Sordid scandal erupts in the UK over cover-up of military leak of Afghan names

Thomas Scripps

The Starmer Labour government and the Conservative opposition are rolling around in the mud over revelations of a military data leak potentially endangering thousands of Afghans, and a close to two-year-long superinjunction preventing the media from reporting the story in any way.

In February 2022, six months after the imperialist withdrawal from Afghanistan, a British soldier was asked to pass on 150 names of Afghans applying for asylum in the UK after the Taliban’s takeover to several contacts for verification. He mistakenly sent the entire database of 18,000 names. The list subsequently made its way to people in Afghanistan.

British soldiers storm a building in Afghanistan, 2007 [Photo by Defence Imagery / Flickr / CC BY-NC 4.0]

It was only over a year later in August 2023—when an Afghan with access to the list who had their asylum claim refused threatened to post the database online—that the British government even discovered the leak. The individual was contacted by the security services, had their asylum refusal reversed and is now in the UK.

The Taliban have said they secured the list in 2022, with a senior official telling the Telegraph, “We got the list from the internet during the very first days when it was leaked,” meaning the horse had already bolted as far as preventing any possible retribution.

But the then Conservative government nonetheless applied for an injunction to prevent press reporting of the story, claiming an ongoing threat of harm to those named in the list as an excuse for covering up the leak. Judge Robin Knowles granted a superinjunction, meaning even the existence of the injunction could not be reported—the first such gagging order secured, or at least known to have been secured, by a UK government.

Breaching an injunction is contempt of court and carries a maximum sentence of two years or an unlimited fine.

Labour’s then Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey was informed of the situation in December 2023, with Keir Starmer apparently informed only upon taking office as prime minister in July last year.

Defence Secretary John Healey speaking at the Heads of Mission Conference at Lancaster House, July 1, 2025 [Photo by Rosie Hallam / MOD / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0]

From April 2024, the Conservative government began relocating some Afghans from the list to the UK under a top-secret Afghanistan Response Route. Nearly 4,500 people were brought to the UK this way by July 2025. They are still to be joined by another 2,500, with an expected cost of around £800 million in total.

Roughly 16,000 others affected by the leak have been resettled via publicly known schemes, which have brought just over 35,000 Afghans to the UK so far—at a cost of roughly £7 billion.

The superinjunction was repeatedly extended by Mr. Justice Chamberlain on application from both the Tory and then the Labour government.

In January 2025, the Labour government commissioned a review into the secret asylum scheme. The report was filed in June, finding that the risks of the data leak were likely overstated and that the existence of the gagging order had possibly made matters worse by raising the cache of the named individuals in the eyes of the Taliban.

Chamberlain lifted the superinjunction, meant to last three months, on July 15 after 683 days. As late as July 7, the Starmer government was seeking to secure continuing restrictions on detailed reporting.

Both sides of the House of Commons launched into solemn disquisitions on “mistakes made” and attacks on the other side’s incompetence, hypocrisy, lack of patriotism, etc. Meanwhile the media has lamented variously—depending on political persuasion—the betrayal of the UK’s Afghan allies, or of the British taxpayers lumbered with the cost of housing more asylum seekers.

Unacknowledged by all concerned is the fact that any harm resulting from the leak would have been only the latest blood spilled in a war jointly pursued by Labour and Tory governments, at the cost of up to 250,000 lives lost directly as result of the fighting, and countless more indirectly.

Labour are making the most of the fact that the leak happened on the Tory government’s watch, but it was Tony Blair’s Labour government which in 2001 launched the war together with US President George W. Bush and their NATO allies—justified with the lie that dismantling al-Qaeda and its host, the Taliban, would advance the cause of “democracy” and “human rights”.

Two decades and trillions of dollars later, the “War on Terror” left Afghanistan as one of the poorest countries in the world. It was handed back to the Taliban as the corrupt and reviled puppet government of Ashraf Ghani collapsed.

The occupation was such a debacle for the imperialist powers that the agreement to withdraw US and allied forces—initially proposed by Donald Trump but initiated by President Biden in May 2021—left thousands of their former allies to their fate.

In his response to the latest revelations, Healey plumbed new depths of hypocrisy by simultaneously touting promises kept while pledging to put a stop the secret resettlement scheme: “From today, there will be no new ARR [Afghanistan Response Route] offers of relocation to Britain. From today, the route is closed.”

Thanks to Labour’s “policy decisions that we have taken compared with simply continuing the policy and schemes that we inherited, the taxpayer will pay £1.2 billion less over the period, about 9,500 fewer Afghans will come to this country”.

This is the savagery of the imperialist ruling class at its most brazen; even their military collaborators fall foul of the government’s vicious anti-migrant and cost-cutting campaigns.

The decision follows the exposure of repeated interventions by the UK’s special forces to deny thousands of asylum applications from members of the Afghan special forces, for fear of what they could reveal about British war crimes committed in Afghanistan.

Similar concerns also motivated the superinjunction, which prevented even the Afghans on the list from being informed of the leak. Also named were more than 100 British citizens, including MI6 agents and members of the UK special forces—among them, according to the Telegraph, a major-general and a brigadier.

To protect these assets, and spare the government’s blushes, the public were kept in the dark utilising draconian legal restrictions. The anti-democratic precedent is obvious. No one knows whether other superinjunctions are presently in force, nor will they know whether another is implemented in future. And once again the courts were the enforcers of this blanket censorship, not guardians against it.

When he finally lifted the injunction, Chamberlain said it was “fundamentally objectionable for decisions that affect the lives and safety of thousands of human beings, and involve the commitment of billions of pounds of public money, to be taken in circumstances where they are completely insulated from public debate.”

But that was just as true nearly two years ago as it was this Tuesday.

Trump, Republicans maneuver to defuse Epstein crisis

Barry Grey

Jeffrey Epstein, March 28, 2017 [AP Photo/New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP]

In the aftermath of a politically explosive article posted Thursday evening by the Wall Street Journal detailing Donald Trump’s extensive relationship with the billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have scrambled to defuse the crisis triggered by the Justice Department’s refusal to release FBI investigative files on the Epstein case.

Release of the files could implicate hundreds of leading political and corporate figures, Democrats and Republicans, documenting the corruption and depravity of the entire ruling class. Six years after Epstein’s death, supposedly by suicide while awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail cell, over a thousand victims have been identified, but not a single perpetrator who availed himself of Epstein’s services as a procurer of teenage girls has been named by the government.

Trump and his MAGA allies promoted claims of a “deep state” conspiracy to cover up the scandal in order to protect leading Democrats, such as ex-president Bill Clinton, and pledged to release the Epstein file. But earlier this month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a two-page report declaring that no “client list” had been found, that there was no suspicion of foul play in his death, and that no further information would be released about Epstein’s criminal activities.

This triggered an uproar from sections of Trump’s fascistic base, including former White House aide Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and social media pundits Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Laura Loomer, who demanded the release of the documents and called for Bondi’s resignation. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson called for the release of the files.

Trump denounced his MAGA critics as “stupid” and “weak” and claimed they had fallen for a Democratic provocation. But following the Wall Street Journal article, he announced that he had instructed Bondi to go to court to seek the release of grand jury testimony in the federal case against Epstein. Bondi promptly reversed course and on Friday filed in court for the release of the testimony.

This move, however, falls far short of the demand to release the FBI’s Epstein file, which includes, among other things, reams of video recordings taken from Epstein’s homes. Moreover, it is very difficult to secure the release of grand jury testimony, which is highly protected by the courts, and in any event would take many months of legal wrangling to obtain. The move has more the character of a diversion than a concession to Trump’s enraged base.

Before Trump issued his call for the grand jury testimony, he posted on Truth Social a denunciation of the Wall Street Journal. He accused the newspaper of publishing a “false, malicious and defamatory” report and said he would sue the Journal, NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch. He added, “President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal.”

Also Thursday evening, House Republicans, in a bid to appease the Republican base and preempt Democratic attempts to pass a resolution demanding the release of the Epstein file, obtained passage by the Rules Committee of a non-binding resolution concerning the controversy. The measure calls on the Justice Department to make available within 30 days “documents, records and communications” surrounding the investigation into Epstein, his death, and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. The resolution has not been scheduled for a vote and it is not clear if it ever will be.

The Rules Committee resolution was also meant to deflect a procedural maneuver by Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Trump critic, to force a floor vote on the matter, a move that had drawn the support of at least eight other Republicans.

In a social media post, Massie denounced the Rules Committee resolution as a toothless gesture that would not produce any new disclosures. “Congress thinks you’re stupid,” he wrote. “The rules committee passed a NON-BINDING resolution, hoping folks will accept it as real.”

Also on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal posted an editorial headlined “No Special Counsel for the Epstein Files.” The newspaper endorsed President Trump’s opposition to calls for the appointment of a special counsel to look into the Epstein case and the suppression of FBI documents. It noted that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had said Thursday afternoon that Trump “would not recommend a special prosecutor,” and affirmed his support for this position.

The crisis within the political and media establishment over the Epstein case is bound up with the broader crisis of the Trump administration, facing mounting popular opposition to his assault on social conditions and democratic rights, and sharp divisions within the ruling class, particularly over economic policy. Murdoch has fully supported Trump’s unprecedented attack on social programs and his dictatorial moves, but he has been highly critical of Trump’s tariff war and his threats to fire Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell. At the same time, he has no desire to expose the pervasive corruption and depravity at the highest levels of the corporate and political establishment.

Peru’s far right rams through amnesty for human rights violators

Armando Cruz

Troops of the Peruvian National Police [Photo: @presidenciaperu]

Peru’s far-right forces, through their representatives in the totally discredited Congress and their puppet President Dina Boluarte, are in the final stages of implementing a legal framework for granting total amnesty for human rights violators and breaking from the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS).

The IAHRS is the legal body responsible for human rights within the Organization of American States (OAS), to which Peru and all South American countries belong. To date, only the governments of Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela, the latter of which the Peruvian far right denounces as a dictatorship, have effectively separated from the IAHRS.

On July 9, congressmen from the right-wing parties Fuerza Popular, Avanza País, Alianza para el Progreso, among others, voted in a session of the Permanent Commission (a body that meets when Congress is out of session) for Law 32107, which establishes a new statute of limitations for crimes against humanity committed before July 1, 2002.

The law has provoked condemnation and outrage from lawyers, human rights organizations and representatives of victims, who rightly denounce the law as an open door to police state impunity. This was confirmed just days after the law came into effect when three members of the former paramilitary group Colina requested to invoke the new law to apply the new statute of limitations on their convictions.

Colina was created by the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) during the so-called Internal Conflict of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which the armed forces fought a dirty war against the Maoist guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and, to a lesser extent, the Castroite MRTA.

Members of the Colina group were convicted in various courts for two massacres of civilians that occurred at that time—Barrios Altos and La Cantuta. In 2009, Fujimori himself was found guilty of “direct responsibility” for these crimes and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Fujimori was pardoned in 2017 as part of a corrupt agreement with then-right-wing President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, but was sent to prison again in October 2018 when the judiciary overturned the pardon. Fujimori was finally released by the Constitutional Court in December 2023 with the support of President Boluarte. He died of cancer in September of last year.

Keiko Fujimori, his daughter and political heir, is the main ally and political supporter of Boluarte, who assumed the presidency after then-pseudo-leftist President Pedro Castillo was overthrown in a parliamentary coup in December 2022. She consolidated her power by ordering lethal repression, killing 50 unarmed protesters in the southern Andean regions, where Castillo had strong support.

Since then, Boluarte has been nothing more than a willing puppet of the right-wing forces led by Fujimori and her capitalist, anti-worker, and anti-human rights agenda. In exchange, Fujimori ensures that her party’s 24 congressmen and political allies support Boluarte, her ministers, and officials in the face of any crime, accusation or scandal that may arise.

Boluarte’s sympathy for the impunity laws enacted by Congress are no doubt driven by her own fears of facing prosecution once she leaves office for crimes against humanity for the bloody repression she oversaw as the regime sought to assure international capitalism that it had the nation under control.

Boluarte and the far-right factions with which she is aligned have implemented the most reactionary policies and laws since the fall of the Fujimori regime, of which the impunity laws are one of the most eagerly awaited and planned packages.

Currently, Boluarte, with a 3 percent approval rating, and Congress, with a 2 percent approval rating, are the most unpopular president and Congress in the world.

On March 13 of this year, the so-called APCI Law was passed, which strengthens the control, sanctioning and supervision of NGOs active in Peru. The law was criticized by Amnesty International because it states that everything NGOs do with international cooperation funds must be approved in advance by the state.

Two months later, in June, Congress voted 61 to 44, with three abstentions, in favor of Bill 7549, which was specifically created to grant direct amnesty to military and police personnel accused of or on trial for human rights violations during the internal conflict. The main promoters of this new law were Fernando Rospigliosi, a staunch Fujimori supporter and long-time agent of the US embassy—an accusation he has never attempted to deny—and Jorge Montoya of the Honor and Democracy caucus, a reactionary and racist retired Navy admiral who served as chief of the armed forces command and who is the direct voice of the most fascistic factions of the Armed Forces.

In an interview, Rospigliosi stated that there are “endless judicial proceedings that seek not justice but revenge,” referring to the trials against military and police personnel. Montoya, meanwhile, stressed that military and police personnel who fought against “terrorism” should not be prosecuted. “Endless trials have been opened. This is manipulation of justice,” he declared.

Montoya is also a former member of the far-right and ultra-conservative Popular Renewal party, whose leader, Rafael López Aliaga, is the current mayor of Lima and a candidate for the presidency in the upcoming elections. López, a businessman and member of the Catholic sect Opus Dei, is likely to become the leader of the entire right wing, as corporate elites are reportedly abandoning Keiko Fujimori in favor of his candidacy. He recently stated that he would “solve” the growing wave of crime by sending prisoners to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador.

As with Law 32107, this new legislation was criticized because it would effectively upend more than 600 ongoing judicial proceedings and 156 cases in which convictions have already been handed down for crimes such as forced disappearance, torture or extrajudicial execution, almost all of them committed during the Internal Conflict. Delia Espinoza, the nation’s prosecutor, stated that the new law would contradict the norms of the IACHR, to which Peru is a signatory: “The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been clear. Amnesty laws for crimes against humanity are inadmissible.”

The day after the law was passed, Prime Minister Eduardo Arana announced in a speech to Congress that he would propose to Congress the creation of a high-level commission to evaluate Peru’s withdrawal from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). No further details have been provided, but withdrawal from the IACHR is a plan that has strong support from the Armed Forces, the government, the extractive companies and even the Catholic Church. Many victims of the internal conflict have turned to the IACHR as a last resort to sue the Peruvian state and the Armed Forces for their role in human rights crimes. The IACHR has also shown its support for environmentalists and indigenous peoples in conflicts with extractive corporations, as well as for LGBT rights.

Just one month before Arana’s proposal, a hearing was held at the IACHR in San José, Costa Rica in the case of Celia Ramos, a Peruvian working woman who died after being coerced into undergoing surgical sterilization under a “family planning” campaign imposed during Fujimori’s second term in office.

The case concerns “Forced Sterilizations.” It was presented by the Ministry of Health at the time as the “National Reproductive Health and Family Planning Program,” whose objective was to reduce the birth rate, but in reality it was a quasi-eugenic campaign in which women of poor, rural and indigenous origin were deliberately selected and coerced or deceived into being sterilized in order to reduce their population. An estimated 270,000 women (and a smaller number of men) were sterilized during this period.

According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the recently closed USAID agency participated in or directed this program.

Celia’s daughter, Marisela Monzón Ramos, managed to bring this case to the IACHR after the Peruvian justice system shelved the sterilization prosecutions; and in 2021 the IACHR declared the Peruvian state responsible for Celia’s death and recommended comprehensive reparations.

However, this case, like thousands of others, would once again be shelved and forgotten under the new amnesty law, which seeks to protect the most heinous crimes committed by the Peruvian bourgeois state and thus pave the way for future crimes.

US child health plummets amid austerity and inequality

Isaac de Vries

Children walk past a U.S. Army helicopter on the National Mall ahead of a Trump's military parade Wednesday, June 11, 2025, in Washington. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]

The health of children in the United States has deteriorated catastrophically over the past 16 years, a trend now documented in a new study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Authored by Dr. Matthew M. Davis and a team of researchers from Northwestern University, UCLA and other leading institutions, the report sheds light on the devastating social and medical conditions confronting an entire generation of American youth. Drawing on extensive data from nationally representative surveys, pediatric health system records (PEDSnet), and mortality statistics from the US and comparable OECD countries, the study exposes a systematic and across-the-board decline in pediatric health outcomes.

Between 2007 and 2022, mortality rates for infants under one year old in the US were consistently 1.78 times higher than in comparable OECD countries. The main drivers of these excess deaths were prematurity, which was 2.22 times more likely, and sudden unexpected infant death, at 2.39 times the OECD average.

Additionally, among children and youth aged 1–19, the mortality rate was 1.80 times higher, with firearm-related deaths an alarming 15.34 times more likely, and motor vehicle crash deaths 2.45 times more likely in the US than in the OECD average.

Data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) showing increase in mortality rate among children in the United States. [Photo: JAMA]

Chronic health conditions among children aged 3 to 17 have also risen substantially. From 2011 to 2023, the prevalence of chronic conditions increased from 39.9 percent to 45.7 percent according to clinical records (PEDSnet), and from 25.8 percent to 31.0 percent based on parent-reported data. Conditions such as anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorder, obesity and developmental disorders have seen significant increases, with major depression more than tripling in prevalence.

Additionally, childhood obesity rates climbed from 17 percent in 2007–2008 to 20.9 percent in 2021–2023. Early onset of menstruation in girls rose sharply, from 9.1 percent to 14.8 percent. Trouble sleeping among adolescents nearly doubled from 7.0 percent to 12.6 percent. Limitations in daily activities due to chronic illness also increased, affecting 9.1 percent of children in 2018 compared to 7.7 percent in 2008–2009.

Furthermore, the prevalence of physical symptoms diagnosed by physicians, such as pain, dermatological issues and menstrual disorders, has significantly grown, with over 41 percent of children experiencing at least one of these symptoms by 2023.

Data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) and World Health Organization (WHO) showing increase in various forms of death among young people. [Photo: JAMA]

Equally concerning is the stark rise in emotional and psychological distress. Depressive symptoms among high school students increased dramatically from 26.1 percent in 2009 to 39.7 percent in 2023, and loneliness rose from 20.2 percent to 30.8 percent among adolescents aged 12–18 between 2007 and 2021.

This comprehensive evidence from the JAMA study provides clear documentation of a pervasive decline in the overall health and well-being of American children. The breadth of worsening health outcomes demands a deeper examination of the socio-political conditions and policy decisions from 2007 to 2023 that have determined this ongoing public health crisis.

Across the Obama, Trump, Biden and second Trump administrations, both major political parties have overseen and intensified the subordination of healthcare policy to the demands of capital.

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed under Obama, was touted as a historic reform, it ultimately reinforced the private insurance model and left tens of millions of working class families with inadequate coverage, high deductibles and limited access to pediatric care.

At the same time, the Budget Control Act of 2011, a bipartisan agreement, imposed strict caps on domestic spending—including public health and education—initiating a decade of austerity that directly impacted the systems children rely on.

Trump’s first term brought further dismantling of whatever could be salvaged of the ACA, undermining Medicaid and enabling states to impose work requirements and restrict eligibility. His administration cut over $1 billion from the Prevention and Public Health Fund and sought to cap Medicaid on a per-capita basis—moves that would have dramatically reduced funding for child health.

Environmental deregulation under Trump also increased exposure to toxins, particularly in low-income communities, while cuts to SNAP (food stamps) and school lunch programs further strained families.

Biden’s presidency continued this pattern. Despite the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan, its failure to be renewed resulted in a rapid spike in child poverty. Biden also allowed emergency Medicaid flexibilities from the COVID-19 pandemic to expire in 2023, leading to the disenrollment of millions of low-income children.

The worsening health of American children is not a blameless state of affairs but the direct result of a society governed by a financial oligarchy that subordinates every aspect of life to the pursuit of private profit. Over the past several decades, both capitalist parties have overseen the systematic dismantling of the social programs—housing assistance, public education, food security and healthcare—that form the foundation of childhood development. As corporate profits have soared, investment in these critical services has stagnated or declined, leading to rising rates of disease, disability and inequality among working class youth.

The most egregious expression of this process is Trump’s recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a bipartisan-backed measure that represents the most sweeping transfer of wealth from the bottom 99 percent to the top 1 percent in modern American history.

While the ruling class enjoys massive tax breaks and government handouts, the working class is left to bear the costs of social collapse: crumbling schools, vanishing nutrition programs, unaffordable healthcare and deteriorating public infrastructure. It would be wrong to characterize this as a policy failure: it is a deliberate strategy to deepen exploitation and preserve the wealth of the ruling elite at the expense of workers and their families.

The child health crisis is bound up with the broader disintegration of economic opportunity and class mobility under decaying capitalism. Real wages have stagnated, union protections have been gutted and basic necessities have become unaffordable. For millions of families, despair is not psychological—it is material. Rising child suicide, obesity and mental illness reflect the deepening poverty and hopelessness that afflict working-class communities.

Education, which plays a crucial role in health literacy and child development, remains chronically underfunded. Public schools lack resources for basic nutrition and health education, while millions of families live in “food deserts” that make healthy eating all but impossible.

These conditions are compounded by ideological attacks from the far right. Figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now secretary of Health and Human Services under Trump, peddle pseudoscientific nonsense that shifts blame onto individual workers while concealing the role of capitalism in producing mass illness. One immediate result can be seen by a measles outbreak that has reached a three-decade high.

Policies like abortion bans are part of this exploitative system as well, promoting increased maternal and infant mortality. While capital devalues and discards older, costlier workers, a desperate new generation are exploited anew. This ruthless logic governs capitalist public health policy, which is methodically designed to protect profit.