Economic and Philosophic Science Review

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

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Recent issue

No 1199 September 09th 2003

Bush's $87 billion "fight on" defiance speech, plus Meacher's acknowledgment that this is a US imperialist war for "world domination", gives massive fuel to EPSR perspectives that what the working-class is facing is the greatest capitalist-system economic crisis ever, which is inexorably leading to something like World War III, and that only a Leninist programme to cope with total revolutionary turmoil is going to be of any use at all to ordinary people everywhere.

The ruling-class mentality around the American presidency is now plumbing the depths of degeneracy with its crude aggressive mouthing to "finish the job" in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the filthy chaotic disasters being created there, still determined to pretend that the "war on terrorism" makes any sense at all when the whole world already understands that this is a war of global control and exploitation which is only going to create "terrorists" by the million.

The capitalist system's own propaganda service is giving the details of how Third World resistance is effectively getting the better of this monstrous Western imperialist aggression, or at least so resentfully and determinedly defying it that both the warmongering itself and its ludicrous "rationalisation" as a "war on terrorism", - or any kind of worthwhile operation,- is becoming not only increasingly doubted but even despised:

Boston Globe September 2

"The Bush administration's hubristic foreign policy has been efficiently exposed as based on nothing more than hallucination. Hi-tech weaponry can kill unwilling human beings, but it cannot force them to embrace an unwanted idea. As rekindled North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes prove, Washington's rhetoric of 'evil' is as self-defeating as it is self-delusional. No one could have predicted a year ago that the fall from the Bush high horse of American Empire would come so hard and so quickly ... The rise and fall of imperial Washington took not hundreds of years, but a few hundred days ...

"Sooner or later, the US must admit it has made a terrible mistake in Iraq, and it must move quickly to undo it. That means the US must yield not only command of the occupation force, but participation in it ... This might seem terribly unlikely today; but something like it is inevitable. The only question is whether it happens over the short term, as the result of responsible decision making ... or over the long term, as the result of a bloody and unending horror."

Mail on Sunday September 7

"I know with total certainty that things are far worse [in Iraq] now than they were a few months ago ... Large parts of Iraq are now run by armed militias, Kurdish and Shia, that ignore the occupation forces. How many more British and American troops do they think will be needed before we have Iraq 'under control'?

"I would like to hear from some of those who beat the drum for this war. I would like them to do as I did and go by the road route from Amman to Baghdad ... to travel round and talk to the Shias about what sort of Iraq they want - since they are the majority and a true democracy would be run by them. And then see how many of them continue to believe that the operation was a success, even though the patient died."

A rocket-propelled grenade had formed a conical crater on the verge, narrowly missing a US armoured car. The American soldiers piled out, and residents spent the next two hours in their gardens, as their houses were searched.

Yesterday, some 12 hours later, Donald Rumsfeld arrived by helicopter from Baghdad in Saddam Hussein's home town and the symbolic heartland of the old regime.

The architect of the US-British victory was unable to set foot on the streets. Far from being a place of joyful liberation, Tikrit is in the grip of a low-level insurgency. And outside the palace-turned-military fortress in which he briefly touched down, almost no one was glad to see him.

Even the weary American troops had reservations. "I don't give a damn about Rumsfeld. All I give a damn about is going home," Rue Gretton, a member of the US forces, said.

Mr Rumsfeld cancelled a speech citing a tight schedule and flew on to Mosul, where he had to view from a helicopter the house in which US troops killed Uday and Qusay Hussein.

There was no mistaking that someone very important was coming to Tikrit, but for most of the inhabitants the occasion was nothing more than a nuisance. From early morning, the town centre and the main road in front of Saddam Hussein's former palace were blocked by checkpoints, reinforced with tanks and armoured cars. The number of US troops was tripled. Some 1,500 Iraqi police were deployed, including reinforcements from the neighbouring towns of Owja and Samarra.

Teenage boys had been employed for an urban beautification programme, painting neat yellow and white lines along the curbs of the roads, but none of it was visible from Mr Rumsfeld's thunderous air convoy of Apaches and Black Hawks.

"We can see lots of helicopters, the roads are all closed, and there are rumours of a visitor," said a 29-year-old lorry driver named Idris Amer. "But we didn't see anyone."

There is near-universal resentment in Tikrit of the US presence, and the guerrilla attacks have become almost routine. The complaints centre on the inadequacy of the electricity supply and the cost of living.

"If I could speak to Mr Rumsfeld, I would ask him about the bizarre and inexplicable behaviour of the coalition," Laith Fadel Abdulrzak, a 17-year old student, said. Two months ago his motorbike was seized and burnt, by US soldiers, along with those of dozens of young men. "They claim the Fedayin [Saddam loyalists] were using such motorbikes, but I bought it with my own money."

Hummadi Josim, 65, a local sheikh, who says he has twice been arrested, handcuffed and interrogated by US forces on both occasions without charge - said: "If you are decent to me, I will do the same for you. But if you are rude to me and don't treat me as a human being, I will answer you with my actions."

Tikritis say that they have no idea who was behind the grenade and mortar attacks, and none went so far as to articulate explicit support for them or nostalgia for Saddam. The soldiers face a frightening and difficult task, and a deadly enemy; the raids and searches and checkpoints are a response to real danger.

But Iraqis who are caught in the middle after years of suffering, have little understanding of this and still less sympathy.

But the recently-replaced-after-6-years-in-the-Blair-Cabinet Michael Meacher has poured oil on the flames of bourgeois doubt with a vengeance by his remarkable public attack at the weekend on the entire "justification" imperialist skulduggery which has cynically used the militarily-trivial Sept 11 "terrorist" incidents of 2001 in the USA as a covering "excuse" for Middle East re-colonisation plans which crisis-threatened Western monopoly-capitalist interests have in fact been hatching for more than six years, just waiting for a "cause" and an opportunity to get going with:

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently, as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11- it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination.

The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence".

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured".

The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002).

Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan; Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public rejoin the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor".

The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Meacher is a political lightweight but that only makes his devastating onslaught all the more remarkable.

His obsession with the "CIA conspiracy" theory as an "alternative" explanation for the dramatic shock of Sept 11 demonstrates his weak grasp of capitalist-system crisis which is the crucial thing to bring out about everything that has happened in this whole long warmongering-aggression buildup in the West from the blitz of Serbia onwards; - but to hear an authentically degenerate British Cabinet member (of long-standing) acknowledge that this whole "war on terror" hysteria is nothing but a rotten cover for vicious and dangerous neo-colonial tyranny by the West against the Third World, is very useful anti-imperialist propaganda.

The insoluble economic crisis at the core of all these warmongering activities, which the soft-headed Meacher misses, is far more difficult to pinpoint, especially from capitalism's own admissions where although still anxious, all the talk is still of "recovery" and "solutions", - and is likely to always continue in that vein to a certain extent, no matter how catastrophically bad a collapse and slump may become in the near future.

But all the dodgy signs that need interpreting are still coming as thick and fast as ever, and are even worse than ever, in some respects.

The latest US unemployment figures are a shattering blow to all the Washington bullshit about "the recession is definitely over", etc ,suddenly leaping dramatically to over 6 percent, fully 16 months into "renewed growth" claims, and prompting pretend amazed discussions about "the jobless recovery".

But shedding labour while doing marginally better in trading is a classic sign of ferociously SHARPENING competition for world markets, which is exactly what the many other signs of so-called "recovery" are also indicating.

And ever-more-vicious cut-throat competitiveness is not necessarily a good "recovery" sign at all but can fairly be taken to mean the exact opposite.

Getting the sack to aid the firm's costcutting survival is still getting the sack.

And if the whole world market is simply just continuing these costcutting rampages, then what history is looking at is not any kind of "recovery" but ever-worsening trade war and global mass unemployment plus falling living standards, - the absolute recipe for a total international economic slump and "over-production" crisis on the way, which twice before in the last century has only ended up in inter-imperialist World War.

Will the "militant brothers" at Brighton this week, supposedly "defending working class interests" with collaborative "reformist" petty bourgeois illusions, have the slightest concern or understanding for a single tiny aspect of all this?????

Or will one single fake-'left' sect, trading newspapers or leaflets outside the hall, challenge the TUC brothers with these truly vital questions?????

And will they even get a platform hearing on the next supposedly "national anti-war demo" on Sept 27????

Most crucially of all, how long before the WORLD REVOLUTIONARY implications of this titanic capitalist system crisis sweep aside the anti-revolutionary backwardness of all 57 varieties of wretched Stalinist and Trotskyist opportunist sectarianism ????????

All of them have dismissed the ideologically naff shallowness of spontaneous national religious resistance to Western imperialism as "condemnable terrorism", - all of them totally missing the point about the colossal depths of the globalisation crisis which is dredging up anti-monopolist struggle from any number of hitherto undisturbed delusions and attitudes, just waiting to be hammered by the unstoppable revolutionary process itself towards renewed Bolshevik revolution purposefulness and consciousness.

Speculatively, the EPSR has repeatedly used the Palestinian experience as a possible example of how the unfolding of this greatest-ever class struggle to determine the world's future might develop, and right on cue, it is once again demonstrating its possible validity.

Just as all sorts of new conclusions are slowly being come to everywhere about exactly what kind of degenerate mess the Western imperialist-dominated world is relentlessly plunging itself into, up rears this indomitable Palestinian resistance once again to help stretch imaginations to the limit.

"You MUST stop fighting", the terrible might of US-backed Zionist imperialism keeps on telling the totally brutalised and enslaved remnants of the Palestinian nation, completely driven out of the heart of their homelands by the monstrous Stalinist-backed UN Partition decision of 1947 to recognise armed Jewish colonisation as a "legitimate state" on 57% of Palestine; further driven into the wilderness from now 78% of their homeland by the "legitimate conquest" of the 1967 war as far as the Western imperialist armaments supplies to Zionist colonisation were concerned; and even now butchered and bullied out of the best part of even that remaining 22% of Gaza Strip and West Bank territory by the never ending armed-Zionist colonisation process fervently backed by the whole mighty influence of West European and US jewry.

"You MUST stop fighting" this most cruelly persecuted territory in all modern colonial history continues to be commanded, backed by ever-more ferocious blitzkrieg punishments and Nazi-style assassinations to hunt down the universally-condemned (by the entire corrupted West) "Islamic terrorists".

But exactly as the EPSR has speculated, all the contemptible "two-state solution" and "road map" so-called "peace" processes simply ignorantly and blindly refuse to consider the epoch that the world is moving into, one of nonstop REVOLUTIONARY turmoil.

What the proud, 7 million-strong Palestinian Arab nation is effectively being asked to accept is nothing less than the PERMANENT loss of their homeland (or 80°/ of it) to the "state of Israel", so-called.

But this in an epoch where surely ALL Western imperialist colonial domination is due to be finally swept from the Earth?????

And in conditions of terrified capitalist system crisis where EVERY ruling-class without exception in EVERY corner of the planet is brutalising, exploiting or humiliating ALL that it controls (in the desperate struggle for SURVIVAL in this greatest-of-all imperialist crises), does this not result in this non-stop ruling class tyranny virtually FORCING its subjects to learn how to make an irresistibly successful SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARY response eventually, built on the dictatorship of the proletariat Bolshevik-style, which no amount of imperialist bullying tyranny will ever dominate ever again thereafter????

ALL of these aspects of a greatest-ever imperialist-system crisis remain decidedly speculative perspectives, but equally they have already provided the EPSR with years of international political analysis which has always so far proved remarkably more accurate than any other attempted characterisation of the precise historical epoch the world is going through, and of what will be the inevitable fate of all fake-'left' opportunist manoeuvres which do not start out with the clear priority to build an open party of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory as THE great requirement for the best interests of the working class.

Wall-to-wall backward philistinism and fake-'left' opportunism is all that will be heard on Sept 27, surrounded by the spontaneous ever-willingness of tens of thousands of ordinary people to listen to any revolutionary perceptions that might emerge.

It is a general time for revolutionary socialist studying to stretch itself to the maximum possible, the key works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and the key moments of the long triumphant/tortured history of the world communist movement after 1911, dovetailed into the most flexible possible grasp of where this greatest ever imperialist-system crisis is heading next.

It is the complications of the potential economic collapse which remain among the most difficult issues to fathom.

By general agreement, a key part of this whole balance of Bush's neck-or-nothing warmongering spending-blitz hangs on how quickly or slowly this further intolerable imposition of unrepayable American debt (from hopelessly unrealistic US budgetary and foreign payments deficits) forces the rest of the world "free market" economy to buckle under the strain.

In general, this endless dollar-pollution of the international exchanges is going to bring inevitable collapse and ruin at some stage. But how soon??

Or will all of that be superseded (as well as the fate of this anti-Third-World blitzkrieging, currently in such desperate trouble) by warmongering/bullying American action kicking off against totally new and even more hair-raising targets such as China and Japan?????????

Without much comment, it was reported last week that the former socialist camp is now receiving more international capital investment than the "free world", with China ousting the USA as the planet's favourite investment area.

Not much was said about what a reflection this was on the relentlessly sharpening international trade-war competition whereby Western monopoly-corporations are now frequently closing down plants in the West (causing rising unemployment) in order to open more modern and cheaper labour plants in China and the former socialist camp.

But simultaneously, the US Treasury Secretary Snow was reading the riot act in China demanding that the all conquering Chinese economy should now start reflecting its position with an ever-rising currency (giving rival world traders a chance) instead of perpetually pegging its value to the US dollar, thereby always maximising China's exporting opportunities to the huge American market.

China initially has told Washington to keep its nose out of China's affairs.

Then Japan came in for a similar warning, told to stop artificially trading the yen for dollars on the markets in order to keep the price of the yen (and thus of Japanese exports) artificially low.

Simultaneously to those opening shots in a fresh trade-war round, the international conference in Mexico opened where the Third World is expected to openly declare war on the First World for the continuing disgracefully unfair treatment which the less developed countries are receiving, - their exports tariffed out of contention, while they are continually politically or militarily bullied in various ways to open their doors to Western corporate penetration and/or privatisation on pain of losing Western aid or support of various kinds.

The total anarchy of the capitalist "free world" market is nicely building up to its greatest crisis ever, at last knocking the nonsense out of Revisionist/Stalinist beliefs that "world cooperation with non-aggressive imperialism" was a viable way forward for the planet, and thus setting the scene for a rebirth of Marxist-Leninist REVOLUTIONARY anti-imperialist understanding worldwide.

Meanwhile, idiot Blairism's governmental crisis rolls on unchecked.

The Hutton inquiry recess only meant that inevitably gloomy prognostications for Blair about the judge's eventual findings were filling every newspaper column.

The following was typical from the pro-Blair (and anti-BBC) Sunday Times (a voice of Murdoch).

The following was among the best it could offer,- dressing up the lying nonsense (put out by New-Labour spinning, in order to stay committed to the prearranged US blitzkrieg warmongering plan for Middle East political recolonisation) as merely the result of "muddled thinking" by the Defence Intelligence service.

But to put it another way, this war was launched on the basis of either a complete mistake or a total lie, by official admission:

THE government's handling of vital intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was muddled and confused, a committee of senior parliamentarians is preparing to tell Tony Blair.

In a report to the prime minister on how intelligence was gathered in the run-up to the Iraq war, the intelligence and security committee (ISC) has concluded that Whitehall officials made what sources describe as a "muddled series of judgments" when including the infamous 45 minute claim.

In secret hearings over the past three months, MI6 and defence officials have given the committee conflicting evidence about what they thought the 45-minute warning referred to.

Some believed it meant a local artillery commander would take 45 minutes to fire chemical or biological shells once he had received orders. Others told the committee they believed it referred to the time it would take from Saddam giving the command to fire the shells. Some in the media presented it as the time it would take Saddam to strike Britain.

The committee is understood to have concluded that "muddled" thinking - as opposed to a deliberate attempt by Downing Street to mislead led to this confusion. It is believed to say that the 45-minute warning should have been fully explained, a move which would have avoided the subsequent claims that No.10 was deliberately trying to overstate the dangers posed by Saddam.

The findings, expected to be published this week, are likely to be seen as a criticism of John Scarlett, Britain's most senior spymaster. As chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), Scarlett had overall responsibility for drawing up the Iraq dossier.

Scarlett has been a key figure in the inquiry by Lord Hutton into the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, the government weapons expert, which is preparing to enter its second phase.

When Scarlett appeared before the inquiry, he broke with protocol to comment on the raw intelligence that the 45-minute claim was based on. It was made clear for the first time that the claim narrowly focused on battlefield munitions rather than long-range missiles.

This week's ISC report will fuel the controversy. Its conclusions on the 45-minute warning are unlikely to please the government as it suggests he entire row and perhaps even Kelly's death could have been avoided had clearer language been used.

Scarlett told the inquiry last month that Kelly, who was sceptical of the 45-minute claim, probably thought it referred to missiles with ranges of hundreds of miles. In fact it related to short-range "munitions [and] mortar shells". Scarlett also said he had not been aware of any dissenting voices in the intelligence community.

Last week, however, Brian Jones, a recently retired senior weapons expert with the defence intelligence staff, said he and fellow officials had had concerns about the intelligence and the way it was presented.

The information, Jones said, had been passed to MI6 from an informant who got it from an unidentified Iraqi army officer. "If didn't really give us any real feel that the primary source knew very, much about the subject," said Jones. "There was a lack of detail."

In its report, the ISC has concluded that the 45-minute tip came to MI6 from someone who had proved reliable in the past. But when it came to be presented in the dossier "nobody actually knew what they were saying", a source said.

The committee's conclusions will be cold comfort for Scarlett. He told the inquiry the JIC had approved the dossier but Jones challenged whether intelligence officials did actually sign off on it. If Hutton rules that standard procedures for producing such reports were bypassed, it will prove damaging for Scarlett and the government.

However it is interpreted, the "war to stop Saddam Hussein's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) from permanently threatening Britain's security drastically on only a 45minute fuse" was based on nothing but a total pack of lies.

And to go along with this long prepared Western-imperialist programme to inflict unwanted & lying warmongering tyranny on mankind, what could be more appropriate than a huge increase in the size of the British Gestapo (the secret state police) over the last few years of ever mounting INSOLUBLE capitalist-system economic crisis (which was undoubtedly pointing to the need for re-emphasised Western political-military world control in this immediate future, which was likely to prove highly unpopular in this post-communist epoch of supposedly wall-to-wall "peacefully negotiated democratic solutions to all the world's problems", etc, etc, etc).

A civil liberties group has published a report on this huge rise in domestic Special Branch activity:

Statewatch says the numbers in Britain grew from 1,638 in 1978 to 4,247 last year.

The special branch is now two and a half times as big as it was at the height of the cold war or the worst part of the Northern Ireland conflict.

"Political police - special branch and MI5 - are more intrusive in everyday political activity than at any other point in British history," claims Tony Bunyan, editor of the Statewatch bulletin.

In addition to the growth in its size, the special branch "now has far more civilian staff and the means for mass surveillance of telecommunications and the payments of informers which it never had in those days," he adds.

In the run-up to the next EU summit in Brussels in mid-October, each special branch division in Britain will be expected to provide the names and profiles of activists who are expected to go to Belgium to protest, Statewatch says.

The special branch was set up by the Metropolitan police in 1883 to combat the activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, otherwise known as the Fenians, in England and Wales.

Yet by the mid-1960s it still had only 300 officers. Provincial forces only began to create their own special branches after the mass protests of 1967 and 1968.

So the growth of special branch numbers to 1,638 by 1978 represented a big expansion in the activities of the "eyes and ears" of the security services.

As the BBC series True Spies documented last year, the 1970s saw the special branch infiltrating and recruiting paid agents in trade unions and leftwing organisations, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmanent and the National Union of Mineworkers.

By the early 1990s the size of the special branch had grown to 2,220, with the biggest point of expansion in the 600-plus officers stationed at ports and airports around Britain.

But, as Statewatch points out, the growth in the 1980s was even more rapid than this figure suggests, because first the 93 officers in the anti-terrorist branch were hived off into a separate organisation, followed by the 847 officers in the royalty and diplomatic protection squad.

This process continued in 1992 when the lead role in the special branch's original function of combating Irish terrorism was handed to MI5.

Each police force in Britain outside London has a special branch varying in size from couple of dozen to several hundred officers.

They complement the work of the security services who rely on them to detain suspects and present evidence in court.

A review by the chief inspector of constabulary, published this year, confirmed the changing role of the special branch in monitoring emerging threats, including Islamist extremists.

But it also concentrated its efforts on the threat to public order from groups such as the animal rights movement and anti-globalisation demonstrators.

Its official brief says its operational work "is directed towards counter-terrorism, followed by public order ... the two main methods of targeted surveillance collection being through human sources and surveillance". The events of September 11 underlined the "urgent need to monitor those who abuse democratic liberties to further their terrorist intentions".

In this context the term "surveillance" means observing, following, bugging homes and offices, and tracking, including placing bugs on vehicles, says Mr Bunyan.

The use of human sources means running "covert human intelligence sources" or agents within the procedures laid down by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

The potential for running such operations is limited by the number of special branch "handlers" who are available, but the Home Office has made clear that some universities now provide training courses.

Traditionally such agents are recruited either from among those who are politically or ideologically hostile to the individual or group they are spying on, or who are blackmailed into becoming agents in return for dropping charges such as drugs, or covering up embarrassing personal information.

Mr Bunyan says that it is surprising how small the financial inducements involved maybe, with a regular payment of £100 a week not unusual in return for information.

A second important role for the special branch is the monitoring of demonstrations that may lead to a breach of the peace.

Although a distinction is made for legitimate political protest, the special branch also sees it as its role to keep in touch with local or national demonstrations.

Undercover officers may attend planning meetings and may even volunteer to help in an attempt to gather information.

In this role they have a distinctive function compared with the security services. The special branch will investigate potential threats to public disorder, while the security services are limited to those who pose a direct threat to national security.

For "spying on anti-globalisation activists", read subversion against every breath of anti-imperialist politics that the Gestapo can flush out, or hysterically stunt-up, in this ever-growing atmosphere of ludicrously-exaggerated "terrorist threats to the West's survival"; etc.

And also how handy will this expanded state surveillance be for reinforcing the Big Business cost-cutting attack on jobs, workers rights, and conditions (to survive in this cut-throat trade-war phase of crisis) which is what is provoking the alleged "awkward-squad militancy" revival around the TUC, - putting the Gestapo finger on any genuine anti-imperialist revolutionary understanding which might really be able to inform and inspire trade-union resistance to speed-up pressures.

With all these pointers to a knowing systemic crisis,- meaning that the warmongering offensive and the "defend against terrorism" domestic hysteria are deliberately planned in order to take world developments relentlessly only towards more and more all-out conflict in all directions; some hard thinking is required about this uncharted historical territory.

In previous times of major, inter-imperialist, "overproduction" economic breakdown, deliberate aggressive wars against Second and Third World countries have mostly been a route towards all-out blitzkrieg conflict between the major imperialist powers themselves, as rival "spheres of influence" or "vested interests" have been more or less consciously threatened, knowingly provoking retaliatory armaments build-ups.

The unprecedentedly totally unbalanced shape of the imperialist world today, completely dominated by overwhelming US military and technological industrial might, keeps straitforward inter-imperialist war still on the very furthest horizon, in spite of the obvious and predicted (EPSR) splits in the Western imperialist camp which this phase of insoluble tradewar crisis was always bound to lead to.

And at the same time, "minor" build-up wars against Second and Third World countries are no longer quite what they used to be either, - especially in the post national liberation and post Soviet bloc-independence era, - and especially in the oil-rich Arab Middle East where one of history's greatest cultures has fallen on lean and backward times in recent centuries, but where it never proved quite colonially tamable in the way that overtook the rest of the planet under Western imperialist tyranny.

Aspects of advanced industrial development; courtesy of nationalised oil industries and state-of-the-art military weaponry plus the almost universal Third World and Muslim-religion horror and indignation at the grotesque brutality, suffering, and humiliation to which the Palestinian, Iraqi, and Afghani nations are being systematically subjected by Western tyrannical aggression - raises faint suggestions that maybe it is this onslaught itself on the Second and Third World countries which will in fact turn into World War III, - with the doubting second rank imperialist countries forever tut-tutting on the "anti-terrorist" UN sidelines, never quite sure which adventures or which forces to back, and with the proletarian masses of the Third World and the Middle East possible aspirants for the next revolutionary socialist advance in the world, much as Asiatic Russia played that role after World War I, and China, Korea, and Vietnam, etc, repeated it after World War II.

The Middle East has already "liberated itself" once from Western imperialist domination after 1945, - only to end up permanently subservient to, or dependent-upon, or browbeaten by Western imperialism once again in the long "anti-communist" aftermath.

II the Middle East AGAIN "liberates itself" from Zionist colonisation and Western warmongering tyranny in the near future, where would there be any historical sense for such a once-before and potentially-again LEADING region of world culture in merely stopping short to languish yet some more as second-rate capitalist powers still continuing in the shadow of dominant Western imperialism???

The historical logic all points towards unbeatable proletarian dictatorship socialist states as being the only possible vehicle for taking this region seriously forward for a completely new start in global cultural historical development. Build Leninism. EPSR supporters (theoretical speculation seminar).

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EPSR supporters from the London EPSR
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