In the hysteria after five ‘bombings’, the first casualty is truth - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

The aim of terrorists is to sow terror. Yesterday, in a series of five random bombings around noontime, terrorists achieved just that.

As might have been expected, the explosions were followed by scores of telephone calls "warning" of bombs and explosive devices planted all over the place. Again, not discounting the gleeful cooperation of ghoulish pranksters with their crank calls, the telephone "terrorists" reaped maximum damage in terms of confusion and panic.

As one who during years of reporting in several countries, encountered urban terrorism in various forms from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt in the Middle East, London (UK) and Paris in Europe as well as here in Metro Manila, Central Luzon and Mindanao, I can only say that there is no sure weapon that can be employed against determined terrorists or assassins.

Nobody can be alert or vigilant 24 hours a day or stand guard everywhere. Terrorist plots can and have been frustrated here and there by relentless sleuthing, and through the efforts of deep-cover moles, paid informers (through a seduction and reward system), and other methods familiar to Robert Ludlum, John Le Carré, Tom Clancy, Ken Follet and Andy McNabb novels. But no means is perfect. Somewhere, somehow, a terrorist or even a mad "bomber" or schizo plane hijacker manages to sneak through.

The only thing clear – about the bombings in the LRT train near Blumentritt, the bus in Cubao, in Plaza Ferguson across Roxas avenue from the US Embassy, the air cargo terminal in the NAIA (possibly failing, by happenstance, to blow up and ignite the airport’s fuel storage set-up) and near a 5-star hotel in Makati – is that apparently they were all orchestrated by the same group.

I invoke the term "apparently" because, once again with feeling, I maintain that in coping with terrorists nothing is certain. The factor that links the five blasts together is that they occurred on the same day, within a few minutes to two hours of each other.

Again, it’s useless to jump to the quite "reasonable" conclusion that the bombings were the work of the rebel (or bandit) Moro group, the Abu Sayyaf. By coincidence, Hector Janjalani alias Abu Escobar – a brother of the late Abu Sayyaf founder Abubakar Abdurajak Janjalani and another sibling, Khadafy Janjalani, who took over command of the Abus when the elder Janjalani was slain in a police sweep in Basilan in 1998 – was nabbed a few days ago (about December 22) in the Muslim enclave in Quiapo, Manila. "Abu Escobar" Janjalani was seized along with another Abu comrade by police Special Action Force (SAF) team.

Who knows, Abu Escobar might, indeed, have been in Metro Manila to coordinate the planned bombing campaign. However, it’s still guessing time.

There are other suspects. For one, the New People’s Army, the National Democratic Front, the Alex Boncayao Brigade, and their opposite numbers in the breakaway Communist "proletarian army" faction could just as well be the culprits. They, too, have a terrorist agenda.

Then there’s the wild theory that rightwing elements, even "government-funded" elements (the paranoia dates back to the Marcos-engineered "bombings" that preceded martial law in 1972) might have set the blasts to deflect attention from the impeachment proceedings, the "explosive" witnesses lined up to testify, or to (here, what the heck, let’s get wilder still) give the Estrada administration the excuse to declare emergency measures or something like martial law. Somebody even mischievously quipped: "Must have been the Abu Sayyaf ‘Robot’ of Aventajado." You can be sure the Opposition will trot out such a speculation, and you can bet your bottom peso – devalued or deteriorated, if you will – on the fact that the government will as indignantly or scornfully reject that "absurd" notion.

When bombs explode, "truth" is the first casualty.

* * *

Nobody forgets, though, that the Abu Sayyaf have the capability to make and detonate bombs. As everybody is well aware, the international terrorist Ramzi Yousef – the same man who almost succeeded in 1993 in blowing up the World Trade Center in New York City with a sophisticated bomb – spent several weeks in Basilan, visiting his old guerrilla pal Janjalani (who had fought alongside him in the Afghanistan War against the Soviets), and training more than 20 Abu "experts" both in the remote hills and in safehouses near Isabela, the Basilan capital. Moreover, Yousef and the Abus were financed by the Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden, the daddy of anti-Jewish, anti-American, "anti-Crusader" (meaning anti-Christian) terrorism who is still holed up in between the Pakistani border and Kabul, despite US efforts and United Nations "sanctions" against the Afghan Taleban government to force his extradition for arrest and trial. (Osama bin Laden, whose family originally came from Yemen, is held to be the mastermind behind the horrible bombings of two US Embassies in Africa in which hundreds died.)

It is evident: we’re not dealing with "amateur hour" here.

Yousef was assisted in his training program here by other Islamic fanatics, like his brother Adel Annon, who had also fought with the mujaheddin during the Afghan War, who, shortly after arriving bought and used to operate the Mindanao Meat Shop, which sold Arabic and halal food on M.H. del Pilar street in Ermita, where another militant named Mustafa Abu Zainab who purchased the Al-Tanor restaurant for similar undercover purposes after he got here. The two teamed up to found a terrorist cell in Manila a decade and a half ago called the Hezbul Dawah Al Islamiah or "Islamic Preaching Group" or the "Ali Movement."

Another Yousef associate named Javed Rana later got here, too, and intermarried here.

So, you see, the terrorists have had their roots in Metro Manila as well as in Zamboanga, Basilan and Sulu for many years now. (Ramzi Yousef’s operations here dated back to 1994. When he came up to Manila from Basilan that same year, he used the pseudonym "Adam Ali Qasim" and conducted many teach-ins around the Golden Mosque in Quiapo and in Parañaque and Pasay. He mobilized an inner "cell" of about 23 men in Manila alone during his travels back and forth, but also operated in Cebu and Mindanao. One of his henchmen, Wali Khan Amin Shah (from Pakistan), was the "terrorist" who planted one of his experimental bombs (called "Mark II") under one of the seats in a Greenbelt theatre on December 1, 1994. When the bomb went off at 10:30 p.m. that night, however, luckily nobody was seated too close to the detonation. The only "damage" consisted of slight injuries to a necking couple some seats away, and a few other patrons.

The following December 9, Yousef most ambitiously planted a strong bomb on a Philippine Airlines (PAL) flight bound from Mactan, Cebu to Narita Airport (Tokyo). When the Boeing 747-200 was over Okinawa, the device exploded, killing a 24-year old Japanese engineer, Haruki Ikegami, returning home after completing an industrial contract in Cebu – but failed to destroy the aircraft’s aileron cables underneath which would have disabled the airplane’s flaps and sent it crashing to the earth. Yousef’s intent had been to kill all 272 passengers and 20 crew members on board. Fortunately, only the ill-starred Ikegami died, thanks to the PAL Captain Ed Reyes, First Officer Jaime Herrera, and Flight Engineer Dexter Comendador, who wrestled the half-crippled aircraft safely to the ground at Okinawa’s Naha airport.

In January 1995, Yousef was frustrated in his plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II, who was due to visit Manila, only when his rented apartment in the Doña Josefa Apartment on Quirino avenue near Taft caught fire from the bomb-making chemicals he had stored there, and, when he and his confederate skipped, the Philippine National Police discovered and seized the laptop computer he had left behind in the confusion. When the Americans deciphered the encrypted "entries" in that fateful computer, they were able to trace the fugitive Yousef to his bolthole in Pakistan, where an informer (one of his own Muslim friends) pinpointed his hideout for a hefty "reward" bounty.

As Simon Reeve points out in his exciting book, The New Jackals (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1999), Yousef was regarded by the Americans one of the most dangerous men owing to his extraordinary bomb-making and technical skills, that he was isolated from the other prisoners, kept under 24-hour "watch" in jail, and all his personal possessions – wrist-watch, shaving cream, toothpaste, coffee creamer, cup and spoon even, – were taken from him on the fear that he might be able to fashion a makeshift bomb from them!

He was finally sentenced, for the 11 counts against him, to 240 years of confinement in a federal prison in Colorado, without visiting privileges from relatives or friends (who might be used as terrorist conduits), and no hope of parole or pardon.

You bet. Yousef is gone – but his deadly "seeds" remain here in the Philippines and elsewhere. So, we cannot afford to relax our guard.

The Abus, other Moro rebels, and Arab "agents" in our parts have, by their past actions, already demonstrated that they won’t stop at mass murder.

Should we give in, then, to terror? What we should deny the "terrorists" in our midst is the thought that an entire population can be paralyzed with fear. Other countries have endured and even overcome far graver terrorist assaults than those of the past few months here. Take Spain, where the Basque terrorists have rebounded in full fury. Take England, where Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists, for years, conducted hundreds of bombings (many of them in London alone), and even once blew Lord Louis Montbatten to smithereens aboard his own yacht. He was Prince Charles’ favorite uncle and the man, by the way, who had delivered "freedom at midnight" to India and Pakistan. Take France, where President Jacques Chirac – when Mayor of Paris – crushed a wave of Islamic terrorist bombings (including in the underground metro trains) with ruthless counter-action. The French, of course, were "terrorists" themselves on occasion, as when two French scuba-diving operatives – one a man and the other a woman – attached a bomb to the hull and sank the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, right in the harbor of Auckland, New Zealand. This "attack", in 1985, caused the death of a news photographer who was on board at the time.

Connor Gearty of King’s College, London, and a consultant on terrorism for Television Channel 4 in England, once capsulized it in his 1991 book, TERROR.

He wrote: "Political terror is the ugly wonder of the modern world. The explosion in the bar, the shoot-out in the airport lounge, and the mid-air blowing apart of the jumbo jet are typical examples of its carnage. In such indiscriminate attacks, the innocent are dispatched to immediate death or branded for life with physical or psychological scars. The bloodshed is in the name of a political goal unknown to many victims and irrelevant to them all, but the purposefulness of such acts makes them chillingly different from the road accident or the natural catastrophe."

The men, women, and little children – killed or maimed yesterday – are proof positive that Gearty, while he penned these lines 20 years ago, continues to be right.