European Court verdict no obstacle to UK state surveillance

Robert Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

US public opinion turns against capital punishment

Ed Hightower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brazil imposes drastic austerity amid deepening constitutional crisis

Miguel Andrade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

US abstains as UN passes toothless resolution criticizing Israeli settlements

Jean Shaoul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No “Peace on Earth” in 2016

Andre Damon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report exposes Indian state’s unrelenting repression in Kashmir

Kranti Kumara 

The population of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), India’s only Muslim-majority state, confronts unrelenting repression by heavily-armed central and state government security forces, including indiscriminate pellet-gun barrages, arbitrary and repeated arrests, and deliberate blinding and killing of unarmed protestors. This is the central conclusion of a report issued by a 25-member “fact-finding” group drawn from left-liberal NGOs.

The volunteer group, which included Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan and Anuradha Bhasin of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy, visited India’s northern-most state for 10 days in November.

Their report extensively documents widespread and shocking human rights violations by the Indian state and blatantly criminal behavior by security personnel.

India’s Hindu Supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and its local partner, the J&K People’s Democratic Party, responded with ferocious violence to the mass protests that convulsed the Kashmir Valley during much of the summer and fall. The protests erupted following the July 8 “encounter killing”—i.e. summary execution—of a 21 year-old leader of an Islamist, Kashmiri separatist insurgent group, the Hizbul Mujahideen.

Rattled by the size and tenacity of the protests, the BJP government blamed them on Pakistan-supported “terrorists” and ratcheted up pressure on Islamabad. Its aims were two-fold: to draw attention away from the popular protests in J&K and their brutal repression at the hands of the India state and to compel Islamabad to end all logistical support for the quarter-century long insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir.

In late September, the BJP government plunged South Asia into its gravest war crisis in at least 15 years. It ordered illegal and highly provocative cross-border raids inside Pakistan-held Kashmir in reputed retaliation for the September 18 Islamist attack on the Indian military base at Uri, then vowed it would continue to impose an “unacceptable” price on Pakistan until all attacks on India from Pakistan ceased.

When the 25-member fact-finding group visited Kashmir between November 11 and 20, the Indian and Pakistani armies were mounting massive military barrages across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistan-held Kashmir, effectively blowing apart the shaky truce that has prevailed between the rival nuclear-armed states since 2003.

The “civil society” fact-finding report notes that the concentration of security forces in J&K is among the heaviest in the world. An estimated 700,000 Indian Army, paramilitary and state police forces watch over a population of just 14 million. Moreover, because of the legal immunity granted the state police under the J&K Public Safety Act (1978) and the army and paramilitary forces in Kashmir under India’s notorious Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), they can and do act with impunity.

The fact-finding volunteers traveled to the Kashmir Valley districts where the recent protests have been most widespread and gathered much evidence of the violence and humiliations that the Indian military and state police have imposed on the local populace.

The report states “(unarmed) protests have been met with sustained attack by the Indian army, police and paramilitary, including with the use of pellet guns, (chili-based) PAVA shells and firearms. We learnt of several deaths caused by targeted killings of unarmed civilians by armed forces in the absence of protests or demonstrations.” (Emphasis added)

The volunteers further found that most pellet-gun wounds have been above the waist, indicating that security forces have deliberately sought to blind and kill protesters.

“Most deaths we came across,” say the volunteers, “have been caused by injuries waist-above, without any warning fire. Deaths and injuries caused by pellet guns too are all above the waist and preponderantly at eye level causing blinding or long-term ophthalmic damage.”

Casualty counts vary, as the government is trying to cover up the scale of its repression and families often fear informing authorities that a member has been injured for fear of reprisals. But close to a hundred civilians have been killed since the protests erupted in early July. Many thousands more—the J&K daily Greater Kashmir claims 15,000—have been injured.

The report notes that Indian security forces invariably justify their violence by dubbing its victims as “anti-national.” In fact, this is a catch-all phrase that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government routinely employ against persons or organizations expressing even sympathy with the victims of the state repression in Kashmir.

The report documents how families that pursue legal remedies against the security personnel responsible for the killing of their loved ones are subjected to raids, repeated arrests and even torture from the out-of-control security establishment.

Collective punishments, including destruction of property and animals and revenge attacks, akin to those Israel’s security forces mete out to the Palestinians, are the norm in Kashmir. The fact-finding report bears witness to this: “In the towns and villages where there were killings by the Indian Army, police and paramilitary, we met with ordinary people who narrated a cycle of search and seizure raids following killings, and of indiscriminate firing, including at funerals and memorial gatherings. In several of these instances the Indian Army, police and paramilitary broke windows and destroyed household goods, livestock, and food rations in peoples’ homes.”

“In several of the villages and towns we visited,” continues the report, “the armed forces, during their search and seizure operations, routinely destroy the local electricity transformer or sub-station, denying the entire village or locality access to electricity.” (Emphasis added)

The mass character of the protests in the Kashmir Valley have given the lie to the Modi government’s claims that the opposition to Indian rule is simply or mainly the product of Pakistani intrigue and “Pakistani-sponsored terrorism.” The Kashmiri separatist groups supported by Islamabad were in fact taken by surprise by this summer’s eruption of mass protests.

The report describes the widespread popular disaffection with an Indian state that has repeatedly violated J&K’s special autonomous status within the Indian Union, imposed “presidential” or central government rule, rigged elections, and for decades resorted to mass repression, including “disappearances,” torture and summary executions. “From common people,” says the report, “we heard articulate accounts of what they have faced from the Indian state and, in particular, of the sustained attack on their democratic rights from 1989 onwards. The failure of the Indian state and every government since independence to address the political sentiments of Kashmiri people is a source of both hurt and enormous resentment.”

The Modi government’s violent repression of the popular protests in J&K has been politically aided and abetted by the opposition parties, including the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its Left Front. All of them unequivocally defend the right of the Indian bourgeoisie to rule over Kashmir, have helped in the cover-up of the atrocities being carried out by Indian security forces in Kashmir, and have hailed the provocative “military strikes” that Indian Special Forces troops carried out inside Pakistan in late September.

The Kashmir tragedy and the reactionary military-strategic rivalry between India and Pakistan with which it is inextricably enmeshed are the outcome of the reactionary communal Partition of South Asia. In 1947, South Asia’s departing British imperial overlords and the rival factions of the “national” bourgeoisie divided the subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India.

While the India ruling class and its state have repressed the people of Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistani bourgeoisie has run roughshod over the basic rights of the people of Pakistan-held Kashmir and systematically sought to manipulate the Kashmir question for its own reactionary ends. Islamabad responded to the eruption of mass opposition to the Indian state, after New Delhi rigged the 1989 elections, by sponsoring Islamist insurgent groups, whom it used to impose a pronounced communalist and pro-Pakistani outlook. This included mounting violent attacks on J&K’s Hindu and Sikh minorities.

The reactionary character of the Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir is exemplified by the legal basis of their respective claims to “undivided” Kashmir i.e., to all of the territories that had belonged, prior to Partition, to the British Indian Empire princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan’s claim is based on the reactionary communalist ideology that underlies the Pakistani state: Kashmir is rightfully Pakistan’s because it is a majority-Muslim area contiguous to the Muslim “homeland” in the subcontinent’s northwest.

India, meanwhile, bases its claim not on the support of the Kashmiri people, but on the document of accession to the Indian Union signed by the last member of the British-backed Hindu princely dynasty that ruled Jammu and Kashmir.

The democratic rights of the Kashmiri people will be secured and the threat of a catastrophic nuclear war between India and Pakistan lifted only through a joint, working class-led struggle of the masses of the subcontinent to put an end to capitalist rule and establish the Socialist United States of South Asia.

Monte Paschi bank will seek Italian state bailout

Alex Lantier & Marianne Arens 

Monte Paschi di Siena (MPS), Italy’s third-largest bank, will seek a state bailout to meet an emergency cash crunch at the end of 2016, as tens of billions of bad debts pile up on its books.

MPS spokesmen admitted late Wednesday night that the bank could not find a so-called “anchor investor,” a private investor that would invest the key portion of the necessary funds in the bank, after the oil sheikdom of Qatar refused to invest €2 billion in MPS. On Thursday morning, MPS’ shares on the Milan stock exchange collapsed to a new record low of €14.71, having already lost 87 percent over the year.

On Wednesday, Italy’s parliament accepted preconditions for a €20 billion bailout being prepared by Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan. The Chamber voted 389-134 and the Senate 221-60 to approve the plan. The ruling Democratic Party (PD), the New Center Right (NCD), and ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia backed the plan, while right-wing populist Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement (M5S) voted against.

The Corriere della Sera wrote, “Finding those 5 billion euros on the market before the year’s end would have given a respite to the bank led by [MPS CEO] Marco Morelli. Now instead it will have to seek fresh air from the financial lungs of the Treasury, although it is unclear what form this will take.”

The bankruptcy of European capitalism is again starkly exposed. Tens of billions in public funds are to be handed over to the financial aristocracy, as Italy and Europe slide ever deeper into slump, in a bailout that only sets the stage for further disasters. MPS and Italy’s largest bank, UniCredit, are poised to announce branch closures and tens of thousands of job cuts, with other banks to follow.

The state bailout also threatens not only to ruin small businesses that have borrowed from MPS and at least 40,000 small savers that have invested in MPS bonds, but to unleash deep conflicts among the European powers over the bailout’s terms.

Under European rules effective since the beginning of 2016, state bailouts are illegal unless the bailed-out bank’s creditors take a haircut on at least 8 percent of the bank’s liabilities. When these rules were applied to smaller Italian banks last year, ruining many of their depositors, it provoked a political uproar and protests after a ruined 68-year-old retiree committed suicide in Civitavecchia.

Amid speculation over whether the Italian Cabinet would meet late last night or today to discuss the MPS bailout, reports emerged that the bail-in provisions were included in the PD’s plans. “The scheme is ready,” a senior Italian official declared. “The burden-sharing principle will be respected, but we will try to limit the damage to savers as much as possible.”

European parliamentarians (MEPs) have charged that planned MPS bailouts are illegal and are demanding harsh terms against the Italian banks. Earlier this month, MEP and Green parliamentary fraction leader Sven Giegold said the MPS bailout would be an “unacceptable breach of the firewall between governments and banks and an assault on confidence in the banking union.”

With his December 4 referendum on constitutional changes, former PD Prime Minister Matteo Renzi hoped to strengthen his powers and limit those of the Senate, so as to be able to impose whatever terms he worked out with European authorities and the financial markets.

After Renzi’s referendum failed in a landslide, however, the crisis rapidly intensified. The European Central Bank (ECB) rejected MPS’ request for more time to meet capital requirements, and Qatar refused to invest more funds without more details on what government would emerge from Renzi’s resignation.

Enormous tension over the Italian banking crisis pervades international financial markets and the European political system. With Italian banks facing €360 billion in bad debts, there are fears that attempts to bail out MPS could simply starve UniCredit, an even larger bank, of capital it needs to survive and avert a collapse of the entire European banking system. Other major European banks massively exposed to Italian banks include two of France’s big three banks, BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole, and Germany’s fourth-largest bank, Hypovereinsbank.

Moreover, Grillo’s anti-European Union (EU) and anti-euro M5S is rising against the ever more unpopular PD, threatening the PD government of Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni hastily installed after Renzi’s defeat.

Wolfango Piccoli of Teneo Intelligence predicted that conflicts over the MPS bailout would only emerge after the Christmas holidays, but that they would become “politically toxic” later. “In terms of the junior bondholders [i.e., small savers], let’s see what happens. It will eventually be decided by Brussels,” he told the Guardian, adding: “This will drag on for some time. If we have elections in May or June, it will be used then [against the PD], and there is no way to deflect that.”

The MPS bailout will only intensify the historic crisis of the EU and of European capitalism, most starkly demonstrated by the victory this summer of the British referendum, called by sections of the Conservative Party and of the far-right UK Independence Party, to leave the EU.

The principal danger currently is that rising social anger is benefiting right-wing forces. The MPS bailout threatens to ruin thousands of middle class Italians amid rising electoral support for right-wing populists not only of the M5S in Italy, but across Europe. The neo-fascist Front National could take power in next year’s French presidential elections, on a program of leaving the euro and holding a referendum on France’s EU membership.

There is growing discussion that, in the event of a major banking crisis in Italy, Rome might bail out its banks in overt violation of European rules, setting up an explosive confrontation with the EU. “Italy would be willing to pump billions of euros into its banks to stem a systemic crisis in defiance of the EU, say people familiar with the government’s thinking,” the Financial Times wrote earlier this month.

At the same time, the MPS bailout will simply intensify the economic and social crisis in Italy and across Europe that is undermining the banking system.

The recession that followed the financial crash of 2008 has wiped out nearly a quarter of Italian industry. There is vast unemployment, far higher than the official rate of 11 percent, since many of the unemployed are no longer counted as part of the labor force. The official youth unemployment rate is around 40 percent, however. There is deep and rising poverty, particularly in the South, and more recently in earthquake-hit regions, where most people have not had the chance to move away and start their lives anew in other locations.

Edward Snowden accused of having Russian intelligence ties

Matthew MacEgan

Amid a barrage of anti-Russian hysteria whipped up by the US government and media, a House committee report declassified on Thursday alleges that former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden stole information both for his own personal gain as well as for foreign governments, including Russian intelligence agencies with whom he had purportedly been in close contact. This report also comes amid popular demands to the Obama administration that Snowden be pardoned.

According to the highlights, which are themselves heavily redacted, Snowden removed a vast number of documents that were unrelated to electronic surveillance or to any privacy or civil liberties issues. The committee suggests that “if the Russian or Chinese governments have access to this information, American troops will be at a greater risk in any future conflict.” This of course suggests that government officials, including those serving on this committee, are preparing for such a conflict.

A section of the report attempts to lay out evidence that Snowden was not a whistleblower, at least not “under current law.” It states that no evidence was found that Snowden “attempted to communicate concerns about the legality or morality of intelligence activities to any officials, senior or otherwise.”

The report does not offer any legitimate proof of its accusations, and in fact the declassified document could best be described as character assassination of the lowest level. Much of what the committee did was counterpose verbal and written statements made by Snowden with its own records of his work for the NSA and CIA.

For example, the committee states that some of the network drives Snowden searched “belonged to individuals involved in the hiring decision for a job for which Snowden had applied.” It later suggests that Snowden stole both a test and its answers in order to gain a position within the Tailored Access Operations office (TAO). Of course, neither of these assertions are supported by any evidence that Snowden obtained his position through nefarious means, only that he had access to such information.

The committee further suggests that Snowden lied when he stated that his “breaking point” when he decided to become a whistleblower came in March 2013, after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper gave his congressional testimony. It points out that Snowden had already begun his “unauthorized” mass downloading of information eight months earlier, in July 2012.

The report also claims that Snowden’s statements that he had ethical qualms about working for the CIA are spurious since he never mentioned these concerns during official counseling sessions. “Neither the CIA IG,” the report claims, “nor any other CIA intelligence oversight official or manager has a record of Snowden expressing any concerns.”

This last accusation is particularly outrageous, since the committee spends a considerable amount of space in the report painting Snowden as a “disgruntled employee” who became engaged in “numerous spats” with his supervisors. These “spats” include 2006 and 2008 incidents in which Snowden sought guidance through official channels when he thought he was being treated unfairly by his superiors. It is no wonder that Snowden did not feel comfortable addressing more monumental concerns within the agency itself.

Most egregious is the assertion that Snowden stole information for the purpose of sharing it with Russian intelligence services. One should be reminded that Snowden’s purpose was not to be trapped in Russia for the last three years, or for the foreseeable future.

The Obama administration took extraordinary measures in 2013 to prevent Snowden from receiving asylum from many nations around the world. It cancelled his passport to prevent him from traveling and even went so far as to ground the airplane of Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, under suspicion that Snowden could be aboard. In the end, after being trapped for six weeks in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, Snowden was granted a temporary one-year residency visa by the Russian government. This permit was renewed for three more years in 2014.

The current report was unanimously adopted by the House Personal Select Committee on Intelligence in September. It released a press report at that time making the same attempts to portray Snowden as an unprincipled thief and a problem employee who was only seeking revenge on US intelligence agencies. Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes stated at the time that Snowden is “a traitor who willfully betrayed his colleagues and his country.”

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff stated on Thursday that “most of the material that [Snowden] stole had nothing to do with Americans’ privacy. Its compromise has been of great value to America’s adversaries and those who mean to do America harm.”

Schiff and his committee colleagues wrote a letter to President Obama in September urging him not to pardon Snowden. Obama, who has presided over the manhunt for and persecution of Snowden, has no intention of granting any such pardon. He has evaded this question by stating in November that he “can’t” pardon Snowden because he “hasn’t gone before a court.”

The principal aim of both major parties is to use the Snowden affair to further ratchet up Washington’s campaign against Russia and to intimidate anyone else with access to evidence of US imperialism’s vast illegal surveillance apparatus and other crimes from releasing it to the public.

UK: Cambridge “spy” forum splits over alleged “Russian influence”

Julie Hyland

Several leading security operatives and intelligence experts have resigned from their posts at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar (CIS), amid allegations of “Russian influence.”

The CIS is a prestigious academic forum on western espionage. Founded by official MI5 historian Professor Christopher Andrew, it holds seminars every Friday at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s MI6, Stefan Halper, a former senior White House policy adviser, and leading historian Peter Martland, quit before the new term in September, the Financial Times reported. They stepped down over alleged links between the CIS and the newly-established digital publishing house Veruscript.

According to the FT, the three quit out of “fear that Russia may be seeking to use the seminar as an impeccably-credentialed platform to covertly steer debate and opinion on high-level sensitive defence and security topics, two people familiar with their thinking said, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

Veruscript, which has sponsored some of the seminar’s costs, was established by Russian physicist Gleb Cheglakov and his wife, Nazik Ibraimova. In addition to the Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies, the firm intends to launch a series of journals across multiple research disciplines, including those in Eurasian Studies and Functional Nanomaterials.

Cheglakov told the FT that the London-based company was set up using the couple’s own money and is intended to “shake up the academic publishing business by paying for peer reviews of its articles by approved academics.”

A statement by Veruscript rejected as a “serious and wholly unfounded allegation” claims of its connection with Russian intelligence services and is “reserving our position in terms of legal or other remedy.”

“The Founders of Veruscript, Gleb Cheglakov and Nazik Ibraimova, neither have nor would accept state or related agency influence or sponsorship in their professional or personal lives,” it continues.

Pointing out that it is only one of a number of sponsors of the CIS, and that its contribution has “amounted to no more than £2,000 in the history of our partnership,” it states that it is “standard practice for academic publishers to support relevant research conferences and seminars.” At no time has Veruscript sought or gained any “influence or involvement in the organisation, content or speakers at the seminar.”

The Veruscript statement notes, and the FT admits, that it “has been unable to independently substantiate” the trio’s claims and that “no concrete evidence has been provided to back them.” Cambridge University declined to comment, as have Dearlove and Martland.

The lack of evidence did not stop the leading British financial journal beginning its December 16 report by drawing a comparison with the “heyday of Soviet espionage at the heart of the British establishment,” while also stating how the affair “revives uncomfortable memories of cold war fearmongering.”

This is in reference to the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s, in which a group of students at the university, including Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, were recruited by the KGB.

Professor Andrew, whose work on the “Cambridge Five” and the Russian KGB is considered among the most authoritative, described the latest allegations as “absurd,” noting that the seminar is “entirely unclassified.” Lectures include such topics as, “Intelligence Chiefs in long-term perspective: from Queen Elizabeth I to Putin, Obama and Theresa May,” “Confusion and Opportunism? British Intelligence and the Battle of the Somme” and “Intelligence, policy and the move towards attritional counter-insurgency against the IRA in 1971.”

Neil Kent, a linguist and expert in Russian culture, is chairman of the CIS and editor-in-chief of the new Journal of Intelligence. He said, “The idea any of us would be involved in anything that smacks of Russian influence... it’s real Reds under the bed stuff—the whole thing is ludicrous.”

Kent, a friend of Cheglakov from Cambridge, is reported to have made the connections between the seminar and the journal.

The FT said that some of the academics it had spoken to suggest the conflict may be the result of competition. Dearlove and his colleagues who quit the CIS, run the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSI). Professor Andrew was co-chair of CSI along with Dearlove, but resigned in the spring. He has said his resignation was unrelated to the conflict around Veruscript.

The CSI web site is far more obviously oriented to corporate and state agencies. It also involves numerous deep state actors. It is chaired by Dearlove and includes two former heads of Britain’s GCHQ spy centre as members of its advisory board. The site boasts that its recent “clients have included UK and US government agencies, management consultants, international accountancy and finance firms” and that “Subjects likely to be high on the agenda include the fast-changing situations in the Middle East, Russia and China and their neighbours, cyber security and the rise of extremism in Europe and security threats to the UK, Europe and the US.”

This suggests that the conflict is bound up with more fundamental geopolitical calculations. Dearlove is a signatory to the Henry Jackson Society principles, the British-American neo-con think tank that was closely associated with the Iraq war. As head of MI6 between 1999 and 2004, he was intimately involved in the British/US “war on terror,” including the US invasion of Iraq and the “dodgy dossier” alleging Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Halper is the only one to have reportedly stated that he quit due to “unacceptable Russian influence on the group.” An adviser to US presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, he is the author of numerous works on the problems of US foreign policy from the standpoint of the “centre-right.” He has expressed particular concern at the consequences of an undermining of US authority and influence, especially in facilitating stronger relations between Moscow and Beijing.

The split comes against the backdrop of US and British imperialism’s debacle in Syria, as Russia helped Syrian government forces defeat western-backed Al Qaeda-allied proxy forces in eastern Aleppo.

US intelligence officials claim that Russia hacked Democratic Party emails in order to influence the US election and aid Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. This has been buttressed by allegations that Moscow is planting “fake news.”

The hysterical anti-Russian propaganda is not confined to the US. In Germany, security chiefs are briefing that Moscow is intent on intervening in next year’s elections in France and Germany, while UK Labour MP Ben Bradshaw accused Putin of intervening in the UK’s June referendum on membership of the European Union.

Bradshaw’s inflammatory claims were made during last week’s emergency parliamentary debate over Aleppo. An occasion for war-mongering against Russia, most of those participating blamed parliament’s decision in August 2013 not to support US-led military action in Syria as responsible for strengthening Moscow. Labour MP John Woodcock said the UK faced the grave threat of “a tyrannical regime in Russia that has effectively created a global system that has rules but no consequences.”

According to reports, two months ago a Cabinet Office meeting involving intelligence officers focussed on the “growing scale of the Russian threat.” Although there is no confirmation that Cambridge was discussed, one anonymous security official stated to the FT that “they were nevertheless aware that suspicions such as those flagged at Cambridge were ‘the kind of thing that we are aware of being of concern’.”

The UK is playing a lead role in NATO’s military buildup against Russia in central and Eastern Europe. It is sending tanks, drones and troops to Estonia next year.

With calls from “security experts” for the formation of a “war cabinet,” Prime Minister Theresa May is to chair a National Security Council session in the new year on Russia.

The Telegraph cited the Cambridge split against briefings by Whitehall officials that “Russia is waging a ‘campaign’ of propaganda and unconventional warfare against Britain,” including “fake espionage, misinformation, cyber-attacks and fake news.

“Examples of the new Russian offensive are thought to include state-run news outlets, such as RT and Sputnik,” it continued, which are accused of “spreading propaganda to influence British audiences, in particular over key issues such as Brexit and the Scottish independence referendum.”

The newspaper also reported the public demand by Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, head of the armed forces, of the “need to pay more attention to counterespionage and counterintelligence to protect our hard-won research, protect our industry and protect our competitive advantage.”