Biopower and Security

Julian Vigo

In The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (L’histoire de la sexualité, La volonté de savoir), Michel Foucault defines biopower as the practices engaged by the modern state to effect an “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (184). Developing his notion of biopower through the many exegeses of disciplinary power he studies throughout his career, Foucault focuses his interpretations of biopower on various styles of governments which have historically devised myriad controls of the body—be it in the areas of public health creation and regulation, heath crises and quarantine, military education, the creation of the mental hospital, the structure of the modern prison or the public policies which evolve discourses of the body and discourses of power onto the body:

[I]t is focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. (1976, 183)

Foucault suggests that the somatic, the individual body, is controlled as a means to dominating the general population. Maintaining that biopolitics were developed in the second half of the 18th century and were centered entirely on the body—its health, mortality and continuance—Foucault details this newly born power which has not replaced disciplinary power, but that was instead simply grafted onto disciplinary power, as he writes in “Society Must Be Defended” (Il faut défendre la société):

These are the phenomena that begin to be taken into account at the end of the eighteenth century, and they result in the development of a medicine whose main function will now be public hygiene, with institutions to coordinate medical care, centralize power, and normalize knowledge. And which also takes the form of campaigns to teach hygiene and to medicalize the population (1997, 217).

This distinction between biopower and disciplinary power is imperative to understand in moving forward through his various readings of power: Foucault reads disciplinary power as that which focusses upon people as individuals—subjects to train, teach, punish, surveil and utilize—whereas bio-power focuses on individuals as people—as a “species” to conglomerate, regulate, characterize, and ultimately forecast. Where disciplinary power focuses on particular individuals, Foucault sees biopower as that which focuses upon an extrapolated individual who can be serialized to the point of being interchangeable, repeatable and disappearable.

How does biopower function pragmatically and historically then? In an effort to bring Foucault to the everyday, which I strongly believe is a moral imperative inherent within his writings and life practices, I will mention briefly how biopower has manifested itself in recent history. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities outlines how in colonial Asia was literally amassed through the census: health programs which were established to regulate the population as a mass; the installation prenatal programs to influence birth rates; creation of the census to know the colonial population, and so forth. One of the effects of the British colonial census in Malaysia, for instance, was that the categories became more overtly and “exclusively racial” while religious identity was disappeared after the between the census of 1871 and 1901 while nationalities became “pseudoethnic subcategories,” such as Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and so forth (164-165). Anderson notes the reifying violences of bio-power in the colonizer’s will to homogenize identity:

These “identities,” imagined by the (confusedly) classifying mind of the colonial state, still awaited a reification which imperial administrative penetration would soon make possible. One notices in addition, the census makers’ passion for completeness and unambiguity. Hence their intolerance of multiple, politically “transvestite,” blurred, or changing identifications. Hence the weird subcategory, under each racial group, of “Others”—who, nonetheless, are absolutely not to be confused with other “Others.” The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions. (165-166)

Similarly, these mechanisms of governmentality were deployed in the 19th and 20th centuries by imperialists in many African nation from the creation of the census, health programs, maps, to the “preservation” of the “African past” through the building of museums. Indeed, we see this kind of polemic cast upon the people who are inserted and removed from discourses of nationhood in Canada whereby people paradoxically called “First Nations,” the Inuit and Métis are conveniently inserted or made invisible within the greater playing field biopolitics such as the special dates when independence and nationhood are “celebrated”—be it Canada Day or La Fête “nationale” du Québec. Such celebrations of nationalism are en masse artificial consolidations of identity which conterminously elide those voices and bodies which challenge these quite fictional constructions of national identity which are replete with historical ellipses and devoid of any autochthonous or immigrant presence within its historiography.

Though Foucault did not dedicate much time to studies of Empire or to discourses of nationalism and the body, his writing nonetheless lays the groundwork for studies of biopower in these contexts. For instance, the “testing” zones of various systems of organization were to be found in the colonies of the 19th and early 20th centuries as “French modernity” was displaced upon colonized bodies, architectural spaces and urban sites of modernity as discussed in Paul Rabinow’s French Modern; or the relationship between colonizer and colonized which “was fundamental to the colonial order of things” such that sexuality and race are not separable, nor are theoretical and historical insights to sexuality and the body as detailed in Ann Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (4); and of course the techno-politics of the modern state created by the interactions of sugar cane, malaria and discourses of nationalism in Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts. The epistemology and practices of biopower have retained their traces throughout the twentieth century through the present day and the violences of biopower cannot be overstated either domestically or abroad.

One of the most commonplaces manifestations of biopower from the latter half of the twentieth century through the present day is the production of virtual appearances and disappearances on the contemporary object of power—life and the body. Biopower, in its colonial and neocolonial exercises, has focussed upon the corporeal and the collective masses, bodies as populations, rendering the somatic visible or invisible depending upon the political circumstances or logistical feat. For instance biopower is manifested through seemingly innocuous acts such as the commonplace practice in which media underreports the numbers of counter-institutional protestors at political demonstrations or when the mediatization of these events render the visible bodies participating in such demonstrations as “misbehaving,” coding these bodies as dangerous, marginalizing these people from a possible legitimation within more centralized political discourses and praxis. Where Foucault sees biopower as a technology of control, the exercise of various techniques (and technologies) of authority onto the body, Negri and Hardt see biopower as that which implies resistance, that which “threatens us with death but also rules over life, producing and reproducing all aspects of society” (2004, 94) within “immaterial goods” such as knowledge and relationships:

Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it—every individual embraces and reactivates this power of his or her own accord. Its primary task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself. (2000, 24)

Hardt and Negri view a direct link between global capital and biopower which creates wealth and power for a few while individual control of the body is lost. Ultimately for Hardt and Negri biopower is the biological life and labor of the body, produced by the body, as exercised by the citizenry through manual labour and affective exercises (emotional, family, community). What I find essential in Hardt’s and Negri’s approach is their inclusion of “work” and “production” as factors in the quotidian practices of biopower, whereas for Foucault the somatic is immediate, always present and is often a product of biopower and the institutions that oversee its exercise.

I would suggest that both definitions of biopower are correct inasmuch as Negri and Hardt emphasize the productive value of the biological, emitted from the body outward, and Foucault stresses the institution as ontology in his many analyses of systems of power that effect the somatic: from the welfare state to Fordist controls of the body. It is this conterminous effective and affective body that contributes to biopower today such as the sequencing of the Human Genome and recombinant genetics, the pharmaceutical industry which has turned the female body into a laboratory for Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the male body into one continual and necessary erection, or biometrics which is quickly becoming a procedure that is adopted across governments and private industry. Foucault cites this control of biopolitics in “The Mesh of Power” (“Les mailles du pouvoir”):

Life has now become, from the 18th century onwards, an object of power. Life and the body. Once, there were only subjects, juridical subjects from whom one could take goods, life too, moreover. Now, there are bodies and populations. Power has become materialist. It ceases to be essentially juridical. It must deal with these real things that are bodies and life. Life enters into the domain of power. (2001, 1013)

Foucault views biopower quite differently than the classical vision of sovereignty in which juridical forms of power dominate — biopower is not a version of juridical power, though it is often based upon law or laws are made to reflect its force. Instead, biopower is a set of practices that politicize life by rendering life an object of science and of political intervention whereby power is exercised onto her body carrying a specifically anatomical and biological effect. To this extent, Foucault views biopower as the knowledge that can impact the species through organization and modification such that life can be conceived as both inside and outside human history. Ultimately Foucault opposes biopower to law in The History of Sexuality and “Society Must Be Defended” since his view is that life, not law, is the central issue of all political struggle even if the legal arena might seem to dominate: that the rights to happiness, freedom and so forth all derive from the body and not the juridical structures of sovereignty. Most interesting, however, is that for Foucault biopower continues to produce all forces that resist it, which in turn only extend its reach, like the function of subversion for Judith Butler, biopower is self-producing and self-contesting.

Yet, from the late 1970’s through the end of his life, beginning with The Birth of Biopolitics (Naissance de la bioplitique), Foucault makes another shift in his evaluation of power and in his strategic analysis of security through governmentality, specifically his critique of the liberal government and its power over life. Where Foucault views sovereign power as having the ability enforce power over life or death, exercising its power uniquely through violence. Yet, Foucault points out that since the 17th century, there has been a radical shift in how power is exercised as sovereign power was slowly replaced by bio-power. Biopower gradually replaced the sovereign right to take life, for instance, and instead this absolute control over life was obscured by the normalization of biological life and social technologies. Liberal governmentality aided this concern for biological life by engaging in the fiction of “nature” in order to shift its governmental practices towards newly emergent processes:
What matters is not whether or not this is legitimate in terms of law, but what its effects are and whether they are negative. It is then that the tax in question will be said to be illegitimate or, at any rate, to have no raison d’être. The economic question is always to be posed from within the field of governmental practice, not in terms of what may found it by right, but in terms of its effects… (17)

Here Foucault reflects upon how the government can be effective in terms of understanding these “natural” processes which it seeks to normalize while attempting to comprehend an entire range of relations within the social body (ie. between man and woman, tax officer and tax payer, doctor and patient, and so forth). These sorts of recognizable structural relations employ power in the everyday, yet Foucault’s notion of biopower takes such relations even further. He maintains that how we live within and outside these institutions has become an object of power and knowledge, something that needed to be controlled, even regulated, where the “power over life” upholds relationships of power today. Following from this relationship of power through various state institutions, Foucault recognizes that “nature” itself can be be manipulated by governmental practices putting into question the “natural” that political power disturbs: “What makes a government, despite its objectives, disrupt the naturalness specific to the objects it deals with and the operations it carries out?” (19). Foucault analyzes the relationship between “nature” and “governmentality” locating the governing force to turn subjects into free, neo-liberal individuals. It is here where see the birth of biopolitics as nature cannot be reconciled in terms of governmentality with each valence retaining its relative separation to the other, posing future questions of how juridical power might and can effect change in nature and how nature can affect juridical discourse.

And we see this type of contestation as Foucault attacks liberalism since its “jurisdiction” necessarily encroaches upon the “nature” of individual freedoms: “That is to say, the liberal art of government, is forced to determine the precise extent which and up to what point individual interest, that is to say individual interests insofar as they are different and possibly opposed to each other, constitute a danger for the interest of all” (67). Foucault continues to maintain, however, that liberalism’s danger is not so much univocally poised against the individual or the collective, but rather that liberalism must first and foremost respond to the “security strategies” that actually go against the very condition of liberalism itself:

The game of freedom and security is at the very heart of this new governmental reason whose general characteristics I have tried to describe. The problems of what I shall call the economy of power peculiar to liberalism are internally sustained, as it were, by this interplay of freedom and security.’ (67)

When individual will endangers mass markets or private enterprise, where factories must not pose dangers to its workers, the economy of power to which Foucault here refers, marks this juncture where the states right/obligation to “protect” threatens the freedoms of the individual. What is “natural” to this social order, once threatened, can unleash a series of arbitrations that actually provoke a confrontation between juridical power and biopower.

Certainly there are many instances when we see the absence of the juridic agencies and where power effects the body directly. Yet, there are so many instances today whereby we are not seeing a gradual dissolution of the role of the state, the institution, in the continuance of biopower, and instead we are seeing an increased interest in the production of biopower through the role of the state and private institutions often stepping in for the state. We see many historical instances where biopower is attempts to normalize or order as mentioned early and in recent years: Halliburton’s contractualization of war-torn Iraq to bring back “order;” the United States’ use of mercenaries in Iraq basically surrogating war through the security firm Blackwater; Bechtel’s unsuccessful attempt to dispossess Bolivians of their water resources in the late 1990’s; a series of right to die cases from the United States, to Switzerland, to Italy; and the long distance, video game-like manner of fighting “wars” through computers, drones and the more recent trend of outsourcing war through local, darker-skinned bodies (our future potential “enemies”). And at other times, biopower has historically rested within the realm of the legal as the disappeared body is absent and its past presence or its present absence could only be authenticated by the very legal frameworks of documents, testimonies and recorded data, such as the processes which have attempted to bring back the dead, the missing, the desaparecidos. What we notice more and more in recent years, however, is that in the name of security, nothing is sacred, not even the life that security ostensibly sets out to protect. And as a result today, even the legal references of biopower are changing and being overshadowed by other discourses (more on this below).

Foucault makes reference to this intersection of law and life detailed in “Society Must Be Defended” wherein he distinguishes the “juridical rule derived from sovereignty” from what he terms “natural rule.” For Foucault the idea of emancipation is displaced by another ideal of preserving sovereignty wherein juridical and medical discourses function to create a “society of normalization” (34-36). Certainly the twentieth century has already marked itself as an era where jurisprudence has become somewhat demoted by the current favor of media consensus and medical discourse regarding the “normalization” of the individual, whereby now the subject more commonly seeks affirmation and legitimation from the larger blogosphere or medical community. No longer is it the institution seeking out individuals to normalize, for there is neoliberal social nexus where individuals voluntarily seek out their legitimacy within the structures of various institutions. The body, part of this panorama of securitization, is now procured by the subject who seeks to consolidate her identity through institutional narratives of legitimation. In his study of biopolitics as well as The History of Sexuality, Foucault documents how power shifted in western society throughout modern history: from the Hobbesian theory of the sovereign right to kill to a new regime of biopower in which biological life became the object of political power and surveillance during the eighteenth century, where power implicated the control and the promotion of life. The state of security evidenced in the early twenty-first century, however, demonstrates a biopolitical structure which turns the surveillance of the body both inwards and outwards, from the subject to herself and towards others, where individual will and the good of society are not necessarily antithetical.

Later in the 1980’s Foucault maintains this dichotomization between individual will and the good of society wherein he summons the reader to dispense with the antediluvian dichotomies of domination and emancipation in favor of a subject who can function despite her limits simply because “historical ontology” enables this subject to constitute herself, to question herself, and ultimately to change in the face of power relations:

[T]he historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions? (“What is Enlightenment,” 576)

Reading Foucault’s conceptualization of the individual responsibility for herself requires the subject to adopt a posture of active engagement rather than one of passivity or of objectification in order to understand how “we constitute ourselves,” lending the active voice to traditionally passive manoeuvres in addressing power. This sort of challenge that Foucault offers, specifically his notion of critical ontology of ourselves, extends a Kantian critique of actualité within a philosophy that is neither concerned with telos nor origin, but one that is invested in locating the subject in the here and now. The ontology of ourselves, Foucault advocates, must disavow all projects that claim to be “global or radical,” adding: “In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality…has led to the return of the most dangerous traditions” (284). So while offering a voice to power, a maneuver that does not reify the subject at the very least, Foucault nonetheless acknowledges the problems of emancipatory narratives through which the subject can ostensibly liberate herself, while in fact such narratives, just like the homeomorphic surface of the Möbius strip, seemingly lead one back to the subject’s foundations of oppression.

So what is the factor which mediates between the individual’s freedom and the security of the people in an age when the body is produced by the techniques of power and likewise where this body reproduces or simulates these very techniques? Foucault continues this distinction between these two interests:

What, then, will be the principle of calculation for this cost of manufacturing freedom? The principle of calculation is what is called security. That is to say, liberalism, the liberal art of government, is forced to determine the precise extent to which and up to what point individual interest, that is to say individual interests insofar as they are different and possibly opposed to each other, constitute a danger for the interest of all (2004, 65-66).

Since the turn of this century, international political economies have focused upon questions of security, especially in the wake of September 11, 2001. More directly, the body has become the immediate focus being targeted by the liberal juridical powers in the United States among many countries in attempting to, as their political rhetoric states, “target terror.” In proclaiming a “war” against terror, the US government has created, more overtly than any other government—although many governments do participate in the Global War on Terror—a tactical agenda completely in line with Foucault’s notion of “security devices” (dispositifs sécuritaires) and biopolitics whereby the body becomes the tactical line of evidence and division as well the conterminous object and subject of his own atonement or redemption. The security strategies utilized throughout the Global War on Terror—and the Obama-rebranded “Overseas Contingency Operation”— hold the subject hostage because his body, once private, is now rendered public: his potential as a security “threat” is scrutinized against itself and the orbiting juridic, medical and mediatized discourses which judge it either more innocent, or more guilty. Inevitably, the body occupies this space of dédoublement wherein it is enciphered with the signs of race, citizenship, ethnicity, and even humanity, from within and from without—the subject is doubly inscribed through the mediatization of his “identity.” Distinguishing fictions from truths to include those of race or citizenship, for instance, do not concern the systems of biopower. Rather biopower effects a recreation of the recreated truth, albeit temporal, which generally suit the political climate of the moment.

Biopower is the bastard child of neoliberal societies which have created elaborate systems of surveillance to control the body in pursuit of securitizing culture. As we witnessed the involvement of medical, psychiatric and anthropological professionals during the last fourteen years of the United States’ War on Terror, the use of jurisprudence, medicine and social science has helped to create the body as political object, the body that necessitated being acted upon, being controlled, and even being locked away. The discourses of race and religion since 2001 quickly became conflated by various state apparati whereby the body as affect became part of the larger scope of racial, ethnic and religious profiling throughout the west. The barometer of tolerance was lowered and the biopolitical techniques used against the subject were excused in the name of the “greater good,” the securitization of the state and the protection of “our freedoms” against those who are, in the words of George W. Bush, “jealous of our freedoms.” The tautology is clear: “we” are an ideological threat to “them” because they covet our freedoms. This is a complete reversal of what is exercised in the War on Terror (ie. “they” are a physical/security threat to “us”). Yet this Manichean terrain of freedom/terrorism and security/threat functions on a purely facile and blind acceptance of racial profiling, religious allegiances, and xenophobia. Never was it put into question what these freedoms are (or even if “they” actually exist) nor if these ostensible freedoms to disciplinary and regulatory power might actually have real effects on the lives of others. Very rarely did our media and juridic structures analyze the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), also known as Special Registration, which focussed its surveillance on twenty-four predominantly Muslim nationalities requiring certain male non-citizens over the age of sixteen to register with Homeland Security. Everything down to the Muslim male body was re-naturalized and repositioned in the biopolitical theater where the recreated truth of the Muslim male was that of jealousy, danger, savagery, and inferiority. We have returned full circle to Edward Said’s orientalist analysis of Mohammadism, a purely western construct whose meaning had no resonance to Muslims. Fertilizer, a copy of the Qur’an, an accent, a video camera, or a prayer mat suddenly all became motives to search, sequester and detain, whilst the liberal citizens in whose name such racial profiling is carried out can be secured that indeed they are freer. The War on Terror evidences the most perverse and cynical of all possible self-fulfilling prophecies.

The extra-legal spaces created to control life—from myriad black sites, to Guantanamo Bay, to Abu Ghraib, to various prisons within the United States—all maintain the narrative of security, albeit unlawfully circumspect as arenas of political exception. The Muslim male body is made the surrogate for unlawful behavior, all in the name of security: his skin tone, his accent, his dress and manners, even when resembling that of the westerner, all render him immediately and always guilty. The suspension of the law in the name of “exception” has now become the norm and the body of the accused functions as a cultural synecdoche for the larger social body of Muslims. It is not at all surprising that the nude, duct taped body of John Walker Lindh, also known as “The American Taliban” or “Detainee 001” in the War on Terror, became the object of a mediatized vivisection, the terrorist body laid bare to demonstrate that terror can come from within, even from a nice, “all-American” boy from California. Is it in the least shocking that John Walker Lindh did not take part in terrorist activities as he remains locked up in an Indiana prison for another seven years while the government which actually did aid the Taliban, United States, to the tune of at least $43 million has through the present day remained conspicuously uninvestigated?

It is axiomatic that this War on Terror, almost in its fifteenth year, has nothing to do with investigating or stopping “terror.” Instead the Global War on Terror thrives upon constructing and disseminating innumerable fictions of perceived terrorist acts and terrorist bodies whilst abstracting a panorama of violence that will unceasingly be impossible to defeat both domestically and abroad. Ultimately, the War on Terror can never end. The nature of biopower in the context of state security today is two-fold: first, to de-personify the object of western violence while humanizing the western pathos of the Global War on Terror; second, to re-create the enemy, re-embodied and pre-packaged as the Muslim “terrorist.” In this way, biopower functions to place focus on the body of the individual over the act, such as Foucault’s discussion of capital punishment which invokes less “the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal…One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others” (1976, 138). Given the focus on the Muslim male body in contemporary western politics and the various behavioral typologies set up through the discourses of biopower today, it is not at all surprising that David Bruck is basing the defense of his client, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, upon convincing the jury through photos of the “unrelenting punishment” of the ADX Supermax facility (known as a “clean version of hell”) while leaning heavily on western stereotypes of the Muslim male who, once executed, would necessarily become shahid (a martyr). In order for Tsarnaev to escape death, he must paradoxically be proven to be the stereotypical Muslim terrorist who will suffer more and achieve less fame in life than in death, rather than be shown as yet another angry man whose acts of murder might just speak to the larger issues of male violence the world over.

Fracking linked to earthquakes and increased levels of radon in homes

Philip Guelpa

A newly released study indicates that a significant correlation exists between areas where fracking (high volume hydraulic fracturing combined with horizontal directional drilling used to extract oil and natural gas from shale deposits) is taking place and elevated levels of radon.

Radon is an odorless, colorless radioactive gas, a known carcinogen, which accumulates in homes and commercial buildings. It is a radioactive decomposition product of radium-226, and is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking.

The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, was conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and Johns Hopkins University.

In a separate study, government researchers identified a statistically significant correlation between increased seismic activity and the proximity of injection wells used to dispose of huge quantities of contaminated fracking wastewater.

Neither of these findings is entirely surprising. It has been known for years that the fracking process employs huge quantities of water and a witch’s brew of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals to break open the shale bedrock in order to release oil and natural gas trapped within. It is also known that, in addition to the hydrocarbons, the resulting wastewater “backflow” may also bring up harmful heavy metals and radioactive materials. However, the industry and its political supporters have consistently denied that this is of concern.

The findings regarding radon are based on analysis of over 860,000 measurements taken in Pennsylvania homes and other buildings from 1989 to 2013. Levels of radon began to increase noticeably in 2004 as fracking activity intensified. Between 2005 and 2013, 7,469 fracking wells were drilled in the state.

Radium is a naturally occurring inclusion in the shale deposits being fracked. As it decomposes into radon gas, it normally travels to the surface in varying quantities and can accumulate in building basements, posing a health danger to the occupants. However, the significant increase in radon levels in recent years correlated with the expansion of fracking strongly suggests a cause and effect relationship, posing a marked increase in health risk.

Joan Casey of University of California Berkeley, a coauthor of the study, said in a statement released by Johns Hopkins University that, “By drilling 7,000 holes in the ground, the fracking industry may have changed the geology and created new pathways for radon to rise to the surface.”

Among the study’s findings was that radon concentrations were 21 percent higher in buildings that used well water as compared to municipal sources. Buildings in rural areas where fracking is prevalent were found to have radon in concentrations 39 percent higher than those in urban areas, where fracking is not taking place.

Radon has a half-life of about four days. Within 20 days it has lost 95 percent of its radioactivity. Therefore, the source of radon contamination must be in close proximity to the locations where increased levels have been found.

The new study contradicts earlier findings by Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, published in January, that there is “little potential for additional radon exposure to the public” due to fracking. Last fall, earlier DEP studies downplaying the dangers of fracking were brought into question when it was revealed that they omitted measurements on many important contaminants. Given that the state’s politicians are heavily supportive of fracking, the latest DEP study must be viewed as suspect. The reliability of the UC/Johns Hopkins results is bolstered by the very large sample size of the data used and the fact that the source of the data is the DEP itself.

Another study, published last October, using data from five states, found elevated levels of eight toxic chemicals near fracking sites. These included benzene and formaldehyde, both known carcinogens. And, a September study by the National Institutes of Health found that Pennsylvanians who live close to natural gas wells are twice as likely to report skin and respiratory problems as residents who live farther away.

Not only does fracking pose dangers stemming from the release of toxic and radioactive materials, but the disposal of the huge quantities of contaminated wastewater that result is also a major problem. Treating this effluent to make it safe to return to the environment is technically difficult and expensive. Most sewage treatment plants are not capable of accomplishing this task. Therefore, the industry employs various methods to make the waste “disappear.”

One favored method is the injection of the fracking fluid deep underground, where it is supposedly “sequestered,” preventing environmental contamination. In Oklahoma, more than 50 billion gallons of wastewater went into disposal wells in 2013 alone, according to the Oklahoma Geological Survey. Not only does this make the water unavailable for future use, an especially troublesome problem for arid areas, but it is becoming increasingly evident that introducing large quantities of water under pressure into geologic formations where it did not formerly exist is resulting in seismic disturbances—earthquakes.

A study by the US Geological Survey, released last Thursday, demonstrates a clear correlation between the increasing frequency of earthquakes and the injection well disposal of fracking wastewater. In Oklahoma, the hardest-hit state, earthquakes are hundreds of time more likely than they were a few years ago, before the underground disposal began. Elevated seismic activity associated with this practice was found in eight other states as well.

According to the report, Oklahoma is now experiencing quakes of magnitude 3 or greater at the rate of one or two a day. Previously, such events occurred there only once or twice per year. The state government has been forced to publicly acknowledge the link between the increased seismic activity and fracking wastewater injection wells.

This comes after years of denials by industry and government representatives across the country. There has been only limited regulation of fracking fluid disposal using this method. In 1988 the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cited a loophole in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) which regulates hazardous and solid waste, exempting the waste from oil and gas exploration, development, and production from oversight, leaving responsibility to even weaker or nonexistent state regulations.

Earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater are capable of producing structural damage. In 2011, Oklahoma experience a magnitude 5.6 quake, which is the largest yet recorded that can be linked to fracking wastewater disposal. The cumulative effect of increasing numbers of disposal wells, especially when concentrated in close proximity appears to increase not only the frequency but also the intensity of such events.

Estimates suggest that quakes of magnitudes up to 7 or 8 could result from this practice. This is within the range of naturally occurring tremors that caused major damage. For example, the 1995 Los Angeles earthquake reached 6.7 and the San Francisco quake of 1989 measured 6.9.

Further confirmation of the link between well disposal and earthquakes comes from the observation that in the few areas where this practice has been halted, the frequency of quakes has dropped dramatically.

The Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC), a state regulatory agency, stated in an official report, “The commission finds increased seismic activity constitutes an immediate danger to the public health, safety and welfare. The commission finds damage may result if immediate action is not taken.” However, in deference to the power of the petroleum industry, the order is limited to areas where an increase in earthquake activity has already been observed.

The influence of the industry over state regulators is illustrated by a recently revealed incident in Oklahoma. As shown by emails obtained under the freedom of information law, the state seismologist, Austin Holland, was summoned to a meeting in 2013 with Oklahoma City-based oil and gas tycoon Harold Hamm. Hamm, who has been called the founding father of the US fracking boom, expressed his “concern” that earthquakes were being linked to the fracking process. Holland indicated that meeting was “intimidating.” This was reportedly at least the second such meeting with industry executives.

The pattern seen emerging from multiple efforts by a variety of researchers consistently points to one conclusion: the combination of high-volume hydraulic fracturing and horizontal directional drilling used to extract oil and natural gas from shale deposits, as currently practiced, poses a marked and immediate danger to human health and the environment. Despite persistent industry claims to the contrary, the process itself and the resulting waste create safety hazards.

Leakage and spillage expose humans, both industry workers and residents in nearby communities, as well as plants and animals in the environment, to carcinogens and other toxic materials at unsafe concentrations. Furthermore, tremendous quantities of water, contaminated by the fracking process, are difficult or impossible to safely return to the environment. Efforts to sequester the wastewater by injection deep underground not only remove it from any further practical use, a concern especially in more arid regions, but also causes increasingly dangerous earthquakes.

The vast proliferation of fracking in the US, where it is currently being conducted in 18 states, and increasingly around the world, is driven by a combination of the unfettered drive for profit by energy companies and increasing geopolitical rivalries without regard to the consequences.

Australian Federal Police defend decision to expose “Bali 9” to Indonesian death penalty

Mike Head

At an hour-long media conference yesterday, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Andrew Colvin and two deputy commissioners defended, in the face of public anger, the AFP’s decision in 2005 to place young suspected Australian drug couriers in the hands of the Indonesian authorities in the “full knowledge” that they could face the death penalty.

Colvin refused to apologise for the AFP’s decision, which led directly to last week’s brutal execution by firing squad of two Australian citizens—Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran—and declared that the “harsh reality” was that the AFP would do the same again in the future.

The media conference was an attempt at damage control, breaking the AFP’s silence in response to the justified outrage of Australian workers and young people at the killing of Chan and Sukumaran, along with six others—four Nigerians, a Brazilian and an Indonesian—who were all refused clemency by Indonesian President Joko Widodo.

What emerged from the media event, however, were blunt declarations to justify the AFP’s actions, combined with efforts to whitewash the actual role of the AFP.

“No, I don’t believe we owe them [the families of the Bali 9] an apology,” Colvin stated in response to a journalist’s question. “We can’t apologise for the role that we have to try and stop illicit drugs from coming into this community.” Earlier, Colvin emphasised: “This is the harsh reality for Australians who go overseas and become involved in serious crimes.”

Colvin effectively took the same line as Widodo, who has set a quota of 20 executions this year, on the supposed basis of combatting drug addiction in Indonesia, in a bid to cultivate a base of support among a right-wing nationalist and Islamist constituency. In reality, the widespread drug problems in Indonesia, Australia and globally are rooted in deep social crises, and definite corporate interests.

The wealthy business operators, who dominate the multi-billion dollar drug trade internationally in cahoots with elements of the police, remain immune from arrest. They prey on the desperate situations of the poor, usually young people, who act as couriers. Despite claiming that the Bali 9 arrests allowed police to crack a “major syndicate,” Colvin refused to deny journalists’ assertions that the syndicate’s suspected “kingpins” remain at large.

Colvin stressed the alleged necessity for the AFP to collaborate closely with police forces around the world, regardless of whether they retain the death penalty. He refused to provide details of which countries were involved, but pointedly stated that they included “some of our most significant partners like the US.”

Deputy Commissioner Leanne Close revealed that in the past three years alone, the AFP had received requests for information “more than” 250 times “in relation to matters that may involve the death penalty” and only refused “about 15” requests.

The AFP chiefs sought to counter the continued objections of Lee Rush, the father of one of the Bali 9, Scott Rush, that he alerted the AFP to the drug smuggling plan before the group left Australia for Bali, and was reassured that his son would be prevented from departing. Instead, the AFP handed his information over to the Indonesian authorities, and advised them to “take what action they deem appropriate.”

Colvin and Deputy Commissioner Michael Phelan insisted that they already had intelligence on the Bali 9 group, and therefore did not rely solely on Lee Rush’s anguished bid to stop his son from taking part. Yet the commissioners also claimed that the AFP lacked the evidence needed to prevent any of the group departing from Australia.

This is clearly false. AFP affidavits tendered for a failed 2006 Federal Court challenge by Lee Rush confirmed that the police had the power to stop his son at the airport because he was on bail at the time and barred from leaving Australia. In fact, an AFP officer created a PACE “passport” alert to halt Scott Rush’s departure.

In order to divert from this evidence, Phelan yesterday claimed that Rush was “linked” to two further travel alerts as well, based on other police intelligence. Phelan inexplicably insisted none of these alerts authorised the AFP to actually stop anyone from departing.

The Federal Court backed the AFP in refusing to disclose any of the documents showing how and why those decisions were made, including a secret “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Government of Australia on Combating Transnational Crime and Developing Police Cooperation.”

Clearly, a calculated decision was made to place the group in the hands of the Indonesian regime. Phelan declared: “We understood—and I’ll be clear, and I’ve been saying this now for the best part of ten years—that decision was made in the full knowledge that we may very well be exposing those individuals to the death penalty. I’ve said that before and it’s not a position that the AFP has stepped away from.”

The commissioners made clear that today’s AFP guidelines remain practically the same as those in place in 2005. They said the only differences were that a senior officer must now make a “case-by-case” assessment and that ministerial approval is required where a person is being detained, arrested, charged or convicted with an offence that carries the death penalty. In the past, ministerial approval was only required where a person was already charged and convicted. This adjustment increases the involvement of governments in such decisions.

Commissioner Colvin denied that the Bali 9 suspects were sacrificed in the interests of bolstering relations with the Indonesian security agencies. “The idea that we shopped these Australians into this situation because we wanted to try and curry favour in relation to other investigations is fanciful and offensive,” he declared.

In reality, the AFP’s actions were backed by both the Howard government and the Labor Party opposition, in the interests of strengthening strategic and military ties with the Indonesian administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, which had been strained by Australia’s 1999 military intervention into East Timor to secure control of the breakaway Indonesian province’s oil and gas resources.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer lauded the Yudhoyono government in 2006 after four of the Bali 9’s sentences were increased to the death penalty. “We actually urged the Indonesians to be tough on drug trafficking,” he stated. “We are grateful to the Indonesians for being tough on drugs; it’s just that we don’t support capital punishment.” Following Downer’s comments, Labor Party leader Kim Beazley backed the government and the AFP. “We are in the business of supporting them,” he said.

Today, the crocodile tears of the Abbott government and the Labor opposition over the fate of Chan and Sukumaran, are just as cynical and hypocritical. Last Friday, three days after the men were executed, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop stated: “It’s time for us to seek to move on … I think we need to look at the long-term future of the relationship.” Prime Minister Tony Abbott endorsed her remarks a day later.

Today’s editorial in the Australian also sought to “move on.” After praising the AFP for supposedly “clearing the air” about the Bali 9 case, it declared that the AFP’s conduct in 2005 had “the legitimate effect of helping to bolster co-operation between law enforcement agencies in both nations.”

These responses point to the major strategic considerations involved. For Canberra’s political and security establishment, and its partners in Washington, Indonesia is a crucial linch pin in the US military and economic “pivot” to Asia to encircle and confront China.

Two years since the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh

Sarath Kumara

None of the fundamental issues that led to the Rana Plaza disaster and the deaths of over 1,120 people and the wounding of 2,400 others have been addressed in the two years since Bangladesh’s worst industrial disaster.

Rana Plaza, an eight-storey sub-standard building that housed five garment factories at Savar, just outside Dhaka, collapsed on April 24, 2013. No worker would have been killed or injured if garment company managers had not forced reluctant employees back into the building, which had begun showing serious structural cracks a day earlier.

Rana Plaza, in fact, was a catastrophe waiting to happen, highlighting the deadly conditions facing approximately 4.5 million workers in nearly 5,000 factories in Bangladesh.

Facing international outrage over the tragedy, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina and local garment manufacturers, as well as giant US and European retailers, promised to improve working and safety conditions, and increase wages. These promises were worthless. There has been no real change in industrial safety. The brutal exploitation of Bangladeshi workers continues unabated.

In February this year, a fire in five-storey plastics factory in Dhaka killed 13 workers. In March, at least six workers died when a building extension under construction in Mongla collapsed. While these disasters did not occur in garment factories, they show that the government’s “concerns” about apparel workers and industrial safety were public relations exercises.

No one has been convicted for the Rana Plaza disaster even though the building owner Sohel Rana—a regional leader of the ruling Awami League—declared the building safe after cracks had appeared. Two cases were filed against Rana under the criminal code and building construction legislation, but three charge sheets on these cases have not been acted upon.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) and other groups estimated that $US30 million was needed to compensate survivors and relatives of those killed in the disaster. Several major retailers agreed to contribute to this meagre fund, but 14 companies, including Li Copper, JC Penney and Carrefour, refused to pay anything.

The US giant Wal-Mart contributed just $1 million. Benetton, an Italian company with a €1.6 billion turnover in 2013 and 6,000 stores internationally, recently paid $1.1 million but only after an online petition of more than a million people demanded that it contribute. Two years on, only $23 million has been paid into the fund.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently noted that the compensation paid to survivors was “not sufficient to pay their medical bills and cover their loss of livelihood.” Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) reported that although the Bangladesh government has collected around $16 million to compensate workers, only $2.48 million has been distributed to the victims.

The Bangladesh government has denied these figures but Syed Sultanuddin Ahmed, a senior official of the Bangladesh Institute of Labor Studies, told the media it was “absolutely frustrating and unacceptable” that many victims were “still waiting for compensation and rehabilitation.” Centre for Policy Dialogue research director Khondaker G. Moazzem said: “Many of the injured victims are still suffering from various kinds of physical and mental problems ... many of them are constrained by inadequate financial capacities.”

One victim, Jasmin, who was hospitalised for five months because her spinal cord was snapped, has only received 60,000 taka ($US771). Her monthly wage was 100,000 taka. Jasmin spends 3,000–4,000 taka per month for medical treatment. A survey by Action Aid, an international development organisation, reported that about 55 percent of Rana Plaza survivors are still unemployed, many due to physical inability, trauma or a lack of suitable jobs.

Contrary to Bangladesh government claims that it would increase the number of factory inspections, only 1,200 plants have been investigated. Factories owned by sub-contractors will not be examined.

Workers, however, are paying the price for the safety investigations with hundreds of job losses. About 200 small- and medium-level factories have been shut down because they lacked proper safety measures. According to TIB, one-fifth of the apparel workers now face the risk of losing their jobs.

In December 2013, the Awami League government agreed to a $68 minimum monthly wage, one of the lowest in the world and comparable to rates in Vietnam, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The increase was far short of workers’ demand for $104 per month.

Last month, TIB reported that while 95 percent of factories implemented the new wage levels, the increase was accompanied by a ruthless productivity drive. “Most compliant factories are putting 60 percent additional production targets on workers, terminating workers at helper level without any legal recourse, harassing workers engaged in collective bargaining and union activity, and dismissing workers,” it reported. Ninety percent of sub-contracting companies were not paying according to Bangladesh wage board regulations, it noted.

TIB also said the peak employer lobby group, the Bangladesh Garment Manufactures & Exporters Association (BGMEA), which has considerable political influence in Bangladesh, has been able to increase the legal overtime period by four hours and delay implementation of new fire-safety regulations.

A recent HRW report entitled, “Whoever Raises their Head Suffers the Most,” detailed on-going abuse in the garment industry. Based on interviews with more than 160 workers from 44 factories, it stated that workers are forced to do overtime and denied paid maternity leave, while employers “fail to pay wages and bonuses on time or in full.”

HRW cited several incidents where companies used brute force to prevent the establishment of trade unions. Only 10 percent of the garment factories allow unions. HRW called on the Bangladesh government and employers to allow union coverage.

An opinion piece by US Ambassador to Bangladesh Marcia Bernicat, published on BDNews24 in February, stated: “We encourage the government to ensure these unions’ members are able to exercise their legal right to collectively bargain, free from the fear that they will be fired or harassed, and that illegal retaliation will be dealt with quickly.”

While many Bangladeshi companies regard the trade unions as barriers to further labour exploitation, Western governments and international think tanks want unions established, not out of concern for workers’ rights but as an industrial police force to prevent the eruption of independent political struggles against the government, employers and the profit system itself.

Export earnings for the Bangladesh apparel industry totalled $24.5 billion in 2013–14 financial year, constituting 80 percent of the country’s total exports. About 60 percent of garment exports go to Europe and 23 percent to the US. As the profit-hungry retailers increasingly demand lower-cost products, garment manufacturers will step up their exploitation of Bangladeshi workers, guaranteeing that industrial disasters like the Rana Plaza collapse will continue.

Spain: Rebound in employment based on wage cuts and increased job insecurity

James Lerner

Figures released by Spain’s Ministry of Labour suggest that employment has begun to increase, after years of deep contraction triggered by the 2008 economic crash.

According to the Spanish Ministry of Labour, joblessness fell by 60,214 in March, reputedly the best month of March on record, making a total reduction of 343,927 over the previous 12 months.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the Popular Party (PP) government stated, “They are good figures, we should celebrate,” after data showed the Spain had created half a million jobs over the past year.

However, data from other sources paints a grim picture—leaving no doubt that workers will continue to face high unemployment, “precarious” jobs, low wages and diminished life prospects.

Unemployment still remains at 23 percent, one of the highest rates in the advanced capitalist countries. Almost half of the country’s unemployed have not worked in more than two years. More than half of all youth are also jobless, with tens of thousands continuing to leave the country in search of work, mainly in other European countries.

A closer look at the figures and the current economic climate reveals that the tenuous upswing in employment is premised on across-the-board wage slashing and nearly non-existent job security, conditions that are being used to divide-and-conquer by the European ruling class in their war to drive down workers’ wages and living conditions across the continent.

Spain was one of the European countries hardest hit by the 2008 capitalist crisis. By 2013, no less than 3.5 million jobs were destroyed. Joblessness soared to at least 27 percent and entire economic sectors, particularly construction, virtually ground to a halt.

Now, after years of austerity, labour market “reforms”, and unemployment, the government is trumpeting a turnaround. The “celebration”, conveniently timed for an election year, is aided and abetted by the Socialist Party (PSOE) and state-funded trade unions—Workers Commissions (CCOO) and General Workers Union (UGT).

Recent figures from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, indicate that hourly wages in Spain have in fact fallen even further below the EU average since the onset of the crisis. In 2008, Spanish workers earned 14.3 euros, or 24.3 percent less than the Eurozone average of 18.90 euros. Now, Spanish workers earn an average of 15.7 euros an hour, or 27.3 percent less than the current eurozone average of 21.6 euros.

Top executives are the only ones truly benefiting from the official end of the recession: those in stock exchange-listed companies earned 17.5 percent more in 2014 than the previous year, while those in the largest companies (listed on the IBEX 35) earned 24.1 percent more.

Nine of every ten new-hires are temporary workers, who have suffered the bulk of the wage-cutting since 2008, and who, by definition, have no job security. This is partially the result of “wage devaluation”, i.e., the war to drive down workers’ wages pursued by the PP government and its Socialist Party (PSOE) predecessor, which together imposed three labour “reforms”. For years, both parties claimed a major objective of the economic policy more generally was to reverse the casualisation of employment. In practice, the reverse has taken place.

Social conditions remain dire.

Recent studies indicate that Spain’s children are the second-poorest in Europe after those of Romania, with 27.5 percent below the poverty line, according to UNICEF. Even a recent report by the European Commission criticised Spain for effectively delegating social policy to charities like the Red Cross or Cáritas.

The mass pauperization of workers has still not satisfied the financial elites. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi is demanding a new labour reform. After asserting that Spain “had made unquestionable progress,” he called for “additional measures” to “reduce the high level of duality” in the labour market, claiming such measures would “make the reactivation of employment sustainable.”

“Duality of the labour market” is a euphemism used to refer to the gap between temporary, usually younger workers, and permanent, usually older workers. What Draghi is calling for is a single contract that has been a main demand for years of the main big business association, the Spanish Confederation of Employers’ Organisations.

A single contract would be an attack on older workers, stripping them of their relatively higher wages and stability compared to temporary contracts. No country has yet applied it, but the financial elites hope to use Spain as a laboratory to create a benchmark to be followed by other European countries.

Again, the government has been assisted in its efforts by the acquiescence of the corrupt trade unions and pseudo-lefts, who have mounted no more than episodic and sector-focused protests against this state of affairs. Instead, great efforts are being wasted on promoting the pseudo-left electoral platform Podemos, which has rapidly shed its limited reformist policies since it was created a year ago.

Podemos is following in the footsteps of its Greek counterpart, Syriza, which has become the key instrument for finance capital to continue imposing social cuts on the working class.

The May 1 trade union-led demonstrations were held under the limp slogan, “This is not the way to exit the crisis.” A supposedly more radical mobilization demanded “bread, work and dignity.”

At the very time the worst of the social crisis raged, Spain carried out an EU-backed bailout of its banks to the tune of 40 billion euros, aimed at protecting the interests of its large shareholders. The European Central Bank has showered Spanish banks with some 411 billion euros in practically interest-free loans.

Yet, there are warnings that even the recent tepid economic growth, which is reliant on low oil prices, a weak euro that favours exports and lower interest rates, will soon evaporate. The International Monetary Fund is forecasting 2.5 percent growth in Spain in 2015, and only 2 percent in 2016.

German foreign intelligence service aided NSA spying in Europe

Sven Heymanns

Over the past week, it has been revealed that Germany’s foreign intelligence agency (BND) spied on European targets for the US National Security Agency (NSA) for years. Those targeted include leading French politicians, the European Commission and several top European companies.

According to reports from the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and regional broadcasters NDR and WDR, the BND monitored telephone lines beginning in 2002 and later Internet connections for key phrases given by the NSA and then forwarded on the information. The key phrases were automatically downloaded by a BND server several times per day from an NSA server.

Among the key terms, the so-called selectors, were telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses and search terms. Between 2002 and 2013, around 690,000 telephone numbers and 7.8 million IP search terms had been examined, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports.

The first details about operation “Eikonal” were made public in October last year. According to this, the BND obtained data from a cable that had been laid with the agreement of Deutsche Telekom to run directly from a hub in Frankfurt to the BND’s headquarters in Pullach, Bavaria. From there, the information was supplied to the barracks in Bad-Aibling, where the BND established a joint spying unit with the NSA. The information obtained was then passed on to the NSA.

However, the extent of the operation has only now become clear. According to evidence submitted by the Green Party and Left Party representatives on the NSA investigation committee in the German parliament, the selectors were reviewed by the BND once more. The response from the responsible BND working group was that 40,000 selectors had breached German or European interests.

To date, this list has been kept secret by the chancellor’s office. However, theSüddeutsche Zeitung reported that it includes the two arms companies EADS and Eurocopter, the French foreign ministry, and the seat of the French president, as well as the EU commission.

According to Spiegel Online, the BND had already reviewed the list of selectors in August 2013, two months after Edward Snowden exposed details about the NSA’s spying activities. At the time, the BND came to the conclusion that 2,000 selectors were in conflict with German and European interests. But this had not been reported to the chancellor’s office. Instead, a departmental head within the BND had ordered the relevant selectors to be deleted.

According to information in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the BND knew already in 2005 that among the automatically downloaded selectors were some that concerned German and European interests.

The chancellor’s office has been aware of this since 2008. According to Bild am Sonntag, the BND informed the chancellor’s office in 2008 that the NSA was seeking information on EADS and Eurocopter. But despite repeated warnings by the BND, nothing was done by the chancellor’s office. Instead, this practice was silently tolerated.

The relevant head of the chancellor’s office was Thomas de Maizière, who is today Germany’s interior minister. In 2010, de Maizière’s successor, Ronald Pofalla, allegedly told US representatives in 2010 that he was aware of their illegal activities, reported television broadcaster N24.

De Maizière has come in for criticism. On April 14, he responded to a question from the Left Party in parliament by saying that no information was available about economic spying by the NSA or other US agencies.

Several opposition politicians have demanded the resignation of BND head Gerhard Schindler. Green Party parliamentary fraction head Anton Hofreiter stated that the German government had clearly lost control over the BND. The BND had become an appendage of the NSA. The Left Party’s representative on the NSA investigation committee, Martina Renner, called for Schindler to step down.

The current head of the chancellor’s office and close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Peter Altmeier, has also been criticised. He is also responsible for the oversight of the intelligence agencies. Altmeier only advised the parliamentary control commission (PKGR) the day prior to the scandal being broken last Thursday. The NSA investigation committee was also kept in the dark.

Federal state prosecutor Harald Range has also become involved. His office, which is responsible for the investigation of severe state security crimes, is considering whether there is reason to suspect that a criminal offence has been committed.

Due to the suspicion that it has been spied upon, the airline and space concern Airbus plans to launch criminal proceedings.

It remains unclear who else is implicated in the scandal and whether political heads will roll. However, it is already clear that the BND, like the domestic intelligence agency and other intelligence agencies, conducts its business without any control and that leading politicians have covered this up.

It is becoming increasingly clear why the German government does not want Edward Snowden to testify in Germany or receive asylum. The BND is deeply implicated in the surveillance practices that Snowden exposed. These practices are not only directed against companies and representatives of other states, but also against millions of innocent citizens.

It is significant that not a single politician, whether from the government or the ranks of the opposition, calls for the abolition of the BND, which evades all democratic control, apart from the parliamentary committees that are committed to keep their deliberations secret.

The most despicable role in this regard is played by the Left Party. Left Party fraction head Gregor Gysi called for a restructuring of the BND in Germany’s national interest. In comments to Deutschlandfunk, he accused the intelligence agency of “treason.” “This is about intelligence agency activity against German interests, German companies, at least companies with German involvement, against allied politicians,” he said.

Gysi accused the German government of being “lily-livered towards the US administration. For decades, they have not dared to engage with them as an equal partner.”

With such levels of patriotism from the Left Party, the ruling elite hardly has a need for any right-wing parties.

Two gunmen killed outside anti-Islam provocation in Texas

Bill Van Auken

Two gunmen were shot and killed outside a staged anti-Islamic provocation in the city of Garland, Texas, Sunday night, an outcome that was patently sought and welcomed by the event’s organizers.

The event, which was billed as a “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest,” had been turned into an armed camp by local authorities and its organizers, who paid $10,000 for extra police.

Cops had sealed off the area surrounding the Curtis Culwell Center, which is run by the local school district, and installed metal detectors at the door. An entire SWAT reaction team, dressed in military camouflage and armed with assault rifles, was deployed behind the center.

As it happened, just one Garland traffic cop is reported to have shot both of the gunmen with a pistol after they had fired on a security guard, wounding him in the ankle.

One of the gunmen was identified as Elton Simpson of Phoenix, Arizona, who was well known to federal authorities, while the other was said to be his roommate, Nadir Hamid Soofi. Both were wearing body armor and carrying assault rifles, according to police reports.

The event was organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a right-wing, rabidly anti-Muslim and pro-Zionist organization, with the express purpose of grotesquely cashing in on the right-wing and anti-Muslim campaign whipped up over the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdoin Paris last January.

Aping Charlie Hebdo and its vulgar anti-Muslim caricatures, the group staged a contest offering a $10,000 prize to the “best” cartoon of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, an action deliberately designed to insult and incite Muslim sensibilities while at the same time whipping up anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant chauvinism.

The leader of the group and the event’s organizer was Pamela Geller, who previously won notoriety as one of the instigators of a racist campaign against the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” an attempt to whip up lynch mob hysteria over a proposed Islamic cultural center near the site of the former World Trade Center buildings.

She has also received media attention through a series of lawsuits aimed at forcing local transit authorities to place openly racist and inflammatory anti-Muslim advertisement posters on buses and in subway stations. Last month, a federal judge ruled in her favor, finding that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) cannot prevent her from having a poster with the text “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah” next to the image of a young man in a keffiyeh, a traditional Middle Eastern headdress.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacist and fascist organizations, has described Geller’s outfit as a “hate group,” noting that she “has mingled comfortably with European racists and fascists.”

Indeed, brought to the US to make the main speech at the cartoon contest in Texas was the Dutch member of parliament and leader of the extreme right-wing Party for Freedom, Geert Wilders. A self-proclaimed advocate of “free speech” when it comes to vilifying Muslims, Wilders has called for a ban on the publication of the Quran.

On its own web site, Geller’s AFDI describes itself as a group that “acts against the treason being committed by national, state, and local government officials, the mainstream media, and others in their capitulation to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, the ever-encroaching and unconstitutional power of the federal government, and the rapidly moving attempts to impose socialism and Marxism upon the American people.”

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Geller made it clear that she had anticipated a violent outcome, effectively having organized the event as a means of provoking one. “This is war on free speech,” she tweeted, before any identification had been made of the slain gunmen. “What are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters?”

One of those killed, Elton Simpson, 30, had been closely monitored by federal authorities for years. Beginning in 2006 and continuing until late 2009, the FBI had paid an informant $132,000 for wearing a wire and attempting to entrap Simpson into making statements implicating himself in the support of terrorism and an alleged plan to travel to Somalia to join the Islamist group Al Shabaab. With tapes covering some 327 days of conversations, federal prosecutors were unable to prove their case, and Simpson was found guilty only of making false statements to the FBI and sentenced to probation.

He was subsequently placed on a no-fly list. According to the Washington Post, “The FBI had begun monitoring Simpson again recently.”