'Shock and awe'

The past week started with a very high note of awe where close to two billion people watched the royal wedding of Prince William and a commoner, Catherine Middleton, in a spectacular display of pomp and pageantry that only the British can pull off. From the uniformed guards to the stately hi-tech air conditioned horse-drawn carriages and the estimated one million that lined up the streets leading to Westminster Abbey - this modern-day fairytale came true before the eyes of billions, thanks mainly to advanced communications technology that cut across geographical barriers. 

The last time people saw a spectacular royal wedding was 30 years ago when Prince Charles married Diana Spencer - a romantic episode that ended in a tragedy, leading some to speculate that the William-Kate union might end up the same way. But British Royalty learned their lesson and leapfrogged to modern times - no more prearranged marriages. They allowed the Royal couple to live together for almost 10 years before the wedding. Prince Charles, known to be a cold, unemotional monarch with the proverbial British stiff upper lip, is said to be totally different from his son William, who grew up with his mother. His Filipina nanny described the young prince as a warm person who was exposed to so much emotion. When he was six years old, William saw his “mummy” in so much pain, crying in her room. He instinctively got a tissue and gave it to his mother to wipe her tears.

Just as the romantic euphoria was settling down, the whole world was totally gripped with “shock and awe” as the news of Osama bin Laden’s death reverberated all over the world, causing a major traffic spike on the Internet with over four million page views per minute for top news sites and 4,000 tweets per second as US president Barack Obama announced the news. The Bin Laden operation had all the elements of a true-to-life spy story, the kind we only saw in movies: a lethal team of Navy SEALs storming a secret compound in Pakistan, killing the world’s most wanted terrorist in a 38-minute precision strike almost error-free.

Only the Americans could pull off something like this with the awesome power of technology. It was also the first time in history that the US president and his top level officials were able to watch the action in real time fed via hi-tech cameras mounted on the operatives’ helmets. Images were streamed to a new hi-tech stealth US helicopter hovering over the Abbottabad compound and then beamed to a US satellite which bounced down the images to the CIA headquarters in Langley then on to the White House situation room. Conspiracy theorists can criticize until their eyeballs turn white, but biometric technology, facial recognition software plus a DNA test confirmed that the US, indeed, “got” Osama bin Laden.

The costly, top secret mission was the result of years of intelligence work that made use of sophisticated pattern recognition software, voice print analysis, phone call intercepts, highly advanced eavesdropping and surveillance technology plus computer-based analysis to predict patterns on terrorist behavior. Ironically, it was Bin Laden’s aversion to cell phones and ICT that led to his downfall - relying instead on a medieval style courier that delivered his messages and instructions to terrorist cells. The courier was eventually tracked down to a walled fortress in Abbottabad that became suspicious precisely because it lacked telephone and Internet services - commonplace amenities in a world that has become technology dependent.

The fairytale romance of William and Kate, followed by the death of the most dreaded terrorist leader, came like rain in a world parched of good news. And while there are those who continue to complain that high technology is killing age-old values and traditions, the two “shock and awe” events this past week are tangible proof that technology has in fact helped protect and preserve the very things that matter in life: love, hope and our never ending faith that good will always triumph over evil.

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Secretary Leila de Lima’s announcement that there is a new witness to the Vizconde massacre that could prove the existence of another group of suspects is welcome news. This highly publicized gruesome crime which recently came out in the National Geographic channel must have closure for Lauro Vizconde, Hubert Webb and his friends and family and the country as a whole.

So many people continue to be enraged at the thought that perception and trial by publicity could steal 15 years of a young man’s life, whose conviction by the Court of Appeals was overturned by the Supreme Court last December. What happened to Hubert Webb and his friends just goes to show that injustice can in fact happen to the well-to-do, not just the poor. All because of the typical lynch mob mentality and the need of some people to pander to popular opinion - our biggest sins in this country.

So how does this injustice propose to compensate for the wasted years in the lives of Hubert and the other young men accused of a crime for which they have been acquitted? And what does one do now with the judges who wrongly refused to consider evidence that pointed to Hubert’s probable innocence? And what do we do with the Jessica Alfaros whose hearsay testimony - found to be unreliable by the Supreme Court - stole the freedom and dignity of the young men whose families also suffered in agony? What do we do with them? Do we string them up like criminals, too?

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