The 5 US Colonies

Ben Norton

We live in the 21st century. We are often told colonialism is “a thing of the past.” Yet the US still formally has five colonies: Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands.

These nations are often referred to as US “territories” (there are 16 official US territories in total, but only five are inhabited). This term is a euphemism. These five nations have no formal representation in the US political system. Their peoples, most of whom are US citizens, cannot vote for representatives in Congress and cannot participate in the presidential election. A head of state whom they did elect can send them to war. They merely serve as sources of natural capital the US can exploit and pools of human capital and labor it can siphon into its economy and military.

Remember “taxation without representation”? This maxim is often touted as the principal ideological basis for the so-called American Revolution. (Leading historian Charles A. Beard insisted otherwise, demonstrating in his canonical work An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States that the obscenely rich Founding Fathers were motivated not by freedom, but by profit.)

US schools claim that it was the inability of the American colonies to represent themselves politically that led these colonial subjects of the British empire to declare their independence. We see similar conditions today in the US “territories,” and, yet, the very same fervent American nationalist who would doubtless break out in a fit of rage were someone to call the US a 21st-century colonial power would positively bristle at the notion that New England was just a British “territory,” not a colony.

Political comedian and TV host John Oliver brought attention to this issue in a March 2015 segment on his show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, rekindling public discourse about the undemocratic status these nations endure. Some of the US media picked up on the controversy, yet no one addressed the indisputable colonial nature of this relationship and the injustice it engenders.

Most of the people in these five colonies are US citizens, yet they cannot vote in US elections. According to the 2010 Census on Puerto Rico and Island Areas, 4.1 million people live in these territories. These millions are not afforded the rights of citizens in the US proper. Dr. Anne Perez Hattori, an historian of Guam, notes that “the United States flag is flying over these lands,” but they live under a different set of laws.

How is this justified? The short answer is racism.

98.4% of the inhabitants of these colonies are considered “racial or ethnic minority populations,” according to the aforementioned census. In the 1901 Insular Cases, the Supreme Court ruled that the US colonies, which it referred to as “possessions,” were territories “belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States,” as they were “inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought.” Differing in “modes of thought” was the explicitly racist court’s polite way of saying “they are stupider than us because they are not white.”

The court therefore concluded that “the administration of government and justice, according to Anglo-Saxon principles, may for a time be impossible.” In other words, it claimed that these “alien races” would be unable to govern themselves and administer justice according to how white supremacists define it.

The judge who wrote the lead decision in the first of the rulings in this case was Henry Billings Brown, a white supremacist who also authored the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the 1896 “separate but equal” doctrine that maintained racial apartheid in the US until it was overturned in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education.

Today, decades after Plessy v. Ferguson was defeated, the rulings of the over one-century-old Insular Cases still hold. The citizens of these colonies are separate and unequal. They carry US passports that read “The bearer is a United States national and not a United States citizen.”

This is not a new concern that has only recently emerged. Those living in these lands have repeatedly voiced their opposition to these colonial practices. Their voices have been silenced. In March 2015, Virgin Islands Delegate to Congress Stacey Plaskett testified on the House Floor, stating

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma this week, and the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act, I want to once again call to the attention of my colleagues here in Congress that there are still American citizens today who do not have equal voting rights. These are citizens of America’s island territories—the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Marianas.

Puerto Ricans are US citizens. John Oliver draws attention to the hypocrisy of calling people like Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor the daughter of Puerto Rican “immigrants,” given Puerto Ricans already are citizens. “No she isn’t,” Oliver interjects. “She’s the daughter of Americans who moved from Puerto Rico. If Puerto Ricans are immigrants, anyone who moves anywhere is an immigrant.”

In fact, Puerto Rico has more US citizens than 21 states, but less voting rights than any of these. In January 2015, the country’s resident commissioner to Congress Pedro Pierluisi explained

Puerto Rico has been a territory since 1898. Its status is incompatible with the principles this Nation strives to uphold at home and promotes abroad. There are 3.6 million American citizens in Puerto Rico. My constituents cherish their U.S. citizenship and have made countless contributions to this country in law, science, business, government, the arts, the armed services, and every other field of human endeavor. Yet they cannot vote for President, have no U.S. Senators, and send one Delegate to the House who has a voice but no vote in this Chamber.

The people of Puerto Rico, beyond lacking democratic rights, are deprived of equality under law. Congress has a license to discriminate against the territories, and Puerto Rico is treated worse than the States under a range of Federal programs. To compensate for the shortfall in Federal funding, the Puerto Rican government has borrowed heavily in order to provide adequate public services. This disparate treatment is the principal reason why Puerto Rico has endured severe economic problems for decades.

Inequality, both political and economic, is driving thousands of my constituents to depart for the States every month. It is human nature to go where you believe you can secure a better future for yourself and your family. However, residents of Puerto Rico have finally said enough is enough. They demand a status that is democratic and dignified, a proud status for a proud people.

Guam is essentially a large military base. US Navy and Air Force bases take up over one-fourth (27%) of the country’s land mass, yet its people, who are US citizens, do not have full voting rights.

Meanwhile, at least one in eight (13% of) Guamanians are US military veterans. And those who have served the country that rules over them without their political consent are later abandoned by it. In 2012, the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ per capita spending on medical care for veterans in Guam was lower, by far, than it was in any other state in the US. On his show, Oliver shows a documentary film clip featuring a Guamanian veteran who is trying to get medical care, only to find that the closest location for treatment is over 3,800 miles away, in Hawaii.

During US elections, Guam holds an ad hoc unofficial straw poll. In the 2012 presidential election, its turnout was 67%—higher than the US turnout (at 62%). Evidently they understand and practice “Anglo-Saxon” principles of “justice” more than the Anglo-Saxons living in the US, but are legally treated as third-class citizens because they are of an “alien race.”

Individuals born in every state and territory are automatically granted US citizenship, save for one: American Samoa. The US cares so little about the people of this colony its politicians cannot even pronounce its name correctly. In June 2013, congressman Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) was given a simple task: introduce American Samoa’s non-voting Delegate to the House, Eni Faleomavaega. He butchered not just the name of the representative, but also the name of the country (which he called “Samolia,” procuring a letter l from nowhere). Faleomavaega responded coolly, correcting Bentivolio’s pronunciation.

Although American Samoa does not have representation in the US political system, it does have the largest US Army recruiting station in the world. The US does not care enough about American Samoans to grant them full political rights, but it will happily turn them into cannon fodder.

Five American Samoans have sued the US government over this injustice. The Obama administration has fervently rejected them, citing the racist Insular Cases that claim citizens of these colonies are not capable of living up to the standards of “Anglo-Saxon” law. And ignorant white Americans still have the temerity to claim we live in a “post-racial society.”

None of this should come as a surprise, of course. Colonialism was built on racism. The remaining US territories are vestiges of this colonial history.

Neocolonialism is certainly an enormous issue. The US has hundreds upon hundreds of military bases around the world—so many there does not appear to be a standard publicly released figure. In Afghanistan alone, the US had up to 800 bases, as well as 505 just in Iraq. US imperial control expands far and wide, and de facto colonies can arguably be found in many places. Yet the five inhabited US territories are official, de jure colonies.

The bourgeois liberal solution to this problem is simply to turn the countries into member states, with full political representation. The revolutionary solution is to demand autonomy and independence from the imperialist power that colonized them as far back as the 19th century and continues to exploit them today.

Whichever is chosen is ultimately a decision for the people of these colonies to make democratically, and it is the responsibility of those living in the US to defend their right to do so.

Let’s Talk a Little Treason

Kevin Carson

I normally associate terms like “treason” and “sedition” with right-wing know-nothings like the American Legion. So it’s eye-rollingly painful, in cases like the letter to Iran from Tom Cotton and 47 other Republican senators, to hear self-described progressives seize on those terms.

By way of background, the Congressional GOP recently invited ultra-hawkish and ultra-racist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress. The invitation was extended and accepted without Obama’s approval — a big no-no in legislative-executive etiquette — in a clear bid to pressure Obama into moving closer to Netanyahu’s aggressive line on Iran. And as if that wasn’t enough, Cotton’s letter (which warned the Islamic Republic that any agreement with Obama will be a dead letter the minute his Republican successor takes the oath of office in January 2017, and maybe before then if Senate ratification is called for) was a direct attempt to sabotage any peace settlement short of war.

Since then I’ve seen a lot of squawking from party-line liberals about the Logan Act — which prohibits anyone from conducting diplomacy with a foreign power without presidential approval — and “treason.”

Now, I consider the Cotton letter an outrage — but not because of the Logan Act or “treason.” Frankly, I don’t give a rip about those things. Normally I consider treason a good thing. The actions of Cotton and the senators who co-signed that letter are despicable because, in a case where the executive is actually less militarily aggressive and imperialistic than Congress, the Congressional GOP is attempting to force Obama into a criminal war of aggression on Israel’s behalf. (Not that the attempt was successful — if anything the backlash may have actually caused the Democratic Party to extricate its collective nose from Israel’s posterior by a few microns.)

On the other hand, this is sort of a man-bites-dog story. Most of the time, we need a lot more “treason” and Logan Act violations against official U.S. foreign policy. For example, right now I’d celebrate any member of Congress who violated the Logan Act and undermined Obama’s actions against Venezuela and the US government’s broader agenda of reimposing Yanqui imperialism on South America.

And any senator who (say) attempted to undermine George Bush’s drive for war with Iraq in 2002-2003, by contacting the Iraqi government or travelling to Iraq, would have been a hero.

Quite frankly, the U.S. in 1945 replaced Germany and Japan as the world’s leading imperial and counter-insurgency power, and since then the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy has been to make the world safe for corporate rule and to protect the global corporations and their trillions in stolen neo-colonial loot from the people of the countries they’re robbing and enslaving. The idea of “treason” against U.S. government policy, as such, evokes no more outrage in me than treason against the policies of Nazi Germany.

Here’s a (very partial) list of cases since WWII where anyone violating the Logan Act and “treasonously” undermining US foreign policy would have been a hero of humanity:  overthrowing Arbenz, Mossadeq, Sukarno and Lumumba; entering the Vietnam War; the wave of US-backed fascist military coups in South America starting with Brazil under LBJ and extending to the rest of the continent under Nixon and Kissinger; Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor; the destabilization of Afghanistan under Carter; US aid to Salvadoran death squads; the first and second Gulf Wars the Bushes lied us into; the Balkan Wars Clinton lied us into… ad nauseam, ad nauseam.

And really high on that list is American backing for the Israel settler state since its illegitimate creation in 1948, and extending through its entire history of ethnic cleansing and Apartheid since then.

Treason against the American state and its policies, as such, is no crime. The policies of the American state itself usually are.

For a general strike to defend jobs, safety and living standards!

Jerry White

Oil workers must organize now to defeat the sellout contract the United Steelworkers union is seeking to steamroll them into accepting on behalf of the oil corporations and the Obama administration. If implemented, the four-year deal would give the oil bosses a free hand to continue destroying the jobs, work conditions and livelihoods of tens of thousands of current and future workers in the industry. This must be stopped.

The determination of oil workers to resist the dictates of the corporations represents the beginning of the re-emergence of a movement working class in the US, after decades in which the unions have suppressed the class struggle even as corporate profits, executive pay and the stock market hit record levels. Oil workers have the sympathy and support of millions of workers throughout the country and internationally. This support must be mobilized and given conscious political expression.

Rank-and-file committees at every refinery should be elected to campaign for a “no” vote and to take the conduct of the strike out of the hands of the USW. Delegations of striking workers should go to every working refinery, chemical plant and other oil facility to call out workers for an all-out strike by workers in the industry.

At the same time, appeals should be made to workers and young people for a general strike, linking up the fight of oil workers with the struggle of the whole working class against the destruction of jobs and work conditions, social inequality, police brutality, the attack on democratic rights and the threat of war.

It must be stated bluntly: The agreement the USW is seeking to ram through is rotten to the core. The claim by USW President Leo Gerard that oil workers “won vast improvements in safety and staffing” is a blatant lie. More honest were the comments of BP Fuels North America Chief Operations Officer Doug Sparkman who gloated in a letter to fellow executives that the agreement “preserves the industry’s flexibility to utilize contractors and set staffing levels.” He further boasted that workers would be locked into this deal for four years, instead of the traditional three.

As for the grueling work schedules oil workers face, according to Shell the agreement establishes provisions “to meet semiannually to review site practices related to fatigue.” In regard to contractors, the deal “provides opportunities for local discussion by the parties on the future supply and development of craft workers.”

Industry analysts immediately dismissed these provisions as a meaningless “face saving” gestures. Lee Medley, president of the United Steelworkers Local 13-1 in Houston, admitted there were no restrictions on forced overtime or contracting, but told the Houston Chronicle that he hoped the companies would be sincere and progress could be made on excessive overtime.

Does the USW think workers are fools? The oil giants have made their vast profits—$90 billion for the top five companies last year alone—precisely by working oil workers to the bone and shifting work to lower-paid contractors with no job security, health care or pensions. ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and the other conglomerates have no intention of letting up no matter how many phony labor-management committees are set up. Moreover, workers have long experience with “partnership” committees that, while providing lucrative careers for USW bureaucrats, never did a thing to stop the horrible disasters at Texas City or Anacortes, Washington.

To add insult to injury, the deal includes raises that barely keep up with the rate of inflation and maintains out-of-pocket health care costs that chew up paychecks. In addition, workers will face being dumped into inferior medical plans as the unions and companies implement Obama’s penalties for “Cadillac” insurance coverage in 2017.

Such a miserable outcome is not why workers walked on the picket lines for weeks and sacrificed their paychecks and health benefits. From the outset, however, the USW bargained not for workers but to preserve the bloated salaries of the union executives and their cozy relationships with the oil companies and big business politicians.

The USW only called the strike to allow the rank-and-file to blow off steam. It then proceeded to castrate the struggle by limiting the strike to only 6,500 out of the 30,000 USW workers. The “union” ordered the majority of oil workers to continue laboring and making profits for the oil giants while their brothers and sisters on the picket lines were being put on starvation rations by the USW, which wanted to keep intact as much of its $350 million strike fund as it could.

The USW is now rushing to ram through contract votes at various locals in order to isolate striking workers at Tesoro, LyondellBasell, Marathon, BP and Shell. Once again, the USW has handed the initiative to the companies on a silver platter. Management knows it can now make even more onerous demands on local workforces, like the five-year contract to separate workers at ExxonMobil in Beaumont, Texas from the rest of the national agreement.

Any section of workers who resist will be isolated and betrayed by the USW in the face of company threats that they will be replaced with “relief workers.”

From the beginning, the overriding concern of the USW was to prevent the struggle from developing into a political confrontation with the Obama administration, with which the USW has the closest ties. USW President Leo Gerard sits on Obama’s corporate competitiveness board along with CEOs from Caterpillar and other companies that have savagely slashed wages.

With growing demands from rank-and-file workers for a national oil strike, the USW and the AFL-CIO feared they could lose control of the struggle and that it could develop into a broader mobilization of the working class.

Oil workers no doubt face powerful enemies—some of the richest and most powerful monopolies on the planet, a corporate-controlled news media and bought-and-paid for politicians and pro-company servants like Gerard, Beevers & Co. But workers have far more powerful allies in the working class throughout the United States and internationally who are facing the same struggle against a capitalist system that enriches the few at the expense of the many.

The biggest obstacles to such a struggle are the anti-working class trade unions. Rank-and-file oil workers must take the conduct of the fight out of the hands of the USW and build new organizations of struggle, independent of the pro-company unions and both big business parties.

In opposition to the USW’s slavish defense of the capitalist system, workers should adopt the principle that they have social rights—to a safe and decent paying job, to health care, pensions and future for the next generation—that must take precedence over the profits of the richest one percent. This requires a political fight by the working class to throw out the corporate-controlled government and establish the democratic control of society by the working class.

The global energy industry can no longer be the private property of billionaires who launch criminal wars, destroy the planet and exploit the working class to boost their bottom line. Instead, the industry must be transformed into a public utility, democratically controlled by the working people whose labor produces society’s wealth, and run on the basis of human need, not private profit.

Report shows low-cost private housing in Washington, DC virtually eliminated

Nick Barrickman

A new report released by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI) shows a massive decline of affordable living units in the nation’s capital since 2002. Since the early part of the last decade, homes in the District renting for $800 or less monthly have dwindled from a stock of roughly 60,000 units in 2002 (representing 40 percent of the total housing in the city) to 33,000 as of 2013, or less than 20 percent.

The report calculates that this amount of available low-cost housing corresponds to the total number of subsidized living units currently existing in the city, which government records show to be around 36,000. “These findings suggest that there is very little low-cost housing in the private market and that subsidized housing is now virtually the only source of inexpensive apartments” in Washington, DC, the author states.

“The loss of affordable housing threatens the physical and mental health of families, makes it harder for adults to find and keep a job,” it continues, adding that such a situation “creates instability for children that makes it hard to focus at school, and leaves thousands at risk of homelessness at any given moment.”

Since 2002, the average monthly rent for the most affordable homes in the District have gone from an average of $350 to $400, while the income of the city’s lowest quintile of the population has remained stagnant at less than $6,100 a year—meaning that without subsidies, the typical family of four in the bottom fifth tier of households spends 80 percent of their yearly earnings on housing in the District of Columbia.

The report’s author notes that the stagnating pay for the majority of the city’s working class is largely the product of “flat or falling wages for low-wage workers in the wake of the recession,” stating that “residents without a college degree have been hit particularly hard, with these residents facing growing unemployment since 2008.”

In 2013, 64 percent of families making less than $32,220 a year—or 30 percent of the area median income—were found to be “severely rent burdened,” or paying more than half of their total earnings on housing. This has risen since 2002, when roughly 50 percent of such households were considered to be severely rent burdened, the report adds.

Such statistics expose the cynical character of the city’s Democratic Party and trade union establishment’s promotion of 2013’s “livable wage” legislation. The bill, which was supported by an assortment of Democratic Party officials and hangers-on, raised the hourly rates of the city’s lowest paid workers from $8.25 to $11.50—or less than $25,000 a year. Further, the Housing Production Trust Fund, the city’s main local affordable housing program, has been left unfunded, despite legislation passed last year pledging $100 million annually to the program. This has been left unaddressed by the city’s new Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser.

As with the lowest tier of earners, middle-income families—those making roughly $46,000 yearly—saw an average increase in monthly rents of $250 to $1,000 per month. At the same time, homes going for this amount have disappeared as well, going from a stock of 28,000 units in 2002 to only 20,000 today. The report found that in terms of rent-to-wage increases, families in the middle income groups saw the greatest loss of spending power relative to income, as rent outstripped take-home pay by over $1,000 a year.

As available housing stocks and wage growth have collapsed for working class people, there has been a tremendous growth in both income and housing available to the wealthy and better-off. The amount of homes renting for $1,400 and over has “skyrocketed,” going from a stock of 28,000 in 2002 to over 73,000—or more than 50 percent of the total housing in the city today. Similarly, while rent for those in the top fifth of the population rose by $7,900 a year, incomes grew much more sharply; increasing by roughly $14,000 for the top fifth of the population.

The Washington DC Metropolitan region is one of the most socially unequal areas in the United States. A 2012 report by the DCFPI shows that the top 20 percent of the population receives an income 29 times that of the bottom 20 percent. The top five percent, in turn, takes home an income of over $500,000 a year.

The loss of affordable housing is reflected in the city’s growing homelessness crisis. After 723 families sought help in the city’s shelter system during the winter of 2013-2014—representing a 13 percent increase from the previous year—the homeless population swelled this year to 897 families, outstripping the city’s available resources. The majority of those seeking shelter were single mothers and children.

The difficulty for the vast majority of the population to find affordable shelter has caused a growth in poverty in the surrounding region. A report put out jointly in 2014 by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, the Virginia-based Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis and the Maryland Center for Economic Policy found that over a third of the population in the over two dozen counties comprising the DC Metro region were determined to be “cost burdened,” or paying more than 50 percent of income for rent.

The most recent DCFPI report emerges several months after an independent study conducted by the housing management firm Quadel Consulting urged the city to end its main sustainable housing program. The New Communities Initiative, which maintains affordable homes in neighborhoods affected by gentrification, was stated to be “not feasible at this time in every neighborhood.”

Australia: Phony “leaders’ debate” for NSW state election

Mike Head

The final leaders’ debate was a perfunctory half-hour affair last Friday night hosted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation inside the New South Wales (NSW) parliament building, with no live audience.

Both in its secluded surroundings and its deceitful content, the phony “debate” for the March 28 election in Australia’s most populous state underscored the disconnect between the political establishment and ordinary working people, and the crisis of Australia’s parliamentary system.

Like the first two set-piece “debates” between Liberal-National Party Premier Mike Baird and Labor Party leader Luke Foley, none of the burning issues facing the working class was mentioned—the danger of war, the deepening world slump, the ongoing assault on workers’ jobs, wages and conditions, and attacks on democratic rights. All other parties, including the Socialist Equality Party, were anti-democratically excluded in order to present the two major parties of the corporate elite as the only choices available to voters.

From his opening comments, Foley revealed how much Labor is cynically hoping to claw its way back into office—just four years after receiving its lowest vote (25.5 percent) for more than a century—by exploiting the popular hostility to the sell-off of state assets and the austerity offensive of the federal Liberal-National government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Foley’s pitch was closely in line with that just employed by Labor to oust a first-term Liberal-National government in the neighbouring state of Queensland’s January 31 election. Like Queensland Labor leader Annastacia Palaszczuk, Foley feigned opposition to privatisation and the federal budget cuts.

“We will keep the electricity network in public hands,” Foley claimed, vowing to ditch the Baird government’s plan to try to raise $20 billion by leasing 49 percent of the power grid—the “poles and wires”—for 99 years. This is a sham on multiple levels.

In the first place, Labor itself made repeated efforts, in 1997 under Premier Bob Carr and 2007 under Premier Morris Iemma, to sell off all the electricity infrastructure. With the help of the trade unions, who stifled the opposition of their members, Labor finally privatised everything but the “poles and wires” before its landslide defeat in 2011. On this issue, as on every other, Labor has a long track record of seeking to impose every demand of the financial markets.

Second, Foley committed himself to implement a federal regulator’s restructuring scheme for the electricity network to make it “run efficiently”—a plan that would require the axing of 4,600 jobs, on top of the thousands already eliminated by previous Labor governments.

Third, Foley has made it clear in several media interviews since he was installed as Labor leader late last year that he fully favours the privatisation of state assets. In an interview published by the Australian the morning after the “debate,” Foley complained that he was wrongly depicted in the Australian Financial Review as anti-privatisation. He reiterated that he had no “ideological” opposition to asset sales, giving as an example: “I don’t see a need for the state to own ports.”

Equally aware of the public opposition to privatisation, Baird sought to downplay the electricity sell-off, insisting that leasing for 99 years was different and that his government had no intention of going beyond relinquishing 49 percent ownership. It was a far cry from Baird’s public pledges, directed to the corporate elite after he was selected last year as Liberal leader, to make an aggressive bid to impose privatisations.

Like the recently defeated Queensland premier Campbell Newman, Baird has been heavily promoted by the corporate media, and backed by the Abbott government, as a figure who could lead the way nationally in launching the wholesale economic restructuring being demanded by the financial elite amid the worsening impact of the post-2008 global economic breakdown.

There is, however, widespread public antagonism toward the Abbott government’s attempts to impose the dictates of big business. Both Baird and Foley spent much of their time during Friday’s debate posturing as opponents of Abbott and condemning the multi-billion dollar cuts to state health and education spending in last year’s federal budget.

Baird even declared that if he were reelected, he would make reversing the cuts “agenda item number one” for the state and territory leaders. Foley’s final line for the night was equally fanciful: “We need a premier who is not a rubberstamp for a federal prime minister.”

Labor’s claims to oppose the federal budget cuts are no less a fraud than its anti-privatisation pretences. Foley’s federal counterparts voted, along with the Greens, for the budget appropriation bills last June that began to slash $80 billion from education and health funding over the next decade. During 2012-13, the previous federal Labor governments of Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd carried out the deepest cuts to social spending since World War II.

Regardless of whether Labor or Liberal wins the NSW election, or the next federal election, this social assault will intensify as the “mining boom” that has underpinned Australian capitalism for nearly 25 years continues to implode.

Foley’s interview in Saturday’s Australian laid bare the deceit of his “debate” posturing. Foley insisted that he is a Labor “moderniser.” He named former premier Neville Wran, along with ex-prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and former British prime minister Tony Blair, as his heroes.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Hawke and Keating, together with Wran, personified the transformation of the Labor Party into the spearhead of pro-market restructuring. Under the impact of globalised production, they ditched Labor’s previous claims that it could reform capitalism in the interests of the working class. As for Blair, under the banner of New Labour, he continued and extended the pro-market onslaught on workers begun under the Tory government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

By nominating these figures as his idols, Foley’s intent is clear. It is to assure the ruling elites that a state Labor government will be no less committed to meeting the requirements of the transnational corporations, banks and money markets.

The only way to end the onslaught on living standards and the threat of war is to end the source of the global crisis—the capitalist profit system and its nation-state divisions. That is why the Socialist Equality Party’s campaign in the NSW election is aimed at building a new revolutionary leadership based on a socialist perspective. We urge our readers to study our election statement and contact the SEP about how to join our party.

Hunger strike by UK asylum seekers

Barry Mason

Asylum seekers at the Harmondsworth detention centre, located in south-east England near Heathrow airport, began a hunger strike on March 10. The detention centre, with a capacity of over 600, is the largest in Europe.

The hunger strike began following a protest by detainees against indefinite lock-up—some more than a year—in spite of not having committed any crime. One detainee has been held at the site for over 19 months.

Others are protesting deportation. In the fast track process, under which eight Afghan prisoners face imminent removal, asylum seekers can be deported with as little as two days.

On Saturday a demonstration in support of the hunger strikers was held by protesters outside Harmondsworth. Protesters called for the closure of the site and other similar facilities in the UK.

The hunger strike was reportedly started by detainee Ahmat Obid, who toldRT he began the protest because authorities were “making fun” of detainees who are being held indefinitely and wanted their cases reviewed.

Harmondsworth is run on behalf of the Home Office, by Mitie Group PLC. For this contract it is paid £180 million by the government.

On March 2 Channel 4 featured conditions in the notorious women-only Yarl’s Wood centre for the deportation of failed asylum seekers. Using undercover filming from within the unit it showed examples of abusive behaviour and contravention of rules by employees of SERCO who run the facility.

This was followed by another exposure on March 4, again using undercover filming, at the Harmondsworth facility. This investigation was carried out over a three-month period.

One detainee is caught on camera exclaiming to his case officer: “I beg you please I don’t want to take my own life...I am tired. I don’t want to die here.”

The coverage includes an employee explaining how the government would not want exposure of the conditions within the centre. He lists the presence of rats, fights amongst detainees, and incidences of self-harm, which have been accelerating.

The footage reveals so-called “efficiency” measures introduced by Mitie in which detainees are locked in their rooms for 12 hours a day rather than 10. A Mitie employee at the facility, speaking on film, said the centre was at breaking point and that conditions for staff have worsened since Mitie took over the contract.

The centre has a history of controversy and has been run by various outsourcing companies. There were major riots at the site in 2004 after an immigrant committed suicide, and further protests in 2006.

In 2009 the US company Geo was awarded the contract. Six detainees died under its control. Mitie assumed the contract in September 2014 along with the nearby Colnbrook detention facility. It has plans to merge the two facilities, creating a combined capacity of over 1,000. RT reported that hunger strikers had been able to tweet news about their protest, and that some of those involved had collapsed. There were also tweets from detainees at other detention centres that had also begun hunger strikes. One tweet said 50 detainees at Tinsley House, on the perimeter of Gatwick Airport, were on hunger strike. Another tweet from a detainee at Morton Hall detention centre in Lincolnshire claimed some detainees there were also on hunger strike.

The Home Office denies that the hunger strike had spread to other facilities, but other media outlets, including the Independent newspaper, also reported the action spreading beyond Harmondsworth.

A further report on March 13 claimed that the number taking part in the hunger strike at Harmondsworth had grown to around 200 detainees, one of whom had collapsed and had been taken to hospital.

Britain has some of the harshest anti-immigration policies in the world. Harmondsworth is one of 11 immigration removal centres (IRCs) in the UK.

The Home Office estimates that around 30,000 migrants and asylum seekers, nearly one-third of them women and children, are being detained indefinitely in Britain while their immigration status is resolved. They are isolated from the outside world. Only one visitor is allowed. They are confined, without time limit, until their asylum case is heard. If their appeal is rejected they are deported immediately without regard for their safety.

The government also held almost 800 people separately in prisons under immigration legislation in mid-2014.

On March 10 Independent stated: “The UK is the only country in the EU with no limit on the length asylum-seekers can be detained. Migrant rights groups [say] that unrest inside the UK’s immigration removal centres had been brewing for some time and called on the Government to end the practice of indefinite detention.”

Most asylum seekers are being forced to flee countries that have been devastated by imperialist war and economic sanctions over the last decades, led by the US and Britain.

The Socialist Equality Party defends the rights of workers to be able to move freely around the world. We condemn and oppose the entire reactionary framework of ‘border controls’ and anti-immigrant legislation, and call for full democratic and citizenship rights for all immigrants, including those classified as “illegal.”

Despite Swedish interview request, WikiLeaks founder Assange remains in danger

Julie Hyland

After years of refusals, Swedish prosecutors have formally offered to travel to London to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on allegations of sexual assault.

Per Samuelson, lawyer for Assange, welcomed the move as a small “victory”. “The only thing which is irritating,” he went on, “is that it comes so late because it has kept Julian Assange in the [Ecuadorian] embassy for over two-and-a-half years now.”

The long-delayed request underscores that Assange is the victim of a politically motivated frame-up, which has seen him effectively held prisoner in the UK and forced into hiding for exposing the crimes of US imperialism.

Early in 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing 400,000 “top secret” documents disclosing the criminal operations of the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq. They included a video, “Collateral Murder”, showing a US helicopter killing a group of civilians in Iraq, including two journalists employed by Reuters.

In August that year, Assange had sex with two women while in Sweden. Although both women acknowledge the sex was consensual, the incidents formed the basis for trumped-up allegations of rape.

The claims were initially dismissed by Stockholm Chief Prosecutor Eva Finne but quickly resurrected by lawyer Claes Borgstrom and prosecutor Marianne Ny, both attached to the Social Democratic Party.

Despite the absence of any formal charges, in November 2010, Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant (EAW ) for Assange’s extradition to Sweden from London, where he was continuing to direct WikiLeaks exposures.

This coincided with the decision of the US authorities to empanel a secret grand jury in September, aimed at uncovering and silencing those responsible for bringing its murderous activities to light on charges of espionage.

In July 2010, US private Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning was arrested and later charged with “aiding and abetting” the enemy for passing material to WikiLeaks. Held in solitary confinement for much of the time, he was eventually convicted and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment in July 2013.

Rightly fearing that extradition to Sweden was only a pretext to engineer his own transfer to the US, where he would face similar treatment and worse, Assange spent 17 months under de facto house arrest fighting the UK courts against his removal.

When he had exhausted all legal avenues, in August 2012, Assange was forced to seek political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy. He has remained trapped ever since, as the embassy is under 24-hour police guard, at a cost to the taxpayers of more than £10 million, with the purpose of arresting Assange and removing him to Sweden if he steps foot outside.

Throughout this whole time, more than four years and counting, the Swedish authorities had consistently refused Assange’s request to be interviewed in London. This is despite numerous instances of Sweden interviewing allegations overseas. In 2012, the entire Stockholm district court set up for weeks in Kigali to interview eyewitnesses to genocide in Rwanda.

What appears to have brought about the change is the fact that some of the allegations against Assange will expire under the statute of limitation in August, although the alleged rape offence runs until 2020. Explaining the U-turn, Ny said that “time is of the essence.”

Assange had also taken his case to Sweden’s Supreme Court which, just days before the interview request, had agreed to hear his appeal against the EAW.

His lawyers had cited the prosecutor’s refusal to interview Assange in London as amounting to “severe limitations” on his freedom, as such an interview is the essential first step in determining whether the WikiLeaks founder has any case to answer.

Assange remains in grave danger. Samuelson said that the Swedish request contained preconditions, including that the Ecuadorean and UK authorities must both approve the interview. It also asked for a sample of Assange’s DNA, although one was taken in 2010.

Ny’s own statement made clear that nothing is resolved. Having previously questioned the “quality” of a London-based interview, Ny said she now viewed it as “necessary to accept such deficiencies” and “likewise take the risk that the interview does not move the case forward.”

The US authorities have made clear that Assange remains a target.

On March 4, US District Court judge Barbara Rothstein rejected an application by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre for the release of documents under Freedom of Information laws.

Such disclosure would prejudice a “multi-subject investigation” into WikiLeaks that is “still active and ongoing,” she ruled. It could also “expose the scope and methods of the investigation, and tip off subjects and other persons of investigative interest.”

In December, Google revealed that it had been subject to a gag order preventing it from informing WikiLeaks employees that their email records had been turned over to the US authorities for almost two years.

All the Gmail account content of WikiLeaks staff, Sarah Harrison, Joseph Farrell and Kristinn Hrafnsson, had been surrendered by Google in response to search warrants issued by the federal authorities in March 2012.

In November 2013, Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor and releasing material through WikiLeaks.

In January this year, former Anonymous activist Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months imprisonment by a Dallas Court for linking to Hammond’s material.

Divisions emerge between Britain and US over China bank

Nick Beams

A significant rift has opened up between the UK and the US following the decision by the Cameron government last week to defy the wishes of the Obama administration and become a founding member of the $50 billion China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In a sharp rebuke, an unnamed White House official told the Financial Times the British government had been engaged in a “constant accommodation” of China.

The decision came after the US earlier had applied great pressure to its allies in the region—South Korea, Japan and Australia—not to become members, out of concern the bank would undermine the influence of the US-dominated World Bank and cut across US plans for the diplomatic and military encirclement of China under the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.”

Last October, intense lobbying by the Obama administration saw the Australian Liberal government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott overturn a previous decision to take part in the establishment of the AIIB.

Secretary of State John Kerry took up the issue with Abbott during a meeting in Indonesia, and his efforts were followed by a telephone call by Obama to Abbott as well as an intervention by US treasury secretary Jack Lew.

Following the pressure from this “troika”, foreign minister Julie Bishop secured the overturn of the previous decision through the national security committee of the Australian government.

While the official reason given for US opposition is that the new bank will not meet “acceptable” investment standards, the essential motivation was laid out by Bishop, who expressed concerns that funding from the bank would be used to finance infrastructure projects such as airports and upgraded naval ports that would enhance China’s military capacities in the region, citing possible projects in Papua New Guinea.

The attitude of the US to China-funded projects has been graphically demonstrated in strategically important Sri Lanka. The US-backed Sirisena government, which came to power through the carefully organised American regime change operation in January, is now reviewing Chinese funding for the Colombo-based port city project.

Aware of the US position and that any prior public announcement would bring intense US pressure, the Cameron government clearly decided to provide minimal information to the Obama administration of its plans.

According to the Financial Times, a “senior administration official” told it the British decision had been taken after “virtually no consultation with the US” and at a time when the G7 group of major economic powers had been discussing their approach to the bank.

“We are wary about a trend toward constant accommodation of China, which is not the best way to engage a rising power”, the US official said.

Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, made no apology for the manner of the decision, however. Britain had not acted out of the blue, he said, and there had been a month of intense discussions in the G7, including with Jack Lew.

He said Britain should be present at the start of the bank, ensuring that it acted in a transparent way in filling an important gap in the provision of infrastructure in Asia.

“Joining the AIIB at the founding stage will create an unrivalled opportunity for the UK and Asia to invest and grow together,” he said, before delivering another blow to the US by noting that he expected other western governments that had been making positive noises about the bank to become involved.

That prediction was not long in being fulfilled with a report in today’s Australian that Abbott is now “seized by the regional potential of the bank” and is considering making an announcement that Australia will join, possibly later this week.

Pointing to the motivations for the British government decision, the Financial Times noted: “It has been keen to establish the City of London as a platform for overseas business in the Chinese currency as it starts to play a bigger role in the global economy.”

Notwithstanding the supposed “special relationship” between Britain and the US, the intense American opposition was palpable. The Financial Times described the two countries as being at “loggerheads” over the investment bank, while The Guardian pointed to “US anger” in the headline of its article on the decision.

In an editorial comment , The Guardian said it was an “exaggeration to talk of the pace of reform at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” because there had been almost none, and it was “no surprise” that China was promoting a solution to the shortage of infrastructure capital in Asia.

The US, it said, “cannot keep on shoring up an obsolete economic order in Asia,” and China was not withdrawing from the Washington institutions but was supplementing them. “Unlike certain other aspects of China’s policy, this development is properly seen in the context of the ‘peaceful rise’ which China’s leaders have proclaimed. This is a case for accommodation, not confrontation.”

However, so far as the US is concerned, the advance of China’s economic influence in the region and the enhancement of its military and strategic capacities cannot be separated. They are both part of a growing threat to the US position.

The same attitude is reflected in the US drive to secure agreement on the Trans Pacific Partnership, which excludes China. Together with the effort to secure a similar agreement with Europe, the goal of the TPP has been described as an attempt by the US to write the rules for trade and finance in the 21st century.

An article by Sydney Morning Herald China correspondent John Garnaut, published last Wednesday, cited Australian trade minister Andrew Robb as saying that conclusion of the deal would “mark a major strategic win for the United States, as it wrestles with China for regional leadership.”

Robb said the TPP was “very important” for the Obama administration “in terms of being a symbol of its pivot to Asia. It has that strategic importance attached to it,” he said.

Other commentators cited by Garnaut made it clear that more than symbolism was involved.

According to Ely Ratner, a deputy director at the Center for a New American Security, “Failure of the TPP would create a vacuum to be filled by China in ways that would almost assuredly run counter to…the US visions of an open an inclusive regional order in Asia.” In this context, “open and exclusive” means a trade and financial system in which US interests are able to dominate.

Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Information Foundation, warned that failure of the TPP would mean “China, with its focus on mercantilism and restricted freedom of information, will soon be dictating the terms of trade in the world’s fastest-growing economic sector.”

However, other major powers are coming to question whether their economic interests in the region are best served by aligning themselves with the US push to maintain its economic and military position, under conditions where they fear losing lucrative opportunities. These concerns are certainly behind the British decision.

But this poses a dilemma: how far do they go in pursuing those interests without jeopardising the strategic relationship with the US as the dominant military power?

Some of these issues were canvassed in a Financial Times editorial on Saturday. After noting that in the “special relationship” between Britain and the US it was “unusual for one side to rebuke the other publicly”, it said American sensitivity to the creation of banks such as the AIIB was “understandable.”

However, while the US may want to stop the growth of such bodies, “its lacklustre stewardship of the Washington-based institutions is one of the reasons rivals are proliferating.” The influence of the World Bank had declined because of restrictions on lending to poorer countries, and the US had failed to secure enhanced voting rights for rising powers such as China in the International Monetary Fund.

The editorial pointed to claims of “opportunism” in the British decision with “Osborne pitching for the City of London in its attempt to capture a portion of the renminbi trade and other Beijing goodies.”

At the same time, it pointed to strategic considerations, saying that Britain’s move would “encourage China to continue pursuing its strategic goals through a policy of divide-and-rule and that it would have been preferable had the G7 adopted a united strategy towards the AIIB rather than seeing a nation break way in its own interests.”

Pointing to longer-term issues, it said the decision should prompt some “hard thinking” about the role Britain would play in the world. For most of the post-war period, Britain had been able to “punch above its weight” because it was a staunch ally of the US, but now that relationship was under strain.

It concluded that stewardship of the global financial system was up to the United States. However, Washington seemed “flatly opposed to anything which raised China’s profile and threatens the status of the dollar.” A policy of “keeping China at bay at all costs” would only encourage Beijing to build its own parallel system from scratch.

US intensifies pressure on Iran at nuclear talks

Peter Symonds

With time is running out to reach an agreement on Iran’s nuclear programs, the US is intensifying the pressure on Tehran to make substantial concessions in talks this week in Lausanne, Switzerland. In comments yesterday, US Secretary of State John Kerry made clear that the US was prepared to walk away from the negotiating table if Iran does not meet its demands.

Kerry told the media that “important gaps” remain to be resolved prior to the March 31 deadline for key elements of an agreement to be finalised. The aim, he said, “is not just to get any deal, it’s to get the right deal. Time is of the essence, the clock is ticking and important decisions need to be made [by Iran].”

Kerry is due to meet today with Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif who plans to travel to Brussels later in the day to meet with his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and the European Union (EU). The talks in Lausanne will continue tomorrow.

Details of the negotiations leaked to the New York Times indicate that the US is insisting on strict limitations on Iran’s nuclear facilities that would last at least a decade before being eased. Washington’s aim is to guarantee a “break-out” time of at least a year—that is, restrictions to ensure Iran would take 12 months to produce enough fuel for one nuclear weapon.

Tehran has repeatedly declared that it has no plans to build a nuclear arsenal. Moreover, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), all of its uranium enrichment plants, nuclear facilities and stockpiles are already closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

According to the New York Times, the US is insisting on a highly intrusive inspection regime beyond the end of the formal agreement, including immediate access to any sites, including military bases, on suspicion of nuclear-related activity. As the NYT noted, this “verification” procedure goes well “beyond the toughest measures [IAEA] inspectors use in any other country.”

The demand highlights Washington’s utter hypocrisy. While demanding that Iran agree to measures far in excess of the requirements of an NPT signatory, the US turns a blind eye to Israel, which has not signed the treaty, and has already manufactured a substantial nuclear arsenal. In the case of India, the US ratified a deal that effectively nullifies the NPT and allows India to keep its stockpile of banned nuclear weapons.

Kerry has also rejected Iran’s demands for the immediate lifting of international sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy by more than halving its oil exports since 2011 and cutting off access to international banking and finance. Official unemployment is at least 13 percent while other estimates put the figure at 20 percent. Annual inflation hit between 50 to 70 percent in mid-2013 before an initial agreement to start talks provided limited sanctions relief. The US is proposing a phrased ending of sanctions.

In Washington, deep fissures have opened up over the nuclear agreement. In an unprecedented move last week, 47 Republican senators sent a letter to Tehran warning that any nuclear agreement could be abrogated by the next president or changed by congressional action. The letter, which followed a unilateral invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver an anti-Iranian tirade to a joint congressional sitting, was an obvious attempt to sabotage the talks and undermine the Obama administration.

Kerry hit back over the weekend. Speaking on CBS, he accused the Republicans of peddling “false information, directly calculated to interfere” in talks and dismissed any suggestion that a deal had already been done. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell shot back yesterday, saying: “The president is about to make what we believe is a very bad deal.”

The US has also begun talks with other permanent members of the UN Security Council—Britain, France, Russia and China—about a resolution that would lift UN sanctions on Iran. Such a step would make it harder for the US congress to obstruct a deal with Iran as many, but not all, of the US and European sanctions are underpinned by existing UN resolutions.

The rancour in the debate points to sharp differences in the American political establishment over a deal with Iran, which has been likened by some analysts to the US rapprochement with China in 1972. While there are obvious differences with the opening up of US-China relations, the talks in Lausanne are not simply about Iran’s nuclear programs. The Obama administration is seeking to enlist Tehran’s assistance in securing Washington’s interests in the Middle East as it intensifies its confrontations with Russia and China.

Kerry indicated yesterday that Washington might consider opening negotiations with Syrian President Bashir al-Assad over the establishment of a transitional regime in Syria—something that Washington has flatly ruled out previously and the US State Department later denied. Kerry, however, did indicate a renewed US diplomatic push to restart talks over Syria. While Kerry did not name Iran, Assad’s only ally in the Middle East, the US is obviously hoping for Tehran’s assistance in forcing the Syrian president to the negotiating table.

Longstanding US allies in the Middle East including Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are deeply hostile to any moves by the US to end its protracted stand-off with Iran. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia regard Iran as a dangerous rival for regional dominance. Washington’s relations with Tehran broke down after the 1979 Iranian revolution ousted Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had been central to US strategy in the Middle East. Relations further deteriorated after the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003 and signalled regime-change in Iran was its next objective.

Republican criticisms notwithstanding, the Obama administration has repeatedly made clear that any agreement with Iran will be on US terms. Ever since assuming office in 2009, Obama has insisted that “all options remain on the table”—that is, including military strikes against Iran. If the US does “walk away” from the current talks, as Kerry indicated was possible, the military option would again loom large, amid a clamour for action from the Republican-dominated congress.

In a comment entitled “War is the only way to stop Iran” published in yesterday’s Washington Post, neo-con Joshua Muravchik suggested that the Obama administration had no alternative than to attack Iran even if it resulted in Iranian retaliation. “Yes, there are risks to military action. But Iran’s nuclear program and vaunting ambitions have made the world a more dangerous place. Its achievement of a bomb would magnify that danger many fold. Alas, sanctions and deals will not prevent this,” he concluded.

Thus one of the advocates of the illegal US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq based on lies about weapons of mass destruction proposes a new war of aggression based on unsubstantiated claims about Iranian nuclear bombs. The Obama administration has no fundamental objection to waging war against Iran, but prefers to neutralise or even enlist Tehran, as it prepares for even more reckless and dangerous conflicts against nuclear-armed Russia and China.

America’s “dirty brigades” in Iraq

Niles Williamson

Last August, the United States government and the media responded to the brutal decapitation of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with a show of moral indignation. The murder was seized on to justify an escalation of the war launched the previous week against ISIS in Iraq and, soon after, its extension into Syria. President Barack Obama denounced Foley’s execution as “an act of violence that shocks the conscience of the world.”

It has now emerged that even as Obama and other officials were declaring their abhorrence of ISIS atrocities, they were concealing, with the connivance of the media, photographic and video evidence of similar crimes being carried out on a large scale by US-backed forces in Iraq.

ABC News reported last week that Iraqi military units and Shiite militias trained and armed by the United States are being investigated by the Iraqi government for possible war crimes, including the torture and summary execution of Sunni prisoners, in many cases by decapitation, and the desecration of corpses. ABC has known of these crimes since September last year, when it came across an online video posted by a member of the Iraqi security forces showing a handcuffed prisoner being shot in the head.

An investigation was reportedly opened by the Iraqi government after an ABC News journalist presented evidence of “uniformed soldiers from some of Iraq’s most elite units and militia members massacring civilians, torturing and executing prisoners, and displaying severed heads.”

Multiple images posted by ABC last week depict soldiers wearing the uniforms of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces and the Emergency Response Brigade, which operates under the authority of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, posing with severed heads. Others depict Iraqi Special Forces dragging corpses behind their Humvees. Another image shows a corpse being hung from the guard tower of an Iraqi military base.

Responding to the revelations of war crimes carried out by its proxies in Iraq, the Obama administration issued a statement declaring, “If these allegations are confirmed, those found responsible must be held accountable.”

Such statements are worthless. While there has been detailed reporting on the crimes of ISIS, next to nothing has been said by the American government or media about the activities of the US-backed forces. The New York Times has yet to dedicate a single column inch to the latest revelations.

The ABC report has been buried by the rest of media, just as the US media sought to suppress the photos of torture carried out by the CIA and US military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq 11 years ago. The Obama administration continues to suppress more than 2,000 photographs that depict American soldiers torturing, raping and murdering Iraqi and Afghan prisoners.

As for accountability, it is the American government and military that bear principal responsibility not only for the crimes of the Iraqi military, but for those of ISIS as well.

Prior to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, there was no sectarian fighting and Al Qaeda had no significant presence in the country. The devastation produced by decades of sanctions, war and occupation wreaked havoc on the country, while the US deliberately whipped up sectarian divisions in accordance with the imperialist strategy of “divide and rule.”

The US installed a sectarian Shiite government and financed and trained a largely Shiite army to uproot the foundations of the Sunni-based regime of the deposed ruler Saddam Hussein. At the same time, the CIA maintained extensive contacts with the Sunni-based Al Qaeda, including its branch in Iraq, which engaged in sectarian warfare against the Shiite regime, leading to tens of thousands of civilian deaths. The CIA’s ties to Al Qaeda go back to that terrorist organization’s origins in the CIA-financed and armed mujahideen militias employed against pro-Soviet governments and Russian troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

In the US-led air war in 2011 that ended in the ouster and lynch-mob murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the United States employed Islamist jihadist forces as its proxy army on the ground, including “rebel” leaders who had previously been detained at Washington’s Guantanamo prison camp. At the same time, the US and its regional allies were funneling weapons to Al Qaeda-linked forces in Syria, including the al Nusra Front and elements that would form ISIS, in the US-sponsored war for regime-change against President Bashar al Assad.

Last year, the forces it promoted and armed in Syria came into opposition to the US and its puppet regime in Baghdad. ISIS launched an offensive across the border, seizing large swaths of northern Iraq and threatening the US-sponsored set-up in the country. Iraqi Special Forces and Shiite militias have now been unleashed to push ISIS out of Iraq and back into to Syria, while terrorizing the Sunni population in the north and west of Iraq.

The exposure of Iraqi government atrocities in the war against ISIS shatters the propaganda pretense of a war between “good” and “evil.” It is a conflict between reactionary forces brought to the fore by the predatory imperialist policies of the United States.

The aim, as was the case with the previous wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria and the ongoing slaughter in Afghanistan, is to establish US hegemony in the Middle East, Central Asia and Northern Africa. In addition to its immense oil resources, the region is of central geo-strategic importance in the American ruling class’ offensive against regional and global rivals, particularly Russia and China.