The American Gulag: US Navy Planning to Build Military Camps to Jail 120,000 Immigrants

Source - The American Gulag: US Navy Planning to Build Military Camps to Jail 120,000 Immigrants | Global Research  by Alec Andersen, June 23, 2018 World Socialist Web Site

A draft memo leaked to Time magazine Friday reveals preparations by the United States Navy to build sprawling internment camps to house over 120,000 undocumented immigrants. Massive camps housing nearly 50,000 each are being proposed in Northern and Southern California, close to the country’s largest immigration populations, with an initial 25,000 to be housed on military bases in Alabama.

The capacity of the new facilities would match the total number of Japanese and Japanese-Americans detained during World War Two. This follows a separate Department of Defense announcement Thursday that the military will erect detention camps on four Army bases in Texas and Arkansas that will hold another 20,000 migrant children.

The establishment of military prison camps on American soil marks an ominous milestone in US history. These are being erected to detain not only immigrants, but also striking workers, protesters against police violence, and all who resist conditions of deepening exploitation, war and dictatorship. This police state policy is aimed at the entire working class.

Indicative of the complicity of the corporate media in these dictatorial moves, neither NBC, ABC nor CBS mentioned the proposal for the Navy to set up concentration camps on their Friday evening news broadcasts.

The internal memo details plans to construct “temporary and austere” tent camps to house 25,000 undocumented migrants immediately, with massive facilities to come later. Under the proposal, 25,000 beds would be built within weeks at two Navy airfields near Mobile, Alabama—Navy Outlying Field Wolf in Orange Beach and Navy Outlying Field Silverhill—at an estimated cost of $233 million for six months of operation.

Navy officials suggest a timeline of 60 days to complete the first stage of tent construction, which would hold 5,000 detainees. After that, capacity could be expanded at a rate of 10,000 beds per month.

The document also proposes construction of two internment camps in California that would each house up to 47,000 detained immigrants. One would be located on the former site of Naval Weapons Station Concord, near San Francisco, and the other would be built at Camp Pendleton, the nation’s largest Marine Corps base on the coast of California between San Diego and Los Angeles.

The memo also calls for further study of a proposal to detain an unspecified number of undocumented workers at the Marine Corps Air Station outside of Yuma, Arizona.

The document, drafted by Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and Environment Phyllis Bayer for signature by Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer, was circulated in anticipation of the influx of detained migrant families under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.

Under this policy, announced in April, all undocumented migrants captured by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will be detained and tried for the so-called crime of “illegal entry.”

US to Deport 262,000 Salvadoran Immigrants

These revelations underscore the fact that Trump’s reversal on separating families does not signify a shift away from his drive to criminalize immigrants and arrest, detain and deport them in the hundreds of thousands. The executive order Trump signed Wednesday calls for indefinite detention of immigrants, including children.

The release of detailed plans for the construction of military detention centers throughout the western and southern states, with the capacity to detain massive numbers of undocumented workers fleeing the violence and economic devastation that American imperialism has produced in Central America, represents a new stage in the ruling class’s turn toward authoritarian rule.

This confirms the warnings made by the World Socialist Web Site at the time of the 9/11 attacks and launching of the “war on terror” that the concentration camp at Guantanamo was a prelude to similar facilities and mass repression within the borders of the United States itself.

Such plans have ample precedent in the recent history of the United States. At the height of the 1986-1987 Iran-Contra affair, which was itself an illegal and unconstitutional conspiracy of the Reagan White House and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a secret plan, known as Operation Rex 84, was exposed. Rex 84 was a program to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, establish a parallel government comprised of military-intelligence officials, and round up political opponents in the event of a US war on Nicaragua.

At a July 13, 1987 hearing of a joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, Texas Democratic Congressman Jack Brooks sought to question Oliver North, who was at the center of the conspiracy, about Rex 84, which North had been involved in drafting. The exchange that followed is a telling illustration of the Democratic Party’s role in covering up the secret preparations of the US government and its military-intelligence apparatus for mass repression and dictatorship.

BROOKS: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC [National Security Council], were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

BRENDAN V. SULLIVAN, counsel for Colonel North: Mr. Chairman?

SENATOR DANIEL K. INOUYE, Democrat of Hawaii: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that.

BROOKS: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American Constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

INOUYE: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon, at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I’m certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.

The administration’s escalation of repression against immigrant workers in recent days has been accompanied by a series of fascistic rants by Trump seeking to whip up the most backward and reactionary social and political layers in order to justify even broader attacks on democratic rights.

At a Wednesday rally in Minnesota, Trump blustered that the United States faced being “overrun” by immigrants and that his administration was “sending them the hell back.”

In a Friday morning tweet, Trump wrote:

“We must maintain a Strong Southern Border. We cannot allow our Country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections.”

The Democrats have offered no opposition to the construction of military prison camps for immigrant families. On the contrary, they have consistently supported raising funding for “border security” and increasing the number of ICE and CBP agents, while peddling the false and reactionary narrative that immigrant workers endanger the jobs and depress the wages of the native-born work force.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer noted the report of the plan to detain 20,000 immigrants on Army bases, but merely expressed concerns over whether the plan was “feasible”. On Twitter Thursday, Schumer denounced the notion that Democrats were for open borders.

“The bipartisan immigration bill I authored had $40 billion for border security,” he boasted.

At a press conference Thursday, Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declared,

“The Democrats have taken full responsibility for securing our borders. We know that is a responsibility that we have.”

The pro-war, anti-immigrant Democratic Party will do nothing to stop the establishment of military prison camps and the imposition of police state conditions in the US. That task falls to the working class, which must mobilize to demand the abolition of ICE and CBP, the liberation of all imprisoned immigrants, and the right of all workers to live and work with full citizenship rights in the country of their choice.

[Haunting] The Met spychief who infiltrated Freedom Press

Exclusive: The Met spychief who infiltrated Freedom Press – Freedom News 24.3.2018

Freedom News, Mar 24th

After an investigation tracking his articles through the paper and talking to old comrades, Freedom can today reveal at least some of the story of former spycop Roger Pearce as he used our paper to worm his way into Northern Ireland.

Earlier this week it was disclosed that Freedom Press would now be considered a core participant in the Undercover Policing Inquiry, following official confirmation that Pearce had operated as “Roger Thorley,” a former writer for Freedom in the 1970s and ’80s.

Having looked through the Freedom archive and cross-checked with former collective members, Freedom can confirm that Pearce, writing under the moniker R.T, penned a series of articles over the course of the period 1980-81 and then joined a fact-finding mission to Belfast, before disappearing from sight.

Download the articles (pdf)

Most of these essays were dryly written, but heavily critical assessments of the policing and justice systems with a focus on the situation in Northern Ireland, suggesting among other things that IRA members detained by Britain should be treated as political prisoners — a major and controversial demand of Republican combatants at the time. Pearce qualified as a barrister with Middle Temple in 1979, meaning he was ideally placed to act as an “expert voice” on such matters when putting forward such articles for publication.

The strong implication, and one which Freedom is investigating, is that Pearce was using the paper as a way to contact and assess British connections with the radical community in Northern Ireland in a period of crisis. The news will strengthen the case for an expansion of the inquiry into the region, as Pearce joins other undercovers with links to Northern Ireland and would go on to become the Met’s Director of Intelligence and head of Special Branch from 1998-2003.
Have pen, will travel

Anarchists who were active at the time do not, for the most part, remember Pearce very well — he seems to have kept a relatively low profile — and as far as can be told he was never an active editor at the paper. Some memories do survive however, which fit with what we now know to have become the standard operating procedure for Met infiltration of perfectly legal, poorly resourced organisations.

Dressed up with Trotskyish glasses and a goatee, Pearce was conspicuously “useful” as a car driver prepared to give people lifts (this is a recurring theme from spycops) and one comrade remembers that he was the “unofficial chauffeur” of Leah Feldman, a grandee of earlier times in the movement who, it was said, had been at the funeral of Peter Kropotkin 60 years earlier. Other memories place him as having a girlfriend who was also an activist, though this can’t be confirmed.

What can be confirmed is that when inquiry head Mitting defined Pearce’s writing as “virulently anti-police” he wasn’t exaggerating — and it was specifically in favour of the IRA. In one article, Prisoners of Politics (Vol 41, No. 22, Nov 8th 1980) the editors debate “R.T” over his demand that IRA detainees should have political prisoner status, noting that “all prisoners are political”. In another he attacks the arrest of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, as “difficult to evaluate in terms of sheer blatant prejudice and hysteria,” comparing him to Provisional IRA man Gerard Tuite.



But it is R.T’s final article which should raise the most eyebrows. In The Not So Distant Struggle (Vol 42 No. 19, Sep 26th 1981) he reports back from a fact-finding mission to Belfast that he had inveigled himself onto, along with four other members of the Freedom Collective. The consummate London police spy’s empathetic report on the Troops Out phenomenon, which suggests a close working relationship with the then-active Belfast Anarchist Collective, notes:

Within a short distance of Britain we are daily witnessing a most repressive regime whose intensity supports no comparison with life in London; a regime where there is near total monitoring of movement day and night, where constant use is made of the Prevention of Terrorism Act to detain and prosecute ‘political offenders’, where the overt presence of armed forces often reaches saturation point, where prisoners are condemned by juryless Diplock courts, and where widespread condemnation has been directed internationally, particularly from America.

This was a man so embedded in the heart of that “repressive regime” he would rise to high office, ringmaster to the many other liars and manipulators of that force in their efforts to destroy resistance in Belfast and beyond. A paid-up member of the British state writing to the public that:

Ideological scruples must not be allowed to erode the clear responsibility of focusing attention on what has become the embodiment of the repressive state visibly at work in utilising all its resources, using the streets of Belfast, Derry and elsewhere as a prime testing ground for future urban unrest in Britain.

In doing so, the striking image of people demanding to determine their own existence emerges not just from individual IRA actions, but rather from the close communities of which the IRA guerrillas are an indissoluble part.

It’s an analysis many anarchists and leftists would agree with, then and now. But for an agent of the Crown, misleading would be an understatement.

We are now asking around Belfast comrades to see if anyone remembers his visit – or whether he resurfaced later in his deployment period, up to 1984. Please get in touch if you do!

Catalonia Referendum: Resisting the Spanish Government Siege

In 1713-14, it took the troops of Spain’s Borbon monarchy 14 months of siege before taking Barcelona and ending Catalan self-rule. In September 2017, Catalonia is again under siege, this time from the central Spanish People’s Party (PP) government. Under prime minister Mariano Rajoy the Spanish state is concentrating all its firepower on stopping the Catalan government’s October 1 independence referendum. On that day, if this siege is successfully resisted, Catalan citizens will vote on whether “Catalonia should become an independent state in the form of a republic.”

Since September 6, the day its parliament adopted its referendum law, Catalonia has experienced a “shock and awe” offensive aimed at forcing the pro-independence government of premier Carles Puigdemont to submit to the central Spanish administration. The adoption of the law by the parliamentary majority of 62 Together For The Yes (JxSí) and 10 People’s Unity List (CUP) MPs was the culmination of an eight-year process that has seen over one million people mobilize every Catalan National Day since 2012.

The stakes could not be higher. If the referendum takes place, the PP minority government in Madrid will suffer a lethal blow to its credibility, opening the way to a change of government in the Spanish state. It would also bring into view the prospect of finally overturning the sub-democratic regime that has been in place in Spain since the late 1970s, when the heirs of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco negotiated a flawed “transition to democracy” with the anti-dictatorship resistance.

By the same token, if the Rajoy government manages to stop October 1, it will be a setback not only for Catalan aspirations to sovereignty but also for all forces in Spain fighting for democratic rights and against austerity. The partial weakening of the “1978 regime” represented by the rise of anti-austerity party Podemos and its allies would be contained: the “constitutionalist” parties – the PP, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the hipster neoliberal outfit Citizens – would be strengthened.

Understanding of the stakes of the fight is increasingly reaching across the whole Spanish state, with left forces like Podemos and the older United Left, which had originally rejected October 1 as “not the referendum Catalonia needs,” now allying with pro-independence forces in the face of a legal and police offensive that amounts to a state of emergency in all but name.

The Fear Campaign

These stark possible outcomes to the conflict explain the ferocity of the Spanish government’s offensive. The Spanish Constitutional Court’s immediate decisions to suspend both the referendum law and the Law of Jurisdictional Transition (to apply in the case on a Yes win) have allowed Spanish prosecutor-general José Manuel Maza to unleash a judicial firestorm via regional Catalan prosecutors’ offices and the High Court of Justice of Catalonia. To date the main thrusts of the offensive have been to:

• Charge those members of the Catalan parliament’s speakers’ panel who enables debate on the laws with disobeying a lawful instruction and perverting the course of justice;
• Instruct the electoral commission appointed by the Catalan parliament first to cease all work on the referendum and two days later charging them with usurping public functions, disobedience and misuse of public funds;
• Formally warn all MPs supporting the Catalan government and 700 senior public servants that any collaboration with the referendum will open them to charges of disobedience, perverting the course of justice and misuse of public funds;
• Instruct the Catalan police, Spanish National Police, the paramilitary Civil Guard and municipal police forces to locate and confiscate all material related to the referendum;
• Warn all private media that if they carry advertising material for October 1 they will be liable to prosecution and instructing the heads of Catalan public radio and TV not to carry advertising material for the referendum;
• Advise owners of halls and public spaces that hosting any events connected with the referendum will open them to prosecution;
• Have the Spanish postal service instruct its employees not to deliver any material connected to the referendum;
• Order the closure of the web sites of the Association of Municipalities for Independence (AMI) and the Catalan Association of Municipalities and Shires (ACM) for facilitating collaboration with the referendum and then order the closure of any web site in any way connected with October 1; and
• Open proceedings against the 712 Catalan mayors (out of 948) who have indicated that their councils will make premises available – as per normal – for the referendum. The mayors are to be summoned to regional prosecutor’s offices, where they will face charges of disobeying a lawful instruction, perversion of the course of justice and misuse of public funds (which carries a jail sentence). The Catalan police have been ordered to arrest any mayor who fails his or her appointment with the prosecutor.

Most seriously of all, in the face of a Catalan government refusal to continue to supply the central Spanish government with a weekly report of its expenditures, the Spanish Council of Ministers (cabinet) decided on September 15 to take direct control of all payments to Catalonia’s creditors, effectively ending its financial autonomy.

Police actions in support of this offensive have so far included a Civil Guard raid on the newspaper El Vallenc (with the editor charged with disobedience, perverting the course of justice and misuse of public funds) and the National Police preventing the anti-capitalist CUP from reading a pro-independence manifesto in Valencia. On September 14, Dolors Sabater, the mayoress of Badalona, Catalonia’s third largest city which is run by a left coalition including pro-independence and pro-sovereignty forces, denounced the Spanish government delegation in Barcelona for making threatening telephone calls to council employees.

At the time of writing (September 17), the Civil Guard claims to have confiscated 1.3 million posters from printeries in Catalonia, while municipal police has been engaged in low-intensity harassment of Yes campaign stalls. However, the main meetings of the referendum campaign, including the Yes case’s 13,000-strong launch in the southern industrial city of Tarragona, have so far gone ahead without impediment.

The most potentially damaging action to date was the Civil Guard’s closing of the referendum web site. When this was done on September 13 the Catalan government had two replacement sites on line immediately. These and others were then closed down by September 15, but on September 16 premier Puigdemont tweeted instructions on how to access the referendum web site via proxy servers invulnerable to against Civil Guard interference.

Symptomatic of the rising concern the Catalan rebellion is causing in the establishment was the September 12 decision of a Madrid judge to ban a meeting on the Catalan right to decide from taking place on Madrid Council premises: the grounds were that “the general interests of the citizens precludes the realization of public events in favour of an illegal referendum.” The organizers of the meeting, the platform Madrid for the Right to Decide, then rescheduled the meeting to another location. When it was finally held on September 16, the crowd overflowed the theatre and filled the nearby street.

At the time of writing, over 60,000 people potentially face charges for associating themselves with the “illegal” referendum and the rumours are of even more drastic action to come. The PP is supposedly moving towards establishing the legal and political grounds for suspending the Catalan government under article 155 of the Spanish Constitution; 4000 extra National Police are ready to be deployed; the Civil Guard is bringing extra agents into Catalonia – such is the daily dose of psychological warfare to which Catalans are being exposed.

In a September 17 interview with the web-based daily VilaWeb premier Puigdemont described how far he thought the Spanish government’s intervention had come:

“[T]he Spanish government is near as well implementing articles 116 [covering conditions for declaring states of emergency or siege] and 155 without having to declare them. It is looking for the practical impact of a state of emergency – suspension of public events, confiscation of informative material, intimidation of the means of communication, creation of a generalised climate of persecution of all mayors…”

On September 16, in an address to the PP faithful in Barcelona, prime minister Rajoy warned:

“Don’t force us to go to a point that we don’t want to arrive at.”

Who are the Authoritarians?

The blatant goal of the central government campaign has been to create a climate of fear and panic: the October 1 referendum is a political Chernobyl – if you even touch it you won’t only go to jail, you´ll lose all your assets – like former Catalan premier Artur Mas and three of his ministers, who stand to lose five million euros for allowing a September 9, 2014 “participatory process” (9N) to go ahead in the face of a court ban (over 2.3 million of Catalonia’s 5.5 million voters took part).

Central government ministers have personally weighed into this campaign. On September 12, finance minister Cristobal Montoro said that “nobody’s going to use a euro of public money against the law: it didn’t happen on November 9, and it won’t happen on October 1, unless someone wants to put their assets at risk.” On September 13, Rajoy announced:

“I say to everyone who understands that the government has to carry out its obligation, that we’re going to do that, that they needn’t worry. If anyone is asked to staff a voting centre, don’t go because there can’t be a referendum and it would be an absolutely illegal act.”

With this statement Rajoy unwittingly betrayed his government’s double approach: to stop the referendum by any and every means that don’t entail an intolerable political cost (like sending in the army) and, if that’s finally not possible, to at least drive participation in the referendum to as low a point as possible.

At the core of the PP approach is the big lie that the Spanish government has no choice but to have the law obeyed because a Scottish-style negotiated referendum was always impossible under the Spanish constitution. However, as many Spanish jurists have pointed out, the Constitution provides mechanisms for consultations of a part of the population of the Spanish state – the PP chose not to have one in the Catalan case because it has always seen greater political gain in cultivating anti-Catalanism in the rest of Spain.

Having made that choice, the PP has then had no option but to paint and themselves as the staunch and principled upholders of constitutionality against the authoritarian and anti-democratic Catalan outlaws “abducted” (term of prosecutor-general Maza) by separatism. Matters have reached the bizarre point where some PPers have accused the Catalan government of having Nazi and Francoist tendencies.

The Fight to Adopt the Referendum Law

It was the need to paint the Catalan movement in these black terms that drove the tactics of the PP and the other unionist parties in the September 6 and 7 sessions of the Catalan parliament that adopted the new laws. Spanish television channels were able to broadcast two days of filibustering, procedural haggling and theatrical outrage from the PP, Citizens , the Party of Socialists of Catalonia (PSC) and even from a fraction of the left coalition Catalonia Yes We Can (CSQEP).

It could not have been otherwise. In order to get a referendum in Catalonia in the face of the Spanish institutional refusal to negotiate (18 rejections since 2012), the Catalan parliamentary majority had no choice but to develop its own referendum bill. It was inevitable that this would be met with filibustering and procedural antics aimed at bogging down its adoption. To get it through parliament without giving the opposition the chance to delay its implementation through court appeals, the majority also had to use a fast track procedural provision.

The majority also had to shun the advice of the parliamentary speakership panel’s two legal advisers – who pointed out the bill’s unconstitutionality in terms of Spanish law – and to refuse to allow parliament to seek an opinion from the Catalan Council of Statutory Guarantees, which would also have been certain to point out that incompatibility. CQSEP MP Joan Coscubiela described this approach as “unprecedentedly anti-democratic.”

However, premier Puigdemont justified it in these words:

“They’ll get us lost talking about public servants, attorneys-at-law, the Council of Guarantees… However, what is important are the citizens. And they are demanding respect for fundamental rights, for human rights, including the right to self-determination.”

In the two days of acrimonious debate, the PP and Citizens speakers made a point of speaking in Spanish, so that their message could be understood by people in the rest of Spain (the interventions of the majority, done in Catalan, would have been mainly lost on them). The supposedly undemocratic behavior of the speakership panel majority and of the speaker Carme Forcadell could thereby more readily become an “accepted truth” for Spanish public opinion: this impression would have hopefully been reinforced for the PP, Citizens and the PSC by their decision to walk out of the chamber when the final vote was taken on both pieces of legislation.

The conservative Madrid media – sworn enemy of the right to self-determination and even of acknowledging Spain’s plurinational reality – described the adoption of the new laws as “democracy kidnapped” (La Razón) and a “coup d’etat” (ABC). The Spanish deputy prime minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria, in charge of the PP government’s operations against Catalonia, said: “I’ve never felt such shame on behalf of democracy in my life.”

Prime minister Rajoy then used the supposedly outrageous behavior of the Catalan parliament to justify his government’s legal carpet bombing. He warned on September 13:

“This was an anti-democratic act, a blow against democracy. And in Spain the law gets carried out because if not it would mean that the will of the majority of citizens counts for nothing.”

The Battle for Participation

How has the Catalan government reacted to this aggression?

On the one hand by insisting that all logistics are in place for October 1, that the referendum will be going ahead regardless of the legal and constitutional barrage, and that people should be able to vote at their usual polling station. In cases where local councils refuse to make these available, the Catalan government will make its own premises available as voting centres. At the September 14 launch of the Yes campaign, Puigdemont said: “Does anyone really believe we won’t be voting on October 1? What sort of people do they think we are?”

Such confidence became more plausible earlier on the same day, when the Catalan government and Barcelona Council announced they had reached an agreement on providing voting centres in the Barcelona area. This was an important gain in the critical battle for participation, because it puts Catalonia’s biggest municipality on the side of October 1. Ada Colau, the Barcelona mayoress who had come in for criticism for delaying a decision on the issue, came to the agreement with the government despite advice from the council’s legal service that it would potentially open the administration to prosecution.

On September 16, when the mayors potentially facing charges demonstrated in central Barcelona, Colau was there to greet them on behalf of Barcelona Council. She said:

“This is not about independence. They will find an entire people against them in defence of the rights that have cost so much to win.”

Colau’s position reflected a shift in Catalonia’s non-independence left towards participating in October 1, even while still regarding it as “not the referendum Catalonia needs” but mobilization against the Rajoy government and for a Catalan right to decide. This is because a considerable part of its support – mainly but not only working people from other parts of Spain who have immigrated to Catalonia – do not support a unilateral referendum in which the independence case is likely to win. In the world of the “commons” – the catch-all term for Barcelona en Comú (running Barcelona Council), En Comú Podem (largest Catalan force in the Spanish parliament) and Catalunya en Comú (grouping together Barcelona en Comú and the “old left” forces Initiative for Catalonia-Greens, United and Alternative Left and the green party Equo) – the October 1 referendum had intensified differences over how to relate to a unilateral consultation.

However, in the atmosphere of increasing aggression from the Rajoy government a shift towards greater support for October 1 showed in the results of Catalunya en Comú’s membership ballot on whether to participate. The result was 59.39% for to 41.61% against, with 44% of the membership taking part. According to its coordinator Xavier Domènech, Catalunya en Comú will “stage events denouncing the repression and affirming the rights of the Catalans … If, finally, there are ballot boxes, we’ll be going to vote.” This was a move away from an initial orientation that focused more on demanding guarantees from the Catalan government than on how Catalunya en Comú might be able to intervene most fruitfully in the referendum process.

It also represented a defeat for those forces in the party that had called for a boycott of October 1, as organized around the manifesto “Don’t Participate or Call for Participation in the October 1 Referendum.” The shift also came with the effective dropping of their call by Pablo Iglesias and Alberto Garzón, leaders at the level of the Spanish state of Podemos and the United Left, for the commons not to participate.

Nevertheless, despite the Catalunya en Comú membership ballot result certain mayors within the universe of the commons will still not be making their councils premises available for the referendum, the main example being the Initiative For Catalonia mayor of the greater Barcelona industrial town El Prat de Llobregat. In other councils where councilors from the commons are part of the government – especially in partnership with ERC – they have already voted to make premises available on October 1.

As for the PSC, it is driving the campaign among working-class voters to ensure that October 1 is a low turnout flop if it eventually goes ahead. In the two provincial capitals run by the Catalan social democracy (Lleida and Tarragona) councils have refused to make premises available despite protests demanding that they do. The PSC has denounced the supposed intimidation these demonstrations represent. In others towns it controls, such as the outer Barcelona industrial city of Santa Colomer de Gramanet, the PSC has refused to make council premises available for meetings on the referendum.

The party has started an active boycott campaign, launching a manifesto called “On the illegal ‘referendum’ of October 1.” There are signs that this may be beginning to have some effect: all polls previous to September 17 showed around 50% of PSC supporters prepared to vote in the referendum. This figure has fallen in the latest Opinòmetre poll to 35%.

However, even as it tries to wreck October 1 and supports all legal activity to stop it, the PSC has to try to appear as not simply the running dog of the PP. A sign that it does not want to cut all ties with forces supporting the referendum was a September 10 statement by PSOE federal secretary Pedro Sánchezto the effect that, even if Barcelona Council provided voting centres for the referendum, he did not think the PSC should break its governing alliance with Ada Colau’s party (Barcelona en Comú).

Conclusion

If morale and commitment were enough to win on October 1, the victory would already be secure. In the days since the 712 mayors were summoned to appear before the prosecutors, 38 more have signed up to make their council’s premises available for the referendum. To ensure the proper staffing of voting stations, 5000 volunteers were needed: 47,000 have put their name down to help (13,000 more than for 9N).

Nonetheless, the Rajoy government simply cannot afford to lose this fight. Backed by the monarchy, big business, the establishment media, three of the four major Spanish parties and the four main associations of judges, it still remains confident in its capacity to cripple the Puigdemont government.

The deciding factors will be: whether the Puigdemont government is organized enough to ward off Madrid’s sustained attack on the logistics of October 1; whether the mass of Catalan supporters of independence – and of basic democratic rights – are strong enough to make the Rajoy government pay as high a political price as possible for each new act of aggression; and whether, in the case that the referendum goes ahead, the enormous media campaign to denigrate it as a “fraud” fails to reduce participation.

At the time of writing the political cost of the Rajoy government’s aggression is increasing, domestically and internationally. For example, while its legal aggression has received no explicit support from beyond the borders of the Spanish state, support for a negotiated referendum has come from the Scottish government and from 17 Danish parliamentarians representing seven different parties.

Within Catalonia, the Civil Guard’s confiscation of posters is being answered with the reproduction on home printers of posters downloaded from improvised web sites and then pasted up by teams of volunteers from the Catalan mass organizations. The September 16-17 weekend meetings on the referendum went ahead without police interference and were bigger than all expectations (and the halls in which they were supposed to fit). On September 17, 30,000 marched in Bilbao (in the Basque Country) in support of Catalonia’s referendum.

The campaign for October 1 is increasingly taking the form of a peaceful insurrection for democracy against the authoritarian Spanish state – all democrats will be doing what they can to help it prevail.

Dick Nichols is Green Left Weekly’s European correspondent, based in Barcelona. An initial version of this article has appeared on its web site. This article first published on the Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal website.

Featured image is from the author.

The original source of this article is Socialist Project

Philippine president declares “State of Lawlessness” after Bomb Blast. “Not Martial Law”

Source- Philippine president declares “State of Lawlessness” after Bomb Blast. “Not Martial Law” | Global Research 7.9.2016

Disclaimer: This article is an authorized translation of an article published on the Global Research web. The facts included are public knowledge. Whether you agree or not, these are the author opinions, not of this blog. It does not defame or encourage behaviors that are not allowed by the Google platform or by the legality established in the US or the Philippines.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte seized upon the pretext provided by a bomb blast in a marketplace in the southern city of Davao Friday night to announce a nationwide “state of lawlessness.” The declaration is a significant step toward the formal declaration of martial law.

The bomb, which was set off in Roxas Night Market in Davao, killed 15 people and injured at least 71. Duterte, who was in Davao at the time, appeared at the bombing site at four in the morning and announced to the press that he had placed Davao city under military lock-down and that he was declaring a nationwide “state of lawlessness.”

While stating that this was “not martial law,” Duterte told the press that the military would be “running the country.” He stated, “I am inviting now the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the military and the police to run the country in accordance with my specifications.” Military checkpoints would be set up throughout country, and the military and police would be authorized to conduct searches without warrants of vehicles and persons. Curfews might also be imposed throughout the country.

Duterte then told the media that he had been forewarned that the bombing would take place. He stated that this was why all of his military and police commanders, as well as intelligence heads, were already on the scene in Davao.

He was not able to prevent the bombing because “the Philippines is not a fascist state … It is unfortunate that this is a democracy and we cannot frisk anybody for just any reason.” He repeated this point later in his press conference, “Unfortunately we cannot stop people because that would be fascistic. That is the price of being a democratic state.”

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana issued a similar statement to the press, claiming that “the enemy” is “adept at using the democratic space granted by our Constitution to move around freely and unimpeded to sow terror.”

Duterte is openly stating his desire for a police state, if not fascism. According to him, democracy is a problem that must be remedied through direct police/military rule.

Duterte stated that the “state of lawlessness” would last as long he deemed that there was a threat of terrorism or “drug violence.” He cited the epidemic of vigilante killings, for which he is directly responsible by openly encouraging these murders, as a justification for his declaration.

Duterte’s declaration of a “state of lawlessness,” and his calling for the military to “run the country,” was a carefully planned event. Sal Panelo, the official legal counsel of the president, told the press over the weekend that the president had prepared the declaration long before the bombing as part of his campaign against alleged drug criminals. The bombing merely provided a convenient pretext.

The initial police suspect for the bombing is the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG). Operating in the Sulu archipelago, the Abu Sayyaf is a terrorist organization with approximately 200 members. Its activities consist of kidnap-for-ransom, beheadings of hostages, and occasional bombings.

The ASG was created in the early 1990s by Islamist elements returning to the Philippines from Afghanistan, where they had been part of the CIA’s secret war against the Soviet-backed regime. With assistance from then President Cory Aquino, the ASG was created to foment division between the larger Muslim secessionist organizations, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Over the past 25 years, the ASG has provided the pretext for repeated US military interventions and for the increased militarization of the Philippine state.

The ASG issued a press statement over the weekend denying that they had been involved in the Davao bombing and claiming that a new breakaway group, Daulat Ul Islamiya, had been responsible.

The declaration of a “state of lawlessness” will be used to directly incorporate the military into Duterte’s murderous anti-drug crusade, which has thus far been carried out by the police and vigilantes.

As of September 1, the official death toll from this campaign, which targets the most impoverished layers of the population, was 2,446 in the first two months of the Duterte administration. Of this number, 929 were killed by the police, and 1,507 by vigilantes.

As a point of comparison, the scholarly consensus on Martial Law under the Marcos dictatorship estimates that 3,257 people were killed by state forces from 1972 to the early 1980s. If the current body count continues, Duterte will pass this figure by early October, as he completes his third month in office.

The vigilante killings are being carried out with the direct sanction and encouragement of the Duterte administration. An account published by BBC on August 26 revealed that at least some of the vigilante hit squads are operating on direct orders from local police and are being paid by the police for each of their victims.

Duterte openly sanctioned the hiring of hit squads during his Saturday press conference. He called for the hiring of “mercenaries,” saying, “There’s no other option. These people are like germs, which must be eliminated.”

Business investors and international finance capital continue to enthusiastically endorse Duterte’s dictatorial measures. Guenter Taus, chair of the European Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines (ECCP), told the press that what was needed—just as in “Brussels and Paris”—was a “transparent and obvious severe increase of military and police presence everywhere.” ECCP spokesperson Henry Schumacher told Reuters two weeks ago that investment would flow into the Philippines because “an iron fist is going to be behind it.”

Washington has funded Duterte’s death squads, with Secretary of State John Kerry supplying $32 million to support the anti-drug campaign. Whether Washington continues to support Duterte’s fascistic policies depends entirely on whether he toes their line in the South China Sea. Washington is looking for Duterte to aggressively assert Philippine claims of sovereignty in the South China Sea using the ruling against China by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague.

Duterte has thus far attempted to pursue a conciliatory foreign policy toward Beijing, looking to secure increased trade ties with China. Washington has begun raising the specter of “human rights” against Duterte as a means of applying pressure.

Duterte will be meeting with President Obama in Laos this week during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit. He has begun to signal that he will adopt a more oppositional stance toward China as a means of securing Washington’s continued backing.

Over the weekend, Duterte summoned the Chinese ambassador demanding to know why Chinese vessels were operating in the disputed Scarborough shoal, which the PCA had ruled was not Chinese territory. Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay stated, “China will be the ‘loser’ if it does not recognize an international court ruling against its territorial claims in the South China Sea. We are trying to make China understand especially when the dust settles that unless they respect and recognize the arbitral tribunal, they will be the losers at the end of the day on this matter.”

If Duterte demonstrates that he will serve the interests of Washington in their drive to war against China, Washington will drop all concerns about “human rights.” They will back a Duterte dictatorship just as fully as they did the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

Published on 9.9.2016, last edition 15.1.2023