Study the past, if you would divine the future

– Confucius (551-479 BC), Chinese Philosopher

A CNN news report on July 26 three years ago, reported that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the third highest ranking official of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network has admitted to US authorities that he plotted in Manila the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, together with his nephew Ramzi Yousef. During interrogation, they had admitted planning the Sept. 11 attacks that killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania as early as 1994. It took seven years to hatch the successful attack. Aside from this, the culprits were arrested overseas only 2 years after the attack, meaning they had two years of post-monitoring on the mission he had accomplished and could have jotted down important do’s and don’ts to ensure the success of future terrorist attacks.

In December 1994, Yousef actually planted and set off a bomb on a Philippine Airlines flight, CNN said. "They were sent to carry out an audacious plot to bomb 11 US airlines over the Pacific, which the FBI estimates could have killed 4,000 people." Mohammed has been charged in the 1995 plot to bomb or hijack 11 US-bound flights coming from Asian countries, including the Philippines. Yousef was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

CNN also said the "blueprint" for the 9/11 attacks was discovered by local operatives and Abdul Hakim Murad was interrogated in Manila, supposedly a former classmate of Yousef’s. "They have a plan to crash the airplane, the commercial jetliner, into the specific target, and they have done it," a local police official said in the CNN interview. Besides the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed supposedly admitted plotting in Manila to kill then US President Bill Clinton and to bomb nuclear plants in the United States.

Past occurrences can well be the basis of anti-terrorism plans, one of which, called Oplan Bojinka, was once hatched in Manila. The 9/11 operatives were also trained in Zamboanga, where the Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group is based and which is a corridor for other terrorist militants cells in Indonesia and Malaysia crossing to and from the Sulu archipelago and Mindanao. The bombing of the Philippine Airlines flight in 1995 could have served as a dry run of the 9/11 attack. Liquid explosives were planted by terrorists as early as 1995 at the NAIA. Eleven years later this August, they try to repeat another dry run of what could have been a series of transatlantic explosion (using liquid bombs) of planes in flight from London to the USA.

Anti-terrorism plans of our local government officials are now in place but it would be good to review the past from time to time to make more calculated and effective plans. On laying out plans for war, ancient military strategist, Sun Tzu, taught that "…The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat…".