It’s shameful to have to ask MILF for ‘help’

PARIS – The front-page report yesterday that the government was asking the rebels of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to help the police and military in rescuing a kidnapped Italian missionary, Fr. Giuseppe Pierantoni, is dismaying.

If our government can’t tackle the kidnap gangs and Moro "Lost Commands" by itself, this is a sign of weakness – and will be translated into scorn on the part of the already-terrified inhabitants of Mindanao.

The awful truth is that – outside of the villainous self-styled mujahideen of the Abu Sayyaf Group, now notorious worldwide and giving our country a bad name – the MILF insurgency (which has been put on "pause" by a shaky preliminary peace deal) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) which is supposed to have come in from the cold but whose militants are often found in cahoots with the Abus, we still have too many criminal gangs like the Pentagon Gang, the Kuratong Baleleng gang (the police didn’t kill enough of them), etc. Needless to say, when "caught", gangsters are found to have been in the armed forces or the police.

It’s not just becoming a "narco-state" (like Colombia) that we must fear. It’s the general state of confusion.

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It’s now been confirmed that the United States is under direct attack by bioterrorists. Yesterday’s front-page headline in The Times of London says it all: "Two Dead in Washington Anthrax Alert."

The story said that "two Washington postal workers have died of suspected pulmonary anthrax and two of their colleagues were last night seriously ill in hospital."

Times correspondent Damian Whitworth wrote that "three weeks after the first death from the disease, spread by letter attacks, officials announced that two more fatalities were ‘high suspicious . . .’ " Excuse me: It’s certain the US is under anthrax assault.

The postal workers affected worked in the Brentwood postal facility in the US capital which handles mail destined for the House of Representatives and Senate. The 2,200 postal employees at this station are now being given nasal swaps and undergoing testing for anthrax infection. One disgruntled worker complained: "They knew we would be sorting out dangerous mail. Why were we not protected? Why do we have to beg for masks and surgical gloves, which should have been distributed immediately?"

The only answer I can think of is that, even after Robert Stevens, the deputy picture editor of the tabloid, The Sun, published by American Media in St. Petersburg, Florida, died of anthrax, the US government was in a state of denial. Who could mount such a wide-ranging attack in the "safe" United States? They asked themselves.

Now, it’s clear that deadly bugs are being transmitted through the mail. The finger of suspicion, this time, is not being pointed at the hated terrorist Osama bin Laden but at another terrorist of a more vintage variety, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

I picked up a new book from the Galignani bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli which details, according to its subtitle, The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda. The author, Khidhir Hamza, is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate whom Saddam seduced into going "home" from his Florida State University professorship and utilized his "atomic energy" knowhow to design an atom bomb. "The price of refusal," Hamza explained, "was torture."

In his volume (Scribner New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, 2000) Hamza described how he had put together a bomb with the help of World War II blueprints from America’s Los Alamos laboratories. All this time, Hamza and other scientists were planning their escape. They finally succeeded. In his autobiography entitled Saddam’s Bombmaker, Hamza also narrated how the Iraqis had ruthlessly tested biological and chemical weapons on human subjects.

Now, that’s interesting.

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The Americans themselves ought to know from personal experience how easy it is to manufacture those "anthrax" spores. Judith Miller, co-author of a new book on biological warfare called – what else? – GERMS, recounts how the US Department of Defense has once conceived "Project Bacchus", by giving some funds to a group of scientists and telling them to set up a biological warfare factory.

"The catch was that they could use only materials bought on the open market," Miller recalled. The Pentagon chiefs, in fact, never bothered to inform US Congress of their plan to create anthrax in a way that "would simulate how terrorists might covertly make the deadly bacterium." The Pentagon simply doled out the money quietly and told the scientists to get on with it.

The team set out in 1999 to build a small-scale laboratory in Nevada. A local hardware store supplied pipes and filters. A firm in Europe dispatched a 50-liter fermenter unit suitable for culturing germs. A Midwest company provided a milling machine capable of grinding dried material into powder.

By summer last year, they had produced two pounds of germ materials, "including one that simulated anthrax," according to Jay Davis, the recent director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Pentagon unit that supervised the experiment. "No Western intelligence agency had detected the operation." Nobody attempted to stop it.

"The project has proved its point," Miller concluded. "A nation of bioterrorists with the requisite expertise could build and operate a small-scale germ weapons plant."

Saddam has the expertise and capability to produce those same "bugs" on a grand scale. If Osama’s Al Qaeda network, teaming up with the Iraqis, provide the delivery system, it’s all-out war. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Americans attack Iraq anew, not just Afghanistan. They’re a nation close to panic because anthrax is a threat they can’t bomb, can’t rocket with missiles, or perceive through night-vision goggles. A bunch of rascals with a makeshift lab could overwhelm all their technology.

The extent of the terrorists’ success goes beyond the spread of the deadly germ. Americans are now afraid to open their mail or packages, mail sorters are scared to handle the tons of mail that inundate their facilities daily. Business and everyday life (outside of e-mail) can only grind to a stop.

The next attack: Computer hacking and a "virus" assault?

America, alas, has provided its enemies with the tools with which to discombobulate or even destroy America. But steady now. When the US fights back, its retribution can be terrible – and Americans must strike back. Whatever the target (even if it's wrong) they’ll be forced to act.