While partying Friday night, he reminded me that terrorists never sleep, and they strike when their target is at its most vulnerable, when the state lets down its guard and does not expect an attack.
He also had a rather depressing view of the war on terror: the threat will never go away, he said, because every terrorist neutralized is quickly replaced by another.
This means counterterrorism experts will never be out of a job. Which is probably why Benjie Defensor was also regaling party guests with his talent for karaoke.
He used singing, he said, to lighten the mood during APEC gatherings on the terrorist problem. The threat is most serious, he said, when people start taking it for granted. Defensor, who likes to describe himself as the saner version of his sister, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, isn’t worried if people call him paranoid.
"We can never underestimate terrorists," he said. "They strike when we least expect it."
Now that the 13th Congress has started its third regular session, it will have to tackle the anti-terrorism bill before campaign fever sets in.
Many of the proposed provisions will require effective oversight if we don’t want to turn our quirky democratic country into a police state.
Proponents of the bill want legal tools to deal with threats that use new technology and systems in a global environment.
Among other things, the proponents are seeking broader state powers to conduct electronic eavesdropping including surveillance of Internet communication, and an expansion of laws against money laundering. They want longer periods for detention and interrogation without the filing of formal charges.
Merely defining terrorism and what constitutes support for it can be contentious. The crime of "terrorism" is not in our statute books. A man who transports a bomb from a safehouse to a bus that is later blown up by another man is charged merely with illegal possession of explosives. The person who sets off the bomb is charged with murder or homicide.
Those who provide sanctuary to the bomb-maker are charged merely as accomplices or accessories. With a good lawyer, the cases against them may be dismissed, if they can prove that they were clueless about what the bomb-maker was doing.
With terrorists getting off lightly under our laws, and sneaking easily into Mindanao and setting up training camps in areas protected by peace negotiations, certain parts of the country can turn into terrorist havens. And people like Benjie Defensor have reason to expect a terrorist strike when we are all in a party mood.
An attack must carry a strong message — one that will send a warning to the enemies of Islamist extremism and at the same time rally more supporters to the Islamist cause.
To be effective, a terrorist strike must have great shock value. So far the forces of Osama bin Laden have not topped their suicide attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. But they have been aiming for the biggest body count and destruction possible in subsequent attacks, by focusing on crowded soft targets. We saw this twice in the nightclub bombings in Bali, Indonesia. We saw it in the train bombing in Madrid and the subway attack in London. We saw it in the bombing of a ferry in Manila Bay, which left over 100 dead and missing.
Sometimes targets luck out and the terrorists achieve relatively minimal mayhem, as in the bombing of a packed bus in Makati on Valentine’s Day last year, with all but three of the passengers surviving.
More often, however, going for unprotected civilian targets guarantees the type of carnage that grabs headlines.
And Benjie Defensor has a point: we are most vulnerable when our guard is down.
In a way, public complacency is an indication that terrorists have failed in their aim of sowing terror. After 9/11, the general consensus was that the soldiers of hatred and fear must not be allowed to control people’s lives. Fear can be healthy if it eliminates carelessness, but it cannot consume our way of life.
Keeping people terrorized can be difficult in a world that has become inured to violence and security threats. Terrorism has become a way of life around the globe. It became a way of life for us long before 9/11, with the Abu Sayyaf sowing terror in Mindanao since the early 1990s and Jemaah Islamiyah blowing up the Light Rail Transit in Manila in December 2000.
We shouldn’t even be too worried about travel advisories on the Philippines issued by foreign governments. The terrorist threat is everywhere, including, as we have seen, in Britain, Canada, Spain and, of course, the United States.
Refusing to be terrorized, however, does not mean we have to ignore security threats. And knowing that every neutralized terrorist will be replaced by another does not mean we have to give up fighting.
This war is not just America’s war. As the latest warning issued by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s No. 2 man, showed, terrorists want their brand of Islamist extremism "to reign from Spain to Iraq." Al-Zawahiri also called on all the "downtrodden" of the world including non-Muslims to rise up against "tyrannical Western civilization."
I don’t mind people resenting Hollywood movies, sexy Western fashion, equal rights for women and hip-hop music, as long as they don’t express their resentment by blowing up innocent civilians.
This is a war against a way of life. How much do we cherish that way of life, and how far are we willing to go to protect it?
It’s going to be a long war. For victory, we need all the resources at our disposal. A bit of paranoia, even as we sing along with Benjie Defensor, will help.