Lead story

CIA torturers must face trial

by Daphne Liddle

THE UNITED States is reeling after the publication of a landmark report into the CIA interrogation of detainees — in Guantanamo and many other less well-known centres around the world — after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on 11th September 2001.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a 528-page summary of the complete 6,000-page report — which remains classified — last Tuesday. It accused the CIA of going far beyond the “enhances techniques” authorised by the Justice Department and of lying at every turn about what was being done.

The published summary of the still secret full report also concludes that the torture used did not produce any significant or useful information. As the CIA knew well, when people are in agony they will say anything to stop the pain.

But these methods did induce some desperate people to give names of anyone they could think of, leading to a whole lot more innocent people being rounded up and tortured in their turn. In a normal court of law evidence obtained under torture is not allowed because it is more than likely just not true but that did not stop the CIA.

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Protest as vultures gather over Ukraine

by New Worker correspondent

ANTI-FASCISTS braved the biting early morning wind along the Albert Embankment at Vauxhall last Tuesday to protest at the wholesale privatisation of Ukrainian state property and other austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the EU and implemented by the new Poroshenko-Yatseniuk regime.

Members and supporters of Solidarity with Anti-fascist Resistance in Ukraine (SARU) assembled outside the Park Plaza between Lambeth and Vauxhall where the Kiev regime had invited the capitalist fat cats of the world to a London “Investment Summit” to carve up the assets of the Ukrainian people for privatisation and plunder. Ukrainian acting Prime Minister Tatseniuk recently said: “We will announce the most ambitious privatisation programme for 20 years,” and the Kiev regime has promised it would “consider a draft law on the list of objects that are not subject to privatisation”.

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Editorial

Time to get off our knees

A REPORT delivered last week from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) revealed that the growing inequality of wealth in Britain is “significantly” curbing economic growth. It found that inequality in Britain cost the economy almost nine percentage points.

The OECD also found that redistribution of wealth via taxes and benefits does not hamper economic growth. “This compelling evidence proves that addressing high and growing inequality is critical to promote strong and sustained growth and needs to be at the centre of the policy debate,” said OECD’s secretary general, Angel Gurría.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, has other ideas. His Autumn Budget statement last week had the pundits at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) working overtime with their calculators to reach the conclusion that the increasing scale of cuts planned by Osborne over the next five years will force a “fundamental re-imagining of the state”.

The IFS director, Paul Johnson, said Osborne’s proposals to cut the size of the state back to a level last seen before the second world war showed there was now “clear blue water” between the major political parties, after Labour said it would borrow extra funds to boost investment in infrastructure and take longer to achieve a balanced budget.

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