The barbarity of Australian government’s detainee shackling laws

Mike Head

The Albanese Labor government is already facing three High Court challenges by refugees to the manacling legislation that it and the Liberal-National Coalition jointly rammed through both houses of parliament in just 12 hours on November 16. Further challenges are likely as well.

In a blatant bid to evade a November 8 High Court order to release immigration detainees who had been imprisoned indefinitely, the legislation suddenly inflicted a new form of indefinite detention. It imposed an unprecedented regime of electronic monitoring by ankle bracelets, curfews and other draconian restrictions on all the detainees, as well as some previously released, potentially for the rest of their lives.

The legal challenges highlight two key reactionary features of the bipartisan parliamentary operation to effectively defy the supreme court’s ruling. After sanctioning for three decades the shameful practice of indefinite incarceration of asylum seekers and other non-citizens denied visas, the court said it was unconstitutional, even according to the 1901 Australian Constitution’s extremely limited restrictions on arbitrary detention.

First, the challenges show the human face of the 145 released detainees, who have been deliberately demonised by the government, the Coalition and the corporate media. Many of them are innocent refugees. They have been falsely depicted as “murderers” and “rapists” in an effort to justify police-state measures, including the government’s proposed “preventative detention” bill to re-detain many of them.

In fact, two of the cases involve men who had been earlier released into the community, long before the High Court ruling, having been assessed by the immigration authorities and government as no threat to anyone. They are not alone. At least 21 of the detainees—all witch-hunted as hardened or “disgusting” criminals—had previously been released from detention facilities.

This occurred under both the current Labor government and the previous Morrison Coalition government, exposing the claims that the detainees were too dangerous to release.

Second, the speed with which the three cases have been brought forward underscores the readiness of the political establishment to overturn even minimal constitutional restraints. There is strong legal opinion that the shackling and curfew legislation is just as unlawful, and cruel, as the indefinite detention system which the Keating Labor government pioneered in 1992.

Similar challenges are inevitable to the as-yet unseen preventative detention bill that is aimed at greatly widening the power to detain people without charge. The government is nevertheless demanding that parliament pass the legislation with equal haste this week, proclaiming that parliament must keep sitting until it does so.

In one legal challenge, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) lodged a case on behalf of a 30-year-old Sudanese refugee who has been living in the community for nearly a year.

Despite his earlier release, the man has now been subjected to the same conditions—requiring him to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet “at all times” and follow a strict 10 pm to 6 am curfew. Any departures from these conditions, even for an hour, could mean five years’ imprisonment.

The refugee—identified only as RVJB—arrived in Australia at the age of 13 after fleeing war-torn Sudan. According to the ASRC’s media release, he struggled as a young man to adjust to life in Australia and recover from trauma without adequate support. At the age of just 18, he was convicted of an offence, for which he was punished, but has had no convictions since he was 22.

“After careful assessment, health experts, the [Immigration] Department, courts and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal have all positively remarked on his character, assessing that he was not a danger to the community, and observing he had ‘turned his life around.’

“Despite this, he was subjected to seven years of immigration detention by the Australian Government, including on the notorious Christmas Island, where his health deteriorated and he experienced further trauma.”

His son, mother, two brothers, sister and nieces are all citizens and permanent Australian residents. The immigration minister finally released him from detention a year ago, but the new restrictions “will prevent RVJB from playing an active role in his son’s life and finding employment, impact his health, and expose him to further detention.”

In the media release, RVJB explained: “I’ve been an Australian since I was 13. I made mistakes when I was young after fleeing trauma. I served my time, and learned about consequences the hard way. I’ve worked so hard to change myself and make something of my life and I’ve proved myself over years and years…

“The last time I saw my son, he was three months old. He starts high school next year. When I got my bridging visa, his mother and I planned a special visit. But I don’t want him to see me like this.”

A second case is that of a 37-year-old Afghan refugee who fled Afghanistan and arrived in Australia in 2011. Refugee Legal lawyer David Manne said his client was fined $2,000 for indecent assault while in detention, where he remained for the next 11 years.

“He was then released into community detention and for the next nine months he has been able to live in the community without an ankle bracelet or curfew,” Manne said. “He is also extremely remorseful for what he did in detention and hasn’t committed any further offence over the last 12 years.”

The third challenge, by a Chinese refugee known only as S151, was launched less than a week after the shackling law was rushed through parliament. He arrived in Australia in September 2001 on a student visa, progressing on to other visas. After serving a sentence for an undisclosed offence, he was thrown into indefinite immigration detention, despite being determined to be a refugee in danger of persecution, preventing removal to China.

These three challenges come in the aftermath of the November 8 High Court ruling that led to the release of 145 detainees. The court declared that a stateless Rohingya Muslim asylum seeker from Myanmar, identified in a dehumanising fashion only as NZYQ, had been unlawfully detained since May, when it became clear that he could not be deported.

NZYO had arrived in Australia by boat in 2012. He was locked in immigration detention until 2014 before being granted a temporary bridging visa. In 2016, he was convicted of a sexual offence against a child but had served his time by 2018, when he was placed back into immigration detention.

Even more damning cases are coming to light. Last Thursday, a Federal Court judge ordered the government to immediately free an Iranian asylum seeker, Ned Kelly Emeralds, who had spent a decade in immigration detention after arriving by boat in 2013, despite never committing an offence.

Emeralds had applied for a refugee protection visa, but his application was eventually rejected in 2018 on the basis he did not have a well-founded fear of returning to Iran.

Matthew Albert, Emeralds’ counsel, told the hearing his client had tried to kill himself in detention, vowing: “I will not go back to be tortured and killed by a regime I despise.” 

After the ruling, Emeralds said: “Over 10 years ago, I came to Australia to seek protection from torture in my country, and instead I was tortured. I had no way to escape. I could not go home, and the government chose not to release me. Nobody should be asked to choose between their life and their freedom. What happened to me should not have happened, and it should not happen to anyone else.”

Justice Geoffrey Kennett found Emeralds’ detention was unlawful because there was “no real prospect” of his deportation “becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future.” That is the narrow test applied by the High Court in the initial NZYO ruling, which still permits detention, or re-detention, if deportation becomes “reasonably foreseeable.”

Throughout what has become a political crisis over the detainees, the Labor government has led the way in slandering the detainees, and therefore refugees more generally. In fact, it has criticised the Coalition, especially opposition leader Peter Dutton, from the right.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil [Photo: Clare O’Neil MP]

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and other government ministers have branded Dutton as “weak” for releasing some detainees while he was home affairs minister in the previous Morrison government. They even accused him of protecting paedophiles by opposing an amendment last Monday to ban released “child sex offenders” from going near schools.

Dutton was actually demanding harsher measures, notably preventative detention, a reactionary proposal that the Labor government took up the next day when the High Court published its reasons for the NZYO ruling. The judges advised that detention could be reimposed via a preventive detention law.

Labor seized on that suggestion to again join hands with the Coalition to try to push through unprecedented measures this week, now to incarcerate people for what they might do in the future, according to the government’s police and intelligence agencies, not for any crime they have committed.

Israel resumes its genocidal assault on Gaza, targeting the southern strip

Thomas Scripps

Israel resumed its genocidal assault on Gaza Friday morning within minutes of the seven-day “operational pause” expiring. By the end of the day, at least 178 more Palestinians had been reported killed, and 589 injured. A woman and her son were killed in Lebanon by Israeli artillery fire, after shooting restarted across the border.

The Netanyahu government blamed Hamas for ending the truce—the latest in a long list of lies. Rocket fire into Israel, still unattributed, came only after Israel claimed that Hamas had failed to honour commitments to free all the women and children it was holding when it released eight hostages yesterday.

Palestinians look at destruction after the Israeli bombing In Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza Strip on December 1, 2023. [Photo: Mohammed Dahman/WSWS]

Hamas responded that there were no more such hostages to return. They had offered to hand over the bodies of a mother, Shiri Bibas, her 10-month-old son, Kfir, and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, who were killed by an Israeli bomb. “Hamas also offered to transfer the Bibas family’s bodies and release their father [Yarden] for their burial, along with two Zionist detainees,” it said in a statement, but Israeli authorities “remained unresponsive.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had already determined to resume military action, come what may, after repeated complaints that it was “losing momentum”. Citing Hamas’s supposed failure to uphold its side of the bargain was a transparent justification for doing so.

Only a day before, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had raved that Israel would “chase and destroy” its enemies “everywhere with the help of God.” The pretext for this outburst was an attack in Jerusalem in which two alleged Hamas members killed four people at a bus stop before they were fired on by an armed civilian and then killed by the IDF.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted that this proved he was correct to arm civilians with assault rifles. The “hero gunman” died Friday from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted by the IDF, who mistook him for an enemy combatant.

Netanyahu’s response made clear that what is planned in the name of eliminating Hamas is the ethnic cleansing not only of Gaza, but of the West Bank and Israel itself. “All Hamas terrorists will die—in Jerusalem, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and everywhere,” he thundered.

No secret is made of the brutal, criminal character of the second phase of the IDF’s assault now underway. Government spokesperson Eylon Levy told reporters thuggishly, “Having chosen to hold onto our women, Hamas will now take the mother of all thumpings.”

Reviewing the day’s slaughter, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, “The results are impressive. Hamas only understands force and therefore we will continue to act until we achieve the goals of the war.”

The destruction wrought in the north of the Gaza strip is now planned for the south, focusing on the city of Khan Yunis, where Israel claims Hamas is headquartered. Leaflets have been dropped on the city, which has already come under repeated and deadly attack, telling residents to evacuate and describing the area as a “dangerous battle zone”.

Given that the vast bulk of northern Gaza’s population is already crowded into the south—with 1.8 million of a 2.3 million total population displaced—there is nowhere to go. The IDF has told civilians to move towards the border with Egypt at Rafah, confirming fears that Israel is seeking to drive the Palestinians out of the strip entirely and into the Sinai desert.

Al Jazeera journalist Zoran Kusovac commented, “the south is now so overcrowded that there is a danger that an all-out ground assault from Israel might leave the people of Gaza with no option but to try to force their way across the border fence into Egypt.

“From the beginning of the conflict, Egypt has been warning that it would not accept any refugees, fearful of political destabilisation and security risks. If it is confronted with that reality, it might find itself in the worst-case scenario of having to use force.”

The humanitarian situation in Gaza was described by the World Health Organization as a “horror movie”. During the truce, roughly 150 trucks of aid entered the strip each day, less than a third of the 500 a day on average before October 7, and less even than the 200 a day believed necessary to meet the most basic needs of the population. Supplies have ground to a halt again with the resumption of the bombing.

International agencies have issued dire warnings. Speaking from the strip’s largest still-functioning hospital, shortly after an airstrike landed barely 50 metres away, UNICEF chief of communications James Elder asked, “Has humanity given up on the children of Gaza?

“I cannot overstate how the capacity has been reduced in hospitals over the last seven weeks. We cannot see more children with the wounds of war, with the burns, the shrapnel littering their body, with their broken bones. Inaction from those with influence is allowing the killing of children. This is a war on children.”

At al-Nasr hospital, International Red Cross surgeon Paul Ley warned, “We are already overwhelmed. There are something like 2,000 patients in a hospital built for 300, and over half need surgery. But we don’t have enough drugs, and insufficient anaesthetics. There is very little pain control and we have to use techniques that have been abandoned for many years because they are seen as dangerous.”

Head of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugee UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini referred to a “staggering human tragedy” and a “race against time…  already disease is becoming as much a threat as the bombardment.”

He described the south of Gaza as “completely overloaded… It simply cannot cater to so many people. Remember people from Gaza City and the north have been asked to go to the south because they were told the south would be safer. Yet a large proportion have been killed in the south.”

Condemning the “siege on an entire population” as “collective punishment”, he referred to the “one million people in UN installations, including 100,000 in the north… Their locations are known, and despite that, nearly 100 installations have been hit directly or indirectly.”

A joint investigation by Israeli outlets 972+ Mag and Local Call, published Thursday, confirmed the deliberate process used to carry out strikes on civilians in unprecedented numbers.

A source told the journalists, “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage.”

An artificial intelligence programme called “The Gospel” has been used to select targets, powering what one source called a “mass assassination factory,” with the “emphasis… on quantity and not on quality.” Reporting the story, the Guardian explained that the programme “was created to address a chronic problem for the IDF: in earlier operations in Gaza, the air force repeatedly ran out of targets to strike.”

At the start of the war, the head of the Israeli air force made a point of emphasising that in carrying out “around the clock airstrikes… We are not being surgical.”

The massacre in Gaza resumes with the continuing support of US and world imperialism. Speaking in Dubai, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken backed Israel’s lie that the pause “came to an end because of Hamas, Hamas reneged on the commitments it made.” He reiterated Washington’s “strong solidarity with Israel defending itself” while cynically insisting that it was doing “everything possible to protect civilians.”

CDC’s provisional US life expectancy and suicide rates for 2022: An indictment of the capitalist system

Benjamin Mateus

On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published two studies of the United States in 2022 that highlight the stark inequality that constitutes the social fabric of life for the working class: the provisional life expectancy estimates and the provisional estimates of suicide by demographic characteristics.

Life expectancy at birth, by sex in the United States, 2000-2022 [Photo: National center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System]

In the first study, life expectancy rose by a mere 1.1 years, from 76.4 years in 2021 to 77.5 years in 2022. This only partially offsets the 2.4 year drop in life expectancy during the first two years of the COVID pandemic, while in countries like Portugal, Belgium and Sweden, pandemic-related declines have been completely offset.

The gains were highest for the American Indian and Alaska Native category, which saw life expectancy climb from an abysmal 65.6 years to a still atrocious 67.9 years, or 6.5 years less than the rest of the country. Life expectancy for Blacks climbed from 71.2 to 72.8 years. Hispanics saw their life expectancy rise from 77.8 to 80, while non-Hispanic Whites saw life expectancy climb from 76.7 to 77.5. Asians, who have the highest life expectancy, had a one-year rise to 84.5.

The gains were not unexpected. After the 1918 Influenza pandemic, life expectancy leaped back to its previous trajectory. Similarly, the main factor in the current rises in life expectancy was significant declines (approximately 47 percent) in COVID-19-related deaths compared to the previous year, 2021.

Life expectancy in the United States, 1900-1960. Showing the impact of the 1918 infleunza pandemic [Photo: The Threat of Pandemic Influenza - Are We Ready, a workshop summary]

However, the fact that the gains barely made up for the declines during the height of the pandemic, exacerbated by the policy of mass infection, reflects the worsening of social conditions for the working class, despite the vast resources that could be used to address these conditions. The mainstream media obscures these social and class issues behind meaningless terms like “statistical incongruity.”

The death of 244,000 Americans from COVID-19 in 2022 was itself considerable and completely unnecessary, given the fact that the means to prevent these infections are well known and available to governments across the globe. The CDC and many in the media took pains to highlight that COVID had dropped to fourth place behind unintentional injuries as a leading cause of death in the US, meaning COVID remained behind cancer and heart disease for three years running.

Flags are placed on the lawn at a memorial for victims of COVID-19 at the Griffith Observatory, Friday, Nov. 19, 2021, in Los Angeles. [AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez]

Thus far in 2023, 60,000 people have died from COVID, while the public health system has continued to deteriorate. Under President Joe Biden, who promised to bring the pandemic to an end, more than 760,000 people have died, accounting for 67 percent of all those officially killed by COVID. This official figure is known to be a substantial under-count.

In short, the response of the White House to the pandemic punctuates the devastation brought on by the ruling elite’s starving of the social infrastructure in order to shore up its crumbling financial institutions. The US national debt has hit a staggering $33.8 trillion, up from $5.6 trillion in 2000, when the rate of gains in life expectancy for the working class began to turn downward.

Driving life expectancy down in 2022 were diseases such as Influenza and pneumonia, prenatal conditions, kidney disease and nutritional deficiencies. Deaths from heart disease, unintentional injuries, cancer and homicide slightly improved.

Contribution of leading causes of death to change in life expectancy in the United States, 2021-2022 [Photo: National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System]

The CDC’s focus on race in regard to life expectancy obscures the more fundamental class issues of poverty and economic inequality. By comparison, a recent report submitted to the Brookings Institution by leading Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton gives a conscientious account of the growing mortality gap, to a staggering 8.5 years, between Americans with and without a four-year college degree, a proxy for socioeconomic status. While those who have a four-year college degree saw life expectancy continue to climb at pace with Asian and Northern European countries, life expectancy for the working class in the US turned in 2010 and has continued to be in decline.

Adult life expectancy at 25 for Americans with a Bachelors Degree and without compared to 22 rich countries [Photo: Case and Deaton Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Conference Draft, September 28-29,2023]

A study published in June 2023 in the journal PNAS Nexus that assessed excess deaths in the US and comparative countries from 1933 to 2021 found that death rates began to diverge in the 1980s, accelerating in the last two decades. This staggering loss of life has been predominately borne by working people.

Age-standardized mortality trends in the United States versus other wealthy nations [Photo: PNAS Nexus]

The second report by the CDC, on provisional rates of suicide in the US, only substantiates the sharp decade in conditions faced by Americans. In 2022, 49,449 people committed suicide, the highest level the country has seen since 1941. Officials say this figure will continue to climb and possibly exceed 50,000 when all of 2022 is counted. The number of suicides carried out by means of firearms, 27,000, is the highest since at least 1968.

The data indicate that deaths of despair affect men disproportionately by a factor of four – 23.1 deaths for men and 5.9 deaths for women per 100,000 population. While rates among adolescent and working-age men and into retirement are similar, men over 75 are committing suicide at unprecedented rates. For women, the highest rates are among those between 25 and 65.

In conjunction with rising deaths of despair, there is a widening mortality gap between men (74.8 years) and women (80.2 years). This has grown from 4.8 years in 2010 to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest gap since 1996. In 2022 it slightly closed to 5.4 years. Besides suicide, COVID and the opioid crisis are factors affecting this trend.

A JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) report on this issue published in November noted:

Men experienced higher COVID-19 death rates for likely multifactorial reasons, including higher burden of comorbidities and differences in health behaviors and socioeconomic factors, such as labor force participation, incarceration, and homelessness. Differentially worsening mortality from diabetes, heart disease, homicide, and suicide underscores the twin crises of deaths from despair and firearm violence.

Professor Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, speaking with Scientific American, said of the findings in the JAMA report:

The trends that reflect more deaths among men and countervailing trends such as increased maternal mortality are happening in the US, which has a significantly higher mortality rate than its peer countries. The right starting point for asking why any particular group in the US has such high mortality has is to ask why the entire United States does.

She added,

The answer isn’t simple. Poverty, overwork, a lack of safety nets, a fragmented medical system, and daily stressors could all play a role. But the truth is probably something like “all of the above.”

World’s media conceal the brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails

Jean Shaoul

Amid their rejoicing over the release of some of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, the international and Israeli media have for the most part remained silent over the Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel and the appalling conditions of their arrest and detention.

To do otherwise would confirm that Israel is the aggressor in this one-sided conflict and that its mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Gaza builds on a record of unparalleled brutality against the Palestinians of a fascistic character.

The demand for the release of Palestinian prisoners was central to the al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7. Almost every Palestinian family in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has had a relative imprisoned by Israel. Their only crime was resisting an illegal occupation maintained through savage repression.

Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, center is supported by her mother after she was released from prison by Israel, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, early Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023. [AP Photo/Nasser Nasser]

As of Thursday evening, Israel had released 240 Palestinian prisoners in return for 99 civilian hostages, including 24 foreign nationals, bringing to 104 the number of civilians released (a further five had been freed earlier). A four-day truce was extended Monday for two days, and again Thursday for a further day.

Of the Palestinians released, all but a handful are women and children who have been kept in indefinitely renewable administrative detention, without charge, due process or trial, in breach of their human rights. Many were held in prisons inside Israel, not in the occupied West Bank, a war crime under the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute and in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Those released included:

• 22-year-old Ahed Tamimi, whose 2017 confrontation with Israeli soldiers made her a symbol of Palestinian resistance. Israel’s national security minister, the fascist Itamar Ben-Gvir, had personally ordered her arrest over a social media post that her family denies she had anything to do with. She had been held for three weeks in an Israeli prison, without charge or trial, under administrative detention order.
• Fatima Shahin had spent seven months in prison. Initially accused of attempting to murder an Israeli, she was never charged with any crime. She said she was denied access to a lawyer while in detention and to her family while she recovered from life-changing injuries caused by her arrest. She told CNN, “They accused me of carrying out a stabbing. It’s not true. They opened fire [at] me. I was hit in the spine with two bullets… I have partial paralysis. I cannot feel my legs or stand up.”
• 24-year-old Marah Bakeer was shot in 2015 twelve times by Israeli soldiers who alleged she had stabbed a soldier, an accusation she denied. She was left with permanent injuries and sentenced to eight years. She was due to be released in four months’ time.
• Shorouk Dwayatt was sentenced to 16 years for stabbing an Israeli and attempting to stab another in East Jerusalem in 2015 after one of the men accosted her and tried to pull off her headscarf before shooting her.
• 59-year-old Hanan Saleh al-Bargouthi, the oldest female prisoner to be released, was in indefinite Israeli custody without any charge.

The freed are on a list of 300 Palestinians published by Israel. All are branded “terrorists” when fewer than a quarter have been convicted of any crime and the vast majority are held on remand pending trial. The overwhelming majority are under 18, mostly teenage boys, although there is one teenage girl and 32 women. Five are as young as 14. Most are relatively new prisoners arrested in the last year or two.

As crowds went to Ofer prison near Ramallah in the West Bank to welcome the prisoners, the Israeli military warned them to keep back and then launched tear-gas canisters into the crowd. At the Beituniya checkpoint near Ramallah, where the Israeli authorities released a group of 24 women and 15 teenage boys, soldiers fired rubber bullets and tear gas.

Ben-Gvir ordered a crackdown on celebrations. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.”

Apprehension stalks the celebrations, with many fearful of rearrest. Following the 2011 Israel-Hamas agreement to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,027 prisoners, many were later rearrested and had their sentences reinstated.

B’tselem, the human rights group, says that in September, Israel was holding 4,764 Palestinians in prison on “security” grounds, including 176 from the Gaza Strip. Of these, 2,222 were serving a prison sentence; 1,117 had not yet been convicted in court; 1,310 were being held under administrative detention; and 115 were simply listed as “detainees.”

Israel was holding a further 932 Palestinians, eight from the Gaza Strip, for being in Israel illegally. Of these, 534 were serving a sentence while 398 were listed as “detainees.”

Many of these youths are seized in mass arrest operations in the dead of night, blindfolded and cuffed, abused and manipulated to confess to crimes they did not commit. Some are as young as 10. One child was so young his hands were too small for handcuffing, while another, the youngest, was too small for the prison uniforms.

In 2012, British legal experts concluded that the conditions the Palestinian children are subjected to amount to torture. In 2013, the United Nations agency for children UNICEF deplored “the ill treatment of children who come in contact with the military detention system, [which] appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” Earlier this year, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called for an end to “all forms of physical or psychological abuse of children during arrest, transit and waiting periods, and during interrogations.”

After October 7, the number of Palestinians in Israeli jails soared to more than 10,000 as part of Israel’s campaign of intimidation and terror aimed at driving the Palestinians out of the West Bank. The security forces swept up around 4,000 Palestinian labourers from Gaza with permits to work in Israel. They were detained in degrading and inhuman conditions for several weeks before being released back into Gaza to face bombardment, the loss of their families and homes and enforced shortages of food, fuel, electricity, water and sanitation.

Israel has also arrested 3,290 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Mostly detained in dawn raids on their homes for social media posts, the majority are being held in administrative detention. The “humanitarian pause” that started on Friday has seen no letup in the arrests, with Israel detaining nearly as many Palestinians as were released.

Prisons are full to overflowing and many must sleep on the floor without mattresses. Conditions have declined still further after October 7. Videos circulating on social media show Israeli soldiers beating, stepping on, abusing and humiliating Palestinian prisoners who are blindfolded, cuffed and stripped partially or entirely.

According to legal rights groups, the prison authorities also halted medical care for at least a week. They have stopped family and lawyer visits; slashed exercise time in the yard to less than an hour a day; restricted access to electricity and hot water; shut down the canteen where prisoners could buy basic supplies; conducted cell searches and removed electrical devices. They have suspended visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to the prisons where members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba force are being held.

Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military courts and are routinely denied counsel. They face language barriers and poor translations, while mistreatment, abuse and even torture during detention ensure that most prisoners plead guilty under a plea bargain, leading to a conviction rate of 95 to 99 percent. Appeals are rarely allowed. This is in stark contrast to the 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in their midst, who are free to attack the homes and property of Palestinians and even murder them.

Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said earlier this month, “Administrative detention is one of the key tools through which Israel has enforced its system of apartheid against Palestinians… Testimonies and video evidence also point to numerous incidents of torture and other ill-treatment by Israeli forces including severe beatings and deliberate humiliation of Palestinians who are detained in dire conditions.”

In 2012, a European parliamentary report described administrative detention as a tactic employed “principally to constrain Palestinian political activism.” In 2020, the then UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories Michael Lynk called on Israel to abolish the practice.

Israel can get away with this because it enjoys the support of all the imperialist powers that are now themselves slashing democratic rights and freedom of speech to suppress opposition to their domestic and foreign policies.

Henry Kissinger and the crimes of American imperialism

Patrick Martin

I met Murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy

A commentary in the liberal Jewish publication Forward suggests that these lines from Shelley, directed against Lord Castlereagh, the reactionary British foreign minister of his time, would apply equally well to Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, who turned 100 years old on Friday, May 27.

It is a more than justified comparison of two enemies of human freedom and social revolution. Castlereagh defended the British Empire and sought to suppress revolution in its colonies, especially Ireland, and destroy the legacy and influence of the French Revolution.

Kissinger has devoted his long life to the defense of American imperialism and the destruction of the legacy and influence of the Russian Revolution. He may have been born a German Jew and escaped the Holocaust when his family fled to America, but he allied himself with the very forces that had sponsored and cheered on Hitler, and which encouraged Hitler’s imitators in fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world.

As Kissinger once remarked—with the cynicism that became a trademark and passed for “wit” among his admirers in bourgeois political and media circles—“If it had not been for the accident of my birth, I would have been an antisemite.”

At a meeting of top Turkish and US officials in Ankara in 1975, after Kissinger suggested that the Nixon administration could arrange to have allies provide critical military supplies to Turkey after a congressional vote banned US aid, the US ambassador blurted out, “That is illegal.” 

Kissinger replied, “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [Laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”

The secret transcript of this meeting was only made available by WikiLeaks in 2011, 36 years later.

Kissinger’s crimes

Kissinger was directly in charge of US foreign policy as national security adviser and then as secretary of state from 1969 to 1976, a critical period of worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the working class and oppressed peoples. In every country where American imperialism intervened, either with military force or political subversion or propping up bloodstained dictatorships, he played a sinister role.

At least one million people died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the period of Kissinger’s direction of American policy, most of them killed by US bombs, incinerated by US napalm or poisoned by US chemicals like Agent Orange. Many were simply massacred by American troops even as Nixon and Kissinger voiced the usual lies about America defending “freedom” and “democracy” against communism.

The Nixon administration proclaimed a policy of “Vietnamization” and began the long-drawn-out process of negotiations with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. Throughout these seven years, American soldiers, nearly all draftees from the working class, continued to die, adding another 30,000 to the death toll.

The war crimes in Southeast Asia are innumerable, but the most important include the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the 1970 invasion of Cambodia that set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and the “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong, the major urban centers of North Vietnam.

In 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Kissinger and the chief North Vietnamese negotiator at the Paris talks, Le Duc Tho. Kissinger did not go to Norway to collect his award, fearful of the likely mass protests. Le Duc Tho refused his award altogether.

In Latin America, Kissinger oversaw a wave of military coups and the imposition of dictatorships, most notably in Chile in September 1973, when Augusto Pinochet launched his CIA-backed military overthrow of the reformist regime of Salvador Allende. It ended in the death of Allende and the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Chilean workers and political activists.

It was about Chile that Kissinger made one his most notorious and oft-quoted remarks, telling a meeting of the top secret 40 Committee before the 1970 Chilean elections, won by Allende, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He wrote later of the bloody 1973 coup, “The Chilean military had saved Chile from a totalitarian regime and the United States from an enemy.”

A tank in support of Gen. Augusto Pinochet approaches the government palace during the 1973 coup in Chile. [Photo by @goodvibes11111 / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Similar coups followed in Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, and these dictators joined forces with military regimes of longer standing in Brazil and Paraguay to mount Operation Condor, a joint venture of the region’s secret police and the American CIA to hunt down and kill revolutionary exiles and leftists of all kinds.

There were equally reactionary events in other parts of the world in which Kissinger is implicated: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975; the military slaughter in Bangladesh in 1971; US support and aid for dictatorial regimes in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran; US support for the ultra-right insurgencies against nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique; US backing for the Canberra Coup, which ousted the elected Labor Party government of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

In the Middle East, Kissinger helped stave off the military defeat of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, rushing huge volumes of military equipment to the Zionist state, and then bribed the Egyptian regime of Anwar Sadat to change sides in the Cold War and become an American rather than a Soviet client.

Kissinger’s legacy

In world geopolitics, Kissinger is most identified with the policy of taking advantage of the split between the Soviet Union and China, both under Stalinist rule, as these bureaucratic police states vied with each other for global influence, a reactionary nationalist conflict that even erupted into military clashes along the border between Chinese Manchuria and the Soviet Far East.

The central thrust of Kissinger’s simultaneous embrace of détente with Moscow and the ending of the decades-long US policy of non-recognition of Beijing was to enlist the aid of the Stalinists against revolutionary struggles in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. It is this policy which is the most celebrated in US imperialist circles and accounts for Kissinger’s ability to exert continued influence decades after he left office.

When the Nixon-Ford administration ended its eight years in office and Democrat Jimmy Carter entered the White House, he publicly pledged to make the defense of “human rights” the basis of US foreign policy. This was aimed at counteracting the stench of Kissinger’s crimes. However, nothing changed but the packaging. The crimes of American imperialism were now embellished with cynical references to the “humanitarian” concerns supposedly determining the actions of the CIA, Pentagon and State Department.

In later years, Kissinger’s accomplices in the Nixon-Ford administration constituted a who’s who of American war criminals. While Kissinger was secretary of state, George H. W. Bush, the future president, was CIA director. Donald Rumsfeld, White House chief of staff and then secretary of defense, returned to the Pentagon in 2001, where he oversaw US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Richard Cheney succeeded Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff, and in 2001 was vice president to George W. Bush and the principal warmonger in that administration.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to head a bipartisan commission to investigate, with a Democratic vice chair, former Senator George Mitchell. The congressional Democrats approved this arrangement, but public protests threatened to discredit the commission even before it could begin, and Kissinger had to step down.

As the WSWS noted at the time, “Selecting Kissinger to head this body amounts to an admission that the US government has much to hide in relation to September 11, and that the Bush administration, working in tandem with the congressional Democrats and the media, is determined to bury the truth.”

We also pointed out the growing notoriety of Kissinger internationally:

Kissinger can no longer travel freely in Europe and Latin America. He had to cancel a trip to Brazil last year because of human rights protests. He was sought for questioning by French police during a visit to Paris, in a case involving a French citizen murdered by the US-backed military dictatorship in Chile. He is the subject of lawsuits in Chile and the US for his role in the assassination of General Rene Schneider, the Chilean military commander whose elimination paved the way for the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Today this opprobrium is expressed on the internet, as the Washington Post noted in an article Sunday in its Style section, which cited the widespread social media preparation to celebrate Kissinger’s inevitable death and the overwhelming disgust and hatred for his crimes among millions of young people who were not even born when he headed the State Department.

For the most part, the media has been nervous about commenting on Kissinger’s 100 years, fearing the implications of any, even sanitized, review of his record. In a noteworthy and particularly guilty silence, the New York Times has not yet published an article on the subject.

It is a demonstration of how far to the right American foreign policy has moved that in recent years, Kissinger has been cited occasionally as a “moderate” critic of undue American aggressiveness, particularly in relation to China. (He is a fervent supporter of the war in Ukraine.) In his 2012 volume, On China, he warned that the US was adopting the same policy towards China as imperial Britain toward rising Germany in the period leading up to World War I, which made open military conflict inevitable.

There is no doubt, however, of the deeply reactionary character of his politics. In 1985, he publicly supported Ronald Reagan’s visit to a Waffen-SS military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where the US president laid a wreath.

In 1973, he made a revealing remark to Richard Nixon, after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who pressed him on the question of permitting Soviet Jews to leave the USSR (with the hope they would settle in Israel). The tape, made public only in 2010, has Kissinger declaring, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

A much earlier work, Necessity for Choice, published in 1961 when he was an academic “expert” on foreign policy at Harvard, sums up his world view: “No more urgent task confronts the free world than to separate itself from nostalgia from the period of its invulnerability and to face the stark reality of a revolutionary period.”

It is this hatred and fear of revolution and determination to crush it that underlies every crime with which the centenarian Kissinger—and the myriad imperialist politicians who consulted him, from John F. Kennedy to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—is identified.

While Kissinger’s criminality was of a particularly overt character, it set a standard for ruthlessness which has continued and indeed deepened in the subsequent development of American imperialism. It is in some way fitting that his 100th year on earth coincides with an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia that is bringing mankind to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

As for the present day representatives of American imperialism, they confront the “stark reality of a revolutionary period” ill equipped to do anything to contain it.

Incoming New Zealand government prepares sweeping attack on public education

John Braddock

On November 27, New Zealand’s conservative National Party leader Christopher Luxon was sworn in as prime minister after securing a coalition deal with two widely despised far-right parties, ACT and New Zealand First.

David Seymour and Christopher Luxon [Photo: ACT NZ, Finnish Government]

The coalition agreement brings into office the country’s most right-wing government in decades. Its task will be to make drastic cuts to public services and ramp up the exploitation of the working class while increasing military spending to prepare the country to join imperialist wars.

None of the parties has any significant popular support. National only got 38 percent of the votes, while ACT received 8.6 percent and NZ First just 6 percent. Amid widespread alienation from the entire parliamentary set-up, roughly one million eligible adults—one quarter—did not vote for anyone.

In line with the turn by ruling elites around the globe which are bringing far-right and fascistic formations into official politics, ACT and NZ First wield far more power than their paltry electoral support justifies. NZ First leader Winston Peters and ACT’s David Seymour share the position of deputy prime minister. Peters takes the crucial foreign affairs portfolio while Seymour becomes minister for regulation and associate minister of education, finance and health.

Seymour’s positions overseeing key sections of the public sector are a sharp warning to the entire working class. ACT is a “libertarian” big business mouthpiece that has long campaigned for reduced taxes, “smaller government,” less “red tape” and minimal employment protections.

In education, the government has adopted ACT’s policy of reintroducing privately-run, publicly funded Charter schools and NZ First’s reactionary policy of ending sex and gender education. Its so-called “back to basics” approach includes mandated teaching hours for reading, writing and maths, regular testing in Years 3 to 8, and a ban on students using mobile phones.

The promotion of Charter schools foreshadows an escalating privatisation agenda. Charter schools are free to operate outside the national system, setting their own curriculum, hours, staff requirements and pay rates.

Modelled on “for profit” schools in the United States, Charter Schools were first introduced in New Zealand in 2014 as part of ACT’s confidence and supply agreement with the then National Party government.

The original schools, numbering 12 by 2019, were deemed a “trial,” but warning signs quickly emerged. Among the first established was Vanguard Military Academy, based in north Auckland, operating on strict military-style discipline preparing students for the armed forces. It established a model for similar military and police “academies” in some 27 schools across the public system.

Māori entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to set up racially separatist schools under the rubric of education provided “by Māori for Māori.” These were promoted on the reactionary basis that the public system had “failed” Māori students in particular who are broadly disadvantaged by the capitalist class system.

In 2015 a Charter school at rural Whangaruru, which received a $1.6 million establishment grant from the government mostly used to buy a farm, was found to have “dysfunctional management” and was closed down by the Ministry of Education. Charter schools in the city of Whangarei unsuccessfully sought help from nearby public schools to help fill curriculum gaps. Many turned to the Ministry of Education for extra funding to cover financial shortfalls or mismanagement.

Charter school advocates falsely claim that they provide parents with “choice.” In fact, evidence from the US shows that parents lost the right to send their children to the nearest school because the for-profit schools carefully vetted their intakes and refused to take students who might require too much attention. The onus was on parents to find a school that would accept their child.

Due to widespread hostility in the working class and among teachers to the emerging privatised system, the Charter model was scrapped under the Labour government following the 2017 election, and the existing schools offered special deals to change into new “designated character” state schools.

The Charter model is now to be brought back, with the distinct difference that ACT proposes that any existing public school can apply to become a Charter school. They will be able to continue to receive state funding but also seek sponsorship and various deals with private enterprise while running as a stand-alone “business.”

The corporate sector will not only establish a direct foothold in determining education practices. Businesses will enrich themselves through ACT’s plan to do away with the national curriculum and establish a private sector “market,” in which schools purchase commercial teaching packages off the shelf, which writers can tender for in return for royalties.

The National-ACT coalition agreement also promises to “explore further options to increase school choice and expand access to integrated and independent schools including reviewing the independent school funding formula to reflect student numbers.” A vast funding increase is on the cards for the elite private schools and state-funded “integrated” religious schools to boost their numbers.

Underpinning the attack on public education is the myth that more parental “choice” is needed to deal with low-performing schools that are “failing” poorer students. Writing in Stuff on November 26, right-wing columnist Damien Grant decried “the single-payer model that consistently fails our children; especially those from under-resourced families who stand to gain the most.”

Charter school advocates have no interest in working class students, whose educational disadvantages are the product of broader class oppression within capitalist society. New Zealand already operates a two-class education system in which wealthy parents seeking to bypass the under-funded, under-resourced state system with its myriad problems can pay thousands of dollars to join the elite private school system.

Charter schools are a further step in the gutting and long-term running down of public education. The agenda builds on the “Tomorrow’s Schools” policy of competitive self-managing schools, introduced by Labour in 1989, which opened up a widening chasm between rich and poor schools, resulting in students from the poorest schools struggling against enormous odds to achieve academic success.

Additionally, thousands of students planning to start university in 2025 will have to fund their first year of study following a change insisted on by Peters. Since 2018, eligible students have been able to have their first year’s tuition funded by the government. The fund is available to first-time tertiary students and covers one year of study or two years of work-based training up to $12,000. Working class students finishing school next year will be hit hard by the change.

The teacher unions, the NZ Educational Institute (NZEI) and Post Primary Teachers’ Association, have either ignored or downplayed the new policies, thereby disarming both teachers and workers about the dangers. Neither union campaigned against them during the election, while NZEI this week complacently described Charter schools as a “weird, radical idea” that would not attract many applicants. Neither union has announced any campaign to fight them.

The wholesale assault on the social position of the working class and youth has sharply intensified the crisis facing all students. As the WSWS has noted, the “parental rights” and “school choice” campaign is “not an expansion of rights, but an Orwellian term for the destruction of the right to free, high-quality public education and culture.”