Bush, Arroyo Concealing CIA-Abu Sayyaf Link in Davao Bombing?

There's more than meets the eye in the March 4 Davao blast that killed more than 20 persons. Police have hastily accused Moro rebels of masterminding it but investigation should not rule out the possible role of the CIA.

By Joel Garduce
Posted by Bulatlat.com

Last March 14, the biggest rally in Davao in seventeen years---that was the time of EDSA 1---kept the city streets alive with rousing condemnation of the March 4 bombing at the Davao International Airport.

Attended by 50,000 Davaoeños from all walks of life, rallyists came from all sorts of persuasions, as members of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, Bayan Muna, and the Moro National Liberation Front linked arms with Muslim clerics, tourism stakeholders, government officials, and leading figures of the Catholic Church to reject terrorism and push for a long-elusive peace.

Former President Corazon Aquino also attended the rally. Hearing mass at the San Pedro Cathedral after the rally, Mrs. Aquino served notice that there is a “danger of losing our own humanity” in the determination to “apprehensd heartless and inhumane terrorists.”

We couldn’t agree more. And this dangling danger of drifting to heartlessness and inhumaneness in responding to Davao’s own 9/11 begins in the stubborn refusal by powerful quarters to provide Davaoeños and Filipinos at large with the whole scenario that made possible the heinous May 4 bombing.

Let’s get specific: The fierce concealment by those in power of a hideous CIA-Abu Sayyaf terrorist network undisrupted and actually in place in the Philippines gives the lie to the dogmatic insistence of the Macapagal-Arroyo regime to blame the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) based on contrived evidence.

First off, allow us to say that to claim that the MILF did March 4 on the basis of evidence thus presented is to highly insult the intelligence of Filipinos.

·      It is the height of lunatic thinking that Montasser Sudang, whom Gloria’s military tagged as the suicide terrorist of Davao’s 9/11, would ever choose to drag along a whole bunch of his relatives---29, at one count---in allegedly making his kill;

·      Sudang is not even MILF, as consistently sworn by his most esteemed townmate, Kabacan Mayor Luzviminda Tan himself;

·      Thus, to junk the earlier police finding that the bomb was planted by someone who left the scene, unaffected by the explosion and replace it with this “Sudang-of-MILF did it” hoax is most suspicious and despicable.

Then there’s the upfront admission of Hamsiraji Sali that his Abu Sayyaf group did it. Military authorities led by Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes find this untenable on the sole premise that the Abu Sayyaf has not been known to have operations in Davao City.

Well, this military claim is a blatant lie. Because there is at least one outstanding case of a terrorist with possible ties to the Abu Sayyaf that tried to bomb Davao in the past---May last year, in fact. And this terrorist is Michael Terrence Meiring of the CIA.

Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte should know him. Agents from the Unisted States National Security Council (NSC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spat on his face and subverted his authority when they whisked Meiring out of a Davao hospital---freshly injured from an inadvertent blast of explosives in his possession---straight to a helicopter provided by the US embassy to deny the feisty mayor the biggest bust of his career.

Fortunately, that didn’t stop Davao City authorities from proceeding with the criminal inquiry. And in a clear statement of independence and high regard for public safety, Davao City Prosecutor Raul Bendico announced last September 2002 the city’s findings that Meiring was indeed a terrorist.

But until now, Meiring remains unaccountable. And his non-prosecution has left, and still leaves, undisrupted the CIA-Abu Sayyaf terrorist network he kept here in the Philippines, all the way up to the March 4 bombing.

That wasn’t lost on independent political animals like EDSA 2 leader Teddy Casiño and Basilan Rep. Gerry Salappudin. In the days following Davao’s 9/11, both expressed the need to seriously consider likely CIA-Abu Sayyaf involvement in the March 4 bombing. Even Ka Roger, spokesman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, chimed in, claiming in turns that the Davao blast was a Pentagon-CIA/DND-AFP, Rumsfeld-Reyes, Bush-Arroyo scheme.

(On CAIS’ part, we have exposed Meiring’s fiasco in previous articles, and most recently wrote of this in an article that came out just days before the Davao bombing.)

But all these conscience-stricken concerns have been suppressed of wide dissemination. Not a single major local media entity---on TV, newspaper, or radio---loudly broached this possibility. Time Magazine studiously avoided recalling Meiring’s injuries in its coverage of the Davao 9/11. Even Ka Roger’s statement, who is usually given coverage considering the impact of his organization’s pronouncements, was given short media shrift. Most interesting of all, Mayor Duterte had instant amnesia on the Meiring affair as he swallowed the official “MILF did it” spin hook, line, and sinker.

But, as the saying goes, those who play a rigged game get stupid. And as the unraveling began with Meiring’s twist of fate, soon enough, more than 50,000 Davaoeños will get reacquainted with the whole truth. Filipinos had unmasked the state terrorism of Marcos and the fascist deceits that attended succeeding US-backed administrations. This time around, they will be joined by millions of world citizens rebuffing Bush’s contrived war on terror in democratic condemnation of those truly heartless and inhumane terrorists lurking from the shadowy corridors of naked, they-thought-they’re-unaccountable power. Bulatlat.com

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