Ms Whyte, you are a champ :)

That acronym is hilarious, Yanks are some of the nicecest and friendlist people, but they can also be rediculously full of themselves.

I would recommend the reading of the entire article. It sends a shiver down the spine especially when you consider what type of world we could be heading for with Governments everywhere using the 'we're fighting terror' argument to take power away from the voters and, militarily, to impose their will upon other nations.
What never ceases to amaze me is the virtual indifference of the average citizen to the erosion of their rights and freedoms and to the increasing deceptions perpetrated by their Governments. In Australia we actually rewarded the Government for lying to us and for taking us into an illegal war.
I guess George Orwell could yet be proved right. The horrors found in his chilling book 1984 already apply in several secretive outposts of the Western World.

The real issue is that the "War on terror" is a fabrication.

Global terror - as the US would have us believe exists - has been the cry since Sep 11 when a group of terrorists continued their series intermittent attacks, numbering less than a dozen, on the US government and its miltary.

The US wanted to go to war in retaliation and so Britain and Australia were stupid enough to go along too. The consequence of this folly was to make the respective countries potential targets for terrorist organisations.

At another level US "marketing" triumphed with its notion that there is a "global threat". Somehow a series of fewer than a dozen attacks against one country morphed into a threat to all countries.

Now we have huge expenditure on security systems and the introduction of various "emergency" laws, none of which appears to be justified on a risk-benefit analysis.

It's time to get real and see the "global war" for the myth that it is.

Let the US deal with its own problems and the rest of us can repeal some of these onerous anti-terror "emergency" laws that only exist because of gullible governments.

cheers