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By Rome Jorge Lifestyle Editor Photos by KJ
Rosales
What-ifs bedevil us.
Beset with hindsight, we gnash our teeth for not having deduced the
riddles that stare us at the face or for brushing aside as rubbish
what would later prove precious and pivotal. We wish to relive the
day when life made us a witness and we looked away, when fate gave
us a role we did not act. All the more rueful is when that day of
days happens to be September 11, 2001. What if you had known about
the terror plot that killed 2,994 people six years earlier and had
chosen not to report it?
Everybody remembers what he or she was doing on
9/11. The incredible terror attacks of planes flying into the World
Trade Center in New York as well as into the Pentagon building in
Virginia, as witnessed by millions on television, is indelible.
For Maria Ressa, then a reporter for the global
television news network CNN, it was the moment that things she and
other international journalists witnessed in 1995 and chose not to
report upon—the plot sounded too fantastic at time—finally made
sense.
She remembers, “That 9/11 attack was like déjà
vu because I just remembered 1995. I was a young reporter in 1995
and there were so many stories thrown at us and the only thing
international reporters took out was the Bojinka Plot.”
On January 6, 1995, nine days before Pope John
Paul II was to visit the Philippines for World Youth Day, a fire
broke out at Room 603 in the Doña Josefa Apartments located on
Qurino Avenue and a block away from the embassy of the Holy See
where the Pope was to stay. Investigators found explosive
chemicals—enough to destroy the building—and a laptop storing
critical data. Authorities detained a Pakistani and an Afghan.
Under interrogation they revealed the Bojinka
Plot which had several phases: to kill the Pope; to explode several
planes flying from Asia to America; and to crash airliners into
buildings such as the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and other
symbols of American might.
Ressa rues, “We all didn’t pay attention.
My main contact gave me documents talking about suicide pilots
wanting to hijack planes and crash them into buildings. But it
sounded so fantastic. It sounded great to report. But then as a
young reporter, I was worried that I would lose credibility. I never
reported it. I wasn’t the only one. None of the international
media reported it.” Philippine officials at the time warned the
United States government about the entirety of the Bojinka Plot. But
as 9/11 proved, the story was found too farfetched then.
When Maria Ressa first saw glimpses of New
York’s Twin Towers burning after passenger jets collided with
them, thought she was watching a Hollywood fiction. “When 9/11
happened I was in a treadmill in Jakarta. I couldn’t hear the
sound so I thought it was a movie. Then I realized it was CNN. I
punched it up louder. By the second one, I caught the blast and I
said, ‘What the heck.’”
As preposterous as it was in 1995 that
terrorists would one day commandeer airliners armed with nothing but
box cutters and karate moves and fly them into the most famous
buildings of the United States and bring about their catastrophic
collapse, so too was it incredible that the Philippines—the only
Christian majority nation in Asia, for centuries a bastion of
multiculturalism and a staunch US ally—would serve as the base for
a virulent Islamic terror organization spanning the globe and funded
by billionaires. This small nation of ours was and still is pivotal
in the long war on terror.
Liquid explosives going through airport
security undetected. Terrorists training as pilots to fly hijacked
planes and practicing scuba diving to get near naval ships. Chemical
and biological agents experimented on animals. Training camps
established deep inside lawless territory. Foreign funding for
charitable institutions and religious schools that inculcate to
youths a creed of hate. All these were pioneered by al-Qaeda more
than two decades ago in the Philippines.
In her book Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness
Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast
Asia published 2003, she states: “It is no coincidence that every
single major al-Qaeda plot since 1993 has had some link to the
Philippines: from the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 to
the 1995 Manila plot to bomb 11 U.S. airliners over Asia and the
1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.”
Consider the occupants of Room 603:
l Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as “the
Brain” as well as over 50 aliases, eluded arrest in Manila and
would later be captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in 2003. He has
confessed to masterminding 9/11, the bombing in Bali, Indonesia in
2002 and numerous other attacks. He faces the death penalty if
convicted by a US military commission.
During his stay in the Philippines, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed went scuba diving in Puerto Galera, possibly to
explore a seaborne attack. In 2000, suicide bombers successfully
detonated a small barge next to the USS Cole in Yemen killing 17
sailors.
l Ramzi Yousef, known as “the Chemist,”
escaped the fire in Manila but was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan
that same year. He is serving life imprisonment in the US for his
involvement in the truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
It was his laptop that was recovered at the Josefa Apartments.
On December 11, 1994, Yousef boarded Philippine
Airlines Flight 434 from Manila to Cebu to test a liquid bomb he
assembled midflight with nitroglycerin disguised in a contact lens
solution bottle and battery hidden in his shoes. After he
disembarked and the aircraft headed for Japan, the bomb exploded,
killing the man who had taken Yousef’s seat. This presaged the
liquid bomb plot uncovered in London on August 2006. In her 2006
television documentary entitled 9/11: The Philippine Connection,
elicited this statement from a man who has first reported on the
rise of foreign jihadists in the Philippines in 1994, Police Chief
Superintendent Rodolfo Mendoza: “The London bombing attempt is
similar to the 1995 plot. The entire operation system is the same.
The entire blueprint is the same.”
l Wali Khan Amin Shah, known as “the Lion”
for his exploits as a mujahideen in Afghanistan, planted the bomb
that exploded in Greenbelt Theater on December 1, 1994. It was,
along with another bomb planted in mall in Cebu by Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, to test the feasibility of liquid bombs.
He was arrested in Manila after the Dona Josefa
Apartments fire but later escaped. He was caught in Malaysia that
same year and is serving a life sentence in the US.
Shah was the financier of the Bojinka Plot.
Like other conspirators, he used his Filipino girlfriend to set up
bank accounts, launder money and to provide a rationale for his
comings and goings.
l Abdul Hakim Murad, captured and interrogated
by authorities after the Doña Josefa Apartments fire, was a
commercial pilot studying at the Air Continental Flying School in
Manila. His involvement foreshadowed the 9/11 hijack plot involving
terrorists trained in flight schools. He currently serves a life
sentence in the US.
The events of 1995 resonate with today’s
headlines of conflict in Mindanao. Bojinka financier Shah sat as one
of the board of directors of a company named Konsojaya along with
Riduan Isamuddin, alias Hambali—former military leader of the
Indonesian terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiah (JI)—currently
detained in the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Hambali
allegedly helped train terrorists such as those from the Abu Sayyaf
Group (ASG) at the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s Camp Abubakar,
captured by the Philippine military in 2000.
For Ressa, the September 11 attacks sparked her
zeal for piecing together clues. “9/11 triggered everything for
me. It was visceral. Everything I was working on in Southeast
Asia—all the explosions, the bombings of the Philippine
ambassador’s house in Jakarta in 2000 that we had thought was just
a transnational crime but that the investigator said had the
signature of the MILF. After 9/11, I started looking at
links—person-to-person. Then things started to make sense.”
She remembers vividly the moment terror struck
the twin towers. “It was 8:30 in the morning in Jakarta. Atlanta
was flipping out. I could hear everything going crazy when I called
them and I said, ‘I remember this. Send me to Manila tomorrow.’
I flew to Manila, looked for my documents that night and found this
document from January 1995… I still have it.”
She opens a steel cabinet full of folders
meticulously organized, each labeled “SECRET.” “After 9/11, I
realized these documents are going to be really valuable.”
Collated from her 18 years as Jakarta bureau chief of CNN
International, these documents serve her well to this day as the
ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs Chief. She continues to uncover new
threads that connect to the plots hatched by al-Qaeda decades ago.
“This is the fun part,” she says as she sifts through reams of
classified information.
As to how she—a petite Princeton University
graduate and Fulbright scholar in theater who speaks with a thick
American accent—obtained such a trove of intelligence information
in all its gory details about terrorists hiding in remote jungles
and seedy urban districts, she says, “I love working in the
Philippines. Because you ask for it and they’ll give it to you.
You just have to ask for it.”
She brings out her English translation of
documents proving that foreign Islamic insurgents in the Philippines
were working on weaponizing chemical biological agents—just one of
many secrets she has collated as a globetrotting journalist for CNN.
In 2004, a raid upon a house in Cotabato owned by Jordan Abdullah,
brother-in-law of Filipino Muslim convert Jaybe Ofracio (currently
detained in Northern Ireland on charges of terrorism), yielded a
chemical-biological warfare manual written in Bahasa Indonesia. It
illustrated how to manufacture cyanide, hydrogen sulfide, phosphene
and botulism bacteria and demonstrated their effects on animals.
Her long experience in tracking down al-Qaeda
gives her a broad perspective on today’s conflict in Mindanao.
Noting how al-Qaeda purposefully instigated sectarian conflict
between Muslims and Christians in Ambon, Indonesia and between
Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq to create lawless regions where they can
establish bases, Ressa observes, “It’s the same thing they have
tried to do in many different countries around the world—using
local conflicts, fueling them for their purposes. Look at the
Philippines and the Abu Sayyaf. We don’t have Muslim-Christian
hatred in the Philippines, not really. We’ve learned to live
together. But then when Ramzi Yousef came to the Philippines around
1995, then the Abu Sayyaf began asking for the release of Murad.”
“The thing that thrilled me when
writing Seeds of Terror was that I could take things that I know
only from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, put it all
together to get a much bigger picture that shows interrelations and
links to a global movement,” she says.
“It made sense. Groups like the MILF would
get financing from international groups. They don’t necessarily
look closely where that financing is coming from for as long as
money’s coming in. Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’s
brother-in-law, had financed the building of mosques and
charities—a lot of them—with the group called the IIRO, the
International Islamic Relief Organization.” In his groundbreaking
175-page intelligence report in 1994, Mendoza named the billionaire
Khalifa as a financier of terrorists. In an interview with CNN in
2004, Khalifa disavowed any connection with 9/11 attacks and alleged
to have parted ways with his brother-in-law, former best friend and
fellow Afghanistan War veteran. Khaddafy Janjalani, Abu Sayyaf
leader, said shortly before dying in combat in 2006 that he received
P6 million from Khalifa. In 2007, mysterious armed men numbering
around 30 liquidated Khalifa in Madagascar.
Even when discussing dead men and cold-blooded
killers, Ressa brims with glee. “It’s fun for me as a
journalist. It’s fascinating. It’s like ripping off a veneer and
seeing this whole world. There’s a certain excitement exploring
that world,” she admits. Hers is the fervor of a woman making
sense of madness.
“If you can understand the personal
link, then you can understand the organizational links, then you can
start to analyze it. If we can understand what’s going on here but
put it into context of a bigger picture then we can see what it all
means,” Ressa explains.
She examples Marwan, alias Zulkifli Bin Hir
alia, a Jemaah Islamiah explosives expert hiding in Jolo and
assisting the Abu Sayyaf. He is considered by the US military as a
high-value target and is on the roster of the Philippine
government’s Rewards for Justice Program. “This guy had a
brother who was arrested in the United States [Rahmat Abdhir alias
Sean Kasem], also a member of JI,” she notes. Ressa reveals,
“This guy Marwan is also married to a Filipina whose father is a
barangay captain. That creates a whole social network for Marwan to
move in.” The modus operandi of foreign terrorists integrating
into society by marrying local women was first pioneered in the late
1980s by al-Qaeda. Again, separate threads intertwine.
Terror defines Ressa as a journalist. “For me
it was fascinating and it gave me renewed meaning,” she admits.
“For CNN, I was the only one reporting on these things for
Southeast Asia. I was in a very unique position at that point to
connect the dots,” she notes.
Her prominence as well as her savvy grew with
that of al-Qaeda. The Bojinka Plot taught her a painful lesson in
“not trusting your own instincts to follow a story. It’s the
road not traveled. You go, ‘What if I had done that? Maybe I could
have done this.’”
Currently, al-Qaeda is in retreat. The abuses
of foreign jihadists have alienated them from popular support and
have led to their defeat in Chechnya and Iraq. Many of its plotters
revealed decades ago are incarcerated or dead. In the Philippines,
they have thus far failed to inculcate the same fanaticism as they
possess and can find no willing suicide bombers among Filipinos.
“In 2005, the MILF kicked out ASG and JI from central Mindanao.
That’s why they shifted over to Jolo,” Ressa reveals.
Al-Qaeda has begun to fade from the public eye.
The US has squandered the sympathy it garnered after 9/11 with its
unjustified occupation in Iraq and has made the world war-weary. And
during the current global food and fuel crisis and economic
downturn, Filipinos have other things on their mind besides
farfetched conspiracies. “Most Filipinos are apathetic. They
don’t care about the power struggles. They don’t care about
Mindanao. In fact we see it in the ratings,” she observes.
But The Long War, as the US Department of
Defense now labels what was formerly known as the Global War on
Terror, is a most apt name. Ressa’s own instincts tell her it is
but a lull in the cycle of terror.
“In 1995 they discovered the terror cells and
they disrupted them. They thought they won. But in reality these
cells went further underground and hooked up with our own movements
such as the MILF and ASG. That’s why we discovered sleeper cells
after 9/11 that had been in the Philippines since 1995. The defeat
allows them time. Just because there are no attacks doesn’t mean
[al-Qaeda] isn’t working. Now the risks seem smaller. But in 1995
I thought the possibility of a 9/11 was zero,” she cautions.
Ressa notes that the ASG and JI have begun to
attract factions of the MILF formerly trained by the JI. The
Philippines and other governments have yet to effectively shut down
foreign funding of terror groups. “One of the things they
[governments] all agree on is money is still flowing in,” reveal
Ressa. Alleged terror financing institutions such as the IIRO
continue to operate as charities.
Citing the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty
in quantum physics, she warns that the very act of observing and
exposing terror groups changes their nature, causing them to go
deeper underground and sever any ties discovered, making any useful
information gleamed irrelevant soon after. “That’s why they
don’t announce these arrests right away,” explains Ressa.
Democracies follow policies that change with
each new elected administration. Their consumerist,
entertainment-addled electorate suffer from short attention spans.
Al-Qaeda plans decades ahead, is unencumbered by any moral qualms
and is motivated by fanatical religiosity that makes them fearless
of death. Their ideas donnot die with the elimination of the
movement’s key leaders.
“Americans think in four-year term offices.
Filipinos think in terms of six-year offices. We live in a world of
sound bites and quick news. These guys think in terms of
thousand-year increments,” she notes.
Ressa laments government policies that dither
with parochial interests and the selection of key security officials
for political reasons. In particular, Ressa scores the
administration for appointing former Ilocos Sur governor and
self-confessed gambling lord Luis “Chavit” Singson as deputy
national security adviser. Ressa notes that, surely, there were
career intelligence officers with experience in antiterror
operations that are better qualified than President Gloria Macapagal
Arroyo’s political ally.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and its affiliates continue
to metastasize and plan for decades ahead. It is a movement that
cites centuries-old grievances to justify new atrocities and seeks
to establish pan-regional caliphates that hearken the glorious
Islamic empires that followed the death of the prophet Muhammad in
632, encompassed a quarter of the globe and lasted for more than 500
years. All al-Qaeda has to do to win is to outlast us.
Al-Qaeda doggedly tries and retries each plot
despite suffering grievous failures, constantly learning from its
mistakes, refining its techniques and evolving. As Ressa notes,
“That is a key al-Qaeda trait. It is a learning organization.
Every failure has lessons for a future success.”
Ironically, as rooted as al-Qaeda is in
centuries-old grievances and hate, its concepts are also more
forward-thinking than those of a high-tech superpower:
cost-effective asymmetrical warfare, remotely controlled weapons
systems (improvised explosive devices) and psychological operations
through media magnification of enemy casualties (YouTube video clips
of its successful attacks) to name a few. It is the first truly
global network organization (Chechen, Pakistani, Arab and Southeast
Asian foreign fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq) and the first to
implement Web 2.0 principles in warfare and social networking
(adherents posting and sharing weapon-making techniques on the
Internet). “They work organically and yet they also have their own
very big goals,” she notes.
Al-Qaeda has successfully infiltrated disparate
local liberation movements among Muslim populations and co-opted
them for its global cause. Ressa recalls, “Benazir Bhutto [the
former Prime Minister of Pakistan, assassinated in 2007] was the one
who explained to me what al-Qaeda was really after: Osama bin Laden
was able to take different issues and different countries and spark
them with idea of jihad against the West, when all he did was to
take regional anger against injustice and hijack it. And yet he is
damaging these groups in the process.”
Al-Qaeda is not is so much an organization as
it is a viral ideology—hate begetting hate and killing begetting
more killings.
“It’s whether or not we have the vision to
fight their vision. The vision that these Islamic extremists have is
all encompassing. If you look at the Middle East where suicide
bombing began, you see that its visceral—people connect to it,
gives them meaning. We in our Judeo-Christian world, where do we get
meaning from? When I looked at the character of the people who
joined JI from Singapore, they were looking for spiritual meaning.
They were affluent and educated. JI offered something that, in our
day and age, we don’t look at. That’s why I think it’s still a
war of ideas. The religion is used and manipulated. But it is a war
of vision. They have it. They really proselytize. And we rarely
compete. Look at the Philippines. We don’t really have an ideology
for what our democracy is,” Ressa warns.
The more carnage they cause, the more favorable
the conditions are for the spread of their ideology. While democracy
and peace require constant vigilance and restraint, things need but
a nudge to fall into anarchy and for old biases to metastasize into
hatred. The more brutal and repressive antiterror tactics are, the
more polarized people are and the more attractive their extreme
ideology is. Already, US Special Forces—numbering at least 1,400
in 2002—have de facto permanent presence in southern Philippines.
Jihadists welcome the war against them. They thrive on it.
“The fact is that we’ve just thrown away a
peace agreement. There’s been an overwhelming emphasis on military
might since 9/11. When in the end it is a war of ideas. I think we
have to move away from military solutions. I feel if you can address
feelings of injustice, you can shockproof and co-op-proof local
groups from al-Qaeda,” she opines, trusting her instincts.
Spanish conquistadors, American occupiers and
the national government have bombed Muslim separatists in Mindanao
for more than 400 years. Clearly bombs alone don’t resolve issues.
Ressa recalls, “Abu Bakar Bashir, the
spiritual leader of JI, had one quote that is echoed by jihadi
leaders in different ways like Osama bin Laden: ‘Between us and
them, there forever will be a river of hatred.’”
This lie that we can never coexist is what we
must all fight. Al-Qaeda lurks. So too do sentinels like Maria Ressa
await.
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