On Friday, a judge in an administrative tribunal suspended the French government’s emergency expulsion order against imam and ex-school teacher Hassan Iquioussen. Iquioussen was born in Dadian in Northern France and has lived here for 58 years. He faces expulsion to Morocco, where he has never lived and has publicly criticized the King.
Iquioussen has five children and nine grandchildren who all reside in France and are citizens. His father forced him and his siblings to refuse their right to French citizenship at 18. He has since unsuccessfully attempted to claim citizenship twice, once in 1984, and once in 1990. He has previously taught French language at high school level.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
On October 31 last year, Iquioussen’s house was raided and searched by gendarmes, who found nothing incriminating. Earlier this year, the Nord prefecture refused to renew Iquioussen’s residence permit, alleging that he gave “hateful speeches against the values of the Republic, including secularism,” denied “equality between women and men,” and developed “anti-Semitic” and “conspiracy theories about Islamophobia.”
On May 3, the Macron government began an expulsion procedure against him. Then on July 28, interior minister and ancient member of the Royalist Action Française, Gerald Darmanin told the National Assembly that Iquioussen “will be expelled.” After Moroccan authorities confirmed they would accept the imam, on August 1 Darmanin stated that Iquioussen will be “expelled manu militari [by force] from the national territory.”
Iquioussen has denied all these allegations. Lucie Simon, the imam’s lawyer, stated, “He strongly and seriously contests each of the elements contained in the expulsion order, which are not only old but also taken out of context, truncated by cut sentences and often unverifiable.”
Yesterday morning, it seemed the government’s campaign would be successful: the European Court of Human Rights, to which Iquioussen’s lawyers had also appealed, refused to intervene in the French government’s emergency expulsion of the imam.
However, Darmanin’s plan was halted later on Friday morning, when a judge in the Paris administrative tribunal suspended the government’s expulsion order, at least temporarily. This judgment was then rapidly appealed by Darmanin, who repeated allegations of anti-Semitism, sexism, and religious extremism in a tweeted statement on Friday afternoon.
According to journalist Camille Polloni, who has seen the text of the judge’s order, the judge ruled against the government because there was no evidence to support the state’s accusations of anti-Semitism or religious extremism against Iquioussen. The judge agreed with the imam’s lawyers that every quote except one attributed to him by the government were taken out of context and did not amount to a “provocation to hatred.”
The only comment the judge found did contravene this standard was a remark inviting women to stay in the home. However, the judge concluded that this did not “justify the expulsion order.”
Darmanin has very publicly pursued Iquioussen in the context of a renewed offensive against immigrants by the Macron government. The government had planned to introduce a new draconian immigration law targeting basic democratic rights this week but has now delayed the examination of legislation until the end of August. This action was ostensibly to facilitate “debate.”
The bill proposes to eliminate immigrants’ right to appeal expulsion, the sole legal means by which Iquioussen has been able—for the time being—to remain in France. It also proposes the removal of exemptions to deportations, for example marriage to a French citizen or arrival in France before 13 years of age. In an interview with Le Figaro on August 3, Darmanin said he is “ready to imagine additional quotas for each profession or sector under tension [from a lack of available labor].”
The real reason the bill has been delayed is not for debate, but in order for Darmanin and the Macron government to conduct a highly publicized anti-immigrant campaign to prepare public opinion for a wide-ranging attack on immigrant rights.
Marion Ogier, a lawyer from the Human Rights League, noted that Darmanin’s pursuit of the imam sought to “create a media echo to promote his immigration bill” by announcing the imam’s expulsion “publicly, on social networks, even before notifying him.”
The pursuit of Iquioussen is only one facet of this criminal campaign. Since late July, Darmanin has led a foul campaign against the population of the La Guillotèrie district of Lyon, where on July 20 an altercation between three plain clothes police officers and around 20 individuals took place.
The officers were in pursuit of a man they accused of petty theft in the district. Seeing three people in pursuit of a man, members of the local population intervened to protect the fleeing man, which led to fighting between the police and locals. This incident, in which no one was seriously injured, was then hysterically seized on by the pro-Macron and far-right press as a “lynching,” though no one was killed during the event.
Darmanin travelled to Lyon, where he told residents of the need to strength measures to expel “foreign criminals.” Darmanin also seized on the incident to drastically increase the number of police officers in the city, sending 70 more cops into the district to “retake control.”
In his interview with Le Figaro, Darmanin blamed immigration, not widespread poverty and distress amongst the poorest sections of French society, for crime, “Today, foreigners represent 7 percent of the French population and commit 19 percent of acts of delinquency. To refuse to see this would be to deny reality.” On August 4, on CNews he stated: “If [immigrants] do not respect our values and our laws, they must leave. Common sense.”
What is unfolding is a draconian attack on fundamental democratic rights by a government that is inciting far-right sentiments. The state sought to remove a French-born resident, who hasn’t been charged, let alone convicted of a crime, due to his alleged disaccord with the French state’s “values.” Only the imam’s successful appeal against the order, a right the government is seeking to overturn, has temporarily prevented his expulsion.
The Iquioussen case and Darmanin’s anti-immigrant campaign shows how, emboldened by his April victory, Macron and his allies are seeking to deepen and extend the French state’s anti-Muslim campaign. In all its essentials, this is the same fascistic policy proposed by the Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN).
Macron’s law is going to a National Assembly crammed with deputies of his own party, of the RN and of Jean Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Union, which has supported previous anti-Muslim legislation. There is clearly an enormous danger that immigrants’ right to appeal deportation will be eliminated.
In the case of Iquioussen, despite the judge’s verdict he remains at huge risk of deportation to Morocco in the coming days and week. Embarrassed by the ruling against its highly publicized pursuit of the imam, the Macron government will do everything in its power to overturn the ruling.
Research Outside of the Above: relevant work in areas that may not align with the research priorities highlighted above.
About Meta Fellowship:
The Meta Research PhD Fellowship is a global program designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students who are engaged in innovative and relevant research in areas related to computer science and engineering at an accredited university.
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Nowadays, most travelers entering the U.S. have to undergo this weird thing: after officials take a headshot, software determines the geography of your face, including the distance between your eyes, the distance from your forehead to chin, and different facial landmarks. Your facial signature then becomes a mathematical formula, and can be compared to a database of tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) of known faces, or if you are crossing the border with your visa, passport, or even driver’s license photo.
Sounds like this has the potential to be creepy, right? Well, to set the record straight, House Homeland Security Committee member Clay Higgins (R-LA) argued before Congress in July that it’s just fine, just a matter of convenience.
“The image that has been presented to the citizens that we serve is that this is some sort of nefarious technology and big brother is watching you,” the congressman explained. “But really it’s using photographic images that travelers willingly have provided, or are available on their passports or visas, or driver’s licenses. We already have that information.”
Higgins wore a black coat, a blue button-down shirt, and a spotted tie. As he spoke during this hearing titled “Assessing CBP’s Use of Facial Recognition Technology”, he looked at Daniel Tanciar, the chief innovation officer of Pangiam, a company founded in 2020, which aims “to revolutionize the future of operations, security, and safety at airports, seaports, and land border crossings through the use of emerging technologies.” This company works with Customs and Border Protection on its sweeping, unprecedented deployment of facial recognition technology. That Pangiam is in the mix on this shouldn’t be a surprise. The company’s CEO is former CBP commissioner Kevin McAleenan. If you don’t remember, he was the guy in charge of border enforcement when agents were tearing apart families in 2018.
Rep. Higgins stressed the efficiency and convenience of this expanding technology, which is affecting more and more people. “It just speeds up the traveler’s passage through the security checkpoint,” he said.
At the International Summit on Borders that I attended in Washington, DC, in June 2018, there was a panel titled “The Border Force Officer of the Future.” I was taken aback when one of the panel’s participants, an immigration official from Canada, said that with the direction of global border control, “The face that God gave you the day you were born will be your passport.”
Though chilling, this seemed far-fetched. Four years later, however, I see that I did not realize how fast it was all arriving, fueled by the public-private partnership exemplified by Higgins and Tanciar, a partnership that is powerful yet hidden. Never once at the hearing was Tanciar asked about his financial stake in the facial recognition system he was promoting. In his testimony, Tanciar gushed that “over 100 million travelers have been successfully processed by CBP’s use of this technology. While there are always improvements that can be made, CBP has implemented a well-performing program that meets the congressional biometric mandate while maintaining privacy, civil liberties, and data security.”
Facial recognition has become the primary biometric technology for CBP. Everyone who enters the country has their picture taken, though supposedly people can opt out (that often isn’t obvious, thanks to a lack of signage; I cross the border constantly and have never seen anything about opting out). The surveillance technology has also been deployed at 32 airports for people exiting the country. CBP partners with airports and airlines to add another layer to this private-public nexus.
During the hearing, Rebecca Gambler of the Government Accountability Office testified that CBP “is in the early stages of pilot testing the technology for other areas of the land environment.” She did not give details about what that means. According to internal documents, during previous secretive testsof facial recognition in Arizona and Texas, authorities obtained a “massive amount of data,” including images of “people leaving for work, picking up children from school, and carrying out other daily routines.” And DHS has called for companies to develop medium-sized drones with facial recognition cameras.
Market forecasts, such as this one from Grand View Research, predict that the global facial recognition market will nearly triple its worth in seven years—from $4.45 billion in 2021 to $12 billion in 2028. As GVR explains, “The market for facial recognition technology is growing enormously. … From its application in social media and mobile technology to security applications at airports, law enforcement, and targeted marketing campaigns, the deployment of facial recognition technology is inevitably part of our future.”
There were, however, witnesses at the July hearing, such as Jeramie Scott of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who were not so keen on a future of constant techno-surveillance. In his testimony Scott described facial recognition as a “dangerous surveillance technology” and said it poses “serious threats to our privacy and civil liberties.”
“CBP uses the technology heavily to track migrants along both sides of the U.S. southern and northern borders, and employs the technology at U.S. international and foreign airports, subjecting travelers to dangerous tools that sweep up massive data into U.S. databases with little scrutiny. The technology has an inherent racial, gender, and age bias, compounding existing discriminatory practices common among CBP and ICE agents.”
Facial recognition is but one component of a much larger border apparatus composed of walls, drones, armed agents, jails, and an expulsion system that regularly separates family members. It is difficult to separate the one from the other.
Franzblau also zoomed in on the border-industrial complex and stressed that it is vital for members of Congress “to closely examine the link between DHS employees and the surveillance tech industry. The revolving door between DHS officials and companies that benefit from the surveillance tech contracts fuels a toxic cycle of policy choices driven by profit over humanity.”
These links went undiscussed at the July hearing. Higgins did, however, ask what happens if the recognition technology makes an error. “And if for some reason [a traveler’s] image is not recognized or flagged with a false identity, they are pulled out of the line and go through a normal check of a human being. Is that correct?” he asked Tanciar.
“Yes, that is correct,” Tanciar replied. All would be fine was their consensus. Before Tanciar was hired at Pangiam in 2020, he worked at CBP’s biometric entry and exit program for four years. Like his boss McAleenan, he was a living example of the revolving door, in which CBP officials pass from public institutions to private corporations with ease, and presumably grease the wheels of the contract conveyor belt.
Pangiam claims that its technologies are “futureproofed,” because their artificial intelligence can replicate human intuition. It can protect you, the Pangiam website says, from “both today’s threats and, for the first time, the threats of tomorrow.” The border officer of the future is already here and it is public and private, human and automated, dystopic, and profitable.
Under intense pressure by states, activists and health institutions to respond to the spread of monkeypox, the Biden administration yesterday afternoon declared the new pandemic to be a public health emergency.
On Tuesday, Biden appointed Robert Fenton, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator for region nine, to be the national monkeypox coordinator. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who currently works at the Division of HIV Prevention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with clinical experience on health issues affecting the LGBTQIA+ communities, will serve as his deputy.
In an effort to appease public concern after weeks of official inaction and downplaying of the evolving crisis, the White House statement declared, “Fenton and Daskalakis combined have over four decades of experience in Federal emergency response and public health leadership, including overseeing the operations and implementation of key components of the Biden Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and leading local and Federal public health emergency efforts such as infectious disease control and HIV prevention.” In other words, they are the president’s men and can be called to do the White House’s bidding, not to bring monkeypox under control, but control the messaging on monkeypox.
Despite the World Health Organization’s declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) nearly two weeks ago, the White House had resisted making a similar announcement even though the three hardest hit states followed en suite—New York, Illinois and California—to declare a state of emergency to obtain much-needed federal resources.
Having mulled the issue of a national declaration for more than a week—during which the president was quarantined with a COVID-19 infection—the White House eventually acquiesced, although it carefully crafted the messaging to reassure the financial markets.
The administration claims it remains in control of these developments and informed the public that they have released monkeypox vaccines to affected regions and increased testing capacity to 80,000 per week, albeit only recently. Notably, unlike COVID-19, where the test kits had to be manufactured from scratch, these tests have been available in the US diagnostic arsenal for decades but had not been acted upon based on early assessments that the monkeypox outbreak would be limited and quickly disappear “like the flu.”
Testing and vaccination
Monkeypox testing is labor-intensive, requiring lab workers to swab the lesions, a risky procedure, then extract the virus DNA through multiple steps and amplify the genetic material through PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to obtain a result. The slow process takes two to three days for results while the patient waits. Additionally, such tests require a physician’s order.
A rash develops much later in the course of infection. After symptoms of fevers, aches, fatigue and enlarged lymph nodes, there is an incubation period of 2–3 weeks before the characteristic rash develops. Only then can a confirmatory test be conducted. However, as these rashes can be located anywhere on the body, it requires a heightened awareness of a monkeypox diagnosis on the part of health care workers. Since testing is a lagging indicator of community spread, contact tracing and isolation are critical in stemming the spread of infection.
As for post-exposure treatment, the vaccination of a person known to have been exposed to someone with a confirmed monkeypox infection must be carried out within three days of the exposure. There is limited data on the efficacy of the Jynneos vaccine in immunizing individuals against the monkeypox virus and even less information on using the current vaccine to treat people after they have been exposed. The guidance has been extrapolated from experience with smallpox, and a comprehensive review can be viewed here.
Figure 1: The graphic references several smallpox outbreaks and the timing of postexposure vaccination. Symptoms were prevented in 75 percent or more of those exposed when the vaccines were given within three days. Source: the journal Vaccine.
With the narrow clinical window in treating the exposed and delays inherent in confirmatory testing, a vaccination-only strategy is doomed to failure. Only implementing a broad-based contact tracing and isolation initiative, which must include the isolation of secondary contacts and an expanded ring vaccination program, which means the number needed to vaccinate grows exponentially to cover secondary contacts, can achieve the aim of eradication.
Additionally, patients with confirmed or suspected infection or exposure must also isolate for at least four to eight weeks until they are cleared of harboring the virus or the disease is allowed to run its course and they are no longer infectious. Depending on their symptoms, they need constant evaluation and monitoring by medical professionals.
How the monkeypox virus is transmitted
Perhaps an important consideration that has not had any serious and honest discussion in the media and by Federal public health officials is the potential airborne route of infection for monkeypox. There has been an insistence that infections occur predominately through prolonged contact exposure.
Dr. Donald Milton, a professor of Environmental health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health who is an internationally recognized expert on the aerobiology of respiratory viruses, has written extensively on the airborne nature of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 virus. He wrote a critical review article in 2012 on the implications of the mode of smallpox transmission for biodefense which is an essential read.
After an extensive analysis, he concluded, “Smallpox appears to have been most effectively and virulently transmitted by fine particle aerosols and therefore should be classified as an anisotropic infection, an infection where the route of transmission influences either virulence and or probability of infection, formerly called a ‘preferentially’ airborne infectious disease.”
He added, “Current recommendations for control of secondary smallpox infections emphasize transmission ‘by expelled droplets to close contacts (those within six to seven feet per CDC 2002, 2003). Recommendations include vigilant maintenance of standard, droplet, and airborne precautions. However, emphasis on spread via large droplets may reduce the vigilance with which more difficult airborne precautions are maintained.”
The precautionary principle is at play here, meaning that the best interests of the patient and public health require a scientific understanding of how the virus moves and how the various routes of transmission affect the severity of the disease. An assumption that infections occur only through prolonged contact with infected individuals raises the danger of furthering the community transmission of the virus, repeating the catastrophic failures already seen in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Without a coordinated effort to bring the expanding outbreak to an immediate end, the monkeypox pandemic could begin impacting the labor force and manufacturing in the next few months. A worker at Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Michigan recently informed the World Socialist Web Site that there had been a confirmed case of monkeypox at the plant, which the union and management are attempting to cover up.
The announcement of the appointment of Fenton and Daskalakis to coordinate a “strategy and operation to combat the current monkeypox outbreak, including equitably increasing the availability of tests, vaccinations, and treatments,” is nonsense. Given the experience with the failed and criminal policies allowing COVID-19 to spread unchecked, these statements are purely sentiments for political purposes.
Problems in vaccine production and storage
What is not being mentioned is that the shortage of vaccines is real, and the effort to ramp up manufacturing faces a bottleneck, with only a single pharmaceutical company in Denmark, Nordic Bavarian, able to produce the smallpox vaccine known in the US as Jynneos. What is apparent is that there is no clear and compelling strategy other than reaction down the line.
Worse, Jynneos (a non-replicating smallpox vaccine) and the second-generation vaccine ACAM2000 (a live smallpox virus) were manufactured for use against the possible reintroduction of smallpox in the event of bioterrorism or accidental lab spillover but have never been tested against monkeypox. MedPage Today wrote recently, “[N]o one knows how well the Jynneos vaccine will serve as a get-out-of-infection-free card.”
The much-quoted 85 percent effectiveness of smallpox vaccines against monkeypox is based on a very limited study conducted in Africa in the 1980s that showed cross-protection. However, MedPage noted, “One data expert calls its findings ‘pretty weak.’ Other studies have only been conducted in animals.” No studies have been undertaken on ACAM2000 and Jynneos. Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and response in New York, recently explained, “It is absolutely critical that public health officials work on messaging this uncertainty to people being vaccinated.”
Though the US has more than 100 million doses of ACAM2000 smallpox vaccines available, they have remained largely untouched. The vaccine needs to be injected into the skin using a two-pronged needle utilizing a series of jabs to provide a small dose of the live virus into the skin. Health care workers would require to be trained to do this. Evidence of vaccination involves the formation of a small abscess a week later for confirmation, and some may need another jab.
ACAM2000 can also severely compromise those who have an underlying immunocompromised state. The rare, dangerous side effects of ACAM2000 include a six in 1,000 chance of heart inflammation, with one or two people in a million expected to die. Jynneos was intended for this population of around 66 million eligible people in high-risk households, according to the New York Times. The vaccine is an injection administered in two doses four weeks apart, which was criticized as not being ideal in a bioterror attack.
In 2013, the US had around 20 million doses of Jynneos, previously known as Imvamune, sitting in freezers in the Strategic National Stockpiles. In 2015, another 8 million doses were added due to the three-year limit on their shelf life. However, federal agencies decided at the time to allow vaccine doses to expire without replenishing the stockpile as they waited for a freeze-dried version of the vaccine to be developed and approved, a process which has been dragging longer than expected. By the time monkeypox appeared in the US mid-May, only 2,400 usable doses were left in the stockpile.
The Times wrote, “From 2015 onward, the United States instead placed orders for hundreds of millions of dollars of bulk vaccine product—basically raw vaccine stored in large bags, which would be converted to freeze-dried doses once the company perfected the process and had the necessary FDA approval.”
The 300,000 doses of vaccines recently ordered were sitting in Denmark and had to be filled by a contractor and then shipped back to the US in batches in a wait-and-see approach taken by the administration. Due to strict temperature requirements, the Danish pharmaceutical firm has stored the bulk of 1.4 million doses ordered for the US.
Bavarian Nordic’s new fill-finish facility, which was up and running in 2021, has only recently been inspected by the FDA and greenlighted for fill and shipment. However, logistical details mean there will be continued delays in seeing large quantities of vaccines delivered to the US or any other country seeking to vaccinate their population.
As explained by a Bavarian Nordic spokesman, when an order is placed, the company has to receive a container known as a “cocoon” that has to be frozen to temperature for five days before the vaccines can be packed and shipped. Additionally, the recent airline strikes and flight delays have impacted the delivery of these vaccines.
According to the CDC, as of August 3, 2022, with more than 25,000 cases globally, 6,617 infections have been documented in the US. The global seven-day rolling average of daily monkeypox cases is presently at 1,200 and rising. For the US, that figure has reached 532 per day. Presently, New York state is the epicenter of the monkeypox pandemic in the US, with 1,666 total cases. California has recorded 826 cases, and Illinois, Texas, Florida and Georgia each have more than 500, indicating a broad geographic spread of the disease.
Figure 2: Seven-day rolling average of monkeypox cases in the United States. Source: data scientist Antonio Caramia.
The first case in the US was diagnosed on May 18, 2022. One month later, on June 16, cumulative cases surpassed 100. By July 13, cases surpassed 1,000. At the present rate, by mid-August, the cumulative figure will more than exceed 10,000 infections. The rapidity of the spread has caught the entire federal public health infrastructure off guard once again, despite the repeated calls by principled health experts about the burgeoning threat.
Despite the acclaimed rise in testing capacity, cases are climbing much faster. For such patients, a confirmatory test is required to access antivirals like tecovirimat, which was approved to treat smallpox disease in adults and children but can cause significant side effects. Meanwhile, as of this writing, the CDC has yet to make monkeypox a notifiable disease for states.
Additionally, the number of tests and their positivity rate have not been publicly available. This fact raises the question of whether contact tracing is being conducted earnestly. Caitlin Rivers, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Wired, “If we had those metrics, we would have a better understanding of how much of our existing capacity is being used and whether it’s reaching enough people to be able to say confidently that we’re finding cases.”
Even though most cases remain among men who have sex with men, the number of women infected is growing. For instance, in Indiana, the Department of Health reported that 20 percent of the 30 confirmed cases on July 22 were among women. The case count has risen to 45, and two children are among the infected.
Five children have thus far been confirmed with monkeypox in the US. These must be seen as sentinel events, a forewarning of the spread of monkeypox into more vulnerable populations, especially as the school year will soon see millions of children return to in-person classes.
The social issues raised by a second lethal pandemic are being suppressed by the likes of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who vehemently rejected any concerns over monkeypox during a recent press conference. He declared, “We are not doing fear, and we are not going to go out and try to rile people up and try to act like people can’t live their lives as they’ve normally been doing because of something.”
Given the last three years with COVID-19, it isn’t difficult to recognize that such sentiments will prevail within the corporate elite and its political servants in both capitalist parties. But there is scientific guidance that has been extrapolated from experience with smallpox, and a comprehensive review can be seen here.
A Russian court sentenced 31-year-old Brittney Griner, a star of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) in the United States, to nine years in a penal colony and a $16,400 fine on Thursday, based on charges that she had deliberately committed the crime of smuggling drugs into the country. Her lawyers announced that they will appeal the verdict.
Griner was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport on February 17, one week before the imperialist-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. In her luggage, the Russian police found less than 1 gram of cannabis oil (CBD). Griner pleaded guilty on the charges early in the trial, saying that she had made and regretted “an honest mistake.” She had been prescribed the cannabis oil for medical purposes in the US and claims to have accidentally included it in her luggage.
In court, she said, “I never meant to hurt anybody, I never meant to put in jeopardy the Russian population, I never meant to break any laws here. I know everybody keeps talking about political pawn and politics, but I hope that, that is far from this courtroom.”
WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner is escorted from a court room after her last words, in Khimki just outside Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. Closing arguments in Brittney Griner's cannabis possession case are set for Thursday, nearly six months after the American basketball star was arrested at a Moscow airport. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
The sentencing of Griner is cruel and completely out of proportion. The average time in jail for this type of crime in Russia, by itself grossly excessive, is only five years, and, according to one of Griner’s lawyers, almost a third of those convicted usually get parole.
There is no doubt that the Kremlin, in the midst of a proxy war against the US and other NATO powers in Ukraine, is seeking to make an example of the American athlete and use her as a pawn in negotiations with Washington.
For weeks, the White House has been negotiating a prisoner exchange with the Kremlin, involving not only Griner but also Paul Whelan, a US citizen and former Marine who was arrested in Moscow on espionage charges in 2018 and sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison.
In contrast to Griner, Paul Whelan is a highly dubious figure who has deep ties to the American military and intelligence apparatus. According to the White House, the US has made a “substantial offer” to the Kremlin to exchange Griner and Whelan for the Russian national Viktor Bout, who is serving a 25-year sentence in a US prison for arms trafficking.
The fact that Griner is black and a well-known advocate of the LGBTQ community is likely another motivating factor in the Kremlin’s decision to target her. For many years, the Kremlin-controlled media has engaged in an openly racist campaign against refugees and immigrants in both Russia and Europe, while many prominent commentators denounced the 2020 George Floyd protests from the right.
Members of the LGTBQ community in Russia are barred from marrying and displaying their relationships in public and are routinely vilified as “abnormal” in the media. With the war effort, this longstanding reactionary promotion of far-right Russian chauvinism and backwardness, as well as the crackdown on democratic rights, has assumed an evermore vicious character.
But as reactionary as the Kremlin’s sentencing of Griner is, workers must reject with contempt the campaign unleashed by the White House and its hangers-on in the media in response to the sentencing. In a statement, US President Joe Biden called the sentencing “unacceptable” and denounced Russia for “wrongfully detaining” Griner as well as Whelan. What nauseating hypocrisy!
The United States imprisons more people than any other country, the majority of them for drug offenses, many of them based on evidence just as flimsy and concocted as that against Griner. And it is Biden himself who made one of the largest contributions to this tidal wave of repression, sponsoring numerous “law-and-order” bills and shepherding them through the Senate during his years as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Internationally, the US has devastated entire societies in the Middle East and Africa with bombs, drone missiles and outright invasions, killing and maiming millions, and has deliberately provoked the current war with Russia over Ukraine which threatens mankind with a nuclear catastrophe.
The American military and intelligence apparatus are known to have cruelly tortured, illegally detained and assassinated countless civilians, including American citizens, over the past decades. No one can forget the hideous photos of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, stripped naked and forced to pose for celebratory photos with their captors, or the revelations about waterboarding and other crimes at CIA secret prisons.
The most important political prisoner in the world, the Australian-born publisher Julian Assange, has been illegally hounded and tortured at the behest of Washington for over a decade because he revealed some of the most heinous war crimes of US imperialism in the Middle East to the world population. Assange has been detained without charges in Belmarsh prison and is now set to be extradited to the US, where he faces a prison sentence of 175 years. After a British judge announced his extradition in late June, he was stripped naked and placed under suicide watch in an isolation cell, only the latest in a series of horrific attempts to torture him and effectively force his slow death in detention.
The government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe is intensifying its repressive actions amid growing opposition among workers and anti-government protesters.
Police mobilised at Parliament Road in Colombo May 6, 2022
* The president issued a gazette notification at midnight on Wednesday extending its repressive Essential Public Services Act (ESPA) which designates the supply of electricity, the supply and distribution of petroleum products and the health sector as essential services.
According to this draconian act, any employee in these sectors who does not attend work faces “conviction, after summary trial before a magistrate” and will be “liable to rigorous imprisonment” of two to five years and/or a fine of between 2,000 and 5,000 rupees ($US5–13).
The “movable and immoveable property” of those convicted can be seized by the state and his or her name “removed from any register maintained for profession or vocation.” It is also an offence for any person to “incite, induce or encourage any other person” to not attend work through a “physical act or by any speech or writing.”
These repressive measures are in force while the Trade Union Coordinating Centre, which comprises unions in the health, electricity and petroleum sectors, have announced a one-day protest on August 9 against the government’s crackdown on protesters. The unions have taken the decision to deflect the growing anger among workers over intolerable price rises and acute shortages and Wickremesinghe’s anti-democratic actions.
* On Wednesday evening, police arrested Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Ceylon Teachers’ Union (CTU), at the union’s head office. The police claimed the arrest was due to the violation of a court order banning a protest march near police headquarters on May 28. Fort magistrate Thilina Gamage yesterday ordered the union leader to be remanded until August 12.
Police also arrested the secretary of the Bank of Ceylon branch of the Ceylon Bank Employees Union, Dhananjaya Siriwardana, and its former branch president, Palitha Atampala. They were accused of forcibly entering the Presidential residence on July 13. Both union leaders were released on bail yesterday.
* The police yesterday issued an ultimatum to anti-government protesters who are still occupying one corner of the Galle Face Green to vacate the area before 5 p.m. today. The police notice read out to protesters yesterday stated that they were occupying the area illegally and faced legal action if they did not leave.
At a media conference, protesters declared they would not vacate the area and had filed a court appeal requesting a writ order to prevent police forcibly clearing the area.
On July 22, hundreds of heavily-armed police and a military contingent mounted an early morning attack to forcibly evict protesters occupying the Presidential Secretariat and the surrounding area. Many were injured and nine were arrested.
Last week protesters refused to leave Galle Face Green until Wickremesinghe steps down. They are now confined to a government-designated “protest site” in Galle Face Green.
These repressive measures come in the wake of raids by two police teams on the Colombo office of the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) last Friday. The police ignored the opposition of FSP members, claiming they were searching for the convener of the Inter-University Student Federation, Wasntha Mudalige.
According to the media, more than 100 protest activists have already been arrested by police and military squads.
Officers of the Department of Immigration Emigration have barged into the home of British social media activist Kayleigh Frazer on August 3 and confiscated her passport. Police accused her of supporting anti-government protests on her Facebook page. However, when questioned by the media, the officials declared that the “department is yet to determine whether she has violated her visa conditions.”
While the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) has fundamental political differences with the union leaders, the FSP and protest organisers, we unequivocally condemn all of these arrests and police actions.
The SEP warns working people that the Wickremesinghe regime is preparing a far broader repression against all opposition to its severe austerity measures that are creating enormous hardship and suffering. We call on workers and rural toilers to demand the immediate dropping of all charges and release of those arrested.
A protest organised on Galle Face Green on August 3 demanded an end to police repression and the current state of emergency, and the resignation of Ranil Wickremesinghe and his government. Another protest organised by the Trade Union and Mass Organisation (TUMO) yesterday called for the immediate release of Joseph Stalin, other trade union leaders and anti-government protestors.
The trade unions, however, bear political responsibility for opening the door to these police-state measures by deliberately limiting the strike movement that developed among workers in opposition to intolerable living conditions. In doing so, they gave the ruling class vital time to prepare its counter-offensive.
Millions of workers participated in the strikes of April 28, May 6 and then on May 10 and 11 against President Gotabhaya Rajapakse who fled the country on July 13 amid mass protests. The TUMO and Trade Union Coordinating Centre not only did all they could to limit the scope and duration of the strikes but sought to divert the movement into the dead-end of parliamentary manoeuvres.
Their demand for an “interim government” was completely in line with that of the opposition parties—the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). None of the parliamentary parties, however, have any fundamental disagreement with the anti-working class agenda of the Rajapakse and now Wickremesinghe government to force working people to pay for the deep economic crisis of capitalism.
In his policy statement to parliament on Wednesday, Wickremesinghe reiterated his determination to impose the savage austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While imposing a state of emergency and launching a police dragnet, he cynically declared that the government would allow “peaceful protests” at government-designated sites and would open a “hotline” for protesters to express their grievances to him.
This is nothing but a transparent façade for police-state repression. If the Wickremesinghe regime has not launched a full-scale crackdown on all opposition, it is only because the ruling class is extremely nervous about unleashing an eruption of opposition by workers and the rural poor. Wickremesinghe is testing the waters, denouncing more militant protesters as “fascists” and arresting them while preparing for far more savage police-state measures.
