Its security was breached – partly, as the official report on the events of 09 September 2001 reveal, because it complacently looked the other way – but the full story remains hidden: How is it possible for some one who attended flying school for the first time commandeer jumbo jets – four were out of an eleven intended, so says the 09/11 official report – breach the tightest official security cordon in the world, veer off course with two crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York, one into the Pentagon in Washington, the fourth crashed (shot down?) before it reached its target believed, then as now, to have been the White House.

WHEN THE UNITED STATES adopted, in the wake of the jet plane attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on Sept 11, 2001, detentions without trial for those suspected of terrorist attacks, the then Malaysian prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, was ecstatic.

When it does that, it allows the hegemon to decide who should be in power. However one looks at it, that man is not Pak Lah but his deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak. He must know this by now. It was, remember, Washington's public support for the jailed deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, that sharpened the political debate in Malaysia. Tun Mahathir accused Dato' Seri Anwar of being Washington's stooge, amongst others, because the Pentagon gave him a right royal welcome, even inspecting a guard of honour, as it did not Dr Mahathir. If you extend this to the present situation, so did Dato' Seri Najib in Washington on a recent visit. Would Pak Lah get a similar welcome when he visits Washington? He might or he might not, depending on how loyal a poodle he could be. Dato' Seri Najib's credentials on this cannot be faulted: when he called on Mr Tenet, the great man had his legs on the table and slumped to his chair, telling him that the US is a greater power than the Roman Empire. He was insulted and, yet, he did nothing about it. Washington, I should think, knows the SCOPE factory cannot be a major link, but it is enough to unnerve Pak Lah. Why should he be rattled?

Let us look at the state of play in South Asia at the turn of the millennium. Washington shifted its support from Islamabad to New Delhi, forcing Pakistan leaders to justify what it was once taken for granted. Afghanistan was firmly in Western hands, the last victory of the Cold War, the Taliban, supported no doubt at Washington's request but which it continued after the war. The rise of the Muslim parties threw Washington's goodwill in Islamabad at risk. The destruction of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in 2001 changed the confrontational world view from the Soviet Union and communism to Islam and Osama bin Laden. But on the basis of what is known, or rather published, it does appear that Dr Khan's activities could not have gone the way it did if it was not approved. The Pakistan armed forces is in control of its nuclear weapons programme. It would not allow a rogue scientist of even national acclaim to do what Dr Khan did. It did not. He was forced to take the blame, but for one who, if the charges against him are true, is guilty of treason is let off with a light slap on his wrist. There is more to it than meets the eye. Dr Khan could not have sold his wares to North Korea without official authority, even if it is for the money it would bring in.

A case is built on British and US paranoia, this fear that Islamic militants and rulers they trained and paid to destroy the Soviet Union, could bite the hand that fed them. So Afghanistan is invaded. Iraq is invaded. The Muslim world is thrown awry. Washington and London seek a common link amongst especially Muslim countries who disagree with their plans to control the world and its oil. All it has done is to put all nations it regards as potential enemies at edge and, under pressure, agree with its global agenda; but with a citizenry hostile to the very idea. Neither Washington nor London understand the enemy they fight, but they are sure they can be contained. They believe that their enemies operate as they do, with computer graphs, long-term plans, detailed war plans, contingency planning, when as tribal societies, they dance to a different beat, linked only by a common enemy and sense of injustice, often working independently and without a central direction. When the dust clears, it could well be while Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network took the blame for blowing up the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001, an offshoot planned and executed it independently. But in the Western mind, that is impossible.

After all, how could the Malaysian government led by Dr Mahathir and whose home minister is Pak Lah explain how those charged for the Bali bombing had Malaysian permanent residence, as had several of those Washington alleges were responsible for the World Trade Centre and Pentagon bombings. Does this then follow - in the same faulty logic of the United States and its sheriff in Asia use to prove the unprovable - the National Front (BN) government is an Al Qaeda operative in Southeast Asia? All that this programme has established is not Dato' Seri Anwar's links to international terrorism and Al Qaeda but that the Malaysian government could well be. That Pak Lah, when he is prime minister before the week is out, is then chief Al Qaeda terrorist in Malaysia. But surely that is not what Dato' Aziz Shamsuddin had in mind!

It is fear that forces governments to cut the niceties and operate in secret. The destruction of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon brought home to Washington that fortress America is in trouble. Its policies overseas must now cause havoc in the United States. It decided on Islam as the enemy, and built up a case without understanding the problem, with revenge as the raison d'etre. It reacted as a cornered animal, threatening havoc and destruction to all who dared stand up to it. The electricity black out could well be nothing more than a mechanical problem, but the fright in US officialdom was clear enough: very quickly and without any evidence whatsoever, it insisted it is not a terrorist attack.

MALAYSIA IS HOST TO THE SOUTHEAST Asia regional centre for counter-terrorism. It was formed after a panic-stricken United States, after the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, decided this war on terror is best conducted at source. Since then, the United States, with its ally, the United Kingdom, has gone on a frolic on its own, find terrorists in the most unlikeliest of places, attacked Iraq on a whim and now cannot even provide the justification for it. Last year, the US secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, proposed the centre be in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur accepted, and tried to have one in which the United States has no say in it. That cannot be. However one looks at it, Washington needs a centre in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia is the only Moslem country who would have allowed it. After all, in the government's contested view, Malaysia is a hotbed of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism, of the type Osama bin Laden would gladly recruit.

Why does Pak Lah then insist when he takes over there would no political and economic upheaval? I do not think he means it in the way it is reported. But such misunderstandings could well be the norm for he is surrounded by political advisers reacting not to political trends or what lies on the ground but by a theoretical critical path analysis that might work well in the United States or Singapore but not in Malaysia. There is no reliable data from which they can make their confident assessments. If Pak Lah continues to make statements like these he must expect the local version of President Bush's problems in Iraq, who went to war based on Pentagon war games, not the reality on the ground. His advisers are young, bright, well-meaning but they do not have the wisdom that comes with age and experience to round off their more outlandish ideas. It is they who allowed the ASEAN anti-terrorism centre in Malaysia and earlier, the Australian anti-terrorism centre. The danger is that the rationale for important national imperatives could be based on what the foreigners would like.

If anything undermined Western confidence in the past two decades, it is the Iran revolution, the Afghanistan regime under the Taliban, the Iraq regime under President Saddam Hussein, the isolationist North Korean regime. Add to this the attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers in New York, and the rise of virulent Islamic groups, and for the first time in centuries there is a deliberate and systematic challenge to Western hegemony. It is run as a collective hurt, one the West does not understand, and which it insists on cataloguing, often irrelevantly, into easily digestible intellectual pigeonholes. But the United States can forget about pulling its troops in Iraq for, let us say, Christmas, ten years hence. It begins to make the mistakes it made aplenty in Vietnam. It does not begin to understand what makes Iraq tick, that democracy cannot be imposed in chaos. Afghanistan, for all its hype, is led by an American citizen and forced upon the people. So would Iraq if the Pentagon had its way.

What is frightening at this colonial invasion of Iraq is how out of touch with reality the United States is. In embarking on it, Washingtonn was certain the majority Shia community would welcome it with open arms, and as one commentator noted, its most difficult problem would be how to deal with the floral tributes the grateful Shia community, long repressed under Saddam Hussein, would welcome them. Today, the most potent organised opposition is that very same Shia community. It miscalculated and misjudged every step in this invasion. What was to have been a quick surgical operation is now messy, that the very men in the Pentagon who promised a quick, sharp, easy victory now think they would be in Iraq for "at least five years", perhaps more. Every hopeful expectation is forgotten, as the invading army turns into an occupation army.

The Anglo-American imperialist adventure in Iraq is no different and suffuced with the same hubris. As Moscow in 1979, Washington in 2003, defied the world to invade a country to show it could. The neoconservative cabal around President George W Bush had been straining at the bit to march into Iraq for months before the aerial attack on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. And looked for excuses to march in. It defied the United Nations, and its claim of 49 nations backing it must be taken with a pinch of salt: many dare not reveal their support, a few heard of it when they read of it in the newspapers, some of them one would have difficulty of identifying on a map. When all is said and done, it is the United States and its sabaltern, the United Kingdom, that marched in. Nothing one has heard from their operational headquarters in Doha or from the House of Commons in London or the Pentagon says it is anything but.

The issue now is not Iraq, the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, the global war of terror, nor even regime change. It is colonisation, pure and simple. As skepticism grew of the Bush-Blair plans, and global opposition mounted, the two spinned ever unconvincing reasons why Iraq must be destroyed. Why is not hard to find. The global superpower is unchallenged after the Soviet Union self-destructed in 1989. It is now: the informal and disparate global coalition of individuals and non-governmental groups which confront the US, softly and without weapons. That worked. The US and its 'Coalition of the Willing' is challenged at every turn by this informal global force. The meeting in Azores is its latest humiliation. There would be more.

THE XIII NON-ALIGNED SUMMIT IN KUALA Lumpur opened in good intentions and hope, the 114 heads of government and state present praising and criticising it with equal abandon, but with Iraq and to a lesser extent Palestine taking centre stage, all else was pushed to the sidelines. President Parvez Musharraf made a quixotic attempt to force NAM to focuss on Kashmir, but he clearly spoke to an audience which believes it is best resolved bilaterally between India and Pakistan. Terrorism, especially after the blowing up of the World Trade Centre in New York and the attempt to blow up the Pentagon, got more mention than it would have. Several delegates looked inwards to see how NAM could be strengthened, but the will to do it is not there.

It is this need to demonise an enemy, the oldest rule in the propaganda book, that leads Washington and its sycophantic allies in this egregious war on terror, to make Al Qaida to be a near invincible enemy. It began with blaming it for, to the West, frightening targetting of its economy, political, and military headquarters -- World Trade Centre, the White House, and the Pentagon. It is now almost certain that the aircraft which crashed (or was shot down) in the Pennysylvania fields was headed for the White House. An air attache in a foreign embassy in Malaysia said crashing three planes into buildings could not have been done except by professional aviators, and it involved so tight scheduling and plans that it could not have been possible by proxy, as we are told. Who did it will remain a mystery. But Osama bin Laden is quite happy to take credit for it. He now targets the West's economic targets: the attack on the French tanker on charter to Petronas is one such. It has not attacked soft targets like the Bali bombings. All these accusations fit in with his state agenda of what he sets out to do.

In the changed global backdrop of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, every attack, if by a Muslim, is ipso facto connected to bin Laden and his Al-Qaida network. It does not matter if it is or not. Nothing is proven. Nothing need be. But the Big White Chief in Washington has spoken. He is not sure. But he has said it is. That is enough. So, only Islamic terror groups could have hijacked four Boeing 747s and have them crash into New York's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon; the fourth crashed, or was shot down, before it reached its target. The world is turned upside down. But Washington reacts in fright and impotence, building a case how vicious and dangerous what it created --- Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaida network -- is. It forces the world to accept it, but the Muslim world would not. The rhetoric rises to a shrill, but it remains unconvinced. There is now a perciptible division between the Muslim world and the rest of the world. And if Muslims are involved in a decades old terrotorial dispute, as for instance Kashmir in India, it is pressganged now into this war on terror.

But there are other possibilities. The strongest -- and which got the diplomats terribly upset -- is that Washington could have deliberately orchestrated the carnage. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution which brought the US into Vietnam turned out, as the Pentagon Papers showed, was based on a lie; as the claim by the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador that she saw Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait removing respirators from newly born babies. But it was enough reason for Congress, in anger, to act. By the time it was found out, the action had begun, and it became moot.

When the enormity of that struck him, various seemingly intellectual opinions are proferred to suggest that those who bombed the Pentagon and World Trade Centre are irresponsibe and bad Muslims; while those who do not indulge in such acts of terror are responsible and good. At the time, in the immediate aftermath of 11 September, President Saddam Hussein was a good Muslim. The alleged ringleader is no where to be seen. So he targets President Saddam, not for his role in the attacks, if indeed there was one, but for holding on to the stock of biological and other weapons Washington, in happier times, had allowed him to buy and accumulate. It is another sign how frightened and unsettled the Leader of the Free World is. But there is a link: both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are Muslims.

THE UNITED STATES CANNOT yet shake itself out of its mindnumbing terror one year ago today: that in 30 minutes, two commercial jetliners, hijacked, smashed into its citadels of financial and military power; if a third had not crashed, or shot down, in the fields of Pennsylvania, of political nerve centre. The World Trade Centre, the Pentagon, the White House represents the might of the United States in this unilateral world it dominates. That it was unexpected sufficiently unnerved the US government to divert Air Force One, in which President Bush was travelling, in panic, while they unscrambled to take take stock.

So, there is a link between this feudal prescription for its failings by forcing Malaysians to learn English after forcibly removing it from the curriculum a generation earlier and the PAS penchant for hudud. Fanciful explanations justify both. But punishment and inconvenience dominates both. The hudud laws is in keeping with an extreme form of Islam, the Wahabbi strain of Saudi Arabia. In this battening of the hatches against the infidels, especially in the anti-Islam frenzy after three commercial airlines slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington last September, the Muslims in Malaysia keeps the non-Muslim and non-Malay at bay, in law and practice.

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