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 1206  October 28 2003

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Mini-Tet offensive on Baghdad stirs American thoughts of getting out,  — the "worst disaster of all" according to other imperialist voices. But doubts continue rising on all sides about whether Western warmongering domination strategy to get monopoly-capitalism through its economic crisis will leave imperialism surviving at all.	

The most astonishing thing about the rising counter-attacks on the US blitzkriegers in Iraq, and on their local and international collaborators, is that the mighty American war machine, — the most awesomely all-powerful Empire the world has ever known, — still hasn't the faintest idea who it is fighting, — or daren't say.

The EPSR is content to accept that it is the universal hatred of Western imperialist world domination via its corrupt, crappy, crisis ridden capitalist economic system which is fuelling this amazing resistance to American colonial occupation.

From Washington's point of view, however, that 'useless' generalisation will only add to US imperialism's nightmare whereby even its top government officials can no longer visit in safety the scene of America's latest "greatest military triumph" despite the huge, expensive, and ludicrous "security" precautions.

Before Wolfowitz was rocketed out of his hotel, he had already had to scuttle out of Tikrit where the resistance downed a "security" helicopter with an X40 black-market grenade launcher.

Attacks on the occupation regime have now risen from 5 a day just six weeks ago to more than 30 a day currently; and an apparently legitimate and respected Iraqi opinion poll has reported that only 15°/ of the population now regard the coalition as a "liberating force", while 67% see this imperialist racket (now daftly and provocatively bearing an official "United Nations" label) as "the occupying powers".

The top war chief Rumsfeld, now sidelined, has sourly begun doubting whether things can get any better, fatally allowing the devastating question: "Are we winning the war?" to become a withering summary of his doubts:

DONALD RUMSFELD has cast grave doubt on America's ability to win the War on Terror and given a warning of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan in a secret Pentagon memorandum leaked to the press yesterday.

The Defence Secretary's grim private assessment, in stark contrast to the Administration's public statements, threatens to upset recent White House attempts to halt doubts over President Bush's handling of foreign policy.

That White House campaign, launched by Mr Bush in an address two weeks ago to military reservists, has involved senior Administration representatives taking an upbeat message about the War on Terror and Iraq to the country in speeches and interviews.

The two-page Rumsfeld 	memo, however, offers a far more candid and sobering assessment.

Written last Thursday, it was sent to his senior advisers, including his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Today, we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global War on Terror," Mr Rumsfeld writes. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas [religious schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

Despite repeated claims by Mr Bush that the United States is winning the War on Terror, Mr Rumsfeld clearly believes that huge obstacles to a clear victory remain.

"Are we winning or losing the global War on Terror?" Mr Rumsfeld asks his advisers. He suggests that the US may need to do more to "stop the next generation of terrorists" and concedes that the war against terrorism is hugely expensive.

"The cost-benefit ratio is against us," he writes. "Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."

In a striking admission, Mr Rumsfeld states that the Pentagon is too cumbersome to fight terrorists effectively.

In a television interview he said that the ability of al-Qaeda to function "has been significantly affected". By contrast, he writes in his memo of  "mixed  results" against al-Qaeda. 

"Although we have put considerable pressure on them, nonetheless a great many remain at large. 

"Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get?" he asks. He continues: "It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one was or another, but it will be a long, hard slog." 

He cannot be the only one. Unprompted, Madeleine Albright told ITV that the worst thought haunting her mind was of a "disastrous" American pull-out. So where did that idea come from??

And if all the chiefs are quaking or demoralised, what must it be like for the Indians? Imperialism's own press is admitting that things are bad:

The growing-toll and reports of poor conditions and low morale among troops have produced an undercurrent of dissent among US military families. The Guardian has found that 75% of the 478 troops removed from the Iraqi theatre because of mental health issues have been reservists.

In researching this story, we received more than 70 emails and phone calls from relatives of US forces overseas. All but two were negative — about the treatment of soldiers, the reasons for the Iraq war, the pain of family separation and the insensitivity of the military bureaucracy.

The criticisms — a breach of military culture — are viewed with concern at the Pentagon, which sent a team to Iraq this week to investigate 13 cases of suicide in recent months. It has also promised better treatment of sick soldiers, and has vowed to expand the programme of 15-day furloughs introduced last month — despite the failure of about 30 soldiers to catch their flights back to Iraq. 

But many on the home front remain furious, and today's anti-war protests in Washington and others US cities will kick off with candlelight vigils by families of soldiers serving in Iraq.

Ms Bright's unease set in soon after her son arrived in Iraq, and grew deeper with calls and emails home in the months before he was killed. "He had lost 25 pounds from dysentery. My daughter-in-law told me he called one day and he sounded very upbeat. She said, 'Why are you so happy?'  He said he had just got food and water.

Horrific
"I don't care what the administration says about flag-waving and children throwing flowers. It is just not true. The stories coming back are horrific. All he told me was that he had seen and done some horrible things — that they had all done and seen some terrible things."

The stories coming back from Iraq have helped to chip away at the culture of stoicism. So have the circumstances of the deployment. An underclass that grew up to view military services as a ticket to advancement or a college education now finds itself going off to two distant wars — in Afghanistan and Iraq — in less than two years.

It is still uncommon for families of soldiers to voice criticism. Some are afraid of retaliation against their relative serving in Iraq. But there are signs of growing outspokenness, in part because of the Bush administration's decision to rely heavily on reservists and National Guard members to fights its wars.

The families of reservists have taken the separations harder than those on active duty, who are used to military life. The experience of war, with its mix of tedium, brutality and the capriciousness of the US military bureaucracy, also appears harder for the reservists and National Guard members to bear.

Rattled
Reservists are beginning to speak out, saying they are made to do the "grunt work", and are treated unfairly in provision of supplies — especially of bulletproof vests for which there are shortages — and of military furloughs. "The equipment they tried to hand us was items that were bound for the trash pile," Nicholas Ramey, a reservist from Indiana working in a public affairs unit, writes in an email.

"Vietnam-era flack vests held together by dental floss and a prayer would keep us safe ... It was like pulling teeth trying to get the things we needed. As 'dirty reservists' we didn't deserve the same respect, even though we're supposed to watch the active duty's backs."

Such stories are increasingly common among reservists, and circulated among family members at home. The friction, combined with growing confusion about their mission in Iraq, has rattled even longstanding members of the reserves.

None of the people the Guardian contacted said their family member would re-enlist. Some have taken a decision to get out  — even those who have devoted their lives to the reserves.

The biggest complaint is the one most difficult for the Pentagon to remedy: that service personnel are under strain from long deployments in Iraq,

Others said they detected anger and depression in their emails that would be difficult to fix when they returned. "They're changing. They have dehumanised the Iraqis. They call them 'hajji' now — that's like 'gook'. I am old enough to remember the Vietnam war, and I remember," says Adele Kubein, whose daughter is a National Guard mechanic serving in Iraq.

On one occasion, her daughter telephoned her, sobbing. "She said, 'Mom, I have shot people. I am never going to be able to come home and live a normal life again. How can I come home and live a normal life when every second I am trying to be alert to see if I will be shot?"'

From a female member of the National Guard serving in northern Iraq "1 don't see anything wrong with doing whatever it takes to stay alive. There is nothing sacred about kids with guns. There is nothing sacred about anybody trying to kill anybody else, it don't matter how old they are. I hate this shit... I don't mind Iraq, 3 don't mind war, but I absolutely hate the situation I'm in, and I'm beginning to hate most of the people I'm surrounded by."

From a reservist serving as a mechanic near Baquba "I was offered to go on a convoy today but I did not go. They came back late tonight, and it turns out that the Iraqi people opened fire on them from a rooftop in a small town. We returned, but did not kill any of them, no one was hurt. This happens all the time. No one really aimed at the enemy. You just get scared and pull the trigger and open up in the direction you think they are firing from."

From a reservist from Indiana: "Everyone hears that morale is high and it is a bold-faced lie. The only people they ever talk to are these commanders. The reserve soldiers never get to speak their mind. We are the pawns of this war. We watch the active duty retire, and move to new assignments. We watch their tours end as we are still trapped because of poor postwar planning."

But as crucial as declining military morale is, the wobbles in Western imperialist philosophy in general are even more fascinating.

The New York University Zionist Tony Judti, — whose doubts about the very viability of the whole "Israel" Western project (to oust the Palestinian nation from its homeland to give the Jews some "national" real-estate) had America's airwaves buzzing last week, — — has appeared more fully in the Sunday Times:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not — as is sometimes suggested — that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically 19th century separatist project into a world that has moved on; a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state" — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are for ever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

What sensible Israelis fear much more than Hamas is the steady emergence of an Arab majority in "Greater Israel", and above all the erosion of the political culture and civic morale of their society. Unless something changes, Israel in a few years' time will be neither Jewish nor democratic.

Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the settlements and return to the 1967 borders in exchange for real Arab recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by western and international agencies. This is still the conventional consensus.

But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit divided by barbed wire and pass laws. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the ground and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts.

It may be that more than quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidised Jewish settlers would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but nobody believes it will happen. Many of those settlers will die — and kill — rather than move. The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution — the core of the Oslo process and the present, "road map" — is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons.

The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, bi-national state of Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hardliners in Sharon's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.

In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic, but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct fullscale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel indefinitely to the status of an intemational pariah.

But what if there were no place in the world today for a "Jewish state"? What if the bi-national solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. "Christian Europe", pace Valéry Giscard D'Éstaing, is a dead letter; western civilisation today is a pleasing patchwork of colours and religions and languages, as any visitor to London or Paris will know.

Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethno-religious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not — as its more paranoid supporters assert — because it is a Jewish state and nobody wants the Jews to have a state, but because it is a Jewish state in which one community (Jews) is set above others in an age when that sort of state has no place.

The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Israel's identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something Israel's American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit. To find fault with the Jewish state is to think ill of Jews; even to imagine an alternative configuration in the Middle East is to indulge the moral equivalent of genocide.

In the years after the second world war, those many millions of Jews who did not live in Israel were often reassured by its very existence — whether they thought of it as an insurance policy against renascent anti-semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and would fight back. Before this, Jewish minorities in Christian societies would peer anxiously over their shoulders and keep a low profile; since 1948 they could walk tall. But in recent years the situation has tragically reversed.

Today non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, that is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their allegiance.

The behaviour of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel's current behaviour is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for Jews. In a world where nations and peoples intermingle and intermarry at will, where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed, where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them, in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism — as Switzerland is one — but a dysfunctional one. In today's "clash of cultures" between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.

It is Western imperialism itself which is in "the wrong camp", being an unjust tyranny now completely anachronistic and loathed by the entire Third World.

Malaysia's PM Mahathir Mohamad, notorious for just accusing the Jews of controlling world politics and needing to be fought against, has been outspokenly slamming Western imperialism again:

As South-East Asia's elder statesman, at his last-ever international summit, he could simply have basked in the esteem of his fellow Asian leaders. A week on from a controversial speech, for which he was accused of anti-Semitism, he might have discreetly chosen to avoid the limelight.

	Instead, he took his leave of the international stage by insulting the Australian Prime Minister, undermined the US President, sneered at the European Union and repeated his contention that Jews rule the world. No one who has followed his 22-year career was surprised.

His incendiary speech at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in Malaysia last week drew shocked criticism around the non-Muslim world.

However, in an interview, published in the Bangkok Post yesterday, he insisted that his remarks had been taken out of context "The reaction of the world shows that [Jews] control the world," he said. "The Europeans and Americans and others want to condemn me ... Berlusconi himself made a statement that Muslims are terrorists. Did the European Union then pass a resolution to say that this is against Muslims?"

On Monday, the US press secretary said, President Bush took Dr Mahathir aside to rebuke him for his speech. Dr Mahathir began his press conference yesterday by denying that such words had been spoken. "Certainly, he did not rebuke me," he said. "All he said was that 'I regret having to use strong words against you'." Asked for his personal impression of Mr Bush, he laughed "It might sound offensive," he said, "so I will not reply to that question."

Vying for Dr Mahathir's contempt was John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, who earlier had put on a good show during the group photograph, shaking hands and smiling with his Malaysian counterpart.

"I extended to him formal cordiality," Mr Howard said, after an Australian reporter asked whether he had not been tempted to poke Dr Mahathir in the ribs. "I don't intend to give him any kind of political valedictory. I don't intend to talk about him."

Dr Mahathir was more eloquent "There's a fondness among prime ministers of Australia to make nasty comments, like calling me recalcitrant," he said. "John Howard did the same thing, repeatedly, even casting aspersions on our judicial system."

He continued with a jibe about Australian history. "We had a very good history of treating our aborigines. We didn't shoot them dead. We didn't commit genocide. So when making criticisms of other people, please look at your own background and temper it with some humility."

Just about the only one of his various bugbears not mentioned was homosexuality: he once commented that if a gay British Cabinet minister brought a boyfriend to Malaysia, "we'll throw them out".

This unusual tactic of deliberately provoking Western "political
correctness" as well as the "norms of international diplomacy" is surely some reflection of just how far advanced the Third World's hatred of Western imperialist domination now is. And the deepening splits in Western imperialist confidence all show how badly rattled the joke "free world" really is by its own insoluble economic crisis and its faltering warmongering offensives as a "solution":

Wall Street Journal Editorial, October 20

"Nobody should have any doubts that [the] plan to set up an independent European defence organisation ... aims to effect a transatlantic breakup ... Europeans tempted to go it alone militarily should consider long and hard whether they want to inhabit a world where the US has turned truly isolationist after being deserted by its allies. Those who define as 'unilateralist' an America that in fact trips over itself to attain UN recognition of facts ... in Iraq should ask themselves if they would be happier with a recluse giant freed from the counsel of friends."

Daily Mail Editorial, October 21

"When Britain suddenly caved in last month to Franco-German demands for a European army under EU command ... [Tony Blair] wanted to show he was a good European. He wanted to persuade France and Germany to offer more help over Iraq. He wanted concessions on the EU constitution. So now we have the worst of all worlds. The Americans are incensed. The [Nato] alliance is in danger of unravelling. And for what? Despite their pretensions, the EU nations spend pitifully little on defence. Their 'army' essentially exists only on paper. Their ability to protect Europe is slight. Their reliability in times of crisis is non-existent:'

John O'Sullivan Chicago Sun-Times, October 21

"All the examples cited [in argument for a European defence force], such as the current EU operation in Macedonia, could be performed equally well, better actually, either by the full Nato or by a Nato 'coalition of the willing' ... Mr Blair wanted to demonstrate his 'commitment' to European unity at a time when he was unwilling to risk the politically unpopular step of taking Britain into the euro ... That now looks like a colossal misjudgment ... Mr Blair ... blathers on about 'not being forced to choose between Europe and America even as he does exactly that by default - and, what is more, chooses Europe."

Times Editorial, October 21

"Mr Blair can afford no more ambiguity. This is an issue that could be more damaging by far than Nato's 'near-death experience' on Iraq - all for the sake of a 'European army' that is incapable of deploying more than 3% of its forces."

Gavin Esler Scotsman, October 21

"Nato, [the US] insists publicly, is vital to the defence of our common values and a powerful shared forum between transatlantic nations. Anything that puts this relationship in jeopardy is dangerous. But can this be the same Nato that voted overwhelmingly to go to war on America's behalf after September 11 and which was then largely ignored by Washington, and specifically by [the US defence secretary] Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon? As [EU commissioner] Chris Patten pointed out, Mr Rumsfeld does not talk so much about an alliance as about a 'toolbox' from which America can fashion policy. Being described as an American tool is perhaps not the role Britain is seeking in the 21st century"

But despised stooges for degenerate American warmongering is precisely what the British political class have become, all parties.

The Tory turmoils are capitalist "democracy" turmoils as more and more people see through the shallow pretence that the richest business club on the Thames, — Parliament, — is in the slightest representing what "the people" of Britain really want, or in any way responds to the deluded "democracy" dream that "the people control government". Money does. Build Leninism. EPSR

There should have been a way to preserve the workers states AND be critical of Stalinism's  theoretical howlers and leadership mistakes but WITHOUT adding to Stalin's paranoid insecurity and getting labelled "counter-revolutionaries" as all Trot turncoats justifiably were, hiding their middle class fear and hatred of proletarian dictatorship in practice, behind self-righteous moral abstractions about "bad men" leaders. As the crisis of economic slump (plus imperialism's  warmongering antidote) relentlessly deepens, the Marxist-Leninist theoretical questions of workers revolution as the only answer to this degeneration of civilisation become more and more urgent to be solved.

With typical fake-'left' opportunism, it is the Trotskyites who are bleating loudest now about the trouble the people of the planet are in from the US blitzkrieg world domination programme as a result of the Soviet workers state no longer existing to challenge Washington's barmier aggressions and aid specific victims to resist and defeat imperialist intervention.

The ludicrous contradiction is obvious.

These Trots were the frauds who gave post-1945 global anti-communism its necessary 'left' cover, always on hand (when Western counter-revolution staged coup-stunts or war provocations against countries allied to the Soviet Socialist Camp) to shout their "anti-imperialism" the loudest while in reality aiding the fascist reaction by continuing their muckraking against these pro-Soviet regimes.

The catastrophe for the Polish working class, e.g., — and for the world, as these Trots now admit, — that was Solidarnosc, the supposed "rank-and-File socialism" movement which masqueraded as a "trade union" but was in fact a complete programme for counter-revolution written and financed by the CIA and the Vatican,  — —  should have shut up this anti-communist Trotskyite delinquency once and for all.

Although provocative sects like the Sparts tell endless lies to try to cover their tracks, — ALL of the Trot 57 varieties let their usual anti-Soviet bile pour out, along with the rest of Western middle-class brainwashed "world opinion" when Lech Walesa launched his Gdansk shipyard wall-climbing stunt (see below).

But such is the schizophrenic dishonesty of the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' that not a Trot can now be found who will admit to the Solidarnosc counter-revolutionary disaster that their misdirected opposition to Stalinist stupidity helped to unleash.

Among many things that need clarifying from 20th Century anti-imperialist history are what better ways might have been found for disputing the theoretical nonsense used by Stalinism to embroider its grotesque Revisionist retreats from Marxism-Leninism and to cover its gruesome paranoid mistakes and crimes, — other than going down the equally shallow and opportunist path, — suicidal from the start, and always making successful anti-Stalinism even harder, — of Trotsky's "political revolution" lunacy.

The entire international proletariat quite properly saw through this specious middle class garbage to the full counter-revolution beyond (which this conceited "I-should-be-the leader" biliousness of Trotsky would lead to, handling Stalin's mistakes in completely the wrong way).

And only grotesque historical distortions by the Trots cover up the fact that EVERY time this "political revolution" nonsense appeared on the scene, it always did end in imperialist COUNTER-revolution eventually, as even the faintest grasp of Marxist-Leninist science would have explained every time was INEVITABLE.

Also needing to be clarified is the unmistakable historical pattern whereby the counter-revolutionary shallow dilettantism of the lifelong anti-Bolshevik Trotskyism escaped the exposure that the Solidarnosc catastrophe eventually brought ONLY because all the endless other putsch attempts against workers states ended in failure, thereby denying Marxist science the absolute PROOF of what sinister counter-revolutionary treachery Trotsky represented IN PRACTICE behind all the sophistry of being "anti-Stalinist, but anti-imperialist and anti-counter-revolution too", etc, etc..

The disgusting pro-Western anarcho-individualism (which briefly "triumphed" on Tiananmen Square in 1989) only didn't become indelibly associated with the counter-revolution it would have unleashed BECAUSE the proletarian dictatorship ROUTED it.

All the leading demagogues of the Square, provocatively parading their Statue of Liberty symbol while singing the Internationale as a sick cover for their pro-capitalist putsch, have since in the West all come out in their true counter-revolutionary colours.

But the Trots can still hide their complicity in this West-induced rottenness because the full counter-revolutionary flowering of these petty bourgeois anti-communist opportunists in China never came to disastrous fruition, unlike in Poland and the Socialist Camp in Europe.

The same luck held for shielding the anti-Marxist counter-revolutionary lunacy of Trotsky's "political revolution" gimmick in the Western-run so-called "Hungarian Revolution" of 1956 which would have reverted that country to the Arrow Cross fascist control which prevailed when Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, — in exactly the same way that Walesa's brief reign in Poland attempted to re-establish that country's comparable Pilsudskiite tradition, another ally of Hitler.

Other failed coups would have had similar counter-revolutionary outcomes, identical in fact to where East Europe DID end up eventually once Stalinist "peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful roads to socialism" imbecility had finally gone the whole logical way to TOTAL class-collaboration with Western imperialism by unilaterally scuttling the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And how interesting that Trotskyite opportunist hypocrisy is now so quiet about calling for the revolutionary overthrow of the leadership of the Chinese workers state now that the scuttling of the Soviet workers state has had such an admittedly catastrophic effect on anti-imperialism's surface ability to resist US blitzkrieg bullying.

And even more revealing that this farcical delusion of a "political" revolutionary overthrow should have been quietly shelved with regard to the Cuban workers state, — which was initially pronounced by all the Trots as being just as "deformed" or "degenerated" (i.e. useless beyond repair), —  but which is now so obviously the hope and inspiration of the whole of Latin America (and much of the Third World beyond) for its heroic resistance to US imperialism's non-stop counter-revolutionary offensive.

And shelved without a single sensible word of self-analysis by the Trots since, for having once touted the insane FANTASY of the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' of "overthrow Castro in order to encourage REAL socialist defiance of US imperialism in Cuba".

The Trot weasels counter-revolutionary cover-up is currently in full cry about how they mourn the loss of the Soviet workers state, what a triumph it was, and how bad things now are for the anti-imperialist struggle since the USSR's self-liquidation:

Millions around the world burn with rage at the sight of Iraq reduced to rubble and humiliated by old-style colonial pillage. The images of U.S. troops trampling with their jackboots over a country which American imperialism first starved, then bombed and bled white in a display of global dominance by the "world's only superpower" are truly obscene. This just outrage must be raised to a political understanding that the enslavement of Iraq is yet another price that the international working class and the oppressed peoples of the Third World are paying for the destruction of the Soviet Union through capitalist counter-revolution in 1991-92. Today's imperialist global rampage was impossible when the USSR still existed.

Soviet Union represented the industrial and military powerhouse protecting every other country that had overthrown capitalist rule, from China to Vietnam to Cuba. It was only fear of possible Soviet retaliation that held American imperialism back from using nuclear weapons against North Korea and China in the Korean War of the early 1950s and against North Vietnam in the 1960s.

While the U.S. rulers are now grabbing more of the oil wealth of the Near East, their main and ultimate target is the People's Republic of China, by far the largest and strongest of those remaining states where capitalism has been overthrown. China is confronting mounting American military pressure, from the expansion of U.S. bases in the Philippines to new U.S. bases across Central Asia. China (and North Korea) are among those states explicitly indicated as potential targets for a U.S. nuclear first strike as laid out in the Pentagon's 2002 "Nuclear Posture Review." This makes all the more clear our duty to fight for the unconditional military defense of China and North Korea, bureaucratically deformed workers states, against the imperialist powers. And that means defending the right of North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

Another result of the Soviet Union's demise is that the nominally independent countries of the Third World can no longer maneuver between the "two superpowers." They thus face the unrestrained economic exactions and brute military force of the imperialists. Look at the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where the overturn of the October Revolution has led to the intensification of imperialist bloodsucking, and with it, the increased starvation and bloodshed, ethnic group against ethnic group, country against country, everybody out for some advantage in a battle for survival. This has occurred because the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have demanded repayment of the money they had given previously as a sop to these African countries during the Cold War against the Soviet Union..

The greatest devastation brought about by the fall of the USSR has taken place on its own former territory. The face of the "new Russia" can be seen not only in the economic catastrophe that has befallen the population but in the degradation of women and national minorities and in the slaughter and destruction inflicted by Russian occupation forces in Chechnya. A central goal of the counter-revolutionary regime of Boris Yeltsin was to destroy the collectivized economy inherited from the former Soviet Union. Against all complaints over incompetence or corruption, Yeltsin's stock answer was to point out he had achieved the main thing he'd promised: no more communism in Russia.

And in place of what it destroyed, what has capitalism built in these 12 years? Just as Soviet progress could be measured in the figures of concrete, steel and education, so now can capitalism's return be measured in figures of ruin, disease and barbarism. In these 12 years capitalism's profit system reveals itself as a deadly enemy of humanity — a machine not for the advancement of the international productive forces and culture but for their destruction.

Capitalism has passed a death sentence on the Russian population: in absolute numbers deaths exceeded births during the first six years after the capitalist counter-revolution by 3.5 million; by 2001 this figure had become 6.75 million; and by now even conservative estimates of the population contraction are closer to 8 million! In 1989, average male life expectancy was 64.2 years. In Yeltsin's Russia of 1994, it dropped to 57.6 years. This historically unprecedented sudden drop in life expectancy equals, for the nine-year period from 1987 to 1996, the ghosts of 11 million stolen lifetimes. A 16-year-old boy has less of a chance to survive to 60 in Putin's Russia than in the benighted filth of 19th century tsarism!

In 2002, the State Statistical Committee predicted as its "most probable forecast" that the population of the Russian Federation would fall from 144 million to 101 million by 2050. In a worst case scenario, the population would fall to 77million, a reduction of almost 50 percent!

What is behind this catastrophe? The economic collapse of post-Soviet Russia was unprecedented for a modern society: gross domestic product fell by over 80 percent from 1991 to 1997; according to official (understated) statistics, capital investment dropped over 90 percent. By the middle of the decade, 40 percent of the population of the Russian Federation was living below the official poverty line and a further 36 percent only a little above it. Millions were literally starving.

This massive economic and social immiseration has combined with the destruction of the public health system. Tuberculosis (TB), which had been effectively eradicated in the Soviet Union, has returned as a scourge of Russia's poor. 

Capitalism has wiped out a century of social progress, and what a century! What is being destroyed in Russia today is everything that Soviet workers and rural toilers had built, everything that 	their parents and grandparents before them had constructed with such sacrifice and heroism in the face of the Civil War and imperialist interventions of 1918-21, the invasion by Nazi Germany in the Second World War. All of this had been endured in the bitter-resolve that it would someday, somehow lead to a better, socialist society. Now the proletariat's very will to live is being torn away, as everything they had built over the generations is smashed to pieces and looted as the officially sanctioned and celebrated private property of vulgar capitalist gangsters. 

To understand the social catastrophe that has befallen post-Soviet Russia and to save the banner of socialism, it is necessary to understand the origins of the Soviet Union in the October 1917 Revolution, led by the Bolshevik Party.  The October Revolution arose out of the imperialist slaughter of the First World War. It was the signal act of the 20th century, which Lenin described as the epoch of imperialist decay and socialist revolution. It took the question of socialist revolution out of the realm of theory and made it real in the former Russian tsarist empire.

The bourgeoisie and its lackeys have done everything in their power to poison, or wipe out entirely, any memory of what the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet workers state were really about.

Spartist posturing at its finest.

But the sick and sinister contradiction appears right in the middle of all this phoney eulogising.

Incapable of concealing their deeper petty bourgeois feelings, in reality horrified and terrified at the stark class-war reality of what the dictatorship of the proletariat had to be to survive those holocaust early decades of nonstop imperialist counterrevolution and sabotage, not to mention worldwide propaganda vilification and isolation, — these anti-communists simultaneously let rip with:

"...the murderous excesses of agricultural collectivisation and forced-march industrialisation .... the horrors of Stalin's terror which reached every family ....Communist Party leaders and apparatchiks, so long falsely identified with "socialism"...a new conservative and bureaucratised layer in the party and state apparatus came to the fore, intent on preserving its relatively privileged status amid extreme poverty, scarcity and imperialist hostility .... the rigged 13th Party Conference in January 1924 marked the qualitative point at which the bureaucratic caste seized political power. From then on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled, and the purpose for which it was ruled all changed. This was a....counter-revolution."

Some "counter-revolution", which then proceeded to transform world development history over the next 66 years, as earlier described fulsomely by these selfsame Spart 'left' posturers.

But the contradictory insanity of all this gets worse. Far, far worse, — certifiably so.

To work their way round to the justification for their OWN and REAL counter-revolutionary course, the Sparts continue:

Trotsky also explained that the Stalinist bureaucracy was capable of extensive but not intensive economic growth. What does that mean? It means that the Kremlin oligarchy could and did expand the Soviet economy by crudely transplanting advanced capitalist methods and even entire factories from abroad, but it was incapable of constantly raising the overall level of technology and labor productivity. As Trotsky put it in The Revolution Betrayed: "Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery."

So how did the Soviet workers state get into space?? Certainly not by relying on the captured NAZI Werner von Braun which the mighty "freedom" of that mighty "democracy of producers and consumers", the USA had to rely on.

This planned socialist economy, which Trotsky's lost-leadership bile insisted could only "crudely transplant capitalist methods or entire capitalist factories" to survive at all, in reality completely outstripped international imperialism's best efforts by achieving the world's most sophisticated telemetry communications, most advanced fuel technology, and most efficient rocket-motor science to leave the entire "free" world utterly gobsmacked.

The same with nuclear technology. The US imperialists recruited the scientific genius of the entire planet to produce the world's first atomic weapons.

But with just one British defector to lend a hand, the Soviet workers state in only a few years after 1945, although devastated, completely outdeveloped the West in nuclear technology theory.

Two years after Trotsky's 1936 "Revolution Betrayed" attempt to demoralise the entire international working class with tripe about the USSR's incurable economic uselessness, the poisonous dilettante was at it again with his 1938 farrago the "Transitional Programme" to world revolution (!)

The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers'' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism."

In reality, of course, the Soviet workers state, which at that point had only existed for 20 years filled with non-stop imperialist military intervention, economic blockade, and counter-revolutionary sabotage, — in fact went on over the following 50 years to totally transform the international anti-imperialist situation (as the Sparts earlier admit), by aiding or protecting the OVERTHROW of capitalism for nearly half of mankind, from Korea and China and Vietnam in the East to Europe and Cuba in the West.

"Yet Trotsky was right in the end, wasn't he" the Sparts will reply, (utterly ignoring the fact that Trotsky's endless daft prognoses (e.g. the two above from 1936 & 1938) are self-evident nonsense, even as these 'left' frauds reproduce this "theoretical" drivel yet again in 2003.

Well, not really. Stalin's crass theoretical Revisionism was inevitably always heading towards total class-collaborating-with-imperialism confusion once Marxist-Leninist revolutionary-scientific understanding of necessary world development had been abandoned, misunderstood, or polluted.

What to make of that historical phenomenon and how to fight it remains one of the great unanswered theoretical challenges facing the working class, still very relevant today in that Stalin's Revisionist confusion still holds sway in Beijing, Hanoi, Pyongyang, Havana, etc, although these remain valuable workers states in the global balance against imperialism, as the Sparts themselves admit.

But the one clear way NOT to try to oppose or challenge this Revisionist bureaucratic ageing process (observable in the Second International long before Stalin and the Soviet workers state had even been thought of) is to try to kill it via an armed putsch, the "political" "revolution" so-called. A theoretical trouncing is obviously what is called for, — hardly served by this Trot decision to treat the Soviet workers state leadership as the "counter-revolution" from January 1924 onwards.

But as Stalinist paranoia and arbitrariness developed alongside the sickening cult of the individual, any theoretical opposition at all became more and more difficult and dangerous.

Worse still, the boundlessly joyous novelty of the world's first workers state having been born at all, but then actually thriving in spite of, the colossal hostility, destruction, and sabotage which worldwide anti-communist hatred was being created to sustain, — — rendered the entire international proletariat, and all the best of the intelligentsia too, almost reverently pro-Soviet.

But critical debates did break out from time to time, especially within the communist parties internationally; and many parties split frequently but then came back together again, most of the time without any over-heavy Soviet influence, and never at all with a Soviet labour camp or a Stalinist bullet being the decisive factor, as tragically could happen in internal Soviet party disagreements,

But what has never yet emerged clearly was the development of any totally coherent theoretical opposition to Stalin's ever increasing departures from classical Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science into Revisionist feeblemindedness. The Chinese party developed the strongest doubts about the validity of Moscow policy while yet maintaining 100% principled solidarity with the Soviet state in all its necessary diplomatic dealings and propaganda campaigns over criticism e.g., around all forceful actions by the Soviet proletarian dictatorship against endless imperialist provocations or counter-revolutionary stunts. But Beijing itself never made a complete analysis of Stalinism's weaknesses and errors, and came up with even more useless Revisionist nonsense of its own when it started lashing out at the successors and continuers of Stalinist Revisionist nonsense.

Castro has started making critical comments on Moscow Communism's leadership and theoretical defects but has reached a level little better than what "Cult of the Individual' impressionistic shallowness originally came up with after Stalin's death, — the childish "bad man" view of history which gets no further than cataloguing personal and mass suffering.

History can never be re-run now but clearly what was needed but never tried (in the 73 years of the Soviet workers state, marred and eventually wrecked by Stalinist Revisionist inadequacy), was a CORRECT Marxist-Leninist criticism of Moscow's mistakes, misjudgments, and misunderstandings, ALLIED TO the hindsight which these Trot counter-revolutionaries now brazenly trumpet that the WORST thing that could happen would be for the Soviet workers state to cease continuing to exist, despite all its leadership's faults.

Many independent Communist Parties outside of the USSR might have come up with the correct critique while still maintaining full propaganda solidarity with Moscow against the west, — especially the parties in China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, etc, where they had established their own revolutionary authority.

Other parties too, as in South Africa, Greece, Malaya, Algeria, etc, who had their own undoubted revolutionary sincerity and suffering to show for it, could hardly have been dismissed easily by Moscow counter-polemics as just "imperialist agents-provocateurs who want to spark war between the USA and the USSR" if they had spoken up against the "peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful roads to socialism" garbage which eventually spread from mere barmy headrot to the shamefaced dismantling of the Soviet workers state, the whole Socialist Camp, and then the entire Communist International, leaving behind just pockets of still-continuing Revisionist lunacy here and there (SLP, Lalkar, SACP, CPI, etc, etc).

But what can be made of what did happen in history??

Civilisation's immaturity is the only conclusion that can be drawn.

In the next round of workers-state building after the coming revolutionary explosion of insoluble imperialist crisis, the world will be an older and wiser place.

Crap theories from rubbish workers-state regimes should be able to get the criticism they need from the general scientific wisdom by then accumulated for building socialism and seeing off the last degenerate eruptions of imperialist system warmongering and counter-revolution.

One curious footnote on the Trots. Some of the most self-righteously purist among them like the Sparts and the Healyites, — normally the readiest with the "Kill the scoundrels" standard Trot invective against the Stalinists, edged towards reformist dialogue with Moscow near the end, once it was much too late to develop a global correction to Stalin's fatal Revisionist theories.

WRPers came up with the fantasy that Gorbachev WAS the "political revolution" and started praising him for this joke "perestroika", — so desperate were they to make some sense of meaningless Trot theory now that a full flood of reform and change in Moscow (in fact nothing new at all in the Soviet Revolution) had become clear international knowledge, thus ridiculing the lifelong Trot dismissal since 1924 of an "ossified, totalitarian bureaucracy", etc, etc, needing counter-revolutionary overthrow, not dialogue and support.

Symbolically, — (doubting how much real international influence the Healyites had), this backing for Gorbachevism could not have been more damaging or come at a worse time (as well as being so ludicrous by these firebrand Trot-purist "revolutionaries" as to be almost incredible), — cheering Moscow on right at the moment when Gorbachev's words and deeds daily made it clearer to the EPSR from 1985 onwards that this latest Revisionist succession could take everything to self-liquidatory ruin, — for the Soviet Union, for the workers states, and for the Communist International, leaving nothing but wreckage behind.

The Sparts came up with a similarly catastrophic opportunist stunt when they took up Trotsky's "In Defence of Marxism" line (which gave sneering faint approval to the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland and Finland) to go right over the top to bellow "HAIL RED ARMY" to the 1979 Soviet intervention into Afghanistan, — Brezhnev's last fatal stab at gesture-politics in his rare moments of sober coherence, and a disastrous mistake.

Despite all their denials, the Sparts let slip their real feelings of counter-revolutionary venom towards the Soviet proletarian dictatorship soon after, when the far more blatantly counter-revolutionary Solidarnosc (far more of a danger to international anti-imperialism than were the tribal/feudal Mojaheddin reactionaries in Afghanistan) was in full flood, and Moscow was thinking of intervening militarily.

Although they try to hide it now, the Sparts first welcomed Walesa's "trade union" CIA stunt with the words "Polish workers move" (5/9/80).

They scabbily followed this up 8 months later, when worldwide pro-Solidarnosc hysteria was at its height, with their SB32 pronouncement that "Genuine proletarian internationalists must bitterly protest a Russian military intervention which would represent a defeat for the cause of socialism".

After capitulating 10 years later to the Pilsudskiite Walesa's fascist-nationalist "democracy", laughably programmed by his CIA and Vatican sponsors, the Polish workers state was rapidly liquidated, helping to bring down the Soviet workers state with it.

Now this joke "democratic" Poland is US blitzkrieg-imperialism's leading stooge regime in East Europe, currently providing troops in Iraq to help Washington's colonial barbarism there try to avert a justified come uppance.

The Spart individuals sneered with prime counter-revolutionary biliousness at the proper (if too tardy) Soviet interventions to stop anti-communist putsches in 1956 (Hungary) and 1968 (Prague) and at the contingency plan for Poland in 1980, — all examples of correct Soviet understanding of its duty to put down REAL counter-revolution's preparations to restore capitalism (i.e. "free-market democracy").

How interesting that the one misjudged adventurism by the usually ultra-conservative Moscow, - the unwise expedition into totally unstable Afghanistan with no established workers state and where massive lavishly-funded CIA-organised sabotage and counter-revolution was ready and waiting to suck the Red Army into an endless bloodbath mounted from surrounding hostile territory, — — — the Sparts jumped up and sinisterly shouted "Excellent: Hail Red Army". Curious???

Charitably assuming that poor understanding and a lack of foresight explained the Sparts aberration, the EPSR has no qualms about noting its own failure, through romantic exhuberance, to see the pitfalls that awaited the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

But the EPSR had spoken principled support to EVERY Soviet military action from 1917 onwards; and given its lack of wisdom to see the problem ahead, it would have been an aberration for the EPSR to have NOT been in favour of giving the CIA's counter-revolutionaries in Afghanistan a bloody nose, protecting the emergent Afghani workers state.

And even the Afghan adventure could have been turned round to Soviet workers state and global anti-imperialist advantage but for the Stalinist Revisionist delusions misleading Moscow into continuing its silly pledge to "overtake the USA' in economic production and living standards, an impossible task all the time that monopoly imperialism still controlled well more than half the planet's wealth, and given that the entire relatively backward Socialist Camp and non-aligned world was being lavishly aided by the USSR along egalitarian lines.

Spart venom, despite all its "We Fought to Defend the Soviet Union" bullshit, fails to make this crucial point about the REAL disaster of Revisionism, preferring to stick to its poisonous innuendo, inseparable from the entire western bourgeois counter-revolutionary propaganda for 74 years, that the economy failed to come up to expectations (which made the Afghan war costs seem too pricey) because of its leadership being "hostile from the outset to workers democracy and the fight for international extension of the revolution as the road to socialist development", and because of "these privileged social strata" wanting "to further enrich themselves at the expense of the working class". 	

In other words, more and more personal impressionistic venom based on despicable moral self-righteousness in the abstract, and about as far from a Marxist-Leninist historical materialist analysis of the great movements of class forces and their accompanying delusions which really shaped the outcome of the 20th century, —- as it is possible to be.

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

Bogus delays to suit colonial intransigence

SINN FÉIN PRESIDENT Gerry Adams has cautioned against any further postponement of elections.

"My big concern at the moment is that the two governments and the Ulster Unionist Party have set the bar too high, right outside the Agreement," said Adams. The Sinn Féin leader pointed out that demands were being made of republicans while the British and Irish governments were in breach of the Agreement.

At the same time, as a result of its Executive resolution on the Joint Declaration the UUP has adopted an agenda in which other elements of the party had joined the rejectionists to move backwards, said Adams. The UUP has moved away from elements such as the Equality Commission, justice issues and other matters at the core of the Good Friday Agreement.

"The rejectionist unionists had their way," said Adams. "I look at the Ulster Unionist resolution and read through it and see rejection of element after element of the Good Friday Agreement and then I read the demands."

Adams pointed out inconsistencies within the unionist rejectionist position. "The UUP wants to see the IRA going away, and Sinn Féin's peace strategy is to achieve that objective, but at the same time the UUP are against the British Army going away and they want to see the RIR retained. It just doesn't make sense," said Adams.

Unionists want the IRA to disappear but they want a small, locally recruited militia to be maintained and they want the British Army to stay in Crossmaglen, in Carrickmore or wherever else throughout the Six Counties.

As for the current negotiations, Adams said Sinn Féin's case has been transparent.

"We are prepared to play our part and we are prepared to stretch beyond ourselves and beyond our commitments under the Agreement but we cannot do any of that in the absence of a date, certain and publicly promulgated, for an election," said Adams.

Current difficulties in the 	peace process were further exacerbated during a 110 strong meeting of the Ulster Unionist Executive that unanimously adopted a motion demanding 'radical change' to the Joint Declaration.

The motion that had been tabled by party leader David Trimble had been framed by amendments from Jeffrey Donaldson. For many commentators it was difficult to see the amended motion as anything other than a rejection of the Joint Declaration.

"We are calling for radical change," said Donaldson, "and we are saying that the Joint Declaration doesn't provide a satisfactory basis for progress."

Trimble has had his chance to throw his dissidents, out of the party. By failing to do so, he is now the leader of a party that proclaims it is in support of the Agreement but consistently allows the agenda to be set by a determinedly anti-Agreement rump.

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

ONE YEAR on from the high profile arrest operations and the raids on Sinn Féin's Stormont office that created the ongoing crisis in the Peace Process, the families of the four people detained have called for the charges of gathering information against Denis Donaldson, Ciarán Kearney, Fiona Farrelly and Billy Mackessy to be dropped.

All four were arrested from their homes in Belfast in October 2002 as the PSNI carried out raids in homes across the North and were subsequently accused of intelligence gathering.

As well as the house raids, the PSNI, under the gaze of the media, carried out a highprofile raid on Sinn Féin's Stormont offices, thus triggered one of the most serious crises in the Peace Process to date.

Operation Torsion saw Special Branch carry out surveillance against republicans. This included break-ins and the handing of documents which are now being used by the prosecution against the four - just days before the much publicised raids and arrests.

The statement from the Donaldson, Kearney, Mackessy and Farrelly families is printed here in full:

"It is now one year since the Special Branch's 'Operation Torsion' entered its final stage. According to BBC reporter Brian Rowan, this clandestine enterprise involved Special Branch bugging, surveilling and. breaking into premises and handling documents, in a period immediately preceding a series of PSNI raids and arrests. The climax of Operation Torsion was the forced entry of Parliament Buildings and the calculated destabilisation of the power-sharing Executive. The scenes of a PSNI raiding party entering Sinn Féin's administrative offices in the Assembly were televised by a camera crew in a political charade which lent credibility to Special Branch's lurid fantasy of a 'Stormont spy ring'.

"That charade was criticised by many, including Irish Senator and leading proponent of the Peace Process, Dr Martin Mansergh, who characterised the Special Branch's Stormont raid as akin to the anti-democratic forces in Zimbabwe and Chile. This fraud was exposed when Special Branch returned all the property taken in the raid on the Sinn Féin offices.

"Around the same time, the new PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde made a qualified apology for the Special Branch's actions at Stormont. However, the malicious and sustained misinformation campaign driven from within the Special Branch continued. Journalists were briefed through politically motivated leaks, as highlighted by the Police Ombudsman.

"This same spurious defamatory and dangerous myth has engulfed our lives from the time our homes were forcibly entered before dawn on Friday 4 October 2002. Our homes were smashed into as we slept, we were placed under room arrest, our homes were ransacked, and our property and personal affects seized. Our loved ones were placed under arrest, detained for up to the maximum of seven days, charged and imprisoned.

"The Director for Public Prosecution has yet to decide whether there is any basis for the charges, which are strenuously contested by all defendants. We believe in the innocence of our loved ones. Their human rights and the rights of our families have been subverted and violated by those behind Operation Torsion.

"In the last year, as formal judicial proceedings have been pursued, the right to be presumed innocent and the right to advance a proper, effective legal defence has been relentlessly undermined.

Their Special Branch accusers have yet to substantiate any of their widely publicised allegations with evidence. The inordinate delays in providing disclosure to defence solicitors has been repeatedly raised in court.

"Paradoxically, whilst the Special Branch have shown no compunction about leaking selective information to the media about Operation Torsion, they have so far refused to answer questions in court from defence solicitors about this subject.

"Complaints have been lodged by defence solicitors with the Police Ombudsman and remain to be pursued.

"The Special Branch commander who led Operation Torsion, and has since retired amidst a controversy over alleged misconduct and leaks to the media, has not been shy to reveal his motivation an prosecuting Operation Torsion.

"He has stated that his objective was to 'take skulls' in the expectation that the power sharing Executive would be endangered as a result. Whilst he was still a senior PSNI officer, that same former Special Branch commander made public his strident opposition to the Patten Report's reforms for policing.

"Our families are supporters of the peace process. Indeed, character references from many public figures have pointed to the effort and dedication some of our relatives have demonstrated in their own lives to the development and promotion of the peace process.

"We share the view of An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern that the outworkings of Operation Torsion 'were open to suspicion'. To fully dispel those suspicions and to clear the name of, our relatives, we are calling for the full truth about Operation Torsion to be disclosed and for formal judicial proceedings against our relative to be thrown out."