NSA documents expose secret US spying program in Ethiopia

Eddie Haywood

According to documents released Wednesday by the Intercept, the National Security Agency (NSA) has established an elaborate network of spy facilities in Ethiopia.

The documents, acquired from the trove made public by Edward Snowden in 2013, reveal that the NSA’s Ethiopian operation dubbed “Lion’s Pride” encompasses a surveillance effort by Washington over East Africa of enormous magnitude. The secret program’s broad operational components include not only spying and eavesdropping, such as the indiscriminate gathering up of phone calls, e-mails, and Internet traffic in multiple countries, but also comprises a program of cyber warfare and the infection of networks and computers with spyware.

The program set up by the NSA in Ethiopia is strongly suspected to have utilized FinSpy, a software product marketed by the company Finfisher, that allows the user to hijack other computers by e-mailing the target an “infected” attachment file. This enables the FinSpy user to steal passwords remotely, from the target’s Internet browser, e-mail, and even administration passwords. Essentially, the user of this software can take total control of another computer without the target being aware.

The “Deployed Signals Intelligence Operations Center” was set up by the NSA in 2002 in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, as part of Washington’s “war on terror” in the aftermath of 9/11. According to the document, the spying operation began as a small outpost, employing only twelve Ethiopian officials.

By 2005, the program had expanded its reach and influence to include an additional three remote branches around the country, including one in Gondar, a province in northwestern Ethiopia. The program also expanded its operations to include the eavesdropping on communications in Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.

The spying operations established by Washington in Ethiopia are a key element of the broader drive by imperialist strategists to assert US dominance over the region and the Horn of Africa.

The Ethiopian program functions as a subset of the worldwide operational effort of the NSA’s vast anti-democratic architecture that has stretched its tentacles into Internet and communications networks across the planet.

Illustrating the close relationship Washington has cultivated with the government of Ethiopia with the introduction of the NSA program, the documents cite a report written in 2005 by Katie Pierce, who was the officer-in-charge of Lion’s Pride in Ethiopia, “[The] NSA has an advantage when dealing with the Global War on Terrorism in the Horn of Africa.”

Pierce describes the mutually beneficial relationship between the US and Ethiopia, writing, “The benefit of this relationship is that the Ethiopians provide the location and linguists and we provide the technology and training.”

The establishment of such a blatantly anti-democratic operation in Ethiopia, a country with a history of grave human rights abuses, including extra-judicial murder and torture, corresponds with Washington’s lawless methods in striving for total dominance over the Horn of Africa.

Between 2015 and 2016, during a wave of anti-government demonstrations in Ethiopia, more than 500 protesters were gunned down by security forces, while many others were arrested and beaten. Teargas was used by police indiscriminately to disperse the demonstrations.

In October, attempting to quell the protests, the government of Hailemariam Desalegn imposed a nationwide state of emergency and assumed sweeping draconian powers—which included restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly and granting the police extra-legal powers to detain anyone without cause.

Exposing the true nature of the government’s claim of fighting terrorism, media outlets critical of the government were shut down under the pretext of “promoting violence and disorder”.

In May, elucidating Washington’s imperialist aims for Ethiopia, the US State Department stated on the US Embassy in Ethiopia’s web site: “The U.S. Embassy engages with the Ethiopian government to improve the business climate, create a level playing field for all investors, and to foster an entrepreneurship culture. There are growing opportunities for U.S. trade and investment, particularly in manufacturing, energy, and agricultural processing”.

The NSA program in Ethiopia began after September 11, 2001, when Washington commenced its so-called “war on terror”. Long before the 2001 attacks, Washington regarded the Horn of Africa as a geo-strategic target because the region fronts the main waterway for the world’s oil traffic originating from the Middle East through the Red Sea. In more recent years, the struggle for hegemony has unfolded as part of US imperialism’s rivalry with Chinese influence in Africa.

The chaotic state of Somalia, itself the result of decades of US imperialist intervention, has long been an obstacle to Washington’s aims for the region, beginning with the fall of the Mohamed Siad Barre dictatorship in 1991, which precipitated Somalia’s plunge into complete disarray, with various warring factions battling for power. The destruction of Somalian society has had a grave impact on the masses, and fueled the rise of the islamist militant organization Al-Shabaab.

Backed by the US, Ethiopian forces in 2006 invaded and occupied Somalia to neutralize the Council of Islamic Courts (CIC), when the Somali Islamist organization staged a political rebellion against the US-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu.

According to Human Rights Watch, Ethiopia carried out grave atrocities during the invasion and ensuing occupation, including indiscriminate killings and torture.

Another NSA document divulged by Snowden dated from 2007 reveals that the agency praised Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia. “Ethiopian invasion of Somalia plays to the advantage of US counter-terrorism forces,” it stated.

The document goes on to detail that the NSA provided Ethiopian forces with the agency’s Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) efforts against the CIC, including reports of its troop movements and communications.

Coordinating its intelligence-sharing with the CIA and the US military in Djibouti, the NSA boasted that its “program paid off handsomely” and that “Ethiopia easily defeated the CIC”. The document also boasted of the killing of two unnamed so-called leaders of Al-Qaeda by Ethiopian forces, owing to the effectiveness of the intelligence provided by the NSA program.

The US support has propped up an oppressive regime representing a narrow ruling elite against the Ethiopian masses, who experience immense social misery. More than half of the population lives in poverty, surviving on less than $2 per day.

Illustrating the stark contrast of the social position of the masses to that of the small layer of the ruling elite sitting atop Ethiopian society is the fact that ten of these individuals collectively possess more than $25 billion.

Making clear the Ethiopian masses are the principal target of the NSA program is the revelation that the ruling Desalegn government has used the program against internal political enemies and dissidents.

Felix Horne, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, told the Intercept,“The Ethiopian government uses surveillance not only to fight terrorism and crime, but as a key tactic in its abusive efforts to silence dissenting voices in-country. Essentially anyone that opposes or expresses dissent against the government is considered to be an ‘anti-peace element’ or a ‘terrorist.’”

Under conditions of continual decline in its living standards, fueling a rise in mass social anger, the increasingly restive population is perceived by the establishment as a threat to be crushed.

Mexico earthquake death toll climbs to 98

Andrea Lobo

More than one week after southern Mexico and Guatemala were hit at midnight by an 8.2 earthquake, the strongest in almost a century, food and basic supplies are still scarce in the affected areas, efforts to find victims continue and thousands are sleeping on the streets after losing their homes.

The official death toll currently stands at 98, and the state governments have reported 80,000 damaged homes, along with 1,000 schools, and 96 health facilities. While the total number of people in need of aid has climbed to 2.5 million, the damage and casualties were heavily concentrated in the most impoverished areas of the two poorest states of the country, Oaxaca and Chiapas. Guatemala suffered no casualties, but 605 homes were reported damaged.

Just as with Hurricane Harvey a week earlier in southeast Texas and Hurricane Irma at the same time in the Caribbean and later in Florida, the historic earthquake in Mexico has exposed conditions of staggering inequality, deteriorated social infrastructure and corrupt negligence on the part of the ruling elites.

The deteriorated state of relations between the US and Mexican governments was also made visible. On Tuesday, the Mexican Foreign Ministry cancelled the sending of a convoy of food and medical aid to the areas affected by Hurricane Harvey in Texas in order to direct those resources to the areas impacted by the earthquake.

The Mexican ministry further indicated that the US had not responded to their formal offer of aid after a week, while Trump waited a full week to offer condolences for the losses inflicted by the devastating earthquake. He spoke to President Enrique Peña Nieto only on Thursday, claiming he could not do so earlier because of problems with “cell phone reception.”

This response was in line with his administration’s “America First” program, threatening to “terminate” NAFTA and force Mexico to pay for a border wall. Moreover, the Mexican foreign minister had complained last week that thousands of its citizens will be “potentially affected by the decision” to revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Under these conditions of perceived animosity toward Latin America’s second largest economy and Washington’s top military partner in the region, next to Colombia, US Defense Secretary James Mattis, travel to Mexico City to attend the Independence Day festivities over the weekend. Despite the guise of aid and solidarity, many Mexicans will appropriately perceive that the fifth-ever visit of the Pentagon chief to the country is intended to remind Mexico’s comprador elite of their semi-colonial status and commitments to US security demands.

It was also announced yesterday that the tropical storm Norma is approaching the Pacific coast of Mexico threatening Baja California with high winds and heavy rains.

This storm comes shortly after yet another hurricane hit the state of Veracruz along the Atlantic coast last Friday, leaving seventy thousand people without electricity and two dead from a mudslide.

On Wednesday, the President Peña Nieto travelled to Oaxaca and set off a wave of indignation after he asked “respectfully” that the media not act as “indicators or critics of what is missing, but be part of the solution.”

This was merely the final the drop of cynicism that caused the glass to overflow. A series of denunciations followed in the bourgeois press, led by the conservative El Universal. A column by Carlos Loret de Mola warns that the deadly 1985 earthquake provoked the formation of the political organizations that “fed militants into the nascent PRD,” referring to the Party of Democratic Revolution. He concludes his piece abruptly: “Let’s see what sprouts out of the earthquake… politically speaking”.

This uneasiness goes beyond fears that the earthquake will affect the ruling party in the general elections next year or that it will lead to the formation of other right-wing, nationalist organizations like PRD and its offspring Morena. What preoccupies the ruling class the most is that its criminal negligence exposed by the earthquake leads to the independent mobilization of the working class, leading the peasant and impoverished masses against the governments’ agenda of militarization and austerity diktats from Wall Street and the City of London.

Only eight months ago, workers carried out mass demonstrations all across the country in response to a 20 percent gas price hike or gasolinazo as part of the government’s energy privatization scheme. Already, the earthquake has been trailed by bold acts of protest in southwest Mexico.

Last Tuesday, about 200 peasants in Tapachula, Chiapas, calling for running water, electricity, street maintenance and security, clashed with the police, which responded with beatings, tear gas, and at least a dozen arrests. The next day, protesting the disappearances of their classmates in 2014, 60 teacher students or normalistas from Ayotzinapa seized a bus, a tanker truck with fuel, and other vehicles, and allegedly kidnapped four police officials. The Guerrero police fired live rounds at their caravan, intercepted it and arrested twelve students.

Last week, expert in disaster management and geologist Nieves Sánchez Guitián declared that, unlike the 8.1 earthquake in 1985 that killed tens of thousands, the recent one was off the coast and twice as deep. Nonetheless, she concluded that, after 32 years, “the key to escape the cycle in which poverty leads to more poverty with a catastrophe” remains the same, technical preparedness and prevention.

The hardest-hit states have been long recognized as the poorest of the country. According to the National Council of Evaluation of Social Policies (Coneval), only 7.4 of the population in Oaxaca is not considered poor or vulnerable, compared to 10.3 percent in 2012. In Chiapas, this figure is 6.4 percent. This is in a country in which 1 percent of Mexicans own one third of the country’s wealth.

Juchitán de Zaragoza, one of the two poorest districts of Oaxaca with over half of the population people living below official extreme poverty, was the most affected. Thirty-six people died and about one-third of its homes were fully destroyed. The mayor complained that “assistance is lacking” and that there is no “close coordination with the government”.

The newspaper La Jornada reported that the distribution of food, medicines, clothes, and personal items has depended on the initiative of neighbors, families and friends. A painter, Francisco Toledo, organized the establishment of 20 community kitchens, while a retired teacher Virginia López delivers food to the thousands sleeping on the streets.

“Those affected have not received any provisions”, says López, while the government announced that it is deploying over 4,000 military officials presumably to help with the distribution. A peasant in Ixtepec told EFE: “The Army is not supporting us, it only goes by like a parade. What is required from them is help to remove the debris”.

A 2015 study by the Inter-American Development Bank found that Mexico already dedicates a lower percentage of its GDP to social infrastructure than any other Latin American country. Nonetheless, the government’s response to the disaster has centered around tax breaks and loans to small business ostensibly to “accelerate the reactivation of the economy” in Chiapas and Oaxaca.

Tellingly, the Wall Street credit agency Moody’s discarded offhand that the official response will go beyond meager economic aid to affected families under the natural disaster fund Fonden, noting simply that the economic cost of the disaster will be “limited”.

India and Japan strengthen their anti-China “strategic partnership”

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones 

Tokyo and New Delhi used Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s two-day visit to India last week to further cement their anti-China “strategic partnership,” laying plans for enhanced military-security cooperation across the Indo-Pacific region and for joint economic and strategic initiatives to counter Chinese influence in Africa.

Ominously, this included a pledge from India to work closely with Japan in its efforts to compel North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program under conditions where the United States—Japan’s principal strategic partner—has repeatedly threatened to launch a “preventive war” on the Korean Peninsula. Abe, moreover, is exploiting the US-provoked crisis with North Korea to speed up Japanese rearmament and eliminate the remaining constitutional restrictions on Tokyo pursuing an aggressive, militarist foreign policy.

Abe and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi scrupulously avoided mention of China in their public pronouncements and in the lengthy statement they issued at the conclusion of their summit last Thursday. But no one was in any doubt that China was the principal motivating factor and target of their push to strengthen the Indo-Japanese alliance.

In the run-up to the summit, the Indian media was full of editorials and opinion pieces arguing that New Delhi must augment ties with Japan in response to this summer’s 73-day border dispute and war crisis with China.

Invariably such commentary emphasized that—apart from tiny Bhutan, whose territory New Delhi claimed to be defending—Japan was the only country to explicitly back India during the tense military stand-off on the Doklam Plateau.

According to the Indian Express, Abe raised the Doklam standoff with Modi in private and “complimented” him for “standing his ground” during the crisis.

In their joint statement, Modi and Abe outlined plans to strengthen Indo-Japanese military-strategic cooperation across the board, emphasizing theirs is a “global” partnership. The two countries pledged to work together to “enhance defence equipment and technology cooperation in such areas as surveillance and unmanned system technologies, and defence industry cooperation.” They also agreed to explore the possibility of mounting “joint field exercises” in 2018 between the Indian Army and Japan’s Ground Self-Defence Forces.

Japan, as the statement noted, used the summit to reiterate its readiness to sell India its state-of-the-art US-2 amphibian aircraft. It had been rumoured Abe and Modi would announce they had finalized Tokyo’s largest ever foreign arms sale, but to the disappointment of many Indian and Japanese strategists the negotiations on the US-2 deal are continuing, apparently because New Delhi is angling for greater technology transfers.

Modi and Abe welcomed “the renewed momentum” for Indo-Japanese “trilateral cooperation” with the US, and Australia “stressed …the strategic importance of these cooperative frameworks” and agreed to work for their expansion. The statement made specific mention of the annual Indo-US-Japanese Malabar naval exercise, whose most recent iteration was hailed by the Trump administration as the largest-ever Indian Ocean wargame.

Tokyo also gave strong support to India’s campaign to strategically isolate its traditional arch-rival, Pakistan. Japan pledged to work with New Delhi to combat Pakistan-based Islamist groups active in the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir and endorsed India’s demand that Islamabad “bring to justice the perpetrators of terrorist attacks including those of the November 2008 attack in Mumbai and the 2016 terrorist attack in Pathankot,” in Indian-held Kashmir.

The joint statement’s paragraph on North Korea also included a snipe at Pakistan and an implicit attack on Beijing, with Modi and Abe urging “all parties that have supported North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs” to be held “accountable.” India has long accused Pakistan of having collaborated with North Korea in developing its own nuclear capabilities.

The People’s Republic, it need be noted, has responded to New Delhi’s integration into the US military-strategic offensive against China and the parallel burgeoning of Indo-Japanese ties by strengthening its own strategic partnership with Islamabad.

Again without naming it, the Modi-Abe statement attacked China’s Belt and Road Initiative, in which Pakistan (through the $50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor) is playing a major part. This was coupled to pledges that India and Japan will cooperate in building infrastructure to enhance connectivity between Asia and Africa and between India’s northeast and Southeast Asia. India and Japan are currently working on a $40 billion Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, although the project has yet to be officially launched.

India’s invitation to Japan to help build infrastructure in India’s northeast—an economically backward region bordering China, Bangladesh, and Burma—underscores the strength of Indo-Japanese ties. India views its northeast as especially important and strategically vulnerable, because it is the site of myriad anti-Indian ethno-nationalist insurgencies, is at the center of its border conflict with China, and is connected to the rest of the country only by a narrow corridor.

Development of the northeast is critical to India’s plans to expand its commercial and strategic ties with Southeast Asia. Both Washington and Tokyo have repeatedly pledged to support India’s “Act East” policy as part of their attempts to implicate New Delhi evermore deeply into the South China Sea conflict. Japan is also anxious to link its existing cheap-labor production lines in the ASEAN countries with India.

Beijing’s response to the Abe-Modi summit has been muted. This is not surprising given that it is seeking to reset relations with India in the aftermath of the Doklam crisis and, more importantly, is coming under unrelenting strategic pressure from the US as it stirs up the crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

That said, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying did take exception to India’s plans to have Japan assist it in developing the northeast as India’s gateway to Southeast Asia. No “third party,” said Hua, should “meddle in the disputes between China and Indian over territorial sovereignty in any form.”

While the forging of closer military-strategic ties topped the Modi-Abe summit agenda, Japan and India were also anxious to kick-start their commercial ties. These have waned in recent years, with Japan’s exports to India remaining stagnant and India’s exports to Japan falling from US $6.81 billion in 2013-14 to just $3.85 billion in 2016-17.

A highlight of the summit was a groundbreaking ceremony held in Modi’s home state of Gujarat to initiate the building of the 508-kilometer Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail project. Determined to beat out a Chinese bid to develop India’s first-ever high speed rail line, Japan is funding more than 80 percent of the project’s total cost via a 50-year, US $17 billion loan at a concessional interest rate of 0.1 percent.

Modi and Abe also joined Suzuki Chairman Osamu Suzuki to inaugurate a new Maruti Suzuki car factory in Gujarat. To demonstrate to foreign investors that the Indian state will ruthlessly suppress any challenge to the sweatshop conditions that prevail across India, the political establishment, police and courts have jailed 13 Maruri Suzuki workers for life on frame-up charges. The 13 had led resistance to poverty wages and precarious contract-labour jobs at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar, Haryana car assembly plant.

Both Modi and Abe are anxious to underpin the Indo-Japanese military strategic alliance with an economic partnership in which Japanese capital helps India emerge as a rival cheap-labour production-chain hub to China. A recent editorial in India’s Economic Times boasted that the wages of Indian workers are only one fifth of those in China and argued that maintaining this wage differential is key to realizing Modi’s plans to make India a world-force in manufacturing.

Workers must beware: the cementing of the Indo-Japanese alliance will only encourage US imperialism in its reckless and incendiary offensive against China and whet the great-power appetites of Japanese imperialism and the Indian bourgeoisie.

South Korea assassination squad to target Pyongyang leadership

Ben McGrath

South Korea is assembling an assassination unit to be activated by the end of the year, according to Defense Minister Song Young-mu. It is being trained by the US military to be able to murder North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as well as other high-ranking figures in Pyongyang. The move is part of an overall agenda in Washington and Seoul to expand plans for war against the impoverished state.

The decision to roll out the hit squad is particularly chilling given South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s comments on Friday following North Korea’s test firing of another ballistic missile. Moon responded by ruling out talks with Pyongyang saying, “In a situation like this, dialogue is impossible.” He then warned that South Korea has the “power that can destroy the North beyond any recovery.”

The assassination unit is just one aspect of the preparations for war with North Korea. Defense Minister Song told the National Assembly’s defense committee on September 4, “We are in the process of conceptualizing the plan. I believe we can create the unit by December 1.” The assassination squad would also be tasked with carrying out nighttime raids across the Demilitarized Zone, separating the two Koreas.

The same US Navy Seals team that murdered Osama bin Laden in 2011 is working to train the new unit. This US Seal Team 6 took part in this year’s massive Foal Eagle/Key Resolve war games, conducted by the US and South Korea each spring. It was the first time it had been involved in the exercises, during which, it practiced assassinating Kim Jong-un.

Seoul and Washington are openly discussing the murder of a country’s head of state, though claiming it is only meant to scare Pyongyang or be used in the event of war. However, influential former government figures are openly calling for Kim’s assassination. Nam Seong-uk, a professor at Korea University and former leading official in the National Intelligence Service (NIS) told a meeting of members of the right-wing Liberty Korea Party two weeks ago that, “The problem will not be resolved unless Kim Jong-un is eliminated.”

The assassination squad is part of the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation (KMPR) program. It divides Pyongyang into different sectors to be destroyed in a barrage of missiles supposedly if North Korea shows any signs of attacking. The hit team would then infiltrate and kill any top regime officials who survived. The key to the KMPR is its implementation at any signs of an attack, making it a part of a wider preparation for preemptive war.

South Korea demonstrated its KMPR system in its response to Pyongyang’s missile test on Friday. The military launched two Hyunmoo-2A ballistic missiles only six minutes after the North’s launch. Both landed in the Sea of Japan but only one accurately hit its designated target. After signs of the North’s missile test were reported to Moon on Thursday, “The president, without taking anything else into consideration, approved the firing of Hyunmoo missiles upon North Korea's missile provocation,” a government source stated.

A second system, known as the Kill Chain, has similarly been designed to launch preemptive attacks on North Korean military positions. The third system being put in place is called the Korea Air and Missile Defense (KAMD), which can supposedly track and shoot down an incoming missile.

The KMPR program is not new. It was announced, along with its hit squad, last September following North Korea’s 5th nuclear test, by the Park Geun-hye government. President Moon, who postured as an opponent of military escalation and promised to engage Pyongyang in dialogue, is continuing the program.

In fact, South Korea is accelerating its war drive as the US’s Trump administration continues to ramp up tensions and threats. Seoul has already reached an agreement with Washington to remove the limit on the war head weight on its ballistic missiles while also agreeing to the full deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery.

Moon is planning to increase South Korea’s military budget to 2.9 percent of gross domestic product during the course of his term, up from 2.4 percent. Trump also stated in a Tweet that he would allow South Korea and Japan to purchase substantially larger amounts of military equipment from the US.

The overall joint US-South Korea war strategy is known as Operations Plan (OPLAN) 5015. First adopted in 2015, it instituted a far more aggressive posture, including plans for “decapitation raids” on North Korean officials. It served as the basis for the springtime Foal Eagle/Key Resolve exercises as well as the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills conducted last August. Seoul’s KMPR plan is designed to carry out OPLAN.

Even if one takes at face value South Korea’s claims that these programs are “defensive”, they greatly heighten the danger of war. In its article on the assassination squad, the New York Times admitted, “[T]he potential consequences of accurate detection [of a North Korean attack] are huge. Miscalculation could prompt an unwarranted preemptive strike, which could start a regional nuclear war.”

Such a war would be catastrophic. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ,General Joseph Dunford stated in July, a war “would be horrific, and it would be a loss of life unlike any we have experienced in our lifetimes, and I mean anyone who’s been alive since World War II has never seen the loss of life that could occur if there’s a conflict on the Korean Peninsula.”

At the same time, there is no reason to believe that South Korea or the US would not try to assassinate Kim Jong-un or conduct some other clandestine operation to goad the North into firing the opening shots. The Asahi Shimbun reported on June 26 that former President Park Geun-hye had signed off on a plan to remove Kim following an unsuccessful meeting of officials from the two Koreas in December 2015. Citing an anonymous source, the paper stated the plan included the possibility for Kim’s forced exile, retirement, or assassination.

Pyongyang made unsubstantiated claims in May that the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the NIS in 2014 bribed a North Korean lumber worker in Russia to carry out the assassination of Kim. Given the tensions and the regime’s own nervousness over a US-South Korean attack, even a minor incident or accident in Pyongyang involving a leading figure could be interpreted as an act of war.

Pentagon to fortify Kabul for unending Afghanistan war

Bill Van Auken

The Pentagon is implementing a plan to expand and more heavily fortify Kabul’s “Green Zone,” the section of Afghanistan’s capital where the American and other foreign embassies, NATO and other military headquarters, international organizations and government ministries are located.

This major project, reported by the New York Times Sunday, coincides with a major US escalation of the nearly 16-year-old war, and signals Washington’s intentions to maintain what is effectively a permanent occupation of the war-ravaged but strategically situated south Asian nation.

The Pentagon is reportedly sending another 4,000 troops into the conflict, the longest war in US history. This short-term response to escalating reversals for the security forces of the Afghan puppet government has been accompanied by the US military’s admission that—with the complicity of the corporate media—it had long deliberately undercounted the number of US troops already in the country, with the real number exceeding 11,000, rather than the 8,400 previously reported.

President Donald Trump has maintained the pretense that he is keeping the exact numbers of troops to be sent into Afghanistan a secret, so as not to tip off the insurgency there, however, the real motive is to conceal the buildup as much as possible from the American people. Nonetheless, there are local reports of ceremonies marking the departure of some 6,000 US soldiers being sent from the 4th Infantry Division in Fort Carson, Colorado, along with an undisclosed number from the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Drum, New York.

There are no grounds for anticipating that the beefed-up force of 15,000 US troops will fundamentally shift the situation in Afghanistan, where the government has lost control of roughly 40 percent of the country to the Taliban, which is stronger than at any point since the October 2001 US invasion that drove the Islamist movement from power.

While it was previously said that the US-backed Afghan government was in firm control of nothing outside of Kabul, the Afghan capital itself has become the target of increasingly devastating attacks, suffering the largest number of casualties of any region in the country. The plan to more than double the size of the Green Zone, absorbing a nearby US military base, and bringing in the kind of heavy security and fortifications utilized in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq is in part a response to a truck bomb attack last May that demolished the German Embassy and killed some 150 people.

The plan reportedly calls for the Green Zone to be expanded from its current 0.71 square miles to 1.8 square miles, with streets leading into the fortified district closed to all but official vehicles.

Pointing to the rhetoric of the Pentagon about a new strategy of a “conditions-based withdrawal” as well as Trump’s bombastic speech last month vowing that his administration would “push onward to victory” in Afghanistan, the Times report acknowledges that “the Trump administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan is likely to keep the military in place well into the 2020s, even by the most conservative estimates.”

Among the long-term military plans already on the books is the building of an Afghan Air Force, with the US set to pour some $6.5 billion into the effort between now and 2023.

These plans, along with the proposal for fortifying Kabul, pre-date Trump. As the Times reports, “The process of turning Kabul into a fortress started before Mr. Trump took office, of course—security measures were tightened and an obtrusive network of blast walls was established in some places years before President Barack Obama left office.”

Aside from the escalation in the number of troops on the ground, the shift in US strategy is characterized above all by an increased use of firepower that will inevitably drive up Afghan civilian casualties, which already number more than 1,500 this year alone.

US B-52 bombers flying from Qatar have been staging increased numbers of airstrikes since March, while new artillery units are being sent into the country to shell districts under Taliban control. Trump, ceding control to the cabal of active-duty and retired generals who are setting his administration’s foreign policy, has placed rules of engagement for US troops in the country entirely in the hands of local commanders, setting the stage for a sharp increase in the number of atrocities inflicted upon the Afghan people.

It has also been revealed that the Pentagon is working with the Afghan government on a scheme that would create a new irregular combat force by arming up to 20,000 civilian fighters to secure territory rested from insurgents. The plan appears to reprise earlier efforts to create the so-called Afghan Local Police (ALP), a force that placed effective local control in the hands of semi-criminal warlords who carried out killings of their opponents and extortion of local populations. The proposal is driven in large measure by the crisis gripping the Afghan security forces, which have suffered severe losses in terms of casualties as well as desertions.

In a further avenue in the escalation of the US killing in Afghanistan, the CIA has requested the Trump administration’s approval to begin carrying out drone assassination strikes in Afghanistan for the first time. While the US intelligence agency was given free rein to wage a murderous drone campaign in northwestern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), near the Afghan border, killing and maiming thousands of civilians, until now, drone strikes in Afghanistan have been carried out by the US military. As opposed to the Pentagon, the CIA treats its drone strikes as covert operations, refusing to acknowledge them.

A decisive component of the shift in strategy initiated under Trump is a far more aggressive stance in relation to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country of 190 million. The US president accused Pakistan of “harboring criminals and terrorists,” threatening retaliation, including a cutoff of aid.

On Friday, the US resumed its drone strikes against Pakistani territory, with one of its unmanned aerial vehicles reportedly firing missiles at a Taliban gathering in Kurram, part of the FATA region, killing three people and wounding two others.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad were underscored by an interview in which Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif told the Wall Street Journal that the US was “pursuing a folly, a strategy that has already failed” in Afghanistan. He indicated that he would address the issue at this week’s opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, accusing Washington of relying on a “militaristic” policy, and insisting that only a negotiated settlement can end the war.

“I think Americans should be more realistic and more pragmatic about their approach in Afghanistan,” Asif told the Journal. “They have already lost more than 40 percent of territory to the Taliban. How do you keep on fighting with them?”

The deterioration of bilateral relations was made clear with Asif’s calling off a previously planned trip to the US for talks with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Pakistani government’s rejection of a planned visit to the country by the senior State Department officer for South and Central Asia.

While canceling meetings with US officials, Asif organized meetings with his counterparts in China, Iran and Turkey, stressing Pakistan’s agreement with the governments of these countries on the need for a political solution in Afghanistan. He also indicated his intention to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the UN session to coordinate Afghan policy with Russia.

Such initiatives, aimed at assuring Pakistan’s interests in any settlement of the Afghan war, particularly vis-a-vis its main regional rival, India, cut directly across the aims pursued by US imperialism in its decade and a half of brutal colonial war in Afghanistan. These include establishing a permanent US military presence in a country that borders both Iran and China, as well as the oil rich former Soviet republics of the Caspian Basin.

Washington’s response will likely include not only a further military escalation in the region, but also a further tilt toward India, heightening dangerous tensions between the two nuclear-armed powers in South Asia.

GM CAMI workers strike in Canada

Carl Bronski 

Autoworkers struck the General Motors CAMI auto assembly plant outside of London, Ontario late Sunday night after the Unifor union and GM failed to reach agreement on a new three-year contract. The strike by 2,800 workers is the first at the assembly plant since 1992.

The walkout will all but halt production of GM’s highly profitable Equinox SUV, which is only produced in smaller numbers at two other plants in Mexico. Workers at CAMI assembled more than 300,000 vehicles at the factory last year, making it one of the most productive and profitable in GM’s system.

The strike will immediately hit production at GM’s other operations, including an engine and transmission plant in St. Catharines, Ontario, that supplies CAMI, as well as suppliers that make components for the Equinox.

The walkout by CAMI workers is part of a growing wave of struggles by autoworkers around the world, including the 2015 rebellion by US autoworkers at Fiat Chrysler (FCA) and recent strikes by Korean GM workers, FCA workers in Serbia and VW workers in Slovakia. Last year, there was widespread opposition by rank-and-file workers to the concessions Unifor handed to the Detroit-based automakers.

Workers, who voted 99.8 percent for a strike last month, were quick to set up picket lines determined to recoup their losses from a series of concession contracts signed by Unifor and its predecessor, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW). CAMI workers are forced to labour under a separate agreement than other Canadian autoworkers employed by GM, Ford and FCA—and their factory has long been used to set a lower labour cost benchmark that the unions could then impose on other autoworkers.

The Equinox is GM’s third top selling product in the United States and the fourth biggest seller in Canada. US sales of the Equinox, which retails for $US25,000–$US35,000 per vehicle, were up 67 percent in August. For the past eight years the CAMI plant has been running all out with three shifts producing vehicles six days a week.

CAMI workers have endured a ten-year wage freeze, the imposition of a two-tier wages and benefits system, with a third tier of temporary part time workers added in. They face relentless speed-up and the decimation of any semblance of a grievance procedure on the shop floor. In the last contract Unifor abandoned defined benefit pensions for new hires at the CAMI plant, which was then extended to all Canadian autoworkers in 2016.

If Unifor was forced to call the strike it is because there is enormous opposition among rank-and-file workers to any further concessions. GM is sitting on an $18 billion cash hoard and funneling the profits it extracts from workers to pay billions in dividends and stock buybacks to enrich its top investors.

Plant Chairman Mike Van Boekel told reporters that the main unresolved issue in talks with the company was keeping production of the Equinox at the facility. “We want a guarantee that the Equinox is not leaving and GM will not do it,” he stated. “We want a guarantee that we are the lead plant.”

GM officials refused to designate CAMI as the lead plant for future Equinox production, union officials said, and offered investment of $60 million, compared to $400 million earmarked for a plant in Oshawa, Ontario, during contract talks last year.

Whatever jobs promise GM makes will not worth the paper it is written on. Instead, Unifor, like its counterpart in the United States, the United Auto Workers (UAW) has always used claims of securing new investments to justify further wage, benefit and working condition concessions. Indeed, last February, after GM’s announcement of 625 job cuts at CAMI, Van Boekel told workers, “Let me be clear, we are not going to put ourselves on a pedestal and price ourselves out of jobs and people need to look at the big picture.”

Last February, GM announced it was moving production of its Terrain model to Mexico. Unifor did nothing to oppose the destruction of jobs. The union rejects out of hand any fight to unify Canadian, US and Mexican workers in a common struggle to defend jobs against the global automakers. Instead Unifor, along with the UAW, are peddling the claim that the Trudeau government and the billionaire president in the United States, Donald Trump, will renegotiate the NAFTA agreement to favor the interests of workers in Canada and the US.

The promotion of economic nationalism by the Canadian and US unions has never saved a single job. On the contrary it has served to drive a wedge between North American workers and justify the relentless attacks on workers’ jobs and living standards in the name of “saving” Canadian or American jobs. Both unions accepted massive concessions during the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler.

Thanks to “flexible contracts” with the UAW that include two-tier wage systems and profit-sharing payments instead of fixed raises GM's US hourly worker labour cost fell to $US5 billion in 2015 compared with about $US16 billion in 2005. Unifor has granted similar concessions.

Unifor officials have sought to silence opposition and brand as disloyal any opposition to its collaboration with management. If this struggle is not to be defeated, then rank-and-file workers must take over the conduct of the strike, block every effort to shut it down and impose a sellout deal, and fight to broaden the struggle throughout the Canadian, US and Mexican auto industry.

Spain threatens potential military takeover of Catalonia as referendum looms

Alejandro López 

Spain’s conservative Popular Party (PP) government is continuing its clampdown on the referendum on Catalan independence scheduled for October 1. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is threatening to implement an emergency clause of the Spanish Constitution to block the vote.

On Friday, Rajoy travelled to Barcelona and said Catalonians "are making a mistake, and you are going to force us to go where we don't want to go.” Last week, PP parliamentary group spokesperson Rafael Hernando and Justice Minister Rafael Catalá separately called for its invocation.

Article 155, widely described as the “nuclear option”, states that if a regional government “does not fulfill the obligations imposed upon it by the Constitution or other laws, or acts in a way seriously prejudicing the general interests of Spain, the Government” may take control of the regional government to compel it to meet its “obligations” or to defend “the general interest”.

The article has never been invoked. Until recently, even Rajoy and the Spanish military have been hesitant to call for its invocation for fear it will set off a social explosion among workers both inside and outside of Catalonia.

The Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) is equally fearful of the possibility of both the breakup of Spain and the possibility that opposition to Rajoy’s dictatorial threats will develop outside the framework of Spanish bourgeois politics. PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez responded to Rajoy’s comments in Barcelona by supporting him: “you [Rajoy] will do what you have to do.” A nervous editorial in Saturday’s El Pais, historically tied to the PSOE, noted: “It is impossible for democratic order and chaos to coexist. It is not stable. It is not sustainable. And above all, it is not acceptable. The government cannot permit this parallel legality to further implant itself…”

Madrid’s inflammatory language and actions recall the thuggery of the Francoist dictatorship that ruled Spain from 1939 to 1978. This only increases the likelihood the referendum will pass.

Madrid has taken the unprecedented step of announcing it will take over Catalonia’s finances this week in order to “guarantee that no euros are spent on illegal activities,” according to Spanish Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro.

Vice president of the Catalan government and Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) leader Oriol Junqueras has said that this measure is “a covert way to liquidate the institutions of the country [i.e., Catalonia] and a covert way to implement Article 155 of the Constitution." The separatist parties—the Catalan European Democratic Party (PdeCAT), the ERC, and the Candidatures of Popular Unity (CUP)—have so far continued to prepare for the referendum, holding public rallies calling for a “yes” vote.

The paramilitary Guardia Civil has seized at least 1.3 million pro-referendum leaflets and posters from print shops, closed down 10 web sites promoting the referendum, and threatened Catalan news editors with criminal charges if they publish referendum ads in their papers or on their web sites. Local police are also seizing pro-referendum materials on the streets and identifying anyone with pro-referendum material.

The 700 mayors allowing public spaces to hold ballot boxes in their towns and cities are now being summoned to court for openly supporting the vote. They have been threatened with arrest if they fail to comply.

For the moment, the judiciary has not sought the arrest of Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont. However, Spain's Attorney General José Manuel Maza has threatened to do so in an interview for daily right-wing El Mundo, adding that “I absolutely do not rule out asking for prison sentences”.

The only precedent that exists is under the Second Republic in October 1934, which is now being widely discussed. These threats constitute a warning to the working class of the enormous political tensions that underlie the present conflict. In 1934, in the context of fascism’s takeover of Germany, Italy and Austria, the Spanish conservative government in power brought in fascist ministers, provoking revolutionary struggles in the working class, especially in Asturias, when workers attempted to establish a commune.

In Catalonia, the regional authorities then proclaimed a Catalan State within the Federal Spanish Republic. The initiative failed due to a lack of popular support and the fact that the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labour), supported by most of the region’s workers, did not support the Catalan government.

The subsequent repression led to the detention of thousands of workers and left-wing political leaders. Political centres were closed, newspapers were suppressed and in Catalonia, the regional President Lluis Companys was arrested and the Statute providing the region with a degree of autonomy annulled.

The leader of the anti-Catalan secessionist Citizens Party, Albert Rivera, and former PP Foreign Minister José Manuel Garcia Margallo have both referred to the 1934 events.

Today, the right-wing press is denouncing the Catalan secessionnist drive in articles such as “The Republic Already Suspended the Autonomy of Catalonia” (OkDiario), “The first ‘Catalan State’ lasted 11 hours and Ended Up Behind Bars” (El Confidencial), “October 6 1934: the Coup that Finished in the Sewer”(Libertad Digital), or “Catalonia of 34: from Companys to Puigdemont” (ABC).

Once again, like in the 1930s, the crisis of capitalism has witnessed relentless offensives against the working class in the form of deep austerity, attacks on democratic rights and a rise in militarism.

The critical issue is the independent mobilization of the working class in opposition to both the ruling elite in Madrid and the bourgeois separatists in Catalonia and for the unity of the Spanish working class with their international class brothers and sisters. Neither the Balkanization in Spain, nor the growth of a repressive police apparatus centered in Madrid, offer anything to workers.

The Catalan separatists are reacting by fraudulently posing as defenders of democratic rights. The same forces that have clamped down numerous protests and strikes by workers and youth over the years against their successive austerity policies in the region are now presenting themselves as the defenders of “democracy” against “repression”. Puigdemont has likened his separatist movement's struggle with Madrid to Spain's 1936-39 Civil War and even the Vietnam War, saying in a TV interview, "Every day is a Vietnam."

The Podemos party is deeply divided and, for now, remaining on the sidelines. While opposing the degree of Rajoy’s clampdown, the party claims this referendum is not legal but supports it as a “citizens mobilization”. As staunch defenders of Spanish imperialism and its geopolitical interests internationally, they oppose separatism, but, like much of the European and US bourgeois press, propose to give concessions to the Catalan nationalists in order to stop the secessionist drive.

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has said the PP’s measures are endangering Spanish interests: “We are not only ruled by corrupt people, they are also useless and pyromaniacs who are bringing our democracy to a state of exception.”

Podemos hopes that the minority PP government will burn itself out against the secessionists, opening the door to a “progressive” Socialist Party-Podemos coalition government that would be better able to contain both growing social anger and the Catalan secession drive.

Inhabitants of Irma-ravaged Saint Martin gain nothing from French President Macron’s visit

Francis Dubois

When on Wednesday French President Emmanuel Macron finished his trip to Saint Martin in the Caribbean, an island territory that was 95 percent destroyed by Hurricane Irma, its inhabitants were still fighting for survival. Distribution of food and water remain completely chaotic and inadequate, there is a rising danger of epidemics, and thousands of people, many of them in a weakened state, are homeless, without food or medical care.

Officially, the hurricane claimed 11 lives, almost one third of the losses Irma caused in the Caribbean, as well as seven missing. The French government has not yet decided to give an official estimate of the number of wounded. The damage is initially estimated at €1.2 billion.

Macron was compelled to travel to the devastated island by a rising drumbeat of criticism from the political establishment, on the one hand, criticising the “failure of the state,” and from the French public, which was appalled by the official lack of preparation and indifference to the island’s inhabitants, even after it was clear that the most powerful hurricane in history was set to hit the island.

A crisis meeting was held at the Elysée presidential palace on September 9, even though the scope of the disaster had been obvious for two days, and just after Marine Le Pen of the neo-fascist National Front (FN) attacked the “completely insufficient means for law enforcement” in Saint Martin. Macron then announced on Twitter the “doubling of military and police forces” on the island.

Once he was on the island, Macron was confronted by the rising hostility of inhabitants who for days were left to fend for themselves without food, water, or medical care, as running water and electricity services collapsed. No evacuation order had been given before the storm, and the evacuation after the storm was very partial, while private residents of nearby Guadeloupe came by boat to help the inhabitants. Security forces sent to the island primarily guarded aid shipments that had been sent but not distributed.

Elie Domota, a trade union official in Guadeloupe, said on BFMTV: “The government mainly sent 2,000 soldiers and various police special forces units, as if we were in some sort of outlaw state.” He accused the government of “colonial-style management of this catastrophe.” He added that the first initiative of the state was to “evacuate the wives of soldiers and policemen, leaving the poorest people in chaos.”

Macron travelled to Saint Martin with three ministers in what was primarily a political manoeuvre to quiet criticisms from the conservative The Republicans (LR), the FN, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon. It also was aimed at rising discontent among workers in the Caribbean and in France, who are drawing devastating political conclusions about Macron’s government at the same time as it imposes its anti-democratic decrees for the destruction of the Labour Code.

Macron presented himself in the island as a head of state who was “rolling up his sleeves,” anxious to help his fellow citizens, in a series of carefully staged photo-ops designed primarily to appeal politically to the security forces. One of his main priorities was to participate in a police patrol on Tuesday evening and to call for the “disarmament” of the island.

Allegations of systematic ransacking immediately after the hurricane were rapidly picked up by French politicians, who tried to give the impression that the island was being taken over by organised looting. This false picture was torn to shreds by reports from the island’s inhabitants.

One said: “For four days we’ve had no water or electricity, no roof, everything is wet, we need to wash a two-month-old baby, it’s very hot and he’s breaking out in a rash, and look, there is another cyclone [hurricane Jose was threatening the island]. They give you three bottles of water and say, ‘stay at home.’ What are we supposed to do? Then they complain about looting. They gave me three bottles of water to survive a Category 4 storm, there is the issue of hygiene, my child is two months old, we have to eat, do the dishes and the laundry, flush the toilet. It’s not theft, it’s survival.”

An officer interviewed by the right-wing daily Le Figaro said, “We are dealing with people who are in need and have no more resources, now that electricity and running water have been cut off.” He said they were taking “action that is often connected to survival strategies to feed their families. In fact, the targeted shops mainly were selling basic foodstuffs and products for essential needs.”

Faced with these criticisms, Macron rejected “any idea of abandonment or neglect on the part of my government.” He announced that the island would be rebuilt by big business. “I am appealing to all big businesses and we will mobilise them,” junior minister Benjamin Griveaux said on France Inter on September 11.

Macron seized upon the proposition for a disaster management inquiry made by LR and supported by Mélenchon, saying he was “favourable” to it, but “at the right time.”

Saint Martin is divided between France and the Netherlands, and the French portion is deeply impoverished. Unemployment affects a staggering 27 percent of the population. The percentage of households dependent on relief is high: one-third relies on Universal Medical Coverage (CMU) and nearly a tenth of the population relies on welfare payments. Two thirds of tax households declare yearly incomes less than €9,400.

Infrastructure has been totally neglected for decades, which caused the collapse of running water and electricity services during the hurricane.

In the United States, decades of tax handouts and other payoffs to the super-rich financed by wave upon wave of cuts to basic infrastructure led to the devastation of Texas and Florida by this year’s hurricanes. In France, the systematic transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top by successive governments, both of the right and of the Socialist Party (PS), are now producing similar catastrophes.

This is precisely the class character of the policies being rammed through the parliament by the Macron government. Its indifference, faced with the distress of populations devastated by Hurricane Irma, is of a piece with the massive handouts to the financial oligarchy entailed by Macron’s cuts to the tax rate on the top income brackets and on corporations.

UK government officials back Trump demands for Internet censorship following London bombing

Paul Mitchell & Robert Stevens 

Moves by the ruling elites, in the US and internationally, to censor and even shut down access to the Internet, are gathering pace following Friday’s detonation of a bomb on a London Underground train.

Within minutes of the bombing at Parsons Green tube station that injured 30 people, US President Donald Trump called for the Internet to be shut off. Within hours, senior government UK officials were repeating his demands in increasingly hysterical terms.

The government of UK Prime Minister Theresa May quickly used the bombing to increase the UK terror threat level from “severe” to the highest level, “critical,” triggering Operation Temperer, the mobilisation of heavily armed soldiers working alongside armed police on the streets of the capital and other major urban areas.

Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, national lead for counterterrorism policing, declared, “Military personnel have been drafted in to protect national infrastructure sites, allowing additional armed police officers to carry out patrols.” These would “be patrolling at crowded places, iconic sites, transport hubs and ports.”

On Saturday, the Daily Star reported that troops from the Special Air Service (SAS) have been deployed in pairs on the London Underground “with orders to kill terrorists.” A source told the newspaper, “The unit is composed of some of both male and female personnel from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment who are trained killers and can pose as couples while travelling on public transport.”

Within hours of the explosion, an 18-year-old was arrested in the departure hall at the port of Dover on suspicion of planting the homemade bomb.

The Guardian reported that he is “suspected to have planted the device on the tube carriage, which was detonated by a timer, and would have caused much more extensive casualties had it fully exploded. Investigators do not believe the person who placed the homemade bomb on the train was present when it exploded.”

A second man, 21 years old, was arrested in Hounslow, west London, shortly before midnight on Saturday night.

Both are being held under Section 41 of the draconian Terrorism Act, allowing police to keep them detained without a warrant.

Following the arrest of the second person, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) based at MI5 reduced the threat level from critical back to severe. However, armed police will still be on Britain’s streets for days to come. Rowley said Sunday, “The military support we have had in place under Operation Temperer will start to phase out as we move through the coming week.”

Trump tweeted that the bombers were “sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!” He declared, “Loser terrorists must be dealt with in a much tougher manner … The internet is their main recruitment tool which we must cut off & use better!”

Trump’s remarks about the attackers being known to the British authorities were borne out by a report in the Daily Mail. It cited neighbours of the 18-year-old’s foster carers, Ronald and Penelope Jones, who live in Sunbury-on-Thames, who said he was detained by police at the same tube station days before the attack. Serena Barber said, “I know about two weeks ago he was arrested by police at Parsons Green, for what I don’t know and returned back to Penny and Ron. After that Penny said she was going to have to stop caring for him, she couldn’t handle him.”

Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May immediately condemned Trump’s remarks, but this consternation derives from the fact that they pulled the rug from under her government’s attempts to cover up the fact that virtually all terror attacks in Britain and Europe have been carried out by individuals, often radicalised Islamists, who were known to and monitored by the state.

It is a matter of record that many of them had been employed by the major powers in their neo-colonial wars in Africa and the Middle East.

Following the May 22 Manchester Arena suicide bombing attack, in which 22 people died, US intelligence sources divulged the identity of the bomber, Salman Abedi. They claimed that he did not act alone, but was part of a wider network that had been allowed to operate by the British intelligence services for years. Similarly, the June 3 attack on London Bridge and Borough Market, which killed eight people and injured 48, was carried out by three individuals known to the intelligence services and police.

Trump’s outburst was aimed at putting pressure on the May government not to vacillate in its plans to step up police and intelligence operations and roll out long-prepared repressive legislation to be used against domestic opposition to its agenda of austerity, militarism and war.

May and her government are at one with Trump on curtailing the Internet. This week she is co-hosting a summit with French President Emmanuel Macron in New York “to talk about what more we can be doing to ensure that we deal with the terrorist propaganda, with the extremist propaganda, with the hatred that is put out across the Internet.”

UK Security Minister Ben Wallace warned Internet companies they had to speed up the removal of terrorist material declaring, “We are constantly trying to build that pressure, explaining to them that we think that they can do more and where we need to, we get tougher on them.”

Wallace added, “It is a 21st century phenomena. We have to deal with it. On the Internet people can learn how to make bombs, they can learn how to use weapons.”

Wallace’s comments followed lurid headlines in the UK media Saturday demanding a crackdown on Internet “extremism,” with the right-wing Daily Mail declaring that May “is to confront bosses of the web giants with blood on their hands.” The article stated that the instructions on how to make the type of bomb detonated in London last Friday was readily available on the Internet via a 10-minute Google search.

Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is being touted as a leadership contender against May, said Google should be held criminally liable for Friday’s attack.

Rees-Mogg declared, “Google has amazing software that makes it possible to search for anything … it is shameful that it will not use its technology to root out sites that help evil-doers.

“I would like to see the company made criminally liable for the result of any terrorist act that it can be shown to have abetted. It must do more to help prevent terror.”

Simon Kempton, head of counterterrorism for the Police Federation of England and Wales, said, “The responsibility is on the Internet providers, the hosts, to take down this material if it is clearly a threat to public safety.”

In the name of opposing “extremism,” a drastic curtailing of democratic rights and civil liberties is being readied, with the constant presence of armed soldiers and police on the streets becoming the new normal.

To this end, Colonel Richard Kemp, ex-commander of UK troops in Afghanistan, demanded in the Sunday Express, “STOP unregulated movement from EU countries to the UK, even before Brexit … VET all those entering the UK from countries where violence is rife, including refugees from countries like Syria … DEPORT all non-British citizens involved in extremism or radicalisation … SET UP special courts to hear evidence based on secret intelligence that cannot be revealed in public … SEGREGATE and if necessary isolate terrorist convicts and others who try to radicalise their fellow prisoners … TAG those involved in extremism that cannot be deported or imprisoned so their movements can be more effectively monitored … BAN burkas and other clothing that conceals identity in public places.”

Friday’s attack has been used by the Tory government to pile even more resources into facilitating state repression. On Sunday Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced that an additional £24 million was going towards “counterterrorism” operations nationwide.