Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. - V. I. Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£20 p a.) & circulation:078679 96074    [P&P Bulletin Publications PO 80X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]   
No 1105 September 25 2001                                                                                                               25p

Artificial war fever to hide the crushing blows to American pride is merely serving to conceal the real rottenness and sickness ailing this putrid imperialist system. US reliance on the region's biggest terror-hijackers, the Pakistani military dictatorship, shows the farcical hypocrisy of this whole stinking revenge operation. Shame on the cowardly fake-'lefts' for helping bourgeois propaganda make meaningless nonsense of what 'terrorism' is supposed to mean. Third World guerrilla war against fat First World domineering can only escalate as this warmongering chaos plunges from disaster to disaster. Meanwhile, the non-stop financial-pollution bribery and corruption to cement imperialist domination will be dooming the 'free-market' way of injustice and exploitation to even more certain catastrophe. The USA has easily the modern world’s biggest and worst record in terror tactics and fascist brutality, and now openly threatens more to come, with English 'liberal opinion' standing by just blinking. The Bush-Blair 'master-race' smiting and posturing will in time look as obscenely farcical as imperialism's Hitler/Mussolini braggadocio-aggressiveness during the system's last great crisis. Imperialism's forced-turn to openly brutal and irrational war-blitzing plus the anti-democratic censorship, etc, which accompanies it, - is a sign of WEAKNESS, not strengthening, - as the whole history of fascism proves. Reasoned democracy is imperialism's cleverest con-trick, a stunt it gets away with only when all-powerful.

As normal life (chaotic and uncertain enough in itself under capitalism) temporarily continues to be almost obliterated by imperialist warmongering bluster, - the real maggots undermining Western society carry on burrowing away beneath the surface. Uncontrollable economic CRISIS relentlessly deepens.

The exhausting blitzkrieg of propaganda aggressiveness, real arm-twisting threats, but above-all massive corrupt financial bribes which the monopoly-bourgeois ruling-class of the American 'New World Order' are pouring out to try to stitch some plausible 'revenge triumph' together in order to cover up their humiliating defeat,  - is only going to end up making their system's historical disaster even more potentially catastrophic and traumatic than this first pin-prick of misery has been.

The philistine middle-class, ignorantly describing (from far right to fake-'left') this incredible hi-jacking anti-imperialist victory as 'an act of despair' are 100% looking in the wrong direction. It is in this hollow-eyed 'free-world-patriotism' jibbering about going to war "against terrorism" by the West's politicians and on-message fashionable public which is the real despair.

What are these imbeciles on about??????? War "on terrorism"????

Listen to the contradiction at the heart of - not the silliest fascist rhetoric such as "Get Bin Laden dead or alive" or 'He needs bringing to justice, or worse", - but in a typically more serious 'intelligent-journalism' attempt to explain why the armed terrorists who stole the government of Pakistan at gunpoint two years ago, can be reliably and plausibly used as the lynchpin of this already hopelessly cocked-up and mislabelled 'Crusade' and 'Operation Infinite Justice' which is being derided as "infinite injustice" even before it starts:

It was just hours after the attacks in New York and Washington, the Muslim scholar recalled, when two senior officers of Pakistani military intelligence arrived at a dusty compound of mosques and classrooms on the outskirts of Peshawar.

This collection of buildings, scattered along the great road built by the British Raj across the northwest frontier, is an incubator for the Taliban. It hosts 1,200 religious students from Afghanistan and Pakistan, many destined for the ranks of the holy warriors across the border.

The boys were already celebrating the carnage in America when the officers drew up in an unmarked car. The visitors wasted no time in getting to the point. Pakistan's survival was at stake, they informed the clerics. Its nuclear weapons facilities and its missile systems were at that moment under threat: A nation founded on the basis of Islam faced destruction if anyone made a wrong move in the hours and days ahead.

For that reason, the officers said, everyone should mask his true feelings and avoid giving any provocation to the United States. The nation was on the brink of disaster and General Pervez Musharraf, its military ruler, faced the hardest decisions any Pakistani leader had confronted in 30 years, they said.

The clerics obliged, -- up to a point, for Islam provides for dissimulation by the faithful in the event of a threat to their religion. When foreign visitors called later on, the students tried to look solemn. But they chattered delightedly in Urdu and Pushtu about the vengeance of the godly on America.

The nightmare scenario for Pakistan has almost arrived. It is a doomsday reckoning that has lain in the folders of policy planners in western capitals for several years: a bankrupt, turbulent country of 140m, people, armed with nuclear weapons, falls into the hands of fundamentalists.

Bill Clinton risked Osama Bin Laden's terrorists to come here in person last year, precisely, because he wanted to defuse the risks on the subcontinent, accepting the view of the State Department official who called the region "the most dangerous place on earth".

Clinton came and went safely so fearful were his protectors that America's secret service flew a decoy jet into Islamabad airport but the danger has not gone away. In Pakistan, the West is playing for enormous stakes, probably as high as those it played for and lost in the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Pakistan has a far greater concern than the Taliban and their deluded Afghan utopia. It has unfinished business with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. For most Pakistanis, that is the remaining national cause left over from the agonised partition of British India in 1947. Afghanistan's eternal intrigues come a distant second.

Musharraf uses this argument to convince the corps commanders, who are crucial to his power base. Then he turned it upon the critics. If we go against America on Bin Laden's behalf, the government argued, we will risk defeat and national disaster.

Quoting the Koran, Musharraf reached over the heads of the mullahs to tell Pakistanis that they had to choose the lesser evil. "Showing strength without wisdom is a kind of foolishness," he told them.

Musharraf is running an almighty risk. Imran Khan, the former cricket star turned politician, summed up his predicament accurately last week.

"I wonder if the Pakistani army can start shooting its own people," he said. "It is one thing when certain fundamentalist groups exploit a crisis. It is quite another if people all over Pakistan start reacting to what they feel is a huge injustice. In that event, General Musharraf will be unable to do anything."

Musharraf has, so far shown every sign of playing the politics with more skill than many expected of a straight-talking military man with a rumoured penchant for fine malts. Some of the sharpest minds in the Pakistani elite have rallied to his side.

America has also played its hand with unaccustomed skill, admit several Pakistani officials. There has been no public admission of a quid pro quo, but everybody knows that Pakistan is staggering under $38 billion (£26 billion) of external debt and has dismally failed to live up to almost every International Monetary Fund programme ever devised for it.

Musharraf has the chance to cement himself in power, to achieve a new balance with India, to gain economic breathing space and to call the bluff of Pakistan's firebrand clergymen once and for all. There is every sign that Washington is ready to treat Pakistan as generously as it did Turkey and Egypt in the Gulf war of 1991. Last week the American embassy in Islamabad sought $30m in immediate funding for programmes in the country: have $40m (£27.8m) at once, said its paymasters. Sanctions on Pakistan and India, imposed after the 1998 tests, are under review. A great deal hangs in the balance: the future of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent, peace on a subcontinent that is home to more than l billion people, the future map of central Asia. The troops in battledress and the machine-gun nests that appeared around Islamabad airport on Friday said it more clearly than words can: Musharraf's gamble is in deadly earnest and the die has been cast.

Superficially, this is presented as another 'success' for the 'irresistible' combination of American bribery power plus its arm-twisting military might and brutal imperialist ruthlessness to mercilessly wipe out all obstacles in the USA's way once something really matters to America's survival as undisputed world top-dog.

But the bribes themselves are the first and greatest weakness of this scenario, albeit a long-term flaw.

It is this suicidally irresponsible manufacturing of endless monetary credits all round the world for 50 years by US imperialism - to finance on tick every disgusting and disreputable degeneracy imaginable in 180 countries to make sure that they don't "go communist" or support any equivalent "hostility to American interests", etc. - which forms a large part of the insoluble accumulated crisis of 'surplus' capital on earth which now must wreck all profitability everywhere until the vast proportion of those 'surpluses' (and the capital-investment expansions they inevitably lead to) have been wiped out.

Fundamentalist anti-imperialism is a problem because international capitalism is a recipe not for universal happiness and success, but for its exact opposite, for the greatest and most intolerable gap between the rich minority on earth and the poorest Third World billions that can be imagined.

Resistance to imperialism rises up and up as the anarchic economic crisis starts to add industrial slump, market collapses, and total starvation poverty-failure to the already unbearable infinite injustice of the Haves and the Havenots to begin with.

But to quell just one tiny corner of the world, in uproar over the unfairness and the now-incurable economic rottenness of the international 'free-market' system, - vastly more quantities of the same corrupt capital have to pour fuel on the very flames which are burning the planet up in the first place.

If hand-outs and bribes to military dictatorships could have tamed the world to bring it doggie-like to heel to creep along 'flourishing' in the trickle-down dust of America's 'progress', - then why is Pakistan in this mess at all which has just required the umpteenth military coup since 1948 just to keep the lid temporarily on things?

And beyond Pakistan, why are there scores more states in even greater difficulty for maintaining at least some semblance of 'law and order' (that a military coup is contradictorily supposed to provide) and where the total breakdown alternative, leading inexorably on towards communist revolution ultimately, is yet harder to keep at bay??????

The point is that Bin Laden's al-Qaeda irregulars are just the tip of the iceberg, and not remotely the whole avalanche of cold-blooded revolt which is bearing down worldwide on the survival of America's 'free-market' paradise.

And the bribery to stop this particular Fundamentalist squeaky wheel, at this particular squeaky time, is in any case only going to ADD TO capitalism's worldwide problems, not in the slightest solve them. 

And hand-in-hand with this further discharge of easily the most damaging and corrupting pollution of the planet (out of all the pollution that the West's industrial-imperialist system is responsible for), - the financial pollution, - the anarchy of corporate capital venturing continues to see collapse after collapse looming in the markets, presaging bankruptcy after bankruptcy at major multi-national corporate level or even whole industry wide level in the longer term, guaranteeing yet vaster and more intractable international problems of world imperialist control to come.

And apart from being the temporary hero of billions of Third world victims of the imperialist exploitation system, who is Bin Laden anyway?  He is a Yemeni nobody with a completely nutty line in national religious-chauvinist philosophy, whose immigrant family's shop-keeping and trading success in Saudi Arabia provided young Osama with a lippy dislike of the American master-race and some funds with which to dabble as a freelance mercenary. How 'unusual' is that???? There must be 50 million potential Bin Ladens on earth, and 2,000 million potential willing followers of similar defiance. Half the world's population could be standing on the hillside saying "We are all Bin Laden" as Bush demands to know "which folk is Osama?".

And a war "on terrorism"???? Firstly, in that case, wage a war on the US imperialist state itself which is the all-time record-holder and the overwhelming giant of worldwide dirty practices, killing, mass murdering, coup-making, blitzkrieg-bombing, chemically-defoliating, nuclear-poisoning and nuclear-annihilating, napalm-terrorising,, etc, etc, etc, etc, - there is not a single aspect of foul treachery, corrupt sabotage, brutal assassination, fascist power-stealing or bullying tyranny in which American monopoly-capitalist international rule has not set terrorisation standards which put the whole previous history of world hegemonism in the shade. 

Secondly, capitalism's survival would do much better to pretend yet again to wage a war on 'world poverty', as middle-class liberals of every cretinous reformist variety (from far right to far fake-'left') are all anxiously urging. As the world's relative poverty and injustice unstoppably increase as the international economy steadily deteriorates towards a long deep international slump, so will anti-imperialist rebellion of all kinds begin to escalate. And 'terrorist' anti-imperialism struggles will escalate within that rebellion. The imperialist world order is a bucket with an ever-increasing number of holes in it. As all this huge posturing face-saving effort is being made to plug the hole marked Bin Laden, dozens of new holes are being made all the time by the incurable economic anarchy, heading irrevocably towards massive world Depression.

But the American pitch on Pakistan has other serious problems too, beyond that fact that 'controlling' the situation with money in fact means losing more control over the international financial crisis, and beyond the fact that the dictator Musharraf, who grabbed not just an airliner at the point of a gun but grabbed the fifth largest country on earth (with 140 million people and nuclear weapons) by threatening death and destruction to any aspect of 'democracy' that stood in his path, - might achieve his own downfall by this nauseating hypocritical pact with equally-gangster imperialism to "save mankind's freedom".

Pakistan's sub-plot of getting debt-relief, fresh American arms, and international diplomacy Brownie points-by stabbing the like-minds around Taliban in the back, - all in order to secure longer-term ruling-class stability over a volatile economic, social, and political mess via gaining 'national saviour' credibility if these new advantages can be turned into a winning hand against India over the disputed Kashmir territory, - could be the straw which breaks the Indian camel’s back.

Delhi is likewise earning international diplomatic Brownie points at the moment by going along with the farcical hysteria in the West about 'Bin Laden, dead or alive', but the masses there will as much be enjoying Western imperialism's humiliation as anywhere else, and both rulers and ruled will be carefully watching to see how this extravagant warmongering pantomime might seriously affect the real underlying international balance of class and national forces in any way.

A nuclear-armed military-run Pakistan, India's greatest antagonist and rival in regional-national posturing, but one teetering between imminent total failure again, on one side, and 'most-favoured-nation-in-Washington's-eyes' aggressiveness on the other, - could be a troublesome prospect, especially at a time when India's own internal problems from international economic crisis and degeneration will be escalating rapidly.

On top of that, the US rehabilitation of this Pakistani nuclear-armed military dictatorship, - supposedly an international pariah for presumably the 'worst crimes against international peace and disarmament agreements, and against the world democracy order' that could be listed, - will just shoot so many fresh holes in the 'New World order' humbug, that all opportunist villainy creeping along in the coat-tails of the corrupt imperialist system the whole world over, will laugh itself all the way to the money-laundering off-shore bank-haven again, - more brazenly than ever, and more untouchable by 'Western moral leadership and standards' than ever.

Some people in some Western countries may for the moment still be able to keep from bursting out laughing at all the ludicrous and totally insincere hypocrisy that Bush, Blair, and pathetic American flag-wavers and xenophobes are gushing forth in mostly totally manufactured emotion.

But when this self-righteous, bilious, and jingoistic warmongering spasm is looked back to in future, it will be seen as one of the most shaming defining moments of capitalist society's fatal philistinism that sinister political opportunism could have fashioned.

Hitler and Mussolini are easily seen now as grubbily-obscene imperialist-thug monsters play-acting their way towards butchery of opponents of their 'new world order'. Bush and Blair will soon look little better in retrospect for their grotesquely-posturing preparations for their own Third-World blitzkrieg to assert their master-race 'moral superiority'.

Meanwhile, the plot is going very badly. Splits in the international camp of bogus 'anti-terrorism' are rampant. Disgust on the domestic front by people who have retained some rationality about this chauvinist hypocrisy, is reaching breaking point.

As last week's EPSR suggested, the West should worry far more about keeping its 'safe stooge' clients in line like Egypt and Saudi than think up nifty ways to isolate or blackmail 'rogue' states like Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Sudan. So-called 'fundamentalist' hostility to Western imperialist domination of the Middle East is rampant, everywhere.

Yesterday, the capitalist press itself admitted:

Saudi Arabia, fearful of stirring up long-suppressed internal conflicts, yesterday rejected a US request to use its air bases for an offensive against Osama bin Laden.

Saudi officials said the US cannot use the Prince Sultan base, which is host to 4,500 US military personnel and an undisclosed number of planes, for retaliatory attacks. "Saudi Arabia will not accept any infringement on its national sovereignty, but it fully backs action aimed at eradicating terrorism and its causes," said an official, who refused to be identified.

Saudi Arabia, which has 25% of the world's known oil reserves, is of enormous strategic and diplomatic importance to the US and officials are hoping that its support will help to deflect Arab and Muslim criticism of American actions.

But the extent and nature of Saudi support was thrown into confusion by yesterday's statement from the Riyadh government, which has to take into account the reaction from Saudis who support and even help to fund Bin Laden. According to one estimate, 80% of his network's recruits come from the kingdom.

Hegemony

"The Osama bin Laden syndrome is strong in Saudi Arabia," Mai Yamani, a Saudi social anthropologist, told Reuters. "I spoke to young people in Saudi and to my surprise they are very pleased about Osama because they think he is the only one who stands against US hegemony"

The Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef, said yesterday that seven Saudis named by the FBI were innocent. "There are seven names of people who did not participate and are present in the kingdom and who are known [to us];" the official Saudi Press Agency quoted Prince Nayef as saying.

The level of support for radical Islamic groups, including Bin Laden's, is never discussed in public by the Saudi authorities. "They don't want to admit that they have got a dissident problem," said Josh Mandel, of Control Risks, which advises businesses on international risks.

The company places Saudi Arabia, along with Kuwait, in the second of three risk categories - behind Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen. This category is explained, Mr Mandel said, by "Bin Laden connections and the fact that support for Islamic groups is greater than people think'.

The US military presence in the kingdom has always been controversial, even among mainstream Muslims, who regard the Arabian peninsula as holy soil, not to be defiled by unbelievers. In 1990, when it seemed that Iraq might attempt to invade Saudi Arabia as well as Kuwait, King Fahd broke with tradition and allowed US forces in.

"For all the billions spent on the latest weapons technology, when it came to the crunch, Saudi Arabia's first and only line of defence was the Americans," a former British diplomat in the region said. "It was humiliating and it struck a chord which Bin Laden was able to tap into."

After the Gulf war the US forces remained, as part of the policy of containing Iraq. Saad al-Fagih, of the London-based opposition group, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, said: "The Saudi government's insistence on keeping US military forces there is seen as a direct insult, a continuing irritant and a challenge to Muslims in Saudi Arabia. People look at the US as conspiring with the royal family to loot the country's resources." Dr Fagih claims that 80% of Bin Laden's recruits in the last three years have come from Saudi Arabia.

A British expert on Islamist movements disputes the figure but agrees on the general trend. He attributes this partly to a collapse of internal opposition in the kingdom. "The people who would be drawn to radical causes have lost a voice. They can't effectively engage in domestic campaigns, so they look elsewhere, but they are often inspired by circumstances in their own country" he said. The expert, who asked not to be named, added that the predominant trend among radicals is towards salafi views, which are close to those of Bin Laden.

"The salafi interpretation of Islam emerges from the Hanbali school of Islamic law, which is one of the most literalistic. It has a strict puritanical vision.

"Salafis look back to the way the first three generations of Muslims behaved, which they use as a prism for viewing the Koran and the hadith [the traditions of the Prophet]."

By reverting to - in their eyes - the purest form of Islam, salafis reject nation states and man-made laws in western provinces of Asir and Najran, where many people - like Bin Laden - are of Yemeni descent. Salafi views are also popular among Islamist radicals in Yemen itself. The Islamic Army of Aden Abyan, which kidnapped a group of mainly UK tourists in 1998, was led by a salafi with Afghan connections.

During the 1990s, the southern Saudi provinces came to be regarded as a hotbed of support for Islamist struggles in Bosnia and Chechnya. Others aligned themselves with Bin Laden.

"After the Nairobi embassy bombing and the US response, which gave Bin Laden a big name, many people from the south flocked to Afghanistan," Dr Fagih said.

Apart from providing fighters, Saudi Arabia is a major source of funds for Islamist guerrillas, including Bin Laden. Much of this money comes from respectable Saudis. The system of zakat - one of the five "pillars" of Islam -   requires Muslims to donate 2.5% of their wealth each year to good causes. This has produced large numbers of well-endowed charities in the kingdom but some funds have been diverted to support armed struggles, and Bin Laden is widely regarded as a beneficiary.

In 1995, under international pressure, the Saudi government set up a committee to police the charities, though there are doubts about its effectiveness. As part of the campaign against Bin Laden, analysts expect the US to press for a more serious clampdown but the risk is that some will interpret this as a further attack on Islam.

The repeated unthinking and insensitive clumsiness of the imperialist-thug Bush who philistinely finds it fun to play-act his way shallowly through these momentous developments in world politics, has possibly even out-done his 'Crusade', 'Dead or Alive?' and 'Infinite Justice' fascist or sacrilegious gaffes with his streetcorner cheap snarl: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists".

Even half the world's 'decent, law-abiding' citizens at that point rushed to one side to declare: "We are ALL terrorists now." Who wants to be identified with the uncultured, murderous, election-stealing sleaze of US mafia-imperialism's first-family in power-grasping, reaction-encouraging, and corruption-dispensing.

Even the feudal Saudi tyranny of public hanging and flogging for trivial 'moral' and property offences, has sufficient human awareness and self-respect not to want to appear too publicly associated with the "shoot first, ask questions after" lynch-mentality of the southern USA's slave-owning traditions.

Ignorant fake-'left' posturing has alone joined belligerent imperialist disinformation to try to brand this 'fundamentalist' anti-imperialist struggle as 'fascist'. The strong element of religious-nationalist reaction in this fight against Western domination obviously cannot be seen as part of civilisation's future which has to be communist-materialist; but neither is it ruled out as a legitimate part (because it is actually happening, here and now) of cultural-national resistance to monopoly-imperialist exploitation.

The big question is what is 'fascism', and where does it come from? And there is only one historical answer to this, and cast-iron proof of it. If fascist posturing had not been inseparable from aggressive imperialist expansionism, it would have been even more of a sick, failed, 'master-race' historical obscenity than farcically actually took place.

If Germany, Italy, and Japan had not been rising imperialist powers, belatedly arriving on the colonial-empire scene but with every bit as much 'advanced-nation' culture, confidence, and political know-how as the already dominant colonial powers such as France, Britain, and Holland, etc, - then the national-pride and national self-assertiveness 'argument' by Germany & Co for 'a place in the sun', 'lebensraum', etc, etc, would have been even more completely insufferable gibberish than it ended up as in any case (because the imperialist-colonial epoch ITSELF was coming to an end with the rise of the world revolutionary communist movement).

Bin Ladenism is going nowhere, has demanded no 'master-race' place in the sun, and is not going to capture and occupy any colonies.

The only seriously fascist ingredients in this whole disgusting 'free world' shame and disaster are the would-be murderous ruthlessness of the arbitrary blitzkrieging indiscriminate slaughter which most US political leaders would LIKE to inflict if they thought they could get away with it; and the actual factual master-race colonial-imperialist aggressive genocide and land-seizure eviction of a whole nation from its homeland which the Zionist-fascist movement is inflicting on Palestine, and which is the blatant direct grievance with the Western imperialist camp which is driving these Third World resistance movements to these dramatically extreme suicidal bombing measures in order to fight for their rights to be recognised to freedom from imperialist domination.

Similarly, 'terrorism' is not some primitive disease or condition from which only unpleasant or backward people suffer; as much barmy moralising bourgeois propaganda tries to describe it. 'Terror' is simply a pejorative description by establishment garbage-speak for any resistance to overwhelming repression or domination. Necessarily, this is often likely to be of an arbitrary, individual, desperate, suicidal nature because of the extremely difficult or demoralising conditions for any fighting back spirit.

Under colonial tyranny or fascist occupation, such battling heroism is known as guerrilla-war or the resistance struggle.

Blowing-up headquarter buildings or derailing whole trains (regardless of there doubtless being 'innocent' casualties involved too) is the stuff of Hollywood and Pinewood's whole culture.

The spectacular volume of innocent casualties from the 'anti-imperialists' New York strike does not alter the 'terror' epithet from being just the usual subjective self-righteousness in all bourgeois propaganda and ruling-class self-preservation.

What is really happening is quite simple. The exploited Third World has never stopped being at war with imperialist domination, whether via direct colonial tyranny or via local Western-stooge dictatorships or fraudulently 'democratic' regimes equally on the take and equally dependent on CIA-orchestrated counter-revolution for survival.

And the one quite open source of fascist-warmongering in this whole affair has been the blood-curdling call for the CIA 'covert operations' or terror-warfare department, to "start playing more dirty", as though its entire historical record was not already just one 1ong spine-chilling account of virtually Nazi-style inhumanity and tyranny - as the capitalist press itself is quite smugly content to admit at this time when even the SWP/Alliance Trots, Revisionists, and other bogus 'revolutionary' anti-communist sects are helping the West's Goebbels propaganda to scream "appalling terror-horror to be deplored by everyone" at these epoch-making attempts by the Third World to at last fight back against the universal 'New World Order' domineering:

Four years ago, details emerged of a CIA plot in the early 1950s to train assassins to kill at least 58 political leaders in Guatemala. The murders proved unnecessary after a successful coup. In 1963 a CIA-backed military coup overthrew the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, who was assassinated. 

Meanwhile, the agency's Operation Mongoose was one of many efforts to assassinate President Fidel Castro of Cuba. Methods verged on the farcical - an exploding cigar, spiking a milkshake and administering poison that would make his hair fall out. After accusations of American complicity in the death of President Salvador Allende of Chile the Congress forbade the CIA from plotting assassination. Since then, America has never admitted targeting a foreigner, but there have been suggestions that constraints have led America to rely on British units for their "wet work". 

David Shayler, the former M15 officer, claimed Britain had paid £100,000 to back an assassination attempt against Gadaffi.

These tactics were alluded to by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week in a triumph of evasion as 'the other things' - components of what he called the 'shadow war'. On Wednesday, as Rumsfeld addressed a briefing for Pentagon reporters, he told them of things that might be done that the reporters and public would never know about, raising concerns of a return to operations such as the Iran-Contra arms sales scandal - conducted without oversight and beyond the pale of political accountability.

While few would argue that US intelligence agencies - which failed signally to deter the catastrophic attacks on 11 September despite forewarnings - should be overhauled, critics fear a return to the darkest days of the CIA, including its support for General Augusto Pinochet's murderous coup and its alleged involvement in the killing of Congo's Marxist leader, Patrice Lumumba. Already it seems certain that - as reported by The Observer last week - the Bush administration will lift the ban on foreign assassinations by US agents or those working for them introduced in 1976 by President Gerald Ford after he discovered details of a CIA plot to kill the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has already thrown his weight behind demands - from the likes of Senator Richard Shelby of the House Intelligence Committee – to review the ban. Last week the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, confirmed that the executive order 'was under review'.

Pressure is also growing from senators and officials for a loosening of the tight controls on phone taps to allow easier surveillance of potential suspects within the United States, moves being met with growing concern by civil rights activists. The review of the assassination ban is the most visible sign of a sea change in US attitudes towards its intelligence community, marking a retreat from the recent portrayal of the work of the intelligence services, via their websites, as a wholesome career for the brightest young university graduates.

One model likely to be under consideration is that of the Israeli intelligence services - Mossad and Shin Bet - which have matched a high counter-terrorism kill rate with an unpleasant reputation on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli undercover operations have traditionally put a heavy reliance on old-fashioned intelligence fieldwork, including blackmail and paying informers substantial salaries (by local standards) to spy on their Palestinian neighbours. Informers are then used to set up so-alled 'targeted assassinations' including car bombs, missile attacks and sniper shootings - and to identify suspects for the army undercover snatch squads of Dov Devan, the Cherry Brigade. Critics will point out, however, that even the unreconstructed approach of Mossad and Shin Bet has done little to deter Palestinian attacks.

According to a Democratic staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Bob Graham, there is broad agreement that the US needs to get back to the basics.

The staffer, who asked not to be identified, told The Observer: 'As far as repealing the ban on assassinations goes, Senator Graham and the committee are in favour of repealing it, although, because it is an executive directive, the President can do that on his own. Another aspect we are going to have to deal with is that we are going to have to get into the corrupt business of dealing with the really dirty folk - some of whom may have been involved in terrorism themselves - if we are going to get them over to our side.'

Senior Republicans are insisting that the rules on checking informants' pasts before hiring them be abolished by legislation, if the executive branch does not act soon, allowing the CIA to recruit agents with criminal records or records in terrorism. And while US intelligence insiders are said to be dubious about whether an end to the assassination ban would have helped stop the 11 September atrocity, they argue that what is really needed is more money for additional case officers with which to pay informants, and agents.

The emerging-intelligence doctrine is not without its critics, who say a return to the kind of dirty operations that made the CIA notorious, and seen throughout Asia, Africa and South ,and Central America, would undermine America's moral claims in the war against terrorism.

The disclosures about the new direction that US intelligence is being asked to take comes against the background of emerging concern over the massive failures in intelligence by the FBI and CIA, who - it is claimed - had been warned in August that as many as 200 terrorists were slipping into the US and were planning 'a major assault on the United States'.

According to a senior law enforcement official, the warning, issued by Mossad, cautioned that it had picked up indications of a 'large-scale target' in the US and that Americans would be 'very vulnerable'. The official added that the warning was linked 'to Afghanistan and [exiled Saudi militant] Osama bin Laden'.

But the most immediate problem now facing America's intelligence community, say insiders, is a shortage of expertise on Afghanistan and credible agents on the ground in an area intelligence-sources say has been difficult to penetrate. Indeed, evidence of how US agencies were rushing to catch up came when FBI Director Robert Mueller publicly solicited resumés from Arabic and Farsi speakers.

The hiring of 'agents' with criminal records is simply code-speak for the hiring of simple common cut-throats worldwide from every gangland hell-hole on earth just to do the CIA's political assassinations for money so as to give the "intelligence service of the world's greatest democracy" convenient deniability when these Nazi-style fascist outrages get discovered.

The xenophobic street-terror against Muslims or Asiatics, etc, which has broken out all round the Western world, is a direct companion of this Nazi-fascist character of this 'free world' hysteria behind the insane notion to "wage war on terrorism".

And this CIA which is to be entrusted with a licence to kill almost any "enemy of freedom" it deems fit to be rubbed out, is the selfsame CIA which in another aspect of whipped-up public vengeance in the USA, is precisely being blamed by 59% of mass opinion as being "to blame" for the New York catastrophe because of its hopeless "intelligence" failure.

Despite its vast worldwide personnel and its virtually unlimited billion-dollar budgets all the time, this utterly bankrupt "intelligence" agency is now being urged by the Western consensus to redouble its already murderous 'covert operations' war against anti-imperialists worldwide, and to go out and do even more killing against God-knows which innocent victims. But the only 'terror' to be condemned by Socialist Alliance motion-passing is this astonishingly heroic and devastating guerrilla-war suicidal action by the hi-jackers in the USA.

Mass political revolution for a new proletarian economic and social order remains the sole way forward for all civilisation in the long run, but the fake-'left' traitors of the Socialist Alliance who cowardly fingered the anarchist street-fighters in Genoa, blaming them as being the 'cause' of the police murderous violence inflicting terror on the anti-globalisation rally, (CPGB, etc, a slander now disgracefully echoed by Scargill's Stalinist stooges in Lalkar - details to follow), and then told the Fundamentalists that they were only "strengthening" the imperialist position, - need to explain how the serious ructions between Washington and its Zionist-fascist stooges have arisen, - as here admitted by capitalism's own reports:

By the end of the week, it was clear that it would be near impossible to build a coalition of the breadth of the one the president's father had rallied against Iraq in 1990, unless there was tangible progress in stopping the fighting in the occupied territories. President Bush called Mr Sharon, asking him to accept a meeting with Mr Arafat, in the long term interests of the war against terrorism: According to US sources, the conversation was inconclusive. Mr Sharon resented Israel's enforced passivity in the 1991 Gulf war, absorbing Scud attacks without response in the interests of the coalition's cohesion. It left Israel looking timid, he complained. He could not make the same mistake.

The Israeli prime minister gave his answer on Saturday. He called off a meeting arranged for Sunday between Mr Arafat and his doveish foreign minister, Shimon Peres. and tried to press the advantage handed to him on the first day by the damaging pictures of celebrating Palestinians.

"It is inconceivable to grant [Yasser Arafat] legitimacy because someone thinks that might facilitate the inclusion of Arab countries in this coalition," Mr Sharon told the Israeli newspaper Yedloth Aharonoth. "We will not pay the price for the establishment of this coalition."

He ordered the creation of a buffer zone on Palestinian land in the West Bank, closed to all Palestinians except local farmers, justifying the move as part of Israel's own struggle against terrorism and Mr Arafat -  the "Bin Laden of the Middle East".

The Israeli rebuff caused outrage In the White house, cooling - perhaps permanently - the administration's hitherto admiring view of Mr Sharon. The US had after all lost more people in a single day than Israel had in decades of terrorism.

The weekend was a turning point, at which Jordan's King Abdullah and Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, played critical roles. No doubt aware of the implications of Mr Sharon's error of judgement, they took a hard line.

Mr Mubarak went on CNN at prime time on Monday to say that President Bush had personally promised him that he would be "very active" in trying to arrange a ceasefire between the two sides.

"But what I'm seeing now is the Israeli government is seizing the opportunity an launching attacks now and then," the Egyptian leader said "This will have terrible repercussions after that."

King Abdullah went on record as saying that the attacks on the US would not have happened if Washington had resolved the problems in the Middle East, especially the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The Jordanians and Egyptians agreed to meet in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh yesterday to cement their common stand, and the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, representing another pivotal member of the Gulf coalition, is expected there today.

The leader of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Zaid bin Sultan al-Nahayan; said the coalition could only work if the US avoided "double standards" The US should stop the "terrorist" Israeli actions in the occupied Palestinian territories". His words carried clout, as the UAE hosts one of the few Taliban diplomatic offices in the world.

The threat that coalition-building would stall in the Middle East produced another, sterner call to Mr Sharon on Monday. It is not known whether Mr Bush reminded the Israeli leader of the $3bn subsidy the US pays to Israel annually. Israelis keenly remember the withdrawal of US loan guarantees by Mr Bush's father. It helped to push a reluctant Israeli government to the negotiating table in Madrid.

President George Bush last night overcame a major hurdle to building an international coalition against terrorism when he forced the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, to agree to a long-sought Middle East ceasefire.

He used America's enormous economic and political clout to bring Mr Sharon in particular to heel, fearful that Israeli incursions into the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza during the past week would wreck his attempts to include Arab and other Muslim countries in the coalition.

As part of a total rethink of the Bush administration's foreign policy since the New York and Washington attacks, the president is taking a tougher line with Israel in an attempt to secure a speedy end to a conflict that feeds Arab hatred of the United States.

The Israeli foreign ministry confirmed that the ceasefire opened the way to a long awaited meeting, previously blocked by Mr Sharon, between the foreign minister, Shimon Peres, and Mr Arafat before the end of the week.

In an indication of the extent to which patience with Mr Sharon had ended, a British Foreign Office senior source yesterday described Mr Sharon as "the cancer at the centre of the Middle East crisis". US and European diplomats will follow up the cease-fire with a huge campaign over the next few weeks, with a procession of foreign ministers heading for Israel and the Palestinian Authority to try to make the agreement stick.

Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who has been more critical of Israel than his predecessor, Robin Cook, and who protested to Israel last week over the incursions into Jenin, Jericho and Ramallah, said: "All of us have been deeply disturbed by the escalating violence in the region in the last week.'

In the past few days, there has been enormous telephone traffic between Washington and Jerusalem and Mr Arafat's headquarters in Gaza.

If the ceasefire holds, the next step will be to implement a peace plan set out earlier this year by the former US senator George Mitchell.

Under the plan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority will begin implementing confidence-building measures. Then, after a few weeks, the two sides would return to the negotiating table to discuss the issues that divide them.

The Mitchell plan is for UN observers to permanently police the anti-colonisation war in Palestine, a proposal utterly detested and feared by the Zionists.  

It is still reformist crap and a non-starter from a Marxist point of view (see endless past EPSRs), but the splits in the imperialist camp and the deeply-worried alarm among the Zionists could not be plainer. The dominant imperialist status quo in Occupied Palestine has been seriously disturbed and rattled. So how is imperialism "only strengthened" by the attack on New York as far as this crucial Palestinian issue is concerned????

The CPGB has returned to its counter-revolutionary vomit in its latest Weekly Worker to repeatedly stress that Washington’s "forcing" of Sharon to ceasefire, plus all the other frantic arm-twisting, bribery, censorship, Goebbels-propaganda hysteria, and fascist CIA preparations, etc, are all signs of "imperialism strengthening its position".

Anything more crassly wrong is inconceivable, betraying a non-dialectical ignorance of the capitalist epoch which is beyond belief.

And all because of these anti-communists’ pathetic cretinous faith in petty-bourgeois 'democracy' which blinds them to the obvious historical reality that democracy, while once capitalism's greatest political triumph, ended up as the monopoly-imperialist bourgeoisie's most devastating and formidable weapon of working-class control and castration.

In current circumstances, it is a sign of the imperialist ruling class's great WEAKNESS whenever it has to resort to dumb bullying force to get its way, - always a sign of its great uncertainty and insecurity whenever it has to resort to censorship and street-fascism in order to survive political upheavals and difficulties.

Pretending to live or die by accepting the political verdicts of 'free and fair democracy' is imperialism's greatest con-trick but its greatest STRENGTH. All elections are a bought fraud, and can never be anything else. They can be fought from the tribunes only in order to expose more prominently what a giant racket the whole of capitalist 'democracy' really is.

Imperialism always goes towards fascism when its regime is losing credibility and in real danger of losing control to real working-class socialist revolution.

Fascist tyranny puts imperialism then temporarily back more firmly into the saddle, but ONLY AT AN ENORMOUS EVENTUAL COST.

War-tyranny and limited 'democracy' lost capitalism its first great defeat in 1917.

Fascist warmongering's even savager assaults on 'democracy' in World War II saw bourgeois imperialism lose control over even more of the planet in the end.

This CPGB panic about Bush's "serious warmongering business" is defeatist brain-rot. Horrors and unpleasantness on a very vast scale were always going to be the character of Western imperialism's end, but it is on the way to TOTALLY LOSING IT that Bush & Co’s disgusting and degenerate assault on all logic and reason is beginning to appal all thinking people everywhere.

The worst mistake of all is for the fake-'left' not to see that it is only in further DEFEAT and HUMILIATION at the far end of all this insane warmongering hysteria that imperialism starts to become seriously vulnerable to organised working class political, social, and economic overthrow.

To miss the all-round shattering of imperialist confidence and clear signs of vulnerability that the Fundamentalists' audacious and heroic guerrilla war assault so dramatically demonstrated to the world, is to miss the whole point of being alive to history's inexorably eventually-triumphant anti-imperialist class spirit.

As explained above, Fundamentalism is clearly only a non-progressive reaction against Western imperialist domination, and as such cannot possibly take civilisation forward. But for so-called CPGB 'anti-imperialists' to declare that these tragically heroic suicide bombers are "the enemy" when the whole Third World is still rejoicing in their astonishing guerrilla-war feats, - is merely to explain what a counter-revolutionary fraud has been the whole modern Revisionist tradition.

Build Leninism. EPSR 

(Lies the fake-'left' is spinning, distorting Lenin on terror and on Islamic anti-imperialism, will be analysed next issue).

	World socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Bush fuels the war against Cuba

President George W. Bush announced the intensification of various anti-Cuban measures already in place.

As he stated, the objective is to make the blockade provisions even more rigorous in relation to remittances to families on the island and curtailing visits from the United States to Cuba to the maximum.

Other aspects include converting cultural and humanitarian exchanges into instruments of subversive politics, upping Radio and TV Martí transmissions and increasing government aid to "independent" groups it fosters on the island.

The president noted that he had asked the Treasury Department to fortify and expand the offices responsible for applying sanctions in effect against Havana.

He highlighted the importance of maintaining and applying the law as far as possible so as to prevent 'excessive' or unlicensed trips to Cuba, of limiting remittances sent and ensuring that cultural and humanitarian exchanges really reach activists working for 'democracy' in Cuba.

Bush added that the White House would extend its backing to 'human rights' activists and the 'democratic' opposition, as well as additional funds for non-governmental organizations working with 'pro-democratic programs'  in Cuba.

In relation to the so-called Radio and TV Martí transmissions, financed by the U.S. government and controlled by Miami gorillas, he confirmed that once the flow of 'information' on the island is promoted, claims for 'freedom' will be stronger than ever.

Bush's announcement came 72 hours before he was due to suspend or instigate the application of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, related to arraignments in U.S. courts of foreign business people with investments in Cuba, even in favor of murderers, torturers and corrupt politicians in the service of the Batista dictatorship.

An AFP agency analysis emphasized that applying that title would push the United States into a new confrontation with the European Union, in addition to a large number of transatlantic contentions over trading issues, the environment and the antimissile defense system.

Alongside that, since 1992 when the Torricelli Amendment was passed, the UN General Assembly has annually backed with growing force a resolution calling for an end of the U.S. blockade of Cuba.

These contretemps with his allies, the evident diplomatic isolation suffered on this front and growing internal opposition to that policy are also forcing Bush to assume a realistic position in relation to the above-mentioned Title III of the Helms-Burton Act.

This section of the legislation maintains its full effect and for the last five years has been employed as a crude form of blackmail of the European Union and other U.S. allies, a marked aspect since its first freezing.

This occurred on July 16, 1996 at a White House venue, where Peter Tamoff, undersecretary of state for political affairs, and Sandy Berger, national security advisor, explained why they would not enforce the title in practice for six months.

Berger stated that they would work aggressively with their allies and companies around matters uniting them, with the aim of promoting change in the nature of the Cuban regime so that when the six months were up there would be a presidential decision concerning those companies and governments.

They placed backing for "independent" groups on the island among the plan's main objectives, and Tamoff acknowledged that disagreements between Washington and the European Union in relation to Title III had hindered those goals.

Its extraterritorial nature was unacceptable to governments allied to the United States, as the Europeans have just reiterated, and that fact has pushed Bush.

However, given that he is heavily linked to extreme-right groups of Cuban origin in Miami, he is veering toward suspending Title III once again, while intensifying U.S. policy on Cuba in an effort not to displease them.

As a mission of prime order, he needs the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) to help guarantee the re-election of his brother Jeb Bush as governor of Florida in the 2002 partial elections. That's why he is playing both ends.

This helps to better explain the CANF influence in Miami where, in grand mafia style, political life moves at their whim and judges, juries and local journalists are bought, hired or blackmailed with the same ease as lighting a cigarette.

Yet another naked display of real U.S. democracy in relation to how they manufacture relations with Cuba, and of the behavior of Bush, steadily more resembling a gangster in the guise of a president.  

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles)

Race-hate Loyalists sums up all the rottenness of the bankrupt imperial era that Bush now wants to excuse

The RUC operation to afford the children protection had been woefully inadequate, if not down right half hearted. Children, many as young as four and five, had wept and screamed in bewilderment and fear as loyalists hurled their particular brand of hate.

"Scum, scum, scum," the mob had chanted. Catholic parents had been told to "get that Fenian Bastard out of here". Catholic mothers were subjected to particularly nasty sexual verbal abuse. Distressed, and by then also desperate, parents had pulled their crying children close, many covering their ears and eyes as if this could somehow shield them from the worst excesses of hatred in which they had been unwittingly plunged. "I didn't expect it to be as bad as this," one parent said.

Pelted with stones, bottles and fireworks, the children had arrived at Holy Cross hysterical and too afraid to stay. A teacher described a child cowering in a corner and others hiding under desks as the mob outside continued to lay siege to the school gates. Newly-appointed parish priest, Fr Aidan Troy, who had accompanied parents and children on the route to the school, described the journey as "beyond my worst nightmare".

"I have been in many troubled areas in the world," said Fr Troy. "In 30 years of being a priest, I have never seen anything like this."

And the scenes had been heartbreaking. As news broadcasters flashed the images across the world, they were watched by thousands, perhaps millions, of people, but most particularly by northern nationalists. Sectarianism in whatever form is always ugly, but stripped of all pretence, it is hideous.

British journalists, upon whom the mantle of apologist for unionism has rested so comfortably for years, repeatedly focused their hostility towards nationalist parents. "Just why were they subjecting their children to such an ordeal?"

Traumatised mothers and their children were hauled up before the cameras by a media still running along the parallel tracks of the 'two tribes' model. Increasingly desperate commentators tried to build a picture of events in which both sides were equally blameworthy.

But how could the images of the baying mob, hurling insults and missiles, be equated with the tear-stained faces of terrified children, some barely more than babies? The story had already careered off the rails. The power relationship of oppressed and oppressor had been exposed by the display of naked sectarianism captured on screen, just as it had been in Alabama decades ago.

And sadly, while loyalists, caught up in rivalry between various paramilitary groups, may well have orchestrated this, there appears to have been no shortage of Protestant residents willing to attach themselves to the cause. Screaming sectarian abuse in front of cameras caused no visible sign of shame amongst many Glenbryn residents, who appeared totally immune or unaware of their own despicable behaviour.

Brazen-faced in her bigotry, a resident old enough to be a grandmother demanded to know "why should there be four Fenian schools in a Protestant area?" No pretence here that this was something other than what we can see before our own eyes.

This is not David Ervine's 'cry for help and understanding'. There are no 'great complexities' as suggested by Church of Ireland Primate Robin Eames, too difficult for outsiders to comprehend, as some unionist politicians and commentators have suggested. This is the white supremacist calling the black a 'nigger'.

So what if the object of their racist venom just happens to be a four-year-old  whose only 'crime' is walking to school past their front door? What's the big deal? A Fenian is a Fenian from the day it is born.

And should we really be surprised by this shocking display of hatred and intolerance? For decades, anti-Catholic sectarianism has been fostered and utilised in the interests of British occupation in the North. If the residents of Glenbryn have no shame, it is because they have been shamefully used.

And many loyalist leaders, like Billy Hutchinson, are intelligent enough to know this. They lack, not insight, but the political will to lead their constituency out of this cul de sac of reaction.

Offering comfort and support, local priests, teachers and members of the school's board of governors join parents and pupils as they wait to walk to school,

As the decision is taken to set off, some of the children collapse into tears and panic and are taken home. Others, pale with fear, cling to mothers and fathers who remain calm despite their own visible anxiety.

The RUC and British Army have decided that only parents and pupils will be allowed to walk the 400-yard stretch along the Ardoyne Road to Holy Cross School. Even a clear view of the road has been obscured. Relatives, friends and neighbours stand aside.

Everyone is very aware that this ordeal will not only be faced by some of the most vulnerable and defenceless members of this community but that they will be facing it alone. Cut off from their own neighbourhood, parents and pupils are now totally dependant for their protection upon the discredited RUC and a hostile army of occupation. Some of those left behind are already tearful, and everyone is afraid.

A threat against Catholic parents, issued the night before in the name of the Red Hand Defenders, adds to the tension. Just minutes earlier, the sound of an explosion ripped through the air as a blast bomb was thrown further along the Ardoyne Road. From behind the cordon, another blast is heard and within minutes a number of ambulances begin to arrive.

Unable to see or communicate with their relatives, people in the waiting crowd begin to panic. Fathers, who had been persuaded it would be less provocative if they stayed behind, scramble onto the top of armoured cars and Land Rovers in a desperate attempt to find out what is happening.

News filters down that the children have arrived at school unhurt and the crowd settles. Now all we have to do is to get them home safely when the school day, ends and then tomorrow the process starts over again.

As parents and children make their way along the Ardoyne Road loyalists gathered at a junction within the Glenbryn Estate throw a pipe bomb, packed with shrapnel. Falling just a few feet short of its intended target, the bomb explodes, injuring four RUC officers. A mother screams, "Oh God, Oh God," and runs, dragging her terrified child away from the junction. Other mothers and their children cry out and begin to run.

Fr Troy stands at the junction, arms raised as he tries to calm traumatised parents, now terrified for the safety of their children. The scene is one of hysteria and panic. "This is carnage," says Fr Troy. "It is beyond belief."

Inside the school grounds, teachers try to comfort pupils and parents. 'This is attempted murder," one tearful mother says. " They tried to murder babies and the mothers of babies today."

"It was absolute chaos," says Philomena Flood, who was walking with her seven-year-old daughter Erin when the attack took place. "There were children everywhere and we were trying to grab our own and get to school."

Outside and amidst the ranks of loyalist protestors, John White of the Ulster Democratic Party and Billy Hutchinson of the Progressive Unionist Party both condemned the attack. "I am totally ashamed to be a loyalist today," says Billy Hutchinson, calling for the loyalist protest to end.

"It was disgraceful that any situation should come to this," says John White choosing his words carefully, before accusing the RUC of "attacking innocent people". 

For decades, northern nationalists have been forced to run the gauntlet of sectarian hatred, but in the words of Minister for Education Martin McGuinness, the time when nationalists will sit at the back of the bus or go by the back door are gone and gone for good. If the Good Friday Agreement is to mean anything it has to mean an end to sectarian harassment and discrimination, and for the little girls of Holy Cross, the right to walk to school unmolested.