It was too good to be true

How did she get it so wrong? Or was she misquoted? Anyway, when Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas was reported by the Associated Press as asserting our hostaged Filipino truck driver, Angelo de la Cruz, had been freed by his Islamic terrorist captors in Iraq, the false report caused some premature rejoicing.

Yesterday, hopes were dashed by a subsequent report in which the Islamic militants holding De la Cruz categorically denied the story, and threatened anew to "behead" their hostage unless the Philippine government withdraw our "troops" within 24 hours. Our "troops"? Really. We have a measly 51-member official contingent in Iraq, most of its members assigned to humanitarian duties. In truth, it’s the Philippine flag those murderous terrorists want withdrawn, as a sign the outside world is abandoning Iraq and the Iraqi people to their gun-toting, fundamentalist, tender mercies.

When the story of the unfortunate Angelo having been "freed" came out, this writer was among the Doubting Thomases. It didn’t seem in character for those thugs, who blithely torture, murder, and even behead their victims, to have turned benevolent and released De la Cruz – just like that. The false tale raised hope, so painfully dashed hours later, in the ramshackle home in Barangay Buenavista, Mexico, Pampanga, in which the hostage’s wife and their eight children live; and all over the nation where many were praying for Angelo’s safety and his release. We must always ask for God’s help, and hope for His mercy. But fanatics anywhere, as those Muslim terrorists have demonstrated time and again, are unmoved by either tears, prayers, or appeals to reason.

As for their demand that our Philippine contingent be recalled, once again it’s evident that our Government must not yield. Give way to blackmail once, and militants will kidnap and threaten to kill Filipinos, whether OFWs or overseas residents wherever they are, because those blackmailers know we have a weak-kneed, cowardly Government, and an easily-bullied people, who’ll blubber in surrender rather than face sacrifice and pain.

This is no comfort, of course, for Angelo’s anguished family, and we all hope for a happy ending, no matter now bleak the prospects of it may appear.

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What’s additionally hearthbreaking is the fact that "officially" the term of commitment of our Philippine contingent in the "Coalition of the Willing" in Iraq ends next August 20.

In short, unless our contingent is enlisted, this time under the aegis of the United Nations under the unanimously-approved UN Resolution 1564, our Filipino team will indeed come home on August 20. But not under threat, or under murderous blackmail, please.

We must stand firm. That nonsense that we sent our handful of policemen, military and humanitarian aid workers there under duress from the United States or because GMA was toadying up to Dubya Bush is a cheap allegation to be dismissed out of hand. We’re there because our Government made a decision to join the Coalition to liberate Iraq. And when we leave, as we will do sooner or later, we must and will depart on our own terms – not in cravenly response to bullying or blackmail.

It’s easy for opinion writers and editors to write bravely from their "comfortable" offices and editorial chairs. I’m sure some readers and observers will say – particularly the suffering family members and those who hold hostages like Angelo dear. But life inflicts suffering and painful choices. Journalists like me don’t claim to know everything, or much of anything, or to have acquired wisdom but we live and work in the muddy trenches, swamps, and jungles, too; captured and tortured in war; gone through combat; blown out of a helicopter in Vietnam; imprisoned, under threat of firing squad. In early life, our family knew abject poverty, too, with almost none or little food on the table. But God is good. Thanks to Him, and to our people’s patience and (cynicism aside) resilience, the Filipino nation endures.

What’s happening in Iraq – and I don’t refer to poor Angelo alone, but to the Iraqi people, too – is a tragedy. The US and British-led "Coalition" went in with all the best intentions – I still believe that despite all the bungling, disappointment and recrimination – but found themselves in the wrong place and at the wrong time. There is no easy way out. In the end, the Iraqis themselves will have to – in inevitably bloody fashion – sort their present and their future out.

But to abandon Iraq to the violent fanatics, now that we’re already stuck there, would be an even costlier mistake for us, and the Free World (to use that term which has almost become a bromide). Iraq would then become another launching pad from which al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah, and other crazy Jihadis could attack us. And a well-oiled launching pad, indeed – to risk a pun – financed by Iraqi oil, just as the al-Qaeda, Taleban and other fundamentalist terrorist attacks in Asia and the rest of the world, continue to be increasingly financed by billions of dollars earned from the opium and heroin funneled to Western Europe from the poppy fields of only partly-liberated Afghanistan, where frustratingly, the only "free" zone remains the capital of Kabul.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, considered the foremost authority on narco-terrorism (she coined the phrase), has written a book entitled Funding Evil, subtitled How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop It (Bonus Books, Chicago, Los Angeles, 2003).

In it, she revealed that the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center is estimated to have cost the terrorists, including the suicide-bombers themselves, the measly sum of only $500,000. In short, terrorists don’t require large amounts of money to mount a killing spree.

The total cost, however, of maintaining a global network of terrorism costs billions of dollars, pounds and euros. Terrorists get their funds from drug dealing, money laundering, market manipulation, smuggling, and other deals – or from "friendly" governments which funnel funds to them.

For instance, intelligence sources suspect that al-Qaeda’s financial network is composed of former employees of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) which collapsed, if you’ll recall, many years ago. BCCI used to be owned by the Sheikh of Abu Dahbi. I know a bit about BCCI because when I used to write a column for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, that newspaper took out a small bank account for me there from which my pay and operating funds were debited. In this light, I used to deal with BCCI’s branches in Hong Kong and even in its Edgeware Road branch in London. I noticed that several of the bank officials as well as tellers were either Arab or Pakistani, particularly in the London outlet.

The bank, it eventually turned out, had extensive operations in gold smuggling as well as in drug trafficking, money-laundering and illegal arms and diamonds trading.

By coincidence, an al-Qaeda manual found in a raid by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in 2001 contains detailed instructions on how to "disguise and smuggle gold". What about our substantial resources in gold mined in our Mount Diwalwal in Davao del Norte, Mindanao?

Dubai – that burgeoning skyscraper city-state on the Persian Gulf, one of the seven emirates comprising the United Arab Emirates (UAE) founded in 1971 to which Abu Dhabi also belongs – has virtually no financial regulations, which makes it a convenient hub for terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and assorted financial soldiers of fortune. Osama bin Laden and his merry men find it convenient to launder money through its banking system and gold by its gold suks. Much of the plotting is done, not in caves, but in air-conditioned offices.

There’s an old ditty which went, "Diamonds are a girl’s best friend". Diamonds, too, are the terrorists’ best friend. After August 1998, when al-Qaeda bombed the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Saalaam, Tanzania, killing 220 Americans, Kenyans and Tanzanians, the US government pinpointed and froze $240 million of al-Qaeda’s assets.

Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, instructed the movement’s members to go out and buy diamonds and exploit the illicit diamond trade as an alternate method of fund-raising. Enrenfeld discloses in her book that the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone exports about $600 million in diamonds per annum, of which $420 million worth is "illegal". Al-Qaeda and, before them, another terrorist outfit, Hezbollah (dealing through Lebanese traders) have traded millions of gems from Congolese and Zimbabwan army generals, not to mention those notorious "conflict diamonds" from Liberia, and resold them in places like Mauritius, India, and the UAE.

Wars are waged against terrorists in the unlikeliest places, because we have to fight them where they breed – not wait until they come, with their suicide-bombs, and their rockets, at us, where we live.

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Yesterday, I mentioned a prospective "protest" to be filed by the KNP Opposition charging election fraud. This remains iffy, however.

Like Homer’s Achilles sulking in his tent (as you saw Brad Pitt do in the movie Troy), opposition leader Fernando Poe, Jr. seems to have been in seclusion for almost a week and a half. He hasn’t given his lawyers any instructions on this score.

Would you believe? FPJ hasn’t been seen in public for that entire period, and reportedly keeps to his home in Greenhills – seeing only a few friends. Can it be true that he hasn’t been out meeting his leaders, preparing his "case", or rallying the Opposition?

If you’ve gotten a recent picture of Panday doing that, please rush it to me. This is strange. Intimates allege that this happened before, when FPJ was in the movie world. On one occasion, he went into seclusion in his home for 18 days without seeing anybody.

He reportedly emerged only once. To go to the movies to watch Spiderman-2.