U.S. planes pounded Taliban front line positions north of Kabul and near a strategic northern city on Tuesday for athird successive day as the Afghan opposition said they intend to surround and eventually take the capital of Kabul.The Taliban accused U.S. forces of killing more than 100 people in a hospital in an earlier raid. Taliban officialssay hundreds of civilians have been killed and thousands wounded in President Bush’s so-called war on terrorism.

Among the allies the US is enlisting in this so-called war is Russia ­ which has killed thousands of civilians inChechnya. Then there’s China ­ which is currently arresting and killing Muslim dissidents in that country’sNorthwestern provinces; Turkey ­ which has killed thousands of Kurds and destroyed hundreds of villages in an effortto wipe out Kurdish resistance, and Indonesia, home of one of the world’s most brutal militaries, which has killedthousands of people in Aceh and West Papua.

It’s an irony that would have made George Orwell proud, some of the biggest sponsors of state terror enlisting in thefight against terrorism, and using the fight against terrorism to justify their own crimes.

One might be forgiven for wondering just what kind of terrorism the US is interested in wiping out.

We turn now to Professor Noam Chomsky…This weekend he gave major speech on terrorism ­ its history and how it’spracticed today, on U.S. soil and through US policies.

Guest:

• Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at MIT, and one of the world’s leading scholars and critics of USforeign policy.