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 

No 1164  December 10 2002

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The lying stupidity of the Blairs in concealing their dealings with crooks and conmen of every variety is the LEAST alarming thing about capitalist-system degeneracy which is herding people towards the greatest slump and war suffering in history. The cynical Bush/Blair warmongering carve-up (to excuse economic failure with the terrorism hysteria diversion) is sickening even bourgeois reactionaries. But panic as policy is as doomed to failure and revolt-rejection as is Shamanism in Downing Street. US bullies UN into dirty work of bribing defectors to spout whatever garbage about Iraq that $100 million will buy. US trade-war notions in addition will dump Blairite Britain into a more humiliating dungheap of farcical failure than anyone could make up. The eventual dollar collapse will do the same for most of the entire ‘free’-world.

The worsening situation for Western crisis has suddenly lurched dramatically lower with the admitted failure of American economic policy; the humiliation of the Blairs and Blairism; and the open ridicule now rising against imperialist warmongering from every quarter.

The brutal sacking of US Treasury Secretary O'Neill and White House economic adviser Lindsey, from the abrupt way it was done, cannot be interpreted as "merely accommodating policy change" or "ensuring better results" in the way that the comatose bourgeois press is doing.

Such a bruising is plainly a furious panic measure.

The Bush monopoly mafiosi clearly want things to change urgently; but with no immediate replacements in position or announced, and little conveyed about which new directions to take, the obvious assumption is that a hopelessly inadequate regime has just begun to fear what a disastrous economic mess their system is SEEN to be in.

A leap in the level of unemployment in the USA was the supposed "final straw for White House patience", but with instant gossip for "new initiatives" only about more tax cuts and a weaker dollar, then a spectre emerges of this Bush regime being utterly bankrupt as far as "serious and responsible economic theory" is concerned, and interested only in aggressive trade-war as "securing the American interest" in the most highly damaging way imaginable, - an extension into the international products market's difficulties of the Texan gunslinger's "those-who-aren't-with-us-are-against-us" crude warmongering.

The capitalist press noted the aggressiveness, and speculated about how the gloomy overall assessment might be awful news for New Labour’s mindless assumptions that a return to worldwide boom conditions would rescue its pie-in-the-sky spending programme from disaster in 2004.

But either naively or insanely trustingly, there was no comment on the catastrophic trade-war implications of the USA playing the currency-devaluation card to make' its exports cheaper, all imports to the USA more expensive, and let world trade (which is virtually dependent on fat-arsed American credit accounts sucking in the 'surplus' products of the entire planet) collapse completely:

George Bush performed a night of the long knives on his economic team yesterday as the White House took fright at the deteriorating state of the US and world economy.

On a day which saw a sharp rise in US unemployment and a big drop in British factory output, Mr Bush forced the resignations of his treasury secretary, PauI O'Neill, and the White House economic adviser, Larry Lindsey.

The move was seen by Wall Street as an attempt to clear the decks for a more aggressive economic policy, including tax cuts, that will prevent Mr Bush from following his father into the history books as a one-term US president.

Dean Baker, the director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, said: "You can have odd characters like ONeill and Lindsey in the first two years, when not at war. But if you want to have everyone singing the same song if you do go to war and there is an election coming up, then these two were out of line.”

Washington has been alive with rumours for months that Mr Bush was not happy with the increasingly vain attempts of his plain-speaking treasury secretary to talk up the stockmarket and the US economy.

Interest rates have been cut 12 times over the last two years to a 41-year low of 1.75%, but the fragility of the US recovery was underlined by the surprise jump in the jobless rate yesterday to a nine-year high of 6%.

The evidence of renewed weakness in the world's largest economy will cause alarm in Britain, where the chancellor, Gordon Brown, is counting on a strong international rebound, led by the US, to boost the UK.

Mr Brown cut forecasts for growth this year and next in last week's preBudget report, but City economists and independent experts have warned that his downgraded estimates still look too optimistic. Labour's ambitious public spending plans could be at risk if the economy fails to notch up strong growth by 2004.

With the White House fearful that President Bush's reputation could be tarnished by economic weakness, Wall Street analysts said last night that Mr O'Neill was being eased out in favour of a more aggressive approach to both tax cuts and the dollar.

Mr O'Neill's upbeat view of the economy put him at odds with the president in recent months, with Mr Bush apparently losing patience with his treasury secretary's reluctance to cut taxes further to stimulate the economy. There was also speculation last night that the new team at the treasury would quietly abandon America's "strong dollar" policy, in the hope that a cheaper currency would boost exports and help reduce the record US trade deficit.

Stephen Jen, economist at Morgan Stanley, said: "The strong US dollar policy has clearly outlived its usefulness.” Mr O'Neill's replacement would be more willing to leave the markets to decide the value of the dollar, rather than emphasising the government's preference for it to be strong.

The White House's downbeat assessment of the economy was supported by figures released by the US department of labour which showed a 40,000 decline in non-farm payrolls in November, and a jump in the unemployment rate from 5.7% to 6%.

"It's a very weak report. This is telling you we have a weakening labour market," said Asha Bangalore, economist at Northern Trust in Chicago. The detail of the figures showed 45,000 manufacturing workers were laid off, and retailers cut 39,000 jobs, suggesting they are cautious about the prospects for the crucial preChristmas trading period.

Further pressure on consumer spending is likely to come from a decrease in the rate of growth of average earnings from 3% to 2.8%, the lowest level since May 1995.

The gloomier outlook for jobs in the US comes despite an emergency cut in interest rates by the Federal Reserve to a 40-year low of 1.25% early last month. With separate data for retail sales and manufacturing orders last week also showing the economy running out of steam, there was speculation last night that the Fed would cut again.

Massaging the dollar down and the price up for all imports into the USA, could be as clear a hint of trade war as will be forthcoming immediately.

It might be assumed that O'Neill, of an ever-optimistic industrialist background, could have warned against trade-war as a “solution" to anything ailing the world 'free-market' economy (or ailing the Western imperialist control of it).

His reported opposition to another round of expensive tax cuts for the rich of America may similarly have been seen as accepting current deflationary trends and hoping for the best in a future economic upturn, rather than deliberately adding to a further import guzzling spending-spree on credit, and certainly against a trade war as a way of trying to ease the USA's crippling balance-of-payments deficits and government budget deficits.

The further implications of deliberate dollar devaluation could be truly cataclysmic.

The entire Cold-War, anti-communist, post-1945 world has basically only been kept going by the 1944 Bretton Woods imperialist warmongers fatwa that henceforth, the paper dollar would be internationally regarded as being "as good as gold".

Creating an economically successful "free world" (free from the otherwise inevitable communist revolutions which were sensibly sweeping the planet following the monstrous death and destruction from capitalist warmongering that the planet had just had to suffer (WWII) to get the imperialist system out of economic crisis (the 1930s) yet again), - was relatively easy when all Washington had to do was to 'manufacture' ever new billions and trillions of dollar credits for propping up any and every 'anti-communist' regime that could be invented (military dictators, fascist nutcases, feudal despots, and farcical corrupt 'democracies' of every description), while simultaneously bribing mercenaries and opportunist turncoats to undermine, denounce, or defect from every socialist revolution or progressive government that mass revolt against capitalism had thrown up.

The result now is that trillions and trillions of 'surplus' dollars from all this endless anti-communist political racketeering, 'legal' and illegal, currently slosh around the worlds markets at frightening speeds and in incredible volumes, all still looking for a profitable investment or two.

All the time that Washington still agrees to stand by these (effectively) huge debts on the US Treasury to the rest of the world, then the dollar’s ultimate collapse is delayed. This requires the USA to continue to run these unbelievable balance-of-payments deficits and government budget deficits (which keep the rest of the world trading more or less profitably).

But once the accumulative consequences erupt from this sustained false USA living standard (in reality), and the whole illogical, unstable, corrupt, and blatantly fraudulent "capitalist economic miracle" starts to totter, - then there could commence the long-feared rapid chainreaction of scores of unviable economies going bankrupt all round the 'free' world, - with the giant US economy itself at the very heart of the degenerate catastrophe.

That the crooked extravagant ways of the anti-communist free-spending West are subject to the iron laws of economic science (sadly always lagging behind the ever-new actual developments in the world of imperialist crisis and counter-revolutionary arbitrary warmongering) has been obvious at many critical moments in history when propaganda nonsense could no longer keep capitalist civilisation flourishing smoothly, and huge burdens had to be borne by suffering humanity (World War I, the 1930s, World War II, etc.).

And the inescapable relationship between determinist economic laws and arbitrary imperialist warmongering was also made clear when the hideous cost of the monstrous (and failed) Western imperialist blitzkrieg to stop IndoChina and Vietnam from going communist, led to the formal value of dollars in gold being abandoned forever (and having to be abandoned) as US Treasury 'debts' took more and more of the strain of maintaining the bogus 'free' world.

As many clues to the ultimate collapse of the joke ‘free world’ system, and the joke of Americas unrepayable 'debts', can be deduced from the now demented drive in Washington to commence international warmongering threats in all directions, as can be deduced from the dismal science of seeking the lawgoverned limits to the colossally-vast and arbitrary Western economic imperialist aggression.

To even large sections of bourgeois world opinion now, all logic and reason is shrinking away from Americas nonexistent ‘case' for a bloody warmongering blitzkrieg against Iraq.

Increasingly, conviction will grow everywhere that all that is emerging is a historical pattern of imperialist warmongering at all costs (in times of serious economic crisis which could threaten the very survival of the capitalist ruling-class system).

Currently, American warmongering propaganda hysteria is openly verging on the levels of demented hatred and Big Lie distortions which make even the barbaric nonsense of notorious Hitler/Goebbels warmongering propaganda of the Nazi-German imperialist-aggression era seem tame and unextreme.

Despite badly-split bourgeois opinion registering huge hostility to a blitzkrieg on Iraq throughout the world in general, not excluding the majority of Western and NATO powers, and even inside not just the USA but Washington itself, - nevertheless the rich and powerful monopoly-capitalist clique around Bush & Co is bulldozing everyone relentlessly towards only total war and humiliation for Iraq as the sole option.

Few serious or influential Western sources are really convinced that the Saddam regime is an actual threat of any kind to the peace and security of the 'free’ world or even any small specific part of it (the Zionist illegal colonisation of the Palestinian nation's homeland possibly excepted).  Not many believe Iraq even has any serious weapons of mass destruction, or wants to try using them against the overwhelming power of its US imperialist enemies.

Fewer still think that Iraq has anything whatever to do with al-Qaeda terrorism, or that destroying the Saddam regime would form any sensible or worthwhile part in Washington's proclaimed "war on terrorism" (itself an idiotic concept), even arguing that an onslaught on Iraq, unjustifiable by any measure imaginable, could only possibly INCREASE the incidence of terrorist hatred of the USA currently growing in the world, not reduce it.

Yet despite the blatantly crass stupidity of America's position, now universally acknowledged, warmongering destruction of Iraq remains the linchpin of the Bush regime s "international policy".

Why??? Because the 'free world’ is heading for collapse in uncontrollable economic catastrophe, and a huge cover-up is needed, plus endless 'excuses' for the economic debacle of capitalism.

If Hans Blix is not careful, the chief UN weapons inspector will be named a prime urgent war-target himself for his pretended insistence on "an honest, objective, and thorough inspection to see if war really is necessary because of Iraqi concealed weapons of mass destruction, threatening the world".

It is hard to believe that the UN will continue to stand in America's way to the end by still insisting on 'proof' of this obvious nonsense, but Blix is initially resisting the more crude US stunts for "finding the smoking gun".

The oldest 'free world’ trick in the book is Washington's favourite, - enticing over to the West some Iraqi weapons-industry official to say, in return for a swimming pool mansion in Florida and lifelong generous salaries for self and family (replacing a desperately poor existence in Iraq), that he supervised the secret hidden production of the world's worst biochemical weapons all day long, his whole life long, in Iraq. 

But the key to this trick is to get some Iraqi officials to go outside of Iraq in the first place so that the bribery scam can be properly set up, far away from any pressures on any official from Iraqi society. This produced the astonishing proposal weeks ago (EPSR 1161) that entire extended families, or village clans numbering many hundreds, would need to be given "hospitality" by the West to ensure that any official could finally 'talk freely' and not fear 'Iraqi secret-police punishment' on his kith and kin "for finally telling the truth about production of weapons of mass destruction", etc.

The Times reported the growing tension over this astonishing Hitler-Goebbels racket thus:

US Administration hawks want Dr Blix and his inspectors to ask for lists of Iraqi scientists, demand interviews with them, and if necessary offer them and their families asylum. Washington is reportedly offering to set up a type of "witness protection programme" for defectors.

Hans Blix, the chief inspector, countered growing pressure for more aggressive investigations including American specialists by insisting: "We are in nobody's pocket." 

The White House called openly for the UN inspectors to spirit Iraqi scientists out of the country and offer them asylum - as allowed by the UN mandate if the scientists and their families are in danger - in exchange for secrets. But Dr Blix retorted: "We are not going to abduct anybody and we are not serving as a defection agency." 	 

The sickness of these propaganda stunts, and the obviously disastrous destructiveness of America’s entire warmongering project, is throwing up almost as much nervous resistance among the USA's nominally capitalist imperialist closest allies, reflecting how the insoluble economic crisis at the core of all this warmongering-aggression is going to have all the free-market powers at each others throats before much longer, even if Washington's fiercer trade-war thoughts remain concealed for a while yet.

Although never ceasing to be potentially lethal imperialist warmongers in their own right, Germany, for example, is continuing to put increasingly conscious distance between itself and Washington's blitzkrieg project, - and getting a very undiplomatic kicking from the Bushites in return, - as the capitalist press itself is reporting:

Ever since its chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, announced during his reelection campaign in August that he would not take part in any "adventure" in Iraq, Washington's propaganda machine has been in high gear. Spinners put out the word that its irresponsibility may have lost Germany any chance of getting a permanent seat on the UN security council. Schröder's government was coldshouldered by senior US officials.

The Americans initially hoped Schröder's outburst was merely a ploy to get votes which a cynical chancellor would renounce under the pressure of American wrath once he was safely back in the saddle. But there has been no retreat. Schröder has gone on with his criticisms of US policy and at the recent Nato summit in Prague the Americans tried to corner him by making a big media issue out of whether superpower Bush would even shake the naughty boy's hand.

Far from being isolated, Schröder was the man who with French help led the resistance to Washington's plans for Nato.  Together they toned down the AngloAmerican draft for a Nato statement on Iraq,  preventing any mention of "readiness" for military action and turning it into nothing more than a repetition of support for the UN.

Schröder could not block the US from using longstanding American bases in Germany or deny it overflying rights for a war on Iraq. These are guaranteed by treaty and in the election campaign the chancellor never said he would reverse this. So his promise in Prague not to interfere with American freedom of movement, which he spelled out formally last week, was not a u-turn. His refusal to let Germany itself take part in a war remains firm.

The new iron in the chancellor's spine comes in part from the even stronger stand of his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. But Schröder now gives all the signs of being a man who is arming himself with a battery of arguments for a long struggle with Washington. In a jovial self-assured performance at his Prague press conference he talked of "Europeanising" decision making on international issues and brushed aside American pressure on the EU to give Turkey a guarantee of future membership. If done, he said, it would be because it was in Europe's interest to encourage secular forces there.

Washington's position was not part of the equation. 

He talked of "asymmetrical" warfare, now that powerful states have been shown to be vulnerable to low-tech terrorism. It was wrong to put the new threats into the framework of Nato's old machinery. 

On the contrary, the alliance had to come up with a sophisticated threat assessment and then develop a range of counter-measures, including more aid for development and poverty reduction, rather than simply rely on new hardware. Military means were only one 	element in what needed to be a broader and more imaginative package.
		
Although Schröder denied seeing America's sudden new plans for a 21,000-person Nato reaction force as a measure aimed at undercutting the EU's slow effort to have its own such force, Schröder's actions show he shares French suspicions. His conditions for German participation effectively sabotage the US plan. Any decision to use the new Nato force would have to be unanimous, and no German troops could take part without a parliamentary vote.

Schröder's decision to turn US foreign policy into a domestic election issue certainly had an element of expediency. The Social Democrats' private polls in August foretold defeat as clearly as the public ones. Yet what was important about the chancellor's move was that it succeeded. It revealed powerful underlying support for more independence in German foreign policy. Germans were waiting for leaders to recognise the world was different. They want "nationalism with a European face"; in other words for Germany to defy the US  when necessary and bring its European partners to take a similar stance.

Having tested this new political chord in the election, Schröder continues to develop it. Chirac sees military prowess as a key element in his country's international reputation and has notions of great-power status. 

Even more revealing of the deep divisions which this incurable global economic crisis is sowing between the imperialist powers (which supposedly provided the "triumph of history, secure for all time" bedrock of the enduring "free world"), - is this bilious onslaught on Germany from the Times, accusing the old enemy, simultaneously, of being pathetic fascist failures; dangerous nationalist aggressives; a virtual socialist basket-case, socially and economically; but potentially ferocious capitalist rivals in due course.

Either someone just doesn't like Germany; or else this insane Bush-Blair warmongering crusade is unhingeing the entire middle class:

Germany is in shock. It is not just that times are bad, bad enough for the sulphurous leftwinger Oskar Lafontaine to have scored a rare and palpable hit by comparing Gerhard Schröder to the hapless Heinrich Brüning, the Weimar Republic Chancellor whose ruinous polices sent Germany into a tailspin that paved Hitler's road to power. It is not even that virtually every German voter reckons that the Schröder Government deliberately lied before the September elections, concealing a €15 billion hole in public finances in order to squeeze back into power. It is an altogether deeper sense that the abyss has opened.

People are angry in a society that takes pride in being slow to anger. Small wonder. The economy, having never really emerged from the last recession, is headed south again. Tax revenues in this insanely overtaxed country are slumping and, with Germany's top companies shedding labour at home and shifting investment elsewhere - and 45,000 firms bankrupted this year - more misery is on the way. People are not spending; but they are not saving much any more either. Even West Germans feel poor, and they will feel poorer stall when the new "wealth" tax cuts in on assets, for a family of four, above £600,000 (house included).

Just about the only thing that is growing in Germany is unemployment, standing at four million at least and, according to one German economist, nearly six million if hidden unemployment is factored in. That, too, will get worse.

Revolt is in the air. The most, perhaps the only, popular people in Germany are its satirists; and German satire, when it gets going, is robust verging on nasty. The "shirt game" is gentler, but. its message is unmistakable. In response to the 48 different tax increases, on everything from flowers to fuel oil, announced since September by a Chancellor who only last July declared that "tax rises make no economic sense" in a slump, the web designer Christian Stein suggested that people should solve Herr Schröder's financial worries by sending him the "shirts off their backs". The response has been such that he predicts that the Chancellor, compared in one of the less vitriolic epithets around to a bad case of athlete's foot, will have 50,000 of them in his wardrobe come Christmas.

The Germans also want their deutschmark back. It turns out - as became known when C&A, in an inspired bit of marketing, invited Germans to spend their "useless" marks in all its branches this week that they hated surrendering the currency so much that they still have DM8.8 billion stashed under their mattresses. The euro - and, by extension, "Europe" - is becoming equated with national disaster. There is a queasiness about that goes beyond the dyspepsia induced by this particular winter's discontents. That could be a good thing if it means that a truth evident to others for some time is finally sinking in. This is that the postwar German system, in which this most systematic of nations has placed its trust, is not just in need of a tonic but is fatally diseased. Not only that, but the quack medicines being administered will make its eventual demise a messy, expensive, and needlessly, humiliatingly, miserable business.

Tombstone imagery is everywhere, with the cover of one business paper proclaiming, simply: "Germany - the obituary." The wave of new taxes has been compared to "carpet bombing". Everyone, apparently except the Chancellor, sees the writing on the wall.

Yet the danger even now, for Germany and for Europe, is that revolt will spend itself in satire, and the indispensable debate about where Germany went wrong and what it must now do will, yet again, be submerged in a generalised, purposeless angst.

The lavish social benefits, secure jobs and cushy retirement incomes that went with "Rhineland - capitalism" made for complacency and, whisper who dares,  - pervasive inefficiency. Germans came to view sick leave as an additional holiday entitlement; free massages, health spas and even daughters' first communion dresses were standard perks. The public sector, too, became so cosseted that a staggering 42 per cent of all budget spending this year will go on civil service pensions.

By 1990 Germany was rich; and constipated. The "social state" was in dire, though still disguised, need of reform. Instead, Germany got unification, a political triumph but - when East Germans rapidly received similar wages and benefits that priced them overnight out of the labour market - an economic disaster. The gigantic subsidies that flowed, and still flow, eastwards have been staggeringly unproductive. After a short postunification boom, German growth stalled, averaging 15 per cent a year. The prognosis for 2003 is 0.4 per cent.

What should worry all of Europe is that there is no real sign of the "paradigm shift" in thinking that the Greens, alone among Germany's political parties, are demanding. The breakdown is not just economic, but political. The election turned not on hard facts about the economy, but on Herr Schröder's crude manipulation of anti-Americanism. Germans have turned on their own man for now, but the less able they are to face facts, the more tempting it will be to hunt scapegoats outside Germany. That would be the most alarming development of all.

The Blairs' disturbing barminess (see below) is the most colourfully sordid aspect of petty-bourgeois deepening gloom and loss of confidence in the political establishment, reflected above; but it is a specifically nasty imperialist warmongering stunt which might surprisingly prove even more damaging to Bush-Blair blitzkrieg credibility in the short run. It is yet another rightwing blast, in the Times main feature, against, effectively, the entire attempted historical justification for any "war on terror" at all in the 21st century. From such a generally reactionary stable as the Murdoch press, is this a sign that more rational souls are simply seeing that contemporary society is going to find such Hitlerite aggression, and its warmongering propaganda hysteria, unbelievable nonsense for a modern age??????

Two stories were this week expected to top the political agenda. They were Brown versus Blair and Cherie Blair's murky ventures in the Bristol properly market. 

By yesterday morning the world was singing a happier tune. "Britain put on smallpox terror alert" and "Killer bug threat to Britain", sang the headlines. There was also a descant: "Saddam a Monster," incanted the Foreign Office; "See Saddam's Jail Horror". The Prime Minister was taking tea with the wives of tortured Iraqis. The masters of spin had done it again. Welcome to the world of tabloid politics.

This is the third weekend in a month that a terrorism threat has emanated from Whitehall. Terror stories are always the easiest for government to sell. Headlines write themselves and the pictures always "burn or bleed". Yesterday they came with string accompaniment. Jack Straw's Saddam-is-awful video showed Iraqis yet again having their heads kicked in, this time to background music. Foreign policy is now a branch of showbiz.

Why does the British Government now scare me, rather than persuade me, into spending more taxes on defence and security? By what right does it make my children frightened to walk the streets or use the Tube? Why must we all fear white powder and Arabs with duffel bags?

I was outraged by the smallpox scare story. It was a clear repeat of the previous weekend's lobby story of "gas horror on London Tube",  itself an echo of the Home Office "dirty bomb" story two weeks earlier. These Whitehall officials are panic happy, careless of the cost and worry they cause others. In a speech at the Mansion House last month, Tony Blair pleaded the difficulty of drawing a line between public information and "doing the terrorists' job for them". He implied that, given what MI5 had been telling him, he should close Britain. If so, he should, sack M15.

Downing Street seems no longer able to assess risk. The chance of Britain being engulfed by a smallpox epidemic must be infinitesimal. Three weeks ago the story was anthrax and cyanide. There is no evidence that Iraq or al-Qaeda have the smallpox virus which, we are told, is near impossible to convert into a weapon. Yet Downing Street virtually wrote yesterday's headlines. There are now to be 12 "regional smallpox response groups", 700 vaccinated key workers and 50 million doses of vaccine. The word "danger" was spattered through the remarks of the hapless Chief Medical Officer, Liam Donaldson, on Monday.

With America now vaccinating millions of workers, the effect can only be to unnerve parents into worrying whether they should be vaccinating their children. If the entire nation were vaccinated, say the epidemiologists, on average one in a million would die and ten times that number would suffer crippling side effects. In Britain that means 50 dead.

That is the real risk of this scare . 

There are a dozen more "terrifying" epidemics than smallpox deserving of £100 million of taxpayers' cash. There are a dozen regimes whose human rights merit the attention of Gordon Brown's £1 billion Iraq war chest. This is a Government which continues to bomb Iraq each week yet refuses for devious reasons to cite its leaders before any war crimes tribunal. 

While an atrocity kills and maims, its impact lies in the nation's reaction to it. Killing is murder. Terror is aftermath, and terror can be enhanced or diminished by leadership.

By turning the hunt for the perpetrators into a "War on Terror", they effectively switched sides. For the past year they have bombarded their people with scares, threats, warnings, Hitters, evil armies, mushroom clouds and "something in the offing". It is the terror, not the atrocity, that has wrecked the Western economies. I resent the Government trying to terrify me, week after week, to dominate the news agenda. I am not afraid of Saddam Hussein. I do fear the next leak, wink and nudge from the terrormongers of Whitehall. Scaremongering is not a spin-doctoring pastime; it plays on the basest human instincts of group paranoia, xenophobia and ghoulish panic.

Downing Street and Mr Wolfowitz may have glowed inwardly when they read "Britain in Smallpox Terror Alert". Mr Moore would have thought them mad. I am with Mr Moore.

As for the Blairs, such utterly banal, philistine, and talentless chancers, - glad to posture glitzily and in style at the figurehead of a truly monstrous political project of advertising, gimmickry, and deceit, (which is just opportunism for them, but economic and warmongering disaster for the rest of us), - - they deserve all of the venom now coming their way from exposures of their ultimately stupid and dangerous shallowness.

Typical of how the worm can turn in such a maggot infested rotting nonsense that Blairism has been FROM THE START - (see the EPSRs from day one on what a terrible price would eventually be paid for foisting this totally empty brainwashing stunt on the public as 'the new politics'),  is this blast from the generally New Labour favouring Observer:

THE MOST accessible entrance into the Blairs' spirit world of paganism, spiritualism, pseudoscience and quackery is through a chat with Cherie's 'homeopathic dowser healer' -  one Jack Temple, aged 86. Temple is the possessor of a ‘Neolithic stone circle', which, he assured me, captures the healing energies of the stars, sun and moon and holds them for the benefit of his paying customers. He discovered the ‘magic' stones in Pembrokeshire.

‘I see. A farmer said a load of old rubble was once a Stone Age religious site and you paid ready money to get your hands on it. How did you know the stones were genuine stones, so to speak?'

An irritated note entered Temple's voice. 'I dowsed them with my magic pendulum, of course. I made the amazing discovery that each of the 16 stones relieved stress in different parts of the body - the muscles, the brain and so on.' After he moved the stones to Surrey, Temple went to the garden centre and used his pendulum to divine the aura of the herb and alpines section. The trial of the plants was merciless. He found only wild strawberries had the strength to ‘contain nature's energy generated by the stone circle'.

TEMPLE DULY PLANTED his circle with strawberries. He will sell you a small packet of their dried leaves for £10 (plus £1 p&p). It's a bargain, as Cherie Blair knows. Temple said in his autobiography Medicine Man: ‘I believe I've helped the lame to walk, the barren to conceive, and the sad to smile. I've been able to reflate the lungs of childreri, previously condemned to a life constricted by asthma. I've even seen the bald pates of middle-aged and elderly men begin to spring hair growth again.'

Don't mock him. Fergie and, inevitably, the late Princess Di have acclaimed him as a healing genius. Temple is happy to allow everyone to share the inner harmony of royalty and the Blairs. For £85 he will sell you a pile of stones and instructions on how to lay them out in the garden. (This time he doesn't mention the cost of the post and packing, which 1 suspect will be steep.)

Cherie Blair was introduced to the doddering dowser by Sylvia and Carole Caplin. Sylvia, 67, is a former ballet dancer turned spiritualist. On 11 November, the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece. According to a former client, Caplin Senior ‘can bring the light down' and open channels with the dead. Mrs Blair regularly visits the mystic's £500,000 house in a gated park in Dorking. It, too, is filled with stones. 'There was a particularly active period in the summer when Sylvia was channelling for Cherie over two or three times a week, with almost daily contact between them,'  the Mail reported. ‘There were times when Cherie's faxes ran to 10 pages.'

Caplin's daughter is the former soft-porn model who became Mrs and Mr Blair's style guru and confidante in 1994. She has been a lady in waiting at the New Labour court since. Her boyfriend is Peter Foster, an Australian fraudster with a criminal record that goes back to 1983. After a week of stupendous lies, the Blairs admitted Foster had somehow secured them two flats in Bristol at £69,000 off the market price - or about three times the annual pay of a fire officer.

The mother is as alarming as her daughter's crooked lover. Cherie evidently believes Caplin senior is in touch with the other side, and Caplin may well believe she can natter with the dead herself. None of her clients has suggested she played on their fear and credulity. But, so what? Whether she is a sincere fool or a sly fraud doesn't matter. A con's a con whatever the mental state of the con woman. What spiritualists say is a lie whether they know it or not. 

Given its history, why does Cherie believe it? Well she is a Catholic and her husband is an Anglo-Catholic, and if you can believe that wine and a wafer are the blood and body of Christ you can believe anything. Or, indeed, everything. Until now, there has been an averting of wellbred eyes from the superstitions of our creepy PM and his gullible wife.

A year ago, the Times printed the following account of what they did on their summer holidays at the luxurious Maroma Hotel on Mexico's Caribbean coast. The Blairs visited a 'Temazcal', a steam bath enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met Nancy Aguilar, a new-age therapist. She told them that the pyramid was a Mayan womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs saw the shapes of animals in, the steam and experienced ‘inner-feelings and visions'. They smeared each other with melon, papaya and mud from the jungle, and then let out a primal scream of purifying agony. No one followed-up the Times's scoop, deference is not as dead as some people would have you think.

When the Blairs moved into Downing Street, a feng shui expert rearranged the furniture at Number 10. Cherie wears a ‘magic pendant' known as the BioElectric Shield, which is filled with ‘a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals' that surround the wearer with ‘a cocoon of energy' and ward off evil forces. (It was given to her by Hillary Clinton, another political spouse who combines the characteristic Third Way vices of sharp practice and bone-headedness.) Then there have been inflatable Flowtron trousers, auricular therapy and acupuncture pins in the ear.

New Age Labour has spilled out of Downing Street and blighted public policy. In January 1999, for instance, the Government recruited a feng shui consultant, Renuka Wickmaratne, to discover a magical way to improve inner-city estates without. raising taxes.

'Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,' she concluded, ‘and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.' Three years later the Government announced that, for the first time since the creation of the NHS, ‘alternative' remedies could be granted the same status as conventional treatments, despite the absence of evidence that they might cure the sick. According to the Sunday Times, ‘The inclusion of Indian ayurvedic medicine, a preventative approach to healing using diet, yoga and meditation, is thought to have been influenced by Cherie Blair's interest in alternative therapy.'

The Blairs' interest, along with that of Di and Fergie (in mystics as well as allegedly neolithic circles), of Prince Phillip (a subscriber to Flying Saucer Review since the magazine began publication in the mid-1950s) and of Margaret Thatcher (in electro-shock bath therapy), show that superstition isn't always the preserve of the hopeless poor. It can appeal to the feeble-minded everywhere, from the ‘anarchoprimitives' of the anti-capitalist movement to the supposedly tough Tories who turn from the exposés of the Blairs at the front of the Mail to friendly discussions of how the Bible Code predicted whatever happened last week at the back.

NOTHING WORTH HAVING can come from their babblings and not only because 10 Downing Street is beginning to look like a tsar's court filled with shamans and holy-rolling petty criminals.

At the heart of New Age crankiness is a  deep selfishness. The treatments favoured by the Blairs and so many from their natural constituency in the upper middle class promise to release the true self, heal the abused self, pamper the stressed self and reassure the doubting self that deep down inside there is good. Others don't get a look in.

The only possible benefit is that at least I will stop hearing Labour MPs saying that Cherie will keep Tony's feet on the ground and make him stick to socialist principles. What's left of the Labour movement is going to have to face the weirdness of its leading couple without illusion and, I hope, purify itself by colonically irrigating the Blairs out of the system.

This is funny. The economic and warmongering disasters in store for us (because the vague and ludicrous nonsense of "reformist democracy" petty-bourgeois dreamers, of all kinds, has stupidly put up with Blairism "just to keep Labour in"), -- is less so. Blairism has been disgusting batty rubbish from day one. But it is the whole delusion of  "reformist democracy" which really needs abandoning fast. It is capitalism, and its regularly recurring incurable warmongering crises, which have it in for the world, - with "reformist democracy" as the greatest deception stunt in all history, always covering up eventual tyranny until it is too late. Read the fine print of any capitalist newspaper any day to see what is coming, - the most devastating long warmongering slump in all capitalist history:

Britain's manufacturing sector was a whisker away from recession in November, as the global downturn depressed export orders and cash-strapped companies continued laying off workers. 

With export orders falling for a second consecutive month as the hoped-for recovery in global demand failed to materialise, growth in output had slipped to its slowest since the summer.

	"The combination of weak global demand and intense competition from globalisation suggests that a strong, sustained recovery is unlikely."
 
Pessimism about the state of manufacturing was echoed in the US, where the Institute for Supply Management index remained below the breakeven 50 mark. Employment expectations slipped to a nine-month low, and new orders declined for the first time in three months.

Bearing in mind that Blairism says a world trade revival will rescue Britain's economy by 2004, - when the USA is obviously thinking about the fiercest trade-war of all time, demolishing world trade, - even an £85 bag of old rubble could make more sense. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

For as long as one hundred of us 	remain alive we will never never, consent to the rule of the Irish. For it not for glory we fight, nor riches, nor honours but for freedom alone,   which no man should lose but with his life --  signed -  UDA/UFF

Unionists need to knew that they can be part of managing the necessary change but that they cannot step the changes that are coming.

LIKE a fast approaching comet, the 'Wreckers' Charter' that emerged from the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC) meeting on 21 September is on a direct collision course with the institutions that underpin the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).

Since the signing of the GFA, the world has become accustomed to one artificially contrived 'crisis' after another emanating from the inner sanctums of the UUC. This is the ninth UUC meeting since the signing of the GFA. It is also the ninth occasion on which the British Government has made concessions to the UUP in advance of these meetings.

Although said to be nominally in favour of the Agreement, the obstructionist tactics of the UUP have been seen by many nationalists and republicans as clear evidence of the Unionist Party's strategy to frustrate, slow down and dilute the process of change towards genuine equality.

In light of the shenanigans at the UUC on 21 September, the view that avowed Unionist Party support for the Agreement was merely tactical and a temporary measure to ward off pressure from the British and American governments has gathered further credence.

The arrogance of the ultimatums and preconditions contained in this latest unionist invention leave no one in any doubt that this unbelievable example of brass-necked hard balling is designed to create a definitive crisis in the peace process.

Not only does the nine-point combined motion from Trimble and Donaldson commit the UUP to an immediate breach of their obligations under the Agreement but it also establishes three preconditions outside the terms of the Agreement.

The vast bulk of political unionism has given up the pretence and is now unashamedly and vehemently anti-Agreement. It wants Sinn Fein, the largest nationalist party, excluded from the Executive. It wants the Good Friday Agreement dispensed with and renegotiated. It wants a unionist controlled and dominated police force. In short, it aspires to the return of a political order that they can dominate.

The clear message to nationalists is that the vast bulk of political unionism cannot and will not countenance the concept of equality with nationalists. because to do so would undermine the raison d'être of their political philosophy, which has historically been based on exclusion and supremacy.

SINN FEIN FOCUS

This is a dangerous time. For our part, Sinn Fein has given leadership. We argued for collective initiatives from pro-Agreement parties to bring calm to our streets and confront sectarianism. The First Minister failed to respond. The reasoning is obvious: He has already decided on a collision course.

However, this is not a time for republicans to knee jerk. We intend to stay focused on making the Agreement work - on seeing its many outstanding elements implemented. But Irish republicans are but one element of the body politic. There is a shared responsibility. Those of us interested in conflict resolution, those of us interested in building on the work of the past ten years, must ensure that we minimise the damage that will result from Mr Trimble and his colleagues abandoning the political institutions in January.

Sinn Fein will do what we can to achieve this. We will continue to engage with the two governments. We will continue to engage with the other pro-agreement parties on the island and we will seek to meet with political and civic unionism. This rightward lurch in political unionism has left a large section of pro-agreement people within the unionist community voiceless. We must not only seek out and encourage the articulation of this voice but also encourage its political manifestation.

PANDERING TO REJECTIONIST UNIONISM MUST END

The roots of this crisis can be traced to the constant pandering to every unionist whim by the British government. Time and time again crises were manufactured, UUC meetings held and goodies outside the terms of the Agreement were offered by the British government to be pocketed by Mr Trimble. And we moved along until the next artificially created crisis.

This is no way in which to manage a process of conflict resolution or a process of political change. The most recent UUC meeting shows what the real agenda is. And this is very understandable.

The British Government's behaviour gave political unionism the green light to believe that they could stop the change promised in the Good Friday Agreement. Their constant threats to the political institutions and constant threats to stop political progress on equality, human rights, criminal justice, policing, the all-Ireland agenda and a whole range of other issues was continually a course for political collapse.

The British Government's pandering to rejectionist unionism was always going to result in this situation.

The political instability generated by the last four years of continuous political crisis has encouraged anti-Agreement loyalist paramilitaries to fill such a vacuum with violence. For the past two years they have been involved in a sustained sectarian campaign which has seen hundreds of bomb attacks, scores of shootings, several deaths and thousands of other attacks and threats against the nationalist people across the north of Ireland.

The Good Friday Agreement is a binding international agreement between the Irish and British governments. They are obliged to implement the Agreement and have a joint and co-equal responsibility for the implementation of its terms.  The process must be moved forward through resolute and speedy action by both governments, but particularly the British Government. It should immediately make it clear to the unionists that the implementation of the Agreement will proceed and the two governments should call a meeting of all pro-Agreement parties.

Unionists need to be know that we are not giving up on this process, that we have invested too much time and energy over ten years and more, that we are not going to abandon the desire for equality, democracy and partnership. They need to know that we want them to be part of managing the necessary change but that they cannot stop the changes that are coming. People's rights and entitlements cannot be filtered through a unionist prism. This is not acceptable.

Sinn Fein has a democratic mandate. We recognise unconditionally the mandate of other parties and governments. They have an equal responsibility to recognise ours.

Some unionists clearly resent this. They resent the fact that equality discriminates against privilege; against a failed status quo. This is not optional or conditional. The two governments, and especially the British government, have a particular responsibility in this regard.

The thrust and dynamic created in this peace process must be sustained. The implementation of the Agreement, even if unionist opposition pulls down the Assembly, must proceed. Political, democratic, peace process and legal imperatives, not to mention good common sense, requires this approach.

In short, the democratic rights and entitlements of the overwhelming majority of the Irish electorate north and south must not be thwarted or denied by the those who have set their face firmly against a lasting settlement based on equality.

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

The Bloody Sunday Inquiry
"The platoon cracked, really some of them were seeing targets everywhere. Fucking officer he'd fired - fucking prat - as if we were going to say - oh, only a warning shot. Set everybody off, didn't it." - A former para recalls Bloody Sunday

John Goddard, who made a film to mark the 20th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, appeared before the inquiry.

He said that during the course of his research he had met with a number of IRA volunteers and "all were adamant that the Provisional IRA had given an undertaking not to be present on the march with any arms and that they had adhered to that undertaking.”

The inquiry was also presented with verbatim notes made by his researcher; Neil Davies - himself a former member of the Parachute Regiment ,- who had interviewed a number of the soldiers who took part in the shootings. One of them, who subsequently denied being present on Bloody Sunday when interviewed by Stoddard himself, told Davies that: 

"Some of those soldiers were way too cocky - thought they were the big guys 'cos they could roll a few drunks. Never been anywhere. else no other experience.

"I would say we had bully boys and should have jumped on them - things got out of hand. Yellow Card - fuck who believes in that nonsense? Lots of the guys could get done for murder - crimes, you know.”

The notes continue: "Well, we all thought - snatch operation in the Bogside. Fucking watch out - gunmen. Look what happened to the Green Jackets, just before. They couldn't get out of the Creggan: East to get in. Yeah we all thought the flats - got to have people in there. Gunmen. Major Loden didn't brief anybody really - briefed by rumour. Just word was going to give them a lesson.

"Well, when we got the word to go in - listen to the noise - rubber dicks going off - CS gas -water - petrol bombs exploding - Very tense situation... Rumours of radio reports of gunfire - couple of people hit (Irish).

"Adrenaline was up.  Roared in gung ho. Screaming let's get them. Pig went too far - driver wasn't sure of area. Everybody shouting get in amongst them. Pig went too far, right into the flats. Can't 25 retreat. Fuck, I thought we'd get done here. Piled out right under the flats - sitting fucking ducks - people running everywhere.

"Crowds pouring round a corner. We all looking up at the flats - bombers, snipers, anythihg. People, charging round a corner... then rifle fire. I don't know over our heads from the officer's Pig. I'm sure some stuff from the walls. Loads of Army snipers up on the walls.

"Well, shit hit the fan then. The lads started firing. Letting loose, people were running, screaming - our guns going off. Shadows became targets. At first it was possibly put some fire into the flats, scare anybody with a gun. Then they started shooting at the barricades - they only had bricks, didn't they? Nobody stopped to check.

'The platoon cracked, really some of them were seeing targets everywhere. Fucking officer - he'd fired - fucking prat - as if we were going to say - oh, only a warning shot. Set everybody off, didn't it. Also it wasn't hard to believe gunmen up there. Well, who is going to say that weren't, that there were no gunmen up in the flats. This was the Bogside  - there were gunmen there."

The soldier's comments continue: "I only began to realise after we started loading bodies. Fuck, there will be hell to pay. Of course, - we got our stories together - didn't talk about anything else. Got to get it sorted out. Found no weapons of any kind. Threw the bodies in the back on the transport. Major Loden was livid - thought that had ended his climb up the ladder.

"Widgery - It was a matter of keeping our reputation. The platoon was broken after that. Jesus, we got away with murder - cracked up you know. Nobody will talk about it. Not even to other soldiers in the battalion. We were told by the officers and senior NCOs just button your lip on this one.

"Bloody hell, man - some of those guys even fired from the hip - bloody cowboy attitude - craphats only do that. Lost our dignity over that. Some of them tried to be cocky after - but the older soldiers got angry with them. A few fights over beers, I tell you.

"We were lucky with Widgery - show job, wasn't it. Army had to cover up. Nobody wanted to talk. Better left alone."

THE most senior RUC officer on Bloody Sunday, Patrick McCullagh, was recalled as a witness to the Bloody Sunday inquiry last week and admitted that the force did not interview any British soldiers involved in the shootings, even though senior officers had concluded that at least one of them had been guilty of murder. He said that normal practice was for the military police to carry out interviews with soldiers.

His admission came after he was shown a letter from the then Superintendent Michael Finn (now deceased) referring to the death of Jackie Duddy. In his letter, Superintendent Finn said: "There is no evidence to establish which member of the army fired the fatal shot but it is clear that he had just dismounted from the APC before doing so. In my opinion he is clearly guilty of murder but as he has not been identified no further action can be taken."

Harvey asked whether "even in an abnormal society, if a senior officer comes to the conclusion that a person has been murdered by a number, or one of a number of identifiable people, would it not be normal practice for the police to interview him°?

McCullagh responded: "I accept nobody's murder; I accept nobody's murder in any circumstances and do not ask me to reply to you on the basis that I accept that anybody committed murder."

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

Special Branch strategy is simple enough. Scupper reform by marginalising Sinn Fein politically and by demonising the IRA. Create McCarthy-type hysteria with allegations of republicans under the bed, or in the office of the First and Deputy First Minister, and carry out a witch hunt against Catholic civil servants

When the PSNI raided Sinn Fein's party offices in Stormont, so timely as to pluck the then First Minister David Trimble out of the hole that the Ulster Unionist party's ruling council had dug for him, the media frenzy concentrated on the obvious.

With Saving Private Trimble topping the bill, it was all too easy to miss the 'B' movie, or more accurately the Special 'B' movie. It was a movie, in which real horror stories of Special Branch collusion with loyalist death squads and deliberate suppression of evidence, as in the case of Pat Finucane, were forgotten, during a cinematic rerun of the familiar fable of the IRA bogeyman.

"Special Branch corruption is an inevitable outcome in the presence of absolute power the power over life and death in many cases - and in the absence of effective accountability measures.

"It is in everyone's interest that structures of accountability are created which are unwilling to condone the negative and corrosive influence of Special Branch activities," concluded a detailed document released by Sinn Fein just hours before the raid.

Sinn Fein has been saying this kind of thing for years and let's be honest, it didn't much matter when republicans and northern nationalists remained politically marginalised and socially demonised. But it's quite a different story now. 

Sinn Fein is not only the largest nationalist party in the north, with a growing electoral base in the south, but also a party that can wield real influence within governments both at home and abroad.

Significantly Sinn Fein has not been the only voice. The Patten report recognised that "a force within a force" was incompatible with the promise of a "new beginning to policing".

SDLP claims that the Special Branch, post Crompton, will no longer be a "law unto itself", maybe premature but at least the agenda's agreed.

The Police Ombudsman's recent report into the Omagh investigation, which prompted the review by the former British Inspector of Constabulary Dan Compton, was highly critical of the role of Special Branch and called for urgent address.

But while Sinn Fein has not been the only voice, it has been the most persistent and persuasive. And given Irish republicanism's historical, and not so historical, relationship with Special Branch, (originally the Special Irish Branch was set up in 19th Century Britain specifically to thwart Irish dissidence) republicans are most likely to bear the brunt of any Special Branch counter offensive.

The strategy is simple enough. Scupper reform by marginalising Sinn Fein politically and by demonising the IRA. Create McCarthy-type hysteria with allegations of republicans under the bed, or in the office of the First and Deputy First Minister, and carry out a witch hunt against Catholic civil servants. Frighten the British Secretary of State with stories of espionage and get him to sanction further Special Branch meddling.

The ink was barely dry on Compton's recommendations when the PSNI arrested a junior civil servant from West Belfast.

The SDLP's Mark Durkan cautioned against vilification. "The civil servant worked in my private office for a number of months. During that time the only thing that came to my attention was his good work and good manner," said Durkan. "I caution against any rush to judgement in this matter."

Predictably, David Trimble was happier to play along with the Special Branch. After all, their agenda and that of the Unionist leader is inexplicably linked, to resist progressive change and hope to turn back the clock.

It would have major implications for the already troubled peace process, said Trimble. "The consequences are huge," he continued, confirming that the civil servant worked as his diary secretary for a period last year. Of course the diary of the First Minister is neither classified nor secret but Trimble was making hay while the sun shone and was talking up the threat.

Within 24 hours the civil servant had been released without charge and is currently pursuing a case of wrongful arrest against the PSNI. But the frame had already moved swiftly on.

"A major IRA intelligence gathering operation concentrating on Stormont and Castlereagh Special Branch has now been smashed, according to the PSNI," reported Gerry Moriarty of the Irish Times.

"Police smash provo spy ring" ran the front page of Belfast's Newsletter, "a spy ring which operated from the heart of the IRA has been smashed in one of the biggest police operations in the past ten years".

No journalist stopped to ask why "one of the biggest police operations in the past ten years" had been mounted when even the newly promoted deputy chief constable Alan McQuillan fronting the press conference admitted that there was "no immediate threat".

"I have seen nothing in the information in my possession that indicates there was any intention to use it," admitted McQuillan. And as for more arrests, according to McQuillan the PSNI can only "hope".

And even if McQuillan's wildest dreams are fulfilled, "from the material we have recovered and the documents we have read we are actively investigating a small number of approaches to a small number of people in a small number of offices in government".

So here we have it, 40 PSNI officers working in shifts of 15 for 16 hours a day trawling through 79 computers, 1,000 computer disks and 2,500 evidential exhibits and 19,000 pages of documentation believe they can identify, not actual IRA spies but potential spies which may or may not have been approached by the IRA.

When it comes to discrediting republicans and taking the heat off Special Branch, the dedication of the PSNI is beyond reproach. Northern nationalists will no doubt wonder why the PSNI appear unable to focus as much energy and resources into thwarting loyalist attacks on Catholic neighbourhoods.

Within hours of McQuillan's press conference, the plot was thickening. In a television report it suggested that Special Branch had been "tipped off" about the "spy ring" by one of their agents "deep within the IRA". Furthermore it was claimed, the former NIO messenger, William Mackessy, currently charged and imprisoned, was only a stooge used to cover the tracks of their alleged "agent within the IRA".

Having seemingly gone to such lengths, including the apparent false imprisonment of at least one of the four people facing charges, to provide an agent with cover, it appears incomprehensible that Special Branch decides to tell us all about it - incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the art of psy-ops or false propaganda. Having brought down the power sharing institutions and flooded the media with IRA scare stories, clearly Special Branch now hopes to sow doubts and suspicions within the IRA.

Outside the media carnival the core issues remain the same. The Compton Review was not mandated to address or deal with the fundamental issue of the control by Special Branch and MI5 of all aspects of policing in the Six Counties.

Yet this is at the core of the Special Branch's role in relation to Omagh, the very issue to prompt the review. It is also at the heart of the failure to deliver the type of policing promised in the Good Friday Agreement.

"The reality is that the ability of Special Branch, despite being renamed, to control and distort all aspects of policing, working to a political and largely anti-Peace Process agenda remains intact," said Sinn Fein's spokesperson on policing, Gerry Kelly.

"Political policing is unacceptable. It can have no part in our future," said Kelly. "The malign influence of Special Branch and British Military Intelligence, working to their own political and military agenda, works against the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process and must be removed."