A slump occurs when “capacity outstrips demand” – that is to say, when people can no longer afford to buy all that is being produced. This is inevitable in a capitalist system, where productive capacity is privately owned, because the global working class as a whole are never paid enough to purchase all that they collectively produce. As a result, unsold goods begin to pile up, and production facilities – factories and the like – are closed down. People are thrown out of work as a result, their incomes decline, and the problem gets worse. This is exactly what we are seeing happen today.

In these circumstances, avenues for profitable investment dry up – the holders of capital can find nowhere safe to invest their money. For them, this is the crisis – not the unemployment, the famine, the poverty etc (which, after all, remain an endemic feature of the global capitalist economy even during the ‘boom times’, albeit on a somewhat reduced scale). The governments under their control – through ownership of the media, currency manipulation and control of the economy – must then set to work creating new profitable investment opportunities.

One way they do this is by killing off public services, and thus creating opportunities for investment in the private companies that replace them. In 1980s Britain, Margaret Thatcher privatised steel, coal, gas, electricity, water, and much else besides. In the short term, this plunged millions into unemployment, as factories and mines were closed down, and in the long term it resulted in massive price rises for basic services. But it had its intended effect – it provided valuable investment opportunities (for those with capital to spare) at a time when such opportunities were scarce, and created a long term source of fabulous profits. This summer, for example, saw the formerly publicly owned gas company Centrica hiking its prices by another 18% to bring in a £1.3billion profit. The raised prices will see many thousands more pensioners than usual die from the cold this winter as a result, but gas – like all commodities in capitalist society – is not there to provide heat, but to increase capital.

In the global South, privatisation was harsher still. Bodies like the IMF and the World Bank used the leverage provided by the debt-extortion mechanism (whereby interest rates were hiked on unpayable loans that had rarely benefited the population, often taken out by corrupt rulers imposed by Western governments in the first place) to force governments across Asia, Africa and Latin America to cut public spending on even basics such as health and education, along with agricultural subsidies. This contributed massively to the staggering rates of infant mortality and deaths from preventable disease, as well as to the AIDS epidemic now raging across Africa. But again the desired end for those imposing the policies was achieved, as new markets were created and holders of giant capital reserves could now invest in private companies to provide the services no longer available from the state. The profit system was given a new lease of life, its collapse staved off once again.

The World Bank’s closure of the Indian government’s grain rationing and distribution service, for example, meant that a scheme providing affordable grain to all Indian citizens was closed down, allowing private companies to come in and sell grain at massively increased prices (sometimes up to ten times higher). Whilst this has led to huge numbers of Indians being priced out of the market, and a resulting 200 million people now facing starvation in India, it has also led to record profits for the giant private companies now holding the world’s grain stocks – which is the whole point.

This round of global privatisation from the 1980s onwards, however, was so thorough that when the 2008 crisis hit, there were few state functions left to privatise. Creating investment opportunities now is much trickier than it was thirty years ago, because so much of what is potentially profitable is already being thoroughly exploited as it is.

In Europe, what is left of public services is hastily being dismantled, as right wing political leaders happily privatise what is left of the public sector, and currency speculators use their firepower to pick off any country that attempts to resist. David Cameron, following the path forced on the global South over recent decades, for example, is busy opening up Britain’s National Health Service to private companies, and massively cutting back on public service provision for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and the jobless.

In the global South, however, there is little left for the West to privatise, as successive IMF policies have long ago forced those countries in their grip to strip their public services to the bone (and beyond) already.

But there is one state function which, if fully privatised across the world, would make the profits made even from essentials such as health care and education look like peanuts. That is the most basic and essential state function of all, indeed the whole raison d’etre for the state: security.

Private security companies are one of the few growth areas during times of global recession, as growing unemployment and poverty leads to increased social unrest and chaos, and those with wealth become more nervous about protecting both themselves, and their assets. Furthermore, as the Chinese economy advances at a rate of knots, military superiority is fast becoming the West’s only “competitive advantage” – the one area in which it’s expertise remains significantly ahead of its rivals. Turning this advantage, therefore, into an opportunity for investment and profit on a large-scale is now one of the chief tasks facing the rulers of Western economies.

A recent article in the Guardian noted that British private security firm Group 4 is now “Europe’s largest private sector employer”, employing 600,000 people – 50% more than make up the total armed forces of Britain and France combined. With growth last year of 9% in their “new markets” division, the company have “already benefited from the unrest in north Africa and the Middle East.” Group 4 are set to make a killing in Libya, following the total breakdown of security, likely to last for decades, resulting from NATO’s incineration of the country’s armed forces and wholesale destruction of its state apparatus. With the rule of law replaced by warfare between rival gangs of rebels, and no realistic prospect of a functioning police force for the foreseeable future, those Libyans able to manoeuvre themselves into positions of wealth and power will likely have to rely on private security for many years to come.

When Philip Hammond, Britain’s new Defence Secretary and a multi-millionaire businessman himself, suggested that British companies “pack their suitcases and head to Libya”, it was not only oil and construction companies he had in mind, but private security companies.

Private military companies are also becoming huge business – most famously, the US company Blackwater, renamed Xe Services after its original name became synonymous with the massacres committed by its forces in Iraq. In the USA, Blackwater has already taken over many of the security functions of the state – charging the Department of Homeland Security $1000 per day per head in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, for example. “When you ship overnight, do you use the postal service or do you use FedEx?” asked Erik Prince, founder and chairman of Blackwater. “Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service”. Another Blackwater official commented that “None of us loves the idea that devastation became a business opportunity. It’s a distasteful fact. But that’s what it is. Doctors, lawyers, funeral directors, even newspapers – they all make a living off of bad things happening. So do we, because somebody’s got to handle it.”

The danger comes when the economic climate is such that the world’s most powerful governments feel they must do all they can to create such business opportunities. During the Cold War, the US military acted (as indeed it still does) to keep the global South in a state of poverty by attacking any government that seriously sought to challenge this poverty, and imposing governments that would crush trade unions and keep the population cowed. This created investment opportunities because it kept the majority of the world’s labour force in conditions so desperate they were willing to work for peanuts. But now this is not enough. In slump conditions, it doesn’t matter how cheap your workforce is if nobody is buying your products. To create the requisite business opportunities today – a large global market for its military expertise – Western governments must impose not only poverty, but also devastation. Devastation is the quickest route to converting the West’s military prowess into a genuine business opportunity that can create a huge new avenue for investment when all others are drying up. And this is precisely what is happening.  David Cameron is, for once, telling the truth, when he says “Whatever it takes to help our businesses take on the world – we’ll do it.”

As The Times put it recently, “In Iraq, the postwar business boom is not oil. It is security.” In both Iraq and Afghanistan, a situation of chronic and enduring instability and civil war has been created by a very precise method. Firstly, the existing state power is totally destroyed. Next, the possibility of utilising the country’s domestic expertise to rebuild state capacity is undermined against by barring former officials from working for the new government (a process known in Iraq as “de-Ba’athification”). Linked to this, the former ruling party is banned from playing any part in the political process, effectively ensuring that the largest and most organised political formation in each country has no option but to resort to armed struggle to gain influence, and thereby condemning the country to civil war. Next, vicious sectarianism is encouraged along whatever religious, ethnic and tribal divisions are available, often goaded by the covert actions of Western intelligence services. Finally, the wholesale privatisation of resources ensures chronically destabilising levels of unemployment and inequality.  The whole process is self-perpetuating, as the skilled and professional sections of the workforce – those with the means and connections – emigrate, leaving behind a dire skills shortage and even less chance of a functioning society emerging from the chaos.

This instability is not confined to the borders of the state which has been destroyed. In a masterfully cynical domino effect, for example, the aggression against Iraq has also helped to destabilise Syria. Three quarters of the 2 million Iraqi refugees fleeing the war in their own country have ended up in Syria, thus contributing to the pressure on the Syrian economy which is a major factor in the current unrest there.

The destruction of Libya will also have far reaching destabilising consequences across the region. As the recent United Nations Support Mission in Libya stated, “Libya had accumulated the largest known stockpile of Manpads [surface-to-air missiles] of any non-Manpad-producing country. Although thousands were destroyed during the seven-month Nato operations, there are increasing concerns over the looting and likely proliferation of these portable defence systems, as well as munitions and mines, highlighting the potential risk to local and regional stability.” Furthermore, a large number of volatile African countries are currently experiencing a fragile peace secured by peacekeeping forces in which Libyan troops had been playing a vital role. The withdrawal of these troops may well be damaging to the maintenance of the peace. Similarly, Libya, under Gaddafi’s rule, had contributed generously to African development projects; a policy which will certainly be ended under the NTC – again, with potentially destabilising consequences.

Clearly, a policy of devastation and destabilisation fuels not only the market for private security, but also for arms sales – where, again, the US, Britain and France remain market leaders. And a policy of devastation through blitzkrieg fits in clearly with the big three current long term strategic objectives of Western policy planners:

1. To corner as large a share as possible of the world’s diminishing resources, most importantly oil, gas and water. A government of a devastated country is at the mercy of the occupying country when it comes to contracts. Gaddafi’s Libya, for example, drove a notoriously hard bargain with the Western powers over oil contracts – acting as a key force in the 1973 oil price spike, and still in 2009 being accused by the Financial Times of “resource nationalism”. But the new NTC government in Libya have been hand picked for their subservience to foreign interests – and know that their continued positions depend on their willingness to continue in this role.
2. To prevent the rise of the global South, primarily through the destruction of any independent regional powers (such as Iran, Libya, Syria etc) and the destabilisation, isolation and encirclement of the rising global powers (in particular China and Russia).
3. To overcome or limit the impact of economic collapse by using superior military force to create and conquer new markets through the destruction and rebuilding of infrastructure and the elimination of competition.

This policy of total devastation represents a departure from the Cold War policies of the Western powers. During the Cold War, whilst the major strategic aims remained the same, the methods were different. Independent regional powers in the global South were still destabilised and invaded – and regularly – but generally with the aim of installing ‘compliant dictatorships’. Thus, Lumumba was overthrown and replaced with Mobutu; Sukarno with Suharto; Allende with Pinochet; etc, etc. But the danger with this ‘imposed strongmen’ policy was that strongmen can become defiant. Saddam Hussein illustrated this perfectly. After having been backed for over a decade by the West, he turned on their stooge monarchy in Kuwait. Governments that are in control can easily get out of control. However, for as long as these strongmen were needed for the services provided by their armies (protecting investments, repressing workers struggles, etc), they were supported. The crisis now underway in the economies of the West, however, calls for more drastic measures. And the development of private security and private mercenary companies mean that the armies provided by these strongmen are starting to be deemed no longer necessary.

Congo is a case in point. For three decades, the Western powers had supported Mobutu Sese-Seko’s iron rule of the Congo. But then, in the mid-90s, they allowed him to be overthrown. However, rather than allowing the Congolese resistance forces to take power and establish an effective government, they then sponsored an invasion of the country by Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Although these countries have now largely withdrawn their militias, they continue to sponsor proxy militias which have prevented the country seeing a moment’s peace for nearly fifteen years, resulting in the biggest slaughter since the end of the Second World War, with over 5 million killed. One result of this total breakdown of functioning government has been that the Western companies that loot Congo’s resources have been able to do so virtually for free. Despite being the world’s largest supplier of both coltan and copper, amongst many other precious minerals, the total tax revenue on these products in 2006-7 amounted to a puny £32 million. This is surely far less than what even the most useless neo-colonial puppet would have demanded.

This completely changes the meaning of the word ‘government’. In the Congo, the government’s best efforts to stabilise and develop the country have so far proved no match for the destabilisation strategies of the West and its stooges. In Afghanistan, it is well known that the government’s writ has no authority outside of Kabul, if there. But then, that is the point. The role of the governments imposed on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, like the one they are trying to impose on Syria, is not to govern or provide for the population at all – even that most basic of functions, security. It is simply to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy for the occupation of the country and to award business contracts to the colonial powers. They literally have no other function, as far as their sponsors are concerned.

It goes without saying that this policy of devastation is turning the victimised countries into a living hell. After now more than thirty years of Western destabilisation, and ten years of outright occupation, Afghanistan is at or very hear the bottom of nearly every human development indicator available, with life expectancy at 44 years and an under-five mortality rate of over one in four. Mathew White, a history professor who has recently completed a detailed survey of the humanity’s worst atrocities throughout history, concluded that, without doubt, “chaos is far deadlier than tyranny”. It is a truth to which many Iraqis can testify.

Clearly, seasoned imperial powers such as Britain, France and the US, would not commit to the huge expenditure of a months-long air campaign to bring somebody to power in such a strategically important, oil rich state, unless they were already a tried and trusted asset. So who exactly is Abdul Jalil?

Abdul-Jalil gained his job in the Libyan government in January 2007, when he was named Secretary of the General People’s Committee for Justice (the equivalent of Justice Minister). He has been paving the way for NATO’s military and economic conquest of Libya ever since.

First, as head of the judiciary, he oversaw the release from prison of the hundreds of anti-Gaddafi fighters who went on to form the core of the insurgency. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi (Muamar’s son) was leading the prisoner release programme – a move he now publicly regrets as being naïve in the extreme – but faced stiff opposition from powerful elements within his own government. Having a sympathetic Justice Minister was therefore crucial to allowing the releases to go ahead smoothly. Hundreds of members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – including its founder Abdulhakim Belhadj, now military chief of Tripoli – were released in 2009 and 2010, and went on to form the only trained and experienced indigenous fighting units of the rebellion. In January 2010, Abdul-Jalil threatened to resign unless the prisoner release programme was sped up. On the second day of the insurgency, the final batch of 110 members of the LIFG were released; his work done, Abdul-Jalil quit his role of Justice Minister soon after to set up the TNC.

Second, Abdul-Jalil was able to use his position to help prepare the legal framework for the corporate takeover of Libyan resources that was enacted so swiftly after the creation of the TNC. Although his official role was head of the judiciary, a large part of the dialogue between Abdul-Jalil and US officials recorded in leaked US diplomatic cables focused on privatisation of the economy. These reported Abdul-Jalil’s enthusiasm for “private sector involvement”, and revealed his belief that this would require regime change, or as the cables euphemistically put it, “international assistance”, to fully achieve. The cables also reported Abdul-Jalil’s ominous comment that, on the matter of creating a “sound commercial legal environment” and improving relations between Libya and the US, “less talk and more action was needed” .

Thirdly, Abdul-Jalil was able to arrange ‘below-the-radar’ covert meetings between the pro-privatisation Libyans in the ‘Commercial Law Development Programme’ and US officials, both in the US and in Libya. The leaked US cables praised his “willingness to allow his staff to communicate with emboffs [Embassy officials] outside of official channels” and noted that “his organization seems to have a parallel track in securing visa approvals, bypassing Protocol and the MFA [Ministry for Foreign Affairs].”

Shortly after Abdul-Jalil’s appointment in 2007, the other key player in today’s TNC – President Mahmoud Jibril – was also given a government job in Libya. Jibril was made Head of the National Planning Council and later Head of the National Economic Development Board where, according to the US cables, he too helped to “pave the way” for the privatisation of Libya’s economy and “welcomed American companies”. US officials were positively ecstatic about Jibril after their meeting in May 2009, concluding that “With a PhD in strategic planning from the University of Pittsburgh, Jibril is a serious interlocutor who “gets” the U.S. perspective.” Very revealing given the spate of ambassador defections that followed the Benghazi rebellion was the additional revelation that Jibril had been helping to facilitate six US training programmes for diplomats.

2007 also turned out to be a crucial year for the other big player in today’s TNC, Head of Tripoli’s Military Council, Abdulhakim Belhadj. Belhadj was the founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an Al-Qaeda affiliate which launched an armed insurrection against the Libyan state in 1995 lasting for two years. His release from prison in Libya in March 2010, along with hundreds of other LIFG fighters, was the culmination of a process that began with an open letter published in November 2007 by Norman Benotman – one of the group’s many fighters who had been given a safe haven in the UK since the failed uprising. His letter renounced violence and, according to the London Times, “asked Al-Qaeda to give up all its operations in the Islamic world and in the West, adding that ordinary westerners were blameless and should not be attacked”. The letter led to a process of dialogue between the LIFG and the Libyan government, and was followed up two years later by an apology by the LIFG for their anti-government violence in the past, and a statement that “the reduction of jihad to fighting with the sword is an error and shortcoming”. Someone had obviously hinted to them that drones and B52 bombers would be far more effective.

So 2007 was the year that launched these three men on the path towards their current role as NATO’s proxy rulers in Libya. Benotman’s letter made NATO support for a violent Al-Qaeda affiliate politically possible, and helped to sucker Saif al-Islam into releasing the very people who would become the ground forces in the overthrow of his government. Abdul-Jalil’s appointment as Justice Minister smoothed over the fighters’ release, and prepared the legal framework for an economic takeover by Western corporations. Jibril’s appointment as Planning Minister prepared, at a micro-level, the detail of how this takeover would come about, and cultivated the relationships with the Western companies that would be invited in.

So why did all this come about? Who was pulling the strings?

In the case of Benotman’s letter, this would have been a fairly simple matter of MI6 contacting him in London, where he lived, and putting him in touch with a decent PR firm to help draft the letter that would make it politically possible for NATO to set itself up as the LIFG’s airforce.

As for the two government appointments, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was ultimately responsible, but he was clearly not intending the outcome that resulted. He was implementing political and economic reforms driven by both genuine belief, and a naïve desire to improve relations between his government and the West; he did not realise that he was unwittingly laying the ground for the political and economic destruction of his country. So the question is – was he acting on somebody else’s advice?

If he was, the most likely candidate is Mark Allen.

Mark Allen was the MI6 agent who had facilitated Libya’s ‘rapprochement’ with the West in 2003. Saif al-Islam had led the negotiations on the Libyan side, so by 2007, the two men knew each other quite well. But by then, Allen was no longer officially employed by MI6. In 2004, he had been fast tracked by the British Cabinet Office, bypassing the usual security procedures, to work for BP  and in 2007, he successfully concluded a massive £15billion oil deal between BP and the Libyan government. Could the appointment of Abdul-Jalil and Mahmoud Jibril have been part of this deal? In hindsight, given their subsequent roles, it seems highly likely that MI6 would have used whatever leverage it could to manoeuvre willing accomplices into positions inside the Libyan government.

According to the Daily Mail, Allen was also actively involved in pressuring the UK government to support the prisoner release programme. Of course, the tone of their article, as with the current media furore about MI6 complicitity in Belhadj’s torture, all fit in with the overall narrative that Gaddafi and the West had a great relationship until the rebellion started and forced NATO to conduct a humanitarian intervention. It is all designed to obscure the reality that Libya under Gaddafi’s leadership was an obstacle to Western domination and subordination of Africa, and that MI6 has been plotting his removal ever since he came to power.

If the rule of law had prevailed in Belfast at the time, one might expect a prosecution of the killers to have emerged, and for the officers to have been tried for perjury. Instead, the inquest was stopped, never to be reopened; the young solicitor’s assassination was arranged by a British agent; and the man in charge of the police in the landrover, Jimmy Crutchley, was given a medal and a promotion. “This is what happens”, Robert McClenaghan explains, “to the bad apples.”

Cases such as these are the tip of the iceberg. McClenaghan estimates that around 1100 people have been killed by loyalists as a result of collusion with the agencies of the British state. “In our opinion we could put what the British state has been doing for twenty or thirty years on a par with what happened in Chile or what happened in Argentina. It may not have been on the same numerical scale, but the policies were the same.”

Eight years ago, Robert and hundreds of other relatives of those murdered joined forces to create An Fhirinne, a united campaign to discover the truth about how and why their loved ones were killed; to discover, as they put it, “not just who pulled the trigger, but who pulled the strings”. An Fhirinne, which is Gaelic for “the truth”, now represents over 250 families. Their struggle has not been easy: “At the start we were dismissed as republican propaganda: the attitude was ‘how dare you try to assert that the British government could be involved in murdering its own citizens?’ But bits and pieces of evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, began to come out and it got to the point where the British couldn’t hold it back anymore.”
The result was the Stevens inquiry. After eleven years of investigations, Sir John Stevens, former head of the Metropolitan Police and “hardly a republican sympathiser”, concluded that collusion had indeed taken place. “From about a million pages of evidence” explains Robert, “he was only allowed to publish twenty. But those twenty were damning”. Stevens concluded that he had amassed enough evidence to mount 25 prosecutions – including against senior RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary – the police), special branch and British military intelligence personnel. He handed this evidence to the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions). Years passed, until finally, in 2007 – four years after being handed the files – the DPP announced that there would be no prosecutions. The state institutions would protect their own, no matter how great the evidence of their crimes. As Robert put it; “this was the British state covering up the mass murder of its own citizens”.

State cover up of murder is something of which Robert has personal experience. On December 4th 1971, McGurks Bar was blown up by a UVF bomb, causing the biggest single loss of life of the ‘Troubles’ until the Omagh bombing. His grandfather was amongst the fifteen killed. At the time, he says: “we hadn’t a clue about media, about press statements or anything else, we just knew our grandfather was dead. He was blown up, at 75 years of age, and within hours he was being called a bomber in the media. The British army, the RUC, the unionist politicians were all issuing the statement that this was an IRA bomb which my grandfather and the others had been making when it exploded prematurely. You’ve no idea the impact it had on my grandmother or my father. It’s hard enough to deal with a death, especially a brutal death like murder. But then on top of that to be told lies by the police…”. Six years later, whilst being interrogated over an unrelated murder, a UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) member named Robert Campbell admitted to being the getaway driver for the bombing that day. Campbell had already been named as the culprit, along with four others, in an anonymous tip-off the previous year. “Now if you were in special branch, and you had a list of five and one of them confesses, you would think at the very least, you should go out and arrest the other four. You don’t have to watch CSI to work this out.” Even then, the official line continued, and although Robert Campbell was sent to prison, none of the others were even arrested.

In the early 1970s, this type of collusion – the institutions of state covering up loyalist killings – was the norm. What we now know is that both the RUC (the police) and the UDR (the army) were also arming the loyalist militias and providing them with intelligence: “This isn’t us whose saying this, this is a British government report that was unearthed in the public records at Kew. One document, declassified under the 30 year rule, shows that between 5 and 15% of the UDR were also members of the death squads of the UDA or the UVF, and that the biggest single source of weapons for the UDA and the UVF was the UDR.”

What Stevens’ inquiries had unearthed, however, was that by the mid-80s collusion had shifted from this type of informal (albeit widespread) collaboration amongst people on the ground to a crucial plank of British state policy. Loyalist death squads had effectively become integrated into the British chain of command.

Finding the fingerprints of Brian Nelson, a leading member of loyalist militia the UDA, on British army documents, Stevens’ team had Nelson arrested. During his time in prison, Nelson admitted he was a British agent, and that far from being placed in the UDA to disrupt its operations, he was in fact there to facilitate them. Nelson, it emerged, had been given access to army intelligence files to improve the UDA’s targeting and assassinations, and had been aided by MI5 in facilitating the import of a huge arms shipment in from apartheid South Africa in 1987. This haul, which included rocket launchers, fragmentation grenades, Browning pistols and over 200 AK47s, more than tripled the loyalists’ killing rate, from 71 over the six years prior to the shipment’s arrival, to 229 during the six years afterwards.

However, the idea that Nelson and his handlers were simply ‘bad apples’, out of the control of the higher military and political authorities, says Robert, is demolished by what happened after Nelson was arrested: “Two weeks away from his trial, there was an extraordinary, unbelievable meeting that took place here in Belfast. At the meeting was the British Prime Minister, John Major; the head of all the six county judges, Brian Hutton; Basil Kelly, who was due to be the trial judge; the Attorney General, Sir Patrick Mayhew who later became Secretary of State for Northern Ireland; the head of the DPP at the time, and the head of the RUC. They didn’t want Nelson to get into the dock and blow their cover about how all these murder gangs had been allowed to proceed. So they came up with a plea bargain that was put to Nelson: If he would plead guilty to lesser charges, they’d ensure he didn’t spend too long in prison”. The multiple murder charges against him were dropped, and instead he was given a ten year sentence for conspiracy in a court case that lasted less than a day. He served less than half this sentence, and was announced dead the day the Stevens Inquiry report was published. Robert finds this hard to believe: “My gut instinct is that he is in South Africa, or a British dependency where he feels safe and secure and he’s just got away with it. He might be dead and I might be wrong, but it was just too coincidental that on the exact same day as Stevens published his report that implicated him, this 4 line statement got released saying that he’s dead.”

Nelson’s handler was a man named Gordon Kerr, of the Forces Research Unit, established under Thatcher essentially to professionalise collusion. His subsequent career demolishes the ‘bad apple’ theory even further: “He actually left the north under the cloud of being a mass murderer and involved in all these killings – but then went on to become British military attaché in China! Stevens put in a request to interview Kerr, and was told he had moved from China and was now on operational duties. He was actually based in Basra, in Iraq. Do you understand the significance? See all the covert killings that were going on in Iraq? There was an incident in Basra where two British operatives were dressed up in Arab dress at a checkpoint, and the local police tried to stop them but they killed them. Then they were arrested and brought into the police station but a British tank came in and smashed down the walls to take them away. That was Kerr’s unit. So this is not only Belfast or the six counties that we’re talking about, this is transporting terror around the world and this is where they perfected their techniques.”

More evidence was unearthed by the 2007 report of the police ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan, into the killing of a young Protestant, Raymond MacCord jnr, by the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force): “This case blew the lid off everything. She found that there was a UVF gang headed up by Mark Haddock which was responsible for almost 20 murders and he had his own special branch handlers who were using him and letting him do this. The first person he killed was a woman, a Catholic woman called Sharon McKenna. These people were being paid from the public purse – an allowance every week by their special branch handlers. And after he killed Sharon McKenna, he got an increase in the amount of money his handlers were paying him.” Shortly after releasing her report, O’Loan was replaced by a new ombudsman, Al Hutchinson – “in my opinion he is seen by the British government as a safe pair of hands, whose not going to rock the boat. He’s not measured up at all.” Last month, Hutchinson published a report exonerating the police involved in the McGurks case. “That was a brutal report. A loyalist bomb and for forty years they blamed the IRA, and they said that was a proper investigation. It’s another whitewash in our opinion; they didn’t even get the names right on the list of people killed.”

Nevertheless, the evidence of collusion continues to mount, and the British government has adopted ever more contorted positions to avoid it coming out. A number of key cases, including Finucane’s and that of another solicitor Rosemary Nelson, were raised by Sinn Fein as part of the political negotiations with the British government at the Weston Park talks in 2001. The British appointed Canadian former High Court judge Peter Cory to look into six specific cases (including two of alleged Irish state collusion with the IRA). As Robert puts it, “they thought he was going to come over and be a safe pair of hands; another Widgery”. But it was not to be. In 2003, he reported that there was enough evidence of collusion for separate inquiries to go ahead. “So the British government was in a dilemma. They weren’t expecting Cory to recommend inquiries in these six cases and they were now looking at the possibility of a Pat Finucane Inquiry running for months. Senior British army, police and politicians, including members of Maggie Thatcher’s cabinet could have been subpoenaed. So they were faced with a dilemma and what they did was change the law.” Until then, the relevant law was the 1921 Public Inquiries Act, which specified that any public inquiry would have an independent chairperson, who could pick their own panel, and all hearings would be held in public. Blair was to change all that: “They rushed through parliament a new inquiries act in 2005 which says that it is a British government minister who will now decide who the chairperson of any future inquiry is, a British government minister who will decide what evidence can be heard in public and what in private, as well as which witnesses. And when the inquiry’s finished hearing and comes to its conclusions, the same British government minister will now decide how much evidence will be given to the public and how much has to be redacted and held back for 30 years. So the government are now offering Pat Fincane’s family this truncated, almost impossible idea of an inquiry.” The family have, unsurprisingly, rejected this, fearing a whitewash.

That collusion was taking place, however, has never been doubted by republican communities, as it was manifestly obvious in their daily lives, as Robert explains: “It was common knowledge at the time. We had 30,000 British troops on our streets. Now, the British army’s just fought a war in Iraq and the highest they ever had there was 8000. So this was probably one of the highest militarised parts of the world. They might not have had 30,000 by the 1980s but don’t forget there were 11,000 RUC and 2 or 3000 UDR and the police reserve, all acting as back up to the British army, so it was a massively militarised society, covered with checkpoints and helicopters. And then they would suddenly disappear, and the area would be deadly silent; and every one of us used to say, ‘someone’s going to get killed tonight’. Because you knew once the checkpoints had disappeared, this was the death squads getting the green light to come in.”

Robert is like a walking encyclopaedia on these issues. The dates, the names, the places, roll off his tongue with ease. In the two and a half hours I spent with him, there is the basis for a book, never mind an article. Neither is what he is telling me hidden knowledge – it is public and openly available. And the enormity of it is staggering: “the biggest modern story of the British state” as he puts it: the state running death squads against its own citizens; and the personnel involved now doing the same thing around the rest of the world. And yet, “this story has never impacted in Britain. It’s amazing to me, we’re so close, we speak the same language, we travel back and forth…but there’s a glass wall there that we haven’t been able to penetrate.”

But then, the media’s servility towards British policy in Ireland is nothing new. Robert believes they too need to be brought to book: “You kill the people first of all, you shoot them dead and then you issue a statement saying he was a gunman or she was a nail-bomber. The BBC then reports the statement and the media just rolls out the story and blackens their names. So that’s the first thing that an Irish person reads the next morning in the Sun or the Daily Mail – it didn’t matter if it was a redtop or a broadsheet, Telegraph, Express, Guardian, Observer – by and large they all towed the line.”

“The idea of collusion is like a spider’s web. At one end you have the assassins who are provided with weapons, provided with information, and are then allowed to come into an area which has been full of military and is then cleared. The military are brought back to barracks, the death squad comes in, sledgehammers the door down, has a map of the house, goes up and does the killing and drives away. The police then arrive, and there is no proper investigation: no ballistics, no forensics – and no adequate prosecutions. In the case of John Stevens, he had twenty five files on some of the most senior police and army which he gives to the DPP on a plate. And they sat on it from 2003-2007. So that implicates then the DPP’s office, which implicates the whole of the legal and judicial system, not to mention the media. So if we are talking about collusion, we try to paint this picture of a spider’s web. Everybody, whether it’s MI5, RUC, special branch, police military intelligence, the civil servants, the media, the courts, the prosecution service, they’ve all at one point or another failed to do what they’re supposed to do.”

The answer? “We want some sort of independent international inquiry that’s independent of the British and Irish governments but will have the authority to subpoena witnesses. Not just republican, but loyalist or British cases as well. The British government try to portray this image to the world that they were peacekeepers trying to keep two warring factions apart, to stop the Catholics killing the Protestants and the Protestants killing the Catholics; instead of saying this was our colony and we were actively involved as combatants and participants on one side, namely the pro-British loyalist side. And what that meant in reality is that they armed the loyalists, they gave them information and then they let them loose on our community over a generational period and killed upwards of 1000 people. So they can’t then be the people that sit in judgement. We don’t want British judges coming over and bringing republicans and loyalists in, and saying ‘tut tut that shouldn’t have happened, now do you want to tell your story?’ And then the British state gets off scot-free.”

Tomdispatch is a US-based website set up by editor and publisher Tom Engelhardt in the wake of the US bombing of Afghanistan. The essays in this collection comprise the best of that website, and largely fall into two broad categories. The first lay bare the mechanics of the present day occupations, deception, and corruption practiced by the US state, whilst the second reveal the futility of the imperial project and start to map out the trajectory of resistance to it.

The section “Imperial Planet” opens with a debate between the editor and fellow academic Jonathan Schell over whether it is accurate to talk of a US “Empire” in the traditional sense. For Engelhardt, the answer is clear: yes it is, and it has been for sometime. For his colleague, the US is currently trying to become a true, old-fashioned, Empire, but is destined to fail before it achieves such a status. As Hobsbawm has noted elsewhere, today’s anti-colonialists, unlike those of the Victorian imperialist era, have far more than handcrafted spears with which to drive out the occupiers. And more importantly, notes Schell, “The local resistors are weak militarily but strong politically. The imperial masters are powerful militarily but nearly helpless politically. History teaches us that in these contests it is political power that prevails.”

It is this crucial point that is driven home again and again throughout the rest of the book: Whilst the US can – and will – throw its weight around in an increasingly brutal way, its political influence is irreversibly in decline.

Thus, Chalmers Johnson describes recent US attempts to remilitarize Japan and raises the specter of a resulting Sino-Japanese war. “Has the US considered this?” Johnson innocently enquires. I would have thought that was the whole point. Nevertheless, the essay serves to illustrate the growing marginalization of US influence in East Asia, especially following the US role in creating the 1997 currency crisis, as well as their blatant promotion of Japanese militarism and Taiwanese separatism(thankfully, recent events seem to confirm that the Taiwanese desire to act as US-anointed agent provocateur in the region is dwindling fast). Dilip Hiro picks up the theme of US marginalization, outlining the growing ties between developing countries which are making the USA increasingly impotent in imposing its economic will across the world. The military reflection of these evolving realities became unmistakably clear when the new Chinese-led military alliance, the Shanghai Co-operation Conference refused the US request to be granted even observer status – despite having already granted such status to both India and Iran.

In Latin America, Greg Grandin shows how the US military is busily fabricating an Al-Qaeda presence in the “lawless” tri-border region between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina using the time-honored technique of planting stories in the local press for international media agencies to “discover”. The purpose? To justify a stepped-up counter-insurgency program across the region and a re-foundation of General Pinochet’s Operation Condor, which was responsible for the murder of thousands of “suspected leftists” across the continent during the 1980s. To achieve this, all the Congressional “checks and balances” on military aid, established in the light of the Iran-Contra scandal, are being quietly dismantled. For all that, the US strategy appears to going nowhere fast, as government after government have refused to participate in Rumsfeld’s “cross-border security force”; evidently, US military and economic blackmail does not carry the same weight as it did in the 1980s before it had been stymied by Chinese trade in the latter case, and Afghan and Iraqi resistance in the former.

Engelhardt himself focuses mostly on symbolism and historical analogy in US imperialism. Thus, the US’s charmingly named “lily pad” strategy of building military bases right across the so-called “arc of instability” from North Africa to Central Asia,(conveniently encompassing all the world’s major oil reserves) is seen as the contemporary equivalent of what was known in more candid times as “gunboat diplomacy”. But his real tour de force is an excellent piece on “the barbarism of war from the air”, which chronicles the history of both aerial warfare itself, and of the chimerical faith in the ability of such warfare to “break the will” of the enemy — a faith which has persisted in some quarters despite the countless refutations furnished by real life. Later chapters spell out the futility of aerial bombardment in more detail, with “Siege notes” — the frank war diaries of a middle class Lebanese — graphically demonstrating how the 2006Israeli invasion stirred up hitherto neglected passions of resistance and defiance against the aggressor.

Elsewhere, Noam Chomsky continues with his invaluable work of furnishing the anti-war movement with the latest statistical data to confirm and quantify the bleeding obvious –this time, for example, quoting Rand Corporation statistics suggesting a sevenfold increase in terrorism since the invasion of Iraq. His research on the huge US public opposition to their own government’s imperial bloodbaths serves to highlight a clear trend in today’s society – that it is increasingly only the most openly racist – or willfully ignorant – who will even attempt to justify the wars of aggression currently being waged or planned. It is the pro-war, not the anti-war, movement who are currently marginalized.

In “The Smash of Civilizations”, Chalmers Johnson fleshes out the details of the destruction and looting that followed in the wake of the blitzkrieg of Iraq, the largest-scale looting since the Mongol invasion of 1258, according to one Oxford professor. We all heard about the looting of Baghdad museum, but how many realized that the ancient city of Ur, “the literal heartland of human civilization” was chosen by the US military as the precise spot for two 10,000 foot runways, the construction of which “completely ruined” the area? Or that the 2,600-year old brick pavement at Babylon has now been thoroughly crushed by US military vehicles? Or that, before the invasion, a team of internationally renowned archeologists held three separate meetings with the Pentagon specifically to warn them about the dangers of looting? Obviously all this is as nothing compared to the human destruction heaped on Iraq — but nevertheless, for Iraqis, for whom “civilization” is more than just an excuse to knock people over the head, it is another body blow — as indeed it is for all of us.

That human destruction is also chronicled here. In “The Hidden War on Women in Iraq” — often hidden by the victims themselves to avoid shame — Ruth Rosen describes the epidemic of rape and forced prostitution now raging in that country, not only as a result of the imposed lawlessness of the occupation, but also as a specific interrogation technique by the occupiers themselves. Ann Jones goes on to paint a dire portrait of the position of women in NATO’s Afghanistan – with unfortunately only the briefest of allusions to the successes made by the Communist government in terms of girls education and ending feudal oppression in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Revealing historical parallels are drawn, notably between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Both were justified with the exact same troika of imperial excuses – that the offending regime was allied with the enemy, was a threat to security, and perpetrated a tyrannical rule over its people. Just like Bush, Napoleon feigned surprise at the natives’ “lack of gratitude” before suffering ignominious defeat as that ingratitude evolved into a ferocious resistance –though not before he had meted out plenty of futile brutalities against the resisting population. History repeating itself indeed.

The section on the “petro-industrial complex” opens with a comprehensive study of the recent history of Iraqi oil. In candid detail, it shows how Iraq is the archetypal example of the imperial economy trick. The trick roughly works like this: 1.Hoist an oppressive regime onto a third world country, 2. Extend billions of dollars ($120 billion in the case of Iraq) of credit to this regime to spend on your weapons to crush all real and imagined anti-imperialists, socialists, and democrats in the region, 3. When this has been accomplished, bemoan the inequality and lack of democracy in the country and use this as an excuse to invade, 4. Solemnly spell out to the newly installed “democratic government” the importance of honoring the debts incurred under your previous puppet, 5.Use the promise of “debt-relief” to force the new “democracy” to hand over all its economic sovereignty to your corporations (through “open markets,” abolition of subsidies and tariffs, and in the case of Iraq, “Production Sharing Agreements”). The same trick has been used repeatedly over the last half-century – in the Congo, in South Africa, and in countless Latin American countries – but it is Iraq that has the most room for “leverage”. With the highest per capita “debt” in the world alongside, in the words of Dick Cheney, the “ultimate prize” of its massive oil resources, the neocons are determined not to allow the reality of resistance prevent the orgy of looting they have always dreamt of.

The corporate takeover of Iraq is detailed here, as are similar activities closer to home. Just as contracts were drying up in Iraq, the very same vulture capitalist corporations started drooling over New Orleans. Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt spell out the endemic corruption of the Bush administration, whose millionaire corporate backers have swarmed to that city “like flies to a rotting corpse” – with the most lucrative contracts going to companies connected to the former director of FEMA – the government department awarding the contracts. Unsurprisingly, a company linked to Jeb Bush was also awarded some juicy drainage contracts – and just as unsurprisingly, thirty of the pumps they provided were found to be defective. Staying on New Orleans, Rebecca Solnit urges us not to forget that the enduring “spectacle of crowds without food, water or sanitation…was the result not just of incompetence, but of malice”. She goes on to describe how the Crescent City Connection bridge was closed to those fleeing the drowning city by the police of neighboring Gretna, a rich white neighborhood who feared the fleeing hordes. She also details how all housing projects were shutdown in New Orleans, even those sustaining little or no flood damage, showing how Hurricane Katrina has been used as an excuse to evict working class communities – many of whom are still being refused the “right to return” to this day.

In one of the most thoughtful and challenging pieces of the book, “The Chauffeur’s Dilemma,” Adam Hothschild asks some hard questions about US society. The focus is on why it is that the 56% of working class men who believe that Bush’s tax cuts favor the rich, also favor those very same tax cuts. It is a thought-provoking piece and good to see elements of the US left starting to tackle this issue head on.

Overall, the compendium is a thoroughly researched and articulate guide to the current state of the US polity, and as such serves as a valuable contribution to the education of the anti-war movement.

A stunned silence from the audience. Hang on – what? Did we hear that correctly? Wasn’t Moazzam Begg just asked how he felt when he was told he was going to be sent to Guantanamo Bay? Yes, he was. “You have to understand that at that time, I was being held at Bagram.” The US base in Bagram, where Moazzam was held for a year, is notorious. This was where he had had to endure being kept awake for nights on end by the terrified screams of fellow detainees – both women and men – two of whom were beaten to death before his eyes, and where he was threatened with being sent to Egypt for extreme torture, before being hooded, shackled and beaten himself. After a year here, “I was looking forward to Guantanamo.”

Moazzam became politicized at an early age through his experiences of racism growing up on Birmingham’s Sparkhill estate. It was these experiences that led him to join anti-racist gang ‘the Lynx’, who played a part in clearing racism off the streets of Birmingham. His political consciousness deepened as he began to educate himself about international issues during the First Gulf War. Always tending to back the underdog his sympathies lay with the Iraqis, and as he read more widely he found himself broadly supportive of Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro in their struggles against US imperialism, as well as Mandela and the Palestinians in their struggles against apartheid and occupation.

His growing internationalism led him to take part in eight aid convoys to Bosnia, and finally to start work as aid worker in Afghanistan. When the US began bombing in 2001, he and his family fled to Pakistan, from where his nightmare began. Kidnapped by the Pakistani police (who were being paid by the US military for each foreign Muslim they captured), and delivered into US custody, his journey took him from Kandahar to Bagram, where he stayed one year before ending up in Guantanamo’s Camp Echo.

Once there, Moazzam was kept in solitary confinement for two years, never once being informed of any charge against him. How did he survive? “In reality, I didn’t always survive. There’s not much you can do. I often felt I couldn’t use the experience for any kind of benefit. I would dream of escape, but I would also try to memorise my copy of the Koran, and I would make lists of everything I could think of – all the foreign words I knew, all the capital cities, what I would do when I got out. I also started to write poetry.” The methods used at Guantanamo Bay – 24 hour lighting, sensory deprivation, public humiliation, half-drowning… – have been widely reported in this paper and elsewhere. I don’t want this interview to dwell on the details, but I do want to know what Moazzam believes is the purpose of this abuse. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Guantanamo/ Bagram methods, far from producing the quality intelligence the US claim is their purpose, are actually designed to break prisoners down until they admit to anything. In other words, the US torture system is designed not to extract information, but to manufacture it for dubious political purposes. In his book, Enemy Combatant, Begg notes that Ibn as-Shaykh al-Libbee was tortured into signing a ‘confession’ that Saddam Hussein had trained Al-Qaeda in using WMD, which was used as ‘evidence’ during the buildup towards the invasion of Iraq, before later being retracted. After several particularly brutal interrogations and threats, Moazzam himself “began to think that the only thing I could do to end this misery and terror was to pretend to admit to being involved in some terrorist plot… eventually I did agree to say whatever they wanted me to say, to do whatever they wanted me to do. I agreed to be their witness to whatever.”

But Moazzam believes there is also another reason for Guantanamo. “It is a stark warning to the rest of the world: this is what happens to people who dissent, or who live in countries whose governments dissent. We can pick you up, anywhere in the world, without charge, and do these things to you for as long as we want: and no one can do a thing about it.” And let’s not kid ourselves that we are talking only about the US here: Contrary to the widely propagated image of the British government as an appalled, if ineffectual, bystander in the case of the British Guantanamo detainees, in Moazzam’s case at least, they were central to the whole process of his incarceration. MI5 were present at his very first interrogation, and at several others subsequently. Indeed, it was they who had suggested to the Americans that he be picked up in the first place. Why? Their suspicions seem to have been raised by his internationalist work over the years – driving aid convoys to Bosnia, visiting, and subsequently moving to Afghanistan to work in a girl’s school set up under the Taliban – but particularly by a letter he had received from an acquaintance alleging torture and requesting legal assistance.

It seems clear that a big part of what MI5 had against Moazzam was his model of internationalism – a practicing example of aiding just struggles and supporting those less privileged than ourselves. Is part of the ‘War on Terror’ aimed at terrorizing and criminalizing the whole concept of international solidarity? The Terrorism Act 2000, by banning even symbolic support for mass resistance groups such as Hamas, certainly gives that impression…

“One of the things that people don’t recognize in this country – or seem to have forgotten – is that there was a time when Britain could well have been occupied; in fact Jersey and Guernsey were occupied. There was a counter-occupation plan drawn up by the Ministry of Defence, which included what would today be termed terrorism. It included dad’s army – the real dad’s army – taking up arms against not only the occupiers, but also collaborators. We seem to have forgotten that. How do we recognize the legitimacy of, say, the French Resistance, who were using ‘terrorism’ against the Nazis, and not recognize the right of people to defend themselves in Iraq or elsewhere? It’s a principle: are you allowed to resist occupation or not? To say that it is only legal ‘when we say so’ is to remove the principle of self defence. It is a time honoured tradition for people to resist occupation. The Terrorism Acts in this country attempt, with a series of legislation, to criminalize not only attacks against civilians – but any ability or idea to support resistance movements against occupation, whether in Iraq, Palestine, or anywhere else.”

Do people outside the Muslim community have anything to fear from the Terrorism Acts? “We’ve already seen it being used against people like Walter Wolfgang [elderly Labour Party member arrested under the Terrorism Act for heckling Jack Straw at Labour Conference]. I think it is just a beginning. Clearly they are not targeting the non-Muslim community, but I would only add the caveat “yet”. And that is because the idea of dissent is being demonized. It’s not only just the [Muslim] community that is being demonized, as much as we are, but what is really being demonized is dissent. Because we are regarded as having traitorous voices, not supporting our boys back home because we are against the war; when in fact, the reality is that the government doesn’t support them. The government, by introducing this new legislation, is beginning to try to suppress dissent. One example of this is the glorification of terror. Having a certain interpretation could very easily include situations where the British government themselves would have supported terrorism; for example during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Russians called the mujahadeen terrorists. The British, on the other hand, were bringing mujahadeen to Scotland and to Snowdonia to train them and sending them anti-aircraft missiles; but the Russians always maintained they were terrorists. So it’s paradoxical to recognize just how the tables have turned, but in essence the idea of criminalization will not just be limited to the Muslim community, but to wherever opposition is.”

I ask Moazzam if he sees parallels between the criminalization the Muslim community is now facing, and what the Irish community here faced in the 1970s and 1980s. “There is, and one parallel stands out in particular – the major lesson of Northern Ireland – unpalatable as it may be to some – is that the people the government need to think about talking to, are the very people they are currently demonizing.”

It turns out Moazzam has just returned from his third visit to Ireland, where a plaque bearing his name was unveiled as part of the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration. Moazzam’s activism has clearly not been blunted by his time in US custody – not even, it seems, for its duration. In Bagram, he successfully agitated to improve the prisoners’ conditions on two occasions – once to be allowed to exercise, and once for more daily water – the latter through that time-honoured Irish prisoners’ tactic of the hunger strike.

Back in Britain, what does Moazzam think is the way forward for the anti-war movement, given the fact that government are not bothered by marches? His answer is unequivocal: “I can tell you that with a lot of people I have been speaking to across the board, Muslim and non-Muslim, the idea of a campaign of civil disobedience is really starting to take off. That could well be the next step I think.”

How would the government respond? “The response would be arrests of people. I think this goes out to the crux of the matter – how much are people willing to sacrifice for the greater cause? As a lot of Americans also say, our country is now internationally hated – and I think anybody that cares about how their country appears to the rest of the world should take note of that, because whether we like it or not, we’re all British. When we go out of this country, people regard us as ambassadors to our nation. How can one be proud to say, yes, I’m British, to, not just somebody in Iraq, but in Brazil or Guatemala or anywhere else, when people regard you now as war criminals? Britain has invaded Afghanistan more times than Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, and it continues to do so.”

Could a campaign of civil disobedience really take off? “I often get asked when I speak at universities and elsewhere, ‘what do you think should be done’? And I remember a soldier, a Southern Alabaman who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, who said, “listen, son, we didn’t lose Vietnam, it was those punk-ass kids – they’re the ones who lost us Vietnam”. So what I said at the University is: we need more punk-ass kids.”

Moazzam is clearly a serious political thinker and strategist of whom the British anti-war and anti-imperialist movement can be immensely proud. Maybe we should start doing as he suggests.