Global War Machine Gets More Money:

"Britain will boost the size of its domestic intelligence service by 50 per cent, hiring 1,000 new staff to counter the threat of terrorism, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said...

Asked if the recruitment drive was part of the 'war on terror', Prescott said: 'That is the main concern now, frankly.'

'It's (a response to the threat of) a person walking with a massive weapon of mass destruction into an underground (metro system), a chemical weapon or something. So you really have got to have greater use of intelligence than we've got at the moment.'"

Gandhi: Like most of the Western World, these UK spy guys have been watching way too many Hollywood movies. How do you stop an unknown terrorist with a WMD from boarding a bus? The truth is, you cannot do it, at least not all the time. That is the fundamental fallacy of the unwinable "war on terrorism", which is really just an excuse for an Orwellian state of never-ending war.

But why does a terrorist decide to board a bus with a WMD? Why would he even want to find, build or buy a WMD? Humans have an instinct for self-preservation and are generally averse to the concept of murder. The idea that thousand of crazed Muslim terrorists want to kill Westerners just because "they hate our freedom" is just another Bush Lie.

Today's television-addicted children grow up thinking that the world can be separated into "good guys" and "bad guys". Witness the child-like George W. Bush's nonchalant dismissal of the Iraqi war dead and Guantanamo Bay inmates as "bad" or "evil". But the truth is that most people only use weapons against others if they feel they have a legitimate and serious aggrievement that cannot be resolved any other way.

In all this talk of a "War" on "Terror" there has been precious little discussion of how we should resolve the very real and unresolved aggrievements of the Arab peoples. Instead, Bush's phoney "Roadmap" for peace, like the phoney promise of genuine Iraqi democracy, has been left to die a slow beaurocratic death (just as it was created to do). Meanwhile, despite weak US protests, Israel has been allowed to continue building a huge concrete "apartheid" wall that will make life even harder for Palestinians.

Instead of throwing ever more money at our Defence Forces and spewing forth xenophobic vitriol, why don't we launch a real attack on the root causes of terrorism: poverty, racial prejudice and political suppression?