When the world is full of bullies looking for opportunities to target you, it pays to ally yourself with the biggest bully in the playground, and governments, generally, are the biggest bullies in the playground.

The essence of both is that the American response to 9-11 is motivated by considerations other than the attack itself; that the response has been massively disproportionate and that the politicians are taking the opportunity to promote a climate of exaggerated fear in order to provide justification for a sinister totalitarian agenda. None of which, broadly speaking, I disagree with. How can anyone argue? The Americans lost 3,000 lives on 9-11. They've so far claimed well over 100,000 in retaliation and aren't showing any signs of reigning in their warhorses. And every day they increasingly confirm their status as a fully fledged Police State.

How on earth was this assessment hidden from the decision makers? That was the purpose of the Office of Special Plans. To filter out the opposition, the caveats and the caution. True, Cheyney and Rumsfeld didn't personally withhold that assessment from the President, they just chose a team they could rely on to do the job for them.

Before the American response to 9-11, we probably had cause to be concerned about the activities of a few hundred seriously committed Islamic terrorists. We now have the problem of keeping track of ten or twenty thousand individual potential suicide terrorists widely dispersed around the planet. This is a security problem beyond the scale of any we have tackled to date.

The hidden danger in Curtis analysis is that he implies that the authoritarian response is wrong only because there is no real threat. Hence, - if we could ever convince him that there was a real threat (as I try to argue) - he would, presumably, have to concede that the repressive measures were justified. But there are much deeper objections to those measures than merely determining whether or not the threat they are supposed to counter is real or imaginary.

He cannot possibly be describing America as a “society that believes in nothing”. A major part of the problem is precisely how much America does “believe”, how many of its people are also "fundamentalists or fanatics" with beliefs just as deeply felt and irrational as the beliefs held by their enemies; and how many of those are in positions of authority or influence.

One of (Moore's) oddest failures was that he didn't even mention the “Project for the New American Century”; the Neocon manifesto that essentially spelt out – at least as far back as 1996 – exactly what their aims and ambitions were. Iraq was in their sights well before 9-11 and it would have been useful to have that avenue given his special treatment.

All I will say about conspiracy theories in this context is that if any of them are true then they certainly don't provide grounds for downgrading the threat. If, for example, the real culprits responsible for 9-11 are not MIFT but either Zionists or Neocons, then this is not any kind of reassuring conclusion! The threat posed by either of those groups is considerably greater than anything MIFT could throw at us.

Today's suicide attacker has raised the stakes considerably. Those original assassins were almost always targeting a single individual. Today's suicide bomber is aiming to take with him or her as many victims as they possibly can. The more victims, the greater the value of the martyrdom. It is the decision to waive all distinction between combatant and non combatant which has changed the scale of the threat.

as well as posing the greatest potential threat - nanotechnology also offers the greatest potential protections and other rewards. It will, if developed competently, eventually be capable of protecting us, internally and externally, from all possible sources of harm, whether biological, chemical, human, or even astronomical. In fact, I conjecture that the survival of the human species will depend on whether we perfect nanoshield technology before the opponents of human evolution perfect nanopoison technology.

For whatever reason, Gish, and presumably those who think like him, despite having the intellect required to obtain a PhD in a scientific discipline, are apparently genuinely unable to grasp the significance of the "closed system" in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

It's like playing chess with someone who can be consistently beaten with a 4 move checkmate. They're clearly more advanced than chimpanzees. But, in some respects at least, not by much.

Much the same violent reaction and repression is true of all totalitarian societies, when their social experiments fail, science reveals an error in their analysis or the real world simply refuses to conform to the party line.

Most political leaders among us (whether at gang or national level), however, reach their positions because they are driven by a deeper form of the psychosis, which seeks to act on their beliefs and which is reinforced by their success in achieving positions of leadership. This is the basis on which "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Achieving power validates the aspirant's belief structures even more strongly than mere membership of the group and the longer they retain power, the more justified they feel in eliminating any remaining doubts they may have held.

American Fundamentalist Christians, like their Islamic counterparts, believe that all behavioural questions can be dealt with entirely by reference to their dogma but don't dare argue that strongly for the control of society itself, at least not in public; but any objective examination of their declarations, behaviour and attitudes clearly reveals that this is their wider agenda. The Islamic Fundamentalists are more honest in this respect than their Christian counterparts. They openly oppose democracy and advocate religious rule for precisely these reasons. The masses need to be taught how to behave and led by wiser leaders in full accord with the divine word. They cannot be permitted the freedom to decide for themselves.

Because what they are primarily concerned with is controlling social behaviour in strict accordance with their biblically derived prejudices. Undermine the authority of that source, by showing that its description of creation and evolution is, at best, a naive attempt by a prescientific society to explain mysteries beyond their comprehension - but no longer beyond ours - and you remove all basis for taking seriously many of the behavioural guides contained therein. And with that goes all basis for religious control of society. That is what is at stake. That is why they fight so hard to challenge science with their own naive attempts at subversion.

Given the obvious irrationality of that position, it is not easy to see on what basis we can negotiate or reason with the people who share this mindset. This is the fundamental basis of the global problem we are now in the midst of. We're dealing with seriously psychotic people.

Of course, religious fundamentalists aren't the only ones who regard Society as being in desperate need of their supervision, protection and guidance. It is a common feature of secular tyrannies too. The only advantage of dealing with a secular control freak is that, ultimately, they are slightly more amenable to reason.

The significance of that distinction is that we can't even begin to address the populations controlled by those who don't tolerate dissent - their controllers block access to our ideas. Obviously that means we can't do much to influence the Chinese, for example

Those who do still tolerate dissent are further split between those who argue that they are qualified to control us by virtue of being elected to govern ...and those who accept that they are, in fact, no more qualified than anyone else to make judgements about my own life, but argue that they are acting on/with the authority of a supreme being who is solely capable of making such judgements.

I can't immediately think of one of Jesus' major "rules" which I would take serious issue with. His promise of heavenly reward for those who followed his guidance is a trifle optimistic and his conviction that he was the direct descendant of the supreme being was a little more psychotic than most of us seem to be, but it never caused him to harm others, so we needn't be too concerned about it. What matters, surely, is what he had to say about the 3rd Question. And, regardless of who he was, and whether or not he performed any verifiable "miracles", and whether or not he was resurrected 3 days after being ritually murdered by the State, what he has to say about how to behave is pretty reasonable.

Fundamentalists seem to have a problem with the acceptability of his message if it isn't backed up by divinity; as though they would no longer agree that "turning the other cheek" or "Loving thy neighbour" was such a good idea if it hadn't been said by a representative of the supreme being.

Surprisingly (or perhaps not), biblical literalists seem not to have noticed that it's a bit sweeping. The injunction is not limited. It doesn't, for example, say simply "don't kill each other" or "don't kill other human beings". Unless its been badly translated from the original hebrew, it is crystal clear, unequivocal and absolute. "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Which clearly means we are instructed not to kill anything at all. Which would make life itself rather difficult. Even vegans kill most of what they eat.

Ultimately I have reverted to meat for pleasure. I do it fully conscious of the pain and suffering that entails. I have hunted, killed, dressed and eaten my own meat. I have attended abbatoirs and watched the cattle and sheep having their throats slit after being stunned and hung upside down. I have watched their hides being expertly stripped from them before the last twitches of their lives have ended. I have watched and listened to the pigs screaming in terror because, unlike the sheep and cattle, they are intelligent enough to figure out what is about to happen to them.

When animals are killed for food, the death is usually quick and relatively painless. In contrast, many research animals are deliberately exposed to treatment or pathogens which give them a lingering death in captivity. It doesn't matter whether that lingering death takes minutes or months, it is different, in degree, from the efficient despatch carried out by an abbatoir. It fails the "minimise pain" test.

Why, therefore, should I be at all tolerant of labs routinely performing experiments on thousands of cats or dogs? And given that attitude, why am I not campaigning alongside the ALF and petrol bombing research labs?

...the higher the mental abilities, the more likely it is that the captive animal will suffer in the same way I would in their situation. As we approach that point, and the animals intelligence gets closer to my own, I feel increasingly constrained by the "golden rule" (reciprocity - "do as you would be done by")

...if arguing with prejudiced ignorant believers is a waste of time, does that imply that those sites and scientists which go to extraordinary lengths to counter the creationists naive nonsense are also wasting their time? Absolutely not. It may be a waste of time trying to educate someone like Duane Gish, but there are millions - potentially billions - of newly forming minds who are confused by the evolutionary debate and it is desperately important that they have access to authoritative peer reviewed intelligent rebuttals of the masses of "bad science" out there.

The American body politic and many of its supporters, to put it mildly, lack subtlety! The common thread to these policies is the complete absence of "common sense".

Now lets put that into perspective. That 15 year total of 7,812 (People killed by terrorists since 1990) is about as many people as were killed by Aspirin type drugs (NSAIDs) in the United States in the year 2000. It's roughly two thirds of the number of Americans killed by other Americans using guns in the year 2002. It's about as many people as are killed in road traffic accidents, in the United States, every 10 or 11 weeks.

I challenge the reader to find ANY national budget dedicated to reducing death by Aspirin, firearms or road traffic. Against that, the so called War on Terror has so far (June 2005) consumed a budget in excess of $300 Billion dollars.

What makes the US government willing to increase military spending to approximately $25 million dollars per death caused by terrorism while maintaining or reducing budgets aimed at reducing deaths from other causes?

The legitimate requirement for increased security, albeit generated by their own possibly illegitimate action, has in turn provided the spurious basis for the most intense and sophisticated attack on liberty and privacy seen since the Stalinist purges in the 1950s or the Maoist "Cultural Revolution" in the 60s.

I don't live in America. Why should I give a damn? Or, more precisely, why should I give more of a damn about the American Police State than either the Russian or Chinese ones? After all, however much I may criticise the US, the ex communist Russians and the still communist Chinese are both still in a different league of totalitarianism compared to the Americans.

...in line with Clinton's soundbite, my closing message for Part 2 is, that despite the plentiful reasons to be fearful, which we have explored in some detail, there are also tentative reasons for optimism. If we can use our collective intelligence to reach a consensus, there are practical steps we can take to avert this belated stampede into "1984". If we can indeed "think" rationally, then there is definitely "hope". Part 3 explores our options.