How ‘Moderate Rebels’ Are Supported By Islamic State In Syria

Nauman Sadiq

During the last couple of months, two very similar military campaigns have simultaneously been going on in Syria and Iraq, while the Syrian offensive with Russian air support against the militants in east Aleppo has been reviled as an assault against humanity, the military campaign in Mosul by the Iraqi armed forces and Shi’a militias with American air support has been lauded as the struggle for “liberation” by the mainstream media.

Although the campaign in Mosul is against the Islamic State while in east Aleppo the Syrian regime has launched a military offensive against the so-called “moderate rebels,” but the distinction between Islamic jihadists and “moderate” militants is more illusory than real.

Before it turned rogue and overran Mosul in Iraq, the Islamic State used to be an integral part of the Syrian opposition against the regime and it still enjoys close ideological and operational ties with other militant groups in Syria. Keep in mind that although turf wars are common not just between the Islamic State and other militant outfits in Syria, but also among the rebel groups themselves; however, the ultimate objective of the Islamic State and the rest of militant outfits in Syria is the same: that is, to overthrow the Shi’a majority regime of Bashar al-Assad.

It is not a coincidence then that when the regime was on the verge of winning a resounding victory against the militants holed up in east Aleppo, the Islamic State came to the rescue of its brothers-in-arms by opening up a new front in Palmyra from where it had been evicted in March. Consequently, the regime has to send reinforcements from Aleppo to Palmyra in order to defend the city and thus the momentum of the military offensive in east Aleppo has stalled.

It defies explanation that while the US has announced the Phase II of the military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have amassed north of the Islamic State’s bastion in al-Raqqah, instead of buttressing its defenses against the SDF in the north, the Islamic State has launched an offensive against the Syrian regime in the south? In order to answer this perplexing question, we need to revisit the ideology, composition and objectives of the Islamic State in Syria.

Unlike al Qaeda, which is a terrorist organization that generally employs anticolonial and anti-West rhetoric to draw funds and followers, the Islamic State and the majority of militant groups in Syria are basically anti-Shi’a sectarian outfits. By the designation “terrorism” it is generally implied and understood that an organization which has the intentions and capability of carrying out acts of terrorism on the Western soil.

Though the Islamic State has carried out a few acts of terrorism against the Western countries, such as the high profile Paris and Brussels attacks, but if we look at the pattern of its subversive activities, especially in the Middle East, it generally targets the Shi’a Muslims in Syria and Iraq. A few acts of terrorism that it has carried out in the Gulf Arab states were also directed against the Shi’a Muslims in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia and Shi’a mosques in Yemen and Kuwait.

Many biased political commentators of the mainstream media deliberately try to muddle the reality in order to link the emergence of the Islamic State to the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the Bush Administration. Their motive behind this chicanery is to absolve the Obama Administration’s policy of supporting the Syrian opposition against the Syrian regime since the beginning of the Syrian civil war until June 2014 when Islamic State overran Mosul and Obama Administration made an about-face on its previous policy of indiscriminate support to the Syrian opposition and declared a war against a faction of Syrian opposition: that is, the Islamic State.

Moreover, such spin-doctors also try to find the roots of Islamic State in al-Qaeda in Iraq; however, the insurgency in Iraq died down after “the Iraq surge” of 2007. Al-Qaeda in Iraq became an impotent organization after the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi and the subsequent surge of troops in Iraq. The re-eruption of insurgency in Iraq has been the spillover effect of nurturing militants in Syria against the Assad regime, when the Islamic State overran Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in January 2014 and subsequently captured Mosul in June 2014.

The borders between Syria and Iraq are quite porous and it’s impossible to contain the flow of militants and arms between the two countries. The Obama Administration’s policy of providing money, arms and training to the Syrian militants in the training camps located at the border regions of Turkey and Jordan was bound to backfire sooner or later.

Notwithstanding, in order to simplify the Syrian theater of proxy wars for the sake of readers, I would divide it into three separate and distinct zones of influence. Firstly, the northern and northwestern zone along the Syria-Turkey border, in and around Aleppo and Idlib, which is under the influence of Turkey and Qatar.

Both of these countries share the ideology of Muslim Brotherhood and they provide money, training and arms to the Sunni Arab jihadist organizations like al-Tawhid Brigade, Nour al-Din Zenki Brigade and Ahrar al-Sham in the training camps located at the border regions of Turkey.

Secondly, the southern zone of influence along the Syria-Jordan border, in Daraa and Quneitra and as far away as Homs and Damascus. It is controlled by the Saudi-Jordanian camp and they provide money, weapons and training to the Salafist militant groups such as al-Nusra Front and the Southern Front of the so-called “moderate” Free Syria Army in Daraa and Quneitra, and Jaysh al-Islam in the suburbs of Damascus.

Their military strategy is directed by a Military Operations Center (MOC) and training camps located in the border regions of Jordan. Here let me clarify that this distinction is quite overlapping and heuristic at best, because al-Nusra’s jihadists have taken part in battles as far away as Idlib and Aleppo.

And finally, the eastern zone of influence along the Syria-Iraq border, in al-Raqqah and Deir al-Zor, which has been controlled by a relatively maverick Iraq-based jihadist outfit, the Islamic State. Thus, leaving the Mediterranean coast and Syria’s border with Lebanon, the Baathist and Shi’a-dominated Syrian regime has been surrounded from all three sides by the hostile Sunni forces: Turkey and Muslim Brotherhood in the north, Jordan and the Salafists of the Gulf Arab States in the south and the Sunni Arab-majority regions of Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in the east.

The bottom line is that although the American efforts to stall the momentum of the Islamic jihadists’ expansion in Iraq appears to be sincere, but the Western powers and their regional allies are still pursuing the duplicitous policy of using the Syrian militants, including the Islamic State, to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria.

Fake News Laundered 1950-53 US Slaughter of 3 Million Koreans To Maintain US 1%’s Rule of South

Jay Janson

40 yrs after Prez Teddy Roosevelt gave Korea to brutal Jap Empire in return for its recognition of Philippines as US Territory, US invaded Korea long AFTER Jap surrender, overthrowing its Korean  gov., cutting it in two parts, installing a US dictatorship in its south now documented to have murdered 100,000 of its own citizens

What Western media calls ‘Communist China,’ is a China governed by its Communist Party since 1949, and lying just across the Yalu River from a Korea, which between 1950 and 1953, was merciless bombed by the US, both north and south, all cities and towns of any appreciable size (except Pusan a US occupied port city), flattened into rubble to prevent Koreans from having a government of their beloved country chosen by themselves and  governed by a Korean Communist Party. During the time of the 1950-1953 US announced ‘police action,’ later to be dubbed by criminal media ‘The Korean War,’ the phase “Better dead than red!” was promoted on US fake news generating media. No one ever asked Koreans, being murdered from the air, if they would rather be ‘dead than red.’ 

(By the way, fake news generating Western (capitalist) media never refers to the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia or the nations of Europe as ‘Capitalist USA,’ ‘Capitalist Canada,’ ‘Capitalist Australia,’ ‘Capitalist New Zealand,’‘Capitalist England,’‘Capitalist France,’‘Capitalist Italy,’ etc, but does refer to Cuba as ‘Communist Cuba,’ and the part of Korea now free of US control (but not free of US brutal sanctions and threats), as ‘Communist North Korea,’ the US dominated part being referred to as only South Korea, not ‘Capitalist South Korea.’)

China is on the threshold of replacing the US as the world’s most influential nation perhaps as early as in twenty years from now. During the Cold War, the ruling US 1% had its US corporate conglomerate media generating fake news that heralded European and American capitalism as ‘freedom,’ ignoring and avoiding mention of any  comparison with the genocidal centuries of European capitalist imperialist colonial plunder, exploitation and enslavement of all the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas and most of Asia and the savage conquering and destroying of their, for the most part more, more scientifically, socially and culturally advanced civilizations and cultures.

The shift of world economic power to the East and South will bring about the end of the ability of Western monopolized sources of information to criminally mis-inform, dis-inform and instill the fraudulent fears that have built an infantile acceptance of continual neocolonial genocide as necessary. In a multipolar world, the absurdities, illogic and insanity that justifies US NATO UN genocide will no longer be successfully propagated. These outrageous fabrications just wont wash when exposed to the light of day by new major sources of information in Asia, Africa and Latin America that will appear as economic power shifts Eastward and Southward

With the astounding 2016 US presidential election theater threw up a Republican outsider candidate denouncing this long long time fake news generating US media, calling eighty percent of its reporters and commentators liars, we should now look back and understand that to produce fake news successfully it is necessary to block all real news that would cause the fake news to be heard, read and seen as the fake that it is and always has been, causing Americans to believe bombing and invading smaller nations is necessary and good for everyone.
Below, some real US Korean history that is well known by all Koreans, and remember, for Koreans, wherever they may be, there is only one Korea.
1871, June 10 — Adm. Rodgers, commanding five warships and a landing party of over 1,230 men armed with Remington carbines and Springfield muskets attack Choji Fortress of Kanghwa-do, and proceed to occupy the whole island (116.8 sq mi), killing 350 Korean defenders of the island while losing only three of their own, withdrawing to China when the Korean army sends in reinforcement armed with modern weapons. This war known in Korea as Sinmi-yangyo and as the 1871 US Korea Campaign in America.

1905 — US President Theodore Roosevelt cuts all relations with Koreans, turns the American legation in Seoul over to the Japanese military, deletes the word “Korea” from the State Department’s Record of Foreign Relations and places it under the heading of “Japan,” approving of what will be a brutal, too often murderous, forty year occupation, during much of which, Koreans are forbidden even to speak their language; an unconstitutional act of the US president, said to have been in exchange for acceptance of the continuing US occupation of the Philippines by Japan, recognized as a half-brother empire of the European colonial powers.

1918 — President Woodrow Wilson officially recognizes Korea as territory of the Japanese Empire, refuses to receive delegations from Korea and Vietnam demanding restoration of sovereignty, delegations mistakenly hopeful for Wilson having proclaimed before both houses of Congress, as an addendum to his ‘Fourteen Points“ of a day earlier, “National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. Self determination is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action…. that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power; but that all well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them;” a promise become known in the third world as an infamous, cruel and preposterous lie (the Japanese occupiers were deadly in punishing all those involved in the country-wide March 1st Korean Independence Movement).

1945, September 8 — US State Department officials, arrive in Korea with the US Army, disband the government of the Korean People’s Republic created September 6, in Seoul, by delegates from local peoples’ offices from all provinces throughout the peninsula formed when Japan announced intention to surrender (August 10). The US proceeds without any Korean authorization whatsoever to immediately cut Korea into two parts to be occupied by US and Soviet troops, establishing a military government, flying in from Washington DC (in General MacArthur’s private plane), Singman Rhee, to head it; eventually installing him as president of a separate South Korea Government that will include collaborators, and will outlaw all strikes, declare the KPR and all its activities illegal and begin a deadly terror of persecution of members of the disallowed Korean Peoples Republic, communists, socialists, unionists and anyone against the the partition and demanding an independent Korea.

1946-1949 — The US in effect declares war on the popular movement of Korea south of the 38th Parallel and sets in motion a repressive campaign dismantling the Peoples’ Committees and their supporters throughout the south, becoming massively homicidal as Rhee’s special forces and secret police take the lives of some 100,000 men, women and children as documented recently by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the National Assembly of the Republic of (South) Korea in 2001. On the Island of Cheju alone, within a year, as many as 60,000 of its 300,000 residents are murdered, while another 40,000 fled by sea to nearby Japan some two years before the Koreans from the north invade the South. [UN sources and Wikipedia]

1950, June 28 — The US attacks by, air, sea and land, aiming at the southward invading army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North), which nevertheless unifies the peninsula in five short weeks (except for the US defended port city of Pusan); with little resistance from South Korea’s ROK military as most of its soldiers either defect or go home; over the next three years US will commit dozens of high death toll documented atrocities (some recently apologized for) as American planes level to the ground almost every city and town of any appreciable size in the entire peninsula, north and south, in the end threatening to drop the atomic bomb, and be charged with germ warfare by some not easily dismissed sources.

1953-2013 — The US using its control over international financial institutions and its power over the financial policies of most of the nations on Earth, keeps in place economy crippling sanctions and trade blockades (only loosening them slightly from time to time in attempts to halt the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea production of nuclear weapons as it faces a US, constantly condemning it in intense belligerency, massively armed with ever new nuclear weapons. (US sanctions obviously violate Principle VI of the Nuremberg Principles of International Law, c. Crimes Against Humanity: “inhuman acts done against any civilian population.”)

1945-2013 — The US Government, under control of its speculative investment banking elite, uses the gigantic world-wide reach of its likewise controlled US media cartel to manufacture an upside-down reality regarding US business and government intentions in Korea (and elsewhere), by blocking, slanting, omission, disinformation, misinformation and a virulent demonization of a nation once bombed flat, twice over, by US war planes; a six-decade propaganda campaign surely prosecutable as a media crime against peace under Principle VI c. of the universally signed on to Nuremberg Principles in the UN Charter.

2010 May —  The Russian Navy derided, and the Chinese government ignored a fake news story of a old North Korean torpedo having cut in half a modern South Korean warship in an area where days before, US-ROK live fire exercise war games were menacingly taking place off the coast of North Korea; detailed investigation by Japanese found that a US minesweeper, known to have left the day before, might have been practicing with the newest US spider mine weapon, entirely capable, as most modern mines are indeed capable of, blowing a small warship into two pieces; though a discredited and fabulous US accusation, this media doctored widely broadcasted UN backed accusation has however, become accepted as fact by most of the entire Western media audience and will continue on into the future as the truth until the day it can no longer be of interest).

2013 March — A second example of US media crimes against peace justified by fake news, is the present startling situation, as offered in US TV and print media, namely, that of the somewhat tiny nation, North Korea (size of US State of Pennsylvania), threatening the greatest military power the world has ever seen, possessing tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, with a nuclear attack, not for the sake of the bravely warning of its defense and retaliation power to ward of a feared attack from US planes and ships which periodically fire heavy weapons of mass destruction within earshot of its capital Pyongyang as part of frequent military exercises off its coast; the whole world is constantly ‘informed’ of what a madcap menace its leader is, by a Pentagon fed US media, which at the same time is justifying US bombings, invasions, occupations of some three dozen other small nations.

It’s the Christmas season. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark says let’s think of the millions of Koreans and others, who might have lived all the years they did not, for the fake news that made their lives unimportant to Americans.

Telling Lies About Fidel

Marc Norton

The death of Fidel Castro, for those of us living in the belly of the beast, has meant being forced to endure non-stop lies and hypocrisy from the mass media about Fidel.  According to our “free press,” Fidel was a “brutal dictator” who would not allow “democratic” elections like we have here.  Two words put the lie to the story that US-style elections bring justice and prosperity: Donald Trump.

Over and over again we hear that Cubans are ground down by poverty, live in hovels, are being starved, and have miserable health care.  Yet Cubans live longer, on average, than people in almost every other Latin American country.  Cubans live as long as those in many rich European countries.  Cubans live as long as we do in the good old capitalist US, and life expectancy in the US is going down.   How is it possible that Cubans live so long if the Cuban economy is such a wreck?

We are told that Fidel wanted to keep Cubans ignorant.  Yet the first thing his government did was eradicate the illiteracy that Cuba’s former masters had allowed to flourish.  Today, illiteracy in the US is still an unacknowledged scourge among the poor.  In the bad old days, it was even a crime to teach slaves to read.

We are told that Fidel imprisoned his political opponents.  Tell that to Leonard Peltier.  Tell that to Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Tell that to Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.  Tell that to the thousands of black and brown and white prisoners in the nation that has the largest prison population in the world, the nation that accounts for over 20% of all the prisoners in the world.

We are told that Fidel executed a few hundred of the former dictator’s henchmen after the revolution.  The US promotes death squads throughout Latin America, maintains deadly domestic police forces that shoot to kill on a daily basis, and kills untold thousands every year through poverty and war all over the planet.

We are told that Fidel allied his country with the Soviet Union.  The US allied itself with apartheid South Africa, with the European colonialists, and with dictators and repressive regimes in every corner of the world far too numerous to list here.

We are told that Fidel sent troops to Africa to support independent Angola and to fight South Africa.  The US sent troops to Vietnam, to the Dominican Republic, to Grenada, to Panama, to Iraq, to Afghanistan.  The US maintains military forces all over the globe, on land, on sea and in the air – the largest military force in history.

We are told that Fidel let the Soviet Union put nuclear weapons in Cuba.  The US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still has thousands of nuclear warheads ready and waiting to destroy civilization at the push of a button.

We are told that Fidel supported guerrillas and revolutionary movements throughout Latin America.  The US promotes counter-revolution and terror throughout Latin America.  The US treats everything south of the border as its own the backyard, condemning millions to poverty and inequality, intervening only to protect the rich and powerful.

Has Cuba ever invaded the US?  It was the US that organized the notorious Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Has Cuba ever occupied any US territory?  It is the US that occupies Guantanamo.

Has Cuba ever imposed an economic embargo on the US?

Fidel gave long, long speeches.  Our President-elect communicates with 140-character tweets.

Fidel’s real crime, of course, was kicking the Mafia out of Cuba, of nationalizing American corporate holdings, building schools instead of providing cheap labor for the capitalists, organizing a universal and free health care system instead of creating profit centers for medical and insurance companies, slashing rents instead of allowing landlords to get rich, giving people jobs that build up the country rather than jobs that build up the wealth of a ruling class.

If that is “dictatorship,” we need more of it.

The Forgotten War In Yemen

Rebecca Gordon

The long national nightmare that was the 2016 presidential election is finally over. Now, we’re facing a worse terror: the reality of a Trump presidency. Donald Trump has already promised to nominate a segregationist attorney general, a national security adviser who is a raging Islamophobe, a secretary of education who doesn’t believe in public schools, and a secretary of defense whose sobriquet is “Mad Dog.” How worried should we be that General James “Mad Dog” Mattis may well be the soberest among them?

Along with a deeply divided country, the worst income inequality since at least the 1920s, and a crumbling infrastructure, Trump will inherit a 15-year-old, apparently never-ending worldwide war. While the named enemy may be a mere emotion (“terror”) or an incendiary strategy (“terrorism”), the victims couldn’t be more real, and as in all modern wars, the majority of them are civilians.

On how many countries is U.S. ordnance falling at the moment? Some put the total at six; others, seven. For the record, those seven would be Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and, oh yes, Yemen.

The United States has been directing drone strikes against what it calls al-Qaeda targets in Yemen since 2002, but our military involvement in that country increased dramatically in 2015 when U.S. ally Saudi Arabia inserted itself into a civil war there. Since then, the United States has been supplying intelligence and mid-air refueling for Saudi bombers (many of them American-made F-15s sold to that country). The State Department has also approved sales to the Saudis of $1.29 billion worth of bombs — “smart” and otherwise — together with $1.15 billion worth of tanks, and half a billion dollars of ammunition. And that, in total, is only a small part of the $115 billion total in military sales the United States has offered Saudi Arabia since President Obama took power in 2009.

Why are American bombs being dropped on Yemen by American-trained pilots from American-made planes? I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, a glimpse of the results.

“On the Brink of Abyss”

The photographs are devastating: tiny, large-eyed children with sticks for limbs stare out at the viewer. In some, their mothers touch them gently, tentatively, as if a stronger embrace would snap their bones. These are just a few victims of the famine that war has brought to Yemen, which was already the poorest country in the Arab world before the present civil war and Saudi bombing campaign even began. UNICEF spokesman Mohammed Al-Asaadi told al-Jazeera that, by August 2016, the agency had counted 370,000 children “suffering from severe acute malnutrition,” and the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) says 14.4 million people in Yemen are “food insecure,” seven million of them — one fifth of the country’s population — “in desperate need of food assistance.” Before the war began, Yemen imported 90% of its food.  Since April 2015, however, Saudi Arabia has blockaded the country’s ports. Today, 80% of Yemenis depend on some kind of U.N. food aid for survival, and the war has made the situation immeasurably worse.

As the WFP reports:

“The nutrition situation continues to deteriorate. According to WFP market analysis, prices of food items spiked in September as a result of the escalation of the conflict. The national average price of wheat flour last month was 55 percent higher compared to the pre-crisis period.”

The rising price of wheat matters, because in many famines, the problem isn’t that there’s no food, it’s that what food there is people can’t afford to buy.

And that was before the cholera outbreak. In October, medical workers began to see cases of that water-borne diarrheal disease, which is easily transmitted and kills quickly, especially when people are malnourished. By the end of the month, according to the World Health Organization, there were 1,410 confirmed cases of cholera, and 45 known deaths from it in the country. (Other estimates put the number of cases at more than 2,200.)

Both these health emergencies have been exacerbated by the ongoing Saudi air war, which has destroyed or otherwise forced the closure of more than 600 healthcare centers, including four hospitals operated by Doctors Without Borders, along with 1,400 schools. More than half of all health facilities in the country have either closed or are only partially functional.

The day before the U.S. election, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the U.N.’s envoy on Yemen, described the situation this way: “People are dying… the infrastructure is falling apart… and the economy is on the brink of abyss.” Every time it seems the crisis can’t get any worse, it does. A recent Washington Post story describes such “wrenching” choices now commonly faced by Yemeni families as whether to spend the little money they have to take one dying child to a hospital or to buy food for the rest of the family.

The Saudi-led coalition includes Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. Between March 2015 and the end of August 2016, according to the Yemen Data Project, an independent, nonpartisan group of academics and human rights organizations, the coalition launched more than 8,600 air strikes. At least a third of them struck civilian targets, including, the Guardian reports, “school buildings, hospitals, markets, mosques and economic infrastructure.” Gatherings like weddings and funerals have come under attack, too. To get a sense of the scale and focus of the air war, consider that one market in the town of Sirwah about 50 miles east of the capital, Sana’a, has already been hit 24 separate times.

Casualty estimates vary, but the World Health Organization says that, as of October 25th, “more than 7,070 people have been killed and over 36,818 injured.” As early as last January, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees reported that 2.4 million people (nearly one-tenth of the population) were already internally displaced — that is, uprooted from their homes by the war. Another 170,000 have fled the country, including Somali and Ethiopian refugees, who had sought asylum from their own countries in Yemen, mistakenly believing that the war there had died down. Leaving Yemen has, however, gotten harder for the desperate and uprooted since the Saudis and Egypt began blockading the country’s ports. Yemen shares land borders with Saudi Arabia to the north and Oman — the only Arab monarchy that is not part of the Saudi-led coalition — to the east.

In early October, Saudi planes attacked a funeral hall in Sana’a where the father of the country’s interior minister was being memorialized, killing at least 135 people and wounding more than 500. Gathered at the funeral, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), were a wide range of Yemenis, including journalists, government officials, and some military men. HRW’s on-the-ground report on the incident claims that the attack, which intentionally targeted civilians and involved an initial air strike followed by a second one after rescuers had begun to arrive 30 minutes later, constitutes a war crime. The Saudi-led coalition acknowledged responsibility for the bombing, blaming the attack on “wrong information.” 

U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon was horrified and called for a full investigation. “Aerial attacks by the Saudi-led coalition,” he said, “have already caused immense carnage, and destroyed much of the country’s medical facilities and other vital civilian infrastructure.”

For once in this forgotten war, the international outcry was sufficient to force the Obama administration to say something vaguely negative about its ally. “U.S. security cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” commented National Security Council Spokesman Ned Price, “is not a blank check.” He added:

“In light of this and other recent incidents, we have initiated an immediate review of our already significantly reduced support to the Saudi-led coalition and are prepared to adjust our support so as to better align with U.S. principles, values, and interests, including achieving an immediate and durable end to Yemen’s tragic conflict.”

That “check” from Washington did at least include the bombs used in the funeral attack. According to HRW’s on-the-ground reporters, U.S.-manufactured, air-dropped GBU-12 Paveway II 500-pound laser-guided bombs were used.

What’s It All About?

Why is Saudi Arabia, along with its allies, aided by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, fighting in Yemen? That country has little oil, although petroleum products are its largest export, followed by among other things “non-fillet fresh fish.” It does lie along one of the world’s main oil trading routes on the Bab el-Mandeb strait between the Suez Canal at the north end of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the south. But neither Saudi nor U.S. access to the canal is threatened by the forces Saudi Arabia is fighting in Yemen.

The Saudis have specifically targeted the Houthis, a political movement named for its founder Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a Zaidi Shi’a Muslim religious and political leader who died in 2004. The Zaidis are an ancient branch of Shi’a Islam, most of whose adherents live in Yemen.

Officially known as Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), the Houthi movement began in the 1990s as a religious revival among young people, who described it as a vehicle for their commitment to peace and justice. Ansar Allah soon adopted a series of slogans opposing the United States and Israel, along with any Arab countries collaborating with them, presumably including Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. As Zaidi Muslims, the movement also opposed any significant role for Salafists (fundamentalist Sunnis) in Yemeni life and held demonstrations at mosques, including in the capital, Sana’a.

In 2004, this led to armed confrontations when Yemeni security forces, commanded by then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh, attacked the demonstrators. Badreddin al-Houthi, the movement’s founder, was killed in the intermittent civil war that followed and officially ended in 2010. Al-Jazeera, the Qatar government’s news agency, has suggested that President Saleh may have used his war with the Houthis unsuccessfully to get at his real rival, a cousin and general in the Yemeni army named Ali Mohsen.

During the Arab Spring in 2011, the Houthis supported a successful effort to oust President Saleh, and as a reward, according to al-Jazeera, that sameGeneral Mohsen gave them control of the state of Saadra, an area where many Houthi tribespeople live. Having helped unseat Saleh, the Houthis — and much of the rest of Yemen — soon fell out with his Saudi-supported replacement, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. In January 2015, the Houthis took over Sana’a and placed Hadi under effective house arrest. He later fled to Saudi Arabia and is believed to be living in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The Houthis for their part have now allied with their old enemy Saleh.

So, once again, why do the Saudis (and their Sunni Gulf State allies) care so much about the roiling internal politics and conflicts of their desperately poor neighbor to the south? It’s true that the Houthis have managed to lob some rockets into Saudi Arabia and conduct a few cross-border raids, but they hardly represent an existential threat to that country.

The Saudis firmly believe, however, that Iran represents such a threat. As Saudi diplomatic documents described in the New York Times suggest, that country has “a near obsession with Iran.” They see the hand of that Shi’a nation everywhere, and certainly everywhere that Shi’a minorities have challenged Sunni or secular rulers, including Iraq.

There seems to be little evidence that Iran supported the Houthis (who represent a minority variant of Shi’a Islam) in any serious way — at least until the Saudis got into the act. Even now, according to a report in the Washington Post, the Houthis “are not Iranian puppets.” Their fight is local and the support they get from Iran remains “limited and far from sufficient to make more than a marginal difference to the balance of forces in Yemen, a country awash with weapons. There is therefore no supporting evidence to the claim that Iran has bought itself any significant measure of influence over Houthi decision-making.”

So to return to where we began: why exactly has Washington supported the Saudi war in Yemen so fully and with such clout? The best guess is that it’s a make-up present to Saudi Arabia, a gesture to help heal the rift that opened when the Obama administration concluded its July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Under that agreement’s terms, Iran vowed “that it will under no circumstances ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons” in return for the United States lifting years of economic sanctions.

U.S. Boots on the Ground

The munitions the United States has supplied to the Saudis for their war in Yemen include cluster bombs, which sprinkle hundreds of miniature bomblets around an area as big as several football fields. Unexploded bomblets can go off years later, one reason why their use is now generally considered to violate the laws of war. In fact, 119 countries have signed a treaty to outlaw cluster bombs, although not the United States. (As it happens, Saudi Arabia isn’t the only U.S. ally to favor cluster bombs. Israel has also used them, for instance deploying “more than a million” bomblets in its 2006 war against Lebanon, according to an Israel Defense Forces commander.)

We know that U.S.-made cluster bombs have already killed civilians in Yemen, and in June 2016, many Democratic members of Congress tried to outlaw their sale to Saudi Arabia. They lost in a close 216-204 vote. Only 16 Democrats backed President Obama’s request to continue supplying cluster bombs to the Saudis. Congressional Republicans and the Defense Department, however, fought back fiercely, as the Intercept has reported:

“‘The Department of Defense strongly opposes this amendment,’ said Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., chairman of the House Committee on Defense Appropriations, during floor debate. ‘They advise us that it would stigmatize cluster munitions, which are legitimate weapons with clear military utility.’”

Perhaps some weapons deserve to be stigmatized.

These days it’s not just American bombs that are landing in Yemen. U.S. Special Operations forces have landed there, too, ostensibly to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, the local terror outfit that has been expanding its operations amid the chaos of the war in that country. If anything, the air war has actually strengthened AQAP’s position, allowing it to seize more territory in the chaos of the ongoing conflict. In the ever-shifting set of alliances that is Yemeni reality, those U.S. special ops troops find themselves allied with the United Arab Emirates against AQAP and the local branch of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and also, at least temporarily, with a thriving movement of southern Yemeni separatists, who would like to see a return to the pre-1990 moment when there were two Yemens, north and south.

In the beginning, the White House claimed that the special ops deployment was temporary. But by June 2016, the Washington Post was reporting that “the U.S. military now plans to keep a small force of Special Operations advisers in Yemen… for the foreseeable future.” And that has yet to change, so consider us now directly involved in an undeclared land war in that country.

Compared to the horrors of Iraq and Syria, the slaughter, displacement, and starvation in Yemen may seem like small potatoes — except, of course, to the people living and dying there. But precisely because there are no U.S. economic or military interests in Yemen, perhaps it could be the first arena in Washington’s endless war on terror to be abandoned.

Missing (Reward Offered for Sighting It): Congressional Backbone

I vividly recall a political cartoon of the 1980s that appeared at a moment when Congress was once again voting to send U.S. aid to the Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Having witnessed firsthand the effects of the Contra war there, with its intentional military strategy of attacking civilians and public services as well as its use of torture,kidnapping, and mutilation, I found those Congressional debates on sending money, weapons, and CIA trainers to the Contras frustrating. The cartoon’s single panel caught my mood exactly.  It was set in the cloakroom of the House of Representatives. Suspended from each hanger was a backbone. A blob-like creature in a suit could just be seen slithering out of the frame. The point was clear: Congress had checked its spine at the door.

In fact, in every war the United States has fought since World War II, Congress has effectively abdicated its constitutional right to declare war, repeatedly rolling over and playing dead for the executive branch. During the last 50 years, from the Reagan administration’s illegal Contra war to the “war on terror,” this version of a presidential power grab has only accelerated. By now, we’ve become so used to all of this that the term “commander-in-chief” has become synonymous with “president” — even in domestic contexts. With a Trump administration on the horizon, it should be easier to see just what an irresponsible folly it’s been to allow the power of the presidency and the national security state to balloon in such an uncontrolled, unchecked way.

I wish I had the slightest hope that our newly elected Republican Congress would find its long-lost spine in the age of Donald Trump and reassert its right and duty to decide whether to commit the country to war, starting in Yemen. Today, more than ever, the world needs our system of checks and balances to work again. The alternative, unthinkable as it might be, is looming.

It’s 2016. We know where our bombs are. Isn’t it time to bring them home?

Cashless India: Inviting Disaster

Vijaya Kumar Marla

Usually, Sunday evening is peak business time for local super markets. On last Sunday, 11 December evening, many customers in super bazaars  and malls had come back empty handed as credit cards were not accepted – the reason – bank servers were down and there is still Monday ahead, which happens to be a bank holiday. On Sunday morning many dailies had reported that bank servers are down on Saturday itself. This is what awaits us in the coming days. There is a rule in engineering design, which says, “when things fail, they are most likely to fail at the critical moment.’ Engineers know this only too well and try to improve reliability by improving the factor of safety and also by incorporating redundancy where ever possible. But even these measures cannot prevent a system from crashing. So you have to have spares and consumables ready on hand to handle emergencies. This is a classic case of contradiction between techies and bean counters – techies want spares and consumables along with the new equipment being installed and bean counters say that they come under current account and cannot be clubbed with capital expenditure. So many new systems are put in place without necessary spares. When overloaded, the system crashes and there is chaos everywhere. With our ramshackle infrastructure and poor quality maintenance, coupled with our “chalta hai, chal ne do” attitude of decision makers, our systems, including our much abused bank computer servers are really not equipped to handle overload. Economists and financial experts, advising those sitting atop the power pyramid, take the existing infrastructure for granted and go on preaching gospels that the country has to go ‘cashless’ – the sooner the better. But with most of those already holding cards coming to use them, the system gets overloaded and crashes. What if card usage and on-line transactions increase by, say, a factor of 10? – God forbid! – there is bound to be pandemonium everywhere. The whole country’s economy can come to a grinding halt! To install higher capacity systems and migrate to them can take months. Just recalibrating the ATMs is taking such a long time that, people curse the government whenever they come across an ATM. Which means that, with poor infrastructure in power, communications and other critical areas of the economy, any call for major and instant change will only invite a disaster. And disaster is already staring at us in the face.

Much has already been written about how 80% of Indians are not fit as per the existing bank rules to own credit and debit cards. This requires fresh breeze of changes in the way our banking system functions and such a fundamental change cannot be instantaneous. And over and above that facilitating the use of on-line facilities by uneducated and semi-educated people calls for much more innovative ways of conducting on-line bank transactions. Right now, only the educated and tech-savvy youth feel comfortable with apps on smart phones. Many highly educated elderly people feel lost when confronted with an on-line transaction – what to say of the common poor and lower middle class citizens. Crores of rural and urban poor in our country do not a have a permanent address – many of them migrate to distant pastures looking for work, as agriculture is not able to feed them. They rest their legs in ramshackle slums and try to save on the daily or weekly wages to meet expenses at home. They necessarily get paid in cash. As things stand, none of them are eligible to qualify as ‘esteemed’ bank customers. Expecting a billion people to suddenly changeover to digital currency is nothing short of pure madness, bordering on insanity. This move by the “most exalted one” is definitely going to plunge the country in to a bottomless pit of economic downward spiral.

By now, it has become amply evident that the real motive behind the demonetization is neither of the two stated goals – black money is still thriving and “God is in heaven and all is well with the world” for the black barons. The only difference now is that, black has taken the colour of purple. Neither is there much to talk home about the much hyped war on “fake” currency – a mountain has been dug to catch the proverbial rat. That the hurry to convert the nation to plastic is driven not by altruistic intentions of curbing black money and corruption, but for keeping up the faith of the masters, the MNCs and Big-Biz is all too evident now. With an estimated 150 lakh crore transactions between organizations and between individuals taking place annually, converting the economy to plastic and digital bits holds the prospects of enormous profits for MNCs as well as for the homegrown variety. No matter that the petty and small traders, who stood with the BJP all along, will be sacrificed at the altar of Big-Biz matters very little to the Modi brigade, as they owe their seat of power to Amabnis and Adanis. Keeping them in good humor is more important. That the dictates of neo-liberal order mandates that pliant regimes fall in line, no matter at how much the social and economic cost to the people has been witnessed in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia and elsewhere. International financial oligarchy wants changes that can give free rein to their regimen, while killing local businesses. Anyway, the cards of nationalism and religious bigotry will come in handy when needed for BJP – they had used them successfully all along. But something had gone sour along the way to demonetization. By projecting himself as the face of this “heroic act”, he has also become the target of all those slogging in vain in serpentine queues for the last one month or so.

The RSS and its sister organizations had thrived all along by rumor mongering, whether to incite communal riots or to put Modi in power. The ‘jumla’ of depositing 15 lakh rupees in to every citizens’ account and the promise of jobs for youth had carried the day for BJP. Now, with distress in long queues before banks and ATMs morphing in to anger at the government, the Sangh outfits are busy again, with a whisper campaign that every Jan Dhan account holder is going to see 2 lakh rupees deposited in to their accounts anytime soon. Yes, people believe it, at least for now. A simple math tells us that with 26.8 crore or so Jan Dhan accounts opened in the country, the bounty to be dispensed by the Modi dispensation works out to 54 lakh crore rupees, amounting to about 3 yearly budgets. So far the governments have shown enthusiasm in showering the rich with tax incentives amounting about 6 lakh crore rupees in every successive budget. If the intention of forcing common citizens to deposit their money in banks with the excuse of demonetization, is intended to keep the banks afloat, then surely, dispensing the ethereal 54 lakh crore rupees will not only kill the banks along with the government – before we even ask where from that kind of money is going to come from. The Modi regime has to perform hara-kiri, if it wants to extract such a large amount of money from big businesses, who are the real fountainhead of black money. And there are more poor people in this country who do not possess a Jan Dhan account – depriving them of this ranbow bounty will surely make then sworn enemies of Modi. And what about the lower middle classes and the workers in the organized sector? How can the ruling party keep them from getting disgruntled for ignoring them?

When land was acquired from poor peasants in the name of development and they were paid small amounts, the money was mostly frittered away, rather than being put to productive use. What is sensible is that if this government, or for that matter any government wants development, they have to put the money at their disposal to productive use. Just 2 lakh crore rupees doled out by banks as loans, with some seed money given by government can gainfully provide livelihoods to 1 crore educated youth. They can be encouraged to set up mini food processing units, small solar power units, solar water purifiers, mini cold storage units etc., a measure which can go a long way in reviving our rural economy. And it is going to have a cascading effect in nurturing livelihoods and incomes for another 5 to 6 core youth in the form of jobs and secondary business opportunities. Which literally means that with just an expenditure of 2 lakh crore rupees every year, we can bring about 20 crore people out of the cycle of poverty and they will in turn expand the market by becoming consumers in their own right. This is what is really going to increase profits for businesses, by progressive expansion of the market, rather than by short cutting the banks with NPAs.

The 21st Century Cures Act: A gift to the US pharmaceutical industry

Brad Dixon

The 21st Century Cures Act is an early Christmas gift from the US Congress to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. The bill guts the regulatory powers of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), weakening the standards used to judge the safety and efficacy of drugs and medical devices. Notably, the bill does nothing to address skyrocketing drug prices.

As part of its public relations cover for the corporate giveaway, Congress included in the bill some limited funding for biomedical research and other health initiatives. This funding, however, is not mandatory and will be subject to the annual appropriations battles over discretionary spending. It is likely that these funds will never materialize.

Crafted over the course of two years with the input of more than 1,400 lobbyists, the Cures Act received overwhelming bipartisan support. The House voted 392 to 96 in favor of the nearly 1,000-page bill, and last week the Senate passed the bill in a vote of 94 to 5. President Obama says he looks forward to signing the bill when it reaches his desk.

The widely publicized portion of the bill contains $6.3 billion in funding for biomedical research and health initiatives. The FDA will receive $500 million through 2026 to pay for the provisions in the act, but nothing to address the agency’s other longstanding problems. The bill also grants states $1 billion in funding to combat the opioid epidemic, and support for mental health initiatives.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has seen its budget decline 22 percent since 2003, will receive $4.8 billion (an earlier House version called for $8.75 billion), but spread out in equal portions over 10 years. This includes the $1.8 billion reserved for the “cancer moonshot” being pushed by Vice President Joe Biden, and another $1.6 billion earmarked for research on brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

“While the bill authorizes $4.8 billion to the NIH over the next 10 years—on average, a mere $480 million a year—this is barely a quarter per year of what the House passed last year,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee on health and human services, told the New York Times.

“There is also no guarantee that the appropriators will follow through and provide funding each year,” said DeLauro.

“When American voters say Congress is owned by big companies, this bill is exactly what they are talking about,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a speech from the floor last week.

“Why bother with a fig leaf in the Cures bill? Why pretend to give any money to NIH or opioids? Because this funding is political cover for huge giveaways to giant drug companies,” said Warren.

Moreover, the Cures Act actually cuts $3.5 billion from the Prevention and Public Health Fund established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), according to The Hill. The fund was established to promote the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, hospital-acquired infections and chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

“Cutting the Prevention Fund will limit the nation’s ability to improve health and quality of life and prevent disease,” Rich Hamburg, interim president and CEO of The Trust for America’s Health, told NBC News. “This is the nation’s first and only substantial investment in moving from our current ‘sick care’ system to a true preventive health system.”

The Cures Act represents a significant rollback of the regulatory authority of the FDA and the guidelines used to approve new drugs for the past half century.

The modern system of drug regulation was established by the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 in response to the thalidomide tragedy. Thalidomide was approved for sale in Europe as an over-the-counter treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women in the late 1950s, but resulted in thousands of babies being born with crippling and deadly birth defects.

Famously, FDA reviewer Francis Oldham Kelsey withheld approval of the drug, insisting that it first be fully tested. Her decision minimized the fallout from the tragedy in the US.

Previously, a drug would be automatically approved if the FDA failed to act on an application within a certain time period. The Kefauver-Harris Amendments transformed the FDA into an actual gatekeeper. Drugs could no longer be marketed unless both their safety and efficacy had first been demonstrated through a series of carefully designed clinical trials. Standards were issued for the manufacture, packaging and labeling of drugs, along with a system for reporting adverse events.

Congress has made a number of modifications to the modern system since then—such as creating an expedited approval process, and requiring that pharmaceutical companies fund agency drug reviews—but the Cures Act marks a qualitative development.

Instead of relying primarily on randomized clinical trials, the gold standard for determining drug safety and efficacy, the Act requires the FDA to consider “real world evidence,” such as anecdotal observations of patient outcomes.

“A homeopath would love this provision, and I’m sure, so would drug companies,” oncologist David Gorski commented in 2015 on the Science-Based Medicine web site. “Why bother with the time, bother, and expense of those pesky clinical trials to get your drug approved for additional indications, when you can rely on clinical experiences based on therapeutic use, uncontrolled observational studies, or registries instead?”

The bill creates a new expedited pathway for “regenerative medicine” products that rely on surrogate or intermediate endpoints, instead of clinical endpoints such as patient survival. Expedited approvals require a rigorous collection of post-approval data to confirm the safety and efficacy of the drug, but a report released last year by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the FDA was not fulfilling its post-market oversight obligations.

The Cures Act allows pharmaceutical companies to promote off-label uses for drugs (uses not indicated by the FDA-approved label) to insurance providers. In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has faced major fines for off-label promotion, and it has sought to roll back restrictions on promotion of off-label uses by suing the FDA, claiming that such restrictions violate free speech. The new rule will discourage companies from funding clinical trials for new indications of a drug.

The limited population pathway provision of the Act pressures the FDA to approve new antibiotics, antifungals and possibly other drugs based on smaller clinical trials, which will be less likely to detect safety risks or establish efficacy.

The bill reauthorizes and expands priority review voucher programs. Intended to promote the development of drugs that treat rare or neglected diseases, the FDA has nonetheless awarded priority vouchers, which can be sold to other companies for large sums of money, for treatments already widely used. Furthermore, there is no provision guaranteeing that these treatments will be made available or affordable.

The Cures Act also weakens the already lax regulations governing medical devices. It requires FDA employees to only ask for the minimum possible amount of information when approving new medical devices, eases the FDA’s authority to regulate combination drug/device products, and provides an overly broad category of “breakthrough” devices.

The watchdog group Public Citizen has detailed these and other problematic provisions contained in the Cures Act.

“These provisions would unravel the FDA, turning it from the treatment watchdog it is today into a puppet of the pharmaceutical and medical device industry,” said Johns Hopkins medical doctors Reshma Ramachandran and Zackary Berger in an opinion piece for STAT News earlier this month .

“If the 21st Century Cures Act is passed as written, clinicians could be given potentially deadly drugs and devices to prescribe to their patients, blessed by this new version of FDA approval,” they wrote.

The Cures Act was one of the most heavily lobbied bills proposed by the 114th Congress, with over 1,455 lobbyists representing 400 companies and other organizations, according to Kaiser Health News, which analyzed lobbying data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. This includes 78 pharmaceutical companies, 24 device companies and 26 biotech companies, which reported more than $192 million in lobbying expenses on the Cures Act and other legislative priorities.

The Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade association representing the drug industry, spent $24.7 million of its overall $30.3 million in spending on the bill.

The Cures Act was also supported by a number of patient advocacy groups. While claiming to give voice to patients, these groups are often heavily tied to the pharmaceutical industry.

A study published this month by the Project on Government Oversight found that at least 93 percent (39 out of 42) of the “patient advocacy groups” included in stakeholder discussions with the FDA in late 2015 and early 2016 received funding from the pharmaceutical industry. More than a third of these organizations (15), had executives, directors or other personnel from the pharmaceutical or biotech industry on their governing boards.

The premise behind the bill—that the FDA holds up and delays the approval of potentially life-saving drugs—has no basis in reality. Last year the FDA approved 45 novel drugs, the highest number since the record-setting 53 approvals in 1996.

“The emphasis has been on getting drugs and devices on the market quickly, not on making sure that they are safe,” Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center and critic of the Cures Act, told Health News Review last year.

An analysis by Forbes this past August found that this year the FDA has rejected only 11 percent of the new uses for new molecular entities it has reviewed (3 out of a total of 28). In 2008, the rejection rate stood at 66 percent.

“The evidence is that we’re living in a golden age of drug approvals, at least from a drug company’s perspective,” writes Forbes reporter Matthew Herper.

Groups such as the ultra-conservative Goldwater Institute and Manhattan Institute have long been pushing for “reforms” to the FDA, a cause that was taken up by Michigan Republican Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Upton was the major sponsor of the act and in the course of the past two election cycles received $536,650 in campaign donations from pharmaceutical and health products groups, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

UK: Government sponsored “integration” report an agenda for division

Julie Hyland

The review by Dame Louise Casey into “Opportunity and Integration” is a misnomer. While it purports to look at “what could be done to fight the injustice that where you are born or live in this country, your background or even your gender, can affect how you get on in modern Britain,” it does nothing of the sort.

Growing inequality and social disadvantages are referenced only briefly, with no connection to the draconian austerity measures imposed by Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats alike. Instead Casey claims, “In this country we take poverty, social exclusion, social justice and social mobility seriously …”

Social “cohesiveness,” or its absence, is presented as the result of individual choices.

Casey has form. As a government official working in social welfare, she has been a favourite of successive Labour and Conservative governments for helping legitimise the assault on social and welfare programmes. Appointed by Labour’s Tony Blair as head of its misnamed Social Exclusion Unit, with a remit to reduce the numbers of rough sleepers, Casey infamously blamed charities and others aiding those on the streets for “perpetuating the problem.”

Her approach endeared her to the powers-that-be. In 2003, she took over as head of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit—tasked with ordering civil behaviour orders against “anti-social” individuals and was appointed head of Blair’s Respect Task Force in 2005 to deal with “problematic” families. Closed down after just two years, Casey moved into community policing and then was appointed Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses. In both roles, she attacked the legal system for favouring criminals and called for the limitation of jury trials.

In 2011, she was given responsibility for investigating the London riots in August that year. The actual trigger for the riots—the police killing of Mark Duggan—was passed over, to blame “troubled families.” Speaking on the subject, Casey asserted, “We are not running some cuddly social workers programme ... we should be talking about things like shame and guilt ... we have lost the ability to be judgmental because we worry about being seen as nasty to poor people.”

In 2015 she oversaw the inquiry in child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a result of which was the government’s decision that the local authority was “not fit for purpose.” Overall control was stripped from elected councillors and given to four government-appointed commissioners who continue to run the authority more than one year later.

Casey’s report on Rotherham was criticised by social work academics for its “lack of rigour and transparency in the methods used to gather and analyse data.” Likewise, her latest 200-page report is based on what she admits are outdated figures, bracketed by unsubstantiated hearsay and assertions. This is not a surprise. During a private Home Office after-dinner speech in 2005, Casey infamously decried the “obsession with evidence-based policy. If No 10 [the Prime Minister’s office] says bloody evidence-based policy to me one more time I’ll deck them one and probably get unemployed.”

Her disdain for “evidence” only endeared her more to the politicians she was supposedly railing against. As a BBC report mused on her latest report, “Perhaps Casey’s real value to politicians—and the reason she keeps being asked to produce reports on difficult social problems—is that she is able to say things in public that they think privately (that social workers are too ‘soft’ for example).”

In other words, Casey specialises in raw propaganda dressed up as research, and her latest report is no exception. Commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015, its purpose is legitimise the Prevent programme introduced by then home secretary, now prime minister, Theresa May. This so-called counter-terror strategy has been used to attack personal and political freedoms and increase the powers of the police and state under the guise of combating Islamic extremism. On this basis, Muslims have been cast as a virtual “enemy within.”

Casey’s report specifically attacks “an anti-Prevent lobby” which has been “successful in stirring up anxiety and concern without offering any constructive alternatives to protect communities …” She calls for leaders in “government, in public sector, and faith institutions, and communities—to stand up and be more robust on this.”

To give some semblance of balance, she drops in the occasional reference to “black boys still not getting jobs,” difficulties facing girls and “white working class kids on free school meals still doing badly in our education system.” The term working class is only used in reference to “white” kids. Everyone else is referenced only by virtue of their skin colour, sex or religion. But the overwhelming bulk of the report blames immigrants and Muslims in particular—who are referenced 249 times—for failing to “integrate.”

To cover her back, Casey claims that she “wrestled with what to put in and what to leave out,” because “I know that putting some communities under the spotlight—particularly communities in which there are high concentrations of Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage—would only add to the pressure that they already feel.”

The centrepiece of Casey’s report is her call for the promotion of “British values” and for immigrants to swear an “integration oath.” To argue for this, she focuses on two main areas: the “unprecedented pace and scale” of immigration over the last years which, “in a situation where the country has been through an economic downturn,” she claims, “it is understandable that the pace and scale of immigration has felt too much for some communities.”

Casey notes that the UK population has grown by 4.1 million between 2001 and 2011—half of which she attributes to immigration. Still eight of out 10 people identify as “White British” and 60 percent define themselves as “Christian.” But she presents as a significant problem the fact that the non-white population (“most notably Indian and Pakistani”) is increasing; that the birth rate amongst ethnic-minorities is higher and that the number of people identifying as Muslim “grew most significantly” to make up the non-Christian religious population in the UK at 2.8 million. (The number of those with no religion has also risen from 17 percent to 26 percent, although other surveys put this at almost 50 percent).

On this basis she asserts, “As a nation, we are getting older, more secular and more open about our sexuality” while the “growing ethnic minority population is younger and more likely to identify as religious …”

Casey identifies as a central problem certain “mono-cultural” Muslim enclaves. The huge decline in social housing, and vast increase in house and rent prices, which have forced poorer people into certain areas, are passed over. Instead she repeats, again without evidence, various instances meant to prove the failure of Muslims to integrate. This includes citing, several times, one anonymous school where “pupils believed the population of Britain to be between 50% and 90% Asian …” There are no similar complaints at the majority of schools or areas that are overwhelmingly “White British” or “Christian.”

In the section “Domestic violence and abuse,” Casey notes that the overwhelming majority of female victims of domestic abuse are “White British” females, and that 92 percent of those prosecuted for such offences are “White British” males. Nonetheless, the rest of the section focuses on the “particular vulnerability of some immigrant or ethnic minority women” by virtue of their “lack of English language skills” and “social isolation and notions of honour or shame in some communities.”

Casey’s report has duly been welcomed by the government and large sections of the political establishment. In particular her complaint that “fear of being called racist” has prevented “society from challenging sexist, misogynistic and patriarchal behaviour in some minority communities,” and her condemnation of “right on” critics for “ignoring” the problem.

The government said it would act on the findings and both Labour and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) endorsed the report.

Echoing Casey, UKIP’s immigration spokesman, John Bickley, said it was an “excoriating critique” of “mass immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness,” which “the main parties have singularly failed to address …”

For Labour, Chuka Umunna claimed, “The fact people live parallel lives in modern Britain has been swept under the carpet for far too long and deemed too difficult to deal with …”

Umunna, who chairs the all-parliamentary group on integration, welcomed proposals requiring immigrants to pass English proficiency tests and similar courses.