Defend The Palestinian People!- No U.S. Aid To Israel!- Down With U.S. Imperialism- No U.S. Aid To Egypt!- End The Blockade Of Gaza!-All Zionist Troops And Settlers Out Of The West Bank And East Jerusalem! 

Workers Vanguard No. 1050	8 August 2014

Defend the Palestinians!-Zionist Bloodbath in Gaza-Down With U.S. Aid to Israel!

 

AUGUST 5—“They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists.... They are all enemy combatants.” This screed by Israeli politician Ayelet Shaked, posted on the eve of “Operation Protective Edge,” is a genocidal expression of a cold Zionist ideology that views the Palestinian people as untermenschen (“subhumans”) to be killed with impunity. “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail” was how a notorious right-wing Israeli rabbi baldly put it some 20 years ago. Today, this is reasserted through the wholesale slaughter of more than 1,800 largely defenseless Palestinians, with another 9,400 wounded, by the U.S.-armed Israeli war machine, carried out under the pretext of responding to Hamas’s largely ineffectual rocket attacks.

As we go to press, it appears that Israel is withdrawing its forces from Gaza. At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to renew the massacres under the pretense of going after Hamas’s rockets and tunnels. In the face of Israel’s barbarity, we take a side militarily in defense of Hamas against Israel, without giving an iota of political support to that reactionary Islamic fundamentalist outfit. Defend the Palestinian people!

For the last month, the already devastated population of the Gaza Strip has been under a relentless barrage of Zionist state terror, with missiles raining down from the skies above and from the sea, while people are being shelled by artillery in an 86,000-strong ground invasion. The overwhelming majority of the dead are civilians, including at least 400 children. The streets are strewn with decomposing limbs and bodies. Whole blocks are flattened. Whole families are exterminated. Scenes abound of women and children fleeing on foot from missiles and shells.

Gaza lies in ruin upon ruin. The skyline of Gaza City and other towns in one of the most densely populated places on earth is a ragged outline of shattered buildings and torn minarets. Gaza’s meager infrastructure is devastated, many of its few factories destroyed, its one power plant in flames. A population that has had to live on four hours of electricity a day will now be forced to subsist with neither electricity nor treated water nor a sewage system, while overwhelmed hospitals lose electrical power even just to keep blood and medicines refrigerated.

The sordid bourgeois media in the U.S. presents the carnage in Gaza as a “war” between two equal sides. CNN’s contemptible anchor Wolf Blitzer airs lurid stories about “terrorists” using the tunnels in Gaza. The New York Times runs stories about Hamas using Palestinians in the Gaza ghetto as “civilian shields.” The underlying message is clear: Israel is to be absolved for any amount of murder of Palestinians, who, in turn, have no right to defend themselves. The leaflets that Israel drops telling Palestinians to flee are a cruel reminder that Gaza’s residents have nowhere to flee from what is a concentration camp surrounded by an electrified fence, a sealed border with Egypt and a Mediterranean shoreline patrolled by the Israeli navy.

There is no refuge for Gazans. UN schools—which have been sheltering more than 200,000 people, over 10 percent of Gaza’s population—have been bombed repeatedly. On August 3, one such school in Rafah was hit by Israel, killing 10 people—this after UN administrators at the school had communicated to the Israeli military no less than 33 times its precise coordinates and the fact that it was housing some 3,000 refugees. This was the seventh such Israeli bombing of UN shelters. On July 30, after announcing a four-hour “humanitarian pause” in the bombing, Israel struck a market in Shejaya where desperate people were trying to get food. The brutal bombardment killed at least 17 people and wounded over 200.

The scale of Israel’s current onslaught in Gaza has already surpassed that of its 2008-09 terror campaign, called “Operation Cast Lead,” in which some 1,400 Palestinians were slaughtered. Whereas during the first (1987-93) and second (2000-05) Intifadas (uprisings) it took months and years for thousands of Palestinians to be killed, today such numbers are reached in days and weeks. This is the new “normal” that has been established by the war criminals in Tel Aviv.

Behind the Israeli terror machine stands the far more powerful and deadly terror machine of U.S. imperialism. National Security Advisor Susan Rice declares, “Here is one thing you never have to worry about: America’s support for the state of Israel.” For his part, Secretary of State John Kerry reiterates that Israel “has every right in the world to defend itself.” The U.S. arms Israel to the tune of more than $3 billion a year in military and other aid. And the U.S. has announced that it will allow Israel to tap into U.S. stockpiles of grenades and mortar rounds inside Israel. On August 1 the House voted 395 to 8 to approve another $225 million for Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system, which the U.S. helped to create; the measure passed unanimously in the Senate. Down with U.S. aid to Israel! Down with U.S. imperialism!

The European imperialist powers are not far behind the Americans in consigning the Palestinian people to whatever fate the Zionists have in store. The French head of state, François Hollande, proclaimed on July 9: “The government of Israel has the prerogative to take all measures to protect its people in the face of danger.” The “Socialist”-led government has banned demonstrations against the Zionists’ atrocities and its cops have arrested dozens at protests in Paris and other cities.

In the Near East, most of the venal Arab bourgeois regimes, with Egypt taking the lead, have effectively stood with Israel against Hamas. Even the empty declarations of solidarity with the Palestinians have been dispensed with this time. Al-Sisi’s regime in Egypt came to power last year through a bloody coup that overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi. To the current Egyptian government, Hamas, a close ally of the Brotherhood, is far more of an enemy than Israel. The Egyptian media retails accusations against Hamas—blaming it for provoking Israel’s current onslaught—to such an extent that Israel has been broadcasting Egyptian talk shows into Gaza. More significantly, the U.S.-armed Egyptian military has sealed its border with Gaza, refusing to allow goods into the Strip or Palestinian refugees into Sinai. Down with U.S. aid to Egypt!

There have been protests in many cities against the bloodbath in Gaza. The Spartacist League/U.S. and other national sections of the International Communist League have intervened to express our solidarity with the Palestinian masses and to put forward the only perspective—international socialist revolution—that can put an end to Palestinian national oppression. Here in the belly of the beast we emphasize our class-struggle opposition to U.S. imperialism. In the Near East, there is no hope of peace or a decent life for the myriad peoples of the region until the proletariat overthrows bourgeois rule through a series of socialist revolutions.

Zionist Lies and Disinformation

The premise for Israel’s current savagery in Gaza is built upon the sort of lies that would win the admiration of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. The bourgeois media dutifully prates that Israelis live in terror of Hamas attacks. In fact in all of 2013, a total of six Israelis were killed—three of them soldiers and all but one in the occupied West Bank, where hundreds of thousands of Zionist settlers, backed up by troops, routinely terrorize Palestinian residents. As for the Hamas rockets and mortars, the number of attacks in 2013 dropped by 97 percent from the previous year according to the Israeli government’s own statistics. In fact, some fascistic elements have taken to picnicking in the hilltops near Gaza—within range of Hamas’s rockets. They bring with them lawn chairs, snacks, sodas and beers as they watch the bombardment of Gaza, taking thumbs-up selfies in front of black plumes of smoke and roaring with approval as Israeli missiles and shells hit their targets.

The supposed impetus for the pummeling of Gaza this time around was the kidnapping and killing of three yeshiva students in the West Bank in June. With no evidence whatsoever, Israel immediately declared Hamas guilty, ignoring the latter’s denial. It has since come out that the Netanyahu regime knew virtually from the moment they were kidnapped that the yeshiva students were dead. But for 18 days, the government maintained the lie of searching for them in order to build up the hysteria in the country and abroad against Hamas. As calculated, a round of fascistic terror was unleashed against Palestinians, capped by the torture and murder of a 16-year-old East Jerusalem youth: kidnapped by ultra-Zionists on July 2, he was found burned to death.

During those 18 days, Israel carried out a large-scale crackdown against Hamas in the West Bank, destroying homes, carrying out raids that killed ten Palestinians and arresting several hundred senior Hamas leaders, including many of those recently freed under the terms of a prisoner exchange. It was in response to this that Hamas intensified its feeble rocket attacks.

The actual background to the current onslaught is the increasing isolation of Hamas. Having backed the Sunni fundamentalist insurgents in the brutal Syrian civil war against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Hamas lost support from the Syrian regime as well as its backers, Hezbollah and Iran. At the same time, the overthrow of Morsi in Egypt resulted in the loss of a key ally right on the border of Gaza.

In this situation, Hamas entered into a “unity government” agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA), the dominant organization in the West Bank. The PA had been the ruling force in Gaza until it was soundly defeated in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections by Hamas, which dislodged it from Gaza in a factional conflagration in 2007 that took hundreds of lives. As noted by foreign policy analyst Nathan Thrall in a July 17 New York Times op-ed piece, “Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt.” Israel then went in for the kill. Israeli policy in recent decades has been to separate Gaza from the West Bank, to fragment and treat them as two separate entities.

Before this recent onslaught, Gaza was already a hellhole. Blockaded by Israel and Egypt since 2007, Gaza has been starved for years. Unemployment stood at 40.8 percent. More than 80 percent of the population had been dependent on UN and other international aid for survival. About 50 percent of infants and children under two were suffering from iron deficiency anemia. The populations of Gaza City, Rafah and Jabalya in Gaza received fresh water only once every four days, for six to eight hours at a time. Down with the blockade of Gaza!

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, the Palestinian population has been sealed off by an apartheid wall and subjected to a deadly Israeli military occupation, including the shooting of demonstrators protesting the rampage in Gaza. Surrounded by over 600,000 Zionist settlers who are backed up by thousands more troops, Palestinians are subjected to a series of military checkpoints and “Jewish only” roads that cut farmers off from their own fields and make travel between towns virtually impossible. All Zionist troops and settlers out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem!

For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

For well over 65 years, the Palestinian masses have suffered under the jackboot of the Israeli state—an oppression that has only intensified since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. The collapse of the USSR, which had acted as a counterweight to U.S. imperialism, deprived the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of crucial diplomatic and financial support, paving the way for the 1993 U.S.-sponsored Oslo accords, which established the Palestinian Authority as Israel’s police auxiliaries in the Occupied Territories.

Far from bringing “peace” or the easing of poverty and national oppression, Oslo and the various later “peace” accords deepened the Palestinians’ desperation. At the time of the Oslo agreement, the land seized by Zionist settlements was estimated at over 55 percent of the total land area of the Occupied Territories; in the West Bank, Israel was taking about 80 percent of the water for settlements and for use in Israel proper. The Oslo accords ignored the question of water resources while “postponing” any adjustment of land claims. In the subsequent two decades, the settlements have expanded virtually unchecked.

Relative freedom of movement within the territories and between Gaza and the West Bank has all but been eliminated. With Oslo, Israel dramatically accelerated the process of expelling Palestinians from the low-wage jobs they were able to hold within Israel, replacing them with migrant workers from Africa, Asia and East Europe, who today face brutal exploitation and repression.

It was the political bankruptcy of the secular-nationalist PLO that paved the way for the rise of reactionary, anti-woman, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish outfits like Hamas, which in the 1970s and ’80s was promoted by Israel as a counterweight to the PLO and more left-wing Palestinian groups. Oslo and subsequent “peace” deals were the logical culmination of the PLO’s nationalist program. When 2,000 Palestinians, mainly elderly people and children, were being slaughtered at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 at the behest of the Israeli army, PLO leaders were abroad being feted as statesmen (without a state) and rubbing elbows in Cairo cafes with other left-talking nationalists from throughout the Third World. The basis of Palestinian nationalism, like all nationalism, is to preach the unity of the downtrodden and exploited with their “own” exploiters and would-be exploiters. In this view, the Palestinians’ allies are to be sought not among the proletariat of the region, but rather among Arab rulers, and, failing that, the imperialists.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is one of interpenetrated peoples, where two antagonistic populations lay claim to the same piece of land. This means that under capitalism, the exercise of national self-determination by one will necessarily be at the expense of the other. Only in a socialist federation of the Near East can the competing claims to land and resources be equitably resolved.

Some 50 percent of the Palestinian population lives outside the Occupied Territories. This underlines that the national emancipation of the Palestinians—including the right of all refugees and their descendants to return to their homeland—necessarily entails workers revolutions not only to shatter the Zionist state from within but also to sweep away the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Syrian Ba’athist bonapartists and the capitalist rulers of Lebanon—countries that all have sizable and oppressed Palestinian populations.

Genuine Marxists recognize the right of the Israeli Jews as well as the Palestinians to national self-determination. The historical fact of Israel’s origins as a Zionist settler state founded on the mass expulsion of Arab inhabitants has no bearing on the right of their descendants—like all peoples—to exist. We reject the notion that there are any “progressive” or “reactionary” peoples; it is the ruling classes in power and not whole nations which are responsible for hideous crimes against humanity past and present, whether committed by German Nazis, Israeli Zionists or American imperialists.

We struggle to win the Israeli Jewish working class away from their Zionist rulers to see that their class allies are the working people of the Arab countries and to champion the national rights of the Palestinians. To be sure, such a perspective seems very remote. Over the last several decades, Israeli society has moved very sharply to the right. While 130 courageous teenagers have refused to be drafted into the army out of opposition to the occupation of Palestinian territories, a recent poll indicates that some 95 percent of Israeli Jews support the Israeli onslaught against Gaza.

The liberal demonstrations in cities like Haifa and Tel Aviv against the assault have been small, emboldening fascistic counterdemonstrators who attack the protesters with rocks and lead pipes while chanting “Death to Arabs!” and “Death to leftists!” Where the cops have not simply repressed the liberal demonstrations, they have penned protesters up where they could be easily assaulted, or simply left the scene. Meanwhile, Palestinian “citizens” of Israel have faced brutal harassment and violence for their opposition to the bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

Nonetheless, Israel is a class-divided society, with a proletariat made up of not only Jewish workers but also Palestinians (as well as a growing sector of foreign migrant workers). More than 25 percent of its citizens live in poverty and income disparities are higher than in even Egypt or Jordan. Palestinians constitute about 20 percent of Israel’s population, second-class citizens who are consigned to segregated, impoverished areas and to low-paid labor or unemployment. Sephardic Jews, though overwhelmingly under the sway of right-wing and religious parties, suffer widespread discrimination and poverty. An even worse situation confronts Israeli Jews of Ethiopian descent.

It is only the working class of Israel that has the capacity and historic interest to destroy the Zionist state from within. It is the false consciousness of Zionist nationalism, religion and racism that binds the Israeli Jewish proletariat to its capitalist ruling-class enemy. The fact that Israel is surrounded by pervasive anti-Jewish bigotry in the Arab countries allows the Israeli ruling class to more easily sell the lie that the Zionist state “protects” Israeli Jews. Hamas (and other Palestinian groups) have no qualms about targeting Israeli civilians for suicide bombings in the cities. Such acts are criminal from the standpoint of the international proletariat and serve only to cement the loyalty of Israeli Jews to Zionism.

Grotesque, even by the lights of “socialists” who will tail anything, is the Socialist Struggle Movement, the Israeli affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), whose American group is Socialist Alternative. Socialist Struggle issued a July 29 statement, “Gaza in Crisis,” which amounts to a left-Zionist critique of Israel’s assault. While condemning the bombings, not once does the piece state the elementary position of the need to defend the Palestinians, much less take a side militarily with Hamas’s forces. While complaining that Netanyahu’s “right-wing security strategy has proved a complete failure” because it did not succeed in toppling Hamas and instead “sowed more desperation, bereavement, death and destruction” (as though this were not conscious Israeli policy), the CWI laments the death of Israeli soldiers in the assault, writing that they “needlessly died.”

Unlike the 2008-09 Gaza invasion, in which only ten Israeli soldiers were killed (four of them by “friendly fire”), Hamas this time around has inflicted some casualties against Israeli soldiers, killing 64. Marxists are not bloodthirsty, but we understand that if large numbers of Israeli soldiers started coming back in body bags, there would be potential for rifts to develop within Israeli society over the government’s terror war on the Palestinians. As Marxists, we do not equate the violence of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressor.

What is vital is to forge revolutionary Marxist parties throughout the Near East to unite the proletariat—Arab, Persian and Kurdish; Sunni and Shi’ite; Muslim, Christian and Jewish—in struggle against imperialism and all the capitalist rulers of the region. The conquest of power by the proletariat in the Near East will not complete the socialist revolution, but only paves the way by changing the direction of social development. But that social development can be consolidated only through the international extension of the revolution, particularly to the advanced, industrialized imperialist centers.

Defense of those subjugated by the imperialists around the globe demands the pursuit of class struggle in the U.S. and other imperialist centers, pointing toward a proletarian struggle for power. The Spartacist League is committed to the fight to forge a revolutionary workers party to lead the multiracial proletariat in the struggle to sweep away U.S. imperialism through socialist revolution.

BDS and Illusions in Imperialism

In recent years, given the utterly desperate situation, many have turned to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a way to “do something” on behalf of the Palestinians. This liberal movement appeals to “international civil society organizations and people of conscience” to implement boycott and divestment campaigns against Israel. It also calls on its supporters to pressure their governments to implement embargoes and sanctions against Israel. The stated goal of the campaign is to force Israel to comply with “international law” and recognize the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Whatever the intentions of the committed young activists in BDS, the fundamental premise of the movement is to appeal to the imperialist forces that are up to their necks in the subjugation of the Palestinian people. This was made clear by the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), which staunchly supports BDS. The ISO succinctly described that the aim of the divestment and sanctions is “to bring sufficient pressure to ‘ensure a change in Zionist strategic calculations’ that would make a democratic state an acceptable option” (socialistworker.org, 13 March).

There is a vast difference between negative demands on the imperialists, like “down with U.S. aid to Israel,” and positive calls on them to act humanely on behalf of the oppressed. To seek to pressure the capitalist rulers to make more “socially responsible” or “ethical” investments is to build dangerous illusions in the supposed benign nature of the imperialists—whose class interests are fundamentally counterposed to those of the workers and the oppressed all over the world—as being somehow better than Israel. The U.S. imperialist ruling class will pursue its interests in as merciless a manner as it needs to regardless of what “people of conscience” have to say. The U.S. supports Israel because Israel serves U.S. imperialism’s interests in the region. Any change in that regard (unlikely though that is) would not be the result of “grassroots pressure” but rather the product of a shift in American foreign policy, which would be no less oppressive, violent and predatory.

Likewise, the BDS’s appeals to the UN to enforce “international law” reinforce dangerous illusions in “democratic” imperialism. Opponents of Zionist terror must place no reliance on this imperialist den of thieves and their victims. Time and again, the UN has acted to reinforce Palestinian oppression. The UN presided over the 1947 partition of Palestine. United Nations “peacekeepers” disarmed Palestinian fighters in Lebanon in 1982, setting up the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Imperialism itself lies at the root of the national dismemberment and resulting deadly antagonisms that have written the history of the Near East in blood. And all the treacherous nationalist leaders whose politics today boil down to seeking advantage at the expense of other peoples only reinforce the prostration of the region before the might of imperialism.

It is precisely the liberal-bourgeois political outlook promoted by the likes of BDS and others—working within a capitalist framework, seeking to pressure one capitalist force or another—that ensured that upheavals like the early 2011 uprising in Egypt, taking place amid massive waves of labor strikes, never developed into a challenge to capitalist rule in that country. This was most clearly expressed by the ISO’s fraternal group in Egypt, the Revolutionary Socialists, which in 2012 called for a vote to the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood only to support the coup carried out by the blood-soaked military a year later. The tragedy of Egypt today, where in place of the struggle for proletarian power military rule has only become more deeply entrenched, is also the tragedy of the Palestinian people.

As we wrote in “‘Boycott Israel’ Campaign and Illusions in Democratic Imperialism” (WV No. 1045, 2 May):

“The current grim situation underlines that there is no easy road to the liberation of the Palestinian people, which requires the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist rule in nuclear-armed Israel and the surrounding Arab states. This perspective demands the forging of revolutionary Marxist parties committed to the struggle for working-class power and tempered through the most uncompromising struggle against all forms of nationalism and religious reaction. There is no other way.”

Hands Off The Ferguson, Missouri Protestors-Stop The Police Killings Of Black Youth-Stop The Harassment Of The Press- Free All Protestors Now!  

Frank Jackman comment: 

It has always been easy for the American imperialist capitalist government and their police to treat black youth, especially black males and increasing Latinos like they have treated the peoples of Southeast Asia in the past, and in Iraq and Afghanistan more recently as so much collateral damage when they pulled the hammer down. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and a myriad of others shot down over the years by the police and/or vigilantes cry out for justice in Ferguson, Missouri this day and will not accept another whitewash. 

*************

THE WARS COME HOME

Some years back, at the height of the Iraq War – perhaps we should call it Iraq War II, as US troops are again returning to that country for the third time -- Dorchester People for Peace was involved in building a community-based coalition to cut military spending and redirect the funds to needs at home.  In the face of constantly trumpeted “security alerts” and the on-going “Global War on Terror” we were concerned to find effective messaging to justify reducing Pentagon spending when people were led to believe that it was meant to “keep them safe.” 

We decided to organize a workshop for coalition members to explore concerns about national security and come up with answers that would make sense in response to the attitudes among the public on the need for a strong military to counter terrorist threats.  It was our intention to develop effective arguments in answer to the expected responses that we needed a strong military to keep us safe.

Reflecting the neighborhood-based make-up of the coalition, the attendees at the workshop were predominantly people of color.  We started with an exercise of going around the room, asking people to answer the question: “What threats make you feel unsafe.”  Perhaps it should not have been a surprise that one after another, the answers were “THE POLICE”. . .

 

Left: Ferguson. Right: Iraq

Police in Ferguson, Missouri are treating the people they're supposed to serve and protect as the enemy. Armed with weapons and riot gear, the police officers look like they're coming from a war zone. Their equipment did. The Ferguson Police Department received military-grade equipment -- free of charge -- from the Pentagon as part of the 1033 program. And they've been using the weapons and gear against protesters following the police shooting of Mike Brown, and unarmed 18-year-old.

Ask your representative to stop the Pentagon from sending weapons of war to local police departments.

 

POLICE TERROR IN FERGUSON: 'This is a War and We are Soldiers on the Frontline'

The raw fury in this northern suburb of St Louis over the killing of Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old apparently walking back from a convenience store, may slowly fade in the coming weeks and months. But the underlying, bitter resentment among many in the local African-American community about their treatment at the hands of an almost unanimously white police force and local authorities, will likely continue to simmer.  More

 

Enough is enough in Ferguson

Anyone familiar with the history of race and policing in the United States had to suspect from the beginning that the shooting of Michael Brown was not just a tragedy, but a crime. Yet presumption of innocence prevails and sober minds know both the need to wait for an investigation and the reality that we may never really know what happened that fateful Saturday in Ferguson, Missouri. But watching events unfold Wednesday night in the St. Louis suburb, there can be no doubt that what happened on August 13 was an outrage.  The local authorities clearly have no idea what they're doing, and higher powers from the state or federal government need to intervene before things get even worse… Police officers, for some unfathomable reason, were pointing guns at unarmed civilians at twilight.  More

 

One Nation Under SWAT

Think of it as a different kind of blowback.  Even when you fight wars in countries thousands of miles distant, they still have an eerie way of making the long trip home… When police departments look to muscle up their arms and tactics, the Pentagon isn’t the only game in town. Civilian agencies are in on it, too. During a 2011 investigation, reporters Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz discovered that, since 9/11, police departments watching over some of the safest places in America have used $34 billion in grant funding from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to militarize in the name of counterterrorism… Report by report, evidence is mounting that America’s militarized police are a threat to public safety. But in a country where the cops increasingly look upon themselves as soldiers doing battle day in, day out, there’s no need for public accountability or even an apology when things go grievously wrong. More

 

GREENWALD: The Militarization of U.S. Police

The dangers of domestic militarization are both numerous and manifest. To begin with, as the nation is seeing in Ferguson, it degrades the mentality of police forces in virtually every negative way and subjects their targeted communities to rampant brutality and unaccountable abuse… Police militarization also poses grave and direct dangers to basic political liberties, including rights of free speech, press and assembly… Law enforcement officials and policy-makers in America know full well that serious protests — and more — are inevitable given the economic tumult and suffering the U.S. has seen over the last three years (and will continue to see for the foreseeable future).  More

 

A nation of Fergusons: Why America's police forces look like invading armies

Although shocking, what is happening in Ferguson is merely a particularly severe example of a much broader and long-running phenomenon: the militarization of police weaponry and tactics in the US. In part thanks to federal programs that provide military equipment to local police (though not military training), and encourage its use as part of ordinary law enforcement, police are increasingly using SWAT-style tactics in routine policing. However, experts say, this phenomenon is extremely dangerous, and can make otherwise peaceful situations dangerous — as police appear to have done in Ferguson.  More

 

Pentagon fueled Ferguson confrontation

The Pentagon might not have boots on the ground in Ferguson, Mo., where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by police on Saturday, but it does have wheels on the street. Michelle McCaskill, media relations chief at the Defense Logistics Agency, confirms that the Ferguson Police Department is part of a federal program called 1033 that distributes hundreds of millions of dollars of surplus military equipment to civilian police forces across the United States. The materials range from small items, such as pistols and automatic rifles, to heavy armored vehicles such as the MRAPs used in Afghanistan and Iraq. "In 2013 alone, $449,309,003.71 worth of property was transferred to law enforcement," the agency's website states.

According to McCaskill, the most recent transfer of military equipment from the Department of Defense to small Ferguson was in November and included two vehicles as well as a trailer and a generator. Details on the vehicles and their intended uses have not been released by the Pentagon. Information on any prior transfers is also unavailable.  More

 

Rep. Hank Johnson to introduce bill to stop providing military equipment to local police forces

Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia's 4th Congressional District will introduce a bill to end the federal government's program of providing billions of dollars worth of military equipment free to local police… “Our main streets should be a place for business, families, and relaxation, not tanks and M16s,” Johnson wrote. “Unfortunately, due to a Department of Defense (DOD) Program that transfers surplus DOD equipment to state and local law enforcement, our local police are quickly beginning to resemble paramilitary forces.”  More

 

Congress Isn't Ending the Pentagon-to-Police Weapons Program Anytime Soon

High-profile lawmakers are criticizing a federal program that puts military equipment in the hands of local law enforcement, a reaction to the chaos and police crackdown in Ferguson, Mo. But that doesn't mean Congress is going to do anything about it… The response from congressional Republican leadership, however, has been measured or nonexistent, suggesting the issue is unlikely to make the agenda when Congress returns from recess in September. And even if it does, the program that connects police forces to military equipment has well-placed defenders in Congress. At issue is the "1033 program," a Defense Department   Support Office, or LESO. "This program protects taxpayers, and it protects our nation's law enforcement men and women as they do a dangerous job," said John Noonan, a spokesman for the Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the program.   More

 

Tear gas is a chemical weapon banned in war. But Ferguson police shoot it at protesters.

Despite its ubiquity across the globe and in United States, tear gas is a chemical agent banned in warfare per the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, which set forth agreements signed by nearly every nation in the world — including the United States. The catch, however, is that while it’s illegal in war, it’s legal in domestic riot control… Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson has defended the use of tear gas. “There are complaints about the response from some people,” he said, “but to me, nobody got hurt seriously, and I’m happy about that.”  While that appears to have held true as of Thursday morning, some scientists and international observers contend the tactic of spraying people with tear gas, which commonly uses the chemical agent 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile (CS), can pose serious dangers. “Tear gas under the Geneva Convention is characterized as a chemical warfare agent, and so it is precluded for use in warfare, but it is used very frequently against civilians,”  More

 

Palestinians share tear gas advice with Ferguson protesters

Local authorities in Ferguson have begun responding to nightly protests with tear gas and rubber bullets. Palestinians on Twitter could relate, and shared words and images of support with the US protesters… After images of Ferguson police using tear gas were disseminated on Twitter, Palestinians Rajai abuKhalil and Mariam Barghouti drew on their own experiences to express support with protesters in Missouri.

@MariamBarghouti

Solidarity with #Ferguson. Remember to not touch your face when teargassed or put water on it. Instead use milk or coke!

Dear #Ferguson. The Tear Gas used against you was probably tested on us first by Israel. No worries, Stay Strong. Love, #Palestine

 

Israel-trained police "occupy" Missouri after killing of black youth

Since the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police in Missouri last weekend, the people of Ferguson have been subjected to a military-style crackdown by a squadron of local police departments dressed like combat soldiers, prompting residents to liken the conditions on the ground in Ferguson to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.  And who can blame them? The dystopian scenes of paramilitary units in camouflage rampaging through the streets of Ferguson, pointing assault rifles at unarmed residents and launching tear gas into people’s front yards from behind armored personnel carriers (APCs), could easily be mistaken for a Tuesday afternoon in the occupied West Bank. And it’s no coincidence. 

At least two of the four law enforcement agencies that were deployed in Ferguson up until Thursday evening — the St. Louis County Police Department and the St. Louis Police Department — received training from Israeli security forces in recent years.   More

 

Sacco & Vanzetti Event in Boston 8/23/2014
by Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society Email: info (nospam) saccoandvanzetti.org	13 Aug 2014
Saturday, August 23rd, in Boston, the 87th anniversary of the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will be remembered. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and committed anarchists whose trial is regarded as one of the great miscarriages of justice in American history. Calling attention to the continued repression of immigrants and radicals, the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society (SVCS) invites all to attend and participate in the ninth annual march and rally.
Sacco and Vanzetti Remembered in Boston, Saturday, August 23, 2014 PRESS RELEASE / PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT Saturday, August 23rd, in Boston, the 87th anniversary of the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will be remembered. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and committed anarchists whose trial is regarded as one of the great miscarriages of justice in American history. Calling attention to the continued repression of immigrants and radicals, the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society (SVCS) invites all to attend and participate in the ninth annual march and rally. We will begin by gathering at the Boston Common Visitors Center (Tremont and West, Boston) at 2PM, followed by a march to the North End at 3PM, and conclude with a rally at 4PM at the Paul Revere Mall at 416 Hanover Street and will feature a number of speakers and live music at both locations. For the last nine years, the SVCS has sought to bring public attention to the wrongful execution of the two Italian immigrant workers and radicals in 1927. We invoke their tragedy and our local history not just to remember Sacco and Vanzetti, but also to demonstrate how little has changed in the 87 years following their execution. Nationalist fear mongering and the repression of dissidents are as prevalent today as it was during the Red Scare in the early 20th century. The way in which immigrants workers are rounded up, detained and deported today under the pretext of a War on Terror, a War on Drugs or securing our borders, is eerily similar to the Palmer Raids targeting immigrants in the 1920s. And while the overwhelming majority of developed nations have abolished the death penalty, the retention of capital punishment in the United States puts the U.S. in the disgracefully bad company of countries notorious for their human rights abuses. # # # Contact: Sergio Reyes, 617-290-5614 Email: info[@]saccoandvanzetti.org Web: www.saccoandvanzetti.org Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/saccoandvanzetti/ Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society
See also: http://www.saccoandvanzetti.org http://www.saccoandvanzetti.org

Worker Revolt Continues to Shake South African Capitalism
by IG	13 Aug 2014
After 5-Month Platinum Strike, 200,000+ NUMSA Members Walk Out
Click on image for a larger version
South African bosses are worried. Business Day (3 July 2014) headlines, “‘Worker revolt’ Aggravating Most Difficult Economic Time Since 2009.” The online news site Daily Maverick frets, “South Africa may well be the strike capital of the world..” The five-month platinum miners strike, the longest in the country’s history, was settled on June 23. Although failing to achieve the demand of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) for a monthly wage of 12,500 rands (a little under US$1,200), the base pay of the lowest-paid miners was raised from around 5,000 to 8,000 rands – a 60% increase over three years. Then on July 1, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) launched an indefinite strike involving more than 220,000 workers in the engineering and metals sector, ushered in by massive marches by its membership across the country. The strike hit producers of iron, steel, durable consumer goods and plastics. By July 4, General Motors had to shut down its Port Elizabeth auto assembly plant due to parts shortages. The head of the employers’ Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa estimated the NUMSA strike was costing the industry US$30 million a day. Following reelection of African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma as president, the back-to-back AMCU and NUMSA strikes, which could spread to the gold mining sector, set the stage for another confrontation between workers and South Africa’s black capitalist regime. The shock waves of the August 2012 Marikana massacre continue to reverberate in the economic powerhouse of Africa. But a decisive victory will require a break with the ruling Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, the sellout Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the anti-communist South African Communist Party (SACP) and rejection of the Stalinst/social-democratic program of “two-stage” revolution in order to fight for socialist revolution. The platinum strike had already shaken the neo-apartheid regime (see “Elections and Miners Strike: South African Popular Front in Crisis,” The Internationalist No. 37, May-June 2014). The miners walked out for 12,500 rands, the demand of the 2012 strike, for which 36 strikers were shot down in cold blood by the police at Marikana. The final settlement was a limited but real victory for the miners. The bosses’ media try to minimize it by calculating how much strikers lost during five months without pay. But for the miners what was key was that the companies were not able to starve them into submission, they resisted police repression and won a big raise. Worker at Lonmin platinum mine in Rustenburg, South Africa returns after five-month strike in which determined strikers won substantial raise, faced down police repression and beat attempts to starve them out. (Photo: EPA) Yet mine workers will still be mired in abject poverty, living in tin shacks while managers wheel around in their BMWs. The claims that replacing the formal structures of white supremacy known as apartheid would bring freedom for the downtrodden South African non-white masses have been shown to be hollow. Now some liberals are talking about a switch from a “low-wage, high-employment” mining industry to a “high-wage, low-employment” model (Business Day, 18 June). Nonsense. They may automate the mines, but South African capitalism was built on the bedrock of superexploitation of black labor and that will not change under neo-apartheid. The platinum strike went up against the ANC government, and had to contend with scabbing by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Even so, the historic 12,500-rand wage demand against the hugely profitable Lonmin, Amplats and Implats mining companies could have been won – but the miners couldn’t do it alone. As we wrote last April, “There should have been, and should be today, a mobilization of all of South African labor to defend the miners with solidarity strike action to bring South Africa to a standstill in support of the platinum strike.” NUMSA workers in the platinum refineries could have continued their strike until the miners won. The point was noted by a Witwatersrand University researcher, Gavin Capps, quoted by the liberal Mail & Guardian (20 June) saying that the union’s initial demand “could have been won with co-ordinated action from another sector. If there had been co-ordination with refinery workers, for example, and with transport workers who would have simply refused to transport the stockpiles, there would have been a tighter squeeze on production.” But this was blocked by mutual suspicion between the NUMSA and AMCU tops while “the National Council of Trade Unions, to which Amcu is affiliated, folded its arms as Amcu slugged it out in Rustenburg.” Even as the COSATU/NUM labor fakers and SACP fake communists back the Zuma government to the hilt as the price for their reserved seats on the neo-apartheid “gravy train,” and despite bureaucratic tensions among the more militant unions, with metal workers walking out on the heels of the miners strike, the capitalists are reacting like they were hit by a one-two punch. “There will be no settlement whatsoever unless a double-digit increase is achieved,” said NUMSA president Andrew Chirwa on June 26. Although the leadership scaled back its demands, from 20% to 15% to 12%, union marchers in Johannesburg are insisting on at least 15%. NUMSA also decided to launch a series of pickets and marches on July 2 over its deadlocked wage negotiations with the power utility Eskom, where it is likewise demanding 12%. Strikes against this state-owned electricity firm are banned under South Africa’s anti-labor “essential services” law. NUMSA represents only a quarter of the 40,000 Eskom workers, but a few pickets at the Medupi power station under construction in Limpopo province resulted in many contract workers not showing up (The Citizen, 4 July). Cops drove off the pickets at the entrance with potentially lethal rubber bullets. The next act in this drama could be bloody. The ANC government has of course denounced the metalworkers, but despite backstabbing by COSATU bureaucrats, the strike has received verbal support from a number of federations. Meanwhile, the bourgeois press screeches that Moody's, the credit rating firm, may downgrade South African government bonds to “junk” status. At a July 1 rally in Port Elizabeth, NUMSA treasurer Mphumzi Maqungo replied to “economic analysts arguing that this strike is politically motivated and will hit the economy hardest. We want to tell them that they must go to hell” (The Herald, 2 July). While the NUMSA strike is fully justified, it is nonetheless very political. In addition to the wage demand, NUMSA is calling for a ban on labor brokers (the parasites who supply temporary contract workers who receive a pittance far below the poverty wages regular workers receive) and a ban on hiring under the Employment Tax Incentive Act (a scheme to subsidize capitalists if they hire youth, also with poor wages and no rights). COSATU has begged its “allies” in the bourgeois government to ban labor brokering, to no avail. (Not coincidentally the profiteers from this modern-day slave trade include the son of President Zuma.) In December 2013, NUMSA broke with the Tripartite Alliance, and refused to back the ANC in the May elections. It talks of socialism and calls for building some kind of “workers party.” But the NUMSA memorandum announcing the strike, while citing the crises of capitalism, deplores the “shameful” poverty wages “in our democracy” and demands “that government stops pursuing neo-liberal policies.” It also asserts that “we have a struggle to engage both business and capital” to “defend the current capability of our manufacturing sector.” Thus in practice, its policy amounts to a hopeless quest to pressure capital into behaving in a “comradely” way. Curiously, the South African business weekly Financial Mail (20 June) recently published a series of articles on “participative capitalism” including an editorial, featuring a photo of NUMSA general secretary Irvin Jim, titled “Can Comrade Capitalism Work?” As any Marxist could tell you, the answer is a flat “no.” Even in the neo-apartheid never-never land, where the South African Communist Party staffs the bourgeois state and runs the police/intelligence apparatus, all the talk of “stakeholder,” “responsible” and “conscious” capitalism won’t amount to a hill of beans because the very essence of capitalism is exploitation. As Lenin remarked about the “economist” social democrats of his day who talked of “lending the economic struggle itself a political character,” such simple trade unionism cannot take the workers’ struggle forward to revolution. Yet the excruciating situation of the South African proletariat cries out for revolutionary, class-struggle politics. To win support from the oppressed masses of township residents, contract workers and unemployed youth that the government appeals to with its demagogic anti-labor laws, NUMSA should fight for massive hiring for full-time jobs through a drastic reduction of the workweek with no loss in pay, with pay adjusted for inflation (a sliding scale of wages and hours). Particularly after Marikana, it should be clear to class-conscious workers that organizing “unions” of police – the armed fist of capital – such as POPCRU is a ticket for disaster. A class-struggle leadership of labor would organize workers defense guards to block scabs and cop attacks. And in the face of threats of retrenchments (layoffs) and closures of plants and mines, rather than simply asking to see the capitalists’ “financials,” as does the NUMSA strike memorandum, it would fight to impose workers control of their enterprises. Such demands from Leon Trotsky’s Transitional Program would be a bridge from today’s struggles to the fight for socialist revolution. Unlike the social democrats of the Democratic Socialist Movement and its Workers and Socialist Party, who envisage the NUMSA obliging COSATU to call a nice, peaceful general (protest) strike for a wage hike and a living minimum wage – with nationalization of the metal industry tacked on at the end as left cover – authentic Trotskyists emphasize that a revolutionary struggle for power would be posed by a real general strike. What’s urgently needed in South Africa today to free the workers and urban and rural poor from apartheid slavery is above all building a revolutionary workers party on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, to fight for a black-centered workers government in a socialist federation of Africa See Also: Lonmin Massacre - South African Police Shoot Striking Mine Workers http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt2zax_lonmin-massacre-south-african-po
See also: http://www.internationalist.org/numsastrikeworkerrevolt1407.html

WBUR - NPR Is Laundering CIA Talking Points to Make You Scared of NSA Reporting
by Glenn Greenwald	14 Aug 2014
Click on image for a larger version
On August 1, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S. officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.” The “big data firm,” reported NPR, says that it now “has tangible evidence” proving the government’s accusations. Temple-Raston’s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20 seconds to uncritically repeating the report’s key conclusion that ”just months after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the way its operatives interacted online” and, post-Snowden, “al-Qaeda didn’t just tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled it.” The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption. With this report, Temple-Raston seriously misled NPR’s millions of listeners. To begin with, Recorded Future, the outfit that produced the government-affirming report, is anything but independent. To the contrary, it is funded by the CIA and U.S. intelligence community with millions of dollars. Back in 2010, it also filed forms to become a vendor for the NSA. (In response to questions from The Intercept, the company’s vice president Jason Hines refused to say whether it works for the NSA, telling us that we should go FOIA that information if we want to know. But according to public reports, Recorded Future “earns most of its revenue from selling to Wall Street quants and intelligence agencies.”) The connection between Recorded Future and the U.S. intelligence community is long known. Back in July, 2010, Wired‘s Noah Shachtman revealed that the company is backed by both “the investment arms of the CIA and Google.” Indeed, In-Q-Tel—the deep-pocket investment arm of both the CIA and other intelligence agencies (including the NSA)—has seats on Recorded Future’s board of directors and, on its website, lists Recorded Future as one of the companies in its “portfolio.” In stark contrast to NPR, The New York Times noted these connections when reporting on the firm in 2011: “Recorded Future is financed with $8 million from the likes of Google’s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its clients have included government agencies and banks.” Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back in 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast her profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has “at least two very important financial backers: the CIA’s investment arm, called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into the company.” That is the company she’s now featuring as some sort of independent source that can credibly vindicate the claims of U.S. officials about how Snowden reporting helps terrorists. Beyond all that, the “cyber expert” who Temple-Raston told NPR listeners was “brought in” by Recorded Future to “investigate” these claims—Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs—has his own significant financial ties to the U.S. intelligence community. In 2012, In-Q-Tel proudly touted a “strategic partnership” with ReversingLabs to develop new technology for the Department of Homeland Security. Vuskan hailed the partnership as vital to his company’s future prospects. If one wants to argue that a government-mimicking report from a company that is funded by the CIA, and whose board is composed in part of its investment arm, and which centrally relies on research from another CIA partner is somehow newsworthy—fine, one can have that debate. But to pass it off as some sort of independent analysis without even mentioning those central ties is reckless and deceitful—especially when, as is true here, the reporter doing it clearly knows about those ties. Beyond all these CIA connections, the conclusion touted in the NPR report—that al-Qaeda developed more sophisticated encryption techniques due to the Snowden reporting—is dubious in the extreme. It is also undercut by documents contained in the Snowden archive. The Recorded Future “report”—which was actually nothing more than a short blog post—is designed to bolster the year-long fear-mongering campaign of U.S. and British officials arguing that terrorists would realize the need to hide their communications and develop effective means of doing so by virtue of the Snowden reporting. Predictably, former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker promptly seized on the report (still concealing the firm’s CIA connections from readers) to argue in The Washington Post that “the evidence is mounting that Edward Snowden and his journalist allies have helped al-Qaeda improve their security against NSA surveillance.” But actual terrorists—long before the Snowden reporting—have been fixated on developing encryption methods and other techniques to protect their communications from electronic surveillance. And they have succeeded in a quite sophisticated manner. One document found in the GCHQ archive provided by Snowden is a 45-page, single-spaced manual that the British spy agency calls a “Jihadist Handbook.” Though undated, the content suggests it was originally written in 2002 or 2003: more than 10 years before the Snowden reporting began. It appears to have been last updated shortly after September 2003, and translated into English by GCHQ sometime in 2005 or 2006. Much of it is found online in Arabic. The handbook appears to be an excerpt from a 268-page document called “Abu Zubaydah’s Encyclopedia.” The encyclopedia, uploaded in Arabic to the internet in 2011, describes itself as the “cumulative result of efforts of the brothers who walked on the path of jihad” and contains highly specific and sophisticated instructions for avoiding electronic surveillance. The first section of the decade-old handbook is entitled “The General Security for all Means of Communication” and includes directions on how to keep landline and mobile telephone calls, emails, and online chats secure. It also includes a detailed discussion of how SIM cards in cell phones can be used by the NSA as tracking devices: exactly the subject of the very first story The Intercept ever published from the Snowden material. The manual further instructs operatives that merely turning off one’s cell phone is insufficient to avoid tracking; instead, it instructs, both the battery and SIM card must be removed. It extensively describes how code words should be used for all online communications. So sophisticated is the 10-year-old “Jihadist Manual” that, in many sections, it is virtually identical to the GCHQ’s own manual, developed years later (in 2010), for instructing its operatives how to keep their communications secure: Long before the Snowden reporting, then, those considered by the U.S. to be “terrorists” have been fixated on avoiding electronic surveillance, which is why Osama bin Laden communicated only through personal courier. The “Jihadist Handbook” demonstrates how widespread and sophisticated these techniques have been for many years (GCHQ declined to respond beyond its routine boilerplate claiming that its operations are legal, which has nothing to do with this story). Then there are the glaring and self-evident fallacies in the report itself. The principal claim on which its conclusion is based is the chronology that extremist groups announced a roll-out of “the first Islamic encryption software for mobiles” in September, 2013 (3 months after the first Snowden report), followed by a new encryption product in December (“The Mujahid’s Security”). But it should go without saying that this proves nothing about causation; it is a basic logical principle that “A precedes B” is not evidence that ”A caused B.” The original Recorded Future report literally did nothing more than assert that there were visible encryption improvements from al-Qaeda that post-dated the first Snowden story, and then, based on no evidence, just asserted the causal link. Beyond that obvious post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, there is no question that “jihadists” have been working for years on sophisticated tactics for communications security; the fact that they continued to be after the Snowden reporting began literally proves nothing. Indeed, in September of last year, The New York Times made clear that the “jihadists” began developing their own advanced encryption methods years before the start of the Snowden reporting: Al Qaeda’s use of advanced encryption technology dates to 2007, when the Global Islamic Media Front released the Asrar al-Mujahedeen, or so-called “Mujahedeen Secrets,” software. An updated version, Mujahedeen Secrets 2, was released in January 2008, and has been revised at least twice, most recently in May 2012, analysts said. The program was popularized in the first issue of Inspire, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s quarterly online magazine, in a July 2010 post entitled “How to Use Asrar al-Mujahedeen: Sending and Receiving Encrypted Messages.” Since then, each issue of Inspire has offered a how-to section on encrypting communications, recommending MS2 as the main encryption tool. All the way back in February, 2001, USA Today reported that al-Qaeda and other groups have been using “uncrackable encryption” since the mid-1990s; the 2001 article stated: “encryption has become the everyday tool of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, Albania, Britain, Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Syria, the USA, the West Bank and Gaza and Yemen, U.S. officials say.” As has long been clear, “the terrorists” did not need Snowden reporting to know that the U.S. and its partners are doing everything possible to monitor their communications. It is certainly possible that some extremists, like ordinary users all over the world, are more conscious now than before about the need to secure their communications—just as some extremists became aware of interrogation techniques they may face if detained by virtue of reporting on American torture (which is why torture advocates argued that such reporting also helped terrorists). But the key revelation of the Snowden reporting is that the surveillance system built in secret by the NSA and its partners is directed at hundreds of millions of ordinary people and entire populations rather than “the terrorists.” Responding to one of the criticisms about the glaring flaws in its report (the obvious absence of causation evidence), Recorded Future admits that “in 2007 Al-Qaeda (AQ) had one encryption product (Asrar) for one platform (PC) which has since been periodically updated (e.g. in 2008).” They claim there was a “significant uptick” after the Snowden reporting but still offer no evidence of a causal connection nor any explanation as to what “the terrorists” learned from those reports that could help them better safeguard their communications or that would provide added motivation to shield those communications. Critically, even if one wanted to accept Recorded Future’s timeline as true, there are all sorts of plausible reasons other than Snowden revelations why these groups would have been motivated to develop new encryption protections. One obvious impetus is the August 2013 government boasting to McClatchy (and The Daily Beast) that the State Department ordered the closing of 21 embassies because of what it learned from an intercepted “conference call” among Al Qaeda leaders: An official who’d been briefed on the matter in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, told McClatchy that the embassy closings and travel advisory were the result of an intercepted communication between Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and al Qaida leader Ayman al Zawahiri in which Zawahiri gave “clear orders” to al-Wuhaysi, who was recently named al Qaida’s general manager, to carry out an attack. As The Daily Beast put it: “Al-Qaeda leaders had assumed the conference calls, which give Zawahiri the ability to manage his organization from a remote location, were secure. But leaks about the original intercepts have likely exposed the operation that allowed the U.S. intelligence community to listen in on the al-Qaeda board meetings.” It does the U.S. government no good to attribute these new encryption efforts to leaks from the U.S. government itself. Recorded Future thus ignores that possibility altogether and suggests—with absolutely no evidence—that it was due to Snowden revelations. They do so even though The New York Times reported a month after the “conference call” leak that ”senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden.” The NYT added: “The drop in message traffic after the communication intercepts contrasts with what analysts describe as a far more muted impact on counterterrorism efforts from the disclosures by Mr. Snowden of the broad capabilities of N.S.A. surveillance programs.” Then there’s the completely unproven yet vital assumption that this series of events—even if they happened this way—actually helped the terrorists evade monitoring. Bruce Schneier, the security expert quoted at the end of the NPR report, thinks exactly the opposite is true. He notes numerous journalists, in the wake of the report, asked him “how this will adversely affect US intelligence efforts,” and he explained: I think the reverse is true. I think this will help US intelligence efforts. Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight. Last fall, Matt Blaze said to me that he thought that the Snowden documents will usher in a new dark age of cryptography, as people abandon good algorithms and software for snake oil of their own devising. My guess is that this an example of that. Chris Soghoian, technologist for the ACLU (whose lawyers represent Snowden) noted that these types of stories have been emerging long before Snowden reporting, telling The Intercept: “every few years, a think tank or security company puts out a report on the use of bespoke encryption software by terrorists, and then media eats it up.” In the wake of such criticism, Recorded Future issued a supplement to its report, this time claiming that the terrorists “are not using home-brew crypto algorithms” but rather “off the shelf” methods of cryptography. But like Schneier, Soghoian suggested that the developments claimed by Recorded Future would make it easier, not harder, for the U.S. government to monitor the communications of extremists: If we assume that these programs are developed and distributed by jihadist sympathizers, and not an intelligence service, then the fact that they continue to develop new encryption tools and advocate their use is only further evidence that they don’t really know what they’re doing. Using terrorist-specific encryption tools will only attract the attention of intelligence agencies. If smart terrorists are using encryption, they’re likely using tools like Tor and PGP, the same tools used by government agencies, corporations, journalists, activists and security experts. Then there are the bizarre implications from embracing the claims of the Recorded Future report. For years, both privacy advocates and experts in cryptography have published guides for how internet users can protect the privacy of their online activities using encryption programs such as PGP email and Tor. Recorded Future claims that terrorist groups are using “open source” and “off the shelf” encryption to shield their communications: does that mean that anyone who publishes information on encryption is guilty of helping the terrorists? In sum, Recorded Future is a CIA-dependent company devoted to spreading pro-government propaganda, no matter how absurd. Among its lowlights is its boasting of how it monitored media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, whereby it claimed to detect Iran’s “growing influence” over that coverage: “We recently Tweeted a shared link showing coverage and gaining online momentum for the Occupy Wall Street movement. When we look more carefully at influencers in this discussion using our Influencer Map, we find that Iran Press TV is the second largest influencer after the US Media!” None of these serious doubts, fallacies, or questions about this company and its “report” were even alluded to by Temple-Raston in her NPR story, beyond a cursory and very limited Schneier quote tacked onto the end. It’s hardly surprising that these kinds of firms, linked to and dependent on the largesse of the U.S. intelligence community, produce pro-government tripe of this sort. That’s their function. It’s the job of media outlets to scrutinize these claims, not mindlessly repeat and then glorify them as NPR did here.
See also: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/12/nprs-dina-temple-raston-passed-cia-funded-nsa-contractor-independent-fear-monger-

Hands Off Edward Snowden!

Snowden: The NSA, not Assad, took Syria off the Internet in 2012
by Ed Snowden	14 Aug 2014
In a Wired interview with well-known National Security Agency journalist James Bamford that was published today, Edward Snowden claimed that the US accidentally took most of Syria off the Internet while attempting to bug the country's traffic. Snowden said that back in 2013 when he was still working with the US government, he was told by a US intelligence officer that NSA hackers—not the Assad regime—had been responsible for Syria’s sudden disconnect from the Internet in November and December of 2012. The NSA's Tailored Access Office (TAO), Snowden said, had been attempting to exploit a vulnerability in the router of a “major Internet service provider in Syria.” The exploit would have allowed the NSA to redirect traffic from the router through systems tapped by the agency’s Turmoil packet capture system and the Xkeyscore packet processing system, giving the NSA access to enclosures in e-mails that would otherwise not have been accessible to its broad Internet surveillance. Instead, the TAO’s hackers “bricked” the router, Snowden said. He described the event as an “oh shit” moment, as the TAO operations center team tried to repair the router and cover their tracks, to no avail. “Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage,” Bamford wrote. Snowden told him that someone joked, “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.” It isn’t clear how the failure of a single router within Syria’s national network would have caused the outage on November 29, which lasted for nearly three days and cut off all traffic from the country to the outside world. It’s likely that the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment withdrew Syrian networks from Internet routing tables to prevent further attacks while they tried to determine the cause of the outage. Syrian state television blamed “terrorists” for the outage at the time, though it was widely assumed the outage was part of a campaign by the Assad regime to deny communications to rebel groups. Syria had previously used illegally obtained network monitoring gear from Blue Coat to break SSL encrypted Web traffic and identify dissidents posting to blogs and http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/snowden-the-nsa-not-assad-too/

Hands Off The Ferguson, Missouri Protesters-Stop The Police Killings Of Black Youth-Stop The Harassment Of The Press- Free All Protesters Now!  

 

Frank Jackman comment: 

It has always been easy for the American imperialist capitalist government and their police to treat black youth, especially black males and increasing Latinos like they have treated the peoples of Southeast Asia in the past, and in Iraq and Afghanistan more recently as so much collateral damage when they pulled the hammer down. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and a myriad of others shot down over the years by the police and/or vigilantes cry out for justice in Ferguson, Missouri this day and will not accept another whitewash. 

*************

Boston Common Protest Police Murder in Ferguson - Thursday 14 Aug 2014
by Common	14 Aug 2014 Modified: 11:14:30 PM
Click on image for a larger version
In Response To Events In Ferguson, Boston Vigil Honors Victims Of Police Brutality By Abby Elizabeth Conway August 14, 2014 BOSTON — Hundreds attended a vigil on Boston Common Thursday evening in response to events in Ferguson, Missouri, where protests have been going on since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer Saturday. The gathering was one of many planned across the country by a movement calling itself the National Moment of Silence For Victims of Police Brutality. The names of those who organizers say were victims of police brutality were shouted from the crowd and repeated into a bullhorn before a moment of silence, during which the crowd raised their hands. Feminista Jones, a New York resident who is coordinating the movement, told The Boston Globe that each vigil was organized by local activists. “The best thing about this – all of the organizers have never done anything like this before,” Jones told the Globe. “These are just everyday citizens who decided that they wanted to do something, and that’s important.” As people gathered on Boston Common, the Associated Press reported that hundreds took to the streets of Ferguson for the fifth night of demonstrations: St. Louis County police and state troopers were walking alongside demonstrators. Several marchers stopped to shake hands with officers. One woman hugged Capt. Ron Johnson of the Highway Patrol, who is overseeing security. The scene stands in stark contrast to earlier this week when officers in riot gear and in military equipment clashed with protesters. The mood Thursday is almost jubilant. A steady line of cars driving by the scene is honking and waving at the protesters. In response to criticism over how the police had responded to days of protests, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon earlier Thursday gave the state’s highway patrol control over security in the St. Louis suburb. Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, who was briefly taken into custody by Ferguson Police Wednesday night, tweeted that the resulting change in tone on the ground was “stunning.” http://rt.com/usa/180472-ferguson-solidarity-rally-arrests/ .................. NYPD threatens mass arrests at Ferguson solidarity rally Thousands of people are rallying in New York in solidarity with residents of Ferguson, showing support to people across the US who have been victims of police brutality. The NYPD has threatened mass arrests if people do not stop blocking traffic. The New York City Police Department has reportedly arrested at least four people during a peaceful rally intended to pay tribute to Michael Brown and others who have suffered from police brutality. Thousands of protesters left their original rally location at New York’s Union Square and descended upon Times Square, ignoring police orders to stay on the sidewalk. As a result, police began cordoning protesters between 42nd Street and 9th avenue. Demonstrators flooded social media, complaining that officers had kettled them and refused to let them go. A number of arrests were made as the situation escalated, although the exact number remains unclear. Eventually, police told protesters they would be able to leave, but that if they returned to the current location and block the traffic again they would be arrested. These developments come as thousands of people in more than 80 cities across the United States gathered on Thursday to hold vigils for victims of police brutality, particularly 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was fatally shot while unarmed by police in Ferguson. Pulling together under the banner, “National Moment of Silence for Victims of Police Brutality” (NMOS), peaceful assemblies gathered at 7pm EST in about 37 states, including New York, California, Missouri, Michigan, and Texas. Twenty minutes later, groups observed a 60-second moment of silence, which was followed by participants sharing stories, marching, and chanting together. The vigils were intended to honor the lives of innocent people killed as a result of excessive police force, as well as those lives that have been touched by police brutality in any way. In addition to the recent death of Brown, New Yorker Eric Garner died from a chokehold by a police officer in July, and Ezell Ford of Los Angeles was fatally shot by law enforcement just two days after the incident in Ferguson. “We will peacefully assemble at over 90 vigils across the nation to share in a moment of silence and solidarity with each other,” NMOS wrote on its Facebook page. “Today, we will show the world and each other that we can come together, as ONE.” In New York City, vigils were held in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. Hundreds of people gathered at Union Square alone, where they chanted, “Hands up; don’t shoot!” together after observing their moment of silence. Similar chants were recorded in cities throughout the US. “I’m sick of people of color being killed by police,” Harlem resident Sally Rumble told RT at Union Square. “It’s the same thing over and over again. America is not for black people.” That sentiment was echoed throughout the rally, where demonstrators raised signs that read, “Black lives matter,” and “civil rights don’t expire at sundown.” David Roberts of the Bronx, meanwhile, said the NMOS vigil was the first rally he had ever attended, but wanted to participate after hearing about Brown’s death. “I’m a young black man and that kind of thing could happen to me also,” he said, adding that he wanted to express his opposition to the militarization of law enforcement and was concerned with Americans losing their rights. http://rt.com/usa/180472-ferguson-solidarity-rally-arrests/

No New U.S. War In Iraq- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries!  Stop The Bombing! –Stop The Arms Shipments …

Frand Jackman comment:

As the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, orders more air bombing strikes in the North, sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case.

***

Here is something to think about:  

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.

**************

U.S. Launches Airstrikes in Battle to Retake Iraq's Mosul Dam From ISIS

collapse story

U.S. fighter planes pounded targets in northern Iraq as a joint military operation kicked off to retake the country's largest dam from ISIS militants, officials said. U.S. military officials said FA-18 fighter bombers and armed drones were launching airstrikes and offering air cover to Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting to regain control of the Mosul Dam.

ISIS fighters seized the dam on the Tigris River on Aug. 7 as part of an offensive that has seen large swaths of Iraq fall to the Sunni militants. Sources told NBC News the decision to try retaking the dam came after intelligence showed ISIS militants were not yet at a point where they could blow up the installation. The Mosul Dam is critical to Iraqi's entire infrastructure, so much so President Obama flagged its control as a key concern a week ago as he took off for vacation in Martha's Vineyard.

advertisement

Iraqi and Kurdish Force Discuss ‘Team’ Effort Versus ISIS

NBC News

Paste HTML to embed video: <script id='metamorph-45-start' type='text/x-placeholder'></script><iframe src="http://player.theplatform.com/p/2E2eJC/nbcNewsOffsite?guid=f_os_iraq_peshmerga_140812" width="635" height="500" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe><script id='metamorph-45-end' type='text/x-placeholder'></script>

advertisement

Kurdish Forces Fight ISIS as Iraqi Citizens Fear for Their Lives

Nightly News

Paste HTML to embed video: <script id='metamorph-52-start' type='text/x-placeholder'></script><iframe src="http://player.theplatform.com/p/2E2eJC/nbcNewsOffsite?guid=nn_05_ksi_iraq_140812" width="635" height="500" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe><script id='metamorph-52-end' type='text/x-placeholder'></script>

advertisement

In-Depth

• ISIS Grabs Major Iraqi Dam and Oilfield
• U.S. Forces on Iraq Mountain See Less Need for Evacuation
• U.S. Drone Takes Out ISIS Firing Position

- Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube

U.S. Launches Airstrikes in Battle to Retake Iraq's Mosul Dam From ISIS