many, not least bees, are important for pollinating key food crops. Most fruit crops are insect-pollinated and insects also provide food for many animals, including birds, bats, some mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Flies, beetles and wasps are also predators and important decomposers, breaking down dead plants and animals. And insects form the base of thousands of food chains; their disappearance is a principal reason Britain’s farmland birds have more than halved in number since 1970. Indeed the 2016 State of Nature Report found that one in 10 UK wildlife species are threatened with extinction, with numbers of certain creatures having plummeted by two thirds since 1970.

Rosemary Mason has been providing detailed accounts of massive insect declines on her own nature reserve in South Wales for some time. She has published first-hand accounts of the destruction of biodiversity on the reserve in various books and documents that have been submitted to relevant officials and pesticide regulation authorities in the UK and beyond. The research from Germany validates her findings.

Mason has written numerous open letters to officials citing reams of statistical data to support the contention agrochemicals, especially Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup, have devastated the natural environment and have also led to spiraling rates of illness and disease, especially among children.

She indicates how the widespread use on agricultural crops of neonicotinoid insecticides and the herbicide glyphosate, both of which cause immune suppression, make species vulnerable to emerging infectious pathogens, driving large-scale wildlife extinctions, including essential pollinators.

Providing evidence to show how human disease patterns correlate remarkably well with the rate of glyphosate usage on corn, soy and wheat crops, which has increased due to ‘Roundup Ready’ crops, Mason indicates how our over-reliance on chemicals in agriculture is causing irreparable harm to all beings on this planet.

The global pesticides industry has created chemicals of mass destruction and succeeded in getting many of their poison on the commercial market by highly questionable means:

“The EPA has been routinely lying about the safety of pesticides since it took over pesticide registrations in 1970.” Carol Van Strum.

Van Strum highlights the faked data and fraudulent tests that led to many highly toxic agrochemicals reaching the market – and they still remain in use, regardless of the devastating impacts on wildlife and human health.

The blatant disregard over the use of these substances by regulatory agencies around the world is apparent. At each stage of her letter-writing campaign to make the authorities call agrochemical manufactures to account, Mason has been frustrated by the lack of concern demonstrated by officialdom. This indifference to the poisoning of both humans and the environment is a result of high-level collusion (which she goes to great lengths to document) and institutionalised corruption between government and the agrochemical corporations.

The research from Germany follows a warning by a chief scientific adviser to the UK government who claimed that regulators around the world have falsely assumed that it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes and the “effects of dosing whole landscapes with chemicals have been largely ignored.”

And prior to that particular warning, there was a report delivered to the UN Human Rights Council saying that pesticides have catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole. Authored by Hilal Elver, special rapporteur on the right to food, and Baskut Tuncak, special rapporteur on toxics, the report states, “Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.”

Although the pesticide industry argues that its products are vital for protecting crops and ensuring sufficient food supplies, Elver says, “It is a myth.”

The report argues:

“While scientific research confirms the adverse effects of pesticides, proving a definitive link between exposure and human diseases or conditions or harm to the ecosystem presents a considerable challenge. This challenge has been exacerbated by a systematic denial, fuelled by the pesticide and agro-industry, of the magnitude of the damage inflicted by these chemicals, and aggressive, unethical marketing tactics.”

Elver says:

“The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies.”

The report recommends a move towards a global treaty to govern the use of pesticides and (like many other official reports) a shift to sustainable practice based on natural methods of suppressing pests and crop rotation and organically produced food.

Rachal Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) raised the red flag about the use of harmful synthetic pesticides, yet, despite the warnings, the agrochemical giants have ever since been conning us with snake oil under the pretense of ‘feeding the world’, while hiding behind bought science to mask their own ignorance or to cover up the harm they knowingly do. When you drench soil with proprietary synthetic chemicals, introduce company-patented genetically tampered crops or continuously monocrop as part of a corporate-controlled industrial farming system, you kill essential microbes, upset soil balance and end up feeding soil a limited “doughnut diet” of unhealthy inputs.

In their arrogance (and ignorance), these companies claim to know what they are doing and attempt to get the public and various agencies to bow before the altar of corporate ‘science’ and its scientific priesthood.

Michael McCarthy, writer and naturalist, says that three generations of industrialised farming with a vast tide of poisons pouring over the land year after year after year, since the end of the second world war is the true price of pesticide-based agriculture, which society has for so long blithely accepted. Modern farming is in effect a principal source of global toxification and soil degradation. However, companies like Monsanto have no shame: they use tobacco tactics and science to try to confuse the issues and will even get their media and academic mouthpieces to ghost write ‘independent’ pieces to defend their products: they too have no shame, if the price is right, of course.

Chemical-intensive Green Revolution technology and ideology has effectively uprooted indigenous/traditional agriculture across the planet and has recast farming according to the needs global agribusiness and its supply chains. This has had devastating effects on regions, rural communities, diets, soils, health and water pollution. However, this financially lucrative venture for transnational corporations continues apace, spearheaded by the Gates Foundation in Africa and the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’.

This model of agriculture is poisoning life and the environment and undermining food security throughout the globe. Power is now increasingly concentrated in the hands of a handful of transnational agribusiness corporations which put profit and market control ahead of food security, health and nutrition and biodiversity.

Due to their political influence and financial clout, these companies are inflicting various forms of structural violence on humanity, including the waging of chemical warfare on nature and people, while seeking to convince us that their model of agriculture – based on proprietary seeds and chemicals – is essential for feeding a burgeoning global population. They mouth platitudes about choice and democracy, while curtailing both as they infiltrate and subvert regulatory agencies and government machinery. And they seek to continually degrade and marginalise approaches to agriculture that are sustainable and which produce healthy food.

Instead of accepting their model is both a failure and destructive, what we see under the banner of ‘innovation’ is even stronger pesticides and the roll-out of next generation untested genetically engineered food and synthetic alternatives to food coming down the pipeline (with all that entails for health and the further undermining of food security).

While governments, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, trade agreements and regulatory agencies remain tethered to the interests of the powerful corporations that have come to define the nature of global food and agriculture, there are alternatives to this system and the discussion of issues surrounding food and agriculture are now appearing in the mainstream media with increasing frequency.

It took a long time to finally curtail the activities of big tobacco. Tackling big agribusiness (and the system of capitalism that allows it to prosper at one expense) and its entrenchment within the heart of governments and international institutions is urgent. Unfortunately, given the scale of the problem and what is at stake, time is not on our side.

US Soldiers In Niger: A Hidden Global Mission

Binoy Kampmark

Empires of scale are often spread thinly across fields of operations. Vast, often opaque functions on the ground are not necessarily conveyed with accuracy to the metropolitan centre. Command structures, for all the sophistication of instant modern communication, do not eliminate human error, let alone enlighten.

The four US army deaths in Niger have been shrouded by the bickering unfolding between President Donald Trump and the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson.  John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, has also been catapulted into the sordid business.

What the Johnson episode has obscured, being rich as social media material, are the deaths of three others who perished with Johnson on October 4 in Niger:  Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright, Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black, and Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson.

The Washington Post write up on the fallen is a feeling effort to add substance to those otherwise obscured by the travails of the US empire.  Black was multilingual but also fluent in the Hausa language, as “he wanted to communicate directly with the people.” This soldier of empire was similarly adept at chess.

Johnson “loved his country” and proved “loyal”. “For some, he was the beloved crazy uncle who never let a dull moment seep into his day.”  Niece Carrie Gomez’s words are noted:  “He was wild and outgoing. Just always on 100; always making you want to pull your hair out”.

These charming if potted accounts serve a few purposes. They add an understandable note of veneration for the fallen, but they also betray the sheer expanse of US deployments in foreign theatres, not all of which are understood in the padded cell of thought that is Washington.  Are these parts of a broader imperial mission, or merely the strutting efforts of a global police effort to keep terrorist elements in check?

Some 800 US military personnel operate in Niger, ostensibly to boost local counter-terrorism efforts. In total, some 1,000 operate in the Chad River Basin, spanning Niger, Chad, the top of Nigeria and the Central African Republic.

The four special forces soldiers were killed in an attack while patrolling with Niger troops near Tongo Tongo in the south-western part of the country, circumstances that will prompt some internal, not very pleasant probing. The skirmishing groups along the border with Mali are a motley assortment, varying between the plumage of Islamic State, led by Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, and opportunistic fringes of al-Qaeda.

Sketchy details of the sanguinary encounter have been sporadically supplied since October 4.  The Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff, Gen Joseph Dunford, attempted to fill in a few details on Monday.   Help, it seems, was not sought till an hour after the attack had commenced.  French and Nigerian assistance duly arrived, but by the time Mirage jets were doing their best, two hours had passed.

What exactly happened?  Pentagon officials initially shot a finger at a self-radicalized IS group that had gotten lucky. According to Joint Staff Director Lt-Gen Kenneth McKenzie, US and Nigerien forces had “done 29 patrols without contact over the previous six months or so” with nothing so much as a sliver to suggest an imminent attack.

Grasping for explanations, McKenzie fanned the murderous appeal of ISIS, which still “have a powerful message in the cyber world”, one which propelled “self-radicalization”.  The general, however, was unsure, claiming that there was “also some minimal flow of people across the divide.”  For all his doubts, it was unlikely that the attackers “were foreign fighters that came from Syria”.

The engagement could not be read as a failure on the part of the US mission.  Neither McKenzie nor Dunford would have you believe that.  ISIS was being challenged, lashing out like a terminally challenged animal in various outposts of the globe.  The attack “was a natural product of the fact that [it] is being crushed in the core caliphate.”

General McKenzie, along with his colleagues, have insisted that the US mission in Niger is heavily circumscribed, and by the book. They are not there to take part, let alone advise the forces of Niger in direct combat missions.

General Dunford has similarly insisted that there was on reason “to believe or not know that they did anything other than operate within the orders they were given.”  But these distinctions are academic points, to be slogged over by believers in operational doctrine and public relations.  What matters is the stretch, and expanse, of modern US power, the sort that doesn’t necessarily work, finding itself in bloody muddles, local grievances and struggles.

The US soldier’s imprint is a global one, finding form in theatres many citizens would be surprised, even perturbed by.  South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham went so far as to express open ignorance that 1,000 US troops were operating in Niger. They continue to apply the policing and erroneous language born in President George W. Bush’s war on terror, with all its conceptual and logistical nonsenses. As they do so, the bodies mount.

Confronting The West With Its Responsibilities Is Essential!

Salim Nazzal

The West has a black history in the middle east that must be recognised. In 1916, Arabs joined the allied forces but deceived.The victorious  western powers divided the region as they wished without any consideration to the peoples’ will. Then  completed  this crime by planting the state of Israel, which since day one spread state terrorism throughout the region.

The West supported Israel and defied the international law set by the West. Our part of the world continued to live in a climate of war, militarisation and tension because of this. In this respect, the West practised and still the most arrogant kind of hypocrisy in modern history.

The truth is entirely twisted.

The occupier is supported by the west, while those defending their home are considered terrorists. Which naturally led to negative consequences that it deprived the region of peace to be able to build its countries.It also promotes the culture of militarisation which naturally weakened the developing of civil societies.

The Americans used to boast that they did not occupy in the past an Arab or Muslim country. Then we saw Afghanistan and Iraq occupied by the USA using different excuses.

In 2003,  based on pure lies, Iraq besieged, and about half a million people died. Then America challenged the whole world and occupied Iraq and killed tens of thousands and created a climate of chaos yet to end. Finally, they said that their information about Iraqi weapons was wrong. Well, will they return the lives of those killed? Or will they compensate those hundreds of thousands who lost their loved ones? But the USA did nothing; they even did not issue an official apology for what they did.

We do not talk here about the Europian invasion in the 17 0r 18 century.

But instead about a policy practised in an era in which human rights concepts have developed profoundly. So what makes us wonder is how far the West is exempting itself from its responsibility for the crimes committed in our region. Which in my view has helped to prepare the climate for the current violence which strikes the Middle East? At the same time the west paradoxically plays the role of the judge by accusing a whole culture of being violent?  This is evident in the western media which agitated against Arabs and Muslim and created a wave of hatred towards them.

Even if we to count the loss of the west in the Islamic terrorism, we will find it peanuts compared with the western and Zionist state terror.

The problem that the west does not want to listen to the sound voice. And, insisted on ignoring the west responsibility in the crimes committed in the Middle East.

Ghadafi said once that either we are slaves to the west or enemies. Well, we do not want to be either .we seeks to live in peace without being terrorised by the west. And we aim to have a mutual relation in a peaceful climate which allows people on both sides to live in peace and harmony. We only want our rights, no more and no less.

I’m not saying that Arabs are not responsible towards where they end of internal fight and religion fanatics and senseless wars.

Arabs have proven stupidity and lack of tolerance towards each other, which is shameful, and a black page in Arab history.

It is essential to hold the West responsible so that the concept of the war on terror does not see from one angle. Killing humans is an act of terror whether the killer in uniform or civilian clothes.

In the meetings with intellectuals or officials in the West, they must be asked to recognise the moral responsibility. Countries like Iraq and Syria must use international law, and there is consistent evidence of intervention, incitement and support to criminal groups with weapons which is a violation of international law.

Australian flu epidemic inundates public health services

John Mackay

The 2017 Australian winter flu season looks to be the most severe for at least eight years. It has caused more than 400 deaths nationally and placed significant demands on under-funded public hospital and primary care health services. The peak numbers of flu cases also occurred earlier in winter than in previous years.

The epidemic has demonstrated the incapacity of the public health system to manage a sudden increase in acutely sick patients. Emergency room visits reached record levels at the peak of the season in many major hospitals, with limited or no beds available for many more affected by the virus.

The past three years have seen higher numbers of reported cases compared to the previous three years, suggesting an emerging trend that means future flu seasons may see repeats of this year’s epidemic or worse. The severity of the Australian flu season also is creating fears that the northern hemisphere winter will produce a similar crisis.

No full report on the Australian flu season is expected until the end of November, but the Australian government’s Health Department recorded 212,365 laboratory-confirmed notifications of influenza by October 16. The numbers have more than doubled since last year.

By the end of September, according to the Health Department, 417 influenza-associated deaths had been notified to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System during 2017. The median age of deaths notified was 85 years. There had been a large increase in deaths since the previous Australian Influenza Surveillance Report, mostly attributed to improved reporting in New South Wales.

However, the Health Department cautioned that the true number of deaths could be higher, because the statistics depend on the follow up of cases to determine the outcome of their infection. Such follow up is not a requirement of notification, making year-on-year comparisons unreliable.

Australian Medical Association vice president Dr Tony Bartone told the New York Times: “Clearly, we don’t have the reliable sources of information to assist us with predictions regarding future years. The more information we collect, the more prepared we will be.”

Media reports have highlighted numbers of deaths in aged care facilities, prompting calls for booster vaccinations for the elderly, because the effectiveness of immunisation can decrease with age, due to weakened immune systems. But the problems are far broader.

The pressure on public hospitals has been overwhelming. Attendances to emergency centres have broken prior attendance records for many hospitals. In the state of Victoria, more than 3,900 people visited emergency departments each day during August, the most ever recorded for that month.

Resources have been limited by continuous cost cutting by both state and federal governments. Many hospital staff have contracted the flu themselves, compounding staffing shortages. The epidemic was not declared a pandemic, which would have triggered increases in staffing levels.

Vaccination is vital in the fight against influenza as it permits people to build up immunities to viruses. Severe influenza can lead to secondary bacterial infections, such as pneumonia, which can complicate the illness, making it life-threatening.

This year’s vaccine targeted four flu strains—two influenza A and two influenza B. It is highly effective against influenza B and one of the A strains, H1N1. However the vaccine is known to be less effective against the H3N2 strain.

Australia-wide data suggest so far that 74 percent of the 2017 cases could be attributed to the H3N2 strain, which is different to the other well-known A strain, H1N1 or “swine flu,” that caused a pandemic in 2009.

The H3N2 variant has been a dominant virus over the past five Australian flu seasons and is known to have the most impact on elderly people. There are fears this year that the vaccine will have been less than 40 percent effective against H3N2.

Vaccines are designed from the flu strains of the previous season. However, health experts are concerned that this year’s vaccinations may have been undercut by new variants or mutations of the H3N2 strain.

The World Health Organisation Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, a worldwide network of influenza centres and collaborating laboratories, found that vaccine effectiveness was reduced where the H3N2 was prevalent. This has led to recommendations to vaccine manufacturers to modify the vaccine’s H3N2 component for the next season.

Flu vaccines success rates vary from year to year. The United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that from 2004 to 2016, influenza vaccine effectiveness ranged from the 10 percent to 60 percent. It can take vaccine manufactures up to six months to produce large quantities once a strain is identified. Thus, the viruses for the next flu season have to be anticipated in advance and cannot account for subsequent virus mutations.

Health experts hope a “universal” vaccine can be developed to account for all influenza viruses and mutations. No such vaccine has been produced, however.

Vaccines are not the most lucrative sector of the pharmaceutical industry, causing companies to shut down vaccine productions. It is more profitable to sell treatments that are taken daily, compared to one-off or annual treatments such as flu vaccinations. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration licensed vaccines made by 26 different manufacturers in 1967. By 1980 the number fell to 17 and by 2002 it dropped to 12.

Today the major pharmaceutical conglomerates dominate vaccines. The profit motive limits the companies from funding vaccine research and development, leaving much of the work to publicly-funded researchers, who find opportunities increasingly limited by major cuts in government budgets.

Despite varying protection with vaccines, extensive research has demonstrated that immunisation decreases the risk of contracting influenza. In Australia, the vaccination rate is low, covering just 20 percent of the population. Under the federal government’s National Immunisation Program, only certain vulnerable individuals can obtain the influenza vaccine for free. Even then, they often must pay a health provider to administer the vaccination.

The program covers pregnant women, those 65 years and older, and people at risk of infection, such as those with respiratory or heart conditions, diabetes or compromised immune systems. This includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people 15 years and over.

For those not covered—the vast majority of the population—if an employer does not provide the vaccine, the cost can be $6 to $20 for children and adults, on top of the consultation fee to visit a doctor.

The cost of vaccination has been proven to be a barrier. The Australian Child Health Poll demonstrated that for Queensland parents, the cost was an issue limiting the vaccination of their children. The study’s author, paediatrician Anthea Rhodes, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “Universally free funded flu vaccines could have the potential to increase the rate among families and kids.”

The severity of this flu season forced the Victorian state Labor government—after the epidemic had already peaked—to announce a one-off funding package of $115 million. The funding related to moving flu patients faster through emergency rooms so ambulances could get back on the road faster. However, the state government refused to offer free, universal vaccinations, unless the federal government funded them.

Australian governments, like their counterparts internationally, are increasingly lowering corporate taxes in order to increase profits. This is driving ongoing cost cutting in healthcare and all essential social services. This year’s flu epidemic, and the possibility of worse outbreaks to come, again highlight the human cost as essential services like public health care become unable to cope with epidemics.

After electoral victory, Argentine president promises “most austere policies”

Andrea Lobo 

In Sunday’s midterm elections in Argentina, the conservative ruling coalition Cambiemos of President Mauricio Macri received 40 percent of votes nationally and came in first in the five most populous voting districts.

Having a long list of reactionary measures waiting only for the election to be over, Macri immediately promised “the most austere politics possible” and imposed a 10 percent gasoline price-hike on Monday as part of an over-all policy of creating more profitable conditions for foreign investors.

In response to the electoral results, the Argentine financial markets rose to record levels, along with a 1.8 percent jump in Argentine dollar bonds.

This year’s round of elections involved races for two-thirds of the seats in the senate along with half of those in the chamber of deputies, with all 24 voting districts electing members in one or both congressional chambers. Macri’s Cambiemos (Let’s Change) party obtained the first place in 14 districts—three more than in the August primaries.

Far from being a “vote of confidence” in Macri, the results express a deep resentment against the twelve-year Peronist rule that began the austerity drive, price hikes and job cuts now being accelerated under Macri.

On Sunday morning, police raided an office of the Socialist Workers’ Party (PTS) in Mar del Plata, the second largest city in the province of Buenos Aires. The PTS, the leading party in the Left and Workers’ Front (FIT), had six of it members, including two candidates, arrested and detained until later in the day on trumped-up charges of violating a mandatory suspension of campaigning in advance of the vote. This cowardly police-state act represents a serious warning that the Macri administration stands ready to use the full weight of its repressive apparatus to intimidate and suppress all social opposition to its agenda.

As a result of the election, Cambiemos has replaced the Peronists as the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, with 108 seats against the 67 of the Front for Victory (FPV) led by the Peronist ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015). However, Macri’s coalition will still be short of a majority in either chamber, and will remain behind the Kirchnerists in the Senate.

Several historical Peronist strongholds saw Cambiemos come in first place. Most significantly, in the province of Santa Cruz—considered the stronghold of Kirchnerism and currently governed by the sister of ex-president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007)—Cambiemos took a 12 percent lead over FPV.

In the populous City of Buenos Aires, Macri’s former minister of education, Esteban Bullrich, who imposed widespread cuts in staff and real wages against teachers, beat Cristina Fernández. Such unfavorable results for Kirchnerism confirm polls showing disapproval ratings between 60 and 70 percent for the ex-president.

In spite of this, she secured one of the three seats in the Senate for the City of Buenos Aires. In a brief speech on Sunday, she called for “the unity of the different political forces of the opposition.” Fernández placed well ahead of the tendencies led by the other top Peronists, Florencio Randazzo and Sergio Massa. The latter even lost to Cambiemos in his main stronghold of Tigre.

Fernández had formed the coalition Citizens’ Unity this year, hoping to give the FPV a new face, and benefit from the escalation of social opposition against Macri’s policies, which saw mass protests by teachers earlier this year, a general strike in April and large demonstrations against the state’s efforts to cover up the disappearance and murder of the youth Santiago Maldonado, whose body was found last week, raising more questions than answers.

However, popular hostility to her political legacy has only risen. During her term in office, a loss of industrial activity, growing dependence on fossil fuel exploitation, debt accumulation, and widespread corruption allegations paved the way for economic stagnation by 2012, a debt default in 2014, spiraling poverty, deep austerity, mass demonstrations and the election of Macri in 2015. Many Peronist legislators have since sought to distance themselves from Kirchner, while even the Kirchnerists have simply pledged to “moderate” Macri’s pro-business measures.

“Everything indicates that Cambiemos made a great election in many provinces,” said Randazzo, congratulating Macri and responding to the results with a sigh of relief.

While the historically-Peronist trade union bureaucracies have already collaborated with Macri in demobilizing a spike in anti-Macri strikes this year, the Peronist establishment parties will act with ever greater complicity in supporting Macri’s delusional promises of stability for Argentine capitalism and making Argentina “normal” again.

Acknowledging that his partial victory will undercut even the façade of opposition in Congress, Macri announced a “stage of permanent reformism,” which truly means a permanent state of financial plundering of state assets and workers’ living standards. “Argentina will have to continue taking new debt,” he said Monday, sanctioning a continuation of high interest rates and the lifting of currency controls that have made Argentina’s bonds and finance sector a paradise for parasitism.

Nonetheless, the Financial Times warns that $54 billion that Macri has already borrowed is more than almost any other emerging economy in the world and will demand severe measures to pay back. “Some of the biggest risks stem from the gradualist agenda that Mr. Macri has pursued to sweeten the bitter pills of his reforms,” the London-based daily warns.

Due to such concerns by the international financial aristocracy, the Macri government has promised to “double down” on its agenda and present bills and decrees imposing further social austerity, tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and labor “flexibilization” measures modeled on Brazil’s recent “labor reform,” which was aimed at overhauling entire sectors of the economy. “This is just the beginning, we still have many battles to fight,” Macri told business executives last week.

Such language of class war makes clear that he is leading a frontal offensive against the working class. Seventy percent of the hundreds of thousands of layoffs since he came into office in December 2015 have taken place in the industrial sector, with one in every three due to the closing of a factory, according to the Center of Political Economy of Argentina (CEPA). This had a multiplying effect, dropping consumption and in turn generating layoffs in the service sector.

Overall, the Labor and Economy Institute (ITE) calculated in September that the supposed “recovery” under Macri has left a balance of 73,251 jobs lost with salaries above the median, in comparison with a slight increase in jobs “in sectors with salaries 25 percent to 10 percent below the median.” However, this imposition of a cheap labor regime has not attracted an increase in productive investments, amid low profit rates and global economic stagnation; consequently, most of the money entering the country is going into finance.

This major electoral defeat and unequivocal rejection of the corporatist, bourgeois-nationalist and populist politics of Peronism exposes the political bankruptcy of its allies within the trade unions and the pseudo-left. This process also reflects the dead-end of the nationalist “pink tide” politicians and governments, which are facing similar degrees of repudiation in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and Ecuador.

The Left and Workers’ Front (FIT), comprised of parties claiming to represent Trotskyism and a coalition of Guevarist organizations, received about 1.2 million votes nationally. With its former presidential candidate Nicolás del Caño at the head of the deputy ballot for the Province of Buenos Aires, the FIT received half a million votes there and two seats. It also gained several seats in the provincial and municipal legislatures.

While it received a vote total similar to what it won in 2013, the FIT lost one place in the national Congress. In spite of its proclamations that this would be a “historic” election, and the promotion by the bourgeois media of its attempts to exploit protests over the layoffs of workers in a PepsiCo factory earlier this year and the disappearance of Santiago Maldonado for electoral gain, the support for FIT has remained virtually stagnant.

In a coalition strictly formed for electoral purposes, organized openly under “the main challenge” of electing new deputies, the FIT’s negative results could again set in motion the irresolvable contradictions behind their alliance and re-open the internal crisis and threats of splits that occurred earlier this year, during the period of opportunistic ballot-trading ahead of the primaries.

Its stymied popularity is largely a reflection of the crisis of Peronism, with which it is associated. Whether it was with the PepsiCo protests, with FIT legislators presenting a bill in partnership with Peronists for a re-hiring of the workers, or the promotion of illusions that repressive disappearances like Maldonado’s will cease with a change in ministers or a new capitalist government, the coalition failed to fundamentally distinguish itself from the essential politics of Peronism, while its constituent organizations have continued their attempts to orient workers to the Peronist trade unions.

The FIT has not only given the appearance of, but demonstrated in practice, its status as a reformist extension of the bankrupt Peronist establishment and its efforts to shore up the Macri government. With the deepening of Peronism’s crisis, its own drive towards the creation of an Argentine version of Greece’s Syriza or Spain’s Podemos will inevitably accelerate.

Trade war in the aerospace industry: Airbus takes over shares in Bombardier

Gustav Kemper

At the beginning of last week, the heads of the aircraft manufacturers Airbus and Bombardier, Tom Enders and Alain Bellemare, announced a long-term cooperation between the two companies. The European Airbus Group will take control of a joint venture to produce the C-Series medium-haul aircraft of the Canadian Bombardier Group.

Airbus will take over 50.01 percent of Bombardier shares. At the same time, the previous owners of the C Series Aircraft Limited Partnership (CSALP), Bombardier and the Quebec government, will reduce their shares to 31 and 19 percent, respectively. Airbus has also been given an option to purchase the shares of the Quebec government two years after the end of the acquisition, and Bombardier’s shares some time later. The result would be a 100 percent takeover of the company by Airbus.

On the same day as the announcement of the joint venture, shares in Airbus rose by 4.2 percent and Bombardier by 15 percent. The price of Boeing shares, however, fell by 2.4 percent and shares in the Brazilian Embraer company, a direct competitor, dropped by 5.4 percent. Financial experts estimate that the value of the joint venture will double in a short time from $2 billion to $4 billion, leading to large profits for shareholders.

The German business newspaper Handelsblatt greeted the takeover as “a masterstroke” by Airbus. According to the paper, when the deal goes through the European company will be the main beneficiary of the trade war measures imposed on Bombardier by the US Department of Commerce following pressure from its US competitor Boeing.

Boeing filed a complaint with the US Department of Commerce after Delta Airlines ordered 75 CS100 model aircraft (108-125 seats) from Bombardier. Global market leader Boeing did not participate in the tender because it does not produce aircraft of this size. Nevertheless, Boeing accused its Canadian competitor of selling its aircraft below cost price. As justification for its lawsuit, Boeing stated that the province of Québec had invested $1 billion in Bombardier in 2015 following delays and cost problems arising from the development of the new aircraft. Boeing declared the investment to be an unauthorised subsidy of development costs.

The Trump administration then issued a lawsuit and in mid-September announced penalties of 300 percent on the import of C-series aircraft. The measure hit Bombardier hard and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried (in vain) to negotiate with Trump. The penalties threatened the sale and production of the C series and thus thousands of jobs in a company already under financial pressure from high development costs of $6 billion and fines for the late delivery of its first aircraft. Trudeau warned that Canada would not buy any further military aircraft from Boeing if forced to pay the penalties.

British Prime Minister Theresa May also threatened to curtail the further purchase of Boeing aircraft. Bombardier has a workforce of 1,000 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and May also negotiated intensively with Trump on behalf of the company. Following the British parliamentary election in June, May has had to rely on the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from Northern Ireland to secure a parliamentary majority for her government, but Trump refused to back down.

For the past two years Bombardier has been pursuing cost-cutting programs that have already cost thousands of jobs in its air and rail sectors. Most recently, a joint venture planned with Siemens over rail vehicles collapsed in September after Siemens struck a deal with the French company Alstom. Now Bombardier has abandoned its plan of competing on an equal footing with Airbus and Boeing, based on its C-Series. The company will retain only its private and luxury jet and train sectors.

From 2012 onwards Airbus public ownership by the French and German governments stood at around 11 percent respectively. Spanish ownership is about 4 percent. The company’s latest intervention will have dramatic repercussions. The world’s second biggest aerospace company has a production facility in Mobile, Alabama, which, according to plan, will assemble the C series after completion of the takeover process.

According to Patrick de Castelbajac, the Airbus board member responsible for corporate strategy, strong legal arguments confirm that this move makes the US penalties obsolete. Although Boeing claims that the import of components of the aircraft should be taxed, half of the parts are already manufactured by American companies.

The US government has not yet responded to the new development and a decision is not expected until the beginning of 2018. The conflict is, however, characteristic of the growing international trade war in which major corporations lobby their respective governments to gain market access and benefits.

Brigitte Zypries, the German economics minister, declared: “Airbus’s participation in Bombardier’s C-series program can provide important opportunities for Airbus and is a positive signal for the deepening of European-Canadian economic relations.”

For years, Boeing and Airbus have been accusing each other of unfair competitive practices due to state funding. A number of complaints are currently being negotiated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The EU, as well as Germany, France, Spain and the United Kingdom, have all filed complaints with the WTO against US tax cuts to protect their own aviation industry, in particular Boeing. The Brazilian manufacturer Embraer SA has also lodged a complaint against Bombardier with the WTO.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Airbus manager de Castelbajac denied that the merger with Bombardier was taking place in order to head off a collaboration between Bombardier and the Chinese manufacturer Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC). Instead, he argued, the merger was about expanding product lines to include a smaller medium-range aircraft, since the world market for this size of aircraft was growing. The Airbus A320 is too big for this market segment. Modern design and the composite materials used make the CS100 and CS300 cost-effective with lower fuel consumption.

The long-term volume of the world market for this category of aircraft is estimated at almost 30,000 and Airbus expects a share of 6,000 aircraft over the next two decades. High investment and development costs, the stringent licensing procedures for air transport and fierce competition are leading to a growing concentration of manufacturers working closely with their respective governments to defend their position on the world market—a race that is also intensifying political tensions.

This process entails rationalisation and cost reductions, which threaten massive job cuts. Airbus has yet to explain how jobs at Bombardier in Canada can be retained when the final assembly of the aircraft is transferred to the US.

Documents show US participation in 1965-66 massacres in Indonesia

Mike Head

Declassified documents published last week confirm that the US government was intimately involved in the campaign of mass murders conducted by the Indonesian military and Islamic organisations during the 1965-66 coup led by General Suharto.

Not only did Washington have detailed knowledge of the massacres that killed up to one million workers, peasants and suspected supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The US escalated covert operations to instigate the military takeover, encouraged the bloodbath, and urged the military to go further in order to overthrow President Sukarno.

Diplomats in the Jakarta Embassy kept a record of which PKI leaders were being executed, and regularly informed the US Secretary of State that tens of thousands of alleged PKI sympathisers were being murdered. It was a “fantastic switch,” one US official enthused.

This material is another warning of the utter ruthlessness of American imperialism. US governments and their diplomatic, military and intelligence agencies have a proven record of overthrowing governments and participating in immense violence and repression in order to pursue its strategic and economic interests.

In the words of one secret diplomatic cable, the United States had a “heavy stake in the outcome” of the bloody political purge. As Washington escalated the Vietnam War, it regarded Indonesia, the most populous and strategically located country in South East Asia, as a linchpin of its continued post-World War II domination of the region.

The US, led by Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, was determined to oust Sukarno, a bourgeois nationalist who collaborated with the PKI as a means of keeping control over the rising social, economic and political unrest among the many-millioned Indonesian working class and peasantry.

Suharto, who formally ousted Sukarno in March 1966, ruled Indonesia with US backing for the next 32 years before being toppled in May 1998. To this day, the country’s military retains far-reaching political and economic  power, and basic  democratic rights remain suppressed.

The 39 documents were posted on October 17 by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, after being processed by the National Declassification Center (NDC). They provide only a partial picture of Washington’s hand in one of the greatest imperialist crimes of the twentieth century.

Of the 30,000 pages processed by the NDC, several hundred documents remain confidential and are undergoing “further review.” The files do not include US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents, which remain secret.

Even without the CIA material, the record is undeniable. Documents published in 1999 already proved that the US and its allies, particularly Australia, helped orchestrate the coup. They drew up lists of PKI and other figures to be assassinated, and urged on the massacres to ensure that Suharto fully seized power and established a military dictatorship.

The latest material points to covert US operations to oust Sukarno, which had been underway since at least 1956, being intensified in the lead-up to the coup. The first document, dated June 7, 1965, records US diplomats welcoming a move by army commanders in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, to overrule the local governor, using powers granted to the military by Sukarno himself. “Army officials clear winner in first skirmish,” the US consul in Medan, Robert Blackburn, reported to the Jakarta Embassy.

Significantly, this “first skirmish” was more than three months before the so-called September 30 Movement, an alleged PKI-orchestrated plot to kidnap and kill leading generals. Suharto seized upon this supposed plot, the circumstances of which remain highly questionable, to instigate the bloodshed.

Many examples can be cited of US culpability for the Indonesian killing fields. On October 12, 1965 recently-arrived US ambassador to Indonesia, Marshall Green, who played a key role in the coup, sent a telegram to Secretary of State David Dean Rusk reporting on a conversation with the German ambassador to Indonesia. According to the latter, “Indo Army is now considering possibility of overthrowing Sukarno himself and is approaching several Western Embassies to let them know that such a move is possible.”

The American Embassy made clear that any US aid was contingent on Sukarno being removed. In an October 23 letter, Norman Hannah, the political advisor to the commander-in-chief for the Pacific (CINCPAC) asked Ambassador Green how to respond to the “reasonable possibility that the Indonesian Army might request our help.” A week later, Green asked the Johnson administration to “explore [the] possibility of short-term one shot aid on a covert, non-attributable basis,” precipitating an expansion of US covert support that would include money, communications equipment and arms.

A November 20 Jakarta Embassy telegram to Rusk pointed to the fraudulent character of the September 30 Movement allegations. Reporting on conversations between Western observers and leading PKI members in Jakarta and central Java, including Jogjakarta, it indicated that the PKI figures had no knowledge of the supposed plot and “there was great confusion in Party ranks on what they were supposed to do.”

On November 30, a weekly embassy summary sent to the State Department said the repression had “reached the stage of mass executions in several Indonesian provinces, apparently at the behest of General Suharto in Central Java at least.”

In a December 21 weekly report, Embassy First Secretary Mary Louise Trent noted that at least 100,000 people had been killed, and lauded the “striking Army success” of its efforts to accumulate power.

US authorities knew the September 30 Movement plot was concocted as a pretext for the coup. Ambassador Green, in a March 4, 1966 telegram to the State Department said the allegations were manufactured to serve “the propaganda needs of the moment.” The military wanted to foster the notion that “the whole pro-Communist movement … should be considered guilty ‘in principle’.”

Two documents from 1967 underscored the corporate interests at stake, as Suharto’s regime sought to meet the needs of US firms by drafting a new foreign investment law and signing concession agreements with oil, mining, and timber companies.

One report noted the “red carpet treatment” afforded a Greater San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Pacific Trade Mission that arrived in Jakarta on April 18, 1967, for a week-long stay. Indonesian regime and business leaders were “cooperative and forthcoming.”

After meeting Ambassador Green, Business International Corporation chairman Elliot Haynes wrote in a diary that multinational corporations, including Uniroyal and Goodyear, were interested in setting up operations in Indonesia, while companies like Alcoa wanted lower income taxes.

US and global media outlets have barely reported the release of the documents, and provided few details of their contents. One reason is that the corporate media was complicit in the coup, assisting the US and Suharto’s regime to justify it and whitewashing the massacres.

A November 1966 report to the State Department recorded a trip embassy officials took with a New York Times reporter to central Java, accompanied by military representatives. In an early example of “embedded journalism,” officials showed off several “model” villages under military control. The author noted that the army had an “ironclad grip” on the province, complete with roadblocks, ID cards, house-to-house searches and a ban on gatherings of five people or more.

Today, the New York Times and the media establishment continue to collaborate closely with Washington as the US and its allies bomb civilians, devastate cities, assassinate people, provoke conflict after conflict, from the Middle East to Korea, and prepare for wars against their rivals, including China.