How the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Emiratis Took Washington

Morgan Palumbo & Jessica Draper

It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The losers? Us. And odds on, you didn’t even know that it happened. Few Americans did, which is why it’s worth telling the story of how Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari money flooded the nation’s capital and, in the process, American policy went down for the count.

The fight began three years ago this month. Sure, the pugilists hadn’t really liked each other that much before then, but what happened in 2017 was the foreign-policy equivalent of a sucker punch. On the morning of June 5th, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Bahrain announced that they were severing diplomatic ties with Qatar, the small but wealthy emirate in the Persian Gulf, and establishing a land, air, and sea blockade of their regional rival, purportedly because of its ties to terrorism.

The move stunned the Qataris, who responded in ways that would later become familiar during the Covid-19 pandemic — by emptying supermarket shelves and hoarding essentials they worried would quickly run out. Their initial fears were not unwarranted, as their neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were even reported to be planning to launch a military invasion of Qatar in the weeks to come (one that would be thwarted only by the strong objections of Donald Trump’s then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson).

To make sense of this now three-year-old conflict, which turned aspects of American policy in the Middle East ranging from the war in Yemen to the more than 10,000 American military personnel stationed in Qatar into political footballs, means refocusing on Washington and the extraordinary influence operations the Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris ran there. That, in turn, means analyzing Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) documents filed by firms representing all three countries since the spat began. Do that and you’ll come across a no-punches-barred bout of lobbying in the U.S. capital that would have made Rocky envious.

The Saudis Come Out Swinging

The stage had been set for the blockade of Qatar seven months before it began when Donald Trump was elected president. Just as his victory shocked the American public, so it caught many foreign governments off guard. In response, they quickly sought out the services of anyone with ties to the incoming administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. The Saudis and Emiratis were no exception. In 2016, both countries had reported spending a little more than $10 million on FARA registered lobbying firms. By the end of 2017, UAE spending had nearly doubled to $19.5 million, while the Saudi’s had soared to $27.3 million.

In the months following Donald Trump’s November triumph, the Saudis, for instance, added several firms with ties to him or the Republicans to an already sizeable list of companies registered under FARA as representing their interests. For example, they brought on the CGCN Group whose president and chief policy officer, Michael Catanzaro, was on Trump’s transition team and then served in his administration. To court the Republican Congress, they hired the McKeon Group, run by former Republican Representative Buck McKeon, who had previously served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

And that was just registered foreign agents. A number of actors who had not registered under FARA were actively pushing the Saudi and Emirati agendas, chief among them Elliott Broidy and George Nader. Broidy, a top fundraiser for Trump’s campaign, and Nader, his business partner, already had a wide range of interests in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. To help secure them, the two men embarked on a campaign to turn the new president and the Republican establishment against Qatar. One result was a Broidy-inspired, UAE-funded anti-Qatar conference hosted in May 2017 by a prominent Washington think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It conveniently offered Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) a platform to discuss his plans to introduce a bill, HR 2712, that would label Qatar a state sponsor of terrorism. It was to be introduced in the House of Representatives just two days after the conference ended.

Qatar, mind you, had been a U.S. ally in the Middle East and was the home of Al Udeid Air Base, where more than 10,000 American soldiers are still stationed. So that bill represented a striking development in American-Qatari relations and was a clearly traceable result of Saudi and UAE lobbying efforts.

The unregistered influence of players like Broidy and Nader was evidently backed by other FARA-registered Saudi and UAE foreign agents actively pushing the bill. For example, Qorvis Communications, a long-time public relations mouthpiece for the Saudis, circulated a document titled “Qatar’s History of Funding Terrorism and Extremism,” claiming that country was funding Al-Nusra, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other groups. (Not surprisingly, it included a supportive quote from David Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)

While that anti-Qatar crusade was ramping up in Washington, the president himself was being wooed by the Saudi royals in Riyadh on his first official trip abroad. They gave him the literal royal treatment and their efforts appeared to pay off when, just a day after the blockade began, Trump tweeted, “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!”

A week after the imposition of the blockade, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Al Udeid Air Base to be moved to the UAE, a development the Qataris feared could open the door for an eventual invasion of their country.

However, this Saudi and Emirati onslaught did not go unanswered.

Qatar Strikes Back

Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, was caught flat-footed by the influence operations of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. The year before Donald Trump became president, the Qataris had spent just $2.7 million on lobbying and public relations firms, less than a third of what the Saudis and UAE paid out, according to FARA records. But they now moved swiftly to shore up their country’s image as a crucial American ally. They went on an instant hiring spree, scooping up lobbying and public-relations firms with close ties to Trump and congressional Republicans. Just two days after the blockade began, for instance, they inked a deal with the law firm of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, paying $2.5 million for just its first 90 days of work.

They also quickly obtained the services of Stonington Strategies. Headed by Nick Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s election campaign, the firm promptly set out to court 250 Trump “influencers,” as Julie Bykowicz of the Wall Street Journal reported. Among others, Stonington’s campaign sought to woo prominent Fox News personalities Trump paid special attention to like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. He was paid $50,000 to travel to Qatar just months later.

In September 2017, the Qataris also hired Bluefront Strategies to craft a comprehensive multimedia operation, which was to include commercials on all the major news networks, as well as digital and printed ads in an array of prominent publications, and a “Lift the Blockade” campaign on social media. Meanwhile, ads on Google and YouTube were to highlight the illegality of the blockade and the country’s contributions to fighting terrorism. Bluefront Strategies was to influence public opinion before the next session of the U.N. General Assembly that month. Qatar and its proxies then used the campaign “to target key decision-makers attending the General Assembly, including Trump” to gain support on that most global of stages.

Its agents weren’t just playing defense, either. They actively attacked the Saudi lobby. For example, Barry Bennett of Avenue Strategies, a PR firm they hired, sent a letter to the assistant attorney general for national security accusing Saudi Arabia and the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee (SAPRAC) of FARA violations in their funding of an expensive media campaign meant to connect Qatar’s leaders with violent extremism and acts of terror.

Such counterpunches proved remarkably successful. SAPRAC eventually felt obliged to register with FARA. Meanwhile, Huckabee tweeted, “Just back from a few days in surprisingly beautiful, modern, and hospitable Doha, Qatar.” Finally, at that U.N. meeting, President Trump actually sat down with Emir al-Thani of Qatar and said, “We’ve been friends a long time… I have a very strong feeling [the Qatar diplomatic crisis] will be solved quickly.” They both then emphasized the “tremendous” and “strong” relationship between their countries.

The Qataris next mounted a concerted defense against HR 2712. Lobbying firms they hired, particularly Avenue Strategies and Husch Blackwell, launched a multifaceted campaign to prevent that legislation from passing. Elliott Broidy even claimed in a lawsuit that the Qatari government and several of its lobbyists had hacked his email account and distributed private emails of his to members of Congress in an attempt to discredit his work for the Saudis.

In November 2017, Barry Bennett from Avenue Strategies went on the attack, using a powerful weapon in Washington politics: Israel. He distributed a letter to members of Congress written by a former high-ranking official in the Israeli national security establishment explicitly stating that Qatar had not provided military support to Hamas, as HR 2712 claimed it had.

Three months later, Husch Blackwell all but threatened Congress and the Trump administration with the cancellation of a $6.2 billion Boeing contract to sell F-15 fighters to the Qatari military (and the potential loss of thousands of associated jobs) if the bill passed and sanctions were imposed on that country. All of this was linked to a concerted effort by Qatari agents to contact “nearly two dozen House offices, including then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy,” to prevent the bill’s passage, according to a report by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy where we work. Ultimately, HR 2712 died a slow death in Congress and never became law.

The Saudi Bloc’s Battle for the War in Yemen

Just as Qatar started to turn the tide in the fight for influence in Washington, the Saudis and their allies faced another problem: Congress began moving to sever support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. On February 28, 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a joint resolution to withdraw U.S. support for that war. According to FARA filings, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP, representing the Saudi ministry of foreign affairs, contacted several members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, particularly Democrats, presumably to persuade them to vote against the measure.

That March, the firm sent out dozens of emails to members of Congress inviting them to a gala dinner with the key Saudi royal, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself. According to the invitation from the CGCN Group, another FARA-registered firm representing the Saudis, the “KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia]-USA Partnership Gala Dinner” was to emphasize the “enduring defense and counter-terrorism cooperation” and “historic alliance” between the two countries. It would end up taking place just two days after the Senate voted to table Sanders’s bill.

Emirati lobbyists similarly reached out to Congress to maintain support for their role in that war. Hagir Elawad & Associates, for example, distributed an op-ed written by the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs justifying the war, as well as a letter written by that country’s ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, to 50 congressional contacts defending the Saudi-led coalition’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties and arguing that “the United States has a clear stake in the coalition’s success in Yemen.”

When that conflict began, Qatar was still a member of the coalition, but the imposition of the blockade led it to withdraw its forces from Yemen. Qatari officials then used the country’s media empire, centered on the broadcaster Al Jazeera, to highlight the disastrous aspects of the ongoing war. In doing so, they provided the Saudis and Emiratis with yet another reason to focus their own influence machines on both Qatar’s and Al Jazeera’s destruction. (That network’s closure was, in fact, one of the original 13 demands the Saudis and Emiratis had made for lifting the blockade.)

From the moment it was founded in 1996, Al Jazeera had been an instrument of Qatari soft power, so it was hardly surprising that the UAE had long pressured members of Congress to force the network to register under FARA as a foreign agent. And Emirati lobbying efforts were not in vain. In early March 2018, 19 members of Congress signed and sent a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging the Justice Department to demand that Al Jazeera be registered under FARA. Another such letter sent to the Justice Department in June 2019 by six senators and two representatives asked “why Al Jazeera and its employees have not been required to register.” According to FARA filings, all but one of those representatives had either received campaign contributions from or been contacted by a Saudi or Emirati lobbying firm. Al Jazeera, however, has yet to register.

The Murder of Jamal Khashoggi

Despite the efforts of Saudi and Emirati lobbyists in the early months of 2018, the emir of Qatar still managed to land an invitation to the Oval Office. At their meeting that April 10th, President Trump again described al-Thani as a “friend” and a “great gentleman” as well. The emir, in turn, thanked the president for “supporting us during this blockade.”

If Trump’s cozying up to him was a setback for the Saudis, the murder of critic and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi nearly did in the Saudi lobbying juggernaut as well. The CIA later confirmed that the crown prince himself had ordered that Saudi citizen’s assassination at the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

As a result, some lobbying firms cut ties with the kingdom and its influence on Capitol Hill waned, as did positive public opinion about Saudi Arabia. In December 2018, the Senate passed the Sanders bill to end support for the war in Yemen. Both houses of Congress also passed a War Powers resolution to end involvement in that conflict, a historic congressional move in this century, even if later vetoed by President Trump (as were a series of attempts to block his treasured arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).

Given the president’s unyielding support for the Saudis and Emiratis as especially lucrative customers for this country’s defense industry, the Qataris have clearly decided to crib the Saudi playbook. In May, that country purchased 24 Apache helicopters for $3 billion and, a few months later, agreed to pay for and manage a $1.8 billion expansion of Al Udeid Air Base to ensure the American military’s continued presence for the foreseeable future. In doing so, Qatar was visibly at work coopting two of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: the military and the weapons makers.

And the Winners Are…

Though Qatar faced a near-existential threat to its survival when the blockade began, three years later it’s not only surviving, but thriving thanks significantly to its influence operations in Washington. They have helped immeasurably to deepen economic, diplomatic, and military relations between the two countries.

Meanwhile, the emir’s rivals in Riyadh not only failed to make their blockade a success, but saw their influence wane appreciably in the U.S. as they stumbled from one public relations fiasco to the next. Even their staunchest defender, Donald Trump, recently threatened to sever U.S. military support for the Kingdom if the Saudi royals didn’t end their oil war with Russia (which they promptly did).

In truth, however, the real loser in this struggle for influence hasn’t been Saudi Arabia or the Emiratis, it’s been America. After all, the efforts of both sides to deepen their ties with the military-industrial complex (reinforcing the hyper-militarization of U.S. foreign policy) and increase their sway in Congress have ensured that the real interests of this country played second fiddle to those of Middle Eastern despots. Certainly, their acts helped ensure near historic levels of arms sales to the region, while prolonging the wars in Yemen and Syria, and so contributing to death and devastation on an almost unimaginable scale.

None of this had anything to do with the real interests of Americans, unless you mean the arms industry and K Street lobbyists who have been the only clear American winners in this never-ending PR war in Washington. In the process, those three Persian Gulf states have delivered a genuine knockout blow to the very idea that U.S. foreign policy should be driven by national — not special — interests.

USS Liberty: One of the many big lies between America and Israel

Jerome Irwin

On this day, June 9th, 1967, Israel’s sea and air forces knowingly attacked the USS Liberty in international waters off of the coast of Egypt’s Gaza Strip in an undeclared Act of War that killed 34 U.S. Navy serviceman, while seriously injuring over 174 other American sailors. Following the attack, the captain and entire crew of the USS Liberty, then one of the most decorated crew in US History, were sworn to secrecy to never divulge the truth of what had actually happened under the threat of an immediate court martial, dishonorable discharge, punitive fines or serious prison time.

Israel’s act of war was never reported to the American people or to the rest of the world because of mutual collusion between the governments and leaders of The United States and Israel who both already could be called veritable partners in crime in the civil and human right violations they were perpetrating against the citizenry within their own borders. In the case of Israel, it was the Palestinians in occupied Palestine and in the United States Black Americans within many states in America, right up to the present day with the murder of Floyd George and the ensuing race riots and protest that ensued.

By 1967 America was still recovering from its Race Riots of 1964 in Detroit, while in Milwaukee, in 1967, the Race Riots that already had destroyed parts of Detroit were erupting while anti-war riots and protests against the aggressive war that America was waging against the government and people of Vietnam were erupting in the U.S and around the world. Yet in the midst of all this racial strife, as if a contradiction of terms and mockery of the truth, Thurgood Marshall was being confirmed as the first African American Justice of the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Israeli Zionist forces were in the midst of fighting their own vicious, bloody Six-Day War against Egypt, Jordan Syria and the Palestinians; while Israel’s Zionist forces were continuing to carry out its war of conquest called the Naksa in the region, that was an extension the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948, known as Al-Nakba, that originally displaced 750,000 Palestinians and began the mass exodus that became known as the Palestine Refugee Problem that, to date, continues unabated and has never been resolved.

So, by 1967, in the midst of all this conflict at home and abroad, the USS Liberty, an American electronic spy ship was positioned in international waters in the Mediterranean off of the coast of Egypt’s Gaza Strip when it was suddenly attacked by Israel war planes firing napalm and rockets, while torpedo boats launched torpedoes at it. Though 12 fighter jets were immediately dispatched from the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, along with four tanker planes, to defend the USS Liberty they were scandalously recalled by non-other than the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara himself and so they never were able to defend the USS Liberty protect the lives of American sailors against Israel’s unprovoked attack.

The explanation for McNamara’s decision has never been made known to the public, other than President Lynden “LBJ” Johnson, and Robert McNamara both lied at the time to the public by calling it a case of “mistaken identity”, in spite of the fact that the Israeli jet fighter pilots and torpedo boat captains could plainly see the USS Liberty’s American flags boldly flapping in the wind at the top of its masthead and were in voice communications with the Liberty. Why the Israel’s continued the attack is also still an unexplained mystery.

The then U.S. President Lynden “LBJ” Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, simply dismissed the ‘incident’ as an unfortunate “mistaken identity”, which, of course, was categorically an out-and-out bald-faced lie and so the real truth behind the events was quickly buried and soon faded from the public’s memory.

Yet today, in 2020, as they have ever since 1948, the American government and the American people have willingly given billions of so-called “foreign aid”, that Israel has used to conveniently purchase U.S. arms and weaponry of war which itd continues to use against Palestinian people or pass on to other nations who hate those within their own borders. In 2020, the amount now being debated in the U.S. Congress is $38 billion, or $10 million per day, to Israel that has been and continues to be an apartheid state, like the United States, as far as many Black-Native-Mexican-Asian-White Americans consider it to be.

The World Health Organization comes under new US attack for its relationship to China

Benjamin Mateus

Last Wednesday, June 3, the Associated Press provided a detailed account of how China, during the initial critical days in late December and early January, delayed releasing important information on the coronavirus to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Wasting no time, US officials immediately used the AP report for a new round of China-bashing. Senator Rick Scott, Republican from Florida, and Representative Ami Bera, Democrat from California and chairman of a US House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, issued statements to the press effectively condemning the UN agency’s relationship with China and insisting that this may have altered the course of the pandemic.

Other imperialist politicians joined in the chorus. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “The World Health Organization remains a truly important ally … but there are many questions that need to be answered going forward.” China hawks among right-wing British politicians called the report “shocking.” Additionally, a Trump administration spokesman declared, “The WHO’s complicity with China to cover up the source of the virus violated the organization’s own regulations.”

On May 29, President Trump, during remarks delivered in the Rose Garden, said that the United States “will today be terminating our relationship with the WHO,” just 11 days after having written a letter to the Director-General issuing an ultimatum. The letter’s conclusion sets a mid-June deadline for the WHO to “commit to major substantive improvements” or the cutoff of funds will become permanent and the US will withdraw from the WHO.

At a WHO briefing in Geneva after the AP report was released, several journalists in succession pressed the panel on these revelations. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus remained silent. Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, issued a cautious and apparently prepared statement, to the effect that “our leadership and staff have worked night and day in compliance with the organization’s rules, regulations to support and share information with our member states equally and engage in frank and forthright conversations with governments at all levels. That’s what I would like to say.”

Whatever the defects in the Chinese response in the early days of the outbreak, the revelations are being politicized to redirect onto China the blame for the mass deaths, the global economic downturn, and the deliberate impoverishment of the population while trillions of dollars have been pumped into the financial markets and the pockets of the super-rich. This campaign is also aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the WHO so as to render ineffective any criticism it might make of the ongoing “back-to-work” campaign.

The timeline of events in Wuhan

It is therefore necessary to review the timeline again with the new information provided by the AP exposé.

In the latter weeks of December, in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in central China, a mysterious pneumonia-like viral illnesses not responding to standard flu treatment led to concerns on the part of health officials that this might be caused by a novel viral pathogen, given China’s recent history with SARS. On December 27, Vision Medicals, a gene technology company based in Guangzhou, was able to piece together most of the genome. The significant similarity to the SARS virus raised concerns about a similar outbreak. The company immediately forwarded the findings to Wuhan health officials and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. By December 30, internal memos within Wuhan’s health administration were warning of the unusual viral pneumonia, and these warnings found their way into social media, leading to a clampdown by Chinese authorities.

Dr. Shi Zhengli is a Chinese virologist and director of the center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), also better known as the “Bat Woman” for her extensive work on coronaviruses. After being informed by colleagues that two patients had potentially been infected with a novel coronavirus, she hurriedly returned from a conference in Shanghai—this according to an article published in Scientific American in March. By January 2, her lab had decoded the entire genome, and on January 5, her team had isolated the virus. According to Dr. Shi, an exhaustive search of the lab records did not identify any matched sequences with the isolated virus.

On December 31, when there were 27 recognized infections, the state television CCTV, as well as three international news agencies, Reuters, Deutsche Welle, and South China Morning Post , had picked up the story, with one headline reading: “China investigates SARS-like virus as dozens struck by pneumonia.”

According to the WHO’s press statement dated January 5, “On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology. As of 3 January 2020, a total of 44 patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology have been reported to WHO by the national authorities. … all patients are isolated and receiving treatment in Wuhan medical institutions.”

Apparently, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had also learned of the “cluster of 27 cases of pneumonia” on December 31. Several months previously, according to Reuters, the Trump administration had terminated a “key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China.” Due to US trade disputes with China, Dr. Linda Quick, a field epidemiologist, left her position in September 2019. As was noted, she had been “in an ideal position to be the eyes and ears on the ground for the United States and other countries on the coronavirus outbreak, and might have alerted them to the growing threat weeks earlier.” US CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield adamantly claimed in a statement to Reuters that the “elimination of the advisor position did not hinder Washington’s ability to get information and ‘had absolutely nothing to do with CDC not learning of cases in China earlier.’”

According to the AP, the Chinese CDC independently sequenced the genome of the novel virus on January 3. On the same day, the National Health Commission issued a “confidential notice ordering labs with the virus to either destroy their samples or send them to designated institutes for safekeeping.” According to Liu Dengfeng, an official with the National Health Commission’s science and education department, this was done for labs not designated to handle unidentified pathogens and intended to prevent secondary mishaps. “Based on comprehensive research and expert opinion, we decided to manage the pathogen causing the pneumonia temporarily as Class II—highly pathogenic—and imposed biosafety requirements on sample collection, transport, and experimental activities, as well as destroying the samples,” he said.

Famed virologist Dr. Zhang Yongzhen and his team at the Shanghai Public Health Clinic Centre were next to have sequenced the novel coronavirus on January 5. Internal communication reflects that the National Health Commission was notified that the new virus was like the SARS virus and potentially infectious: “It should be contagious through respiratory passages. We recommend taking preventative measures in public areas.”

On January 6, the US CDC had issued a travel watch to Wuhan and the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) in Minneapolis had provided an accurate brief of the situation noting 15 more cases, bringing the total to 59. Regional governments were flagging sick travelers who had been to Wuhan. Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of CIDRAP, had assessed that the outbreak wasn’t rapidly escalating.

On January 7, the virology lab at Wuhan University was next to sequence the virus (making it the fourth) matching that sequenced by Dr. Shi at the WIV. The Chinese CDC had already raised the threat level to the second highest the day prior, but they lacked the authority to issue a public warning. By January 8, the Wall Street Journal had run a story titled, “New virus discovered by Chinese scientists investigating pneumonia outbreak.”

The AP report suggests that the National Health Commission in China was tied up in a bureaucratic morass driven by concerns about being wrong about the implication of these findings, preventing Dr. Shi’s data from being published, and not allowing her to speak publicly. Meanwhile, the Chinese CDC was “plagued with fierce competition” to be the first to publish on the discoveries in prestigious journals.

The WHO seeks information

Meanwhile, the WHO health officials had been pressing their Chinese counterparts for critical clinical and diagnostic data. Private remarks spoke to frustrations that China was not forthcoming with sufficient data to determine if they were seeing human to human transmissions. The AP wrote, “The WHO staffers debated how to press China for gene sequences and detailed patient data without angering authorities, worried about losing access and getting Chinese scientists into trouble.”

The WHO has no enforcement powers and no authority to investigate epidemics within a country independently of the host nation. It is evident from the AP report that the international health agency recognized time was of the essence. Dr. Mike Ryan complained on January 8, “the fact is, we’re two to three weeks into an event, we don’t have a laboratory diagnosis, we don’t have an age, sex or geographic distribution, we don’t have an epi curve.”

According to Dr. Ali Mokdad, professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, “It’s obvious that we could have saved more lives and avoided many, many deaths if China and the WHO had acted faster.” But he and many experts surmised that a confrontational approach with China might have prompted Chinese health authorities to break off collaboration, leading to an even more catastrophic scenario.

In the intervening days, the first death from COVID-19 occurred on January 9: a 61-year-old man, a regular customer at the now infamous seafood market in Wuhan. Additional travelers from China to South Korea and Thailand were isolated and treated for viral pneumonia.

On January 11, Dr. Zhang of Shanghai Public Health Clinic Centre, out of frustrations with delays by authorities, published the sequence on virological.org, finally providing the world the first glimpse of the genetic blueprint for SARS-CoV-2. Thai researchers who had isolated and partially sequenced the virus from an ill Chinese traveler discovered at the airport on January 9 issued findings on January 13 that the virus was identical to Dr. Zhang’s sequence.

The crux of the criticism against China’s delay lies in the fact that more than two weeks had passed since the partial sequence had been decoded and more than a week since three other labs had full sequences before the sequences were finally published on GISAID, platform for scientists to share genomic sequences. Additionally, it was important to determine if human-to-human transmission was occurring.

Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealthAlliances, a scientist who has spent his career hunting dangerous viruses, offered a more objective overview. He said, “The pressure is intense in an outbreak to make sure you’re right. It’s actually worse to go out to the public with a story that’s wrong because the public completely lose confidence in the public health response.”

Beijing was quickly forced into damage control mode, launching a nationwide public health emergency plan. On January 14, the National Health Commission, chaired by Party Secretary and Director Ma Xiaowei, convened a confidential teleconference with health officials, providing a formal notification and plan of action to President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. According to a press release, “The meeting pointed out that there are great uncertainties in the current epidemic prevention and control work. Although the epidemic is still confined to the limited scope of Wuhan City, the source of the new coronavirus infection has not been found, the transmission route of the epidemic has not been fully grasped, and the human-to-human transmission capacity still needs to be closely monitored.”

Yet, despite this declaration of a level one emergency within internal circles, the WHO continued to struggle to obtain accurate clinical data to determine the extent of the outbreak. Only after a renowned infectious disease specialist, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, declared on January 20 that the new virus was being transmitted between people, did the Chinese President Xi Jinping call for the “timely publication of epidemic information and deepening of international cooperation.” On January 22, the WHO convened an independent committee to address if there was a need to declare a global health emergency.

WHO review of response by member states

The WHO’s independent oversight and advisory committee (the IOAC) issued their appraisal of the agency’s response to the pandemic on May 21. It stated that the WHO was first notified of pneumonia-like cases of unknown etiology on December 31 in Wuhan. The WHO health emergencies arm began providing updates and guidance to member states almost immediately. The IOAC wrote, “Initial information on case fatality rate, severity, and transmissibility furnished by China in early January reflected an incomplete picture of the virus but were updated by the WHO Secretariat following a country office mission to Wuhan from [January] 20 to January 21. An imperfect and evolving understanding is not unusual during the early phase of a novel disease emergence.”

The WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on January 30, with just over 10,000 cases, of which 80 were outside of mainland China. The IOAC cites concerns with member states’ varied public health responses to the declaration. They wrote, “this raises questions about whether member states view a PHEIC declaration as a sufficiently clear trigger.” They noted, critically, that the majority of countries were poorly prepared for a severe pandemic and struggled to implement public health measures in response to developments.

“The WHO Secretariat’s response to COVID-19 was faster than for either the MERS or SARS epidemics, but this did not prompt similarly rapid action by all Member States; this may indicate a gap between the current International Health Regulations (IHR) and Member State expectations of WHO Secretariat’s role. This pandemic has called into question whether the existing roles and responsibilities that the IHR assigns to the WHO Secretariat and the Member States are widely understood, fit for purpose, and still appropriate for a pandemic.”

The IOAC also raised appropriate disquiet about the agency’s finances. Since February 2020, the WHO has raised $408 million for its work across three levels of the organization. An additional $306 million has been pledged. The IOAC calculates that the WHO would need an estimated $1.7 billion through the end of the year, leaving a funding gap of $1.3 billion. According to the Director-General, the budget of just over $2 billion is that of a medium-sized hospital in a developed country.

In the most searing conclusions, the IOAC wrote, “The COVID-19 pandemic is having huge socio-economic impacts across the globe, on health, economies, businesses, and on the workings and interactions of all communities in a way no other emergency has had before. No single Member State can hope to defeat this virus solely with the tools that exist within their borders. Yet there has been a palpable lack of global solidarity and common purpose. That is a recipe for extending and worsening the global outbreak, leaving all countries less secure. A successful pandemic response hinges on inter-connected global systems and networks: of scientific expertise, medical supply, trade, innovation, and production. The rising politicization of pandemic response is a material impediment to defeating the virus, while it aggravates other health, social and economic impacts.”

In February 2018, the WHO placed on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases, a hypothetical and unknown pathogen, duly named Disease X, that could cause a future pandemic for which there would be no, or insufficient, medical treatments. Two years later, in early February 2020, Dr. Shi Zhengli of the WIV declared the coronavirus causing COVID-19 should be recognized as the first Disease X. In the same month, Dr. Marion Koopmans, head of Viroscience at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, wrote, “whether it will be contained or not, this outbreak is rapidly becoming the first true pandemic challenge that fits the Disease X category.”

The Trump administration and the pandemic danger

If one compares the US response to the WHO’s, on May 11, 2017, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats offered Congress a written testimony during a presentation of the Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment that “a novel or reemerging microbe that is easily transmissible between humans and is highly pathogenic remains a major threat because such as organism has the potential to spread rapidly and kill millions.”

Nonetheless, on February 9, 2018, Trump signed a bill that cut $1.35 billion in funding for Prevention and Public health at the CDC. On April 10, 2018, on the second day on the job as National Security Adviser, John Bolton fired White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert, who had called for a “comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” and disbanded the global health security team.

In September 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had received plans from Halyard corporation for new machines that could manufacture N-95 respirator masks at 1.5 million per day as part of a pandemic preparation plan. Experts had been advising the government for a decade and a half that such masks were vital. The Washington Post later wrote, “No details of progress in the Halyard mask project appears to have been publicly reported by the government.”

On January 29, 2019, the Director of National Intelligence again warned that the US remained vulnerable to a large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive deaths and have catastrophic consequences on the economy, as well as strain international resources. In October 2019, the Trump administration concluded a months-long simulation code-named “Crimson Contagion.” The simulated exercise attempted to address US response to a respiratory virus that began in China and spread to the whole world. In a report marked “Draft Do Not Distribute,” under section 5, “Resources,” the report noted that the US lacked “PPE preparedness in the event of a global pandemic and has problems in the supply chain for medical equipment including ventilators and other ancillary medical supplies.”

China and the WHO are useful scapegoats for the consequences of this systematic neglect of the health and lives of tens of millions of people, on the part of the Trump administration and other imperialist governments, and global capitalism as a whole. In the case of the WHO, there is zero evidence of neglect or indifference, although the agency was certainly limited by its subordination to capitalism and the nation-state system. And however halting and limited the initial Chinese response, those errors are dwarfed into insignificance by the homicidal negligence of Trump and other capitalist rulers.

Papua New Guinea: Ex-PM O’Neill charged with corruption

John Braddock

Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) former Prime Minister Peter O'Neill was last month charged with alleged misappropriation, abuse of office and official corruption. The opposition MP was arrested at the Port Moresby airport on May 23 on his return from Australia and bailed to his private residence.

The case stems from a 2013 purchase made by O’Neill as prime minister of two electricity generators from an Israeli company, LR Group, for $US14 million. The parliamentary opposition filed a police complaint about the purchase in 2014. Its revival, following a failed attempt to charge O’Neill on another matter last October, suggests political moves to pursue the former leader. Another case against him from 2016 remains tied up in the courts.

Police allege that O’Neill directed payments in contravention of procurement processes required under the Public Finance Management Act. The purchase was allegedly not approved by the national parliament, and did not go through required tender processes, nor was there legal clearance from the State Solicitors.

O’Neill, who lost power to current Prime Minister James Marape in 2019, claimed the “highly politicised” case was being “influenced and pushed by dark and shadowy figures behind the scenes,” but offered no details. He said the generators were bought to address the chronic problem of power blackouts in Port Moresby and Lae, claiming the purchase was approved in the Supplementary (Appropriation) Act 2013.

O’Neill also asked why Marape, who was finance minister at the time, was not being investigated. In response, Marape claimed that finance ministers were the last in the chain of approvals. He said he would not interfere in the police investigation, and was willing to act as a state witness.

The targeting of O’Neill coincides with the passage through parliament of a bill to establish an Independent Commission Against Corruption. The Post Courier declared on June 4 that unanimous support by MPs for the measure would reassure “our donors and bilateral partners” that with corruption made illegal, “good governance with transparency and accountability” will prevail.

A vast gulf separates PNG’s venal ruling elite from the poverty-stricken working class and rural masses. The political establishment is mired in cronyism and corruption. The parliamentary speaker, Job Pomat, was recently forced to step down amid allegations of corruption in his office.

Belden Namah as opposition leader laid the 2014 complaint against O’Neill, but he is now his key political ally. He unsuccessfully sought to withdraw the complaint following last month’s arrest.

The purported concern over corruption is, firstly, a response to deepening popular hostility and O’Neill is a convenient scapegoat.

In 2016, police opened fire on a protest, killing four students, that was demanding O’Neill step down and face fraud charges. Opposition intensified following the 2017 election narrowly won by O’Neill. Police and military units were dispatched to the Highlands to crack down on violence stemming from the election, which was widely regarded as illegitimate.

The government is desperate for foreign investment and aid. As oil and commodity prices have tumbled amid the COVID-19 epidemic, PNG faces a severe budget shortfall. Last month, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported that Marape is seeking a $US2 billion bailout from international institutions, including the IMF and Asian Development Bank (ADB), to prevent PNG becoming a “failed state.”

Even before the pandemic hit, PNG faced economic crises, with government debt near 40 percent of GDP and the 2020 budget in serious difficulty. Investment in the resource sector has been declining with the long-term fall in global commodity prices hitting foreign reserves and government revenue. The partially government-owned Oil Search has announced a cut in oil production from July due to weak prices.

The IMF and ADB are certain to demand brutal attacks on the social position of the working class. A likely devaluation of the PNG kina, currently propped up by the central bank, will send the cost of basic food items skyrocketing and a swathe of cuts in public spending, salaries and wages is expected.

The social disaster is being exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic. While only a handful of cases have so far been officially reported, the country’s ramshackle health system, with just 500 doctors and 5,000 hospital beds for the population of 10 million, is in no position to cope with a major outbreak.

Late in his term of office O’Neill made a turn towards Beijing for financial support that has not been changed by Marape. Initially, he entered discussions with China for a total debt restructure funded by Beijing. However, an Australian emergency loan of $440 million last November helped finance the 2020 budget, replacing a similar loan being negotiated with China.

With intensifying crises on both domestic and international fronts, Marape resorted to nationalist demagogy proclaiming a policy to “take back PNG.” Speaking to the Sydney-based Lowy Institute last July, he pledged “regime shifts” in the resource industry to “bring more wealth to the people” and free PNG from dependence on Australian aid.

In April this year, the government abruptly announced it would not extend the mining lease on the Porgera goldmine that contributes some 10 percent of the country’s total exports. Public pressure has been mounting over the mine, as domestic and international environmental and anti-mining groups have conducted a sustained campaign against its operations.

The move is extremely risky, threatening the mining investments on which the PNG economy heavily depends. The mine’s Canadian operator Barrick Gold and Chinese joint venture partner Zijin Mining declared the announcement was “tantamount to nationalisation without due process.” While Barrick threatened legal action, Zijin Mining warned the dispute could damage bilateral relations between PNG and China.

As the PNG government is in no position to run mining operations, Marape is likely seeking leverage in negotiations with other major players. He has accused ExxonMobil and Oil Search of holding the fledgling $US13 billion P’nyang gas project “to ransom” over their refusal to meet government demands for a better stake in the deal. He has also raised doubts over another gas project signed with French company Total.

Such nationalist posturing and maneouvring has nothing to do with improving the lot of ordinary people. A small privileged layer of the PNG elite, which reaps considerable wealth through their collaboration with imperialism and services to the transnational corporations, will continue to enrich itself while most people continue to live in abject poverty and economic backwardness.

Australian imperialism remains determined to maintain its dominance over its former colonial possession. Its major companies have investments in PNG worth $A5.8 billion. O’Neill’s seizure of power in 2011, in violation of the constitution, was backed by Australia, which regarded him as a bulwark against the expansion of Beijing’s influence in the southwest Pacific.

Marape will be closely watched in Canberra. Behind PNG’s sordid political intrigues lie sharpening geopolitical tensions. The country’s lucrative extractive industries, strategic location and relative size make it critical in the escalating US-led confrontation with China. Australia has intervened before in PNG politics to secure its interests, and is quite capable of doing so again.

Australia Post restructure threatens over 2,000 jobs

Oscar Grenfell

A sweeping restructure by Australia Post, the country’s government-operated postal service, threatens up to 2,500 jobs, along with wage reductions and further attacks on working conditions.

Postal workers were informed at briefings called by management last week that one in four postal delivery positions would no longer be required. Australia Post has roughly 10,000 delivery employees, out of a total workforce of around 30,000.

While executives have told the press that workers would be redeployed and sackings were not on the agenda, management informed employees that redundancies would be offered, confirming that positions will be abolished.

The cuts are part of a broader offensive by governments, the corporations and the trade unions, in Australia and internationally. They are seeking to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic to implement long-standing plans for a vast pro-business restructuring of workplace conditions and industrial relations. The privatisation of nominally government-owned utilities, such as Australia Post, is a key component of this agenda.

The speed with which management at Australia Post is proceeding with these plans is a warning to the entire working class.

In April, it announced major changes to delivery schedules and workers’ conditions, claiming that these would be only for the duration of the immediate health crisis.

Last week, however, management revealed the elimination of thousands of existing positions, showing its intent to make the arrangements permanent. Government-owned entities and corporate employers across the country are undoubtedly preparing similar measures.

Management described the April announcement as Australia Post’s most significant restructure in over two decades. The centrepiece was a reduction in the frequency of letter delivery in metropolitan areas from every business day, to every second business day. The required time frame for the delivery of intra-state letters was extended to five days and priority mail letter delivery was abolished.

The overhaul was introduced by fiat, with the Liberal-National Coalition government changing regulations that govern Australia Post on May 14. Other sweeping policy decisions were introduced in a similar manner on the pretext of the coronavirus health and economic crisis, without any opposition from Labor, the Greens or any other parliamentary party.

The Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU), which covers the sector, complained only that it had not been sufficiently “consulted” before the overhaul was announced.

The union has collaborated with Australia Post management, forcing postal workers to remain on the job throughout the pandemic, despite its members complaining about inadequate safety equipment. By April 4, eleven posties had tested positive for COVID-19 in Sydney alone, with at least four of them having been ill on the job.

CEPU officials have since held closed-door meetings with government ministers about the restructure. They have sought to divert concern among workers behind feckless petitions, appealing to management and the government not to make the changes permanent. At the same time, they have deprived workers of information and suppressed democratic discussion at online meetings supposedly called to oppose the overhaul.

By preventing any industrial and political struggle by postal workers the union has paved the way for management’s attacks.

Postal delivery workers currently cover one assigned beat, or delivery round. Under the changes, two posties will be tasked with delivering letters to four beats, meaning a substantial increase in their workloads. A third employee will deliver parcels to all four beats. In other words, previously four beats meant four employees, but now that number will be reduced to three. The union also has revealed that pay cuts of up to 30 percent may be imposed.

The changes are aimed at transforming Australia Post into a lucrative parcel delivery service, in preparation for privatisation. Over the past decade, the volume of letters has continuously decreased. Amid the rise of online shopping, parcel deliveries have soared. In the last financial year, the parcel and services sector accounted for $4.8 billion of Australia Post’s $6.99 billion revenue.

Business commentators, along with corporate analysts hired by Australia Post, have called for major overhauls to its business model including a reduction in the frequency of letter delivery and a greater deployment of resources into the parcel sector.

As has been the case in other sectors, including the airline and power generation industries, the elimination of “excess” jobs and a more direct orientation to the demands of business is the essential precondition for a government-owned utility to be sold-off and acquired by private investors.

Labor and the Greens feigned shock and outrage at Australia Post’s announcement last week. They promised to move a disallowance motion in the Senate, which resumes sittings this week, to overturn the government’s regulatory changes.

But Labor and the Greens said virtually nothing when the regulations were changed almost a month ago. The restructure, moreover, was announced nearly two months ago and is already underway.

Labor’s industrial relations spokesman Tony Burke has now branded the overhaul as “a tricky attempt to bypass scrutiny.” He condemned a lack of “consultation.” This means that Labor will support sweeping cuts provided they are made in consultation with the unions, which have helped impose thousands of job cuts in the past decade.

The last Greens-backed Labor government oversaw the destruction of 2,396 permanent jobs at Australia Post, increasing the proportion of casual and contract workers. The current Liberal-National government then presided over 900 job cuts announced in 2014, and another 1,900 in 2015.

The record demonstrates that workers cannot place their faith in the unions or any big business government, Labor or Coalition. It underscores the bankruptcy of the CEPU’s call for workers to lobby parliament to disallow the regulation and prevent changes to Australia Post legislation.

The union’s attempts to sow illusions in Labor go hand in hand with its acceptance of the job cuts. At CEPU members’ meetings last week union officials declared that contractors must be removed before postal workers lose their jobs. The union opposes any unified struggle in defence of jobs and working conditions.

Instead, CEPU is beginning negotiations with management for a new enterprise agreement. The waves of union-enforced job cuts over the past two decades make clear that any agreement will be a sell-out that facilitates Australia Post’s main demands.

To defeat this onslaught, new organisations of struggle, completely independent of the unions, are required. Postal workers should establish rank and file committees to prosecute a genuine fight against the restructure. These would be tasked with breaking the isolation imposed by the union, and turning out to other sections of the working class facing similar attacks.

Above all, the corporate-union offensive underscores the need for an alternative political perspective which rejects the subordination of social needs, such as decent postal services and well-paid permanent jobs, to private profit. This means the fight for a workers’ government that would implement socialist policies, including placing Australia Post under democratic workers’ control and nationalising the banks and major corporations.