How to Destroy a Planet

Lawrence Davidson

There is more than one way to destroy the planet Earth. Enough nuclear explosions could do it, and rather quickly at that. But now that we are pals with Russia (and assuming  president-elect Trump does not try to nuke China in defense of Taiwan) the potential for that level of carnage has lessened. Of course, the Pakistanis and Indians might go at it, but they only have the capacity to torch part of the planet.

There are other pathways to planetary destruction. The principal one, global warming, requires more time than a nuclear exchange for the consequences to be realized, but in the end, the planet would definitely become a disaster zone.

So, those critics of the next U.S. president who have been rightfully worrying about handing Mr. Trump the nation’s nuclear codes now have something else to worry about. The man is openly planning on leading us into a fatally overheated future.

Disarming in a Time of War

President-elect Donald Trump is ignorant of many things. Most of all he is ignorant of his own ignorance – a situation that often accompanies a grandiose estimation of oneself. One of the subjects on which Trump’s ignorance stands out is environmental protection – the rubric under which comes the effort to save the planet from global warming. This warming process is a scientific fact and the subject of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Under this agreement, 195 countries seek to reduce greenhouse gas emission levels. However, Mr. Trump, not to be deterred by either political or scientific consensus, has declared that global warming is “a hoax” perpetrated by environmentally friendly companies which seek to “make a lot of money.”

On the basis of this belief, the president-elect now prepares to institutionalize his ignorance. He will do so by radically cutting back the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, scrapping President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and deleting many other environmental regulations which Trump and his followers find “unnecessary.” Actually, taken as a whole, Donald Trump’s plans for the environment – that is, the planet’s environment and not just that of the United States – are the equivalent of disarming in a time war.

To lead this perverse disarmament effort Trump has chosen Myron Ebell, a “sound-bite artist” for tobacco, pesticide and fossil-fuel companies. Ebell has made a career out of undermining the regulations that get in the way of polluters “making a lot of money.” What does Ebell really know about global warming? Here is one of his learned judgments: “As for carbon dioxide it isn’t smog or smoke, it’s what we breathe out and plants breathe in. They call it pollution. We call it life.” It is a frivolous statement about a deadly serious subject. Of course, the excess CO2 that is in fact “pollution” does not come from your breath. It comes from the production practices of Mr. Ebell’s client industries.

Behind this flippancy stands a man who, in terms of the science, knows nothing about the subject but is driven by the conviction that regulation efforts in general are “just a pretext for expanding government” – a conventional conservative line.

Promoting Global Warming: a Crime against Humanity

The development of international law specific to crimes against humanity is ongoing. Today we commonly associate  such crimes with acts of genocide, torture, enslavement, and so forth. However, the list of chargeable actions needs expansion.

In 1947 the United Nations gave an International Law Commission the task of  “drafting a code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind.” The task was never definitively completed. However, given this wording, I think we can go beyond the usual notion of wartime horrors and genocides and consider harm to the planet as a whole.

A government that purposefully adopts policies that cause, among other things, (1) rising sea levels that will drown some island nations and destructively impact almost everyone living in low-lying costal areas (10% of the world’s population), (2) an increase in the rate and intensity of storms, floods and droughts, and (3) the jeopardizing of all those who do not have the ability to cope with consequences of extreme heat, is certainly a government that “endangers the peace and security of mankind.” It is a government whose leaders should be considered chargeable with crimes against humanity.

The intent of Donald Trump, soon to be president of the United States, to cast off the 2015 Paris Agreement and purposefully pursue policies that ensure ever greater global warming is an assault on all of us. After all, given the long-range results of global warming mentioned above, Trump’s intent, carried through into action, is potentially more destructive in lives and property than the Holocaust, the civil wars of former Yugoslavia and the genocidal rampage in Rwanda.

Of course, global warming is a slower-moving catastrophe, the consequences of which can at present be ignored by most citizens whose concerns go little beyond their immediate economic desires. And by the time those consequences become too blatant to ignore, the criminals will either be dead, senile with age, or, perhaps, blaming their criminal behavior on “bad intelligence” as does George W. Bush in regards to his disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.

We can say with some certainty that those who voted for Trump never considered the criminal nature of promoting global warming. We can say with equal certainty that their grandchildren will have no choice but to do so.

The War on Terrorism Just Keeps Making It Worse

Patrick Cockburn

European political leaders are making the same mistake in reacting to the massacre at the Christmas fair in Berlin, in which 12 died, as they did during previous terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. There is an over-concentration on the failings of the security services in not identifying and neutralising the Tunisian petty criminal, Anis Amri, as the threat he turned out to be. There is too little focus on bringing to an end the wars in Syria and Iraq which make this type of atrocity unstoppable.

In the aftermath of the killings the visibility of Amri, who was shot dead in Milan this morning, as a potential threat looks misleadingly obvious, and the culpability of those who did not see this appears more glaring than it really was. The number of possible suspects – suspected before they have done anything – is too great to police them effectively.

No politician or security official wishing to retain their job can tell a frightened and enraged public that it is impossible to defend them. Those in charge become an easy target for critics who opportunistically exploit terrorism to blame government incompetence or demand communal punishment of asylum seekers, immigrants or Muslims. At such times, the media is at its self-righteous worst, whipping up hysteria and portraying horrifying but small-scale incidents as if they were existential threats. This has always been true, but 24/7 news coverage makes it worse as reporters run out of things to say and lose all sense of proportion. As the old American newspaper nostrum has it: “if it bleeds, it leads.”

But in over-reacting, governments and media play into the hands of the terrorists who want to create fear and demonstrate their strength, but whose greatest gains come when they provoke an exaggerated self-destructive response. 9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack in history, not just because it destroyed the Twin Towers but because it lured the Bush administration into invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Subsequently, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, rendition, torture and “targeted killings” (otherwise known as assassination campaigns), all justified by 9/11, have acted as recruiting sergeants for al-Qaeda type organisations.

The war on terror has failed more demonstrably than most wars: al-Qaeda numbered in the hundreds in 2001, but today – along with Isis – it has tens of thousands of fighters and supporters spread across dozens of countries.

Political leaders are not blameless, but they tend to be blamed for the wrong thing. Contrary to talk about “lone wolf” terrorism, most people like Amri turn out to have had sympathetic or supportive connections. In his case, US officials say he had communicated with Isis and was in contact with a Salafi preacher. He would have needed little more than inspiration and encouragement, since driving a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Christmas requires no special expertise.

Isis remains crucial to the present wave of terrorist attacks in Europe because it provides ideological motivation and justification and can, as in Paris and Brussels, control and sustain a terrorist cell. So long as there is a well-organised de facto Isis capable of providing these things, terrorism cannot be defeated; there will always be a “breakdown in security” to be exploited.

The continuing existence of such a state is proof of the failure of US and European leadership. It is they who created the original conditions for the rise of Isis by invading Iraq in 2003. They allowed Syria to be torn apart by civil war after 2011 and believed the consequent anarchy could be confined to Iraq and Syria. It was only in 2014 and 2015 – after the creation of Isis, the flood of migrants fleeing to central Europe and the terrorist attacks in France and Belgium – that politicians and officials really took on board the potential danger.

Yet two-and-a-half years after it was first declared, Isis is still in business. Some 2,885 Iraqis were killed in November alone, most of them as a result of fighting between Isis and the Iraqi security forces. Over the last month international focus has been on the fall of east Aleppo and too little attention is given to the fact that Isis has been holding its own in Mosul and has recaptured Palmyra in Syria.

There is a dangerous disconnect in the minds of governments and news organisations between what happens in the war in Iraq and Syria and the long-term consequences this has on the streets of Europe. When the Iraqi armed forces and their Kurdish allies began on 17 October their advance on Mosul, by far the largest urban centre held by any of the Salafi-jihadi groups, it was widely believed that Isis was about to be defeated in its last lair.

It has not happened. The elite units of the Iraqi armed forces, notably the 10,000 strong “Golden Division”, have suffered as much as 50 per cent casualties. They are being ground down by skilful tactics in east Mosul whereby mobile Isis units rapidly shift their positions in built-up areas using holes cut in the walls of houses and a network of tunnels. They avoid permanent fixed positions where they can be located and targeted by artillery and the US-led air coalition. They ambush the Iraqi military forces in their vehicles as they move through narrow streets. The UN says that almost 2,000 members of the Iraqi security forces, including paramilitary Shia units and Kurdish Peshmerga units, were killed in November alone.

The offensive is largely stalled and still has not reached the main part of Mosul city on the west bank of the Tigris River. Districts in east Mosul captured weeks ago have to be captured again. The main thrust of Iraqi government forces attack on Mosul was meant to come from the south, but this front has not moved for six weeks. Isis is even reported to have sent 500 fighters from Mosul across the desert to retake Palmyra, in the first important territorial gain by Isis for 18 months.

This is not an organisation that is going out of business fast, or even at all. The failure of Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and other insurgent groups to defend east Aleppo more resolutely and successfully will probably lead to a haemorrhage of the most experienced and toughest fighters to Isis. It will have the advantage of being less dependent than the other rebel groups on outside support from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar who are close to accepting defeat in Syria. This may not save Isis in the long term because of the sheer number of its enemies, but it has shown once again that it is more resilient than the Pentagon had supposed.

There are serious consequences here for Europe: Isis can keep going for years with the low-level terrorist attacks like that which just happened in Berlin. It does not have to do much by way of exhortation or material aid to achieve this. When a terrorist incident does take place it is capable of shifting the political agenda in a country as large as Germany. Isis knows this and while it exists the terrorism will not stop.

Iraq: Signs Of Hope In Desperate Times

Cathy Breen

Najaf, Iraq–A week has passed since my arrival in Iraq.  Once again we come desiring to strengthen the bonds of human friendship, bonds which threaten to break as the opportunities to visit each other become less and less possible.

A few days prior to my departure, I attended a Veterans for Peace holiday party in New York City where I live. Most members of this chapter were in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The chapter invited the Vietnamese ambassador to the U.N. to their gathering. In a moving message she stressed that the war has been over for forty years now, and that it was hard to find remnants of the war in her country. “It is hard however for us to forget” she said. “We remember so that it won’t happen again.”

Her words struck a deep chord in me, as I would soon be going to a country where the war is far from over. It rages on.

Two days into my trip I was able to visit some of the internally displaced families between Najaf and Karbala. The whole roadside, approximately 70 miles, is filled with displaced families living on either side of the street in empty buildings next to mosques, or in tents and makeshift structures. I remember seeing these conditions on my last trip from Najaf to Karbala in April of 2015.  I’ve heard that an estimated 100,000 displaced people are lodged here.

With families living on roadside near Najaf, Iraq

Two young men, members of a group called Moja (which means wave of change) drove us to the displaced families. Moja is a group of over 100 students that formed three years ago in reaction to “the corrupted world around us.”  Yasser, who graduated from dental school last year, was my translator.  As we drove, he began to explain the purpose of Moja. “The country is sick. Moja is a response to fix the ignorance around us, the corruption. It is an act of survival. We have two choices. One is to just watch the country burn and burn, being uninvolved and unconcerned with the issues. Or we can challenge the obstacles facing us. We want to do something. We want to encourage people to read, encourage people to a new awareness.”

Moja has sister groups in Baghdad and Mosel. In Najaf, Yassar explained, they had a reading festival, the “I am Iraqi, I read” project. Over 1,000 gathered in a park to read together. “The most important thing is not just reading, it is lowering the level of hatred between Sunni and Shia. Also we have thirty-two female members of Moja.  I am very proud of them. They are more important than the male members. Najaf is very conservative. Moja gives them a chance to engage in civil initiatives.”

Yassar related how the Moja group in Mosel, primarily Sunni, collected clothes for the needy in Najaf, a Shia city. The clothes arrived in packages that said “from your friends in Mosel.”

My heart soared as I listened to this animated young man. I would later learn that just two weeks ago, Moja carried out a project called: “From Najaf, a message to Mosel.”  Over a three-day period, about 1,000 handwritten letters were gathered from ordinary people in Najaf, on the streets, in the shops, in the universities as well as from professionals and clerics. These letters were handwritten to ordinary people in Mosel, people under siege, and surrounded by ISIS and Iraqi forces. In effect, they told the people not to lose hope. They were dropped from Iraqi Air Force planes over Mosel. Some messages were also filmed and sent over social media. One message was: “Let us think of ways to end this dilemma in Iraq. The enemy is trying to divide us. Let us try to get together as one people who love each other, undivided, trying for a better tomorrow.”

It is cold now, two and three blanket weather. Arriving at our destination, we were led into a room in a cement building and invited to sit on thin floor mats forming an L-shape. The room was completely barren except for the mats. There were adjoining rooms, I believe, and the space was shared by 3 different couples with 13 children among them. These families were from Telafar in the north and are of Turkish origin. They had fled Telafar when ISIS took over about three years ago.

They get food rations from the UNCHR, but only rice, oil, sugar and flour. No lentils, tea, dried milk, fresh vegetables, fruit or meat.  One of the fathers works in construction when he can get work, maybe 6 days in a 2 month period.  He earns $20 a day. It is hard work. Alongside of mosques, the displaced are allowed to live rent free. School is provided in containers, referred to as “caravans.” These containers are common among the displaced people throughout Iraq.

Nearby we visited a second set of 3 families.  They fled from Mosel and had come 2 ½ years ago, part of a small Shia population there.  Their living space was separated by blankets or large cloths serving as walls.  Crowded with an almost total lack of privacy, they face real hardship.

We heard from some families that a government organization provided them with kerosene heaters, but others said they were unable to get on the lists, and had no heaters.  Also one set of families told us that a doctor comes around monthly, but others told us they had no health care at all. They need to buy water to drink. This costs about $1 a day in the winter and $3 a day in the summer. The greatest needs were for clothes for the children, blankets, heaters and milk.

With no hope of being able to return to their homes in the near future, and with no place or family to go to, people seem resigned to their fate. “We are sick with pain,” one man told us.

Yet signs of hope persist.

Yassar was able to hook one man up with dental care, and he encouraged the families to send their children to the University Dental clinic saying “My colleagues are waiting there for you.”

As evening descended, word had spread that we were there. A man with a faulty prosthesis came seeking help. He said he had been hit by a US bomb. Another two men came who’d been injured by car bomb explosions. One soft-spoken gentleman was blinded in one eye and could only ambulate by using a walker. I asked if we could have our picture taken and he agreed. I told him I would tell his story. We could have stayed on and on as people were eager for a visit. When we left, we didn’t feel like strangers. We bade one another heartfelt goodbyes. I felt grateful for being welcomed, and the people we met appreciated that we had listened to them. In each place I assured people that they are not forgotten, that many people want to hear their stories and long to end all wars.

Australian government exploits “Christmas terror plot”

Will Morrow

More than 400 heavily-armed police and intelligence agents carried out coordinated raids on five family homes across Melbourne late on Thursday night, allegedly in response to a Christmas Day “terror” plot. Although the circumstances of the raids remain entirely unclear, the political establishment and media are using the events to create an atmosphere of crisis.

A wall-to-wall media barrage has featured lurid accounts of a foiled “Christmas Day massacre” (the Australian) in Melbourne’s central business district. Today’s front page of the Fairfax-owned Age newspaper declares: “Threat to the city’s heart.” Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph tabloid features a front-page image of one of the suspects with the caption: “Xmas evil.”

Prejudicing any chance of a fair trial, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews declared that the alleged plot was an “act of evil.” He declared that police numbers would be further boosted throughout the Christmas-New Year period.

Likewise, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull quickly called a press conference yesterday morning, declaring: “This is one of the most substantial terrorist plots that has been disrupted in recent years.” Without any evidence, he connected the arrests to the December 19 Berlin truck attack and terrorist events in North Africa and the Middle East. “Islamist terrorism is a global challenge that affects us all,” he said.

Turnbull, whose fragile government is under intense pressure from the corporate elite to demonstrate its capacity to impose deep budget cuts on the population, repeated his previous claims that Australia’s “way of life” was under threat.

In a similar vein, Queensland Senator Pauline Hansen, the leader of the anti-immigrant One Nation party, repeated her call for a ban on Muslims in Australia. “You’re not welcome here,” she declared.

Despite police statements that none of the suspects had any connection to terrorist organisations, Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten used the arrests to justify Australia’s involvement in the US-led Iraq war. “We are well-served by our defence forces, by our police and our security agencies,” he said.

Nothing said by the police, media and political establishment can be taken at face value. What little is known is the result of police reports and vague anonymous leaks by agents to the media. No evidence has been presented of any specific plot. Broadcasting vague and unsubstantiated police accusations has become the modus operandi of the “war on terrorism” over the past 15 years.

Three young men—24-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, 26-year-old Abdullah Charaani and his cousin, 21-year-old Hamza Abbas—were charged yesterday with the vague offence of “acts done in preparation for, or planning, a terrorist act.”

Abbas was visibly bruised on his face, and sustained back, hip, and shoulder injuries from the raid. Ibrahim Abbas, 22, Hamza’s brother, was charged with the same offence today.

According to the Australian, the men had been under surveillance for more than a year. Ibrahim was “under the radar” of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) “for about two years,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The men have been remanded in custody until April 28, after police claimed it would take weeks to examine evidence from the raids.

Three other people were arrested in the raids by the Victorian and federal police and ASIO, which targeted houses in Melbourne’s northwestern suburbs of Meadow Heights, Campbellfield, Dallas, Gladstone Park and Flemington. With no public explanation, however, they were released without charge.

Zac Daboussi, 21, was arrested and later released, after his Gladstone Park family home was raided at 9.30 p.m. by dozens of tactical police, armed with high-powered rifles. His two brothers, Mohamad and Ahmed, reported that police assaulted the family. Mohamad Daboussi, 20, told Nine News: “I was kicked with steel-capped boots. I was playing PlayStation and all I heard was police rage in and say ‘get on the ground,’ so I laid down, hands behind my back, and that’s when they started assaulting me.”

When police discovered that Zac Daboussi was not at home, the entire family was forced to lie on the floor in silence while police waited to trap Daboussi. According to the Australian: “An officer stood in a room with five children—one three years old—while others kept watch over the results in the living room, all lying prone with no way of communicating.”

Lacking any evidence of links to terrorist organisations, the police and media claimed the men were “self-radicalised.” According to an “inside story” published in the Australian today, based on anonymous sources, about 10 days before the raids, ASIO intercepted a phone call whose contents remain “closely guarded.” But “ASIO’s message to the Victorian police was plain enough: the men were planning to attack on Christmas Day.”

After the phone call intercept, the police observed “several members” of the group “loitering” around St. Paul’s cathedral in Melbourne. “The more they watched, the more they suspected that a group of Islamic terrorists was casing potential targets.”

It is unclear if any evidence exists of a specific plot with a chosen target, except that they were “loitering” in the city. Nonetheless, the Australian ’ s front-page article was headlined: “Alleged terrorists planned to hit cathedral’s midnight service.” The article acknowledged that this was based on the “fears” of unnamed “sources.”

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton said police had seized “the makings of an improvised explosive device,” though it is uncertain what that means. Ashton said the police “believe” there was an “intention to conduct what we call a multi-mode attack.”

Over the past 15 years, numerous supposedly-foiled “terror plots” have been used to whip up an atmosphere of hysteria. Police raids in Melbourne and Sydney in September 2014 were followed by claims of an ISIS-inspired plot to “behead” a random person. A month later, media accounts revealed that a sword seized by police was actually made of plastic.

More recently, in August last year, government prosecutors quietly dropped the sole “terrorism” charge against a Melbourne teenager accused of plotting an attack for Anzac Day 2015, due to “insufficient evidence.” The 18-year-old was held in solitary confinement for four months.

Justice Minister Michael Keenan yesterday declared that “since the middle of 2014, we’ve had four terror attacks on our soil.” Keenan was referring to the siege of the Lindt Sydney cafe in December 2014 by a deranged individual, Man Haron Monis; to Naiman Haider, 18, who was killed by police after stabbing two officers in September 2014; to the shooting of a police officer by 15-year-old Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar; and to the stabbing in September last year of a 59-year-old man by Ibsas Khan, a schizophrenic.

In each case, the attack was carried out by an unstable person who had been under police or ASIO surveillance. There has been a similar pattern internationally, including the Paris terror attacks of January last year and the recent Berlin truck attack, involving individuals known to the intelligence agencies.

This week’s arrests point to an escalation of the Turnbull government’s efforts, assisted by Labor and the corporate media, to ramp up the “war on terrorism” under conditions of a deepening offensive against jobs, working conditions, welfare entitlements and essential social programs.

This campaign, accompanied by the witch-hunting of Muslims, seeks to divide the working class along communal and ethnic lines, and to justify Australian involvement in US-led wars in the Middle East and the expansion of police-state measures.

European Court verdict no obstacle to UK state surveillance

Robert Stevens

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) this week ruled that Britain’s existing surveillance law is illegal. Portrayed as a “setback” by the media, the reality is that on December 30, this legislation will be replaced by new, even more authoritarian laws contained in the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA).

The ECJ ruled on a case, brought in 2014, challenging the UK’s rules on data retention imposed under the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA). In July 2014, the then Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition rushed DRIPA through as “emergency” legislation after the ECJ ruled that the existing European Union directive on data retention was invalid due to its being so sweeping that it interfered with individual privacy rights.

The ECJ’s decision was taken in the wake of the growing public anger at the 2013 revelations by US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden that the US, UK and other imperialist powers were carrying out unrestrained surveillance of the world’s population.

Far from reining in their spying operations, the British ruling elite not only carried on as before but brought in new legislation to legalise their hitherto illegal activities. Under DRIPA, the Home Secretary was allowed to order communications companies to retain data for 12 months. This created a dragnet to capture the records of communications of everyone in the UK, including all emails, calls, texts and web activity and other correspondence. The data obtained under DRIPA was accessed by the police and by hundreds of other public authorities at will.

Around half a million requests were granted to access the data each year.

The government was challenged over DRIPA by two MPs, the Conservative David Davis and Tom Watson, now deputy leader of the Labour Party. They were backed by other groups including Liberty, the Law Society, the Open Rights Group and Privacy International. In 2015, the High Court backed Davis and Watson, ruling that DRIPA was “inconsistent with European Union law” as it “does not lay down clear and precise rules providing for access to and use of communications data.”

That ruling was appealed to the ECJ by the Conservative-led government.

The ECJ ruling has now declared DRIPA illegal as it allows “general and indiscriminate” retention of electronic communications. However, the judgment does not oppose the retention of date in principle, stating that under EU law member states can perform “targeted retention of that data solely for the purpose of fighting serious crime.”

The court noted that the retained data under DRIPA “is liable to allow very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data has been retained… Consequently, only the objective of fighting serious crime is capable of justifying such interference.

Referring to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the ruling states, “Such national legislation therefore exceeds the limits of what is strictly necessary and cannot be considered to be justified within a democratic society, as required by the directive, read in the light of the Charter.”

All of this is true about DRIPA and applies even more so to the IPA, which received Royal Assent on November 29 and was described by the Open Democracy group as the “most sweeping surveillance powers ever seen, not just in the UK, but in any western European nation or in the United States.”

IPA was the flagship policy of Prime Minister Theresa May when she was Home Secretary under the previous prime minister, David Cameron. With the expiry, due to a “sunset clause,” of DRIPA in December this year, IPA was advanced as its necessary replacement.

The IPA is an unprecedented attack on the rights and privacy of every UK citizen. It gives the security services the power to gather information on millions, and to process, profile and store the results. Internet Service Providers will be compelled to keep Internet connection records for 12 months for access by the police and state security services. Every arm of the state is free to raid the data of all citizens, including the domestic Security Service (MI5), the international Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Ministry of Defence, the Police, Ministry of Defence Police, Royal Navy Police, Royal Military Police, Royal Air Force Police, the National Crime Agency and the Home Office.

The ECJ ruling has been sent back to the UK court of appeal, supposedly to be resolved in terms of amending UK legislation.

According to Richard Cumbley, partner at law firm Linklaters, “The provisions in the two laws are extremely similar so it is perfectly logical that the rationale will apply equally to the new [act], and it will have to be amended.”

Liberty made similar claims, while he Guardian headlined its article on the ECJ ruling, “EU’s highest court delivers blow to UK snooper’s charter.”

Given the UK governments record on stepping up—not relaxing—its mass surveillance dragnet in response to its illegal activities being uncovered, there is zero chance of any such retreat.

The Financial Times, long-time advocate of such powers being made law, noted that while, “Lawyers believe the ECJ’s ruling will force the hand of the UK government to amend the law and limit its remit… Large swaths of the Investigatory Powers Act will remain unaffected by the ECJ ruling… including the ability to ‘bulk hack’ citizens’ communications and force technology companies to create a backdoor into their products so that communications can be accessed.”

There is no constituency within the ruling elite—in the UK, Europe or anywhere else—for a defence of democratic rights.

While the ECJ makes a token ruling against DRIPA, the constituent governments of the EU are up to their necks in the surveillance of their populations.

This month, WikiLeaks revealed 2,420 sensitive documents (90 gigabytes) relating to the burgeoning cooperation between the German foreign intelligence agency—the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND)—and the spying agencies of the US.

Davis, the right-wing Thatcherite who has long posed as a defender of civil liberties, ditched the case against DRIPA as soon as he became a cabinet minister in May’s government in July. As Minister for Exiting the European Union, he will preside over the UK’s repudiation of the authority of the ECJ—the body which has just ruled in favour of his original challenge!

An even more hypocritical stance was taken following the ruling by Labour’s Watson. He stated, “Most of us can accept that our privacy may occasionally be compromised in the interests of keeping us safe, but no one would consent to giving the police or the government the power to arbitrarily seize our phone records or emails to use as they see fit. It’s for judges, not ministers, to oversee these powers.”

The line about “judges, not ministers” is a cynical diversion to conceal the fact that this is exactly what Labour has just signed up to in supporting the IPA and ensuring its passage through both Houses of Parliament. As May sought support for the legislation, Labour’s then-Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham solidarised with the Conservatives, saying parliament “must give them [the police and security services] the tools to do their job.”

US public opinion turns against capital punishment

Ed Hightower

A recent study by the Pew Research Center documents a steep fall in support for the death penalty, one of America’s most barbaric and anti-democratic institutions.

The survey conducted between late August and early September found that only 49 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, the lowest such figure in four decades, and a full seven-point decline since 2015 (from 56 percent). The decline is even more drastic when considering that 22 years ago the figure stood at a robust 80 percent.

At that time, 1994, only 16 percent of Americans opposed the death penalty, in contrast with the 2016 figure of 42 percent.

The decline spans all three categories of political identification in the survey: Democrat, Republican and Independent. Even among self-described Republicans, who tend to favor the death penalty, the decline in support is significant, starting with a high of 87 percent in 1996, down to 77 percent in 2015 and 72 percent in 2016.

The decline is even more precipitous for Independents (79 percent to 44 percent) and Democrats (71 percent to 24 percent).

The Pew Research Center study on the same topic from 2015 found that 71 percent of those polled felt that the death penalty would result in killing innocent people, while only 26 percent believed there were adequate safeguards in place to prevent the execution of innocent persons. Thirty-one percent thought that the death penalty was unjustified under any circumstances.

This general change in attitudes towards capital punishment finds expression in the judicial system as well, with fewer juries sentencing people to death. As the end of 2016 approaches, there have been only 30 people sentenced to death in the United States, the lowest number since the early 1970s. Twenty people were executed in the US this year, the fewest since 1991, when the figure was 14. At its highest in 1999 the figure was 98 executions.

One cannot attribute the sea change in public sentiment regarding capital punishment to any single factor. However, the 2014 botched executions of Dennis McGuire, Clayton D. Lockett and Joseph R. Wood certainly horrified broad sections of the populace. These and similar cases exposed the cruel and unusual character of the lethal injection combinations of midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride, which tend to result in seizure-like writhing and other obvious symptoms of the most intense human suffering.

It is likewise hard to imagine that recent artistic productions showing the plight of the accused and/or imprisoned have no impact on this change. The popular NPR podcast Serial, for example, detailed the wrongful murder conviction of a Maryland high school student, in part due to racist, anti-Muslim overtones from the prosecution as well as bogus testimony from a cell phone expert who placed the defendant at the murder scene based on cell tower “pings.”

An even more gruesome tale of prosecutorial and police misconduct was the subject of the recent Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer, where Wisconsin law enforcement officials planted and modified evidence to frame a man, Steven Avery, who had a previous malicious prosecution claim against them. While a full discussion of this documentary is beyond the scope of this article, the series reveals the horrifying lengths through which the criminal justice system goes to destroy an innocent person.

Finally, the near daily occurrence of police killings of innocent people has taken its toll, undermining confidence in the entire justice system, particularly as prosecutors bend and break the law to shield law enforcement officials from the legal consequences of their brutality.

An interesting aspect of the change in popular sentiment toward capital punishment is that it has happened against the political current, rather than drawing inspiration from it. In other words, no politician of any stature, from any bourgeois party has made a political issue of state-sponsored killing. Rather, Democrats and Republicans spar over who is the more reliable supporter of bourgeois law and order, including capital punishment.

Also worth noting is that the decline in support for the death penalty moved in inverse proportion to the successive US military assaults over the past 25 years in Panama, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen.

One should not underestimate the meaning of this shift in sentiment against capital punishment, long a staple of American politics. It accompanies other leftward changes in popular consciousness, including growing signs of opposition to social inequality and the capitalist status quo as well as an increasingly positive view of socialism.

Brazil imposes drastic austerity amid deepening constitutional crisis

Miguel Andrade

On December 13, the Brazilian Senate passed in a second and final vote what the population has been ironically calling “end of the world” amendment to the 1988 constitution.

The government has characterized the amendment, a mandatory 20-year freeze on federal spending, except for inflation adjustments, as a key signal of “political will” to the financial markets. Its passage has dominated the public debate since the September ouster of Workers Party (PT) president Dilma Rousseff on trumped-up charges of budget manipulation.

The right-wing coalition that supports Rousseff’s successor, president Michel Temer, of the Brazilian Democratic Movement party (PMDB), has sought to convince the markets of its resoluteness in waging a class war against the working class and poor with the swiftness of the amendment’s approval. Nonetheless, the whole process has exposed a deep crisis of the bourgeois regime in Latin America’s largest country, along with a growing breakdown of constitutional forms of rule.

The amendment’s second vote in the upper house was initially accelerated by an agreement between the leaders of most of the two dozen parties represented in Congress that fast-tracked the debate. But at the last minute, the whole procedure was put at risk by the suspension from office of the Senate’s president, Renan Calheiros, also from the fractured PMDB, over embezzlement charges. Supreme Court Justice Marco Aurélio de Mello granted an injunction in response to an appeal by the pseudo-left REDE caucus that Calheiros could not hold an office in the line of succession to the presidency while being a defendant in a corruption case.

The injunction, granted on December 5, was defied by Calheiros and the full Senate, which refused to meet to elect a new president or even formalize the tenure of the first vice-president, Jorge Viana, from the Workers Party.

Two days of frenzied meetings and recriminations followed, with accusations by the Senate of Supreme Court interference, while Supreme Court Justice Luis Roberto Barroso claimed that Calheiros had led a coup d’etat. Calheiros himself openly declared that his suspension would likely derail the constitutional amendment demanded by Brazilian and foreign capital.

On December 7, the full Supreme Court overruled Mello’s injunction in a special session, with the Court’s president, Carmen Lúcia Rocha, declaring in a national meeting of judges held before the vote, that given the country’s crisis, the justice system should “make peace.”

Rocha’s procedures reportedly followed a political meeting with Senate leaders and other justices, and were followed by openly political votes by the full Court, with Justice Luiz Fux declaring that Calheiro’s suspension would delay the urgent agenda in the Congress.

But the most shameful role was played by PT’s Jorge Viana, who declared from the moment of Calheiro’s suspension that he was not willing to take office as president in order not to “break up” the PT. His concern was that if it were in control of the Senate, the party would come under pressure to delay or scrap altogether the vote on the amendment, something it had no intention of doing.

In recent months, the amendment has been widely criticized by economic think tanks and even the UN as an “unprecedented move,” undermining crucial anti-poverty policies such as the minimum wage and pension increases, while also rolling back the expansion of public education and health care—withholding an expected $130 billion in planned investments. Most significantly from the standpoint the ruling elite is the anticipated effect on workforce productivity, which should rise together with an increase in average number of years in school for the population as a whole.

This episode was followed on December 14 by another skirmish between Supreme Court and Congress, with Justice Luiz Fux granting an injunction agreeing with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the fascistic representative of the Social Christian Party (PSC), that the lower house should reconsider its vote on an anti-corruption law initially presented by the Public Attorney’s Office (Ministério Público) with the support of more than two million signatures.

Fux’s decision may prove even more contentious, given the divisions in the ruling class regarding the anti-corruption bill, initially called “10 measures against corruption.” The bill was spearheaded by the prosecutors who have been conducting the ever-widening “Carwash” (Lava Jato) investigation into the massive bribes-for-contracts scheme at the state oil giant Petrobras. The probe, which will potentially ensnare more than 300 congressmen and hundreds of leading businessmen, has also led to a wholly reactionary rubber-stamping of the illegal methods used by investigators, including the wiretapping and leaking to the press of a phone call by former president Rousseff.

These illegal practices, universally justified by the press with anti-corruption hysteria, were instrumental in whipping up the most reactionary elements in the upper middle class, including supporters of a military takeover, in the lead-up to the impeachment.

Among the measures originally included in the bill were the widespread application of “integrity tests,” i.e., sting operations, against public servants, the possibility of using illegally obtained evidence in corruption cases and the restriction of habeas corpus and appeal rights, all in the name of “speeding up justice”. Early in December, however, the bill was self-servingly turned upside down by the full lower house, ending up as an essentially anti-prosecution bill, with a new framework of abuse of authority crimes aimed at shutting down recent developments in the Carwash and related investigations.

As the discussions proceeded in the upper house on December 1, the chief judge in the Carwash investigation, Sérgio Moro, who was invited to the debate, was targeted by the opposition leader in the Senate, Lindberg Farias of the PT, who implied that had the bill been passed earlier, he would have been charged in relation to the leaking of the Rousseff phone call and the detaining of former PT president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Then on December 4, thousands of right and far-right demonstrators took to the streets in major cities in support of the original bill, putting pressure on the politicized Supreme Court.

Finally, on December 15 and 16, two opinion pages in the leading, 141-year-old daily O Estado de São Paulo carried an article by Reserve Army General Rômulo Pereira claiming that disrespect for the law and the will of people by Congress—with the keeping of Calheiros in office and the changes to the anti-corruption bill—might motivate the armed forces to intervene “to guarantee democracy.” This alarming warning was followed by a lead editorial claiming that the “institutions were not working”. Earlier, the same newspaper published a December 10 article in which Army commander Gen. Eduardo Villas Bôas warned that “crazy” right-wingers might set in motion a chain reaction that could lead to the army taking a political stand and intervening.

In an attempt to pacify the armed forces, they are being left out by Temer from the draconian reform that will impose 49 years of work before retirement for workers now under 40, and which is supposed to go to a vote by early 2017.

Another stimulus to defiance of civilian rule by the military might come from recent developments in Rio de Janeiro, which faces the deepest crisis in the country mainly due to plummeting oil prices and the crisis gripping Petrobras following the Carwash investigation. With the virtual paralysis of the unions in the state, anti-austerity demonstrations have been spearheaded by off-duty military policemen, heavily supportive of a military intervention, with the corporatist and reactionary aim of being exempted from state budget cuts.

Further contributing to the anti-corruption hysteria which has been used to justify the right-wing drift of the whole political establishment is the support given to the Carwash investigation by Brazil’s pseudo left elements, most notably the Morenoite PSTU and the MES current, which functions inside the PSOL party and holds observer status in the Pabloite United Secretariat.

Both currents have for more than a year claimed that the anti-corruption campaign would bring instability to the regime and thus open up the path to their own growth as a political alternative. In fact, none of this has happened, as the right wing benefited from the anger towards the PT, and the PSTU saw both its elected officials voted out of office and lost half of its membership in a right-wing split ahead of local elections in October.

On the other side, anti-impeachment pseudo-lefts such as the MAIS—the faction that split from the PSTU—and the MRT have since the outset of the crisis redoubled their efforts to prevent any political conclusions from being drawn from the impeachment process and the class war measures that have followed. Both classify the Temer government as a “big house,” plantation regime of the most backward elements of Brazil’s ruling class. MRT’s online organ, Esquerda Diário, went to the point of interviewing Lula’s former Strategic Affairs minister Samuel Pinheiro, giving him the chance to paint the PT governments as “reformist” and “progressive”—and thus as a victim of Brazil’s ruling class.

The recent revelations by the US Department of Justice, in relation to the Carwash investigation, that the Odebrecht building conglomerate paid more than 1 billion dollars in bribes in a dozen developing countries since before the PT took office in 2003, further exposes how the recent corruption schemes are a structural feature of capitalism internationally, regardless of whether “progressive” or “backward” fractions of the semi-colonial and imperialist bourgeoisies hold power.

In this context, the “big house” regime narrative, with its implied anti-imperialist rhetoric, only obscures the fact that the pseudo left’s support for the PT over the last decades only subordinated the Brazilian working class to the bourgeoisie, leaving its hands tied in the face of the current crisis.

US abstains as UN passes toothless resolution criticizing Israeli settlements

Jean Shaoul

On Friday, the United Nations Security Council passed a toothless resolution censuring Israel’s expansion of settlements. The vote followed a decision by the Obama administration to abstain, rather than exercising its veto power.

A vote on the resolution was postponed on Thursday by its initial sponsor, Egypt, following the intervention of US president-elect Donald Trump. It was reintroduced on Friday with new sponsors New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal.

According to an Israeli official, after becoming aware that the Obama administration would not veto the resolution, “Israeli officials reached out to Trump’s transition team to ask for the president-elect’s help.” Trump reportedly called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to urge him to withdraw it.

Following the vote, Trump tweeted, “As to the UN, things will be different after Jan. 20,” that is, the day that he is inaugurated.

The resolution states that the establishment of settlements by Israel has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” It expresses grave concern that continuing settlement activities “are dangerously imperilling the viability of a two-state solution,” adding that the council would “reiterate its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and that it fully respect all of its legal obligations in this regard.”

However, the resolution has no enforcement mechanism and does not impose sanctions if it is ignored by Israel. A statement from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the vote declared that “Israel rejects this shameful anti-Israel resolution at the UN and will not abide by its terms.”

Netanyahu added that the Obama administration had “failed to protect Israel from the gang-up at the UN,” and that Israel would work with Trump and “all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike,” following Trump’s inauguration.

The resolution followed a report published last July by the “Quartet” made up of the UN, the US, the European Union and Russia, which has postured as a supporter of the Israel/Palestine “peace process.” It called for an end to Israel’s settlement construction and stated that at least 570,000 Israelis were now living in the settlements in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, which forbids the transfer of civilians onto land captured in war.

The Obama administration’s decision to abstain was a last-ditch attempt to present Washington as some kind of honest broker in the Israel/Palestine conflict and a break from Washington’s long tradition of supporting Israel unconditionally at the UN.

According to a Security Council Report, the US has vetoed 30 resolutions relating to Israel and the Palestinians, and another dozen relating to Israel and Lebanon or Syria. Combined, these make up more than half of its 77 vetoes since the UN was established in 1946.

For the past eight years, the Obama administration has used its veto to block any and all resolutions criticizing Israel, which is massively funded with US military aid.

The decision to abstain in this vote is an expression of conflicts within the US ruling class over policy in the Middle East. Earlier this month, Kerry accused right-wing Israelis of deliberately obstructing efforts to broker a peace deal with the Palestinians. He said, “I'm not here to tell you that the settlements are the reason for the conflict, no, they're not… But I also cannot accept the notion that they don't affect the peace process, that they aren't a barrier to the capacity to have peace.”

There are concerns that the open embrace of Israel’s settler project will further stoke hostility to US imperialism throughout the resource-rich Middle East and precipitate the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, whose role has been to police the Palestinian working class.

Top Congressional Republicans and Democrats joined Trump in condemning the resolution before and after it was passed.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who oversees the Senate subcommittee that controls US financing of the UN, threatened to “suspend or significantly reduce” this financing if the resolution passed. Among the top Democrats condemning the resolution were incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Representative Eliot Engel, the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The coming to power of Trump has encouraged the most right-wing factions of the Israeli ruling class. “The right is convinced that anything is possible now,” Shlomi Eldar, a columnist for Al Monitor Israeli Pulse, told the Christian Science Monitor. “The two-state solution can be erased, there will be no problem building in the settlements – the Messiah has come.”

Just days before, Trump had tapped Daniel Friedman, a right-wing supporter of Israel’s settlers, for the post of US ambassador to Israel, signalling his intention to ditch the pretence of opposition to Israel’s expansion of the settlements and its outright annexation of the occupied West Bank. Furthermore, he made clear that the US would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby ending its support for a mini-Palestinian state.

Trump’s appointment of Friedman has already given succour to the settler movement and Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners, particularly his rival and Education Minister Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home Party, on whom his fractious Likud-led coalition depends for its survival. They view this as a chance to sideline Netanyahu and his Likud Party.

Bennett has seized the political opportunity provided by the incoming Trump administration to push for the introduction of a “normalisation” or “regulation” bill, obtaining Netanyahu’s endorsement. It will allow the government to expropriate private Palestinian land on which thousands of housing units were built in many settlements, thereby retrospectively legalising settler outposts on Palestinian land.

The bill, if passed, will transfer the right to use private land to the government and force the Palestinian landowners to accept compensation. In so doing, the law would end the ambiguous status whereby the West Bank has, since the 1967 war, been subject to Israel’s military commander and decrees, not Israel’s Knesset and its laws. This served to provide a cover for the occupation that allowed the Palestinians to appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court, while simultaneously settling 800,000 Israelis in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights.

It will also pave the way for Israel’s full annexation of that part of the West Bank designated as Area C under the 1993 Oslo Accords.

No “Peace on Earth” in 2016

Andre Damon

“Peace on Earth, and goodwill to men”—so goes the line of an oft-sung Christmas carol. The end-of-the-year holidays are a season in which such sentiments are generally expressed, genuinely by broad sections of the population, with utmost cynicism and hypocrisy by various figures in the political establishment.

The actual trajectory of world politics, however, was perhaps best reflected in a tweet from the soon-to-be president of the United States. “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability,” Trump declared on Thursday. This was followed by a statement from MSNBC host Mika Brzezinki on Friday: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

The statements from Trump, part of an exchange with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which both men boasted of the nuclear arsenals of their respective countries, seems like a fitting close to a year of bloodshed.

In 2016, large portions of the globe were engulfed in military conflict. And those states that were nominally at peace spent their time preparing for war and mistreating refugees from armed conflict.

Although definitive figures have not yet been released, at least 150,000 people have been killed in armed conflicts throughout the world in 2016. There were three “major wars,” with a 2016 death toll of over 100,000:

 The Syrian civil war, in which 46,442 people were reportedly killed this year. Since the US began backing the Islamist insurgency in 2011, up to 470,000 people have died. The war has forced 4.9 million people to flee abroad and displaced 6.6 million people within Syria itself.

 The Iraq war, in which 23,584 people were killed this year. Since the United States invaded the country in 2003, more than a million people have died. As of November, 3.1 million people were internally displaced in the country, and millions more had fled abroad.

 The war in Afghanistan, in which 21,932 people were killed this year. Since the United States began providing arms to the Mujahedeen, the predecessor of Al Qaeda, in 1978, more than two million people have been killed in that country, which was torn apart by the 2001 invasion and occupation.

These three conflicts accounted for two-thirds of global deaths in military conflicts. They have also led to a refugee crisis unparalleled in scale since World War II. According to the United Nations, there were 65.3 million displaced people at the end of 2015, up by 5 million since 2014, and by nearly 25 million since 2011.

The surge in refugees, together with their increasingly cruel treatment by destination countries, has led to the highest number of refugee deaths ever recorded by the International Organization for Migration.

Some 7,100 refugees died last year, up from 5,740 in 2015. Half of the fatalities took place as refugees sought to enter Europe across the Mediterranean Sea from war and devastation in the Middle East and North Africa.

This year, Europe shut its doors to refugees. The EU agreed to pay Turkey to serve as the gatekeeper of Europe and block refugees from entering, as it militarized its border patrol and deployed the navies of its member countries to stop “people smuggling.”

This change is best exemplified by Germany, the region’s most powerful state, which is rapidly militarizing as it asserts itself as the dominant European power. While Chancellor Angela Merkel hypocritically proclaimed a “welcoming culture” toward refugees in 2015, this month she adopted large sections of the program of the fascistic Alternative for Germany, calling for a ban on the full-face veil and demanding a further crackdown on refugees.

Beyond the “hot wars” of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, the drive of the US to militarily encircle China has poured fuel on the world’s regional flashpoints. This year, nearly 300 people died in raids and shelling over the border between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed powers. Meanwhile military tensions between North and South Korea, which also threaten escalation into nuclear war, have dramatically intensified.

A quarter century of unending and expanding war is reaching a new and even more explosive stage. Beginning with the first Gulf War of 1991, which directly preceded the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States has sought, through a succession of adventures abroad, to reverse its long-term economic decline.

Obama will leave office as the first US president to serve two full terms under continuous war. He will go down in history as the man who proclaimed the right of the president to assassinate US citizens without due process, and who personally authorized drone “hits” that led to the deaths of thousands of people.

These unending wars, however, have failed to achieve their desired end. Over the past fifteen years, China has tripled its share of the world export market, while America’s share of exports has declined. US military operations, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, have turned into quagmires and debacles. The defeat of the CIA’s Islamist proxies in Syria this month has hammered home the failure of the United States to impose its will upon the Middle East and the world.

But only a fool would believe that these failures will turn America’s warmongering ruling elite into pacifists. Rather, they have led the American ruling class to focus ever more directly on its larger competitors.

The inauguration of Donald Trump will mark a new phase in global conflict. Trump’s provocations against China and his declaration that he welcomes a new arms race with Russia are only the initial indications of the lengths to which his administration is prepared to go to preserve the interests of the American oligarchy.

The year 2017, the centenary of the Russian revolution of 1917, will once again place the struggle against war as the highest and most urgent political task facing mankind.