MR. LEHRER: Finally, Mr. Secretary, let me ask you this. The President mentioned today as well that the people who committed these awful acts on Tuesday hate us and hate what we stand for. Where does that come from? You were a military man for years, now a Secretary of State. We think of ourselves as the good people of the world, we Americans. Why do these people hate us so that they would fly an airplane into targets and kill themselves in order to kill Americans?

SECRETARY POWELL: The reasons are very, very complex. In some instances, they don't like our value system. They don't like the system that treats every individual as a creature of God with the full rights of every other individual. They don't like our political system, our form of democracy. They don't like who some of our friends are in the Middle East and the fact that we are strong supporters of Israel and will remain so. They resent, in many instances, our successes of society.

But rather than debating us on our values, rather than listening as we listen to them, they choose another form of debate with us: debate on the battlefield. And they choose terrorism, a weapon that is available to them because they can't defeat us on a conventional battlefield. And I wish that were not the case.



Larry Klayman, chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, a Washington public-interest law firm, recently discovered that Bush and Bin Laden are united by more than just a shared belief in the battle of good vs evil. Bush Sr, it turns out, is a paid senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, a private Washington equity firm described by the New York Times as the US's 11th largest defence contractor.

Carlyle's investors include -- no surprises here -- the Bin Laden family, as well as Bush Sr and former Secretary of State James Baker; and Judicial Watch, according to an 11 October article in the Village Voice, "says all involved stand to benefit from any increase in U.S. defense spending." Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, spelled it out: "George Bush is getting money from private interests that have business before the government, while his son is president. And, in a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments."

Such a confluence between "private" and "public" interests is not new to US politics; last year, according to a Chicago Tribune article dated 10 August 2000, questions were raised over work that Dresser Industries, Inc., had been doing to keep Iraqi oil production up. Dresser, it so happens, had been purchased for $8.5 billion in 1998 by Halliburton.

Current US Vice-President Richard Cheney was the Halliburton's CEO from 1995 to 2000. As Defence Secretary in 1991, Cheney had helped wage war against Iraq; less than a decade on, he was helping Saddam Hussein bypass sanctions imposed by his administration and enforced under its successor.

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