Chris Marsden & Julie Hyland

For the last few days, the British public has been told that parliament has reasserted authority over Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and finally called the multibillionaire to order. Some have gone so far as to exclaim that Murdoch’s appearance before a parliamentary select committee Tuesday, alongside his son James, represents a “British Spring”.

This implicit reference to the so-called “Arab Spring”— revolutionary working-class struggles that forced Western-backed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt to resign this winter—is absurd and false. The spectacle of bought-and-paid-for parliamentarians respectfully questioning Murdoch aims to confuse the population and forestall a political accounting with the corporate oligarchy.

Far from demonstrating the vitality of the British political system, the sycophancy of Murdoch’s questioners revealed its rottenness and corruption. Prime Minister David Cameron—despite ample evidence of his compromising relations with top personnel from Murdoch’s UK media group, News International—did not even face a motion of no-confidence during Wednesday’s emergency parliamentary sitting. If there were any commitment to democracy left in the British establishment, this would not be possible.

It is a matter of record that representatives of News International were involved in hacking the phones of over 12,000 people, bribing police officers and using ties to the criminal underworld to blackmail and intimidate leading public figures. Moreover, the disturbing and unexplained death on Monday of the chief whistle-blower, Sean Hoare, was immediately declared “not suspicious”.

Every major institution and leading politician is implicated in the Murdoch scandal. Besides their own nefarious relations with Murdoch’s media group, top officials of the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service and successive governments have blocked investigations into criminal behaviour at News International for at least six years.

The ruling establishment’s claims of shock and outrage now are rank hypocrisy. Everyone in the political class knew full well the basic character of Murdoch’s operations, and either acquiesced or played an active part in them. For three decades Murdoch was a kingmaker, not only in Britain but also in the US, Australia, and beyond. Politicians, whether nominally “conservative” or “labour”, pledged fealty to him. That is why not a single individual has been prosecuted, much less held to political account, in the News International scandal so far.

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Robert Stevens and Chris Marsden

Parliament and its parties are nothing more than the hirelings of an obscenely wealthy oligarchy that has complete liberty to pursue their self-enrichment and impose their counterrevolutionary social agenda by whatever means they see fit.

The two select committees are nothing more than a cover for the refusal to conduct a serious investigation of the News International scandal that would bring the guilty to book.

The appearance of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corporation, and his son James Murdoch, its deputy chief operating officer, before the British Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee was a piece of well-choreographed political theatre.

As with Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, News Corp’s UK arm, who was questioned afterwards, the Murdochs knew beforehand that there was no danger of them being asked probing questions, let alone suffering any legal consequences from their testimony.

Far from the much vaunted reassertion of the authority of Parliament and the bringing of Murdoch to account, the event took on the character of a PR exercise for News Corp.

One would never have known by the committee’s deference that the three News Corp luminaries were appearing to answer questions relating not only to the News of the World’s phone hacking, but to bribery, corruption and blackmail of police officers, public officials and leading politicians by Murdoch’s media empire.

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Chris Marsden

The ongoing exposure of systematic hacking of thousands of phones and computers by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World lifts the lid on the rampant criminality of the corporate and political elite, in Britain and internationally. At least 7,000 people have had their phones hacked and their privacy invaded. The trawl for personal information has targeted a wide range of victims, from politicians and members of the royal family to the families of murder victims and soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

The scandal is revealing the thorough-going decay of democracy and all of the official institutions in Britain, including the major parties, Parliament, the judiciary and the media. The most powerful media corporation in Britain, which constantly trumpets the need for “law and order,” has presided over serious violations of the law, including hacking on what one MP called “an industrial scale.” It has done so year-on-year with virtual impunity.

Murdoch executives and reporters are notorious as well for threatening and bullying politicians and other notables who criticize the operations of News International or otherwise arouse the ire of the Murdoch family.

Now reports have emerged that a News of the World executive destroyed millions of potentially incriminating emails in order to thwart further investigations.

Both of the major parties, Conservative and Labour, are implicated in these crimes, not only because of their refusal to call to account News International, the parent firm of Murdoch’s British media outlets, but because of their intimate relations with Murdoch’s media empire. They never challenged the Metropolitan Police for accepting the patently absurd claim that these illegal practices were the actions of one rogue reporter and a private investigator, even as it surfaced that police officers had received tens of thousands of pounds in bribes from News of the World.

It was only after numerous civil cases had been taken out against the newspaper by celebrities whose phones were hacked that, in January, the Crown Prosecution Service announced it would review material held by police on phone hacking at News of the World to “assess if a fresh criminal trial is likely.”

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Chris Marsden & Markus Salzmann

WSWS

In addition to Serbia’s reluctance to capture Mladic, there has been behind-the-scenes opposition to his arrest on the part of the United States, Britain and France.

Ratko Mladic, former chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb Army in the Republica Srpska during the 1992-95 civil war, was extradited to the Netherlands on Tuesday, where he will stand trial at the Hague for war crimes.

Mladic, 69, was arrested by Serbian security forces on May 26, under orders from the Democratic Party government of President Boris Tadic. He faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, levelled on July 24, 1995, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague (ICTY). He is accused of orchestrating the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, as well as heading the siege of Sarajevo and other war crimes.

On May 29, a rally of several thousand was held outside the Serbian Parliament building in support of Mladic, which later erupted into rioting throughout the capital.

Two days earlier the ICTY appointed a trial chamber of three judges to hear the case. There is no reason to expect a trial to be held any time soon. Mladic had gone into hiding after the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, in 2001. His capture has been a precondition for Serbia being allowed to join the European Union. For years he was the formal subject of an arrest warrant, and a reward of €5 million. Serbia increased the reward to €10 million late last year.

Mladic was sought alongside Radovan Karadzic, first president of the Republica Srpska, who was arrested on July 21, 2008, and is currently in the custody of the ICTY awaiting trial. The ICTY prosecutor at the time, Carla Del Ponte, stated that Mladic had been in reach of the Serbian authorities since 1998. She warned that unless he was captured by May 1, 2006, Serbia’s entry into the EU would be in jeopardy.

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Joachim Guilliard

Um Demokratie nach Libyen und Afrika zu bringen...

Seit dem 19. März bombardiert eine neue „Koalition der Willigen“ Tag für Tag libysche Städte und Armeeeinheiten. Alle Vermittlungsvorschläge werden ignoriert. Die Kriegsallianz werde ihre Luftschläge wohl noch viele Wochen fortsetzen, tönte es vom Außenministertreffen der NATO in Berlin. Das Bündnis müsse Libyen weiter angreifen, bis der Revolutionsführer Muammar al-Gaddafi verjagt sei, verkündeten am Tag darauf die drei Kriegsherren, US-Präsident Barack Obama, der britische Premier David Cameron und Frankreichs Staatschef Nicolas Sarkozy, in einem gemeinsamen Kriegsappell, den sie via Washington Post, Times und Le Figaro in die Welt schleuderten.

Der neue Krieg der NATO wird von einer großen Mehrheit der Staaten in der Welt abgelehnt. Die meisten glauben, dass er nicht zum Schutz der Zivilbevölkerung geführt werde, sondern für den unmittelbaren Zugriff auf die libyschen Öl- und Gasvorräte. Die gleichzeitige französische Intervention in der Elfenbeinküste und die forcierte Ausweitung der militärischen Präsenz der USA in Afrika deuten zudem auf Ziele hin, die darüber hinausgehen: die Sicherung und Ausweitung westlicher Dominanz auf dem gesamten afrikanischen Kontinent, um dessen Rohstoff-Ressourcen ein erbitter Wettkampf stattfindet.

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Chris Marsden
WSWS

The readiness of the European powers to line up almost unanimously behind the imperialist war against Libya is a defining moment in the political life of the continent.

On January 20, 2003, French Foreign Minister Dominique De Villepin said of Iraq, “We believe that military intervention would be the worst solution.” Paris voted against war in the United Nations Security Council.

Together with opposition to the war from Germany, this led to the unedifying spectacle of putative leaders of the antiwar movement amongst “left” groups and the left social democrats hailing Europe as a counterweight to US militarism and even leading chants of “Vive la France!”

In the run-up to the war against Libya, France was in the forefront of demands for military intervention, with the Sarkozy government aligning itself with Britain and Washington against its longtime German ally and publicly denouncing Berlin’s reluctance to back war. With US support, France pushed through UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorising an attack on Libya. On March 10, 2011, France became the first country in the world to recognise the National Transitional Council as Libya’s government. It led the first air strikes on March 19.

France’s particular enmity towards Libya and the Gaddafi regime stretches back to the civil war in Chad and was made worse by the cargo hold bomb that destroyed France’s UTA Flight 772 in 1989—less than a year after the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. This may have played a part in France’s shift to military intervention in Libya.

More fundamentally, however, it is understandable only from the broader motive of eliminating a regime that France views as an obstacle to its historic imperialist ambitions in Africa. Crucially for Paris, as much as Washington, the mass movement against Western-backed dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia was seen as a threat to imperialist influence in North Africa. The war against Libya provides the opportunity to install an outright stooge regime and turn Libya in a base of operations against the threat of socialist revolution throughout the region.

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Chris Marsden
WSWS

(...The EU Presidency will be your Nuremberg!)

Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s second appearance last week before the Chilcot inquiry into the lessons of the Iraq war again branded him as a war criminal.

Blair was asked to return to the inquiry due to discrepancies between his earlier testimony, the documentary record, and other testimony such as that of his attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, as to when the prime minister had committed Britain to war, and what advice he had received as to its legality.

Previously, Blair had insisted that Resolution 1441, passed unanimously by the United Nations Security Council in November 2002, authorised military action and that he had received advice to this effect from Goldsmith. In fact, when sponsoring the resolution, US and British officials had stressed that the resolution contained no “hidden triggers” or “automaticity” with regards to the use of force against Iraq, which must be discussed by the Security Council.

Resolution 1441 was made the supposed “legal” basis for the invasion only after it became clear that a second UN resolution could not be obtained. On March 7, 2003, Goldsmith sent a memo to Blair in which he concluded that “a reasonable case can be made that resolution 1441 is capable in principle of reviving the authorisation [of the use of force] in Resolution 678 without a further resolution”.

Goldsmith’s testimony before the inquiry, headed by Sir John Chilcot, focused upon the events leading him to reverse his original advice in a January 30, 2003, memo to Blair, which argued that Resolution 1441 did not sanction the use of force and a further resolution would be required. He stated that during the intervening period, Blair had made clear to President George W. Bush his support for an illegal war with the aim of regime change.

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Paul Mitchell and Chris Marsden
WSWS

[This Kosovo Serbian family, here in the picture, was hacked to death by the US/NATO sponsored Islamist Nazi KLA in the summer of 1998. The woman in the picture was five months pregnant; the Islamist Nazi Albanians (KLA-UCK) after raping her, literally cut the baby (fetus) out of her womb with a butcher-knife. The man in the right hand corner (her husband) had his legs chopped off with an axe at his knees, so before he died he was helplessly watching what the Albanian KLA Islamist Nazi savages were doing to his wife. (4international)]

Revelations of fascistic crimes carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) prior to, during and after NATO’s war against the former Yugoslavia should provide a salutary lesson whenever Washington again cites humanitarian concerns to justify its predatory war aims.

A report by the Council of Europe describes Kosovo today as a country subject to “mafia-like structures of organised crime”. It accuses KLA commander and current prime minister, Hachim Thaci, of heading a criminal network involved in murder, prostitution and drug trafficking.

This may come as no surprise to those who have witnessed his rise from terrorist thug to head of the newly “independent” state. But what will be a shock to many is the grotesque way in the KLA helped finance its operations—by removing and selling body organs from kidnapped Serb and Kosovan Albanian civilian prisoners. The practice recalls the barbaric human experiments carried out by the Nazi “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The KLA’s crimes only came to light at all because of the unravelling of an ongoing cover-up by the US, the United Nations and other major powers. Information about KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and across the border in Albania first reached the International Centre for the Red Cross in 2000, after KLA fighters reported that Serb civilians were taken there in 1999 and their organs removed and sold abroad for transplant operations. The allegations surfaced once again in a BBC investigation in April last year and in the publication of the memoirs of International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, revealing that a 2008 investigation into the “organ harvesting” had been dropped because it was supposedly “impossible to conduct.”

Any prosecution of the KLA was made “impossible” by Washington, which has been its main sponsor since at least 1998. Following the Bosnian war of 1995, the KLA, seeking to capitalise on popular resentment among Kosovan Albanians against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, pursued a strategy of destabilising Kosovo by acts of terrorism in the hope of provoking Western intervention.

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Chris Marsden
WSWS

[A photograph taken in hospital in Baghdad shows that Ali was burned across his trunk and that his hands and forearms were incinerated. His head, neck, abdomen and legs were unblemished. Examination of this photograph shows this boy was subjected to the most intense radiated heat – not contact heat. Global Research]

Britain’s armed forces stand accused of torture and murder, perpetrated in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The scale of the abuses involved cannot be attributed to a few “rogue” individuals, or covered up by the routine excuse that Britain simply got “too close” to the United States and is guilty only by association. They present prima facie evidence for war crimes charges.

Revelations regarding Afghanistan focus on the documents released by WikiLeaks, listing 21 British attacks on civilians, including children. But a separate document seen by the Daily Telegraph suggests coalition forces are responsible for up to 1,000 civilian deaths since 2006. This number has doubled in the past four years.

WikiLeaks also cited three reports recording cases of direct abuse by British troops against Iraqi detainees that coincide with mounting evidence of “systemic” abuses of detainees and other civilians.

A preliminary high court ruling in July found, “There is an arguable case that the alleged ill-treatment was systemic, and not just at the whim of individual soldiers”. The court was presented with evidence on behalf of 102 Iraqis held as prisoners by the British military in an action by Public Interest Lawyers headed by solicitor Phil Shiner. The evidence lists the cases of 59 Iraqi civilians who say they were hooded by British troops, 11 subjected to electric shocks, 122 alleging that ear muffs were used for sound deprivation, 52 deprived of sleep, 39 who were subjected to enforced nakedness, and 18 forced to watch pornographic DVDs.

The Iraq war logs also reveal appalling details of the torture and ill-treatment by the Iraqi authorities, after detainees were handed over by US and British forces. This is in breach of international law. States are bound by a duty of “non-refoulement” and must never hand someone over to another state where it is known they face a “real risk” of torture or ill-treatment. Public Interest Lawyers stated, “In the light of the Iraq war logs, the UK cannot say that it did not have evidence that there was a real risk of torture and ill-treatment at the hands of the Iraqi authorities.”

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Ian Cobain

Exclusive: Methods devised in secret in recent years may breach international law

The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

One PowerPoint training aid created in September 2005 tells trainee military interrogators that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. "Get them naked," it says. "Keep them naked if they do not follow commands." Another manual prepared around the same time advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

A manual prepared in April 2008 suggests that "Cpers" – captured personnel – be kept in conditions of physical discomfort and intimidated. Sensory deprivation is lawful, it adds, if there are "valid operational reasons". It also urges enforced nakedness.

More recent training material says blindfolds, earmuffs and plastic handcuffs are essential equipment for military interrogators, and says that while prisoners should be allowed to sleep or rest for eight hours in each 24, they need be permitted only four hours unbroken sleep. It also suggests that interrogators tell prisoners they will be held incommunicado unless they answer questions.

The 1949 Geneva conventions prohibit any "physical or moral coercion", in particular any coercion employed to obtain information.

The revelations come after the Guardian published US military documents leaked to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks revealing details of torture, summary executions and war crimes in Iraq.

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