1. LAST week, the US government announced that it was building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379billion, of which $50billion will pay for its "war on terrorism". There will be special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for "military operations" - invasions of other countries.

 2. The threat of "terrorism", some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare.

IN AMERICA in the 1950s, the Red Scare was used to justify the growth of war industries, the suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissenters.

That is happening now.

3. Above all, the American industrial-complex has a new enemy with which to justify its gargantuan appetite for public resources - the new military budget is enough to end all primary causes of poverty in the world.

4. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, says he has told the Pentagon to "think the unthinkable".

5. Vice President Dick Cheney, the voice of Bush, has said the US is considering military or other action against "40 to 50 countries" and warns that the new war may last 50 years or more.

A Bush adviser, Richard Perle, explained. "(There will be) no stages," he said.

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there ... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

6. Certainly, there are vast oil fields off the coast of Somalia.

For the Americans, there is the added attraction of "settling a score".

In 1993, in the last days of George Bush Senior's presidency, 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia after the US Marines had invaded to "restore hope", as they put it.

A current Hollywood movie, Black Hawk Down, glamorises and lies about this episode.

It leaves out the fact that the invading Americans left behind between 7,000 and 10,000 Somalis killed.

Like the victims of American bombing in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Cambodia, and Vietnam and many other stricken countries, the Somalis are unpeople, whose deaths have no political and media value in the West.

WHEN Bush Junior's heroic marines return in their Black Hawk gunships, loaded with technology, looking for "terrorists", their victims will once again be nameless. We can then expect the release of Black Hawk Down II.

7. Brzezinski (a former National Security Adviser to ex- president Jimmy Carter) not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilise" the Soviet Union.

The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means "student").

8. At that time, the late 1970s, the American goal was to overthrow Afghanistan's first progressive, secular government, which had granted equal rights to women, established health care and literacy programmes and set out to break feudalism.

When the Taliban seized power in 1996, they hanged the former president from a lamp-post in Kabul.

His body was still a public spectacle when Clinton administration officials and oil company executives were entertaining Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas.

10. Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush, has given refuge to terrorists who, like the September 11 gang, have hi-jacked aircraft and boats with guns and knives.

Most have never had criminal charges brought against them.

Why? All of them are anti-Castro Cubans. Former Guatemalan Defence Minister Gramajo Morales, who was accused of "devising and directing an indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians", including the torture of an American nun and the massacre of eight people from one family, studied at Harvard University on a US government scholarship.

During the 1980s, thousands of people were murdered by death squads connected to the army of El Salvador, whose former chief now lives comfortably in Florida.

The former Haitian dictator, General Prosper Avril, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television.

When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US government, and granted political asylum.

A leading member of the Chilean military during the reign of General Pinochet, whose special responsibility was executions and torture, lives in Miami.

THE Iranian general who ran Iran's notorious prisons, is a wealthy exile in the US.

One of Pol Pot's senior henchmen, who enticed Cambodian exiles back to their certain death, lives in Mount Vernon, New York.

What all these people have in common, apart from their history of terrorism, is that they either worked directly for the US government or carried out the dirty work of US policies.

The al-Qaeda training camps are kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, its graduates include almost half the cabinet ministers of the genocidal regimes in Guatemala, two thirds of the El Salvadorean army officers who committed, according to the United Nations, the worst atrocities of that country's civil war, and the head of Pinochet's secret police, who ran Chile's concentration camps.

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The following are some of the issues that I consider very pertinent after reading John Pilger's article.

1. From the article one can safely conclude that the US have no moral right to wage war against Afghanistan for refusing to hand over Osama Bin Laden to them while harbouring other people's worst terrorists. The double standard of the British is also quite clear here.

2. The US, by training and arming gullible Islamic millitants and immorally using religion to further their main aim of bringing down the former USSR, "Operation Cyclone", they are equally guilty in what has happened the world over from fanatical so-called Islamic militants.

3. The huge military spending cannot be justified as the right response to the terrorist threat. This huge amount of money being wasted could have been better used to fight poverty and win America more friends who would be willing to die for them.

4. Whereas thousands of innocent Afghanis have died in this war against Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda group, there isn't much evidence that their key objective of capturing him dead or alive has been achieved.

5. If a "Dovish" Jimmy Carter can and was willingly to use up to $500 million to fan up religious hatred in the former USSR, with all its potential consequencies for everyone the world over, can one imagine what a "Hawkish" Bush is capable of doing?

6. Finally I believe that John Pilger is cautioning the whole world about the dangers of blindly supporting the US's strategy and to the extent they are intent on seeing it through.

Have a good day, Gassa.

There is a time in the life of every problem when it is big enough to see, yet small enough to solve. -Mike- Levitt-