 |
 |
| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Bojinka Re-run
By Antonio C. Abaya Written Aug. 14, 2006 For the Standard Today, August 15 issue By this time, every serious observer of the global scene must be aware that the recent hysteria over alleged terrorists plotting to blow up ten airliners flying from the UK to the US, with the use of liquid explosives, is actually a re-run of an earlier and real hysteria that ante-dated 9/11.. In January 1995, two Middle Eastern men � Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad - rented a unit in the Josefa Apartments (not Dona Josefa, and not a hotel either) on President Quirino Avenue (formerly F. B. Harrison Blvd. ) in Malate, Manila . A fire broke out in the apartment, drawing fire and police investigators, who concluded, from the evidence they gathered, that the two were cooking up a bomb or bombs when their concoctions blew up and set the apartment on fire. Subsequent investigation of the pair�s background and the information retrieved from their computers convinced Philippine police that they had stumbled onto a pair of Al-Qaeda terrorists who were plotting to detonate liquid explosives on board as many as 11 US airliners flying between Asia and the US West Coast, or to hijack and crash the jetliners against tall buildings in California. (This was given the name Operation Bojinka., bojinka being a Serbo-Croatian word for �explosion.� The pair�s handler, Khaliq Sheik Mohammed � operational brains of 9/11 � once fought against the Serbs in Kosovo.) (Earlier, in December 1994, the meticulous Yousef had actually tested his liquid bomb by inserting one under a passenger seat in Philippine Air Lines Flight 434, flying from Cebu to Tokyo . It exploded and killed one passenger, a Japanese, and forced the damaged airliner to land in Okinawa .) After the explosion in the Josefa Apartments, Philippine police notified US authorities and the manhunt was on. One of the pair, Murad, was arrested and flown to the US where he was tried and convicted and is now serving time in federal prison. The other, Yousef, managed to escape the dragnet but was arrested a year later in Islamabad , Pakistan , in an apartment bloc curiously named Mi Casa Pension. He turned out to be the prime suspect in the 1993 basement garage bombing of the World Trade Center , in which six Americans died and more than a thousand were injured. He is now serving simultaneous sentences totaling more than 240 years in prison. This incident sparked a minor hysteria � it was still pre 9/11 � over liquid bombs, as a result of which airline passengers were banned from hand-carrying into the aircraft bottles of ordinary liquid and gel solutions, such as used in the most common toiletries, for fear that these might be chemical ingredients of liquid explosives that could be used to blow up aircraft in mid-flight. Eventually, though � I do not recall how long the hysteria lasted � the sheer impracticality of enforcing this ban and the long delays it caused to thousands of airline flights and to hundreds of thousands of airline passengers overwhelmed the fear of flying with a liquid bomb possibly on board, and the world settled down to business as usual. The same fate will undoubtedly overtake the present hysteria, unless and until a new technology is developed that can sniff out the innocuous but suspect liquids, which at present looks well nigh impossible. (As I write this, passengers have been allowed again to carry small bags or attach� cases into airliners, but not yet liquids and gels.) The liquid explosive that Yousef and Murad were working on in 1994-95 was nitroglycerin, the principal explosive ingredient in dynamite. It is said to be three times as powerful as, and expands to a gas 25 times faster than, gunpowder. It is made by mixing concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids with glycerol, an extract from coconut oil that is used in many common toiletries and cosmetics, even in ice cream and paints.. As the name implies, those tiny Nitrostat tablets that heart patients are supposed to put under their tongues when they suffer heart attacks also contain nitroglycerin. Will they now also ban Nitrostat tablets from being hand-carried inside aircraft? While we have no choice but to accept at face value the allegations of the London Metropolitan Police that there was an imminent plot by Muslim extremists to blow up with liquid explosives up to 10 airliners flying from Heathrow airport to destinations in the US , there must always be room for healthy skepticism. After all, both the US and British governments told the world that Saddam Hussein�s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and had bought uranium yellowcake from Niger to use in its nuclear weapons program. Both turned out to be unadulterated lies, used by Bush and Blair to justify their invasion of that unfortunate country. According to British police, 24 individuals were arrested in London , Birmingham and High Wycombe in connection with this plot, and are still detained, with the exception of one person who was released as merely an innocent bystander. All 24 are British citizens of Pakistani descent. In addition, Pakistani intelligence operatives have arrested seven persons, including two who are British citizens. The British police say they have been tailing these persons for the past four months. As in the original Operation Bojinka, a Pakistani connection seems to have been established in the Bojinka Re-run as well. But is the re-run credible? So far, we have nothing but the British police�s word for it, and not much else. So, from a neutral point of view, there is a 50% chance that it is true. And a 50% chance as well that the whole thing is a manufactured lie, like the WMDs in Iraq and the uranium yellowcake from Niger . What we know for certain at this point is that, in the past four or five days, the fighting between the Israelis and the Hezbollah was suddenly and effectively pushed out of the evening news and the front pages and from the world�s consciousness, and replaced with hysterical and disturbing concerns about liquid bombs. It must be a central principle in Mass Psychology 101 that the most effective way to erase an unfavorable public image is not by disputing it with logical and factual arguments, but by totally supplanting it with a more horrible and overwhelming image. Thus the horrific images of hundreds of Lebanese civilians and children actually killed, and their homes and country actually obliterated, by Israeli smart bombs and artillery shells have suddenly (and deliberately?) been replaced with the images of hundreds of thousands of mostly Anglo-Saxon airline passengers being confronted with the possibility of being blown out of the sky by no less than their favorite villains, the Muslim terrorists. It also retired in the nick of time the soiled image of Israel �s once invincible David cut down to a vulnerable clay-footed and ham-fisted Goliath, and sought to negate the rise of the Hezbollah as a genuine and effective nationalist fighting force, much like the Irgun and the Haganah in Israel �s own past. Until more hard evidence comes to light, we who are neither Israelis nor Muslims nor Anglo-Saxons must view this latest development as possibly (and I stress the word possibly) a clever public relations extravaganza, with an unwitting cast of hundreds of thousands, a storyline from an earlier blockbuster, and the cachet of the Bush and Blair production team (who previously gave us �Close Encounters with WMDs! � and �Gunfight at the Yellowcake Corral�), deliberately designed to mold and change the images in our subconscious. Even re-runs have their uses. ***** Reactions to [email protected]. Other articles since 2001 in www.tapatt.org. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |