March 5, 2007
The Road to Terrorism
Watch the program: Part 1 | Part 2 Fighting the terrorists are people like Colonel Angelito Casimiro, an 18-year veteran who has been constantly on the frontline in this brutal and mostly unreported war. In 2006, I ventured down to the colonel’s theater of operations in the southern Philippines, and his intelligence team gave me unprecedented access. However, the terrorists had a far more hostile reception in mind. Day two on the ground, and we are heading deep into a Muslim enclave on the outskirts of Zamboanga city. It is late at night and the colonel’s special operations group is carrying out a surveillance mission on a suspected terrorist. Somewhere out in the shadows a government informant is at work. But not for much longer. Minutes before we arrive at the "location," the Abu Sayyaf strikes and guns down the informant. As the crowd gathers around our vehicle it is only too apparent we are now the target, and the mission is aborted. A few days later we set out on another mission, this time to the island of Sulu, an hour’s flight south of Zamboanga. This is the new terrorist heartland in the southern Philippines, and the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah operatives are waiting for us. Within 24 hours one of the most experienced counter-terrorist officers on the island who has been assigned to protect us is assassinated. Shot point blank in the back of the head. The government forces are now striking back, and more than 6,000 troops have been committed to the fight. They are winning, but paying a deadly price. -- From reporter Wayne Harley9 Comments
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You do realize that your presence there got those two people killed in the first place.
Anyway, the leader of the Abu Sayyaf has been killed and they have more or less been routed.
When you will have your own Abu Sayaffs or MILF rebels in your own country, let's see you make your sympathetic commentaries on these supposed militants.
I'd like to see what kind of reports will be generated when these "militants" start kidnapping your families, killing people at a whim and insisting that your sons carry their weapons and prepare food for them as they go about doing what they do.
I guess that by following your logic, you are responsible for banks getting robbed because you put money in those banks.
Those people got killed because of terrorists not because of the reporter!
Sulu is no more or no less dangerous than walking around Manila at night.
Why not try leaving your 5 star hotels and bodyguards like the rest of us expats. Then you could see the real picture. BTW, a story about Westerners being murdered in PI, and the PI government's incompetence in bring justice in those cases, would be a far more compelling story for your readers than what you published. If you want a place to start, Google "Steve Davis murder Philippines".
When a foreign journalist goes to the Philippines to do a story---the military gives them unlimited access which is normally not given to Filipino reporters. As for Filipino journalists the opposite is true because the military is responsible for killing 47 Filipino journalists since 2001....This is something I cannot understand...And the Bush Administration seem to look the other way.....
JOhn L. Shinn III Founder & Editor-in-Chief LAZamboangaTimes.com LOS ANGELES
The word "terrorist" is repeated like a mantra in these articles.Yet nobody knows exactly its right definition.It depends on which camp you are.One person's terrorist is another's heoic freedom-fighter. And, at any rate, no one is born a terrorist. You have to deal with the causes, not the symptoms.Terrorism is almost always the result of oppression and desperation.
I'm a westerner living in the Philippines and I can say that the "terrorist" in Mindanao are more or less filipino muslims who have been brain-washed by Al-Qaida and Indonesia's jemayaah islamiya's radical and self-destructive Islamic Ideology to combat the Catholic domitated country because they feel that they are being oppressed by there christian counterparts. But Mainly to the filipino muslims living in Mindanao these so called "terrorist" are but welcomed and praised "freedom fighters". I believe the term "rouge freedom fighter" is more appropriate rather than "terrorist"
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