The noose is tightening

I think the way is clear-cut if we want to pinpoint the blame for the Manila Bay crash of that very old Fokker-27 plane. It’s not enough to crack down on the owners and operators of that barebones air carrier, Laoag Air. If it’s true that they conducted only backyard maintenance and repair activities, cannibalizing one aircraft to provide spare parts for the other three, this is criminal.

But what about the congressmen who granted that skimpy, apparently underfinanced "airline" a franchise? Shouldn’t they be held liable, too? Is our country one in which those in political power, whose responsibility it is to defend and protect the public, conduct their affairs (and business) on the basis of "the public be damned"? The public is not only damned – the commuting public dies, too. That’s the long and short of it.

Make no mistake: The dead (and those who painfully survived) Monday’s tragedy cry out for justice. The same is true of the crickety, unsafe, smoke-belching, second-hand junk buses our government allows to ply our streets, especially EDSA, our main artery. Those buses kill, too.

This country has become a junkyard. We think we’re "saving" by buying scrapyard rejects, "cheap". One thing is certain: We’re not saving lives. Alas, it’s life which has become cheap.

When will our "public servants" (as they like to call themselves during election time to reel in the suckers, meaning us voters) really serve the public? As the old Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev once put it, if I recall right: When the shrimps begin to sing. It was Khrushchev who also said: Politicians are the same everywhere: They promise to build a bridge, even where there’s no river.

Didn’t old Nikita, a.k.a. the United Nations’ shoe-banger, get it? The money’s in the contract to build the bridge. Who needs a river?

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We’d better not pooh-pooh the terrorist threat to ourselves. Even GMA-bashers who want to embarrass her on her continued harping on the fight against terrorism should realize, even while they’re perorating, that the threat is real.

Incongruously enough, she wants to grant "amnesty" to the rebels of the Communist New People’s Army! Aren’t they terrorists as well? I’m astonished that so many of our opinion-writers and politicians seem to be blaming the United States and the European Union for pinning the terrorist label on the NPA and National Democratic Front. What about us? Why are we suddenly so "moderate" and forgiving towards those NPA scoundrels when it’s Filipinos who have for years been the ones murdered, tortured, bullied, blackmailed and extorted by the NPA? Susmariosep, what a nation of wimps we are. It’s the Stockholm Syndrome in spades. We supinely asslick and brown-nose those who torment us.

Even if they weren’t sadists and assassins, don’t you remember the terrible economic cost those NPA bandits inflict on our nation? Take the case of one fishpond owner in Bulacan. For years, he had to pay P50,000 per year to the NPA "progressive tax" collectors – this "payment" was, of course, passed on to the consumer – meaning you and me. Why did this fishpond owner have to cough up? Because if he didn’t pay the "tax", his ponds would be poisoned – killing not just the fish but the fries, and polluting the ponds beyond rescuscitation. His foreman or supervisor would be "executed". This year, the tax has gone up to P150,000 per annum.

Multiply this hundreds of thousands of times, and, you’ll understand what the NPAs are costing this nation in terms of financial loss, even if they long ago shucked Marxist or Maoist ideology in favor of sheer greed and profit-taking.

For that matter, why should an NPA commander or cadre "return to the fold" or make "peace" with the government? A guerrilla lives it up: He’s got a gun, he can swagger around feared by the barrio people and townfolk, his working hours are wonderful: No bundy clock or 8-to-5 schedules for him. And the "profits" are abundant. Why should he go back to working his butt off for a living wage?

Those who think those peace overtures will ever work, are dreaming. Instead the GMA government is humiliating itself. Those offers of peace and amnesty are contemptuously being slapped away by the NPA (even Joma Sison far away in Utrecht, who now wants us to apologize!). Haven’t we got the message?

The 1950’s policy of President Ramon Magsaysay is the only one which makes sense. It worked then, and, despite admittedly changed circumstances, it will work again. Because it was founded on courage, chutzpah and an understanding of human nature. Magsaysay pledged Filipinos good government, honesty and earnestness, aksyon agad and a fair deal for the poor and the despairing. He didn’t hesitate to use the mailed fist to right wrong and enforce justice. He told the Communist insurgents of his time, the Huks, to choose between "all-out friendship or all-out force". He didn’t grovel. What he issued to them was an ultimatum.

For the seventeenth time, let me repeat his four F’s in combatting rebels and bandits: "Find ’em, Fool ’em, Fight ’em, Finish ’em!" In our day, we’re the ones who’re being fooled – and, thereby, outfought, even in the propaganda war. If we don’t watch out, we’ll be the ones "finished", too.

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Slowly, the noose is tightening around the neck of the fire-breathing Islamic cleric, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, the spiritual leader of the radical Jemaah Islamiyah (although Ba’asyir denies the JI exists).

It’s true that Indonesian investigators are still saying – cautiously – that they have no evidence directly tying Ba’asyir to the horrible October 12 Bali attack which killed more than 190 victims, most of them Australians and other foreigners. It has come to light, on the other hand, that Ba’asyir was a main source of inspiration for Amrozi, the 40-year old mechanic who’s alleged to have been the field leader of the Bali operation.

The Financial Times of London yesterday, in a dispatch filed by Shawn Domman in Jakarta and Eric Elis in Bali, said that the police have now been able to "build a rough timeline of how the bombing was planned and what allegedly motivated Amrozi, at least three of his brothers, and a half-dozen other acquaintances to bring havoc to Bali."

There goes the story again! (Poor Thailand, whose booming tourism industry must now be suffering from those rapid-fire revelations of the past few days.) The FT team wrote that "the idea may have been born at a meeting in southern Thailand, at which JI’s senior leaders reportedly decided to attack soft targets in south-east Asia." The specific planning for the Bali bombings "began in early September", the Indonesian police said. "There were meetings in Amrozi’s home in Tenggelun, a two-hour drive from Indonesia’s second city of Surabaya, and others near Mr. Ba’asyir’s boarding school in Central Java."

The police allege that Amrozi and his confederates bought a ton of ammonium nitrate from a chemical shop near his home. "Much of this was then ferried from east Java to Bali, along with Amrozi’s new white Mitsubishi mini-van."

In Bali, it was revealed, Amrozi and his bunch gathered in a rented two-bedroom apartment to assemble the bomb. They packed into Amrozi’s mini-van and drove it to the Sari Club, where it was set off just after 11 p.m. on October 12 – when the revelry inside the two nightclubs hit was at its height.

"The motive appears to have been raw hatred of America," the FT report stated. According to Maj. Gen. I Made Mangku Pastika (who was in Manila last weekend, at the Counter-terrorist Conference in Makati), "Amrozi said he wanted to kill as many Americans as possible and was disappointed when he found out almost half the victims were Australians."

Amrozi, as we already know, was arrested in his home in Tenggulun a week ago, after police traced ownership of the mini-van to him "with the help of experts from Mitsubishi." When investigators raided his home, "they allegedly found empty boxes for mobile phones, electrical equipment and ammonium nitrate, all key ingredients in the bomb."

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In its own front-page story, The Asian Wall Street Journal yesterday quoted General Pastika, too. The chief investigator last Monday, reporters Jay Solomon and Run Hindryati wrote, "described Mr. Amrozi as a longstanding follower of Mr. Ba’asyir’s militant Islamic teachings, having studied under him for years.

Pastika said the 40-year old Amrozi first met the Muslim cleric in Malaysia in the 1990s and that he sought to spread Mr. Ba’asyir’s views to his hometown in eastern Java. Pastika said that on at least two occasions in the past two years, Mr. Amrozi escorted Mr. Ba’asyir from the cleric’s base in the city of Solo, central Java, to the al Islam boarding school in the Lamongan area of east Java. The most recent instance was in June."

Despite the denials by Ba’asyir of Jemaah Islamiyah’s existence (I heard him on CNN telling Maria Ressa the same thing), the police general affirmed that the cleric headed an organization named Jemaah Islamiyah in Malaysia", but that his Indonesian institution goes by a different name: The Indonesian Mujahiddin Council." (Well, doesn’t that name connote that its membership is engaged in a jihad or holy "despite the police statements," the story pointed out, however, "Muslim leaders in Jakarta continue to voice doubts about the government’s case against Jemaah Islamiya." Yeah.

Perhaps, as Ba’asyir had airly claimed earlier, the CIA did it? Or the Israelis? Or the Martians? Sanamagan.

* * *

"Time" magazine (November 18 edition) in its issue just off the press, had the most graphic narrative in its piece, Simon Elegant, the son of my former xxxx xxxx xxx and journalistic mentor, Bob Elegant, the question was asked: "Police may have nabbed the Bali bombmaker; Can they inravel the network around him?"

Elegant reported: "Amrozi must have felt safe. The man who, according to Indonesian police, has confessed to building the explosive… was hundreds of miles away at the time of the conflagration, sitting in a friend’s house in a tiny hamlet in East Java watching a boxing match on television. And, although on Jun w15 he bought the white Mitsubishi L-300 van that would be used to carry the main bomb, Amrozi was careful to change the registration six times. He had even filed off the registration numbers engraved on the engine block and chassis. Amrozi could be forgiven for believing there would be no way of tracing him from the crime scene; investigators say he used at least 50 kilos of explosive."

"But Amrozi was overconfident. Detectives in Bali carefully examined the remains of numerous charred vehicles until they found the wreckage most heavily impregnated with chemicals used to make the bomb the Mitsubishi L-300. Daubing acid on the abraded surface of the engine block, forensic experts teased out the numbers that were etched in the metal. Once they had the registration of the van, investigators were on a path that led to Amrozi’s home village of Tenggulun, about 200 kilometers west of the port city of Surabaya."

"Amrozi’s attempts to keep his name from the police were all too understandable: Once he had been identified as the owner of the van, the skinny 39-year-old (Ed’s note; Here he’s a year younger) must have known his background would target him as a prime suspect. Amrozi was a self-taught auto mechanic and tinkerer who ran a workshop in his backyard; those skills would have been invaluable in assembling and transporting a bomb. He was also known to repair mobile hones; police believe such a handset may have been used to set off the bomb in Bali. He was a former hell-raiser who had turned devout in recent years. And, above all, Amrozi was a man with strong ties to Islamic radicals suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. His eldest brother co-founded the village’s religious school, which then forged connections with an institution originated by Abubakar Ba’asyir, the Muslim cleric who has been described by US and Southeast Asian governments as the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiya a network of Islamic militants in the region that has been designated a terrorist organization by the United Nations. Abubakar visited Tenggulun no less than four times, says village headman Maskun, most recently in mid-June when he gave a speech at the local school."

The "TIME" piece, with inputs by Zamira Loebis, from Tenggulun, and Jason Tedjasukmana from Kuta, underscores that "it is no coincides that the critical meeting (planning more bombings) took place in southern Thailand, a key transshipment point for arms, drugs and women being forced into prostitution. In the past few weeks, southern Thailand has been rocked by a series of unexplained bombings that police and authorities in Bangkok have blamed on criminal disputes. Others see the hand of Jemaah Islamiya, which may be working with local groups seeking autonomy for the largely Muslim region."

Added Rohan Gunaratna, author of a seminal study of al-Qaeda… "There is no doubt that Phuket was considered on the lists of targets before Bali. The Thais must act now or risk (having their own) Bali."

What about us? We already know that Jemaah Islamiya and al-Qaeda have links and a network here.