The human rights report issued by the US State Department said that some "serious problems" remained o­n the part of the Malaysian government in the field of human rights such as "the killing of suspects by police, the torture and abuse of detainees, and the continued use of the Internal Security Act (ISA) to arrest people without trial (read: without reasonable cause).

Now that the US has shown itself in the eyes of many Malaysians to be a serious violator of human rights in its war in Iraq, serious problems of credibility too arise as regards to the US State Department's opinion.

It has no right to preach or judge. Nor should we give weight to its opinion. If the US cannot be believed in its story about Iraq, how could it be believed in its disparagement of the Malaysian government's human rights record?

What the US State Department is trying to do is to paint the Malaysian government as a smaller clone of the Saddam Hussein regime. This is just because the Malaysian government has the trepidation to campaign against the Iraqi war in international forums (NAM and OIC) to resist American assertion of global hegemony. The US is trying to destabilise an unfriendly BN regime.

Malaysia, though a small country, has a big voice. Our foreign and information ministries have even sent 28 journalists from various local media organisations early this month to Iraq as part of a plan to get first-hand reporting o­n the war. This has been done even at the risk of endangering the lives and safety of the journalists ( Doctors injured in ambush, abducted M'sian journalists released ).

The US human rights report is therefore aimed at undermining the credibility of the Malaysian government and therefore should not be given any weight. The cunningness, manipulative and Machiavellian tendencies of the US cabal of hawks in the State Department and the Pentagon are well set out by malaysiakini columnist Dr Farish Noor ( Saddam's fall: a warning to the developing world ).

If it is all true, the Malaysian government abuses of human rights are lesser in scale than the US itself, and I cannot understand why so much tolerance is given to the claim to the US being the bastion of democracy.

Comparatively, the Malaysian government is even more 'democratic', and we Malaysians should know better than to criticise our own government of human rights abuse and cronyism when the US can do no better in allocating part of the reconstruction of Iraq to Haliburton, which Dick Cheney o­nce held a top executive position.

Likewise, it is hard to understand why opposition parties like DAP and Keadilan and NGOs campaign against our government's position in relation to ex-deputy PM Anwar Ibrahim who had shown himself to be consistently pro-American, for example in supporting the US' prescription o­n how to manage the attack o­n our ringgit.

If we were to follow that, our currency would have had a free fall, our corporations - with much stake owned by bumiputras - would have collapsed and taken over by Western multinational corporations, our social re-engineering by NEP completely reversed, and our national resources exploited by the imperialistic Americans as they now seek to do in Iraq.

Malaysians, support our government - don't listen to the US.