Has US Secretary of State Colin Powell the right to moralise the Malaysian government on civil liberties when the US government prioritises them no higher in passing the draconian USA Patriot Act?

The Patriot Act has vested domestic law enforcement and international intelligence agencies with wide and sweeping powers of surveillance over online communications and activities in violation of the people's right to privacy?

Has US the moral authority to lecture us on lack of corporate governance and non-conformance to accounting standards (that attracted hedge fund traders to attack our currency) in the wake of her own corporate shenanigans and scandals involving Enron (implicating Citicorp and JP Morgan group), WorldCom Inc, AOL Time Warner? These could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Just like as in Malaysia in heady years of soaring stock prices that made shareholders and bankers satisfied, little attention was paid to the back room corporate fraud, corruption, misreporting and 'creative' accounting by directors and officers that were camouflaged.

It would take a severe jolt (like a currency attack) to turn exuberance to gloom, reverse stock prices, stress interest servicing and diminish collateral values, the cumulative effect of which is to put companies into insolvency, laying bare in the process the fraud, wrong doings, conflicts of interest that have been going on undetected for years.

In the case of US, the jolt came from Sept 11 from which consumer confidence never as yet recovered, and as the Dow Jones and Greenback decline, so will more and more corporate wrong doings will be unraveled to send confidence down on a downward spiral.

It was not for nothing that terrorists targeted the World Trade Center. It was the symbol of American economic supremacy. Osama bin Laden cannot win the war against the Americans on the military front — that's not his target — but he can, on the economic front.

Once business confidence in corporate America is shaken, it will soon plummet on its own momentum in an unending cycle of bad news of corporate shenanigans being unraveled. Business confidence and its fragility are the US' Achilles heel that Osama and henchmen will strike with devastating and wide ranging consequences.

Across the sweep of Muslim regions, Malaysia is moderate and Dr Mahathir is, in the absence of better alternatives, the only Muslim leader of some credibility and voice to stand up and speak against Islamic extremism and engage other Muslim brethren leaders to hold moderate position.

Mahathir is therefore an important ally to, and courted by the US in its engagement with the Islamic world and the US can ill-afford to alienate him.

It is therefore unrealistic and naive to think that the Malaysian government's incarceration of a few without trial under the justification of preventive necessity, which happens also to be the rationale behind the US Patriot Act, will impair and be more important than the newly forged cooperation between the Malaysian and American administrations essential to the security and national interest of America.