Strikes continue in Finland after Social Democrat prime minister resigns

Jordan Shilton

Finland’s prime minister, the Social Democrat Antti Rinne, was forced to resign last week after disagreements erupted within his five-party coalition government over the handling of a nationwide strike by 10,000 postal workers. His Social Democratic successor, Sanna Marin, took office yesterday amid three days of strikes by over 70,000 workers in the technology and industrial sectors.

The two-week strike at the national postal service Posti was triggered by the revelation that 700 parcel delivery workers would be transferred to a collective agreement with an outsourced subsidiary of Posti, resulting in wage cuts of up to 30 percent. In response, thousands of transport workers launched a solidarity strike, resulting in the cancellation of some 300 flights by national airline Finnair.

The upsurge of class struggle in Finland is part of an international process that has seen strikes and protests spread across every continent over the past two years. The issues driving the strike wave in Finland—savage austerity, rising inequality, attacks on wages, and growing opposition to the entire political establishment—are the same as those radicalising working people around the world. The strikes continuing in the technology sector this week are in opposition to a push by the employers’ organisation to enforce a wage increase of 0.5 percent for 2020, which amounts to a cut in terms of real wages.

Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin, center, chairs her first government meeting in Helsinki, Finland on Tuesday Dec. 10, 2019. (Jussi Nukari/Lehtikuva via AP)

The broad support for the postal workers was driven by sustained austerity measures implemented by successive governments aimed at gutting public services and deregulating the labour market.

Faced with the threat of Finland’s ports being shut down by a sympathy strike, which would have hit corporations hard in a country where 40 percent of GDP is made up of exports, Posti management withdrew the outsourcing proposal in late November. Shortly before the final deal was reached, Prime Minister Rinne demagogically asserted that workers’ rights would not be trampled underfoot while his government was in office.

This comment proved too much to bear for the Centre Party, the second-largest party in Rinne’s coalition. A liberal party with a predominantly rural support base, Centre enforced sweeping spending cuts and attacks on wages and working conditions under Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, who ruled between 2015 and 2019 in coalition with the right-wing National Coalition Party and the far-right Finns Party. Centre Party leader Katri Kulmuni denounced Rinne, a former trade union leader, alleging that he had sided with the workers in the postal negotiations when it was necessary to remain neutral.

After extended government talks, the Centre Party withdrew its support for Rinne and threatened his government with a vote of no confidence, prompting the Prime Minister to resign on 3 December. Marin, the new Prime Minister, was Transport Minister in Rinne’s cabinet, while Kulmuni will occupy the post of Finance Minister.

The end result of the change of faces in the Finish government will thus be a political turn to the right. Behind all the hype about the country having the world’s youngest prime minister, a coalition made up of five parties led by five women and a government pledge to make the country carbon neutral by 2035, the SDP-led government will deepen the assault on working people and public services.

Marin has already stated her determination to implement the coalition’s goal of eliminating Finland’s budget deficit over the coming four years. This is to be accomplished through the privatisation of more than €2 billion of state assets and a reform of social services and health care designed to expand the involvement of the private sector.

However, the government lacks any popular support for these policies. Earlier this year, the Centre Party lost a third of its support in parliamentary elections after presiding over savage austerity for the previous four years. Particularly unpopular was the Sipilä government’s Competitiveness Pact, which, with trade union support, imposed wage freezes, cuts to holiday pay and three additional days of work per year for public sector workers without any corresponding wage increase.

The election was a blow not just to the Centre party, however. For the first time in over a century, no party managed to obtain more than 20 percent of the vote. This underscores that the vast majority of the population is not only hostile to the austerity imposed by the political right, but alienated from the entire political establishment.

The SDP, which emerged as the winner of the election with just 17.7 percent of the vote, a slight improvement on its worst ever result in 2015, moved swiftly to form a coalition with the widely-despised Centre Party. They were joined by the Green League, Left Alliance, and Swedish People’s party. The Finns, which conducted a racist, anti-immigrant election campaign, finished just 0.2 percent behind the SDP in second place.

Although the coalition is typically referred to as centre-left, it has embraced most of the key demands of big business. Barely two months after Centre Party Prime Minister Sipilä had been forced to tender his resignation in March due to the failure of his government to pass its health care reform in parliament, Rinne’s SDP-led government announced in late May that it would implement largely the same health care reform. The plan will put an end to the running of health care services by over 290 local municipalities across the country by placing health care under the control of 18 elected regional governments. These authorities will have the option of engaging third sector and private health care providers to offer certain services, a move being dressed up as improving patient choice.

While the Green League and Left Alliance made much of their opposition to the Centre Party’s drive to privatise health care when they were in opposition, both parties signed up to the slightly revised plan. As Green League leader Pekka Haavisto put it, “Third sector and private services can be used, but this will be left to the self-governing areas to decide how much.”

The five-party coalition is also committed to increasing the employment rate to 75 percent from its current level of 72 percent by the end of its term in office. Given that economic growth is set to slow to less than 1 percent over the coming years due to trade tensions, Finance Ministry officials recently suggested that cutbacks to social security and the further deregulation of the labour market would be necessary to force more people into work.

The SDP-led coalition will also continue the previous government’s deepening military partnership with US imperialism. Finland, together with the other four Nordic countries, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden signed a Nordic Defence Agreement aimed at Russia in 2015. One year later, Helsinki concluded a bilateral defence partnership with the US, and in 2018, the US, Finland and Sweden announced an enhanced trilateral statement of intent to coordinate the three countries’ defence policies. These agreements have been backed by a military rearmament program, including the purchasing of US-built F18 fighter jets and other modern equipment that is interoperable with NATO members.

Although Helsinki remains outside of NATO, it signed up as one of NATO’s Enhanced Opportunity Partners in 2016. Finnish soldiers took part in NATO’s Trident Juncture exercise last year, the largest of its kind since the end of the Cold War. Like previous governments, the current coalition is unlikely to push for full membership. A majority of Finns oppose joining the military alliance. At the same time, sections of the ruling elite rely on economic ties with Russia, with which Finland has a 1,300 kilometre border.

The leading role of the Social Democrats and Left Alliance in enforcing such a reactionary program is entirely in keeping with the political records of both parties. Following an economic crisis in the early 1990s, it was an SPD-Left Alliance government that prepared Finland for membership in the euro, which required imposing attacks on the working class. Then, after the global economic crisis of 2008 threw the export-dependent Finnish economy into recession, the SDP and Left Alliance joined the conservative-led government of Jyrki Katainen in 2011. Katainen’s government supported the enforcement of vicious EU-dictated austerity in Greece and Portugal, while enforcing budget cuts at home amounting to 5 percent of the national budget. It also initiated closer Nordic defence cooperation to support US imperialism’s aggressive encirclement of Russia.

Australian economy remains in slump as trade tensions mount

Mike Head

Data released last week underscores how vulnerable the Australian economy, like many around the world, is to the fallout from the aggressive economic war launched by Washington against its rivals, particularly China.

Largely mirroring international trends, Australia is mired in slump, despite record low interest rates and large tax handouts, mostly to companies and the wealthy. The impact is hitting working class households the hardest. Corporate profits and share prices have soared in 2019, but at the expense of falling real wages and rising unemployment and under-employment.

Combined with widespread nervousness over the global instability, this produced the worst retail and car sales, and other household consumption statistics, since the 2008-09 global financial crisis. Business investment also fell sharply in the September quarter.

Desperate to provide “good news,” many media outlets, and the Liberal-National government, claimed that the results confirmed the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) proclamation of a “gentle turning point” after months of recessionary conditions.

However, the gross domestic product (GDP) rose only 0.4 percent in the quarter, an annual rate of 1.6 percent. The three-month result was down from 0.6 percent in the June quarter, and 0.5 percent in the March quarter. The September quarter result was well short of the government’s budget forecasts, which were 2.25 percent for 2018-19 and 2.75 percent for 2019-20.

The RBA has cut interest rates three times in the months after the May federal election, to a record low of 0.75 percent, and the government paid out nearly $5 billion in income tax rebates. Yet consumer spending rose just 0.1 percent, the poorest result since the 2008-09 meltdown.

Reflecting the nervous mood, spending shrank 0.3 percent on discretionary items such as new cars, clothing and footwear, and cigarettes. Any growth was concentrated on essentials, led by health and rent.

Separately calculated retail figures showed that in the three months to September the volume of goods and services bought fell 0.1 percent. That trend continued in October, with clothing, home wares and department stores sales falling. The retail sector had already suffered its worst 12-month period since the 1991 recession.

In another sign of consumer hardship, sales of new cars fell 9.8 percent in November, the 20th monthly decline in a row, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries.

Suffering one of the highest levels of household debt in the world—nearly twice as much debt as income on average—many consumers evidently decided to try to reduce their indebtedness.

Over the year to September, inflation-adjusted spending grew by a mere 1.2 percent, also the least since the 2008-09 financial crisis. Australia’s population grew by 1.6 percent in that time, meaning the volume of goods and services bought per person went backward.

A significant economic indicator was a 2.1 percent drop in business investment during the September quarter, with mining investment tumbling 7.8 percent. Non-mining investment rose 1.2 percent, but was still stuck around 25-year lows. These trends point to further contraction ahead. Profits are being poured into the stock market and other speculative operations, not production and research and development.

In the anxious words of the Australian Financial Review, stock exchange indexes have been volatile, “amid fears that US President Donald Trump could hit every second nation with tariffs—China of course, but now Argentina and Brazil and possibly everyone in NATO.” Even so, the newspaper warned, the benchmark ASX 200 index remained about 20 per cent higher for the year to date—way out of line with the underlying slump.

“Private sector activity—consumption and business investment—is at recession levels,” the financial newspaper said. Only mining exports, population growth and government spending were keeping the economy afloat.

Government spending grew 0.9 percent in the quarter and 6 percent over the year, mostly on infrastructure projects demanded by big business. Despite chronic underfunding, government outlays also rose on health, disability and aged care costs.

The GDP figures strengthened the betting on the financial markets that the RBA will be forced to cut interest rates again at its first meeting for 2020, in February. Most corporate economists reportedly expect another cut will follow in the ensuing months, taking official rates down to 0.25 percent, far below the “emergency” 3 percent level reached in 2009.

Company profits were up 2.2 percent in the quarter and 12.7 percent over the year. Average wage and superannuation payments grew at about half those rates—1.2 percent and 5.1 percent—and even that statistic covers over the wage-cutting that is affecting low-paid workers in insecure jobs.

The only discernible effect of the record low interest rates has been to fuel a new rise in house prices in the two most populous cities, Sydney and Melbourne, partially reversing the collapse of the housing bubble that prevented a slide into recession between 2012 and 2018.

At the same time, insufficient housing is being built for a growing population. Housing investment was down 1.7 percent over the September quarter and 9.6 percent over the year. Rising prices has made home ownership impossible for many young people, and put upward pressure on rents.

There was another glaring problem. Even though profits and stock prices rose, GDP per hour worked, which is a measure of productivity, fell 0.2 percent during the September quarter and 0.2 percent over the year—another result of the lack of productive investment.

Extreme weather conditions, bound up with climate change, also had an impact. Drought-affected farm production fell 2.1 percent over the quarter and 6.1 percent over the year.

All this means that the jobs situation is likely to deteriorate. Employment fell by 19,000 jobs in October, taking the official jobless rate to 5.3 percent, and the underemployment rate to 8.5 per cent. As measured by the Roy Morgan polling company, nearly 1.1 million Australians were unemployed (7.8 percent) with an additional 1.2 million (8.9 percent) under-employed.

While the government boasts of “creating” 1.5 million jobs since 2013, this simply reflects population growth, plus a rise in workforce participation as older workers postpone retirement because of mortgage debts, low superannuation balances and poor returns on any savings due to ultra-low interest rates.

Taken as a whole, these results mean that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government is under increasing pressure from the financial elite to cut government spending, to avert a budget deficit, and mount an offensive against workers’ conditions in order to drive up the rate of exploitation.

Last month, credit ratings’ agency S&P Global told the government that any increased spending could threaten the country’s triple A rating. “As the official cash rate in Australia moves toward zero there have been growing calls for the government to increase fiscal stimulus, including infrastructure spending, to stimulate and support the slowing economy,” it said, before warning: “While spending initiatives are likely to support the economy, they’re also likely to weaken Australia’s fiscal flexibility to respond to future unforeseen economic shocks.”

Multiple deaths from New Zealand volcanic eruption

Tom Peters

Five people are dead and eight missing, presumed dead, after a volcanic eruption on White Island, also known as Whakaari, in the Bay of Plenty, off the coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Another 31 people are in hospital, many with serious burns, and reports indicate that some may not survive.

The small, uninhabited island is one of New Zealand’s most popular tourist attractions, with 17,500 visitors last year. It is the country’s most active volcano.

Forty-seven people, reportedly from two separate tour groups, were on the island when the crater suddenly erupted at 2:11pm on Monday producing a huge cloud of rock and ash. Several tourists were photographed shortly before the eruption standing near the crater. Most were from the visiting cruise ship Ovation of the Seas, owned by Royal Caribbean International, and were being guided around the island by White Island Tours. Two guides are thought to have died. A few visitors were part of a helicopter tour by Volcanic Air.

The identities of most of the victims have not been revealed, but reportedly they include people from New Zealand, Australia, the UK, China, Malaysia and the US. The injured were evacuated by boat and helicopter. One survivor who gave first aid to the victims, Geoff Hopkins, told the New Zealand Heraldthat almost all were “horrifically burnt” and in agonising pain, with some drifting in and out of consciousness.

Tourists on White Island, April 2019 (Wikimedia commons/Kimberley Collins)

Conditions remained too hazardous today for search and rescue teams to explore the island. Bodies were sighted this morning by reconnaissance flights. There is a risk of further eruptions and landslides.

The full circumstances of the tragedy are yet to emerge, but questions are already being raised about why visitors were allowed on the island.

Professor Ray Cas, a volcano expert from Monash University, told Sydney’s 2GB radio station that he had felt for years that White Island “is a dangerous place to allow the public to visit.” He noted its isolation, 50 kilometres offshore, with “no emergency services immediately available” and no means to escape in the event of an eruption, which can happen without warning. Tour groups typically explore inside the crater, which was transformed on Monday into a horrific inferno.

GNS Science, a government agency monitoring seismic activity, raised the alert level for White Island from 1 to 2 due to increased seismic activity on November 18, indicating that eruptions were more likely than normal.

Professor Shane Cronin, a vulcanologist at the University of Auckland, told Radio NZ that GNS could issue advice and warnings, but had no authority to stop people visiting the island, which is privately owned by the Buttle family. He said “people often underestimate” the volcano and “we’ve probably taken it a little bit too much for granted.”

Tours have been taking place for about 30 years and there have been several minor eruptions over that time, none of which resulted in casualties. This appears to have been purely by chance.

White Island Tours’ website was shut down following the eruption. Previously, it carried a warning that due to “heightened volcanic unrest, there is the potential for eruption hazards to occur” on the island. But this did not prompt it to suspend the tours, which are highly profitable. The Herald reported in February that the company, owned by Maori tribe Ngati Awa, “enjoyed a significant revenue increase from $0.5m to $4m between 2017 and 2018.”

In an interview with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Radio NZ’s Kim Hill bluntly stated: “It does seem crazy to make it so accessible given that it’s an unpredictable live volcano.” Ardern replied that she would not make “assumptions” and promised an eventual “inquiry” into the disaster. She declared that New Zealand took “pride” in keeping visitors safe.

In reality, there have been many avoidable tragedies in New Zealand’s tourism industry, which is the country’s largest industry in terms of foreign exchange earnings. Successive governments have cut back on regulations and allowed companies to essentially self-regulate their safety procedures, placing lives in danger.

These include the country’s worst-ever disaster, the 1979 plane crash at Mount Erebus in Antarctica, which killed 257 people. A subsequent royal commission of inquiry found that Air New Zealand had jeopardised the safety of the crew and passengers, then sought to cover up its safety breaches. No one was ever held legally accountable.

In 1995 a viewing platform collapsed at Cave Creek in Paparoa National Park, killing 14 people. The Minister for Conservation was forced to resign after an inquiry found the platform had been built by unqualified workers and was extremely unsafe.

There are frequent jet-boat crashes, including one in Queenstown in February 2019 which injured nine tourists, and another in March which killed one person in Fiordland National Park. In May, Auckland Jet Boat Tours Limited was fined $25,000 and ordered to pay reparations after admitting illegal and unsafe practices which led one passenger to break her collarbone in 2017.

The political establishment and much of the media have rushed to defend the Labour Party-NZ First-Greens coalition government and tourism businesses over the White Island eruption. Opposition National Party leader Simon Bridges declared, “I think it’s right to let the recovery happen before the serious questions are asked in earnest.”

The Daily Blog, which is funded by three trade unions, agreed that debate over the causes must wait until “after the bodies have been recovered.” Editor Martyn Bradbury gushed, as he did following the Christchurch mass shooting: “Every time there is a shock to us as a nation, Jacinda [Ardern] steps up with such amazing empathy & sympathy—she leads with healing & courage & in times as sad as this, she is constantly the silver lining. This is what political leadership looks like.”

There is rising anger, however, among the victims’ relatives. The brother of Whakatane man Hayden Marshall-Inman, who was killed in the eruption, said it was “Pike River all over again,” a reference to the 2010 Pike River coal mine disaster, which killed 29 men. He told Stuff that the family had not been contacted by authorities regarding recovery of bodies.

The experience of Pike River is a warning that any investigation by the government into the causes of the White Island disaster will be a whitewash, aimed at defending those responsible for the lack of safety procedures. Nine years after the coal mine exploded, no one in Pike River’s management has been held accountable, despite overwhelming evidence gathered in a 2012 royal commission that the company ignored warnings that the mine was a death trap. Politicians of every stripe, along with union bureaucrats, government regulators, the courts and the police, all helped to shield company leaders from justice.

The “Afghanistan papers”: The criminality and disaster of a war based upon lies

Bill Van Auken

The publication Monday by the Washington Post of interviews with senior US officials and military commanders on the nearly two-decades-old US war in Afghanistan has provided a damning indictment of both the criminality and abject failure of an imperialist intervention conducted on the basis of lies.

The Post obtained the raw interviews after a three-year Freedom of Information Act court battle. While initially they were not secret, the Obama administration moved to classify the documents after the newspaper sought to obtain them.

The interviews were conducted between 2014 and 2018 in a “Lessons Learned” project initiated by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The project was designed to review the failures of the Afghanistan intervention with the aim of preventing their repetition the next time US imperialism seeks to carry out an illegal invasion and occupation of an oppressed country.

SIGAR’s director, John Sopko, freely admitted to the Post that the interviews provided irrefutable evidence that “the American people have constantly been lied to” about the war in Afghanistan.

Afghan villagers pray over the grave of one of the 16 victims killed in a shooting rampage by a US soldier in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, March 24, 2012. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan)

What emerges from the interviews, conducted with more than 400 US military officers, special forces operatives, officials from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and senior advisers to both US commanders in Afghanistan and the White House, is an overriding sense of failure tinged with bitterness and cynicism. Those who participated had no expectation that their words would be made public.

Douglas Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as the Afghanistan “war czar” under the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told his government interviewers in 2015, “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction... 2,400 [American] lives lost. Who will say this war was in vain?”

Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser under Bush, was even more explicit in his admission of US imperialism’s debacle in Afghanistan—and elsewhere. He told his SIGAR interviewers that Washington had no “post-stabilization model that works,” adding that this had been proven not only in Afghanistan, but in Iraq as well. “Every time we have one of these things, it is a pickup game. I don’t have any confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.”

Ryan Crocker, who served as Washington’s senior man in Kabul under both Bush and Obama, told SIGAR that “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption. Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it’s somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.”

This corruption was fed by vast expenditures on the part of the US government on Afghanistan’s supposed reconstruction—$133 billion, more than Washington spent, adjusted for inflation, on the entire Marshal Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe after the Second World War. As the interviews make clear, this money went largely into the pockets of corrupt Afghan politicians and contractors and to fund projects that were neither needed nor wanted by the Afghan people.

The US National Endowment for Democracy’s former senior program officer for Afghanistan told his interviewers that Afghans with whom he had worked “were in favor of a socialist or communist approach because that’s how they remembered things the last time the system worked,” i.e., before the 1980s CIA-backed Islamist insurgency that toppled a Soviet-backed government and unleashed a protracted civil war that claimed the lives of over a million. He also blamed the failure of US reconstruction efforts on a “dogmatic adherence to free-market principles.”

An Army colonel who advised three top US commanders in Afghanistan told the interviewers that, by 2006, the US-backed puppet government in Kabul had “self-organized into a kleptocracy.”

US military personnel engaged in what has supposedly been a core mission of training Afghan security forces to be able to fight on their own to defend the corrupt US-backed regime in Kabul were scathing in their assessments.

A special forces officer told interviewers that the Afghan police whom his troops had trained were “awful—the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel,” estimating that one third of the recruits were “drug addicts or Taliban.” Another US adviser said that the Afghans that he worked with “reeked of jet fuel” because they were constantly smuggling it out of the base to sell on the black market.

Faced with the continuing failure of its attempts to quell the insurgency in Afghanistan and create a viable US-backed regime and army, US officials lied. Every president and his top military commanders, from Bush to Obama to Trump, insisted that “progress” was being made and the US was winning the war, or, as Trump put it during his lightning Thanksgiving trip in and out of Afghanistan, was “victorious on the battlefield.”

The liars in the White House and the Pentagon demanded supporting lies from those on the ground in Afghanistan. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable, but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone,” an Army counterinsurgency adviser to the Afghanistan commanders told SIGAR.

A National Security Council official explained that every reversal was spun into a sign of “progress”: “For example, attacks are getting worse? ‘That’s because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.’ Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? ‘It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an indicator that we’re winning.’” The purpose of these lies was to justify the continued deployment of US troops and the continued carnage in Afghanistan.

Today, the carnage is only escalating. According to the United Nations, last year 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, the highest number since the UN began counting casualties over a decade ago. US airstrikes have also been rising to an all-time high, killing 579 civilians in the first 10 months of this year, a third more than in 2018.

The lies exposed by the SIGAR interviews have been echoed by a pliant corporate media that has paid scant attention to the longest war in US history. The most extensive exposure of US war crimes in Afghanistan came in 2010, based on some 91,000 secret documents provided by the courageous US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is now being held in Britain’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison facing extradition to the United States on Espionage Act charges that carry a penalty of life imprisonment or worse for the “crime” of exposing these war crimes. Manning is herself imprisoned in US Federal detention center in Virginia for refusing to testify against Assange.

On October 9, 2001, two days after Washington launched its now 18-year-long war on Afghanistan and amid a furor of war propaganda from the US government and the corporate media, the World Socialist Web Site posted a statement titled “Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan.” It exposed the lie that this was a “war for justice and the security of the American people against terrorism” and insisted that “the present action by the United States is an imperialist war” in which Washington aimed to “establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control” over not only Afghanistan, but over the broader region of Central Asia, “home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.”

The WSWS stated at the time: “The United States stands at a turning point. The government admits it has embarked on a war of indefinite scale and duration. What is taking place is the militarization of American society under conditions of a deepening social crisis.

“The war will profoundly affect the conditions of the American and international working class. Imperialism threatens mankind at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a repetition on a more horrific scale of the tragedies of the twentieth. More than ever, imperialism and its depredations raise the necessity for the international unity of the working class and the struggle for socialism.”

These warnings have been borne out entirely by the criminal and tragic events of the last 18 years, even as the Washington Post now finds itself compelled to admit the bankruptcy of the entire sordid intervention in Afghanistan that it previously supported.

The US debacle in Afghanistan is only the antechamber of a far more dangerous eruption of US militarism, as Washington shifts its global strategy from the “war on terrorism” to preparation for war against its “great power” rivals, in the first instance, nuclear-armed China and Russia.

Opposition to war and the defense of democratic rights—posed most sharply in the fight for the freedom of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning—must be guided by a global strategy that consciously links this fight to the growing eruption of social struggles of the international working class against capitalist exploitation and political oppression.

Australian PM defends secret “national security” trials

Mike Head

Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week publicly supported the holding of criminal trials in total secrecy if they allegedly involve “national security information”—that is, any information about the undercover activities of Australia’s military and intelligence agencies.

Asked by a journalist at a media conference if he thought it appropriate to have a “permanently secret legal proceeding in Australia in 2019,” Morrison replied in the affirmative. He specifically backed the government’s use of the National Security Information (Criminal and Civil Proceedings) Act (NSI Act) against an ex-intelligence officer known only as “Witness J.”

Morrison’s statement is a further warning of the creation of a police-state framework. No known Australian precedent exists for what happened to “Witness J.” In effect, he was thrown into a legal black hole. He was prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned in Canberra last year via a criminal trial that was completely hidden from public knowledge, let alone scrutiny.

This violates the fundamental democratic principle of public jury trials established by centuries of struggle against tyranny, including the English Revolution of the 1640s. Among the outrages that led to the overthrow of Charles I and the end of the absolute monarchy was the use of the secretive and arbitrary Star Chamber court to suppress political dissent and execute opponents of the regime.

Jailed for 15 months last year in a high-security facility—with the first month in solitary confinement—“Witness J” was released in August. However, he and the media are still gagged by undisclosed “Commonwealth orders” from informing anyone about the details of his case.

No one even knew of his fate until a sketchy outline emerged last month via a related lawsuit he took to challenge the Australian Federal Police (AFP) seizure of two manuscripts he wrote in prison.

At Morrison’s media conference, the prime minister not only defended the secret trial of “Witness J.” He endorsed the wider use of such suppression orders and indicated that they would be applied to two trials currently underway against whistleblowers and lawyers who exposed war crimes and illegal spying conducted by the Australian military and intelligence apparatus.

“The National Security Information Act was invoked to manage the protection of national security information on those proceedings and in proceedings like these,” Morrison said. “And the attorney-general has said that the information is of the kind that could endanger the lives or safety of others.”

Asked if that applied to “Bernard Collaery and Witness K,” Morrison said: “I’ve just answered the question.”

Collaery, a Canberra lawyer, is being prosecuted for helping his client, an ex-intelligence officer known only as “Witness K,” to expose the Australian Secret Intelligence Service bugging of East Timor’s government during oil and gas negotiations in 2004.

The government is also demanding closed-door proceedings in the trial of an ex-military lawyer, David McBride, who revealed a cover-up of civilian killings and other violations conducted by Australian Special Forces units during the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Similar provisions could be invoked in any trials of the journalists who were subjected to intimidating AFP raids in June. Police ransacked the home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst, who reported plans for domestic surveillance by the Australian Signals Directorate. The AFP also raided the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which had published information about Special Forces war crimes in Afghanistan.

These raids followed the global precedent set by the April 11 arrest in London of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and journalist, and charging with “espionage” for exposing the war atrocities and anti-democratic conspiracies of the US government and its allies, including those in Canberra.

“Witness J’s” imprisonment confirms that the highest echelons of the political, military and intelligence establishment are engaged in intensive operations to deny the public any knowledge of the crimes, abuses and mass surveillance committed by the US-linked “security” agencies.

According to information reported by the ABC, “Witness J” is an ex-military officer who served in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq—all targets of Australian military interventions. His intelligence career ended in South East Asia, another sensitive region for predatory Australian military and spying operations.

“Witness J” was not a whistleblower. But he was convicted of allegedly divulging classified material after he sent complaints via email and “other unsecure electronic means” to a head of security and a departmental psychologist about his treatment by the agency that employed him.

A recent series of tweets, published under the name of “Witness J,” denied the claims of Morrison and Attorney-General Christian Porter that he endangered lives and “consented” to the suppression orders imposed on his trial. “The accusation that I disclosed recruited agents (for those who understand the professional definition) while overseas is categorically untrue,” he wrote.

It was also “unequivocally untrue” that he had consented to his secret trial, another tweet stated. “I was not informed of, nor given an opportunity to give my consent to, these orders … Why would I consent to orders that restricted my own friends and family from coming to visit me?”

A further tweet said: “For me the scariest aspect to my Kafkaesque situation is that Shane Rattenbury, as ACT [Australian Capital Territory] Minister for Corrections, claims he did not know of my existence in his tiny territory.” That is, the minister nominally responsible for Canberra’s prison system, a Greens member of a Labor Party-led coalition government, said he knew nothing about the secret jailing.

“Kafkaesque” is a reference to Franz Kafka’s dystopian novel, The Trial, in which the accused man, Josef K., is arrested, tried and ultimately executed without knowing what crime he allegedly committed.

With the Labor Party’s support, the Howard Liberal-National government introduced the NSI Act in 2004 under the guise of protecting the population against terrorism following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US.

The WSWS warned at the time that the NSI Act’s draconian provisions would not only be used against those accused of terrorist-related offences: “The Act permits trials on terrorism, espionage, treason and ‘other security-related’ charges to be held in complete or partial secrecy.”

We also explained that the Act facilitated frame-ups: “In closed court sessions, judges can allow government witnesses to testify in disguise via video and, in some circumstances, exclude defendants and their lawyers from trial proceedings.”

It is now clear that the Act enables governments to go further, by conducting trials that no members of the public even know are taking place. This raises a disturbing question. How many other such trials have been held?

The NSI Act is just one aspect of a myriad of secrecy measures imposed to protect the operations of the police-military-intelligence apparatus. A 2010 Australian Law Reform Commission report identified 506 secrecy provisions in 176 pieces of federal legislation, including 358 criminal secrecy offences.

Since then, these walls of secrecy have been extended repeatedly by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments. This was taken to a new level by last year’s “foreign interference” legislation, which criminalised the leaking or publication of any material deemed to damage the country’s military, intelligence or economic interests.

This assault on basic legal and democratic rights goes beyond covering up the past crimes of the military and intelligence apparatus. It is being driven by preparations for even greater crimes. Amid Washington’s increasingly frenzied economic and military confrontations against its rivals, particularly China, the Trump administration is demanding that the Australian ruling elite take a front line in the conflict with China.

These police-state developments highlight the importance of fighting for the freedom of Assange and the courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning. The demand for their release is central to the struggle against war and authoritarianism, and their source, the capitalist profit system itself.

Samoa: Anger grows over escalating measles toll

John Braddock

The population of Samoa was subjected to an unprecedented nationwide quarantine last week as the government struggled to stem the Pacific country’s deadly measles epidemic. Police were reportedly deployed “in force” to impose the shutdown.

On December 5–6, all public and private services, offices, and businesses were closed and road travel prohibited to all except essential traffic. The government previously closed schools and banned children from public gatherings. People not yet vaccinated were told to remain indoors and tie a red cloth in front of their homes while awaiting mobile vaccination teams.

Despite more than 20,000 inoculations carried out over the two days, the toll from the disease has continued to rise. Over the past 24 hours the total number of deaths has reached 70, of which 61 are children aged 4 years or younger. Another 112 new cases were registered, bringing the total to 4,693 since the outbreak began. Currently 159 people are hospitalised, including 17 critically ill children.

According to Auckland University immunisation specialist, Dr Helen Petousis Harris, up to 3 percent of Samoa’s population of 200,000 could be hit with the deadly virus before it is eventually contained.

Addressing a press conference last Friday, Prime Minister Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi admitted the epidemic remained beyond the government's ability to control it, despite an influx of international medical aid and personnel. He launched an urgent financial appeal for $US10.7 million to help the overwhelmed health system. UN spokesperson Simona Marinescu warned that there are still 110,000 vulnerable people at risk.

The government faces mounting public anger over its failure to prevent what was an entirely foreseeable and preventable outbreak. Relatives of children who have died maintain the authorities must have known that the population was at grave risk of infection.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in the last five years levels of vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) collapsed in Samoa, particularly among the most at-risk groups of infants, from 90 to just 31 percent.

Dr Petousis-Harris posted on social media that while the compulsory immunisation campaign may mitigate the crisis, “for many it is too late.” The low immunisation coverage has left Samoa extremely vulnerable to measles, comparing it to “a lit match to dry tinder and gasoline.” With the global resurgence of measles, the risk of an outbreak was “almost inevitable.”

Already low immunisation levels were exacerbated by a medical mishap in July 2018 that killed two babies, causing widespread distrust in the vaccination program. Two nurses were prosecuted and jailed for negligent manslaughter after mistakenly diluting the powdered vaccine with a dose of anaesthetic instead of water.

In an act of wanton negligence, the government suspended all MMR immunisations for 10 months, leaving thousands of children unimmunised. Failure to inform the public that it was not the vaccine that caused the deaths helped boost a pernicious anti-vaccination campaign. In June, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, visited from the US and was photographed alongside Samoan government officials.

Community leader Tupai Molesi Taumaoe, whose 20-month-old nephew died of measles, told the UK Telegraph the government did not react quickly enough to falling vaccination rates. New Zealand had warned the government in August about a possible epidemic, he said, “but they did nothing.” Tuilaepa flatly denied leaving the response too late, asserting the disease “came from New Zealand.”

The Samoan government displayed the indifference and contempt with which the local ruling elite, based largely on traditional tribal chiefs, routinely treats the people. Taumaoe told the Telegraph that “the community points the finger at the government, and the government points the finger at the parents.”

Prime Minister Tuilaepa blamed the victims’ “mindset,” telling media the people had a “lackadaisical attitude to all the warnings that we had issued.” He told TVNZ the crisis had forced people to finally take vaccinations “seriously.” A leading health official exhorted everyone to “stop relying on the government to do everything” and to “look after their own family welfare.”

New Zealand’s Labour-NZ First-Green Party government also shares responsibility. It waited until November 19, nearly a month into the outbreak, before sending an initial team of 10 doctors and nurses to Samoa.

The Samoan epidemic, followed by smaller outbreaks in Tonga, Fiji and now American Samoa originated in New Zealand. There have been 2,149 confirmed NZ cases since January, including more than 1,711 in working class South Auckland. A 1991 survey showed that only 42 percent of NZ-resident two-year-olds from Pacific Island families were vaccinated. Earlier this year alerts were issued throughout the WHO’s Western Pacific region about a potential spread of the disease.

Sapeer Mayron, a former New Zealand reporter now with the Samoan Observer, told the Telegraph that South Auckland was well-known for low vaccination rates among Samoan families. “It was obvious to me what was going to happen,” she said.

NZ’s National Verification Committee for Measles and Rubella Elimination explicitly warned the Ministry of Health in July: “Steps should be taken to prevent measles spreading to Pacific Island nations from New Zealand, via communications to Pacific Island governments on vaccination requirements.”

The Listener magazine’s editorial on December 5 noted New Zealand’s responsibility for the spread of the 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed 22 percent of Samoa’s population. It questioned whether the Ardern government had been “forceful enough” dealing with the known risk of measles spreading to the islands. Dr Petousis-Harris has bluntly accused New Zealand of “failing” to protect its neighbour.

The worldwide resurgence of measles is a product of deepening inequality, poverty and sweeping corporate attacks on basic health provision. There were nearly 10 million cases and an estimated 142,000 deaths globally last year. Three times as many cases have been reported this year than at the same stage in 2018.

Vaccination rates have stagnated for a decade. The WHO says globally just 86 percent of children get the first dose of vaccine and fewer than 70 percent the second. A 95 percent coverage is required for what is known as herd immunity, to avoid outbreaks. Most of the dying are small children, while thousands more suffer ongoing harm including pneumonia and brain damage.

Commenting on the extraordinarily high death rate in Samoa, NZ Immunisation Advisory Centre director Nikki Turner told Stuff, “it is not unusual to see more people die of measles in low-income countries than other countries.” Children in poverty-stricken regions are often malnourished, access to primary healthcare is limited and hospitals are insufficiently resourced.

WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated the death of any child from a vaccine-preventable disease like measles “is frankly an outrage and a collective failure to protect the world’s most vulnerable children.” To save lives, he said, “We must ensure everyone can benefit from vaccines, which means investing in immunisation and quality healthcare as a right for all.”

Over 40 workers killed in Indian factory fire

Wasantha Rupasinghe

At least 43 workers were killed in a massive fire at a four-storey factory building in New Delhi, early Sunday morning. More than 50 workers were injured in the blaze, with some of them in a critical condition. It was second most deadly fire in the capital’s history.

About 200 people were reportedly sleeping at the time when fire broke at about 5 a.m. Those rescued were rushed in auto rickshaws or three-wheeler taxis to the RML, LNJP and Hindu Rao hospitals, according to fire officials. All the victims were poor migrant workers from the states of Bihar and Uttar Prades in northern India. The youngest was 13 years old and the oldest 51.

Doctors confirmed that smoke inhalation was the primary cause of the death. Some of bodies were charred beyond recognition.

About 150 fire fighters struggled for five hours in a narrow lane to douse the blaze and prevent it from engulfing other buildings in the congested area. Two firefighters were injured. Media reports describe “chaotic scenes” as grief-stricken and shocked relatives of the victims rushed to the site to search for their loved ones.

A fire engine stands by the site of a fire in an alleyway, tangled in electrical wire and too narrow for vehicles to access, in New Delhi, India, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2019. Dozens of people died on Sunday in a devastating fire at a building in a crowded grains market area in central New Delhi, police said. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

Manoj, 23, whose brother was working in a handbag manufacturing unit operating from the premises, told the Indian Express: “I got call from his friend saying he has been injured in the incident. I have no idea which hospital he has been taken to.”

The Times of India reported that Mohamed Mahbub, 13, was pronounced dead on arrival at the LHMC Hospital. No trace had been found of his 14-year-old brother who also worked at the factory.

A desperate Wajid Ali from Samastipur told the Times: “My cousin Mohammed Atamul, who is about 18 years old, I saw his body. And my two brothers—Sajid (23) and Wazir (17) are untraceable.”

Each floor of the building, which was located in Anaj Madi on Rani Jhansi Road, had four to five rooms and contained a range of illegal manufacturing units. The ground floor made plastic toys; the first floor was involved cardboard manufacturing; the second floor had a garment workshop; and the third floor produced jackets and also had printing facilities.

According to fire officials, preliminary investigations suggest that the early morning blaze may have been triggered by an electrical short circuit.

Delhi Fire Service director Atul Garg told the Indian Express that the building was old and did not have fire safety certification or fire safety equipment. Firemen had to cut window grills to access the building.

Garg said that about 60 people, most of them contract labourers and factory workers, were asleep in the building when the fire began. He said that four fire-fighting units were rushed to the site, then another 30, but only one unit was able to get into the congested laneway.

More details about the disaster emerged on Sunday evening after the National Disaster Response Team (NDRF) entered the building and discovered high levels of hazardous carbon monoxide fumes.

NDRF deputy commander Aditya Pratap Singh told the Press Trust of India that the entire third and fourth floor of the building had been “engulfed with smoke” and that most of workers in the illegal manufacturing units had died of suffocation. “There was a room, where most of the workers were sleeping, which had only a single space for ventilation,” Singh said.

Police arrested the building owner Rehan and his manager Furkan on Sunday. They were charged under sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 285 (negligent conduct with respect to fire or combustible matter) of the Indian Penal Code.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal rushed to the devastated building and declared that the “guilty will not be spared.” He ordered a ministerial inquiry into the disaster, and in a desperate attempt to dissipate mass anger, announced compensation of one million India rupees ($US14,000) to the families of the deceased and 100,000 rupees to each family of the injured.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered 100,000 rupees compensation to the next of kin of those killed and 50,000 rupees for the seriously injured. Modi issued a perfunctory Twitter message describing the fire as “extremely horrific” and declaring that his “thoughts are with those who lost loved ones.”

These hypocritical statements and the meagre compensation are a desperate attempt by Modi and Delhi territory leaders to deflect attention from their political responsibility for the tragedy. Territory and local government officials have also sought to offload blame on each other.

Sanja Singh, an MP from of Delhi’s ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), questioned the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, which is ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Singh asked why the council had not shut the factory when it knew it was operating illegally and did not have fire clearance.

Delhi Congress Committee President Shubash Chopra denounced the AAP and the BJP, declaring that “they are equally responsible.” Chopra’s statement is a shameless attempt to deflect the blame from Congress, which has held power for decades.

The entire political establishment and the Indian capitalist class, which have created the sweatshop conditions that produced this fire, are directly responsible for this and numerous similar disasters throughout India. The latest tragedy has occurred as the Modi government is stepping up its efforts to boost “investor sentiment” by abolishing India’s limited but hard-won labour laws.

Notwithstanding the finger-pointing and statements of “concern,” the aftermath of Sunday’s fire will see no change in the dangerous conditions and the brutal exploitation of the Indian working class. The entirely preventable fires and other disasters will continue.

The list of deadly fires in Delhi over the past two decades include:

* In 1997, 59 people were killed in a fire at Uphaar Cinema in New Delhi.

* In August 2009: Scores of patients were evacuated after a fire broke out near the emergency ward at Delhi’s AIIMS. While there were no casualties reported, the fire severely damaged the structure. The Microbiology department’s virology unit on the second floor of the teaching block was completely gutted.

* In November 2018: Four people were killed and one person injured after a fire broke out at a factory in central Delhi’s Karol Bagh.

* In February 2019: At least 17 were killed and 35 injured in fire at the Hotel Arpit Palace in Delhi’s Karol Bagh area.

America’s torturers and their co-conspirators must be prosecuted

Tom Carter

“I was in such an indescribable state of pain… I could hear sounds coming from the brothers, not only one but more than one brother; one was moaning, another one vomiting and another one screaming: my back, my back!”

“He started banging my head against the wall with both his hands. The banging was so strong that I felt at some point my skull was in pieces… Then he dragged me to another very tiny squared box. With the help of the guards he shoved me inside the box…”

—Denbeaux, Mark et al., How America Tortures (2019), Appendix I: Abu Zubaydah’s Notes

**

Last month, the Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Policy and Research published a paper titled “How America Tortures,” which contains eight significant drawings by torture victim Abu Zubaydah.

The drawings by themselves are a powerful indictment of the entire political establishment in the United States, which has failed to hold anyone accountable for the crimes that are depicted.

The paper represents the work of a team led by Professor Mark Denbeaux, who is serving as an attorney for a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, including Abu Zubaydah. The paper brings together material from numerous sources, including Central Intelligence Agency cables and other government documents, and Abu Zubaydah’s own account of what occurred, to provide a chronology “not only from the CIA’s perspective, but also from the perspective of the tortured.” The result is damning.

The CIA’s torture techniques are cataloged in comprehensive detail in the report. They include “cramped confinement” in small boxes, in some cases “adding insects to the dark box as another way to scare the detainee locked inside.” The paper documents the use of female soldiers to sexually abuse and humiliate detainees, with “female military personnel going shirtless during interrogations, giving forced lap dances, and rubbing red liquids on the detainees which they identified as menstrual blood.”

One FBI agent described finding detainees “chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated [sic] on themselves, and had been left there for [eighteen, twenty-four] hours or more.”

Loud rap music was played around the clock. The now-infamous practice of “involuntary rectal feeding” involved pumping pureed food into the victim’s rectum for no medical reason.

How have the perpetrators of these bestial crimes managed to avoid prosecution? It is not for lack of evidence.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the release of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “executive summary” of its findings regarding the CIA torture program. This executive summary, which runs in the hundreds of pages, is itself merely an outline of the full 6,700-page report, including 38,000 footnotes, which has been suppressed.

The World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time of the release of the summary: “From a legal standpoint, the war crimes and crimes against humanity that are documented in the report warrant the immediate arrest, indictment, and prosecution of every individual involved in the program, from the torturers themselves and their ‘outside contractors’ all the way up to senior officials in the Bush and Obama administrations who presided over the program and subsequently attempted to cover it up.”

George W. Bush and Barack Obama (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The crimes perpetrated by the American military and intelligence agencies in the course of the so-called “war on terror” were heinous, premeditated, and involved extreme depravity. These crimes were further aggravated by protracted efforts to cover them up, destroy evidence and obstruct investigations.

The crimes cannot be written off as the overzealous conduct of low-level “rogue” agents. On the contrary, they were organized in cold blood and at the highest levels. The Seton Hall Law School paper states as a matter of fact that “top officials in the West Wing of the White House and the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice orchestrated and poorly oversaw a horrific torture program that was responsible for the detention and interrogation of countless detainees.”

A New York Times editorial dated December 5, titled “Don’t Look Away,” is an attempt at damage control following the release of the Abu Zubaydah illustrations. While denouncing torture as “barbaric and illegal,” the article seeks to blame the torture program on the Republicans, denouncing President Trump and “those who think like him.”

The Times concludes: “The United States has by far the greatest security establishment on earth, with the greatest reach. When the United States commits or abets war crimes, it erodes the honor, effectiveness, and value of that force.”

The Times does not attempt to explain how it came to pass that nobody was ever prosecuted for conduct that it admits was “barbaric and illegal” and constituted “war crimes.”

In reality, the CIA torture program was entirely bipartisan. Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as then-House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi were briefed on the program in 2002.

The Obama administration played a key role in legitimizing torture and shielding war criminals from prosecution. Under the slogan of “looking forward not backward,” the Democrats refused to prosecute anyone involved in the program or cover-up. The only CIA employee who was ever prosecuted by the Obama administration in connection with torture was analyst John Kiriakou, who was jailed for publicly acknowledging that the CIA was engaged in waterboarding.

Obama refused for years to release the Senate torture report and assisted the CIA’s efforts to suppress it. In 2015, the Obama administration successfully sued to prevent the American Civil Liberties Union from obtaining it under the Freedom of Information Act.

What did the New York Times have to say about these “barbaric and illegal” practices at the time? On April 6, 2002, a Times headline gloated, “A Master Terrorist is Nabbed.” Describing the abduction of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, without charges or legal proceedings of any kind, the Times wrote, “His seizure demonstrates that the painstaking international detective work of the current phase of the war on terror is paying off.”

On June 12, 2002, in an article titled “Traces of Terror,” the Times continued its role as a CIA stenographer: “After nearly 100 sessions with CIA and FBI interrogators at a heavily guarded, undisclosed location, the captured terrorist Abu Zubaydah has provided information that American officials say is central to the Bush administration’s efforts to pre-empt a new wave of attacks against the United States.”

This version of events was, as is now universally acknowledged, a pack of lies. Abu Zubaydah was not a high-level operative in Al Qaeda, and he may not have even been a member. He has never been charged with a crime, let alone tried and convicted. Yet to this day, he continues to rot in a cell in the Guantanamo Bay torture camp, with no prospect of being released.

Five years after the publication of the Senate report, where are the torturers and their co-conspirators now? Gina Haspel, who presided over a CIA torture compound in Thailand and was implicated in the destruction of tapes of Abu Zubaydah’s torture in 2005, was promoted by Trump to become the new director of the agency.

The previous director, John Brennan, who was a high-level CIA official during the Bush administration and under Obama ordered agents to break into Senate staffers’ computers in an effort to search for incriminating information relating to torture, is now serving as a well-paid “senior national security and intelligence analyst” for NBC News and MSNBC. He makes regular appearances on news programs to agitate in favor of the Democrats’ impeachment drive.

James Mitchell, whose company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, received a $81 million contract from the CIA to develop and implement the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that were used on Abu Zubaydah and others, remains at large. According to a Bloomberg News article in 2014, he is now retired and spends his free time kayaking, rafting and climbing.

And what has been the fate of those who have exposed official criminality? Julian Assange is imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison in London, where his life is endangered by conditions amounting to torture. Chelsea Manning was imprisoned and tortured, released, and then imprisoned again for refusing to testify against Assange before a grand jury. Edward Snowden was forced to flee the country and seek refuge in Russia.

The torturers and their co-conspirators have not been prosecuted, not because of lack of evidence or insufficient legal grounds, but because the entire political establishment is implicated at the highest levels, including the Democrats, the Republicans, the military and intelligence agencies, the establishment media, and all of those who perpetrated the reactionary fraud of the “war on terror.”

The failure to prosecute the torturers has served to embolden the most fascistic layers in the state apparatus, opening the way for Trump to boast of his support for torture in broad daylight. Trump and his fascistic advisers, frightened by the growth of social opposition, believe that the Gestapo-style methods that have been implemented in the course of the “war on terror” are necessary to terrify and suppress opposition both abroad and internally. While Trump brags that he is in favor of implementing torture practices at Guantanamo Bay that are a “hell of a lot worse,” he tells police officers within the US: “Don’t be too nice.”

The Democrats and their allies are concerned that public discussion of the crimes of the state would serve to fuel popular hostility towards the institutions the New York Times describes as the “greatest security establishment on earth.” It would cut across the Democrats’ ongoing efforts to ingratiate and align themselves with the CIA as part of the impeachment drive against Trump. Moreover, the revelations of CIA torture underscore the hypocrisy of their efforts to justify American imperialist aggression and subversion all over the world in the name of “human rights.”

For these reasons, the demand to bring the torturers to justice must be taken up by the international working class. Every individual who participated in the CIA torture program or the cover-up in any capacity, including those who failed to intervene when they had an opportunity to do so, should face arrest, indictment and prosecution.

The fight to end torture once and for all must be connected to the mounting struggles of the international working class to defend and expand its democratic and social rights and halt the drive of the ruling class toward dictatorship. The entire existing social order is implicated in torture and must be overthrown.