Trudeau government appeals ruling on illegal actions of Canada’s secret police

Hugo Maltais

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is appealing a May 15 judgment against the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Rendered by Judge Patrick Gleeson, the ruling concerned numerous cases in which CSIS obtained Federal Court warrants authorizing intrusive surveillance by hiding from the court that the information supporting its warrant requests had been obtained illegally.

According to press reports, Judge Gleeson’s 151-page decision highlighted seven cases where CSIS acted in this manner. But the number of cases was clearly higher, since according to the same reports, the current CSIS director, David Vigneault, had personally approved more than 10 operations involving “potentially illegal activities.”

Justin Trudeau (Credit: Twitter)

Although all details of the seven cases were expunged from the public version of Gleeson’s decision, which was released on July 16, it appears that they all related to efforts by CSIS to infiltrate Islamist terrorist groups in Syria (and perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East) in order to obtain information about Canadians who may have joined their ranks. By paying members of these groups to spy on its behalf, CSIS violated—and knew it was violating—Anti-Terrorism Act prohibitions on the financing of terrorist activities.

Judge Gleeson’s decision was the result of an investigation ordered by the Federal Court on the basis of suspicions that CSIS and government lawyers had systematically withheld information in violation of their “duty of candour”—in other words, that they had lied.

“Having approved operations that were on their face illegal,” the ruling stated, “the service then collected information which in turn was put before this court in support of warrant applications, without notifying the court of the likely illegality.”

This is the third time in recent years that the Federal Court has ruled that CSIS lied to it. In the 2016 Related Data case, the Federal Court concluded that it had unknowingly issued warrants on the basis of information obtained illegally from an extensive metadata collection and retention program.

The case of the illegal terrorist informants involved not only CSIS and government lawyers, but also unnamed top government officials who authorized operations they knew to be illegal. This included senior personnel within the Department of Justice and the Privy Council Office, which directly advises the Prime Minister and oversees the implementation of his decisions.

“The circumstances,” Gleeson continued in his judgment, “raise fundamental questions relating to respect for the rule of law, the oversight of security intelligence activities and the actions of individual decision-makers.”

With the blessing of the Justice Department, CSIS persisted in these illegal operations and deliberately concealed them from the court in order to obtain warrants long after the department’s own lawyers had officially determined in January 2017 that they were illegal.

Vigneault sought to exonerate himself by saying that when he took office as head of CSIS, in June 2017, he wasn’t properly informed of the controversy surrounding these operations. Briefly interrupted after they were deemed illegal, the operations were resumed with the sanction of the department of justice in March 2017.

In press releases issued on July 16, the Trudeau government and CSIS indicated that they would accept Judge Gleeson’s decision, while seeking to minimize and justify what happened. They presented the illegal actions as a minor technical infraction, and glossed over the fact that CSIS and the government had systematically lied to the court.

CSIS claimed that in paying informers it was only doing what every other intelligence agency does, and the Ministers of Public Security and Justice, Bill Blair and David Lametti, asserted that “at no time was the safety of Canadians at risk, nor were our rights and freedoms.” As if the government and the premier intelligence agency breaking the law and lying to the courts does not constitute an arrogation of state power and thus implicitly threaten and violate Canadians’ rights.

All this is now compounded with the Liberal government’s attempt to overturn Gleeson’s ruling. This can only be interpreted as an invitation to the national security apparatus to continue to lie to the courts.

The government appeal is all the more remarkable in that Judge Gleeson did little more than issue a public reprimand to CSIS and their government overseers. He refused to impose any consequences on them for breaking the law and lying to the court. Nor did Judge Gleeson rule that any evidence that the state had obtained illegally should be declared inadmissible in any future court cases. Instead, he developed a pseudo-legal test that gives judges full discretion to accept the evidence if it is in the “interest of the community [because of] the seriousness or imminence of a threat to the security of Canada.”

Judge Gleeson’s sole “corrective” was to recommend the government order a thorough investigation of CSIS’s adherence to and attitude toward its “duty of candour.” The desired review will never take place, as evidenced by the federal government’s decision to appeal the judgment rather than order a review of CSIS’s adherence to the law.

The timidity of Justice Gleeson’s judgment is not surprising. The handful of Federal Court judges appointed to hear national security cases behind closed doors are fully integrated into Canada’s security apparatus. Their role is to provide judicial cover for a reactionary service whose main task is to monitor and spy on the Canadian population so as to defend Canadian capitalism and its state.

This explains the judge’s sympathy for the spies and their lawyers, whom he criticized above all for “breaking the bond of trust between the Court and CSIS and its lawyers.” The anti-democratic implications of the gross violation of the rights of Canadian citizens by CSIS are not worthy of mention in the judgment, other than a reference or two, rhetorically, to the importance of the “rule of law.”

In the end, the judgment, which was released to the media by the Federal Court despite the secrecy that normally surrounds national security matters, was a public relations ploy by the Canadian state. Accordingly, Judge Gleeson issued several warnings to CSIS that such behaviour would “undermine public confidence in the [Canadian Security Intelligence] Service” as a “vital national institution.”

The real objective of the section of the establishment on whose behalf Judge Gleeson speaks is not to “reform” CSIS or even to end its illegal practices. Rather, its goal is to ensure that CSIS works even more closely with the Federal Court to foster the “democratic” image of the national security apparatus among Canadians, so the intelligence agency has the greatest latitude in carrying out its function as a key instrument to surveil and repress social opposition to the government, the capitalist elite, and its agenda among the population in general, and especially the working class.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across Canada, exacerbating social inequalities and class tensions, there is great concern in ruling circles that opposition to its right-wing policies is taking increasingly militant forms.

The Trudeau government intends to confront this challenge by continuing to increase the powers of the security forces, while camouflaging its anti-democratic actions, as it has done since coming to power in 2015, with phony “progressive” posturing. Its ability to do so, despite implementing a massive military spending increase, further integrating Canada into Washington’s military-strategic offensives around the world, slashing tens of billions from health care spending, and spearheading a homicidal back-to-work/back-to-school policy amid the coronavirus pandemic, is entirely bound up with the support it receives from the trade unions and NDP.

Just before the 2019 election, which saw Trudeau reelected as leader of a minority government, the then Liberal-controlled Parliament passed Bill C-59, an Act on Matters of National Security. This legislation expands the repressive powers of the state, particularly those of CSIS and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). Canada’s primary foreign surveillance agency, CSE connived with CSIS in the illegal retention and use of metadata that was the object of the Related Data case.

Bill C-59 was promoted as a democratic reform of the law the Harper government passed in 2015, with Liberal support, that in the name of “fighting terrorism” gave vast new powers to Canada’s national security apparatus. However, Bill C-59 retains the fundamental provisions of Harper’s law—whose powers were so sweeping that even the Globe and Mail termed it a “police state” bill—while adding further anti-democratic measures.

One of the most important changes made by Bill C-59 was to give almost absolute immunity to CSIS agents who violate Canadian laws in the course of their operations. This means that since the Liberals’ legislation came into force on June 21, 2019, the criminal activities revealed by Judge Gleeson are perfectly legal.

In order to hide the reactionary nature of its new legislation, the Trudeau government has touted the creation of so-called review mechanisms, including an intelligence commissioner and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency.

However, as the WSWS explained in its analysis of Bill C-59, these mechanisms, like the Federal Court, “are nothing more than a fig leaf, aimed at providing the intelligence agencies with a legal-constitutional cover.” They have no binding power over CSIS and they conduct their “watch-dog” oversight activities in complete secrecy, well beyond the eye of Parliament, let alone public scrutiny.

Judge Gleeson wrote that their predecessor, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, had been well aware of CSIS’s illegal activities for several years, but had neither succeeded in stopping them nor seen fit to reveal them to the public.

In November, shortly after the Trudeau government announced its appeal of Gleeson’s judgment, it let it be known that it is exploring the possibility of creating a centre to facilitate the declassification of historical Canadian secret service documents. This was an obvious attempt to deflect attention from the government’s cover-up and complicity in CSIS’s ongoing crimes.

Were such a body to be created, it would be used to project a false image of transparency, and, as indicated by comments from various “security experts,” to glorify the country’s intelligence agencies.

The “security experts” quoted in the media criticized Canada for lagging behind its allies in disclosing historic national security and intelligence files, while suggesting that a declassification centre would strengthen public support for CSIS and other arms of the state security apparatus by raising “Canadians’ awareness of the practice, importance and challenges of national security.”

Like the Gleeson ruling, “sensitizing” Canadians to a glorified history of CSIS and its predecessor, the RCMP Security Service, is part of the ruling elite’s preparations to suppress any mass movement in opposition to austerity, imperialist aggression, and its prioritizing of profit over human lives amidst the worst pandemic in a century.

Deaths mount as Spain’s PSOE–Podemos government escalates assault on migrants

Alice Summers

At least nine migrant workers died last week attempting to reach the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory off the west coast of Morocco. The deaths occurred as a boat carrying 30–40 mostly Moroccan migrants sank after hitting rocks close to the northern shore of the island of Lanzarote.

While nine bodies of young men in their twenties and thirties have so far been found, many of the 28 survivors who had been aboard the raft indicated that five women and three children had also travelled with them, who have not yet been located.

Refugees rescued in the Mediterranean in 2014 © Italian Navy/M. Sestini

According to the International Organisation for Migrants (IOM), which is affiliated with the United Nations, over 500 people have so far died this year on the West Africa migration route to the Canary Islands, with the majority of deaths occurring in October and November. The death toll is already well over double that of 2019, when the IOM recorded 210 fatalities on this sea crossing. These figures are a minimum estimate, the IOM stressed, with the actual loss of life feared to be much higher.

The latest deaths come as the Spanish government steps up its attacks on refugees seeking to make the journey to Europe, announcing late November that they would build prison camps across the island chain to hold migrants pending deportation. The Socialist Party (PSOE)–Podemos government has refused to allow the thousands of desperate people trapped on the archipelago to be transferred to the Spanish mainland, stating that to do so would be a “pull factor.”

Speaking at a press conference on the island of Tenerife at the end of November, Transport Minister José Luis Ábalos reaffirmed that migrants will not be transferred to the Spanish mainland, cynically declaring that the internment camps at military bases across the islands are intended to provide “the most dignified [humanitarian conditions] possible” until refugees can be deported to their countries of origin.

If migrants are transferred to the mainland, Ábalos claimed, “we will not stop being the entry door to Europe. We cannot send a message that these things are possible. …”

Spain has appealed to the European Union (EU) to intervene in the crisis in the Canary Islands, with Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya calling for the signing of a “European migration deal.”

“Migration needs a European approach,” Laya declared. “It is not enough that Spain, Italia, Malta and Greece are doing our good work.” In other words, the Spanish Foreign Ministry is demanding that the EU more equally share out the burden of incarcerating, deporting or allowing desperate refugees to drown on the ocean crossings.

In late November, PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez despatched Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska and Foreign Minister Laya to West Africa to negotiate agreements with regional governments to prevent refugees from travelling to the Canary Islands, and for the rapid deportation of those who do arrive on the archipelago.

Spain has already arrived at an agreement with Senegal, with Foreign Minister Laya and her Senegalese counterpart Aïssata Tall Sall announcing the conclusion of a deal on November 22 that will see the deportation of all of the Senegalese migrants who are in Spain “illegally” back to their country of origin.

Spain will also reinforce its security presence in Senegal, increasing the number of Civil Guard and National Police members in the West African country, supposedly to combat people-trafficking operations, as part of a joint offensive with Senegalese authorities. The agreement will allow Spain and Senegal to “jointly fight against irregular immigration, clandestine [immigration],” Laya stated, “which is in the hands of criminal networks.” Laya emphasised Spain’s plans for mass deportations, declaring: “Those who use illegal routes will have to return to their country. …”

Interior Minister Marlaska also travelled to Morocco in the hope of securing a similar deal, reportedly demanding that the North African country reinforce its Atlantic coast and work with Spain to implement the forced repatriation of Moroccan migrants.

According to elDiario.es, authorities in the Canary Islands have been handing out summary expulsion orders to migrants within days of them arriving at the port of Arguineguín in Gran Canaria, in flagrant violation of their right to claim asylum. The migrants, who had had no access to lawyers, despite having the right to legal aid within 72 hours of their arrival, had received deportation notices signed by the Government Subdelegation in Las Palmas, the regional capital of the island of Gran Canaria.

According to Judith Sunderland, acting deputy director for Europe and Central Asia for the charity Human Rights Watch, who visited Arguineguín at the start of November, none of the migrants she interviewed had spoken to any lawyers or had the expulsion orders explained to them in a language they could understand before being made to sign it.

Speaking to Canarias Ahora, Sunderland stated: “All of them told me that they had not understood that the document they had been given was an expulsion order. Those who had understood something told me that the Police had explained that the paper meant they had been registered, and it could be used to identify them if they were stopped by the Police.”

These brutal policies are being carried out with the full collaboration of the “left populist” Podemos party, who, despite token criticisms of the treatment of refugees and claims to support the transfer of migrants to the mainland, have refused to oppose these measures.

Speaking last Thursday before the joint committee for the Coordination and Monitoring of Spanish Strategy, Podemos leader and Spanish Vice President Pablo Iglesias declared that while he supposedly disagreed with the PSOE’s refusal to transfer migrants to the Spanish mainland, his party had to “accept” that their minority status in the government would not allow them to act.

“I am not going to continue along these lines because I think that I am being clear,” Iglesias stated. “In politics, unfortunately, what most counts is not being right or having good ideas, but having sufficient forces.”

There is overwhelming popular hostility to the persecution of migrants and refugees. It is precisely these “forces” that Iglesias seeks to contain and suppress. Podemos’s refusal to wage any serious struggle in defence of migrants has handed political initiative to the far-right, who are calling for an even more brutal crackdown on migrants.

Last week, the national spokesperson for the far-right Vox party, Jorge Buxadé, launched into a fascistic tirade against refugees at a press conference, declaring that Spain was in the grips of a “veritable migrant invasion” and calling on the Armed Forces to intervene.

“In the face of an invasion, the state has to defend itself with all means,” Buxadé stated. The government must use “all the measures at its disposal,” he demanded, including the “intervention of the Armed Forces and a naval blockade of the Canary Islands.”

The inaction of Podemos underscores that no serious fight against the ruling class’s anti-refugee policies can be waged through appealing to factions of the capitalist political establishment. The working class must unconditionally defend the right of workers across the world to live and work in the country of their choosing, with full citizenship rights and in safety. This can only develop in opposition to all the reactionary pseudo-left parties across Europe, who have fully collaborated with the brutal anti-migrant policies of the whole European Union, as part of a struggle for socialism.

Kremlin pressures Lukashenko to give up power in Belarus

Clara Weiss

After almost four months of mass protests against his rule, Alexander Lukashenko, who claims to have won the August 9 presidential elections, indicated last Friday that he will step down early next year once the country adopts a new constitution.

The statement, which was quoted by Belarusian state media, was vague, however. Lukashenko said, “I am not making a new constitution for myself. With a new constitution, I will no longer work with you as president.” He then raged against “democracy” which, in his words, had earlier led to the ruin and collapse of the country.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko speaks during a meeting with officials in Minsk, Belarus, August 27, 2020 [Credit: Sergei Sheleg, BelTA Pool via AP]

On Sunday, the Belarusian police again violently cracked down on opposition protests and arrested at least 300 people. Maria Kolesnikova, the main opposition leader who is not jailed in Belarus or gone into exile, stated that the opposition would not enter into dialogue with Lukashenko until opposition leaders have been freed.

The statements by Lukashenko followed on the heels of a visit by Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to Minsk on Thursday in which he stressed the need for Minsk to make constitutional changes.

Lavrov pointed to the “hostile attitude” of the West—NATO and the EU—toward both Russia and Belarus and stated, “we are, of course, interested in a stable and calm situation in Belarus. In our view, a constitutional reform initiated by the leadership of the country would contribute to such a situation.” Lavrov described rumors that Moscow is in negotiations with the opposition as “lies.”

Media reports earlier suggested that Russia is working on the release of the ex-CEO of Belgzprombank, a Belarusian subsidiary of the Russian state gas company Gazprom, Viktor Babariko, who has also been a leader of the opposition.

Russian media reported that Lukashenko and Putin struck a deal in Sochi back in September. While the details of the agreement are unclear, it reportedly involves constitutional changes that limit the powers of the president, and the basis for a transition of power in Minsk. The Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported that political experts interpret Lukashenko’s latest statement as an attempt to “fool” the Kremlin yet again as to his intentions about actually fulfilling the agreement.

The EU has also been stepping up pressure on Lukashenko. Yet a new round of sanctions targeting officials of his government went into effect last week. According to Russian press reports, further sanctions might target not just Belarusian but also Russian officials and businesses.

Russia has been backing the Lukashenko regime amid the protests, largely in response to the aggressive intervention of the EU in the conflict and its support for the opposition.

However, relations between the Kremlin and the Lukashenko regime have been tense, both before and after the protests. Throughout his rule, Lukashenko has sought to balance between the EU and US, and Russia. In the year leading up to the August election, his government undertook significant steps toward closer relations with NATO, and Minsk welcomed US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last January, the first such visit of a high-ranking US official to the country in decades. Lukashenko has also maintained closed ties to the Ukrainian governments that followed the US- and German-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. Along with the EU, the Zelensky government turned on Lukashenko, however, over the protests.

Belarus is the last state on Russia’s western borders that is not directly integrated into NATO or the EU. The fact that the Kremlin is now stepping up pressure on Lukashenko is bound up with both geo-strategic and domestic considerations.

Not least among them are the US elections and the announcement by president-elect Joseph Biden of his national security team. His appointees are an assembly of war criminals who were active in the Obama administration which orchestrated, among other things, the 2014 coup in Ukraine which triggered an ongoing civil war in the East of the country, as well as the almost decade-old civil war in Syria.

Unlike other foreign leaders, Putin has not congratulated Biden on his clear electoral victory. In a November 22 interview, Putin pointedly referred to Biden as a “presidential candidate.” He said, “We’ll work with anyone trusted by the American people. But who in particular is given this trust should be indicated either through the political custom of one side conceding the other’s victory, or the final election results should be released in a legitimate and legal manner. The president-elect should be named, the incumbent president should recognize the results of the election, and all legal actions should be completed.”

The refusal by the Kremlin to acknowledge Biden as the president-elect has less to do with sympathies for Trump, who, contrary to what the anti-Russia campaign by the Democratic Party has suggested, has in fact, stepped up the sanctions regime against Russia and delivered lethal weapons to Ukraine. Rather, there is enormous nervousness in the Kremlin about the political instability in the US itself, and fear of the consequences of both a potential coup by Trump, which would likely be preceded by a war against Iran, and a Biden presidency. The past few weeks have seen a series of major provocations by the US and Israel against Iran, most recently the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist.

A war against Iran would directly threaten Russian interests in the Middle East, while a Biden presidency is expected to further ratchet up tensions in Russia and also increase direct US support for forces such as the Belarusian opposition.

Under these conditions of growing geopolitical uncertainty and tension, the Kremlin is trying to push for a resolution of the crisis in Belarus as rapidly as possible so as to avoid both a more direct conflict with the US, and secure a transition to a government that would allow it to maintain at least some influence over the country.

At the same time, the Kremlin is concerned about the ongoing social instability on its borders.

Just like the EU, the Russian oligarchy was initially above all concerned with the mass strikes that erupted in August and September against Lukashenko. These strikes also hit factories delivering manufacturing goods to Russian companies, including arms companies. While the strike movement was temporarily brought under control through a combination of violent repression by the regime and above all the political intervention of the opposition and affiliated trade unions, class tensions remain high.

Having lost all confidence in the ability of Lukashenko to control the mass protests, even through violent repression, the Russian oligarchy is fearing that a prolongation of his rule in the face of mass opposition threatens to provoke a strike movement that could well outstrip that of August-September, and spread to Russia and other countries.

The second wave of the coronavirus has hit Belarus hard. The Lukashenko government has pursued a policy of herd immunity from the very beginning of the pandemic. Now, the country of just under 9.5 million people has officially over 135,000 cases, no doubt a vast undercount of the real numbers as testing remains extremely limited. Over 37,000 of these occurred over the past month, and over 11,000 were added last week. The economic crisis is even more severe. As real wages continue to decline, the government is discussing raising the prices for several staple items, including bread, meat, diary produce and sugar. In several regions, public transportation fares have already been raised.

Retired Spanish officers appeal to the king to back a military coup

Alejandro López & Alex Lantier

Over 100 retired high-ranking officers have written to King Felipe VI appealing to him, as leader of the Spanish Armed Forces, to act against the elected Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government. They accuse the government of treason and of threatening the survival of the Spanish nation.

There are no legal avenues for the king, who constitutionally needs the prime minister’s support to dissolve the government, to act on these letters. It comes after the government obtained support of Catalan and Basque regionalist parties in parliament for its austerity budget, and the officers’ letters denounce regional nationalism in Spain. However, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the greatest global economic collapse since the 1930s, and growing working class anger at “herd immunity” policies, it is clear that far more is involved than a dispute over this year’s budget priorities.

Spanish king Felipe VI (elnacional.cat)

The warning must be made: the PSOE-Podemos government has remained deafeningly silent on it, but what is being discussed is a coup to install a military dictatorship aimed against the working class.

The first letter, signed by 73 retired generals and colonels of the XXIII graduating class of the General Military Academy, warns of a serious risk to “national cohesion … in its political, economic and social aspects.” It blames “the social-communist government” for “the decomposition of national unity.” It accuses the government of being “supported by pro-ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna]” groups—referring to EH Bildu, a party linked to Basque nationalist group ETA’s former political wing—and by Catalan “separatists.” It ends by asserting support and loyalty to the King “in these difficult moments for our homeland.”

The language echoes rhetoric of the fascist Vox party in parliament. In a failed no-confidence vote in October, Vox leader Santiago Abascal denounced “social-communists” 23 times in his speech.

Significantly, the letter was leaked to Spain’s main social-democratic paper, El País, which selectively quoted from it in a brief, 500-word article. The daily refused to publish the entire letter, even after other media reported it and dozens of El País readers wrote to urge its publication.

This comes days after a similar one was signed by 39 retired Air Force commanders from class XIX of the General Air Academy. One copy was sent to European Parliament President David Sassoli on November 3, and another to the king on November 10. Neither Sassoli nor Spain’s Royal House informed the public. It was only on November 17, a week after the Royal House received it, that the far-right OkDiario reported this letter. Neither Sassoli nor the Royal House identified the authors, except for former general José Molina Zataraín, who asked to be named.

The signatories write: "We are deeply concerned, Your Majesty, that a government that swore or promised to comply with the Constitution is capable of attempting to breach its oath by promoting changes other than those established therein". They assert that the government is attacking the Spanish Monarchy, the Spanish language and the separation of powers, leading to the “annihilation of our democracy.”

The signatories also state that they are “deeply disappointed and offended by relations between the Executive” and the Basque nationalists, who are “the heirs of terrorists.”

For all these reasons, these officers write: “Your Majesty, these members of the XIX Class of the General Air Academy, today retired and proud of having served in multiple destinations with our Air Force, whom also, and in act of service, many gave their lives, want to be by your side so that you feel our sincere support and our deep loyalty.”

These letters must be taken as a warning. The ruling class is terrified by rising anger, protests and strikes against “herd immunity” policies and multi-billion-euro bailouts for corporations and banks. The fact that neither the King nor the European Parliament publicly disavowed or even disclosed these letters shows that a break with democratic forms of rule is being considered at the highest levels of the European ruling class.

The officers signing these letters, who grew under General Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship, are appealing to the Spanish army’s fascist traditions. The last time the army mounted a coup against what they claimed was a “social-communist” government was in 1936 against the Popular Front government. Led by Franco, the army waged a three-year civil war and carried out mass executions after the war to crush revolutionary working class struggles. The Franco regime would only collapse in 1978, amid an eruption of strikes and workers’ protests.

The only high-ranking Spanish official to speak out on the issue was former PSOE Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who said the army officers’ letter “deserves my reproach.” Zapatero declared that anyone who “has exercised military responsibilities must be prudent when speaking out.” Significantly, Zapatero compared the situation to the army crisis during his term in office, when high-ranking active-duty officers, including Lieutenant General of the Army José Mena Aguado, denounced in 2006 the adoption of the Catalan regional statute.

“That led to some actions. Some are known, others will become known over time. I know there was an attitude that was not appropriate for some military commanders in relation to the Statute,” Zapatero said. He added that Defense Minister José Bono—who reported a decade later, in 2015, that Spain had been in a “pre-coup situation”—intervened “quickly” at the time.

Zapatero downplayed the military letters, however, attributing them to “exaggerated, unfounded and emotionally exciting speeches” in parliament. This apparently referred to Vox’s denunciations of the supposedly “social-communist” character of the government. Zapatero indicated that the generals need not worry, as the PSOE-Podemos government’s policies have nothing to do with communism: “There are too many false indications in the political debate. You have to evaluate policies by real events, not false indications.”

This explanation, blaming the crisis purely on the psychology of the Spanish officer corps, is an absurd evasion. Amid a mounting radicalization in the working class and growing anger at the official handling of the pandemic, the financial aristocracy is breaking with democratic forms of rule. In America, Trump has refused to admit his election defeat and has appealed to fascistic networks that attempted to assassinate his political adversaries, like Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, while Democratic president-elect Joe Biden has said he will rely on the army to oust Trump.

In France, after calling for stepped-up repression of “yellow vest” protests, former armed forces chief of staff General Pierre de Villiers recently told the neo-fascist press, amid mass protests against police brutality, that “the rule of law” should be subordinated to more “strategic thinking.”

In Spain, the general staff is of course perfectly well aware that the PSOE-Podemos government has nothing to do with the October 1917 revolution or an international struggle for workers’ power and socialism. For two years, the PSOE and Podemos have implemented social austerity, while showering the armed forces with billions of euros and the latest military hardware. The PSOE-Podemos government is currently sheltering notorious Venezuelan coup plotter Leopoldo López.

The generals are encouraged in their coup plotting by the predictably cowardly response of the PSOE-Podemos government. The Ministry of Defence said that it is not planning on opening an investigation, “because [the letter] was addressed to the King,” according to Diario16. Spain’s main public television, Televisión Española, tried to lull its audience to sleep, reporting that “sources from the Ministry of Defence said that the letter has not had any repercussions within the active armed forces."

The army is concerned not at the government, however, but at explosive opposition developing in the working class, on the left of the PSOE and Podemos. During the pandemic, the government, in alliance with the trade unions, has forced millions of workers back to work and children back to school, aiding the spread of the virus which has infected over 1.5 million people and left over 65,000 dead in Spain alone. It responded to opposition by banning demonstrations, deploying riot police, threatening to deploy the army, and intensifying surveillance of left-wing social media and web sites.

This underscores the necessity of mobilizing the working class, independently of all factions of the capitalist ruling elite, against the pandemic and the growing threat of police-military dictatorship.

Dozens feared dead in mine collapse as pandemic-fueled social catastrophe wracks Zimbabwe

Eddie Haywood

Thirty informal miners were trapped after the November 25 collapse of the abandoned Ran gold mine in Bindura, some 70 km (43 miles) north of capital city Harare. Six were rescued alive a few hours after the collapse. Simultaneous with the collapse, ground water and mud flooded the shaft, brought by heavy rains the previous day that caused a mudslide.

Rescue efforts were suspended the next day after a generator failed to operate while pumping out water from the flooded 100-meter shaft. By the following day, another generator was located and brought to the site allowing for the effort to resume.

Exterior of the collapsed mine (Twitter/@OFMNews9497)

Christine Munyoro, a spokeswoman with the Zimbabwe Miners Federation (ZMF), an advocacy group of small-scale miners, told the Guardian, “On Thursday the rescue team tried to pump out the water but the generator failed. They started again today. The hardest thing is that the shaft is 100 metres deep. We also do not know what level they are at. They may be trapped in the mud.”

Government officials told the media that the mine had collapsed due to “blasting,” a method in which miners utilize dynamite to expose gold veins. In the Ran mine, officials declared that blasting had damaged several support pillars and facilitated the collapse.

The Ran mine tragedy follows a string of collapses of abandoned mines around the country, and comes only days after 10 informal miners were buried alive in the Premier Estates mine in eastern Zimbabwe, and early November’s Matshetshe mine collapse in Esigodini, a town in southern Zimbabwe, which buried six miners.

Last year, 24 informal miners were killed at the abandoned Silver Moon and Cricket Mines in Kadoma, after severe rains caused the collapse of a dam wall nearby, resulting in massive flooding of the two gold mines.

The decommissioning of mines due to a lack of continuing profitability for Zimbabwe’s mining sector has led to the proliferation of abandoned mines around the country, in which common people, facing chronic joblessness, take up work mining these abandoned shafts, often selling what little gold they find for paltry sums.

Zimbabwe is home to rich deposits of gold, copper, and nickel, and miners employed in the country’s mining industry labor under extremely dangerous conditions for very low wages. The mining companies frequently bypass safety measures and forgo procuring proper protective equipment, risking miners’ health and lives in pursuit of profits.

In recent years, informal mining has attracted younger workers who need money while attending school. These youths are often exploited by buyers who often under-weigh the contents these youths bring for sale.

The tragedies of mine collapses take place amid an acute social catastrophe experienced by Zimbabweans, conditions that have worsened amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Currently, there have been 9,822 confirmed COVID-19 infections in Zimbabwe, a country with a population of just under 15 million, since the pandemic began in March. As of November 29, 275 have died, a toll expected to rise in the coming weeks.

The intolerably desperate conditions facing the Zimbabwean masses, already present before pandemic, have been exacerbated by the pandemic and the response of the government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa. In seeking to control the virus’s spread last March, Mnangagwa imposed a lockdown without the accompaniment of funding for the population to weather the shutdown, leaving many Zimbabweans completely destitute.

The callous response of the ruling class to the deadly pandemic—which has led to skyrocketing unemployment, accompanied by shortages of medicine and food—is nothing short of a social crime.

As a measure of the desperate situation experienced by jobless workers since the onset of the pandemic, there has been an increase of jobless women drawn into sex work in the larger cities around the country, along with many teen-aged girls entering the trade.

Speaking to Reuters on the conditions that led her to become a sex worker, a young woman related her experience of losing her job in March as a waitress in Mutare, a city in eastern Zimbabwe on the border with Mozambique.

“Life was better until the advent of this coronavirus. Our business came to a standstill due to lockdown...unfortunately I was one of the people who were retrenched. … I have two children. I could not watch them going to bed without eating anything.”

As part of the lockdown, accompanied by a strict curfew, the government also closed the borders of the country, which cut off the incomes of 1 million cross-border traders, a significant part of Zimbabwe’s economy, which left a devastating impact on small shops, which have been permanently shuttered.

Hazel Zemura, a former sex worker employed by Women Against All Forms of Discrimination, which provides medical services for sex workers, told Reuters, “As our incomes, like the cross border trading—the importation of weaves and makeup kits from China for resale—got eroded during the lockdown, we had to turn to men for survival.”

Zimbabwe, a country of abundant economic resources, including vast mineral deposits in addition to gold, platinum and diamonds, is one of the most socially unequal on earth. The claim by the Mnangagwa government that there is no money to vastly improve the country’s infrastructure, health care, education, or employment is a lie.

According to figures gathered by the World Inequality Database, the top 10 percent of Zimbabweans possess over half the nation’s wealth, with the bottom 50 percent holding just 12 percent. In a country that produces $28 billion in GDP, 70 percent of the population lives in poverty.

The Mnangagwa government’s refusal to provide any financial relief for the population during the pandemic follows the criminal policy adhered to by the ruling elites around the world, in which the health and lives of workers are sacrificed on behalf of the profit considerations of the wealthy aristocracy.

War tensions mount in wake of Israeli assassination of top Iranian scientist

Bill Van Auken

Iran’s top nuclear physicist Dr. Moshen Fakhrizadeh was buried on Monday, three days after his assassination, carried out by Israel with the support of Washington.

This criminal act of state terrorism has sharply escalated tensions in the region, which was precisely the aim of the killing. US President Donald Trump is still seeking to overturn the results of the US election, with roughly 50 days remaining until inauguration day. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces the probable dissolution of the Knesset this week and new elections under conditions in which he has been indicted on corruption charges. Both see a new war in the Middle East as a means of advancing their respective domestic political interests.

Scene of the assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh [Credit: Fars News Agency via AP]

The Pentagon has steadily built up US offensive forces in the region, dispatching both an F-16 squadron from Germany and B-52 strategic bombers from the US. The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group has been ordered into the Persian Gulf.

For its part, Israel is continuing its provocative attacks on Iranian-connected targets inside Syria. Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi visited Israeli units on the border between the occupied Golan Heights and Syria over the weekend, telling them: “Our message is clear. We will continue to operate forcefully as needed against the Iranian entrenchment in Syria and we will remain on high alert for any belligerence against us.”

While neither Washington nor Tel Aviv have formally claimed responsibility for the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, the authorship of this crime is hardly in doubt.

The New York Times and other media have quoted multiple US and Israeli intelligence officials confirming that the killing was the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, which was responsible for similar state terrorist killings of five Iranian scientists between 2010 and 2012.

Speaking on condition of anonymity to the Times, an Israeli intelligence official involved in preparing the assassination declared that “the world should thank Israel” for murdering the scientist, on the grounds that his knowledge posed a threat.

The Israeli government has charged that Fakhrizadeh led a study on the feasibility of Iran building a nuclear weapon. Both the United Nations atomic inspection agency and US intelligence concluded that the alleged program was wound up in 2003. Tehran has denied ever pursuing nuclear arms, insisting that its nuclear program is strictly for civilian purposes.

Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen claimed in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio that he did not know who was responsible for the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, but went on to denounce those European governments that condemned it for “burying their heads in the sand.” He added: “His removal from the world contributed to the Middle East and the whole world. Anyone who takes an active part in creating a nuclear weapon is a dead man walking.”

The most grotesque acknowledgment of Israeli responsibility came from the right-wing Jerusalem Post, which reflects the politics of Netanyahu. It compared the assassination to the 1985 mafia killing of New York crime boss Paul Castellano, declaring that it showed “the power of those responsible” and that “any Iranian linked to the nuclear program can be found and killed.” One could ask for no clearer recognition of the criminal character of the Zionist state.

The assassination came barely a week after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s talks in Israel with the Netanyahu government and a subsequent unannounced trip with Netanyahu to the Red Sea city of Neom for consultations with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The focus of Pompeo’s tour, conducted in what is ostensibly the “lame duck” period between the US election and the inauguration, was to solidify the anti-Iranian axis between Washington, Tel Aviv and the reactionary Sunni oil monarchies led by the House of Saud. It is inconceivable that the impending assassination of Fakhrizadeh was not discussed and approved in the course of these talks.

The act of state terrorism also follows the revelation that Trump met with his national security cabinet on Nov. 12 to propose a strike on the main Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz, using as a pretext Iran’s increased stockpile of low-enriched uranium, which is neither a violation of any international law nor evidence that it is pursuing a bomb. While the US president’s senior advisors reportedly talked him out of launching such an infamous war crime, it is evident that his administration is continuing to seek a provocation justifying war.

The assassination, in addition to provoking angry spontaneous demonstrations in a number of cities, has also exposed political divisions within the country’s bourgeois-theocratic ruling establishment. President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif have urged restraint, essentially adopting a “wait for Biden” approach, with the hope that an incoming Democratic administration will rejoin the 2015 nuclear agreement unilaterally abrogated by Trump two years ago and lift the devastating economic sanctions imposed under Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign for regime change.

Biden, significantly, has made no criticism of the state assassination of the Iranian scientist. He has also indicated that he would condition rejoining the nuclear agreement on extracting further concessions from Iran, including on its missile production. Iranian officials have stated that they may make their own demands, including for compensation for the devastating effects of the illegal US sanctions regime.

Other sections of the Iranian state have called for swift retaliatory actions. The Parliament voted for a resolution to withdraw from the part of the nuclear accord allowing UN inspectors from the IAEA access to Iran’s nuclear sites. The daily Kayhan, whose editor-in-chief is named by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on Sunday for Iran to retaliate for the assassination with an attack on the Israeli port city of Haifa. With presidential elections set for next year, these divisions will likely deepen.

Also on Monday, Iranian officials and media provided a new version of the Fakhrizadeh assassination, asserting that he had been killed by a new Israeli weapons system, a remote-control machine gun directed from a satellite, with no assassins physically at the scene where his car was attacked.

Earlier, state media had reported that Fakhrizadeh’s vehicle had been stopped by an explosion of a bomb set off in a parked truck carrying lumber and then set upon by 12 waiting assassins firing automatic weapons, one of whom dragged the scientist from his car and delivered a coup de grâce to ensure that he was dead.

No explanation has been provided for the change in the account of the killing. Clearly the assassination of Iran’s top scientist, who had been publicly targeted by Netanyahu two years ago, represented a serious security failure. If the first version of the assassination was true, the story of the remote-control machine gun could be an attempt to deflect criticism of this failure and explain away the fact that none of the attackers have been captured.

Under conditions in which there is mounting anger over increasingly desperate social conditions created by the US sanctions regime and the state’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a new round of strikes and protests developing, the government cannot afford to appear weak.

The danger that the Trump administration will exploit the assassination or even further provocations to launch a new war in the Middle East was raised by two former chief officials of the US military-security apparatus.

Appearing on the NBC News program Meet the Press on Sunday, Former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullens (retired) pointed to the recent purge of top civilian officials at the Pentagon and their replacement with Trump loyalists and extreme right-wing anti-Iranian ideologues.

He said that “it’s pretty difficult to think that over the course of 50 or 60 days you can do something constructive, but you can do something that’s really destructive. And a week ago there were certain—many—media reports that there was a debate about action against Iran specifically. The president reportedly [was] turned down. But I would be concerned that those issues continue to be raised.”

For his part, ex-CIA director John Brennan, who had described the Fakhrizadeh assassination as an “act of state-sponsored terrorism,” expressed similar concerns in an NBC interview on Monday. Referring to the shakeup at the Pentagon, Brennan said: “We all should be concerned about it … Over the next number of weeks that Trump remains in the White House, I don’t know what he might have planned for using the military either on the domestic front or on the international arena.”

Brennan did not spell out what he meant by using the military “on the domestic front.” However, Trump’s firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and his replacement with an ex-Special Forces colonel, Christopher Miller, stemmed in large part from the US president’s anger over Esper’s failure to support Trump’s call last June for invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying regular US Army troops on the streets throughout the country to suppress anti-police violence demonstrations.

The threat that Trump may exploit a provoked military conflict with Iran as the justification for carrying through such plans for martial law and the nullification of the US elections continues. Meanwhile, the driving forces for war and dictatorship, which lie in the insoluble crisis of US and world capitalism, will only intensify, no matter who occupies the White House after Jan. 20.

Evictions caused nearly 11,000 excess COVID-19 deaths in six months in the US

Jacob Crosse

Researchers from major universities in the US have determined that the lifting of state and local eviction moratoriums earlier this year contributed to an increase in COVID-19 incidence and mortality throughout the country, leading to 433,700 excess infections and an estimated 10,700 excess deaths.

The results are a damning indictment of the entire political structure in the US which has allowed thousands of evictions to proceed in states and cities across the country. Unable to guarantee safe housing for all, the demands of the capitalist system, which subordinates all aspects of life to profit making, have resulted in the unnecessary and cruel deaths of thousands of people, while at the same time prolonging and exacerbating the spread of COVID-19.

A rental sign is posted in front of an apartment complex Tuesday, July 14, 2020, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

The authors, which include researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, San Francisco; Johns Hopkins University; Boston University and Wake Forest University School of Law, found before moratoriums were lifted, the incidence rate, that is the number of growing cases, and the mortality rate ratios were relatively constant, “suggesting little evidence of pre-existing trends in states that went on to lift their moratoriums.”

However once states began allowing evictions to proceed, within ten weeks researchers calculated an increased incidence rate and a mortality rate 1.6 times higher compared to the previous weeks. Within 16 weeks states that had lifted their moratoriums saw an incidence rate 2.1 times higher while mortality jumped even more, 5.4 times higher, leading to thousands of deaths.

The study, which is awaiting peer review, focused on 43 states and the District of Columbia between March 13 and Sept. 3, 2020, that is, prior to the current massive “third wave” of infections following the deadly reopening of schools. The last two months have seen a massive resurgence of the virus, overflowing hospitals and morgues, forcing some governors and mayors to implement haphazard lockdown measures (without pay) and undemocratic curfews. Last week alone, over 10,000 people in the US succumbed to COVID-19.

Using publicly available data, the researchers write that they “used models [to] calculate cases and deaths associated with the lifting of eviction moratoriums as a difference between predicted counts under observed moratorium conditions versus predicted counts under a counterfactual scenario in which no state lifted its moratorium during the study period.”

The study focused on all the states that instituted a moratorium, beginning as early as March 13 and as late as April 30. Only 16 states and D.C. maintained an eviction moratorium for the entire duration of the study, while seven states, Arkansas, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming, never implemented a state moratorium and thus were excluded from the study.

By the time the study concluded, 27 states, with Republican and Democratic governors alike, had lifted their respective moratoriums, leaving the limited federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium, which began on Sept. 4 and expires on Dec. 31, 2020, as the only safeguard for millions of people who could be facing eviction in the next month. November data from the US Census Bureau estimates that of the 11.5 million adults who live in rental housing, 1 in 6 did not pay rent in October.

The researchers found that the median length of state moratoriums was only 12 weeks, which left ample time for landlords to evict tenants in between September CDC’s eviction moratorium going into effect and the lifting of state moratoriums, many of which expired at the end of July, along with $600-a-week enhanced unemployment benefits.

The authors are unequivocal in their findings: “Lifting eviction moratoriums was associated with increased COVID-19 incidence and mortality in US states, supporting the public health rationale for use of eviction moratoriums to prevent the spread of COVID-19.” The authors noted an increased rate of mortality and incidence over time which they suggest is due to the fact that displacement due to eviction can cause “crowding” as family members move in together or evicted tenants move into homeless shelters, leading to increased infection. The authors hypothesize the increased mortality rate is due to increased homelessness as the result of eviction.

Acknowledging that their study relied on public-health data, which is increasingly being withheld by government officials, the researchers note that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths “likely underestimate true incidence and mortality.”

Breaking down individual states by excess cases and deaths, the data reveals the deadly consequences of failing to provide basic shelter for thousands of people while the pandemic rages. Texas, which had the second most COVID-19 fatalities in the US last week at 806, had the highest number of excess deaths due to evictions through Sept. 3, an estimated 4,456 people. This was followed by South Carolina, whose moratorium expired on May 14, leaving residents unprotected for 16 weeks, contributing to over 37,500 new COVID-19 cases and an estimated 1,090 fatalities.

After South Carolina, and continuing the trend of southern states that went double digit weeks without a moratorium, Louisiana recorded 959 excess deaths through Sept. 3 with nearly 30,000 excess cases after its moratorium expired on June 15. Following Louisiana, Mississippi recorded 804 excess deaths with 22,010 excess cases after going 12 weeks without a moratorium. Alabama had the fifth most estimated excess deaths with 621, after a statewide moratorium expired on May 31.

As the study makes clear, state eviction moratoriums did not prevent all evictions. Landlords could still use alleged lease violations to justify the removal of tenants.

The CDC moratorium likewise has not stopped thousands of evictions from going forward. It also doesn’t absolve tenants of any past due rent or late fees that might have accrued, meaning potentially millions of evictions, and with them, millions of cases and tens of thousands more deaths loom with the moratorium expiration at the end of the month. Stout’s Investment Banking estimates that by January, renters will be behind as much as $34 billion.

Despite the extreme public health disaster, some landlords, such as Taylor Verhaalen of Stout Management Company, which oversees nearly 9,000 units across 56 buildings in Las Vegas, Nevada, have already begun taking tenants to court in spite of the federal moratorium.

“We’ve left it up to the courts to interpret how they’re going to enact the CDC moratorium,” Verhaalen told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Verhaalen declined to state how many eviction filings the company had already submitted since the expiration of an Oct. 15 statewide moratorium.

For tenants to be eligible to be included in the CDC moratorium, renters have to sign a declaration form, under penalty of perjury, which states they have used their best efforts to seek government assistance, will not have earned more than $99,000 in annual income and would be unable to pay full rent because of a layoff, reduced wages or work hours, or “extraordinary out-of-pocket medical expenses,” which in the US can be virtually anything from a check-up to trying to obtain a COVID-19 test.

Even for tenants who have provided a declaration, Verhaalen says he will still be filing eviction cases against them. “Our intention was that the judges would look at the paperwork submitted by the tenants and do some type of validation to make sure they had financial hardship,” he said. “So far, that hasn’t been the case.”

While it hasn’t been the case yet in Nevada, judges throughout the country have begun to push back on the CDC moratorium as more landlords bring eviction filings to court. In September, a North Carolina judge ruled that because a tenant was not in federally subsidized housing, the moratorium did not apply to them, even though the moratorium does not discriminate between federal and private renters. And on Nov. 24, a federal judge in Missouri rejected a request to halt evictions after a tenants rights group claimed Jackson County officials had violated the CDC moratorium.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Emily Benfer, a law professor at Wake Forest University, said, “We are seeing variations in the way courts are applying the CDC order, and we are also seeing a lack of knowledge among tenants and property owners. Advocates are working overtime to inform tenants of their rights under the CDC order and, in many places, evictions are going forward.”

The confusing myriad of expiring protections for tenants has allowed landlords to take advantage of tenants resulting in thousands of people illegally evicted under previous CARES Act protections. In Maricopa County, an Arizona Republic investigation found that more than 900 evictions were filed against tenants who fell under CARES Act protections, with most of those renters wrongfully charged hundreds of dollars in late and legal fees.

There are more than enough homes and resources for everyone on the planet to have safe accommodations while avoiding the virus; the fact that safe housing remains unobtainable for millions of people in the richest country on the planet underscores the need for the abolition of private property and the implementation of an internationally coordinated scientific plan to fight the virus.

Last week, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, which tracks 26 major US cities, found, so far, landlords had filed 114,808 evictions throughout the pandemic, with nearly 4,000 evictions last week alone. The continued processing of evictions will continue unless the working class intervenes independently through coordinated action through rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood safety committees to stop the medically dangerous and socially unnecessary practice. The political struggle to provide housing for all, save lives, and end the threat from COVID-19 begins with joining the Socialist Equality Party and taking up the fight for socialism.