Panama Scenario: Deja vu!

Panama Scenario: Deja vu!

by Erick San Juan

Our government should be wary of the unabated kidnappings going on in the countryside. The most serious of which is the abduction of the four International Red Cross team who were kidnapped for more than a month now after visiting a Sulu jail five meters away from the provincial capitol. The reported kidnapper, according to my informant is headed by Aldaber Parad, who is known to be an "asset" of scalawags in uniform in Sulu. Out of the blue, he disguises himself as an ideologue and leads a cell of ASG (Abu Sayyaf Group)/JI (Jemaah Islamiyah). He's now an unwitting tool to legitimize a "wag the dog" scenario for a reported ongoing military operation in Sulu where the U.S. military doing ”Balikatan" could intervene at the proper time. This has happened in the rescue of the Burnham couple, that despite the denial of our local authorities that there are no American troops involved in the rescue that killed ASG spokesman, Abu Sabaya and his cohorts, the History Channel at Destiny Cable TV last Tuesday night, February 10, showed how the rescue operation happened. The GMA administration should learn from what happened in Panama before the US military abducted former Panamanian president Manuel Noriega and jailed in the US for alleged international crimes. The same pattern of ICRC abduction happened and Noriega was believed to be behind the kidnapping. In the Philippines, the so called "Mindanao Option" meaning the increasing kidnapping incidents in Sulu, Basilan and Mindanao plus the massing up of hundreds of MILF troops in Maguindanao are bannered in the newspapers and believed by Arroyo critics as a script that the GMA administration will put into play to extend the term of PGMA. It will be timed according to Makati Mayor Jojo Binay upon the issuance of executive order E.O. 777, an alleged revival of the unconstitutional MoA-AD (Memo of Agreement on Ancestral Domain). During the time of Marcos, martial law was declared with the blessing of the US government. Will the so called ”Mindanao Option" be favoring GMA or is it the Noriega option that is ON? With the perception of brazen graft and corruption going on daily and the credibility of the World Bank is threatened and contested by the legal experts and allies of PGMA in Congress, let's just watch the confluence of events unfolding.