Is the BBL a ‘Jabidah operation’ in reverse?

A colleague on this page, and another on the Daily Tribune who also hosts a weekly cable TV show on Global News Network have revisited the so-called Jabidah Massacre of 1968, and arrived at the same conclusion as the anthropologist Arnold Molina Azurin did many years ago -- that it was all a hoax. The Times’ Rigoberto Tiglao has written a series in four parts, while the Tribune’s Herman Tiu Laurel has done a column and an hour-long oral dissection of the issue on his cable TV talk show, with the same startling result. Both journalists have been most persuasive.

In the myth propagated by anti-Marcos politicians and media for years, 24 young men from the Sulu archipelago were said to have been killed on or off Corregidor Island after they mutinied against the military officers who were training them for Marcos’s proposed “invasion” of Sabah or North Borneo.