WWI - Lenin's theory of imperial war

Lenin's theory of imperial war went deeper than the division of the world's territory among the colonial powers - it pointed to the most profound developments in the western capitalist system itself, including the transformation of the capitalist econony into finance capitalism, and the more or less complete 'colonisation' of the state - or, rather, fusion of class and state - by big business.

Significantly, Lenin also was vexed by the more or less complete capitualtion to 'war fever' among the parties of the international socialist movement - including Germany's socialists and Britain's Labout party (apart from a handful of leaders such as Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden) - and the trade union organisations. He noted the political and economic significance of a 'labour aristocracy' based on the superprofits of colonial rule and the superexploitation of the poorest in the colonising states.

Below is a basic analysis of Lenin's approach to imperialism and war, and the 'betrayal' by working class parties of their class.

LENIN, IMPERIALISM AND WAR

Lenin undertook his detailed study of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916, basing it on the research of an English economist named JA Hobson.
Lenin saw capitalism evolving into a higher stage. The key to understanding it was an economic analysis of the transition from free competititon to monopoly.

Lenin provides a careful, 5-point definition of imperialism: "(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this "finance capital", of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed."

Imperialism is enormously profitable. Hobson estimated that in 1899 it had provide Great Britain an income of 90 million to 100 million pounds on the basis of its foreign capital, "the income of the rentiers." As Lenin emphasized, "The income of the rentiers is five times greater than the income obtained from the foreign trade of the biggest "trading" country in the world! This is the essence of imperialism and imperialist parasitism... The world has become divided into a handful of usurer states and a vast majority of debtor states. 'At the top of the list of foreign investments,' says SchuIze-Gaevernitz, 'are those placed in politically dependent or allied countries: Great Britain grants loans to Egypt, Japan, China and South America. Her navy plays here the part of bailiff in case of necessity.'"

In another article around the same time, War and Revolution, Lenin was more specific about the fact that imperialism uses its military as the "bailiff": "Peace reigned in Europe, but this was because domination over hundreds of millions of people in the colonies by the European nations was sustained only through constant, incessant, interminable wars, which we Europeans do not regard as wars at all, since all too often they resembled, not wars, but brutal massacres, the wholesale slaughter of unarmed peoples."
Writing in "Who Stands to Gain?"on the eve of World War I, Lenin saw the arms race as a source of super-profit for capitalist investors: In Europe, "the states that call themselves 'civilised', is now engaged in a mad armaments hurdle-race. In thousands of ways, in thousands of newspapers, from thousands of pulpits, they shout and clamour about patriotism, culture, native land, peace, and progress - and all in order to justify new expenditures of tens and hundreds of millions of rubles for all manner of weapons of destruction - for guns, dreadnoughts, etc. ... the renowned British firm Armstrong, Whitworth & Co ... engaged mainly in the manufacture of 'armaments' declared a dividend of 12. percent. Dividends of 12.5 per cent mean that capital is doubled in 8 years. and this is in addition to all kinds of fees to directors, etc."

In a second article, "Armaments and Capitalism", Lenin elaborates on this theme: "we find that admirals and prominent statesmen of both parties, Conservative and Liberal, are shareholders and directors of shipyards, and of gunpowder, dynamite, ordnance and other factories. A shower of gold is pouring straight into the pockets of bourgeois politicians, who have got together in an exclusive international gang engaged in instigating an armaments race among the peoples and fleecing these trustful, stupid, dull and submissive peoples like sheep."

War, for imperialism, is not only used to conquer and control the colonies and to prevent the development of socialism, but also to compete with other imperialist powers. Periods of peace, says Lenin, are "nothing more than a 'truce' in periods between wars." World War I, to Lenin, could only be understood as an inter-imperialist war. And a few years later, in a speech on December 6, 1920, Lenin would foresee that a second inter-imperialist war was brewing that would pit Japan against the United States and Germany against the rest of Europe.

The superprofits of imperialism enable the capitalists to buy off the workers in the home country. Lenin points out that this had been foreseen by Engels in a letter to Marx as early as 1858, "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois ... For a nation which exploits the whole world, this is of course to a certain extent justifiable." Lenin confirms that this trend had continued to develop and was accompanied by opportunism on the part of many working class leaders and socialist writers.

According to Lenin, companies in the developed world exploit workers in the developing world where wages are much lower. The increased profits enable these companies to pay higher wages to their employees "at home" (that is, in the developed world), thus creating a working class satisfied with their standard of living and more inclined towards imperialism and war.

WWI - Lenin Called it Right 100 years ago

Below I reprint an analysis by VI Lenin on WWI a mere two months after the war's outbreak in which he got the colonial-imperial character of the war just right.  He was vilified at the time by the entire range of socialists and leftists in Russia and beyond but it was the Bolsheviks' determination to stick to that line - against a bloody murderous inter-imperial war that was of no benefit to the majority of the peoples of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, etc - that eventually explains why Lenin's party was able to both remove the Tsar and take Russia out of the war in 1917-18.

 

"The German bourgeoisie heads one group of belligerent nations. It is deluding the working class and the laboring masses by asserting that it is waging war in defense of the fatherland, freedom, and civilization, for the liberation of the peoples oppressed by tsardom, for the destruction of reactionary tsardom…. In reality, whatever the outcome of the war may be, this bourgeoisie will, together with the Junkers, exert every effort to support the tsarist monarchy against a revolution in Russia.

 

The other group of belligerent nations is headed by the British and French bourgeoisie, which is deluding the working class and the laboring masses by asserting that it is waging war for the defense of their native lands, freedom, and civilization, against the militarism and despotism of Germany. But as a matter of fact, this bourgeoisie has long been using its billions to hire the armies of the Russian tsardom, the most reactionary and barbarous monarchy in Europe, and to prepare them for an attack on Germany.

 

In reality, the object of the struggle of the British and French bourgeoisie is to seize the German colonies and to ruin a competing nation which has displayed a more rapid rate of economic development. And, in pursuit of this noble aim, the “advanced” democratic nations are helping the savage tsarist regime to strangle Poland, the Ukraine, and so on, and to throttle revolution in Russia more thoroughly.

 

For us, the Russian social democrats, there can be no doubt that from the standpoint of the working class and of the laboring masses of all the nations of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy, the most reactionary and barbarous of governments, which is oppressing the greatest number of nations and the largest mass of the population of Europe and Asia.

 

The immediate political slogan of the social democrats of Europe must be the formation of a republican United States of Europe. But in contrast with the bourgeoisie, which is ready to “promise” anything in order to draw the proletariat into the general current of chauvinism, the social democrats will reveal that this slogan is utterly false and senseless without the revolutionary overthrow of the German, Austrian, and Russian monarchies. The war has placed the slogan of socialist revolution on the agenda of all the advanced countries… The only correct proletarian slogan is the transformation of the present imperialist war into a civil war."

 

(From “The War and Russian Social Democracy”, November 1914)

WWI - Secret Treaty Indicates Imperial Character of the War

 A couple of days ago, USBlog noted UK education secretary, Michael Gove's, desire to "to give all children a proper rounded understanding of our country’s past and its place in the world." 

To that end he defended an interpretation of Britain's role in World War 1 as motivated by the promotion of freedom.

Please see below for the text of a secret treaty between Britain, France, Russia and Italy which was aimed at bringing Italy into hostilities with Austria-Hungary and Germany, with promised rich territorial rewards in Europe and Africa, and an immediate loan of 50 million pounds. 

So much for the self-determination of peoples, the defence of small nations, and an alliance freely entered into....

After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the Leninist state published the Treaty of London, among numerous other secret treaties and agreements they found in the Tsarist foreign affairs ministry, that demonstrated with utmost clarity the territorial-imperial character of the War. 

The Treaty of London (1915)

---

Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, London, 1920, LI Cmd. 671, Miscellaneous No. 7, 2-7.
The Treaty of London was signed on April 26, 1915. Its provisions were to cause some difficulty during the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 [and, I should say, to Mr Gove's interpretation of Britain's story in WWI].

---

ARTICLE 1. A military convention shall be immediately concluded between the General Staffs of France, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia. This convention shall settle the minimum number of military forces to be employed by Russia against Austria-Hungary in order to prevent that Power from concentrating all its strength against Italy, in the event of Russia deciding to direct her principal effort against Germany....

ARTICLE 2. On her part, Italy undertakes to use her entire resources for the purpose of waging war jointly with France, Great Britain, and Russia against all their enemies.

ARTICLE 3. The French and British fleets shall render active and permanent assistance to Italy....

ARTICLE 4. Under the Treaty of Peace, Italy shall obtain the Trentino, Cisalpine Tyrol with its geographical and natural frontier, as well as Trieste, the counties of Gorizia and Gradisca, all Istria as far as the Quarnero and including Volosca and the Istrian islands of Cherso and Lussin, as well as the small islands of Plavnik, Unie, Canidole, Palazzuoli, San Pietro di Nembi, Asinello, Gruica, and the neighbouring islets....

ARTICLE 5. Italy shall also be given the province of Dalmatia within its present administrative boundaries....

ARTICLE 6. Italy shall receive full sovereignty over Valona, the island of Saseno and surrounding territory....

ARTICLE 7. Should Italy obtain the Trentino and Istria in accordance with the provisions of Article 4, together with Dalmatia and the Adriatic islands within the limits specified in Article 5, and the Bay of Valona (Article 6), and if the central portion of Albania is reserved for the establishment of a small autonomous neutralised State, Italy shall not oppose the division of Northern and Southern Albania between Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece....

ARTICLE 8. Italy shall receive entire sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands which she is at present occupying.

ARTICLE 9. Generally speaking, France, Great Britain, and Russia recognise that,... in the event of total or partial partition of Turkey in Asia, she ought to obtain a just share of the Mediterranean region adjacent to the province of Adalia....

ARTICLE 11. Italy shall receive a share of any eventual war indemnity corresponding to their efforts and her sacrifices.

ARTICLE 13. In the event of France and Great Britain increasing their colonial territories in Africa at the expense of Germany, those two Powers agree in principle that Italy may claim some equitable compensation....

ARTICLE 14. Great Britain undertakes to facilitate the immediate conclusion, under equitable conditions, of a loan of at least 50,000,000 pounds....

ARTICLE 16. The present arrangement shall be held secret.

Syria WMD - Another American Falsehood Exposed

Unsurprising for anyone whose been watching the US for the past decade or so but hardly meriting mass media attention, in contrast with the wall to wall coverage of unfounded allegations by President Obama, secretary of state, John Kerry, PM David Cameron and others with a 'military definition of reality'.

And it should be even less surprising therefore that 'new' revelations of mass killings should emerge just ahead of peace negotiations in Geneva.

 

MIT study of Ghouta chemical attack challenges US intelligence

Published time: January 16, 2014 04:39
Edited time: January 19, 2014 13:49

A new MIT report is challenging the US claim that Assad forces used chemical weapons in an attack last August, highlighting that the range of the improvised rocket was way too short to have been launched from govt controlled areas.

In the report titled “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence,” Richard Lloyd, a former UN weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), examined the delivery rocket’s design and calculated possible trajectories based on the payload of the cargo.

The authors concluded that sarin gas “could not possibly have been fired at East Ghouta from the ‘heart’, or from the Eastern edge, of the Syrian government controlled area shown in the intelligence map published by the White House on August 30, 2013.”

Based on mathematical calculations, Lloyd and Postol estimate the rocket with such aerodynamics could not travel more than 2 kilometers. To illustrate their conclusion, the authors included the original White House map that depicted areas under Assad control and those held by the opposition. Based on the firing range and troop locations on August 21, the authors conclude that all possible launching points within the 2 km radius were in rebel-held areas.

“This mistaken intelligence could have led to an unjustified US military action based on false intelligence. A proper vetting of the fact that the munition was of such short range would have led to a completely different assessment of the situation from the gathered data,” the report states.

The authors emphasize that the UN independent assessment of the range of the chemical munition is in “exact agreement” with their findings.

The report goes on to challenge the US Secretary of State’s key assessments of the chemical attack that he presented to the American people on August 30th and to the Foreign Relations Committee on September 3rd in an effort to muster a military attack on Syria.

“My view when I started this process was that it couldn’t be anything but the Syrian government behind the attack. But now I’m not sure of anything. The administration narrative was not even close to reality. Our intelligence cannot possibly be correct,” Postol told McClatchy publication.

“The Syrian rebels most definitely have the ability to make these weapons,” he said. “I think they might have more ability than the Syrian government.”

It also remains a mystery why the particular type of rocket that was used in the attack was not declared by the Syrian government as part of its chemical weapons arsenal when it agreed to destroy its chemical weapons and their delivery methods. OPCW inspectors charged with implementing the agreement also did not discover such a rocket in possession of government forces.

Syria agreed to the destruction of its chemical weapons through a deal brokered by Russia and the US after a sarin gas attack on August 21. Western nations blamed the deadly attack on President Bashar Assad’s forces, while Damascus accused the rebels for the incident. The UN fact-finding mission had no mandate to find out who carried out the attack.

Under the UN-backed plan, all of the country’s declared 1,290 tons of toxic agents should be destroyed by June 30. Initially, the first batch of the most dangerous materials was to be moved out of Syria on December 31.

However, the deadline was missed because of the ongoing war in Syria and technical issues. It was only on January 7 that “priority chemical materials” left the Syrian port of Latakia on a Danish ship for international waters.

WWI - Tories Try to Turn an Imperial Bloodbath into A Just War

It's the opening month of the centenary year of the outbreak of World War I and the Conservative government, via Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has already launched its ideological offensive on how we should remember that war. This is unsurprising in itself, of course, given this government's desire to promote a school history curriculum that tells a narrow heroic 'island story' that sanitises the past and is designed, in PM Cameron's view, to make Britain 'feel good' about the War.

I reprint below Michael Gove's article in the Daily Mail newspaper in which the just war case is made, as is the claim that Germany's elite was alone to blame for the war, and that Britain was right to resist aggression against the 'international order'. Despite my belief that this argument is fundamentally problematic, it is as well to keep it in mind as this year, and the next several, unfolds because it will be repeated ad nauseum.

And to take such dominant viewpoints on, it's important first to understand them. I have highlighted sections and phrases that appear especially critical to Gove's argument. But immediately below I've tried to put it in a nutshell:

The war is relevant for the world order and British foreign policy today
The war was patriotic and therefore just
Those who fought in it were consciously fighting for King and Country
Anyone who dares challenge this is wrong and usually left wing (and therefore always wrong) and challenges our nation's story
The Germans were ruthlessly bent on global domination due to their social Darwinism
We were protecting a civilised world order based on freedom to which we owe our current freedoms

So please 'enjoy'!

Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes?

By MICHAEL GOVE, Education Secretary
The past has never had a better future. Because history is enjoying a renaissance in Britain. After years in which the study of history was declining in our schools, the numbers of young people showing an appetite for learning about the past, and a curiosity about our nation’s story, is growing once more.

As a Government, we’ve done everything we can to support this restoration. We’ve changed how schools are judged, and our new measure of academic success for schools and pupils, the English  baccalaureate, rewards those who study history at GCSE.

And the changes we’ve made to the history curriculum have been welcomed by top academics as a way to give all children a proper rounded understanding of our country’s past and its place in the world.

+5

Captain Coward: Tony Robinson as Private Baldrick, left, and Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder in the titular sit-com, which Education Secretary Michael Gove blames for distorting attitudes about the First World War

That understanding has never been needed more. Because the challenges  we face today – great power rivalry, migrant populations on the move, rapid social upheaval, growing global  economic interdependence, massive technological change and fragile confidence in political elites – are all  challenges our forebears faced.

Indeed, these particular forces were especially powerful one hundred years ago – on the eve of the First World War. Which is why it is so important that  we commemorate, and learn from, that conflict in the right way in the next  four years.

The Government wants to give young people from every community the chance to learn about the heroism, and sacrifice, of our great-grandparents, which is why we are organising visits to the battlefields of the Western Front.

The war was, of course, an unspeakable tragedy, which robbed this nation of our bravest and best.  But even as we recall that loss and commemorate the bravery of those who fought, it’s important that we don’t succumb to some of the myths which have grown up about the conflict.

Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country  and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage.

The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.
Professor Sir Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian and Guardian writer, has criticised those who fought, arguing, ‘the men who enlisted in 1914 may have thought they were fighting for civilisation, for a better world, a war to end all wars, a war to defend freedom: they were wrong’.

And he has attacked the very idea of honouring their sacrifice as an exercise in ‘narrow tub-thumping jingoism’. These arguments are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate.
The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war. Nigel Biggar, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford, laid out the ethical case for our involvement in a superb essay in September’s Standpoint magazine.

The ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified.
And the war was also seen by participants as a noble cause. Historians have skilfully demonstrated how those who fought were not dupes but conscious believers in king and country, committed to defending the western liberal order.
Other historians have gone even further in challenging some prevailing myths.
Generals who were excoriated for their bloody folly have now, after proper study, been re-assessed.

Douglas Haig, held up as a crude butcher, has been seen in a new light thanks to Professor Gary Sheffield, of Wolverhampton University, who depicts him as a patriotic leader grappling honestly with the new complexities of industrial warfare.
Even the battle of the Somme, once considered the epitome of military futility, has now been analysed in depth by the military historian William Philpott and recast as a precursor of allied victory.

+5

Rehabilitated: Even Field Marshal Douglas Haig, popularly known as 'the butcher of the Somme', has been seen in a new light thanks to Professor Gary Sheffield, of Wolverhampton University, writes Gove

There is, of course, no unchallenged consensus. That is why it matters that we encourage an open debate on the war and  its significance.

But it is important to recognise that many of the new analyses emerging challenge existing Left-wing versions of the past designed to belittle Britain and its leaders.
Instead, they help us to understand that, for all our mistakes as a nation, Britain’s role in the world has also been marked by nobility and courage.

Indeed, the more we reflect on every aspect of the war, the more cause there is for us to appreciate what we owe to our forebears and their traditions.

But whatever each of us takes from these acts of remembrance and hours of debate it is always worth remembering that the freedom to draw our own conclusions about this conflict is a direct consequence of the bravery of men and women who fought for, and believed in, Britain’s special tradition of liberty.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2532923/Michael-Gove-blasts-Blackadder-myths-First-World-War-spread-television-sit-coms-left-wing-academics.html#ixzz2qxaRkcpw
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Manning and Snowden the Same

Dear New York Times Editors: If Snowden Is a Whistleblower, What Is Chelsea Manning?
By: Kevin Gosztola Thursday January 2, 2014 1:26 pm	Tweet399

Chelsea Manning (left) and Edward Snowden (right)

The New York Times Editorial Board is to be highly praised for finally publishing a strong defense of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, one which not only urges clemency but also labels him a whistleblower. But, it invites debate on another individual, one who is currently serving thirty-five years in a military prison for releasing classified government documents to WikiLeaks: Chelsea Manning.
If it is reasonable to argue that Snowden deserves clemency, doesn’t Manning deserve clemency as well? And isn’t she a whistleblower too?
I praised the New York Times editors for their editorial. Nonetheless, I find it worthwhile to challenge the Times.
Manning released the “Collateral Murder” video and over a half million documents to WikiLeaks. The documents included military incident reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, which were released as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghanistan War Logs. Over 250,000 US State Embassy cables were provided to WikiLeaks. Over 700 detainee assessment briefs on Guantanamo Bay prisoners were given to WikiLeaks as well.
WikiLeaks partnered with The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times on the the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs in 2010. The Times was not an official WikiLeaks partner for the release of diplomatic cables but obtained a copy of the set from The Guardian.
Many of the arguments the Times editors make in defense of Snowden could actually be made for Manning.
According to the Times, Snowden revealed “how NSA has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority.” A similar argument could be made about what was revealed in the war logs and diplomatic cables.
The Times editors suggest Snowden “deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service.” Does Manning deserve better than to spend more than thirty years of her life in a military prison at Fort Leavenworth?
Additionally, the editors contend Snowden should “have a hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.” Manning could be an effective advocate too, if she were not imprisoned. She could call attention to how the United States loses its humanity when fighting wars and the need to accept responsibility for conduct when innocent civilians are killed, rather than hiding behind “the veil of national security and classified information.”
Just as the Times makes clear that Snowden could not have gone through “proper channels,” it would have been impossible for Manning as well. The scale of information that she uncovered and found to be in the public interest would never have seen the light of day. Had she sent specific documents in the sets to get the attention of members of Congress or had she gone to superiors within the military and said this should not be secret, she most certainly would have lost her security clearance. The material would have remained concealed.
If one accepts that Snowden tried to go to his superiors and they took no action after he expressed his misgivings because they did not “consider the collection programs to be an abuse,” shouldn’t it also be accepted that Manning had a similar experience?

In 2010, while stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Baghdad, Pfc. Bradley Manning decided to approach a superior officer in his chain of command to voice his concern about something he had stumbled upon in his capacity as an intelligence analyst. His unit had been helping Iraqi federal police identify suspects for detention and discovered that fifteen men had been arrested for producing “anti-Iraqi literature.” After having a high-resolution photo of the “literature” translated into English, Manning discovered that the writing was hardly criminal; it was a “scholarly critique” of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But his superior officer did not want to hear about it. Manning knew if he continued to assist the police in identifying political opponents, innocent people would be jailed, likely tortured, and “not seen again for a very long time, if ever,” as he told a military courtroom in Fort Meade, MD on February 28. Hoping to expose what was happening ahead of the Iraq parliamentary election, on March 7, 2010, Manning shared the information with WikiLeaks.

Six bullet points on violations Snowden revealed and legal actions he provoked are offered by the Times editors to further advance the argument that he is a whistleblower. Certainly, the same could be done for Manning:

• Manning revealed a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack, which shows two Reuters journalists being gunned down in Baghdad. The video, which featured soldiers begging superior officers for orders to fire on individuals, was withheld from Reuters, even though the media organization filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
• Frago 242, which the US and the UK appeared to have adopted as a way of excusing them from having to take responsibility for torture or ill-treatment of Iraqis by Iraqi military or security forces, was revealed in the Iraq War Logs.
• Yemen president Ali Abdullah Saleh agreed to secretly allow US cruise missile or drone attacks that he would say were launched by his government
• Both the administrations of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama pressured Spain and Germany not to investigate torture authorized by Bush administration officials
• US government was well aware of rampant corruption in the Tunisian ruling family of President Ben Ali and the FBI trained torturers in Egypt’s state security service. The information released by Manning was one of the “small things“ that helped to inspire the Arab Spring
• Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj was sent to Guantanamo Bay prison “to provide information” on the “al Jazeera news network’s training program, telecommunications equipment and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview” of bin Laden, a clear attack on press freedom
• Partly basing its ruling on diplomatic cables Manning released, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the court condemned the CIA for its extraordinary rendition program and found Macedonia had been responsible for the torture and violation of German car salesman Khaled el-Masri’s rights when he was abducted. Macedonia was ordered to pay $78,500 in damages to Masri.

The above bullet points only begin to demonstrate the scale of abuse, corruption, misconduct, war crimes and violations of international law that were shown in documents. (Much more on what she revealed and why she is a classic whistleblower can be found here and here.)
In both cases, Snowden and Manning revealed significant abuses of the classification system in the United States. Much of the information should probably not have been secret (and certainly not for the next 20-25 years).
Snowden himself said, when he revealed he was the source for stories on the NSA, that ”Manning was a classic whistleblower.” She “was inspired by the public good.”
At this point, the main historical difference between Manning and Snowden is that Snowden—and the journalists involved in publishing his disclosures—managed to get the political class to respond and acknowledge that the debate he wanted was worth having. Yet, it should not make a person less of a whistleblower if their disclosures do not manage to shake the foundations of government in such a way that parts of the power structure start to accept things will have to change. It cannot be the fault of the whistleblower that government has made itself immune to revelations of corruption.
Manning has formally requested a presidential pardon from Obama. Her lawyer, David Coombs, declared that her sentence was “disproportionate to both the offense and the offender. It will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers and damage the public’s perception of military justice.”
Finally, this is not only an issue for the Times editors to confront but one all of American society should consider. It gets to the problem of how we fail whistleblowers as a country by ignoring them and allowing government to punish and silence them for trying to reveal to us the truth.

Continued racialised warfare under Obama

Below I reprint an article in today's Guardian newspaper on the sheer scale of killing in the war on terror under the leadership of President Barack Obama, America's first black commander-in-chief, and with the full cooperation of the British government. 

No one takes seriously any more the clarion call of "Change We Can Believe In", of course, but few understand how a black president can continue and develop policies like targetted assassination via drone warfare in the manner of a colonial overlord. Some will say that Obama is a mere puppet of "the system" and cannot do otherwise. Others say that he inherited a mess from George W. Bush and is doing his best to get America, the West, the world, out of it. And there's something to each of those arguments.

But, Obama's an innovator - he's creatively devised more effective strategies to kill America's enemies and any innocent bystanders who happen to be in the vicinity. He's a lot stronger a character than the "system" argument allows - against advice from highly experienced war hawks like Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, he ordered US Navy Seals to go through with plans to kill Osama bin Laden. His administration successfully fought to prevent the extension of US constitutional protections to inmates at Bagram prison. Guantanamo remains open. The Egyptian militarists continue to receive massive US aid. He ordered forcible regime change in Libya in 2011, leading from behind. His administration added $200 billion to the military budget of the Bush administration, and has waged cyberwar on Iran.

Why would a black US president who critiqued neocolonialism and acknowledged the arguments of Malcolm X and the achievements of the non-violent Martin Luther King, Jr., (in his impressive 1994 book, Dreams From My Father) carry out the sorts of policies that would be expected from any previous American administration? 

For all its vaunted diversity and multiculturalism, and the imagery of a melting pot, the United States is an elitist society with a powerful foreign policy establishment that remains dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (Wasps). But the key point is less biological than politico-cultural: Anglo-Saxonism today is not defined so fundamentally by race or colour or gender or religion as it is by culture and mindset. And Obama's mindset differs little in practice from any Wasp elite in the national security apparatus. He is a fully paid-up member of the establishment; indeed, its most eloquent leader.

The American establishment is not a caste; it is possible to 'rise' into it from 'below': but instead of embracing diversity, the establishment socialises and assimilates into its own globalist mindset minority wannabes. 

In an article in Village Voice back in 1996, based on an interview with Obama, the writer concluded that "Barack Obama is a foundation-hatched black elite ready for complete assimilation into the white power structure". I'm sure that even Adolphus Reed, the author of the article, hadn't anticipated what's been happening since 2008. 

Barack Obama is the US establishment's greatest achievement to date, it's new face, as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it before the general election of 2008.

New face, but same old racialised killing.

Britain is up to its neck in US dirty wars and death squads

The war on terror is now an endless campaign of drone and undercover killings that threatens a more dangerous world

Seumas Milne  The Guardian, Wednesday 4 December 2013 16.00 EST

You might have thought the war on terror was finally being wound down, 12 years after the US launched it with such disastrous results. President Obama certainly gave that impression earlier this year when he declared that "this war, like all wars, must end".

In fact, the Nobel peace prize winner was merely redefining it. There would be no more "boundless global war on terror", he promised. By which he meant land wars and occupations are out for now, even if the US is still negotiating for troops to remain in Afghanistan after the end of next year.

But the war on terror is mutating, growing and spreading. Drone attacks, which have escalated under Obama from Pakistan to north Africa, are central to this new phase. And as Dirty Wars – the powerful new film by the American journalist Jeremy Scahill – makes clear, so are killings on the ground by covert US special forces, proxy warlords and mercenaries in multiple countries.

Scahill's film noir-style investigation starts with the massacre of a police commander's family by a US Joint Special Operations Command (Jsoc) secret unit in Gardez, Afghanistan (initially claimed by the US military to have been honour killings). It then moves through a murderous cruise missile attack in Majala, Yemen, that killed 46 civilians, including 21 children; the drone assassination of the radical US cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son; and the outsourced kidnappings and murders carried out by local warlords on behalf of Jsoc and the CIA in Somalia.

What emerges is both the scale of covert killings by US special forces – running 20 raids a night at one point in Afghanistan – and the unmistakable fact that these units are operating as death squads, whose bloodletting is dressed up as "targeted killings" of terrorists and insurgents for the benefit of a grateful nation back home.

When a Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, demonstrated just how targeted these killings can actually be in practice – by exposing the US slaughter at Majala – he was framed and jailed in Yemen as an al-Qaida collaborator, and his release was initially blocked by the personal intervention of Obama.

Of course, the US and its friends have carried out covert assassinations and sponsored death squads for many years. But assassination and undercover killings, once criticised by the US as an unfortunate Israeli habit, are now a central part of American strategy – and the battlefield has gone global. The number of countries in which the US Special Operations Command is operating has risen from 40 to 120.

And Britain is with them every step of the way. British officials like to present their own drone operations in Afghanistan as a moral cut above those of the CIA and Jsoc. In real life, the collaboration could hardly be closer. This week Noor Khan, whose father was one of more than 40 killed in a US drone attack in Pakistan, has been at the appeal court in London demanding the British government reveal the extent of GCHQ support for such war crimes.

The government is hiding behind "national security" and the special relationship. But there can be no doubt that GCHQ intelligence is used for drone attacks – just as British undercover units have been operating hand in glove with US special forces in Somalia, Mali, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Theresa May has been stripping British Muslims suspected of fighting for al-Shabaab in Somalia of their citizenship, just in time for them to be killed or kidnapped by US special forces, evidence has emerged that British special forces themselves killed a British recruit, Tufail Ahmed, there last year.

Britain has plenty of experience of its own dirty wars, of course. BBC's Panorama programme last month broadcast interviews with members of a former undercover army unit in Northern Ireland (several of whose officers had taken part in colonial campaigns) that carried out a string of drive-by shootings of unarmed civilians in Belfast in the 1970s. "We were there to act like a terror group," one veteran explained. Just like the US special forces in Gardez, they mounted regular cover-ups and struggled to accept the people they killed had not been "terrorists".

The assumption that they were taking out the bad guys, armed or unarmed, clearly trumped the laws of war. The same goes for the war on terror on a far bigger scale. Drone strikes are presented as clean, surgical attacks. In reality, not only does the complete absence of risk to the attacking forces lower the threshold for their use. But their targets depend on intelligence that is routinely demonstrated to be hopelessly wrong.

In many cases, far from targeting named individuals, they are "signature strikes" against, say, all military-age males in a particular area or based on a "disposition matrix" of metadata, signed off by Obama at his White House "kill list" meetings every Tuesday. Which is why up to 951 civilians are estimated to have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan alone, and just 2% of casualties are "high value" targets.

At best, drone and special forces killings are extrajudicial summary executions. More clearly, they are a wanton and criminal killing spree. The advantage to the US government is that it can continue to demonstrate global authority and impunity without boots on the ground and loss of US life. But that is a reflection of US weakness in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq: dirty wars cause human misery but give limited strategic leverage.

They also create precedents. If the US and its friends arrogate to themselves the right to launch armed attacks around the world at will, other states now acquiring drone capabilities may well follow suit. Most absurdly, what is justified in the name of fighting terrorism has spread terror across the Arab and Muslim world and provided a cause for the very attacks its sponsors are supposed to be defending us against at home.

The US-led dirty wars are a recipe for exactly the endless conflict Obama has promised to halt. They are laying the ground for a far more dangerous global order. The politicians and media who plead national security to protect these campaigns from exposure are themselves a threat to our security. Their secrecy and diminished footprint make them harder than conventional wars to oppose and hold to account – though the backlash in countries bearing the brunt is bound to grow. But their victims cannot be left to bring them to an end alone.