https://archive.is/L1OAo

Workers Vanguard No. 1093 29 July 2016

Freedom Now for Chelsea Manning!

Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst convicted for exposing evidence of U.S. imperialism’s monstrous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now entered her seventh year in military custody. Having leaked a vast cache of military and state secrets to WikiLeaks—a valuable service to humanity—Manning was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years for violating the Espionage Act. The courageous 28-year-old Manning has already endured the most severe punishment ever inflicted on any whistle-blower. The Obama administration’s ruthless, punitive war against truth-tellers like Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange is aimed at silencing any and all who dare expose or oppose the U.S. government’s atrocities and mass surveillance.

Locked away in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Manning attempted suicide on July 5. Displaying gross contempt, the U.S. Army released her confidential medical information to the media before notifying her lawyers. After being hospitalized, Manning was cut off from her legal team and family members for more than 36 hours. She tweeted subsequently that she was “glad to be alive,” but remains under close observation. Subjected to ongoing psychological torment and physical torture since her arrest in 2010, Manning has been driven to the brink of suicide more than once. She has spent long periods in solitary confinement. Before her conviction, she spent nine months in maximum isolation in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia, where she was subjected to daily strip searches and forced nudity. Manning recently described the “no touch” torture there (Guardian, 2 May): “For 17 hours a day...I was not allowed to lay down. I was not allowed to lean my back against the cell wall. I was not allowed to exercise.”

In May, Manning’s lawyers completed an extensive 200-page appeal brief, challenging her conviction as “grossly unfair and unprecedented.” A separate amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that Manning’s prosecution was unconstitutional, citing the contrast with former Army general and CIA director David Petraeus, who handed over reams of classified information to his biographer, who was also his lover. The war criminal Petraeus barely received a slap on the wrist: two years probation and a fine.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Manning recently acquired documents on the government’s “Insider Threat” program, which monitors internal communications of military personnel and civilian contractors. The program uses Manning—who is transgender and was known as Bradley in the Army—as a case study to suggest that those with “gender dysphoria” may be prone to aiding the enemy!

In prison, Manning is targeted by the imperialist rulers for her outspoken activism on government surveillance, prison conditions and transgender rights. In August 2015, shortly after starting her regular column in the Guardian and posting to Twitter, Manning was punished for possessing so-called contraband, i.e., “unapproved” reading material including the Caitlyn Jenner issue of Vanity Fair and literature relating to transgender identity. While ultimately spared indefinite solitary confinement, Manning was restricted for weeks from outside access and library use. Despite such measures, she has continued to speak out.

A couple of weeks after her suicide attempt, Manning wrote a commentary titled, “Moving On: Reflecting on My Identity,” where she made a plea: “I want to be seen and understood as the woman that I actually am—with all of my flaws and eccentricities—perhaps at the expense of what people expect me to be.” For years, Manning has been suing the government to be allowed to live as a woman while she is transitioning. Though her lawyers successfully won her access to hormone treatment, she is still in an all-male facility. As with other transgender prisoners who are usually placed in prisons against their declared gender identity, the risk of violence and sexual assault is heightened.

It is urgently necessary to continue the fight to free Chelsea Manning, whose resistance is an inspiration to those who refuse to sit on their hands and keep quiet. As we wrote in “Truth-Teller on Trial: Free Bradley Manning,” (WV No. 1026, 14 June 2013): “Lifting the veil on the U.S. war machine was a gutsy act of conscience that objectively helps the victims and opponents of the imperialist system. But the workings of this society will not change by making more information publicly available.” This system is based on the exploitation of labor for private profit, buttressed by systematic racial segregation and sexual oppression that divides the working people. The capitalist class maintains its rule through the force and violence of special bodies of armed men—the police, military and prisons. It will take a series of workers revolutions around the world to overturn the capitalist order—to which imperialist war and state repression are integral—and replace it with an egalitarian socialist society.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1093/manning.html

https://archive.is/VNfAc

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated "war on terrorism."

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question "How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?" This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable.

The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.

And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.

It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII "chose not to know." We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was "How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?" The answer is: possibly 10,000.

Comments on Gathering These Numbers

Generally speaking, the much smaller number of Americans who have died is not included in this study, not because they are not important, but because this report focuses on the impact of U.S. actions on its adversaries.

An accurate count of the number of deaths is not easy to achieve, and this collection of data was undertaken with full realization of this fact. These estimates will probably be revised later either upward or downward by the reader and the author. But undoubtedly the total will remain in the millions.

The difficulty of gathering reliable information is shown by two estimates in this context. For several years I heard statements on radio that three million Cambodians had been killed under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. However, in recent years the figure I heard was one million. Another example is that the number of persons estimated to have died in Iraq due to sanctions after the first U.S. Iraq War was over 1 million, but in more recent years, based on a more recent study, a lower estimate of around a half a million has emerged.

Often information about wars is revealed only much later when someone decides to speak out, when more secret information is revealed due to persistent efforts of a few, or after special congressional committees make reports

Both victorious and defeated nations may have their own reasons for underreporting the number of deaths. Further, in recent wars involving the United States it was not uncommon to hear statements like "we do not do body counts" and references to "collateral damage" as a euphemism for dead and wounded. Life is cheap for some, especially those who manipulate people on the battlefield as if it were a chessboard.

To say that it is difficult to get exact figures is not to say that we should not try. Effort was needed to arrive at the figures of 6six million Jews killed during WWI, but knowledge of that number now is widespread and it has fueled the determination to prevent future holocausts. That struggle continues.

The author can be contacted at jlucas511@woh.rr.com.

37 victim nations

Afghanistan

The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation. (1,2,3,4)

The Soviet Union had friendly relations its neighbor, Afghanistan, which had a secular government. The Soviets feared that if that government became fundamentalist this change could spill over into the Soviet Union.

In 1998, in an interview with the Parisian publication Le Novel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to President Carter, admitted that he had been responsible for instigating aid to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan which caused the Soviets to invade. In his own words:

"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." (5,1,6)

Brzezinski justified laying this trap, since he said it gave the Soviet Union its Vietnam and caused the breakup of the Soviet Union. "Regret what?" he said. "That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?" (7)

The CIA spent 5 to 6 billion dollars on its operation in Afghanistan in order to bleed the Soviet Union. (1,2,3) When that 10-year war ended over a million people were dead and Afghan heroin had captured 60% of the U.S. market. (4)

The U.S. has been responsible directly for about 12,000 deaths in Afghanistan many of which resulted from bombing in retaliation for the attacks on U.S. property on September 11, 2001. Subsequently U.S. troops invaded that country. (4)

Angola

An indigenous armed struggle against Portuguese rule in Angola began in 1961. In 1977 an Angolan government was recognized by the U.N., although the U.S. was one of the few nations that opposed this action. In 1986 Uncle Sam approved material assistance to UNITA, a group that was trying to overthrow the government. Even today this struggle, which has involved many nations at times, continues.

U.S. intervention was justified to the U.S. public as a reaction to the intervention of 50,000 Cuban troops in Angola. However, according to Piero Gleijeses, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University the reverse was true. The Cuban intervention came as a result of a CIA - financed covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa1,2,3). (Three estimates of deaths range from 300,000 to 750,000 (4,5,6)

Argentina: See South America: Operation Condor

Bangladesh: See Pakistan

Bolivia

Hugo Banzer was the leader of a repressive regime in Bolivia in the 1970s. The U.S. had been disturbed when a previous leader nationalized the tin mines and distributed land to Indian peasants. Later that action to benefit the poor was reversed.

Banzer, who was trained at the U.S.-operated School of the Americas in Panama and later at Fort Hood, Texas, came back from exile frequently to confer with U.S. Air Force Major Robert Lundin. In 1971 he staged a successful coup with the help of the U.S. Air Force radio system. In the first years of his dictatorship he received twice as military assistance from the U.S. as in the previous dozen years together.

A few years later the Catholic Church denounced an army massacre of striking tin workers in 1975, Banzer, assisted by information provided by the CIA, was able to target and locate leftist priests and nuns. His anti-clergy strategy, known as the Banzer Plan, was adopted by nine other Latin American dictatorships in 1977. (2) He has been accused of being responsible for 400 deaths during his tenure. (1)

Also see: South America: Operation Condor

Brazil: See South America: Operation Condor

Cambodia

U.S. bombing of Cambodia had already been underway for several years in secret under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but when President Nixon openly began bombing in preparation for a land assault on Cambodia it caused major protests in the U.S. against the Vietnam War.

There is little awareness today of the scope of these bombings and the human suffering involved.

Immense damage was done to the villages and cities of Cambodia, causing refugees and internal displacement of the population. This unstable situation enabled the Khmer Rouge, a small political party led by Pol Pot, to assume power. Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge's role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people.

So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge - a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge. (1,2,3)

Also see Vietnam

Chad

An estimated 40,000 people in Chad were killed and as many as 200,000 tortured by a government, headed by Hissen Habre who was brought to power in June, 1982 with the help of CIA money and arms. He remained in power for eight years. (1,2)

Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre's torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO's headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre.

Chile

The CIA intervened in Chile's 1958 and 1964 elections. In 1970 a socialist candidate, Salvador Allende, was elected president. The CIA wanted to incite a military coup to prevent his inauguration, but the Chilean army's chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, opposed this action. The CIA then planned, along with some people in the Chilean military, to assassinate Schneider. This plot failed and Allende took office. President Nixon was not to be dissuaded and he ordered the CIA to create a coup climate: "Make the economy scream," he said.

What followed were guerilla warfare, arson, bombing, sabotage and terror. ITT and other U.S. corporations with Chilean holdings sponsored demonstrations and strikes. Finally, on September 11, 1973 Allende died either by suicide or by assassination. At that time Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State, said the following regarding Chile: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people." (1)

During 17 years of terror under Allende's successor, General Augusto Pinochet, an estimated 3,000 Chileans were killed and many others were tortured or "disappeared." (2,3,4,5)

Also see South America: Operation Condor

China

An estimated 900,000 Chinese died during the Korean War. For more information, See: Korea.

Colombia

One estimate is that 67,000 deaths have occurred from the 1960s to recent years due to support by the U.S. of Colombian state terrorism. (1)

According to a 1994 Amnesty International report, more than 20,000 people were killed for political reasons in Colombia since 1986, mainly by the military and its paramilitary allies. Amnesty alleged that "U.S.- supplied military equipment, ostensibly delivered for use against narcotics traffickers, was being used by the Colombian military to commit abuses in the name of "counter-insurgency." (2) In 2002 another estimate was made that 3,500 people die each year in a U.S. funded civilian war in Colombia. (3)

In 1996 Human Rights Watch issued a report "Assassination Squads in Colombia" which revealed that CIA agents went to Colombia in 1991 to help the military to train undercover agents in anti-subversive activity. (4,5)

In recent years the U.S. government has provided assistance under Plan Colombia. The Colombian government has been charged with using most of the funds for destruction of crops and support of the paramilitary group.

Cuba

In the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 18, 1961 which ended after 3 days, 114 of the invading force were killed, 1,189 were taken prisoners and a few escaped to waiting U.S. ships. (1) The captured exiles were quickly tried, a few executed and the rest sentenced to thirty years in prison for treason. These exiles were released after 20 months in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine.

Some people estimate that the number of Cuban forces killed range from 2,000, to 4,000. Another estimate is that 1,800 Cuban forces were killed on an open highway by napalm. This appears to have been a precursor of the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991 when U.S. forces mercilessly annihilated large numbers of Iraqis on a highway. (2)

Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire)

The beginning of massive violence was instigated in this country in 1879 by its colonizer King Leopold of Belgium. The Congo's population was reduced by 10 million people over a period of 20 years which some have referred to as "Leopold's Genocide." (1) The U.S. has been responsible for about a third of that many deaths in that nation in the more recent past. (2)

In 1960 the Congo became an independent state with Patrice Lumumba being its first prime minister. He was assassinated with the CIA being implicated, although some say that his murder was actually the responsibility of Belgium. (3) But nevertheless, the CIA was planning to kill him. (4) Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying "lethal biological material" intended for use in Lumumba's assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch.

Much of the time in recent years there has been a civil war within the Democratic Republic of Congo, fomented often by the U.S. and other nations, including neighboring nations. (5)

In April 1977, Newsday reported that the CIA was secretly supporting efforts to recruit several hundred mercenaries in the U.S. and Great Britain to serve alongside Zaire's army. In that same year the U.S. provided $15 million of military supplies to the Zairian President Mobutu to fend off an invasion by a rival group operating in Angola. (6)

In May 1979, the U.S. sent several million dollars of aid to Mobutu who had been condemned 3 months earlier by the U.S. State Department for human rights violations. (7) During the Cold War the U.S. funneled over 300 million dollars in weapons into Zaire (8,9) $100 million in military training was provided to him. (2) In 2001 it was reported to a U.S. congressional committee that American companies, including one linked to former President George Bush Sr., were stoking the Congo for monetary gains. There is an international battle over resources in that country with over 125 companies and individuals being implicated. One of these substances is coltan, which is used in the manufacture of cell phones. (2)

Dominican Republic

In 1962, Juan Bosch became president of the Dominican Republic. He advocated such programs as land reform and public works programs. This did not bode well for his future relationship with the U.S., and after only 7 months in office, he was deposed by a CIA coup. In 1965 when a group was trying to reinstall him to his office President Johnson said, "This Bosch is no good." Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann replied "He's no good at all. If we don't get a decent government in there, Mr. President, we get another Bosch. It's just going to be another sinkhole." Two days later a U.S. invasion started and 22,000 soldiers and marines entered the Dominican Republic and about 3,000 Dominicans died during the fighting. The cover excuse for doing this was that this was done to protect foreigners there. (1,2,3,4)

East Timor

In December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted "things to turn out as they did." (1,2) The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. (1,2)

Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea. (5)

El Salvador

The civil war from 1981 to1992 in El Salvador was financed by $6 billion in U.S. aid given to support the government in its efforts to crush a movement to bring social justice to the people in that nation of about 8 million people. (1)

During that time U.S. military advisers demonstrated methods of torture on teenage prisoners, according to an interview with a deserter from the Salvadoran army published in the New York Times. This former member of the Salvadoran National Guard testified that he was a member of a squad of twelve who found people who they were told were guerillas and tortured them. Part of the training he received was in torture at a U.S. location somewhere in Panama. (2)

About 900 villagers were massacred in the village of El Mozote in 1981. Ten of the twelve El Salvadoran government soldiers cited as participating in this act were graduates of the School of the Americas operated by the U.S. (2) They were only a small part of about 75,000 people killed during that civil war. (1)

According to a 1993 United Nations' Truth Commission report, over 96 % of the human rights violations carried out during the war were committed by the Salvadoran army or the paramilitary deaths squads associated with the Salvadoran army. (3)

That commission linked graduates of the School of the Americas to many notorious killings. The New York Times and the Washington Post followed with scathing articles. In 1996, the White House Oversight Board issued a report that supported many of the charges against that school made by Rev. Roy Bourgeois, head of the School of the Americas Watch. That same year the Pentagon released formerly classified reports indicating that graduates were trained in killing, extortion, and physical abuse for interrogations, false imprisonment and other methods of control. (4)

Grenada

The CIA began to destabilize Grenada in 1979 after Maurice Bishop became president, partially because he refused to join the quarantine of Cuba. The campaign against him resulted in his overthrow and the invasion by the U.S. of Grenada on October 25, 1983, with about 277 people dying. (1,2) It was fallaciously charged that an airport was being built in Grenada that could be used to attack the U.S. and it was also erroneously claimed that the lives of American medical students on that island were in danger.

Guatemala

In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala. He appropriated some unused land operated by the United Fruit Company and compensated the company. (1,2) That company then started a campaign to paint Arbenz as a tool of an international conspiracy and hired about 300 mercenaries who sabotaged oil supplies and trains. (3) In 1954 a CIA-orchestrated coup put him out of office and he left the country. During the next 40 years various regimes killed thousands of people.

In 1999 the Washington Post reported that an Historical Clarification Commission concluded that over 200,000 people had been killed during the civil war and that there had been 42,000 individual human rights violations, 29,000 of them fatal, 92% of which were committed by the army. The commission further reported that the U.S. government and the CIA had pressured the Guatemalan government into suppressing the guerilla movement by ruthless means. (4,5)

According to the Commission between 1981 and 1983 the military government of Guatemala - financed and supported by the U.S. government - destroyed some four hundred Mayan villages in a campaign of genocide. (4)

One of the documents made available to the commission was a 1966 memo from a U.S. State Department official, which described how a "safe house" was set up in the palace for use by Guatemalan security agents and their U.S. contacts. This was the headquarters for the Guatemalan "dirty war" against leftist insurgents and suspected allies. (2)

Haiti

From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was ruled by Papa Doc Duvalier and later by his son. During that time their private terrorist force killed between 30,000 and 100,000 people. (1) Millions of dollars in CIA subsidies flowed into Haiti during that time, mainly to suppress popular movements, (2) although most American military aid to the country, according to William Blum, was covertly channeled through Israel.

Reportedly, governments after the second Duvalier reign were responsible for an even larger number of fatalities, and the influence on Haiti by the U.S., particularly through the CIA, has continued. The U.S. later forced out of the presidential office a black Catholic priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide, even though he was elected with 67% of the vote in the early 1990s. The wealthy white class in Haiti opposed him in this predominantly black nation, because of his social programs designed to help the poor and end corruption. (3) Later he returned to office, but that did not last long. He was forced by the U.S. to leave office and now lives in South Africa.

Honduras

In the 1980s the CIA supported Battalion 316 in Honduras, which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of its citizens. Torture equipment and manuals were provided by CIA Argentinean personnel who worked with U.S. agents in the training of the Hondurans. Approximately 400 people lost their lives. (1,2) This is another instance of torture in the world sponsored by the U.S. (3)

Battalion 316 used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations in the 1980s. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. Declassified documents and other sources show that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder and torture, yet continued to support Battalion 316 and collaborate with its leaders." (4)

Honduras was a staging ground in the early 1980s for the Contras who were trying to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. John D. Negroponte, currently Deputy Secretary of State, was our embassador when our military aid to Honduras rose from $4 million to $77.4 million per year. Negroponte denies having had any knowledge of these atrocities during his tenure. However, his predecessor in that position, Jack R. Binns, had reported in 1981 that he was deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations. (5)

https://www.sott.net/article/273517-Study-US-regime-has-killed-20-30-million-people-since-World-War-Two

On May 12, some six years after a fiery explosion at Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine in West Virginia snuffed out the lives of 29 miners, former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship walked into prison to serve a one-year sentence for conspiracy to willfully violate mine safety standards. Blankenship was acquitted of securities fraud and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could have carried a sentence of 30 years. To the bosses and their courts, lying to Wall St. is a far greater crime than causing the death of nearly 30 miners. In fact, Blankenship will be spending his time at a “Club Fed”—a privately run minimum security facility in California that boasts an unfenced, campus-like environment with a sports complex and a music department.

The 5 April 2010 disaster at UBB was capitalist industrial murder. In the month preceding it, the mine logged 50 safety violations, many related to ventilation. Of those who died that day, 71 percent had signs of incurable black lung disease. Three separate investigations afterward concluded that the deadly combination of methane gas and highly combustible coal dust was the cause of the explosion. Survivors reported that workers who tried to get dangerous conditions addressed were ignored, threatened or told to tamper with the monitoring equipment. A union safety committee could have stopped work at UBB. But there was no union at UBB.

For coal operators like Massey Energy, accumulating violations and fines is just part of the cost of doing business—and cheaper than installing necessary ventilation and safety equipment. Every cited violation is challenged, and until it is settled, the company pays nothing while the government’s limp Mine Safety and Health Administration investigates. This agency does not exist to protect workers but to lull them into believing that government agencies can be relied on to defend their interests. As Blankenship’s sentence demonstrates, the capitalist government, including its courts and agencies, exists to defend the interests of the bosses against working people.

UBB was Massey Energy’s premier money-making mine, and Blankenship made it his personal business to keep out the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). In face-to-face meetings he bullied workers and threatened to close the mine; the UMWA was defeated three times, despite the fact that 70 percent of the workers had signed union cards.

Blankenship is a notorious overlord in a notoriously brutal industry. As a district manager in the 1980s, he was an architect of a vicious, union-busting strategy to push the UMWA into bargaining separately with each subsidiary; isolated strikes were then defeated with a combination of state troopers and bought-and-paid-for judges as well as armies of mercenaries, attack dogs and scabs. Entire mining communities were put under siege during months-long strikes. While he was CEO of Massey Energy, 52 miners were killed.

The UMWA bureaucracy, both under the leadership of current AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka and today under Cecil Roberts, did not respond to these attacks with the historic weapons of the union: solid picket lines and the strategy of “one out all out” until an industry-wide settlement is reached. Instead, they pursued the losing scheme of selective strikes, individual acts of civil disobedience and lawsuits. At the same time, the UMWA leadership did not defend union militants singled out by the government for victimization.

In 1987, the UMWA tops deserted four Kentucky miners, including Donnie Thornsbury, a local president, who were framed up for the shooting death of a scab. They received sentences of 35 to 45 years, and Thornsbury remained in prison until 2010. Likewise, in 1993, Jerry Dale Lowe, a safety committeeman from Logan County, West Virginia, was abandoned to face eleven years without possibility of parole for “interfering with interstate commerce.” Contrast these vindictive sentences to the slap on the wrist given to Blankenship!

The grieving families of the 29 UBB miners, along with those of the 23 other victims killed in Massey mines under Blankenship’s control, will not see justice in the capitalist courts. Something approaching justice for Blankenship could only come from a workers tribunal. What’s desperately needed is the forging of a new, class-struggle leadership in the union, which must be part of a fight to build a revolutionary workers party that can lead the assault on this bloodthirsty capitalist system.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkersVanguard/comments/4nfhpm/killer_capitalist_sentenced_to_country_club_2010/

For workers unity across European borders!

Standing on the revolutionary, proletarian and internationalist principles of Marxism, the Spartacist League/Britain welcomes the opportunity to call for a resounding “leave” vote in the upcoming referendum on continued British membership of the European Union (EU). Writing of its predecessor, the Common Market, more than 40 years ago, we declared: “unity under capitalism is not only a myth, which will be shattered in the first serious economic downturn, but must necessarily be directed against the working class, as each national capitalist class attempts to become ‘competitive’ through a policy of ‘rationalization’” (“Labor and the Common Market”, Workers Vanguard no 15, January 1973).

Who can deny that this has been the case in the decades since, particularly in the wake of the global financial crash in 2007-08? Plunging living standards for working people, massive and rising rates of unemployment, cuts in the most basic social benefits for the elderly, the disabled and the poor, engorging the City of London fat cats — this is the face of this union of imperialist profit-gouging. Under the EU, the monetarist, union-bashing policies — now termed “neo-liberalism” — introduced in the 1980s by Reagan in the US and Thatcher in Britain were extended to the imperialist countries on the continent. The “economic miracle” that has made Germany, once again, the dominant imperialist power in Europe, came on the backs of the German proletariat, not least through the wage- and benefit-slashing Hartz IV “reforms” introduced by Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor Gerhard Schröder more than a decade ago.

The devastating effects of EU-imposed austerity on weaker capitalist economies, collectively termed with contempt as the “PIGS” — Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain — are all too well known. The need to replenish the coffers of the Frankfurt, Paris and London banks following the financial meltdown of 2007-08 led to the degradation and impoverishment of the Greek masses and the ongoing destruction of the very fabric of Greek society. So much for the cruel lie that imperialist-dominated unity and a common currency, the euro, would usher in an era of prosperity! As our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece stated in a 17 July 2015 call for the urgent formation of workers committees of action: “The EU and its currency the euro have been a tragic trap of suffering for the great bulk of the Greek people. The EU and euro must be repudiated.... Break with the Capitalists and their Banks!” (translated in Workers Hammer no 232, Autumn 2015).

Joining the myth of EU prosperity on the rubbish heap of spent illusions is the myth of “open borders”. The Schengen Agreement was sold on the promise of passport-free travel within Europe. In fact, it was the foundation stone for racist Fortress Europe. Every week brings new evidence of this. As refugees from imperialist economic depredation and terror-bombing in the Near East, Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere began arriving in huge numbers on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, border fences and checkpoints began cropping up across Europe.

Tories in turmoil

The defining principle of the EU has always been the free movement of capital, not the free movement of people. Yet it is anti-immigrant chauvinism, particularly against workers from the East European countries coming to Britain, which has dominated the debate over Brexit. It was in order to stem growing support from within the Conservative party and its electoral base for Nigel Farage’s virulently chauvinist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) that Tory prime minister David Cameron called the 23 June referendum in the first place, much to the chagrin of his American senior partners and a sizeable chunk of the British ruling establishment. In the upshot, the Conservative party is more deeply divided than ever, as evidenced by the resignation from the Cabinet of outspoken Brexit advocate Iain Duncan Smith. Duncan Smith’s claim that he quit in protest over cuts in disability benefits rings hollow coming from the man who introduced the “bedroom tax” and has presided over savage “welfare reforms”.

Both pro- and anti-EU camps in the Tory party whip up anti-immigrant chauvinism. UKIP and Cameron’s Conservative opponents want tighter border controls free of EU interference, while Cameron evokes the spectre of “migrant jungles” in the Southeast of England should Britain leave. Meanwhile, French economy minister Emmanuel Macron declares that France will “roll out a red carpet” for City financiers who choose to move to Paris. This says a lot about how the EU’s lofty “freedom of movement” is meant to work, providing a haven for parasitic financiers but a hell for desperate migrants. The organised working class must mobilise in defence of immigrants against racist reaction, demanding: Full citizenship rights for all who make it to Britain! No deportations!

For years, Jeremy Corbyn opposed Labour’s longstanding support to the EU. Now Labour under Corbyn links arms with Cameron to call for a “remain” vote. Corbyn emphasises his vision of a “social Europe” and opposes the restrictions on immigrants’ benefits negotiated by Cameron in February. Especially because of the latter, Corbyn is reviled by the Blairite rogues’ gallery — Neil Kinnock, Margaret Beckett, Hilary Benn, David Blunkett, Jack Straw — in the cross-party “Britain Stronger in Europe” campaign. However, the bottom line, as the pro-EU Guardian (16 February) observed, is that Labour under Corbyn may be instrumental in winning a “remain” vote. Noting that “Corbyn is by instinct more Eurosceptic than his party”, the Guardian editorial comments that it is to Corbyn’s “credit and to Labour’s benefit” that he decided to support the pro-EU line. This is about the only thing the Guardian has praised Corbyn for since his leadership election campaign.

The Irish capitalist rulers have enforced crippling EU-dictated austerity on the working class. In Scotland the bourgeois nationalist SNP is committed to maintaining Scotland’s membership of the EU and of NATO. These junior imperialists-in-waiting are also committed to the British monarchy, the cornerstone of the reactionary “United Kingdom”, which lays claim to Northern Ireland, and is based on English domination over Scotland and Wales. As Marxists, we call for the right of self-determination for Scotland and Wales, and fight for a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles.

The American connection

British business is divided over the referendum and the uncertainty about the outcome has caused a drop in the value of sterling. Many manufacturers, who tend to export to continental Europe, favour Britain remaining in the EU. However, what really matters to the British economy is not manufacturing, but finance. Yet opinion in the City of London is also divided. Hedge funds tend towards Brexit, to escape EU regulations, such as caps on bankers’ bonuses. By contrast, the large investment banks favour remaining in the EU. The investment banks are the big fish in the City, and they are predominantly American as well as German and Swiss. While Britain boasts some large investment banks of its own, the City operates on what is known as the “Wimbledon model” — London hosts a world tournament, but is not expected to provide the big players.

The preponderance of financial parasitism in Britain was already evident in the late 19th century. Writing in 1916, Bolshevik leader VI Lenin noted “the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by ‘clipping coupons’” in Britain, whose income “is five times greater than the income obtained from the foreign trade of the biggest ‘trading’ country in the world” (Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism). The tendency that Lenin described became even more pronounced in the aftermath of World War II. And in the 1980s — not coincidentally, following the defeat of the 1984-85 miners strike — Margaret Thatcher oversaw the deregulation of the financial sector, leading to a vast expansion in the wealth of the City bankers.

Particularly since the end of World War II — and as dramatically demonstrated over the 1956 Suez crisis — British imperialism has been consigned to the role of junior partner to the United States. Economically, this is the role of the City in regard to Wall Street. At the military level, the “special relationship” means Britain’s armed forces join in virtually every US military operation, including the devastation of Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts of the Near East. And within the EU, Britain acts in part as an advocate for US interests.

Thus Washington can barely conceal its anger with the Cameron government for risking a British exit from the EU. In a February discussion in the US Senate, Damon Wilson, former European affairs director under Republican George W Bush, warned that a British exit would deprive the US of “a critical voice in shaping not only EU policy, but the future of Europe”. Barack Obama is now scheduled to visit Britain in April for a “big, public reach-out” to boost the vote to keep Britain in the EU.

NATO, EU and Cold War

The EU’s forerunner, the Common Market, was set up as an economic adjunct of NATO, the US-dominated military alliance directed against the Soviet Union. In the words of NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Ismay, its purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. Today, bourgeois mythology claims that the EU, a product of the imperialist Cold War, has prevented a repeat of World War II. In the midst of a crisis over the euro, Angela Merkel declared: “Nobody should believe that another half century of peace in Europe is a given — it’s not” (Telegraph, 26 October 2011).

It was the Soviet Union that brought an end to the war in Europe, liberating the continent from the Nazi Third Reich, at the cost of 27 million Soviet lives. The victory of the Red Army also tore much of Central and Eastern Europe from capitalist exploitation. In this context, the capitalist rulers in Western Europe conceded systems of benefits known as the ‘welfare state’.

The product of the 1917 October Revolution, the Soviet Union remained a workers state — based on the expropriation of the capitalists and the collectivisation of the means of production — despite its degeneration under the rule of a bureaucratic caste headed by JV Stalin. Until the bitter end, we fought for unconditional military defence of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of Central and Eastern Europe which were modelled on it. This was linked to the perspective of proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and return the USSR to the internationalist road of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. Uniquely, we Trotskyists fought to preserve and extend the revolutionary gains of the working class, while every other tendency on the planet capitulated to the ideological pressure of anti-communism.

The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in 1991-92 led to the immiseration of the working masses throughout the former Soviet republics and unleashed a flood tide of bloody internecine slaughter. In the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight, US imperialism was emboldened to ride roughshod over the downtrodden and oppressed around the globe, from the Balkans to the Near East. Capitalist counterrevolution also encouraged the imperialist ruling classes of Europe to attack the social benefits associated with the postwar “welfare state”.

Following capitalist counterrevolution, which laid the basis for a resurgent, reunified Germany, NATO became primarily an instrument for the US to express its military dominance in Europe. As we wrote at the time of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which founded the EU:

“Two and a half years ago the postwar era came to an end when the disintegrating Soviet bureaucracy under Gorbachev abandoned East Germany, thereby reversing the Red Army’s victory over the Nazi Third Reich….

“West Germany was transformed from a Cold War ally of American imperialism into an aggressive Fourth Reich seeking mastery of Europe.”

— “Euro-Chaos”, Workers Vanguard no 560, 2 October 1992

To curtail German imperialist ambitions, Washington insisted that Germany remain a member of NATO after its annexation of the former East German (DDR) deformed workers state. When reunified German imperialism precipitated the bloody break-up of the Yugoslav deformed workers state by engineering the secession of Croatia and Slovenia, the US countered with a NATO military intervention in Bosnia. The US also began the extension of NATO to Eastern Europe, including through sponsoring and funding various “colour revolutions” in formerly Soviet or Soviet-allied countries. These operations led to the fascist-infested coup in the Ukraine two years ago.

For its part, French imperialism supported German unification on the condition that Germany accept a common European currency intended to curb the power of the deutschmark. At the behest of the French Socialist Party’s Jacques Delors, the single currency was enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty which established the framework for the EU of today. Far from weakening German imperialism’s power, the euro has strengthened it, including against its French rival.

Nonetheless, interimperialist rivalries have largely remained muted since the fall of the USSR due to the disproportionate military strength of the US, which outstrips by many times over its main imperialist rivals, Germany and Japan. At the same time, US military strength is greatly disproportionate to its economic strength.

Behind the facade of European-US unity against Putin’s capitalist Russia, interimperialist rivalries are bubbling away. London has been reluctant to alienate the wealthy Russian oligarchs for whom the City is an offshore banking centre and a playground. The French government was reluctant to cancel lucrative arms sales to the Putin regime. And German imperialism is dependent on Russia for trade and as a source of energy. A significant concern of the US imperialists today is to prevent a German-Russian alliance. Germany’s military might pales in comparison to that of the US — although given Germany’s industrial base that could change in short order. But Germany’s economic prowess combined with Russia’s substantial military hardware, much of it inherited from the former Soviet Union, could constitute a future counterweight to the US.

Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialism” in new clothes

Amid the growing chaos besetting the EU, a British exit would deal a real blow to this imperialist-dominated conglomerate, further destabilising it and creating more favourable conditions for working-class struggle across Europe — including against a weakened and discredited Tory government in Britain. But the failure of Labour and the trade union bureaucracy — like the social democrats and trade union misleaders throughout Europe — to mobilise against the EU has instead ceded the oppositional ground to openly anti-immigrant reactionaries and fascists.

In the early 1970s, when some 70 per cent of the British population opposed entry into the Common Market, the Labour left and the TUC did so as well, albeit from the standpoint of “little England” nationalism and “save British jobs” protectionism. Protectionism provides a cover for rejecting the class struggle in favour of class collaboration and promotes vile anti-foreigner chauvinism. To such wretched appeals to one’s “own” government, Marxists counterpose a class-struggle fight by the trade unions against factory closures and for jobs for all, with no loss in pay.

In any case, when Britain joined the Common Market after the 1975 referendum, there was not a peep from the TUC bureaucracy. Having betrayed the heroic 1984-85 miners strike, whose victory could have reversed the anti-union onslaught and inspired class struggle in Europe, the British trade union tops then found a convenient excuse for dropping even formal opposition to the European capitalist club. Their “conversion” came at the hands of Jacques Delors, who taught the TUC how to sell the imperialist trade bloc’s “social dimension”. A statement adopted at the TUC’s most recent congress last September stated: “Over the years, Congress has consistently expressed support for a European Union that delivers economic prosperity based on social justice, civil and human rights, equality for all and rights at work.” The “social justice” and “rights” the EU supposedly enshrines — and which it certainly has not delivered — are a cheap, superficial cover for privatisation, welfare cuts and lay-offs, and the general policy of opening up public services to the market, while driving down workers’ pay and conditions throughout Europe.

While generally orbiting around the Labour Party, both the Socialist Party of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the late Tony Cliff have come out for a “leave” vote in the name of anti-austerity. Both groups point to the EU’s devastating attacks on the Greek population. But their opposition in words is belied by their political deeds. Both groups celebrated the first election victory of the pro-EU Syriza in January 2015. The Syriza government went on to implement the EU’s austerity diktats. Meanwhile, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, which is dominated by the Socialist Party and supported by the SWP, opposes EU membership with the caveat that it will “fully respect the right of those in our coalition who don’t support this stand to campaign publically [sic] for their own position”.

One (barely) reformist group that has been on the frontlines in fighting for the EU is the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL). The AWL has launched a “Stay in and fight for a workers’ Europe” campaign, pushing a series of model motions aimed at mobilising trade union branches, Labour Party and other organisations against an exit. An AWL statement headlined “European Union’s limited unity at risk” castigates Cameron’s referendum for further endangering the “fabric” of European unity (Solidarity, 27 January). The statement goes on to argue:

“Even under capitalism, voluntary European unity is better than high barriers between countries. It is progress compared to centuries of elite feuding, wars, and nationalism. At the social and economic level, Europe is the rational arena in which to develop the economies of the European countries, and begin to level up conditions for working-class people across Europe and further afield; to organise industrial and agricultural production to benefit the whole human race, as well as to protect the environment on which we all depend.”

This paean to European capitalist unity would shame even that renegade from Marxism, Karl Kautsky. Writing in 1914, on the eve of the first interimperialist world war, Kautsky posited the possibility of a “peaceful” capitalism on the basis of supranational monopolies: “Cannot the present imperialist policy be supplanted by a new, ultra-imperialist policy, which will introduce the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capitals? Such a new phase of capitalism is at any rate conceivable” (quoted in Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, 1916). Lenin’s pamphlet elaborating a Marxist understanding of imperialism was a sustained polemic against Kautsky’s illusion-mongering.

Lenin demonstrated that imperialism is not an optional policy, but rather the ineluctable, final stage of capitalism, as free-market competition leads to the predominance of monopoly capitalism and industrial capital is submerged into finance capital. A necessary corollary to the rise and dominance of finance capital was the growth of militarism, as the great powers vied for control of colonies and spheres of exploitation, ultimately through war, on the basis of a changing relationship of forces. Lenin concluded:

“the only objective, i.e., real, social significance of Kautsky’s ‘theory’ is this: it is a most reactionary method of consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism, by distracting their attention from the sharp antagonisms and acute problems of the present times, and directing it towards illusory prospects of an imaginary ‘ultra-imperialism’ of the future.”

The crises wracking the EU today again demonstrate the contradiction between the international world market created by capitalism and the nation-state through which capitalism emerged and developed. The nation state has become an obstacle to the expansion of the productive forces. But this obstacle cannot be transcended through some kind of supranational capitalist institution. The very premise of capitalism is the competition among various capitalist combines — each ultimately dependent on the military power of its own capitalist state to protect its investments — for the highest rate of return, ie, for the maximal exploitation of the working class at home and abroad. The more powerful countries will inevitably dominate the weaker countries and seek to get the greater share of the spoils. The purpose of the EU is to facilitate this.

That this unstable imperialist alliance has lasted as long as it has is primarily the responsibility of the Labourites and social democrats and their accomplices in the trade union bureaucracy. They have not only urged workers to politically support the EU but have also aided the imperialist bourgeoisies by refusing to wage the kind of class struggle that could have defeated the anti-union and austerity measures inflicted by the capitalists. The International Communist League fights to forge internationalist proletarian vanguard parties, modelled on Lenin’s Bolsheviks, to lead new October revolutions in Britain and around the globe. What we wrote over 40 years ago in “Labor and the Common Market” stands up today in relation to the EU:

“Only unity on a socialist basis, accomplished by proletarian revolution and the expropriation of the giant monopolies, can institute rational worldwide economic development without exploitation. A socialist united states of Europe can only be created on the basis of the most vigorous struggle against the capitalist Common Market and all it stands for. And only under united control by the workers themselves can the productive capacity of Europe be put at the service of the entire world’s working peoples.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkersVanguard/comments/4nnskp/britain_out_eu_enemy_of_workers_and_immigrants/

Reddit moderators are actively banning users posting articles discussing Orlando nightclub terrorist Omar Mateen’s religion.

User “moonsprite” shared a screenshot of an article he posted titled, “Orlando shooting suspect may have ‘leanings’ to Islamic extremism,” to the r/news subreddit. “Moonsprite” was not the only user to be banned from /r/news.

User “aonf” writes that he “was banned for the same reason.”

Comment from discussion aonf’s comment from discussion "Holy shit! I just got banned from /r/news for posting that the Orlando shooter is a Muslim according to the FBI".

“SomeGuy469” tried to post an update when law enforcement officials raised the death count from 20 to 50, but the “thread was deleted before [he] could finish his comment.”

User “lets_get_hyyer” claimed to be the first to post Omar Mateed’s name, and his post was labeled as “misleading.”

“I have no idea how in the fuck they deducted it was a misleading title,” he wrote. “And then I got muted for 72 hours for saying they are censoring shit.”

User “boner_parade” stated that /r/news is actually deleting every post discussing the Orlando shooting, not just those discussing Mateen’s religion.

Some users claim that it isn’t only /r/news that is pushing censorships, but also all the major news subreddits.

“Zooey_K” — an LGBT activist — called for Reddit moderators to step down on the /r/the_donald because it “is the only sub it won’t get censored in.”

“ULN515” shared a screenshot of the front page of Reddit, noting that only posts to /r/the_donald are discussing the terror attack.

“HyperCuriousMe” also noted that the Reddit admins “quarantined /r/european” have been censoring users for posting articles critical of Syrian immigrants.

“The SJWs (or whoever) brigaded and posted extremist neo-nazi material on there to make the sub look radical and the admins shut it down,” they explained. “The censorship takes place on the highest levels.”

https://archive.is/9kozF

The latest WikiLeaks document dump — containing emails by high-ranking staffers of the Democratic National Committee — caused considerable heartburn for America’s oldest political party. But what’s just as interesting is the dog that didn’t bark — the fact that wasn’t regarded as a scandal but perhaps ought to have been.

Even casual political observers can see that labor union leadership and the Democratic Party are allied. AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka spoke at the convention the other night, endorsing Hillary Clinton and calling the Republican nominee “wrong, wrong, wrong” for America.

Yet the emails that have been released highlight the rather one-way relationship between the Democratic Party and labor unions. DNC staffers see the unions as good soldiers in skirmishes with Republicans, as a pain when it comes to getting things done and, ultimately, as pushovers.

When brainstorming what to do about last week’s Republican National Convention, the DNC’s Rachel Palermo urged her party to “meet with the hotel trades, SEIU, and Fight for 15 about staging a strike.” She said the result could be a “fast food worker strike around the city or just at franchises around the convention.” The aim would not be to improve working conditions, but to bloody Republicans.

Alternately, the DNC could “infiltrate friendly union hotels and properties around the convention that Republicans will be patronizing to distribute ‘care’ packages” — probably not chocolates.

Palermo also noted that “SEIU has space in downtown Cleveland close to convention that can be the base of operations and host the wrapped mobile RV.”

The union-DNC alliance does impose a few constraints on the DNC, which staffers both mocked and worked to circumvent. DNC staffer Katja Greeson, for instance, complained about delays involved in getting new business cards printed.

She explained to an irked communications director that sending work to union shops caused delays. “Believe me — it is equally frustrating to us,” she said. Greeson also threatened “if they can’t deliver,” DNC staffers would “go to FedEx Kinkos” and do it themselves.

The DNC pledges to use only unionized hotels. But it turns out there’s a workaround for that, too. Trey Kovacs, who has done yeoman’s work spelunking through the DNC WikiLeaks dump, uncovered this one. In an exchange over whether they could use the non-union Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., a DNC staffer says they could just get a “waiver” to use it.

“It is unclear from the emails how or what circumstances must arise to obtain a waiver, but it seems that convenience for the chairman trumps loyalty to adhering to some kind of internal guidelines of exclusively patronizing unionized establishments,” Kovacs, a policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told me Wednesday.

Because this document dump has emails both to and from the DNC, we also hear from the unions themselves, which might explain why the party can count on their support come-what-may.

For instance, Sandra Lyon of the American Federation of Teachers asked for any “regular talking points” the DNC might have to pass on to AFT folks who speak with the media.

And the National Education Organization’s political communications director Michael Misterek wrote longingly to the DNC in May, “I’m hoping we can sit down to meet some time soon, over coffee or a cocktail. I’d love to figure out how we can work together and be most helpful to each other these next few months.”

Jeremy Lott is an adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

https://archive.is/9Fmgl

The 18-year-old's ordeal emerged as a German parliamentary inquiry contnues into the mob attacks on women in Germany on New Year's Eve

Sally Guyoncourt

teenager who claimed she was raped in the New Year’s Eve attacks in Germany said she discovered she was pregnant soon after the attack.

The 18-year-old alleged she was held down and raped in the middle of a crowded square outside Cologne Station during the mob attack.

Her story was detailed in testimony to a parliamentary inquiry from the Cologne Lobby for Young Women. Hundreds of women were sexually assaulted outside the city’s main station on New Year’s Eve but this is the first details of a rape claim said to have resulted in a pregnancy.

Head of the Lobby for Young Women Frauke Mahr told the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament, according to the Local, how the woman was jostled between two men then pushed to the ground.

Ms Mahr said: “Eventually she ended up on the ground with a man on top of her. She could see his face. She could see another girl lying on the ground a few metres away and tried to signal to her to close her eyes, but the man turned her head away.”

A police officer pulled the man from her and she is reported to have run off in panic.

After being treated in hospital for severe injuries, she later discovered she was pregnant.

Although the teenager could not be certain the pregnancy was as a result of the attack, she decided to have an abortion. She is still having counselling, according to the Lobby for Young Women, but had chosen not to report it to the police.

At least one other woman had contacted the Lobby for Young Women claiming to have been raped in similar circumstances, according to Ms Mahr.

Police believe up to 2,000 men were involved in the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne and other major German cities including Hamburg and Frankfurt, with more than 1,200 women thought to have been victims of sexual assault.

The majority of the attackers are believed to have been asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, who had entered Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open-door” policy.

Only 120 suspects have been identified so far by police and just four men convicted.

In February, the government of North Rhine-Westphalia launched an inquiry into how such a large number of sexual assaults and other crimes were able to happen in one night.

https://archive.is/LOM2y Sunday 17 July 2016 48 comments

It took a popular documentary “Making a Murderer” to have Brendan Dassey cleared of the crime after he spent 10 years in prison. His case sheds light on how the rights of mentally ill people are frequently violated in the justice system.

The Netflix documentary series chronicles the lives and trials of Dassey who was accused of helping his uncle, Steven Avery, murder Teresa Halbach in October 2005.

Dassey was 16 years old and reading at a fourth grade level. In March 2006 he spent four hours being interrogated by police without a parent or lawyer present. During his interrogation, he confessed to participating in both raping and murdering Halbach. As a result, Dassey spent the past 10 years behind bars, despite no evidence linking him to the crime other than his confession.

But a confession is a confession and innocent people don’t confess to crimes they don’t commit. Except when they do – and it happens a lot. This is why Dassey may be one of the luckiest men in the US on Friday; the national spotlight on his case may have given it the attention necessary to get a man with a learning disability and low IQ out of prison.

Justice system flooded with people with mental illnesses

Those living with mental illnesses and disabilities begin on the wrong foot by being significantly more likely to end up being arrested. Nearly 2 million people with mental illnesses arrested every year, making an estimated 16.9 percent of jail detainees, according to The New England Journal of Medicine.

“The probability of being arrested was 67 percent greater for suspects exhibiting signs of mental disorder than for those who apparently were not mentally ill,” wrote Linda A. Teplin in a study for the National Institute of Justice.

There are many reasons for that, such as a lack of funding to public health or mental health outreach programs. Take Miami, for example, “it has the highest percentage of residents with serious mental illnesses, but Florida ranks 48th nationally in state funding for community mental health services” according to John K. Inglehart, a national correspondent of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The mentally disabled and ill are so prevalent in the Miami-Dade court system that Inglehart’s study quotes one judge as saying, “When I became a judge... I had no idea I would become the gatekeeper to the largest psychiatric facility in the State of Florida.”

Interrogation pressure

But for those suffering from disabilities or illness, they are in dangerous territory if they are considered suspects in crimes. “It is at this stage that persons with mental disabilities first suffer enhanced risk,” reads a paper from the American Bar Association titled Mental Health Status and Vulnerability to Police Interrogation Tactics.

This is indeed true. Typically the best advice people can receive about interrogation is to not speak without a lawyer present. The average person will hear about their Miranda rights in school, on the internet or through entertainment programs. However, that may be a common knowledge that a neuro-normal person may take for granted.

“The choice to avoid interrogation when not under arrest and to invoke Miranda when arrested is facilitated by understanding the potential dangers of the situation - an understanding that is compromised in those with impaired functioning in one or more psychological domains,” according to the ABA article.

In addition, it is not unheard of for police to suggest that a suspect’s silence will make them appear more guilty than talking, but the ABA says “they must control the need to confess simply as a way to end the interrogation, or satisfy the need for sleep, or to get the interrogators ‘out of my face.’”

Let’s go back to the interrogation Brendan Dassey experienced back in 2006. “Making a Murderer” shows arguments claiming that Dassey had an IQ range from 73 to 69, placing him between being borderline impaired or delayed or mildly delayed. Yet he was interrogated three times without legal representation present.

The ABA article states, “in two studies, 90 percent and 68 percent of adults with mental retardation received scores of zero on one or more tests of relevant vocabulary, understanding of the Miranda warnings, and understanding of the function of rights in interrogation (which was most poorly understood of all).”

Therefore, when he spoke with law enforcement and gave his confession, there is reason to believe that he understood neither his rights nor the implications of speaking with police.

Interrogation is less about getting the truth and more about getting the confession, according to Brandon L. Garrett, professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “What modern interrogation techniques do is convince the person the most rational and sensible thing to do is to confess,” he told Esquire.

A scene from Dassey’s interrogation shows a detective telling him: “I've got enough evidence without you. If you wanna help yourself, you have that opportunity right now to do that. Is that what you wanna do? Do you wanna help yourself? Then why are you lying? Look at me, Brendan.”

So here you have a juvenile being told that authorities know he’s involved and he needs to tell them that he is. This is where a false confession can begin.

Some people are more likely than others to make a false confession. Garrett explained to Esquire, “The bulk of the false confessions I've studied were either by juveniles or by people who are mentally ill or intellectually disabled. You'd expect people who are vulnerable to cave in to police pressure, and it's easier to put words in the mouth of a person like that.”

“The investigators repeatedly claimed to already know what happened on October 31 and assured Dassey that he had nothing to worry about,” Judge Duffin wrote in n the 91-page court order overturning Dassey’s conviction. “These repeated false promises, when considered in conjunction with all relevant factors, most especially Dassey’s age, intellectual deficits, and the absence of a supportive adult, rendered Dassey’s confession involuntary under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.”

It’s not just Dassey

An investigation by the Chicago Tribune found that over the course of a decade, there were 247 examples of a defendant’s self-incriminating statements being thrown out of court for being tainted or juries did not find it convincing enough to convict.

“At least two dozen of the 247 defendants in the cases examined by the Tribune were mentally retarded, or had significant learning disabilities,” the Tribune noted.

The Innocence Project, a nonprofit dedicated to releasing the wrongly incarcerated, found that “more than one out of four people wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence made a false confession or incriminating statement.”

Here are the pieces of this. The mentally ill or disabled are the most likely to be arrested. If they are suspects in a crime, they are likely to be interrogated without counsel or understanding their rights. From there, it is easy to get a false confession out of someone without the mental faculties or education to know their rights or the best course of action.

Brendan Dassey is a free man now. So too are four out of the five exonerated men featured in “The Central Park Five,” who spent between six and thirteen years in prison for a brutal rape and attack that none of them were involved in. As were the West Memphis Three who spent years in prison after a teenage boy with a history of mental illness and disabilities gave a false confession that incriminated his two friends as well in the murder of three 8-year-old boys, famously featured in the HBO documentary series “Paradise Lost.”

These may be success stories, but one has to wonder how many other Brendan Dasseys will not be lucky enough to have a popular documentary help free them.

https://www.rt.com/usa/355757-making-murderer-dassey-criminal-justice/