American imperialism meets its blood-soaked clients in the Middle East

Patrick Martin

There may not be a photograph today of US President Joe Biden shaking hands with Saudi despot Mohammed bin Salman. The press has been largely excluded from the Saudi leg of Biden’s four-day trip to the Middle East, and Biden’s aides have announced a new protocol limiting Biden to exchanging fist bumps, not handshakes or hugs, supposedly due to the greatly accelerated spread of the Omicron BA.5 subvariant of the coronavirus.

There is good reason to believe that this policy has nothing to do with any new health concerns for the 79-year-old president. The White House desires to reduce the amount of attention given to Biden’s embrace of a notoriously bloodstained murderer. He is courting bin Salman in an effort to obtain a sizeable increase in Saudi oil production, both to ease the pressure on NATO countries from the cutoff of Russian supplies as a byproduct of the war in Ukraine and to defuse social discontent in the US itself as gas prices have soared to nearly $5 a gallon.

It is his first trip as president to the region where American imperialism has carried out its bloodiest crimes over the last three decades, waging wars in Iraq, Syria and Libya, supporting countless military coups and brutal repression by kings and dictators alike. Millions have died and tens of millions driven into exile. Biden is not seeking to alleviate the plight of those who have survived imperialist aggression but rather to add to the number of victims. He is devoting four days to intensive talks with the two most important US allies and client states in the Middle East. He has spent two days in Israel and will spend two more in Saudi Arabia, with the strategic aim of lining up the two countries behind the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, while promising US support to their preparations for war against Iran.

There is also a brief side trip to Ramallah, which has more the character of a slap in the face to the people of occupied Palestine than an acknowledgement of their rights. In relation to the Palestinians, Biden has continued all the measures adopted by the Trump administration: the US embassy, moved from Tel Aviv by Trump, remains in Jerusalem; the US consulate in East Jerusalem, the main point of contact for Palestinians, remains closed; the Palestinian mission in Washington D.C. remains closed; the US continues to demand that the Palestinian Authority cut off all support payments for the families of those murdered by Israeli troops and settlers, which Israel calls “financing terrorism;” and the US has not changed the Trump policy of recognizing the legitimacy of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, in violation of international law.

There is an overpowering element of imperialist hypocrisy in the Biden trip. The US government has been engaged for nearly five months in a war against Russia in Ukraine. It has poured in tens of billions of dollars in weaponry and deployed covert military forces. The claimed justification for this confrontation—which risks direct military conflict between countries possessing the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals—is that the United States is defending freedom, democracy and the right of self-determination of the Ukrainian people, as well as warding off a future Russian threat to America’s NATO allies. Yet this policy now leads the president of the United States to embrace two regimes that personify the very crimes that have supposedly justified the US intervention in Ukraine.

The state of Israel was founded on the denial of self-determination for the Palestinian people, indeed, of their very existence. Israel has occupied conquered territory in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights for more than half a century, and it is steadily remaking the character of these areas through the building of settlements and the seizure of Palestinian and Syrian land, in what can only be called ethnic cleansing. Gaza has been aptly described as the largest open-air prison in the world, with the caveat that in most prisons the guards do not regularly fire missiles and rockets and drop bombs on the inmates.

The suppression of the Palestinians’ right of self-determination remains Israel’s key principle. This was codified during the Trump administration with the passage of a law declaring Israel to be the state of the Jewish people, thus relegating non-Jews—Christians, Muslims, atheists, immigrants of all kinds, as well as the Palestinians—to the status of permanent second-class citizens. Zionists may not like the term, but this is apartheid.

Writing in the Washington Post this weekend, Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, bemoaned the fact that in the region extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River (essentially Israel, Gaza and the West Bank), the Palestinian population now outnumbers the Jewish population. “No external threat is as dangerous to the Zionist enterprise as this internal one,” he writes.

Fascist elements, particularly among the Israeli settlers, have drawn the conclusion from this demographic fact that the Palestinian population must be drastically reduced in order to reestablish and maintain a Jewish majority, either through mass expulsions, like those carried out in 1947-48, or through mass killings of the type that befell the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe during the Holocaust.

There was no mention of these inconvenient facts in the course of Biden’s visit, full of saccharine pledges of unending US support for Israeli democracy.

As for Saudi Arabia, it lacks the parliamentary façade of Israel and is ruled by a tyrant monarch who has become a byword for murder, savage internal repression and genocidal warfare against a small neighboring country.

Bin Salman’s most publicized killing is the assassination of Saudi critic and journalist Jamaal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2017. Khashoggi, by then a US citizen and columnist for the Washington Post, was lured to the consulate, then murdered by a death squad dispatched by bin Salman. His body was dismembered and disposed of so thoroughly that no trace has been found since.

Inside Saudi Arabia, bin Salman is the latest in a long line of absolute rulers going back to the founder of the Saudi dynasty nearly a century ago. While his aged and invalid father reigns as king, bin Salman as crown prince actually rules, directing the unyielding suppression of democratic rights for all Saudi citizens, enforced with special brutality against women, immigrant workers and members of the oppressed Shi’ite minority.

Earlier this year, 81 men, mostly Shi’ites found “guilty” of advocating for the rights of their religious sect, were beheaded in a mass execution. While the despotism may be medieveal, the regime enforces it with the most advanced technology, buying weapons of war from the United States, Britain and other imperialist powers, and surveillance technology developed by Silicon Valley and Israel.

As for trampling on “self-determination” and the rights of small countries to be free of cross-border aggression by their more powerful neighbors, bin Salman puts Vladimir Putin in the shade. Since 2015, Saudi military forces have been engaged in brazen aggression against Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. In response to an internal revolt that overthrew Saudi puppet ruler Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, troops, warplanes and warships from Saudi Arabia, with US and British technical assistance and armaments, have waged a war of unexampled brutality, creating what UN officials have called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

Putin’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine, triggered by NATO’s encirclement of Russia over the previous two decades, has killed thousands of Ukrainians and made millions of them refugees. Bin Salman’s invasion of Yemen has been far bloodier. A UN report issued in November 2021 estimated that 377,000 people had been killed, nearly two-thirds of them children under the age of five who died from starvation and disease brought on by the Saudi blockade of food supplies. 

Twenty million Yemenis—two-thirds of the entire population—are dependent on humanitarian assistance to survive. Four million are internally displaced. Millions more would have fled the country but for their escape being blocked by Saudi forces, which control Yemen’s main land border and maintain a US-backed patrol of the country’s sea lanes. The UN report projects that over the next eight years, the death toll will rise to 1.3 million people, while 22 million, the vast majority, will be living in extreme poverty.

Candidate Joe Biden declared that the murder of Khashoggi made Saudi Arabia a “pariah state.” He vowed to isolate bin Salman as punishment for this crime. Now he travels to Jeddah to kiss the bloody monarch’s ring.

There has been some tut-tutting in the American media about the contortions employed by the White House and State Department to justify the reversal of policy towards bin Salman. This is particularly so in the case of the Washington Post, where the murdered Khashoggi was a columnist.

A commentary by Post publisher Fred Ryan, published Saturday as an op-ed column not an official editorial, complained, “Biden’s meeting also sends a dangerous message about the value the United States attaches to a free press. A grip-and-grin photograph with [bin Salman] signals to autocrats everywhere that you can quite literally get away with murdering a journalist as long as you possess a natural resource the United States wants badly enough.”

The column did not dispute the foreign policy necessity for a rapprochement with bin Salman, only urging Biden to hand over a list of political prisoners to be released and stage a face-to-face meeting with Saudi dissidents. “It is a way to show that Biden’s self-abasement is meant to secure greater human rights, not just cheaper gas at American pumps,” Ryan concludes.

The talk of “self-abasement” is entirely beside the point, however. Biden is not lowering himself to bin Salman’s level by making his oil-for-blood deal. He is demonstrating the true barbarism and depravity of American imperialism and of himself as its current political leader.

In the meeting of Biden and bin Salman, it is Biden who has the far longer list of crimes against humanity, including mass killings on a scale that dwarf the Saudi despot’s. Biden has been a leading figure in the US national security establishment for a half century. He helped formulate policy for US wars of aggression as far back as the first Gulf War of 1990-91, which he fully supported in the Senate.

Biden voted for resolutions which authorized the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and provided massive funding for the Pentagon war machine in every one of the 36 years he served in the Senate. Once he became Obama’s vice president, he took direct executive responsibility for the US wars or interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and for drone-missile assassinations over a vast region. Obama made him the administration’s point man on Ukraine, during the period when the US spent $5 billion to overthrow the elected pro-Russian president and install a fascist-backed regime in Kiev.

In the meeting between Biden and bin Salman, it is Biden who is the Godfather, guilty of so many crimes that he can barely remember them all. And he heads a military-intelligence apparatus that was carrying out murders just as bestial as those of bin Salman before the cutthroat crown prince was even born.

Mass anti-government protests hit Albania

Andrea Peters

Mass protests shook Albania’s capital city last week, with thousands pouring into the streets to demand the resignation of Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama and his government. Skyrocketing prices are fueling social anger over deepening poverty, political corruption and authorities’ indifference. The events in early July follow large demonstrations in March that were also animated by outrage over inflation, which at 7.4 percent as of last month is the highest the small Balkan country has witnessed in 20 years. Throughout 2021, it hovered around just 2 to 2.5 percent.

With little in the way of public transportation, the cost of fuel in particular is causing extreme hardship for Albanian families. Rama’s government is blamed for worsening the problem because of its refusal to cut very high gas taxes, which account for 53 percent of the total fees consumers pay at the pump.

But prices across the board are rising, with foodstuffs leading the way. INSTAT, the government statistical agency, just reported that last month the cost of oils and fats rose by 30.3 percent, breads and cereals 19.1 percent, dairy and eggs 18.5 percent and vegetables 9 percent. “Culture and entertainment” were the only sectors where prices did not grow.

With food expenditures consuming 42 percent of households’ budgets, according to INSTAT, hundreds of thousands in the tiny country of just 2.79 million people are being wiped out. The average family of 3.6 people brings home just €718 a month and about 20 percent of the population lives on less than $5.50 a day. Albania, whose GDP per capita is just $5,200 a year, about that of the African country of Namibia, is the fifth poorest nation in Europe. Due to a combination of mass emigration and falling birth rates, the country’s population has shrunk by more than 500,000, about 15 percent, since the 1990s.

In response to March’s mass demonstrations, at which hundreds were arrested, the Rama government promised to raise the minimum wage to a mere €242 a month and to give the poorest households another €24 a month, an amount that will disappear with just a few trips to the grocery store. He also denounced his country’s increasingly impoverished working class for not being willing to bear the cost of the US/NATO conflict with Russia, stating, “I’m ashamed that a NATO country doesn’t understand the consequences of the war in Ukraine.”

The Balkan Barometer 2022, a survey conducted by the Regional Cooperative Council, reveals Albania to be a country seething with social discontent. According to results published late last month, 42 percent of Albanians want to emigrate, 88 percent think social inequality is too big, 40 percent are unhappy with their financial situation, and 82 percent believe there is an “unequal application of the law”—in other words, everyone but the rich and powerful get a raw deal.

Defense attorneys staged a protest this Wednesday over forthcoming changes to Albania’s judicial system that, through a redistricting process, will see a sharp decline in the number of courts. They insist this will further exacerbate the already sizeable backlog of cases in the country, such that the accused will languish in jails and the process of clearing their names will take ever-more time. Lawyers are boycotting the judicial system for another 10 days.

Albania’s journalists also recently protested in the capital. In early July, a reporter was stripped of her government press credentials for three months and told by Prime Minister Rama that she was in need of “reeducation,” after she posed a question to the country’s leader about corruption in his inner circle.

Last week’s demonstrations in Tirana were called by opposition politician Sali Berisha of the right-wing Democratic Party (DP). The former prime minister, whose own government was the object of widespread popular hatred when he was in office from 2005-2013, is attempting to take advantage of the anger at the current center-left government in order to advance himself.

He just barely wrested back control of the DP from his rivals, who kicked him out of his leading position in the organization last year when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement denouncing Berisha as corrupt and declaring that Washington would not work with the DP so long as Berisha was in charge. Berisha is currently on an American sanctions list and barred from entering the country.

On July 7, as anti-government protesters were gathering in Tirana, US ambassador to Albania Yuri Kim issued a statement counseling the demonstrators to “be peaceful” and abide by the law, as if the major problem was them and not the huge numbers of cops policing the demonstration.

Albania is a US ally and NATO member in the Balkans and, along with Greece, Italy, Poland, the US, Latvia, Turkey and Romania, is currently taking part in the Bulgarian-led Breeze 2022 NATO naval exercises in the Black Sea. Albania recently received anti-tank Javelin missiles from the US, as part of the American Congress’ recent legislation. Prime Minister Rama has now offered NATO use of the defunct Pashaliman naval base on Vlora Bay, which was once home to a Soviet fleet and gave the USSR its only access to the Mediterranean. If it takes Tirana up on the offer, NATO will add to its current arsenal in Albania, where it is in the process of renovating the Kucove Air Base.

Rajapakse formally resigns as Sri Lankan president after fleeing to Singapore

Saman Gunadasa

Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s official resignation as Sri Lankan president has been sent to Colombo, and its formal acceptance was announced this morning in the capital. Rajapakse was elected president three years ago with a large majority. He fled to Maldives early Tuesday, following more than three months of massive nationwide protests and three general strikes demanding that he quit as president and that his government resign.

Gotabhaya Rajapakse (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Rajapakse flew into Singapore yesterday afternoon. He emailed his resignation letter last night to Parliamentary Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena. Singapore announced that Rajapakse was on a private visit, indicating that asylum was neither granted nor requested.

The widely despised Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was previously appointed acting president by Rajapakse, immediately instructed the military and police to do “what is necessary to restore order.” He has appointed a committee, including Chief of Defence Staff General Shavendra Siva and the heads of military tri-forces and the police, to “prevent the destruction of property and life.”

Wickremesinghe imposed a curfew in the Colombo administrative district from noon yesterday until today 5 a.m. This followed his declaration of an island wide state of emergency and a 24-hour curfew the previous day for the Western Province. These curfews were largely ignored, with thousands of people last night celebrating Rajapakse’s resignation.

While Wickremesinghe has wide-ranging powers under the executive presidency to unleash the military against opposition, there are nervous concerns within the ruling class that full-scale violent state repression at this moment will backfire, leading to a further intensification of the anti-government rebellion.

As the Hindustan Times reported, “Ranil wants the military to use force, Sri Lankan army says no to firing on protesters.”

US Ambassador to Sri Lanka Julie Chung warned in a tweet yesterday, “We condemn all violence and call for the rule of law to be upheld.” She urged all parties to work together to “implement solutions that will bring long-term economic & political stability.”

In other words, the military and police should not be unleashed at this juncture, and opposition parties must intensify their efforts to contain and dissipate the mass movement while preparing an interim regime to implement brutal International Monetary Fund austerity measures.

Addressing a press conference on Wednesday, General Shavendra Siva appealed to the public, and especially youth, “to help the tri-forces and the police to maintain law and order until a new president is elected.” Notwithstanding these appeals, the military and police attacks on protesters continue, with at least 84 protesters hospitalised and one youth killed from injuries sustained in clashes with security forces over the past week.

The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), Rajapakse’s ruling party, issued a statement on Wednesday calling on Acting President Wickremesinghe and law enforcement authorities to “restore law and order” immediately. The statement referred to agitators as law breakers who “had murdered several individuals, including a parliamentarian as well as destroyed public and private properties.”

In the meantime, SLPP sources told Reuters that Wickremesinghe was the party’s first choice for presidency. These moves underscore the ongoing collaboration between Rajapakse’s party and Wickremesinghe for a future military-police crackdown on protesters and far-reaching state repression.

Army spokesman Brigadier Nilantha Premaratna told a media conference yesterday afternoon that 16 soldiers have been injured in clashes with protesters. He also alleged that two army soldiers had been “brutally assaulted and their weapons and ammunition were stolen by protesters.” These weapons, he said, could be used by protesters to spread violence, a clear indicator that future state provocations against demonstrators are being prepared.

In a televised address on Wednesday, Wickremesinghe denounced the occupiers and said he had instructed security forces to remove them. The protesters should not be allowed to occupy Temple Trees (the prime minister’s residence), the President’s Secretariat and the President’s House, he said, because they would take or destroy documents. Anti-government protesters announced yesterday that they were ending their occupations of these buildings.

Yesterday, Parliamentary Speaker Abeywardane, a close confidante of Rajapakse and an SLPP veteran, canceled the parliamentary session scheduled for today. He said it will resume within three days after receiving the president’s resignation letter. Nominations for the presidency were to be submitted on July 19 and a new president elected by the parliament on July 20.

None of these parties of the political establishment, including opposition parties, has condemned Wickremesinghe’s dictatorial moves. At most, they have issued feeble appeals to the military and the acting president.

Sajith Premadasa, leader of the parliamentary opposition and the main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya, appealed to the military, declaring, “I am asking our dear security forces not to be pawns of an oppressive regime.”

Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) leader and former president, Maithripala Sirisena, appealed to Wickremesinghe, “I am pleading in the name of God for Ranil Wickremesinghe to resign fast.” Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), issued similar appeals.

Scottish health workers ballot on strike action as doctors call for 30 percent rise

Ben Trent & Richard Tyler

Health workers in Scotland represented by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) are being balloted on a 5 percent pay offer, with a recommendation to reject and support strike action. Results are expected in early August.

Last month the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents doctors and consultants, passed a motion at its annual conference calling for its members’ pay to be restored to the real terms’ level of 2008, which would mean a 30 percent increase.

The conference also passed a motion calling for industrial action in opposition to new contract conditions that would see GPs having to open their surgeries on Saturdays and offer evening and weekend appointments. The new working arrangements are seen as too inflexible and overly bureaucratic by many doctors, who argue they take away their ability to allocate resources to best serve their own communities.

While the motion calling for pay restoration was passed, there was considerable opposition from delegates who were critical of the 5-year time frame being proposed, according to the BMA’s own report of the conference.

Nursing staff in an NHS hospital [Photo: WSWS]

Aizemea Okojie, a Brighton-based gynaecologist, told the conference, “I’m moving against this motion not because of the content but because of the five-year timeframe. I would prefer it to be shorter. I get anxiety attacks looking at my bank balance every month.”

Consultant Kevin O’Kane said the motion gave the message to government that they had “five years to sort out pay” and “that’s not good enough”.

“Our members deserve better, and they deserve it now. Don’t waste our opportunity with a five-year flaccid fudge. We need action this side of the general election.”

Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Dr Faisal Bhutta explained the pressures affecting GPs across the country. “Normally, we get a quieter period in June and July, but it’s just been relentless”. Outlining the reasons to strike, such as pay and the new contracts he said, “As GPs, our pay has been frozen for four to five years, limited to around one percent increase. But all the while, the workload is going up, we’re asked to do more and more, including possibly starting seven-day working.”

Falling living standards, rising costs, wage freezes and ever-growing workloads are a tinderbox for NHS staff across the UK. These issues have caused huge numbers of staff to leave their posts, which has fueled a massive staff shortage across all parts of the health service.

The most recent data from NHS England shows a vacancy rate of 10 percent on March 31, 2022, within the Registered Nursing staff group (38,972 vacancies), up on the same period the previous year when the vacancy rate was 9.2 percent (34,678 vacancies).

A survey of more than 2,000 NHS staff in June found that more than half had considered leaving in the last 12 months, with one in five actively looking for other jobs or already in the process of leaving. Four out of five said poor pay was one of the main reasons they would quit the NHS. According to survey organiser @WithNHSStaff, “Stress due to pressure of work and the ongoing impact of the pandemic was a factor for 63 percent of staff. Understaffing, stress, and burnout, compounded by low wages, are leaving many feeling they would be better off working anywhere else.”

The BMA conference took place in the aftermath of the three-day stoppage by rail workers belonging to the RMT union. London GP Dr Jacqueline Applebee, moving the resolution for strike action in opposition to the imposition of new contracts effectively imposing seven-day working, told delegates to channel their “inner Mick Lynch”, referring to the RMT General Secretary.

“We should take our lead from the RMT, they have quite rightly said enough is enough. No more pay erosion, no more service cuts. The RMT’s issues very much chime with those we face in the NHS—solidarity to them.”

Doctors and other health workers should look critically at the role being played by Lynch, the RMT and wider trade union bureaucracy, including the health unions.

After three days of solid strike action by rank-and-file rail workers, it was back to business as usual for the RMT, sitting down with management to try and cobble together a deal while all cuts remain on the table: including mandatory 7-day working, new grading structures, salaries and roles, lower pay and longer hours contracts, and massive attacks on the railways pension scheme.

At the Durham Miners’ Gala last weekend, Lynch was fêted as a militant union leader who was standing up for the working class. But in his speech, he made clear that despite Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer having explicitly opposed the strike and banned his MPs from supporting RMT picket lines, he wanted a Starmer-led Labour government.

Lynch says this of a party which speaks as a defender of big business and the “national interest”, which opposes workers taking strike action to defend their pay and conditions. In a recent visit to Leeds General Infirmary, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said NHS strikes were “not what we in the Labour Party want to see”.

For its part, the last time BMA members took industrial action, during the 2016 junior doctors’ strike, the union sought to curtail the stoppages at every opportunity, eventually selling out the strikes in a craven capitulation.

Despite the government imposing a 3 percent pay “rise” on NHS staff last year, and the NHS Pay Review Board likely to recommend a below inflation rise this year of only 4 or 5 percent, none of the health unions have announced concrete plans for strike action. The votes of their members in various “indicative” ballots are used as bargaining chips to persuade the employers to “negotiate”, which almost invariably ends in a sellout, and to preserve the role of the union bureaucracy as a management partner.

The unions are not the organisers of class struggle to defend the interests of working people, but its saboteurs. They are an industrial police force that divides workers by sector, location, and profession, cutting across all forms of unified action and stifling strikes by agreeing back-door deals.

BBC’s Panorama exposes British war crimes in Afghanistan

Jean Shaoul

BBC TV’s flagship “Panorama” programme has revealed further evidence that UK special forces killed unarmed detainees in Afghanistan and planted weapons near their bodies to justify their crimes.

The BBC also found evidence that senior officers, including recently retired General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith who headed the Special Forces at the time, were aware of concerns within the Special Air Service (SAS) but failed to pass on evidence to the military police.

British soldiers storm a building in Afghanistan, 2007 [Photo by Defence Imagery / Flickr / CC BY-NC 4.0]

Last Tuesday night’s screening of SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime? broadcast interviews and evidence based on official files from police investigations and a four-year probe showing that one SAS unit in Helmand province had killed 54 people in suspicious circumstances between 2010 and 2011. The unit’s tour of duty resulted in a total Afghan death toll more than double that number, yet none of its members sustained any injuries in the raids, indicating their lives had not been at risk.

The Ministry of Defence had been forced to hand over a tranche of emails and documents during a long-running hearing of a civil case in the High Court brought by Afghan citizen Saiffulah Yar into the deaths of four family members at the hands of the SAS, after previously suggesting it had no such documents. Further documents were obtained via Freedom of Information requests.

The documents, written by SAS officers and military personnel, provide evidence of war crimes. They show that while the government claimed—and continues to claim—that there was no credible evidence of criminality, the evidence had been sitting in Whitehall all this time.

According to the 1977 Geneva Conventions, shooting civilians is only lawful if they are participating directly in hostilities. Under UK domestic law, a soldier can use force to defend him/herself and others, including lethal force, only if it is reasonable in the circumstances, while the failure of a commanding officer to inform the military police if he or she becomes aware of potential war crimes is a criminal offence.

The airing of SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime? comes at a sensitive time amid furious claims by Britain that Russia’s armed forces have committed multiple war crimes in Ukraine and calls for Russia’s referral to the International Criminal Court.

Last week, the MoD lambasted the BBC for engaging in “irresponsible, incorrect” journalism by broadcasting the allegations, arguing it could put British soldiers at risk because it “jumps to unjustified conclusions” with its claims that both investigations by military police resulted in no prosecutions. It said, “Neither investigation found sufficient evidence to prosecute. Insinuating otherwise is irresponsible, incorrect and puts our brave armed forces personnel at risk, both in the field and reputationally.”

Members of parliament have called for an urgent investigation into the BBC’s “deeply disturbing” claims.

Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, said, “The optics of this don’t look good,” and called on armed forces minister James Heappey to explain the situation. Heappey gave the now standard government response that the claims “have been investigated, I believe, twice and on each occasion haven’t met the evidential threshold.”

This was a reference to the launch in 2014 of Operation Northmoor by the Royal Military Police, an investigation into 657 allegations of abuse, mistreatment, and killings at the hands of British forces that was wound down in 2017 and closed in 2019, with the MoD finding no evidence of criminality. The BBC said members of Operation Northmoor disputed the MoD’s conclusion that there was no case to answer.

Heappey pledged yet another whitewash investigation, should the BBC’s evidence justify it.

The programme noted a “quite incredible” pattern of “strikingly similar reports” of SAS operations, aimed at killing or capturing Taliban members, in which the SAS shot and killed Afghan men during night raids. After capturing family groups, soldiers would force one of them to enter the building and then shoot him, claiming the man had produced a hand grenade or an AK47 rifle. Typically, the number of rifles were far fewer than the number of men detained, while the position of the bullets in the walls indicated that the victim was lying on the ground and not in a position to fire a rifle.

So standardised were the reports that they begged the question whether the raids amounted to war crimes. Internal emails described one incident as the “latest massacre.” A senior SAS officer warned in a secret memo that it sounded like a “deliberate policy” of unlawful killings. But following the commissioning of a rare formal review of the squadron’s tactics, the investigating officer sent to Afghanistan accepted the SAS version of events at face value.

According to the BBC’s sources, SAS units competed to get the highest number of kills on their six-month tours of duty, with the unit at the centre of the investigation seeking a higher body count than its predecessor.

Colonel Oliver Lee, a commander of the Royal Marines in Afghanistan in 2011, told the BBC its allegations of misconduct were “incredibly shocking” and merited a public inquiry. He said the apparent failure by special forces leaders to disclose evidence was “completely unacceptable.”

Britain’s Special Forces, which have carried out operations in 19 countries since 2011, are not subject to any parliamentary oversight, reporting only to the MoD. With their exemption from Freedom of Information requests, any information that does become available is leaked by whistleblowers who risk serious criminal charges.

The killings and cover-up flow inexorably from the filthy and criminal nature of the war carried out by British imperialism, starting from the very top. It was Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair who lined up “shoulder to shoulder” with US President George W. Bush in the US-led coalition’s illegal war of aggression and occupation of Afghanistan, persuading NATO to support the war on behalf of US and British imperialism. He never retracted his support, maintaining it was a war to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Last August, he berated President Joe Biden for the “tragic, dangerous, unnecessary” US withdrawal from the country.

The illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has led to more than 175,000 deaths, although the real toll, including deaths caused indirectly by the war, is closer to a million, with hundreds of thousands of wounded and millions more forced to flee their homes. One of the poorest countries on the planet, its population suffers grinding deprivation and oppression.

While the British government claims the military costs of Operation Herrick were £23 billion, Frank Ledwidge, author of Investment in Blood published in 2013, estimates the total cost is now around £40 billion, including the human and financial cost of long-term care for more than 2,600 British troops injured, more than 5,000 “psychologically injured” and the pittance paid in compensation to the families of the 7,000 civilians the UK government has officially admitted were killed, injured or lost their homes due to its operations.

The UK government had sought to introduce a statutory “presumption against prosecution” for British soldiers over events five or more years old, giving the green light to future war crimes, including the mass murder of civilians. Ministers were forced to concede that the five-year limit would not include war crimes in the legislation enacted last year.

It is not just those soldiers who perpetrated these crimes on behalf of the imperialist powers who have gone unpunished. Crucially, those at the very top of the political and military ladder who planned and executed a criminal war have escaped punishment. Blair, like Bush, has never been held to account for his role in ordering the invasion of Afghanistan or his central role in the Iraq war in 2003.

The only two people who have faced criminal repercussions are those who reported war crimes: Chelsea Manning, who has endured a decade of persecution, and Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison and faces extradition to the US to serve 175 years imprisonment under the Espionage Act.

Pro-corporate Workers Party signals sweeping attack on public education in Brazil

Eduardo Parati & Guilherme Ferreira

In the run-up to Brazil’s October presidential elections, the right-wing, nationalist and pro-corporate character of the program of Workers Party (PT) candidate Luís Inácio Lula da Silva has emerged ever more openly. In recent weeks, Lula and PT officials have met with businessmen and bankers to assure the markets that a PT government will place the full weight of the growing global capitalist crisis upon the backs of the Brazilian working class. They are promising to escalate the attacks carried out under the PT when it governed Brazil between 2003 and 2016 as the party of choice of the national and international ruling elite.

A central figure in these meetings has been Lula’s vice-presidential running mate, the right-wing politician Geraldo Alckmin, now in the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). Before joining the PSB to run with Lula, Alckmin’s entire political career was in the hated Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), which under former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso pursued a brutal “neoliberal agenda” against the Brazilian working class. During the 14 years that Alckmin was governor of São Paulo, Brazil’s richest and most populous state, he followed the script of Cardoso’s administration, applying pro-corporate programs in public education and harshly repressing social protests.

In pursuit of the PT’s right-wing agenda, Alckmin met in mid-June with representatives of the pro-herd immunity movement, Escolas Abertas (Open Schools). The meeting took place during an offensive by this movement against any measures to close classrooms in the face of the rising fourth wave of the pandemic in Brazil.

Geraldo Alckmin with Open Schools representatives, June 2022 (Instagram)

With the rapid spread of more transmissible and vaccine-resistant Omicron BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants in the schools, where the most basic mitigation measures, such as mask mandates, have been abandoned, Open Schools protested on social media against “schools that are illegally closing entire classrooms! There hasn’t been a [National Public Health Emergency] as a result of coronavirus since May 22, 2022.”

Working closely with the ruling elite, Open Schools met in late June with São Paulo Mayor Ricardo Nunes, who soon after issued a decree abandoning the recommendation to send students with confirmed COVID infections home from class.

The Open Schools movement was created in 2020, ostensibly by a small group of elite private school parents who were protesting against temporary school closures. Behind it, however, were powerful sections of the ruling elite determined to carry out the full reopening of the economy and end all measures to contain the spread of the virus. Before denouncing the suspension of classes in this current wave of the pandemic, Open Schools played a prominent role in making education an “essential service”, enabling schools to reopen even with the pandemic out of control, and in ending the mandatory wearing of masks in the country’s precarious classrooms.

Like the ruling classes around the world, the Brazilian capitalist elite saw the pandemic as an opportunity to increase corporate profits and personal wealth. The Open Schools’ pro-herd immunity program, aimed at keeping parents in their workplaces, is connected to its broad defense of the privatization of public education and attacks against teachers, whom the movement claims are “left-wing indoctrinators.”

Recently, the movement has allied itself with fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro in promoting homeschooling, and has been one of the most vocal advocates of “vouchers” in public education, a policy modeled upon the brutal experience of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

Members of Open Schools have been received on several occasions by the João Doria (PSDB) government of the state of São Paulo. After being elected governor on a far-right platform and directly supporting Bolsonaro in 2018, Doria broke with the fascistic president, demagogically posing as a “defender of science”, while fully reopening both schools and the economy during the pandemic. Doria copied the strategy of the global ruling elites, limiting pandemic control measures to vaccinations. The same strategy was followed by PT state governments in the Northeast, and Lula praised Doria for his supposed fight against the pandemic in São Paulo.

Alckmin was Doria’s principal political patron, preceding him as governor of São Paulo. Alckmin’s terms as governor were marked by extensive attacks on public education, with the introduction of full-time charter schools, external evaluations, and corporate management policies, which cut teachers’ salaries in the state to among the lowest in Brazil. In 2015, he announced a sweeping “school reorganization” that would result in the closure of 1,000 schools across the state. The announcement sparked an explosive school occupation movement by high school students in 2015-6, forcing the government to abandon its project.

The rapprochement between Lula and Alckmin was largely mediated by Fernando Haddad, one of the most right-wing figures within the PT. Haddad is one of the biggest advocates of a “broad front” against Bolsonaro, i.e., the subordination of the popular anger against the fascistic president to the same sections of the ruling class and bourgeois state that enabled him to freely implement his herd immunity policy and attacks on the Brazilian working class. During his time as minister of education in the Lula administration (2005-2012) and as mayor of São Paulo (2013-2016), Haddad , like Alckmin, had a record of attacks against teachers and public education.

In 2005, he implemented the first national external evaluation for basic education, the Prova Brasil (Brazil Exam). Like external evaluations around the world, it opened the way for privatizing public education, as was the case with the high school reform during the government of President Michel Temer in 2016. Haddad himself, as education minister, had defended key aspects of the educational reform later implemented by Temer.

It was also during the period when Haddad headed the education ministry that Brazil saw exponential growth in private higher education. The increase in university enrollments, driven by the “commodities boom” during Lula’s administrations, was fueled by massive federal subsidies to low-quality private colleges, which turned Brazilian higher education into a highly profitable business.

One of the greatest beneficiaries of this process was education businessman Walfrido dos Mares Guia, who also served as a minister under Lula. In 2013, he created Kroton Educacional, which became the largest private educational group in the world. Returning favors received from PT governments, he provided million-dollar donations to Haddad’s campaign for mayor of São Paulo in 2016, to the Lula Institute, and even lent his private jet to Lula. Today, Mares Guia is serving as one of the intermediaries between the PT and the corporate world, repeating that “businessmen need not be afraid” of Lula.

As mayor of the city of São Paulo, Haddad’s policies also benefited private education, which now administers practically all the day care centers inaugurated under his mandate. Haddad’s administration was also marked by large strikes of municipal teachers. In 2015, he attempted to force through a pension reform that would result in cutting the pensions of teachers and other public employees and create a retirement plan administered by private funds. After Haddad vowed to withdraw his pension reform plan, he sent the proposal to the São Paulo City Council three days before leaving office, paving the way for it to be approved the following year with even harsher attacks on São Paulo’s teachers and public employees.

It was during his term as mayor that Haddad began his fruitful political relationship with Alckmin, then governor of the state of São Paulo. In a recent interview, Haddad said: “I have a well-known personal relationship with Alckmin, and when I was mayor I got along very well with him as governor. We had disagreements, but we knew how to build together and we built a lot of things.”

Among the things they “built together” is the brutal repression unleashed by the São Paulo Military Police against demonstrations over the increase in public transportation fares in 2013. This crackdown sparked what became known as the “Brazilian Spring,” the largest mass movement in the last 30 years against widespread corruption, poor social services, social inequality, and the entire political establishment, including the PT governments.

The attacks on public education by Alckmin and Haddad could not have happened without the complicity of the São Paulo state teachers union, APEOESP, and its pseudo-left apologists, particularly the so-called opposition to the PT leadership in APEOESP headed by Morenoite and Pabloite groups within the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL). They have a long record of isolating and sabotaging teachers’ strikes, which allowed then governor Alckmin to carry out his broad attacks on public education in the state, while Haddad did the same as mayor of São Paulo.

During the pandemic, the betrayals of APEOESP and the pseudo-left took on a criminal character as they sabotaged strikes “for life” before the second deadly wave early last year. Today, these political forces are supporting Lula, Alckmin and Haddad, who will be the PT’s candidate for governor of São Paulo, claiming that these bourgeois politicians will “rebuild Brazil. Quite the contrary, for decades they have spearheaded the destruction of public education and the living conditions of the working class, paving the way for the election of Bolsonaro in 2018.

In the midst of a growing global economic crisis and a pandemic still out of control, the world ruling elites are unleashing a broad assault on social and democratic rights, with the advancing threat of dictatorial forms of rule and a nuclear world war. Under these conditions, the guarantee of quality public education is ever more inseparable from a political struggle against the capitalist system. This means confiscating the wealth of the likes of Mares Guia and the other Brazilian billionaires with whom Lula and Alckmin are now meeting to assure the financial markets that there is nothing to fear from a PT administration.

Biden arrives in Israel to begin four-day tour courting dictators and war allies

Patrick Martin

US President Joe Biden arrived in Israel Wednesday to begin a four-day trip whose major purpose is to align the main US client states in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia, with Washington’s plans for war against Russia and Iran. After two days in Israel and the West Bank, he will move on to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to meet with Saudi leaders and with representatives of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes the five other Persian Gulf sheikdoms as well as Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.

President Joe Biden speaks during a welcoming ceremony upon his arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, Israel Wednesday, July 13, 2022. [AP Photo/Ariel Schalit]

In pursuit of this military agenda, Biden is simply dropping the issues of “human rights” that have been used to screen the policies of American imperialism. In particular, Biden will hold a face-to-face meeting with the de facto Saudi ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he once denounced as a “pariah” because of his role in ordering the murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Israel too has been given a pass on murderous actions against the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, although that is nothing new for the US government. Only a week before Biden left for his visit to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the State Department issued a report on the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akhlef, who was shot to death by an Israeli sniper while she was reporting on Israeli military operations in the West Bank city of Jenin for Al Jazeera Arabic.

The report found that an Israeli soldier likely killed Abu Akhlef, but the State Department claimed that there was no evidence the shooting was deliberate, despite the journalist wearing a bullet-proof vest and a sign clearly identifying her as press. Her death was merely a “tragic accident,” the US government agency declared.

Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia has been prepared by a whole series of diplomatic maneuvers and tap-dancing around the well-established fact that bin Salman sent the squad of Saudi security officers who grabbed Khashoggi when he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, seeking a document to permit him to marry his Turkish fiancée.

They killed him and chopped up his body with a bone saw which they had brought to Turkey for that purpose, then disposed of the pieces so thoroughly that no physical evidence of his death has been recovered by Turkish authorities.

Over the past six months, French, British and Turkish leaders have visited bin Salman in Riyadh, while the Saudi ruler has visited Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, in each case bringing piles of cash taken from the $100 billion in additional Saudi revenue from the runup in prices for the country’s enormous oil exports.

Money has made the prince persona grata once again throughout the Middle East, and money brings Biden to Riyadh, seeking an increase in Saudi oil production to help bring down world oil prices and US gasoline prices. The price at the pump in the United States is both a major driver of wider inflation and a huge political problem for the Biden administration, facing an upsurge in the class struggle and a midterm election in less than four months.

A report in the New York Times July 13 suggested that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would agree to a joint increase in production of about 1.25 million barrels a day, but that it would not be announced until a few weeks after Biden’s visit in order to avoid the unseemly appearance of a blood-for-oil exchange.

Besides the immediate political and economic pressures, Biden is pursuing the more long-term strategic goals of American imperialism. It has not gone unnoticed in Washington that neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia has jumped on the bandwagon of the war against Russia in Ukraine.

The Israeli government has to deal with both a large Russian-speaking minority within the country and close economic and political ties to Moscow, developed over a long period of time. The Saudi government is playing hard to get in relation to Ukraine, to gain leverage in its efforts to block Biden from reviving the seven-nation JCPOA nuclear pact with Iran, from which the Trump administration withdrew.

Discussions on Iran will undoubtedly occupy first place on the agenda in both Jerusalem and Riyadh. Washington is seeking to promote a more coordinated effort between Israel and the various Mideast sheikdoms, particularly in relation to preparations for air strikes against Iran, which would require Israeli or Saudi warplanes to cross a number of countries in order to reach their targets.

Biden will portray even the most minimal concession on human rights by the Saudi monarchy as a step in the right direction, while remaining silent on such barbaric events as the recent mass beheading of 81 prisoners, executed mainly for being political activists on behalf of the oppressed Shiite minority in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Aside from the ferocious internal repression of political dissidents, religious minorities and immigrant workers, the Saudi monarchy is up to its elbows in blood through its war against the people of Yemen. The Saudi military, with US backing, has been engaged in military intervention for more than seven years, seeking to overthrow the Houthi-led regime in Sana, which it accuses of being allied with Iran.

The two principal Saudi tactics have been indiscriminate terror bombing—with the United States supplying the bombs, the warplanes and the targeting information—and a naval blockade to shut off food supplies to the impoverished country, the poorest in the Arab world.

Biden and congressional Democrats in Washington have cried many crocodile tears over the crimes committed by the Saudi regime in Yemen, which are far worse than anything done by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. But these atrocities will be swept under the rug in pursuit of the interests of American imperialism in the Middle East and globally.

There are many signs of mounting instability in the region, which could trigger another military explosion, side-by-side with the war in Ukraine. Russian and American forces are at close quarters in Syria, with a Russian air strike hitting near the US-held base at Tanf, close to the Iraq border, last month.

In Israel, the government of Naftali Bennett, a coalition of ultra-right, “center-left” and Arab parties, fell last month, forcing the calling of new elections for November 1, which could lead to a return to power by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid met Biden Wednesday and accompanied him on two ritual visits, to observe the operation of Israel’s “Iron Dome” anti-missile system, and to pay tribute to the millions murdered in the Holocaust, at the Yad Vashem memorial.

The Biden administration has continued the brazenly anti-Palestinian policies of Donald Trump, including legal recognition for Israeli settlements on the West Bank, keeping the US consulate in Jerusalem closed to Palestinians, and keeping the Palestinian mission in Washington D.C. closed.

Publisher’s lawsuit seeks to take down Internet Archive’s digital lending library

Kevin Reed

The Internet Archive is an online digital library based in San Francisco, California, and founded in 1996 with the stated mission of providing “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The archive enables the public to view large collections of digitized music, books and film for free.

Internet Archive servers at the headquarters in San Francisco.

As of May 2022, the Internet Archive had accumulated over 35 million books and texts, 7.9 million movies, videos and TV shows, 842,000 software programs, 14 million audio files, 4 million images, 2.4 million TV clips and 237,000 concerts. Access to the massive repository is available to researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities like low vision and dyslexia and the general public.

Among the platform’s most popular assets is the Wayback Machine. This is a digital archive of the World Wide Web that allows users to go “back in time” and see how websites looked up to 25 years ago. The Wayback Machine has recorded 682 billion web pages because, as explained by the publisher, “Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral—but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it.”

While the Internet Archive provides a window into the potential for online information and digital media to be made available to everyone in a manner similar to that of a public library, the repository has come under a vicious attack by powerful corporate and financial interests.

In June 2020, four major publishers—John Wiley & Sons and three of the big five US publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House—filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, claiming the non-profit organization, “is engaged in willful mass copyright infringement.”

The lawsuit stems from the corporate publishers response to an innovative temporary initiative launched by the Internet Archive during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic called the National Emergency Library. Given the impact of the public health emergency, the Internet Archive decided to ease its book lending restrictions and allow multiple people to check out the same digital copy of a book at once.

Up to that point, the Internet Archive had established a practice of purchasing copies of printed books, digitizing them and lending them to borrowers one at a time. When it kicked-off the emergency lending program, the Internet Archive made it clear that this policy would be in effect until the end of the pandemic. Furthermore, the archive’s publishers said that this program was in response to library doors being closed to the public during the pandemic. Under conditions where the Internet Archive was the only means of access to titles for many people, the policy was justified and a creative response to COVID-19.

However, even if the claim by the $25 billion publishing industry were true that the emergency lending program was damaging—and it is not—it is clear that the aim of their lawsuit is nothing less than the complete shutdown of the Internet Archive.

In their suit, the publishers have identified 127 titles they claim were shared digitally in violation of copyright laws and they are seeking to recoup $19 million, according to one estimate, which is equivalent to one year of the Internet Archive’s operating budget.

On July 8, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) submitted a 45-page brief in support of the Internet Archive’s motion that the federal court in New York City throw out the publisher’s lawsuit on the grounds that it is an attempt to criminalize library lending. The EFF memorandum supporting a motion for summary judgment argues that the Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program constitutes fair use as covered by copyright law and preserves traditional library lending in the digital world.

In an accompanying press release, the EFF explained, “The Internet Archive’s digital lending hasn’t cost the publishers one penny in revenues; in fact, concrete evidence shows that the Archive’s digital lending does not and will not harm the market for books.”

The EFF presents evidence that the big publisher’s did not lose money from the Internet Archive program due to the fact that, when the titles in question were removed from the online library, “their print sales slightly worsened relative to other books.”

Computer engineer and free and open internet activist Brewster Kahle, 61, is the founder of the Internet Archive. Speaking in an online forum about the lawsuit, Kahle argued that Internet Archive is as important to the preservation and circulation of digital media as any other library is to physical media and that the nature of libraries themselves are under attack in the lawsuit.

“The Internet Archive is a non-profit library,” Kahle said. “We do what libraries have always done. What libraries do is we buy, we preserve, and we lend books to one reader at a time. … This lawsuit is not just an attack on the Internet Archive. It’s an attack on all libraries. The publishers want to criminalize libraries owning, preserving, and lending books in digital form.”

EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry said, “The Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support it are not pirates or thieves. They are librarians, striving to serve their patrons online just as they have done for centuries in the brick-and-mortar world.”

Benjamin Saracco, a research and digital services faculty librarian at an academic medical and hospital library in New Jersey, told the EFF, “The library’s practice of controlled digital lending was a lifeline at the start of the pandemic and has become an essential service and a public good since.”

The lawsuit by the four giant publishers—the product of the increasing consolidation of the industry and with combined revenue of $13.4 billion in 2021—highlights several important features of present-day capitalist society.

It is not an accident that the corporations have seized upon the Internet Archive’s emergency lending program which was launched during the pandemic. Not one section of the ruling establishment was prepared to lift a finger to provide the public with resources necessary to respond adequately to COVID-19 and defeat the virus.

While the publishing companies were generating record sales in 2020 and 2021, they saw the pandemic as a means to increasing profits and an opportunity to go on the offensive against the non-profit online resource that is free to the public, and viewed it as an enemy that should be eliminated.

Finally, the publisher’s lawsuit is part of the broader assault on basic democratic rights, attacking the principle of library lending, a concept pioneered by the American revolutionary, inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1731. Franklin viewed the establishment of the public library as an all-embracing cultural institution that provided for the common benefit of a non-elite membership. The early library not only lent out books but a microscope and a telescope.

Of the Library Company of Philadelphia, which eventually served as the first Library of Congress, Franklin wrote, “these Libraries have improved the general Conversation of Americans, made the common Tradesmen and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some Degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Priviledges.”

As with everything else related to the revolutionary democratic traditions of America, the present-day capitalist elite sees library lending as a threat to its maniacal appetite for profits and personal wealth accumulation.