Reagan's successful

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A new national shrine for the US masses? assassin Hinkley purchased his weapon As scientists worked against the clock to rewire and reprogramme the Space Shuttle, praying almost as hard as the would-be astronauts that the glue succeeds in holding on its heat-shield tiles, doctors were giving the wounded President Reagan his clearance to lift off from the George Washington Hospital.

Reagan successfully negotiated his first re-entry to the White House-to cheers from the world's mass mediawhile the astronauts were still glumly biting their nails and dosing themselves with Valium at Cape Kennedy.

However, while the Space Shuttle seems doomed to disastrous failure before or soon after the completion of the countdown, the Reagan administration is far from home and dry even after its Head of State's remarkable recovery.

Benefit

Certainly Reagan has benefited politically from the episode. It is ironic that with tens of millions of US citizens cherishing healthy material reasons for wanting Reagan dead, the would-be assassin turned out to be an incompetent, cranky fascist, who hit almost everything but the President.

Having survived the bullet, Reagan can cash in on the . sympathy he will now receive from Congress in order to ram through his vicious package of economic policies.

The situation exposed once again the disarray of the Democrats-who are so bombed out by last year's electoral disaster that they scarcely have a leading figure JOHN LISTER examines recent political developments in the wake of the abortive assassination bid.

foot in it with the other members of the Reagan team.

To reestablish himself he must now set out to accomplish something in his field of US foreign policy. And in a period of acute political crisis for imperialism, there is nothing more threatening than a US Secretary of State somerhirgut io accomplisi setting out something.

His visit to the Middle East saw immediate backing for the unholy alliance of Zionist armed forces with Lebanese fascists against the occupying Syrian "peacekeeping" troops.

But Haig will be looking for more spectacular diplomatic and military alliances and agreements in the Middle East in order to secure his dual ambition of restoring his own personal political career and furthering the military aggression of US imperialism.

Yet one major propaganda weapon utilised by both Haig and Reagan to justify their huge military build-up has taken a heavy battering-at the hands of none other than the CIA.

No evidence It has been conspicuous since January that-despite repeated allegations that both Cuba and the Soviet Union are literally pouring arms and aid to the lett wing guerrillas in El SalvadorHaig, Reagan and Defence Secretary Weinberger have been unable to produce so much as a scrap of evidence.

On the basis of no more than bald assertions, the Reagan team has accused the Stalinist leaders of aiding and abetting world terrorism"

It seemed that possibly some undisclosed industrial dispute had halted the CIA's forgery press-since not even the most flimsy invoice for guns delivered to Salvador has been turned up.

But a draft CIA report has now emerged that not only fails to support the Administration's wild anti-Soviet allegations, but actually pours cold water on them.

Poor quality

The CIA's Foreign Assessments Centre has declared that while there may be some support for the claim that the USSR was supporting terrorism, there was little, if any evidence, and most of that is dubious in quality.

The CIA report flies in the face of a State Department report, allegedly compiled from documents captured in El Salvador, stating categorically that there is:

"definite evidence of the clandestine military support given by the Soviet Union, Cuba and their Communist allies to Marxist-Leninist guerrillas now fighting to overthrow the government of El Salvador."

Weinberger has now publicly attacked the CIA report and repeated that evidence of Stalinist backing for "terrorism" does exist.

Bush But with the nation's major espionage agency not convinced, the credibility of the Reagan case is thrown into new doubt.

Resistance

Meanwhile as the effects of the Reagan assault on public spending, on working class living standards, on iobs, and on health and safety legislation make themselves felt, US miners-on all-out strike-are in the forefront of the resistance.

Haig with Reagan

Youth, facing a prospect of unemployment, conscription and war, blacks and other oppressed minorities and the poorest sections of the US working class can be increasingly expected to find ways of making their opposition felt, too.

Reagan may have survived his first bullet: but he is a long way from persuading American workers that they should bite on the bullet in order to boost the profits of the oil monopolies, banks and millionaire corporations.

His best hopes lie in the fact that the US workers' movement still lacks any independent political expression for its demands. The unions remain tied to the two main capitalist parties.

To take the struggle forward it is vital that a fight is waged in the unions for the breaking of these political shackles, and the building of Fourth Interr ail No. 1 Nov. 1979 DISCUSSION BULLETIN 60p