Laughing bomber on parade

By Darren Goodsir and Wayne Miller in Denpasar for the Sydney Morning Herald, November 14 2002

The confessed Bali bomber, Amrozi, was paraded before the media yesterday as he joked and laughed with Indonesia's national police chief during a public interrogation.

At one point, the Javanese mechanic pointed to Western journalists and said in Indonesian: "Those are the sorts of people that I wanted to kill."

In bizarre scenes at Denpasar police headquarters, a room full of police and reporters erupted with laughter at Amrozi's remark.

Indonesia's national police chief General Da'i Bachtiar - after a 50-minute taped interview with Amrozi in full view of reporters - said the 40-year-old had admitted to other bombings in Indonesia.

But Amrozi had told the general he was not an Islamic extremist; rather, he was a juvenile delinquent who had been led astray.

However, he had professed to being influenced by Abu Bakar Bashir, the alleged spiritual leader of the banned terrorist group, Jemaah Islamiah.

At 3pm local time (6pm in Sydney), General Bachtiar - surrounded by his top brass - had strode purposefully across a courtyard and into a glass-walled room.

Amrozi, who is alleged to have confessed to a central role in the bombing, was led into the room moments later, handcuffed but looking relaxed. One handcuff was removed and he sat on a chrome chair at a wooden table opposite the nation's top-ranking policeman.

Amrozi, dressed in a blue T-shirt, red-and-blue striped shorts and black slippers, occasionally turned to the media and smiled broadly. Most of what he said was inaudible to reporters. But the locals translated his wisecrack about the Western reporters.

The only police officer in the room who looked ill at ease with the incredible stage act was police General Made Pastika, who has headed the investigation since the October 12 bombing that killed almost 200 people.

As General Bachtiar and Bachtiar carried on, both told jokes and smiled at each other. Immediately after the public interrogation, Amrozi was led away and General Bachtiar strolled to a media conference to give a blow-by-blow account of their conversation.

Only part of the tape was played. An interpreter said "he would like to apologise to his family, his brothers, little brothers, nephews and niece and also his parents and other relatives. He did not intend to get his family into this".

"It is only the involvement of Amrozi - me, myself - as well as my younger brother, Ali Imron."

Amrozi had said his family did not need to run from the police.

"That is all that I have to say. This is from me, Amrozi."

General Bachtiari said the investigation had been carried out "according to the processes available ... There are no fabrications nor engineering".

Amrozi had said Idris, one of the suspects portrayed in police sketches, had given him the funds to buy the Bali bomb ingredients - and vehicles. Between 47 and 50 million rupiah had been spent on orchestrating the explosions.

On October 6, Amrozi had travelled to Bali, meeting the alleged mastermind, Hudama, also known as Imam Samudra. Also present at the first rendevous in Denpasar had been Idris, a man called Umar and another man he had never met before, also known as Umar.

Several times, Amrozi had asked Hudama what had happened to the bomb parts he had assembled. Hudama had replied: "That is none of your business any more."

Before General Bachtiar, on a table, lay an arsenal of weapons and ammunition seized on Tuesday from bush near Amrozi's village of Tenggulun.

General Bachtiar said Amrozi had been relaxed during his week-long detention. "He is healthy and has been fasting."

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Message warns Australians to expect further distress

Sydney Morning Herald, November 14 2002

The following are edited extracts from the official US Government transcript of the Al-Jazeera tape.

The road to safety begins by ending the aggression. Reciprocal treatment is part of justice. The incidents that have taken place since the raids of New York and Washington until now - like the killing of Germans in Tunisia and the French in Karachi, the bombing of the giant French tanker in Yemen, the killing of Marines in Failaka and the British and Australians in the Bali explosions, the recent operation in Moscow, and some sporadic operations here and there - are only reactions and reciprocal actions.

These actions were carried out by the zealous sons of Islam in defence of their religion and in response to the order of their God and prophet . . .

What Bush, the pharaoh of this age, was doing killing our sons in Iraq, and what Israel, the United States ally, was doing bombing houses that shelter old people, women and children with US-made aircraft in Palestine were sufficient to prompt the sane among your rulers to distance themselves from this criminal gang . . .

Our kinfolk in Palestine have been slain and severely tortured for nearly a century. If we defend our people in Palestine, the world becomes agitated and allies itself against Muslims, unjustly and falsely, under the pretense of fighting terrorism.

What do your governments want by allying themselves with the criminal gang in the White House against Muslims? Do your governments not know that the White House gangsters are the biggest butchers of this age? Rumsfeld, the butcher of Vietnam, killed more than 2 million people . . . Cheney and Powell killed and destroyed in Baghdad more than Hulegu of the Mongols.

What do your governments want from their alliance with America in attacking us in Afghanistan? I mention in particular Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia . . .

We warned Australia before not to join in the war in Afghanistan, and against its despicable effort to separate East Timor. It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosions in Bali . . .

If you were distressed by the deaths of your men and the men of your allies in Tunisia, Karachi, Failaka, Bali and Amman, remember our children who are killed in Palestine and Iraq every day . . If you were distressed by the killing of your nationals in Moscow, remember ours in Chechnya. Why should fear, killing, destruction, displacement, orphaning and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability and happiness be your lot?

This is unfair. It is time we get even. You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb. And expect more that will further distress you.

AP

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Bomber sorry Australians died

By Mark Baker, Sarah Crichton, Mark Riley and agencies for the Sydney Morning Herald November 9 2002

The suspect who has allegedly admitted taking part in the Bali bombings has told police he wanted to kill as many Americans as possible and "wasn't happy" that Australians died.

Indonesian authorities also said yesterday that the 40-year-old Indonesian man, Amrozi, had led police to a house in Bali where explosives residue was recovered.

Police say Amrozi has confessed to links with the Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, alleged spiritual head of the outlawed terror group Jemaah Islamiah, and the man regarded as al-Qaeda's number three, Hambali.

As questioning of Amrozi continued, the first substantial evidence emerged linking the Bali attack to a web of Islamic extremists across South-East Asia and accused of al-Qaeda connections.

The New York Times quoted Bali investigators as saying they were looking at the possibility that the attack was planned at a meeting in southern Thailand in January attended by al-Qaeda operatives and other Islamic extremists.

Hambali and an alleged al-Qaeda explosives expert, Mohamed Mansour Jabara, now in custody in the United States, were said to have attended the meeting.

Jabara has also been accused of being a key figure in last year's plot to attack Western targets, including the Australian high commission in Singapore.

The Australian Federal Police general manager of national operations, Ben McDevitt, said of Amrozi's arrest: "It quite possibly is the most significant development at this stage ... we think this will change the momentum of this inquiry."

The chief of the Indonesian police investigation team, Major General I Made Mangku Pastika, said Amrozi had said he wanted to kill as many Americans as possible. He said "they were not very happy because Australians were killed", instead of Americans.

General Pastika said a search of the Bali house had also turned up two one-way tickets to the city of Manado, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. A bomb exploded outside the Philippine consulate in Manado the same day as the Bali blast.

The general suggested that Amrozi and an accomplice might have been planning to flee to the southern Philippines, home to Muslim extremist groups such as Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

He said police believed six to 10 people were involved in the Kuta attack and that there were signs of international involvement. "We have their names already. We know their identities. What the police are doing now is searching throughout the country."

Indonesian police have labelled Amrozi - arrested at an Islamic boarding school in his home town of Tenggulun, in East Java, on Tuesday - as "executor" of the Bali bombing. They confirmed that he owned the L300 Mitsubishi van that exploded outside the Sari Club.

It is believed Amrozi was depicted in one of the three images police released last week, but had twice cut his hair since the bombing, said the national police spokesman, Brigadier-General Edward Aritonang.

Amrozi had told police he was born in 1962 and had travelled several times to Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, looking for work.

He had admitted living with Abu Bakar in Malaysia in the late 1990s when the cleric was in exile from the Soeharto regime. Local media reported that the two were in business selling perfume and had conducted religious meetings at mosques.

General Aritonang said police believed the bomb was put together in Bali, although they had not yet confirmed that Amrozi was on the island at the time of the blast.

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Indonesians Say They Suspect C.I.A. in Bali Blast

By JANE PERLEZ New York Times November 7, 2002

AKARTA, Indonesia, Nov. 3 - The American ambassador here, Ralph L. Boyce, does not have to venture far from his heavily fortified embassy to be challenged about who was responsible for the Bali bombings that killed more than 180 people.

The perception among many of the educated elite in this largely moderate Muslim country is that it was not, as the United States has suggested, a radical Islamic group with links to Al Qaeda.

Instead, they blame the Central Intelligence Agency. Some have argued that the United States prompted the Bali attack as a way of prodding Indonesia to join a possible war against Iraq.

Yet again, Mr. Boyce told a news conference - this time in Bali several days ago - that Indonesians should stop "pointing fingers elsewhere."

"The country needs to come together behind the leadership here and address the issue of terrorism," he said.

For many Indonesians, and especially moderate Muslim leaders, it is proving difficult to accept the idea that a homegrown radical Islamic organization - Jemaah Islamiyah, headed by a frail-looking cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir, who lies ailing in a hospital bed in police custody - could have had a hand in a terrorist act on its own soil.

But given the history of the United States in Indonesia during the cold war, it is not illogical to blame Washington for the Bali violence, some Muslim leaders said.

"People see the hand of the United States in the fall of Sukarno," said Nurcolish Madjid, the most prominent Indonesian Muslim scholar. He was referring to the covert support in 1958 by the Central Intelligence Agency of dissident Indonesian generals ouster of Indonesia's founding president in 1965 after he incurred Washington's displeasure for many years.

Further, during the three decades of authoritarian rule under Suharto, Mr. Sukarno's successor,many Indonesians viewed the United States as supporting the government efforts to repress Islamic expression, Mr. Madjid said.

"They take that as a precedent for this kind of thing," Mr. Madjid said in an interview.

Remarkably, there have been no strong stirrings against the arrest of Mr. Bashir. The absence of protests is an encouraging sign, American officials said, illustrating the idea that the vast majority of Indonesia's approximately 180 million Muslims are indeed of moderate persuasion. Threats by some Muslim leaders that Mr. Bashir's detention would inflame emotions have not been borne out so far.

The police have said Mr. Bashir was being questioned about a series of bomb attacks in Jakarta, including one at the city's biggest mosque, in 2000. Mr. Bashir, who was arrested in the days after the Bali bombing, is not a suspect in that case, the police said.

But while the lack of public protests over Mr. Bashir's arrest is a relief for Washington, American officials say they are dismayed by the reluctance of moderate Muslim leaders to discredit radical Islam in Indonesia and its connections to terrorism.

The Americans ask why mainstream Indonesian Muslims will not say in public what they say in private: that radical Islam's connection to terror is un-Islamic. They also wonder why conspiracy theories about the United States are so prevalent in Indonesia. Is it ignorance or arrogance, one American official asked this week, that makes Indonesians blind to the threat of radical Islam?

Mr. Madjid, 64, a graduate of the University of Chicago who is considered an elder statesman of moderate Muslim thought in Indonesia, cautioned, "If the government, especially, is too quick to point the finger to Muslims, that will feed the radicals."

Americans should recall, he said, that initial suspicions in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City "were that Muslims did it," and that those suspicions "turned out not to be true."

Mr. Madjid said it was not clear to him that a radical Islamic group was the instigator of the Bali attack, which hit a nightclub filled with Western tourists drinking and dancing on a Saturday night.

He doubted, he said, that an Indonesian group would have "strong" links to Al Qaeda, as the United States is asserting.

Rather, he said, he believed that the attack had more to do with Indonesia's "internal politics." He said he suspected that some elements in the Indonesian Army, anxious to take advantage of the weak leadership of President Megawati Sukarnoputri, might have been involved in the bombing.

"In an underdeveloped country like this, to be in power is everything," Mr. Madjid said. "The military is out of power. For some of the military people to be out of power is unacceptable. Military factions could have had a hand in this."

Another Muslim leader, younger and more politically involved is Din Syamsuddin, secretary general of the Indonesian Council of Ulama. He said he strongly objected to the American focus on radical Islam as a source of terrorism.

He said he believed that the United States was behind the attack. "There is no logic that it was done by an Islamic group in Indonesia," Mr. Syamsuddin said. "Muslims don't deny there are terrorists in this country. But there is no fact that there are Indonesian Muslims doing it."

Indeed, Mr. Syamsuddin, 44, who has a doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles, said logic dictated that the United States directed the Bali operation.

He said he based his conclusion on his interpretation of the following events: the deportation of a Qaeda operative, Omar al-Faruq, who worked with Jemaah Islamiyah, from Indonesia to American custody in Afghanistan in June; the dispatch of Indonesian police officials to see Mr. Faruq around the time of the Bali bombing; and the arrest of Mr. Bashir, several days after the bombing.

American officials have said the Indonesian police were sent to question Mr. Faruq as part of an effort to persuade the Indonesian government that Jemaah Islamiyah was indeed connected to Al Qaeda.

American officials dismissed Mr. Syamsuddin's account as one of the "conspiracy theories" now going the rounds in Indonesia.

Mr. Syamsuddin, who organized three meetings between Ambassador Boyce and Indonesian Muslim groups this year, said the United States could do one thing to show its sincerity in determining who is responsible for terrorism in Indonesia.

He said there was "an insistence that al-Faruq should be brought back from United States custody, to make a fair trial here" for Mr. Bashir.

That would allow the accuser and the accused to face off in court, he said, adding, "If Bashir is found guilty, no one will support him."

Copyright The New York Times Company

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Howard's lethal hypocrisy

BY JOHN PILGER, October 17, 2002 in Pilger In Print

LONDON - For 40 years, Australian governments have colluded with state terrorism in Indonesia. Now, the Bali outrage allows Australian Prime Minister John Howard to distract attention from his hypocrisy.

Howard says the atrocity on the island of Bali is "proof" that "the war against terrorism must go on with unrelenting vigour and with an unconditional commitment". What he means is that he will continue to perform his holier-than-Blair role as George Bush's most devoted, if not universally recognised, foreign gang member.

The Australian military is, in effect, an extension of the Pentagon. Australian ships operate with the US fleet in the Persian Gulf, enforcing an embargo against Iraq which, according to the United Nations Childrens Fund, has led to the unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Iraqi children. In Indonesia, Australians, together with their American counterparts, have secretly resumed training the Indonesian military, which, in the world cup of terrorism, is the undisputed champion.

Al Qaeda has been fingered in Washington for the Bali outrage. The script is unchanged. To Bush, Blair and Howard, the Bali bombing will be simply further justification for attacking Iraq.

How truly bizarre the American enterprise of world conquest has become. First, there was the bombing of Afghanistan, the equivalent of bombing Sicily in order to eradicate the Mafia.

"Terrorism" is the enemy; or as Monty Python's Terry Jones remarked, "They're bombing an abstract noun!"

What is clear is that the more bellicose Bush and Blair and Howard become, the more they place the citizens of their own countries at risk.

Like a mouse perpetually roaring, Howard's warmongering has endangered every young Australian backpacking in those countries where his and Bush's provocations are welcomed by extreme groups.

Since he became prime minister in 1996, Howard has renewed Australia's reputation in Asia for European exclusivity.

A return to racist foreign policy

This is tragic, for it is not long since Australia emerged from the cultural isolation of its notorious "white Australia policy" and appeared to express the confidence of the ethnically diverse society it had become. Embracing Asia became politically fashionable, and the old colonial fear of the Asian hordes falling down on Australia, as if by the force of gravity, was rejected by many Australians, especially the young.

Howard's openly racist policies have again begun to isolate Australia. He has deployed Australian troops against helpless, mostly Muslim, asylum seekers on the high seas - more than 350 people went to their deaths in a leaking boat last year even though, as it has now been revealed, Australian military intelligence knew they were in great peril.

He has imprisoned many of those who have reached Australia (mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan, the countries he claims to be "liberating") in desert concentration camps in conditions which, reported a United Nations inspector, were among the worst he had seen in more than 40 inspections around the world.

Seldom a day passes when Howard and his inept foreign minister, Alexander Downer, do not utter vacuities about the War on Terror. The truth is that, for almost 40 years, Australian governments have played a significant role in colluding with state terrorism in neighbouring Indonesia. In 1965, the then-prime minister, Harold Holt, joked about the mass murder that accompanied the seizure of power by General Suharto, the West's man. "With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off", Holt said, "I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place."

During the long years of Suharto's dictatorship, which was shored up by Western capital and governments and the World Bank, state terrorism on a breathtaking scale was ignored. Australian prime ministers were far too busy lauding the "investment partnership" in resource-rich Indonesia.

Ignoring atrocities

Suharto's annexation of East Timor, which cost the lives of a third of the population, was described by then foreign minister Gareth Evans as "irreversible". As Evans succinctly put it, there were "zillions" of dollars to be made from the oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea.

Such lethal hypocrisy was acknowledged by Australia's political and media elite only in the final spasms of the Suharto dictatorship.

In 1998, the World Bank's "model pupil" finally collapsed beneath the weight of its corruption after short-term capital fled Indonesia, leaving 70 million people in abject poverty. Given the pressures on this sprawling, ethnically complex country, it is hardly surprising that extreme groups have found fertile ground, whatever their aims. To lump them in with the "global terror" of al Qaeda serves to suppress, once again, the part that rapacious Western interests have played.

Today, largely unreported, the Indonesian military, with the tacit approval of the United States, Britain and Australia, is terrorising the populations of Aceh and West Papua. Most of the "human rights violations" in these provinces - the euphemism for state terrorism - have been part and parcel of "protecting" the US Exxon oil holdings in Aceh as well as the vast Freeport copper and gold mines and BP holdings in West Papua. Those who need a link between the march of multinational capital and state terrorism need look no further.

One of the sacred taboos for Western journalists and broadcasters is the terrorism of their own governments. Only when they recognise this and its pivotal role in the fate of much of humanity will they be able to report honestly the lesser terrorism of non-state groups.

Violence of state terrorism

Research by Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan covering the period since 1965 points to the killing of several thousand people by non-state terrorists, such as al Qaeda, compared with 2.5 million civilians killed by state-sponsored terrorism. These include the violence of the South African apartheid regime, the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the "contras" in Nicaragua and other US-backed terrorist states.

This is a conservative figure, for it predates the deaths caused by the Anglo-American-driven sanctions against civilians in Iraq. As Neil Sammonds has pointed out: "When US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in May 1996 that the killing of half a million Iraqi children was `a price worth paying' to keep pressure on Baghdad, she was acting well within any reasonable definition of terrorism."

Those who committed the disgusting mass murder in Bali need to be caught and their organisation broken. But this is unlikely to happen while state terrorism is in the ascendancy, and goes unacknowledged as the most virulent menace of all - and as, in many cases, the root of non-state atrocities.

A piratical assault on Iraq will be an act of terrorism by state extremists in Washington. It will also be the catalyst for years of recruitment of those willing to murder Westerners in skyscrapers and nightclubs.

St Augustine tells the story of a conversation between Alexander the Great and a pirate he captured. "How dare you molest the seas?" asks Alexander. "How dare you molest the whole world?" the pirate replies. "Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief. You, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor."

From http://www.johnpilger.com

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U.S. Urges Australia on Anti-Terror

By EMMA TINKLER Associated Press Writer OCTOBER 19, 2002
 
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Australia will not abandon the war on terror despite the Bali nightclub bombing that killed dozens of Australians, the nation's prime minister said Sunday.

``I don't believe this is an isolated incident specific to Indonesia. I believe - although I cannot prove - it is part of a worldwide terrorist operation,'' John Howard said on television.

Earlier Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell appealed to Australia not to give up the broader fight against terrorism despite the often bloody repercussions.

``This is not the time to withdraw from what we have been doing,'' Powell told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Saturday. ``This is the time to redouble our efforts.''

Howard was one of the first world leaders to commit troops to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. He also backs a strike against Baghdad, but opposition lawmakers and much of the Australian public want U.N. approval before any attack.

The Oct. 12 nightclub bombing on the Indonesia island of Bali killed nearly 200 people and injured 300. The number of Australians confirmed dead or missing in the Bali attack was 103, officials said.

In the full interview with Powell broadcast on Australian Broadcasting Corp. early Sunday, the secretary of state urged Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri to be aggressive in the fight against terrorist groups operating there.

``You cannot ignore the presence of these kinds of organizations within your own country,'' Powell said. ``Even though it may be politically difficult ... to go after them or you prefer not to use strong means against them, it doesn't work - they just see that as a sign of weakness.''

The first body of an Australian victim in the Bali bombing arrived back home on Saturday, the coffin draped in the national flag.

President Bush offered condolences to Australia for the deaths of so many of its citizens, saying ``America is with you in spirit,'' in a taped message in advance of Sunday's national day of mourning for those killed in the attack.

Many in Australia are comparing the national anguish over the bombing to the pain Americans felt after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush also made the comparison.

``We remember so well after Sept. 11, 2001, your prayers, your sympathies, your strong support. And we will never forget it,'' Bush said.

Bush said the United States would help Australia ``hunt down the killers so that there is justice in the world.''

Also Sunday, the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper reported that top-level security briefings in Canberra discussed a terror threat in Bali five days before the bombing.

The Australian government has been accused of failing to advise travelers adequately about U.S. intelligence warnings of heightened threats against foreigners in Indonesia.

A security official who attended a briefing on Oct. 7 confirmed that a U.S. intelligence report identified Bali as a ``high risk target,'' the paper said.

A meeting of the National Security Committee, Australia's top security forum, was also called to discuss the report, the official said on condition of anonymity.

But Foreign Minister Alexander Downer denied there had been any such briefing.

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Australia leads the way in hunt for bombers

By Matthew Moore, Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in Jakarta and agencies

October 17 2002

In a highly unusual move, Indonesia has agreed to allow Australia to co-chair a new international police and intelligence taskforce to find those responsible for the Bali bombings.

The Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, and Justice Minister, Chris Ellison, announced that the team, which includes United States and European police, following meetings with Indonesian leaders including the President, Megawati Soekarnoputri. The Papua police chief, General I Made Pastika, has been appointed as the Indonesian head but he said yesterday he did not yet know which Australian officer would share the job with him.

After receiving initial briefings about his new job, he said media reports of a former air force officer admitting to making the bomb were wrong.

However, one Indonesian newspaper quoted the chief of Bali Police, General Budi Setyawan, saying "there is light as to who is behind the bombing" and that he was hoping to produce an identikit photograph of one suspect within days.

Yesterday's top-level meetings and the fact Indonesian police have agreed to share the taskforce management with Australia indicates the enormous pressure the Indonesian Government is under to find those responsible for the bombings.

General Pastika is running the investigation into the murder in August of three employees at Papua's Freeport mine and is regarded by Australian officials in Indonesia as one of the country's most competent police officers.

Mr Downer and the heads of Australia's three intelligence
organisations, ASIO, ASIS and ONA, met Indonesia's Security Minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Foreign Minister, Hassan Wirayuda, early yesterday and were scheduled late yesterday to meet with the head of the military, Endriartono Sutarto, and the head of the intelligence agency, Hendropryono.

In a round of media interviews, Mr Downer was careful not to criticise Indonesia for its reluctance to declare Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the organisation most widely accused of the Bali bombings, as a terrorist group.

While agreeing the issue had been discussed in the meeting, Mr Downer said he did not want to speak about it. He also said he was pleased the Indonesia was planning to introduce a regulation to give police new powers to pursue terrorists in lieu of anti-terrorist legislation which has been held up for months in the parliament.

While Western nations have identified JI as the group most likely to be responsible for the attacks, Mr Yudhoyono said the group did not operate in Indonesia, although its alleged leader, Abu Bakar Bashir, does.

"One thing to be remembered, to be understood, Jemaah Islamiah does not exist in Indonesia. Jemaah Islamiah exists in Singapore and Malaysia," he said.

In other developments:

* Indonesian police said last night that they would formally detain four Indonesians as suspects in the Bali nightclub bombing. The four were undergoing intensive questioning but had not yet been formally detained as suspects, said national police spokesman Brigadier General Saleh Saaf. "Once the arrest warrant is out (issued), then we will detain them," he said.

* Malaysia has detained four members of JI but police said they doubted a link to the Bali attack.

* Rohan Gunaratna, an authority on al-Qaeda, yesterday claimed in London's Financial Times that a Saudi donor sent Abu Bakar's JI organisation $US74,000 ($135,000) earlier this year to buy explosives that might have been used in the Bali bombing. The information reportedly came from Omar al-Faruq, who the CIA says has confessed to plotting attacks on US embassies in South-East Asia.

* In Jakarta yesterday, Abu Bakar filed a multi-million dollar defamation suit against Time magazine for an article which linked him to al-Faruq.

* In a sign militant Islamic groups might be on the defensive, Laskar Jihad, a group whose fighters have battled Christians in the Maluku islands, said on Tuesday it had disbanded and would withdraw its combatants.

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Why didn't they tell us what they knew?

October 19 2002

Despite warnings of a terrorist attack, Bali was never seen as a target. Mark Riley, Tom Allard and Marian Wilkinson report for The Sydney Morning Herald.

Intelligence does not necessarily equate with wisdom, particularly when it comes to international espionage. There, intelligence is merely information.

It is what a spy service does with its intelligence that makes it appear wise. Or foolish.

On the afternoon of September 17 this year, just days after the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America, the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, arranged for government backbencher Petro Georgiou to direct a question to him in Parliament about some disturbing intelligence indicating a threat to Australians.

"The Government has been very concerned by recent information that we have received about a generic threat to Australian and United Nations interests in South-East Asia," Mr Downer began gravely.

"In particular, in East Timor there has been information received relating to direct threats to Australian and UN interests and to United States interests throughout many parts of South-East Asia."

Mr Downer assured the Australian people that the Government had taken "decisive measures" in response, including evacuating most of its embassy staff from East Timor.

But the actions had not been limited to Dili. The intelligence received by our spy network identified threats to Australian interests across the entire region.

"All of our regional South-East Asian posts have been asked to review their level of security, and many of them have adopted additional security measures in cooperation with their host governments," Mr Downer said.

He wanted to press the point that fighting terrorism was a collective responsibility.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, went to Jakarta this year and signed a memorandum of understanding on terrorism with Indonesia. He hoped to do the same very soon with Singapore and Malaysia.

Not only that, Mr Downer said he had spoken a couple of days before with his Indonesian counterpart, Hassan Wirayuda, about what more the regional partners could do to counter the increasing threat of terrorism in South-East Asia.

They agreed to host a joint regional conference on the issue and look particularly at how to tackle the funding of terrorist cells from the Philippines to Indonesia and beyond.

The conference would be in December and they had a safe venue in mind - Bali.

Mr Downer's parliamentary answer tells us many things now. Namely, that the Government had serious concerns about a possible assault on Australian targets less than a month before the terrorist attack in Bali.

But its major fear was its diplomatic posts. The East Timor embassy had been evacuated on the basis of a specific threat. All other embassies and consular offices in the region had been told to review security.

It would be three days after Mr Downer's statement before his department amended its travel warning to Australian tourists. And even then it said in bold type that tourist services were "operating normally" in Bali.

There was nothing in the caution to divert from the long-held belief that Bali was an island of stability and serenity in an archipelago of violent unrest. It was a belief apparently shared by the region's foreign ministers.

How wrong they were.

Now, with the country in mourning, the Government is telling Australians to get out of Indonesia. Tourist services are no longer operating normally. Particularly in Bali.

Facing a torrent of criticism from the families and friends of the Bali victims, Mr Howard conceded this week that it was "a very legitimate issue" for Australians to ask what their country's intelligence services knew about the extent of the terrorist threat before the attack.

It was understandable, too, that they would ask whether the travel warnings issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs were sufficient, particularly in light of much stronger warnings issued by the Americans based on the same intelligence.

The Government's defence was consistent as this criticism escalated on Tuesday and Wednesday. Mr Howard, Mr Downer and the Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, said there had been no specific advice indicating an impending attack on Bali. If there had been, the Government would have "moved heaven and earth" to protect its citizens.

All three said they had no knowledge of a United States intelligence report, based on a CIA communications intercept, that mentioned Bali among targets for an impending terrorist attack just two weeks before the blast.

Then, on Wednesday afternoon, Mr Howard admitted to a hushed Parliament that the Government did receive the US intelligence. It was analysed by intelligence assessors, but they decided that travel warnings did not need to be upgraded.

They were already "at a high level", Mr Howard said. Except when it came to Bali.

Many intelligence experts now believe the lack of forewarning about the attack constitutes nothing less than a massive intelligence failure by Australia's security services.

A former head of the Indonesian desk at the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), Warren Reed, said it was "an unthinkable and unforgivable failure of the intelligence network".

Andrew Plunkett, a former army intelligence officer in East Timor, blamed "managers" in the Department of Foreign Affairs for not giving Australians the same message that Americans got.

"I've seen it happen where diligent intelligence officers pass on significant information on activity in Indonesia that is later hosed down and wordsmithed by careerist departmental officers for political purposes," he said.

"They water down the intelligence so as not to upset the Indonesians and because they place the narrow short-term business interests of Australian companies in Indonesia ahead of human security and our long-term national interest."

A former US ambassador to Jakarta, Robert Gelbard, also spoke with a deep sense of frustration when he was asked about the Bali bombings.

"The sad part about this is that we saw it coming," he said. "We just didn't know what it was going to be."

Mr Gelbard was ambassador until October last year and said he watched with alarm the mounting evidence that al-Qaeda was active in Indonesia and linking up with local extremist groups such as Jemaah Islamiah and Laskar Jihad.

"In June or July 2001 we knew from external sources, multiple sources, that an al-Qaeda team was coming to Jakarta to try and blow up the US embassy," Mr Gelbard told the Herald.

But when the ambassador went to the Indonesian authorities he got little co-operation. By then, he said, it was clear that foreign al-Qaeda operatives were being assisted by local networks. The threat in Indonesia escalated in June this year after local police, at the urging of the US, finally arrested one of al-Qaeda's operatives in the country, Omar al-Faruq, a 31-year-old Kuwaiti living in Indonesia who had been named by al-Qaeda prisoners detained in Afghanistan.

After being handed over to the US, al-Faruq was taken to an US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, for interrogation.

According to several reports, including one by Time magazine, he confessed to planning large-scale attacks against US interests in Indonesia and throughout the region. His confessions triggered the terrorist alert issued by President George Bush just before last month's September 11 anniversary.

Al-Faruq confessed that he worked in Indonesia with Jemaah Islamiah. In the weeks before the Bali bombing, US officials, including the current US Ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, expressed their exasperation to the Indonesian Government over the terrorism threat. On September 23 a grenade exploded in a car near the house of a US diplomat but Indonesian police claimed it was not a terrorist plot.

Following that attack, on September 26, the US embassy issued its warning for Westerners to avoid bars and restaurants in tourist areas.

Two days before the Bali bombing, the US State Department issued a "worldwide caution" following al-Qaeda's distribution of new audio tapes of Osama bin Laden and his closest deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the satellite TV channel, Al Jazeera.

The warning advised that "as security is increased at official US facilities, terrorists and their sympathisers will seek softer targets". These included clubs, restaurants and other areas where Americans congregated.

Eight days ago Attorney-General Williams issued a warning, based on the US worldwide notice, saying energy production infrastructure in Western countries could be attacked.

Australia didn't get a mention by name from bin Laden in the new tapes but Mr Williams noted in an interview on the morning of October 12: "We've seen Osama bin Laden in two statements broadcast on Middle East television refer to Australia specifically, so we can't be complacent."

Less than 24 hours after Mr Williams made those remarks, his security centre was in the midst of a crisis. Mr Howard was briefed by intelligence and foreign affairs officials on the Sunday morning.

While he was getting those briefings, Alexander Downer was on morning television saying there had been no warning of an attack on Bali.

"An attack like this was one we had no forewarning of," he said. "We had no information that led us to believe this specific attack ... was going to happen."

Later that day he would say he was satisfied with the quality of travel advice given to travellers, and repeated that the only intelligence on terrorist attacks in Indonesia and elsewhere had been generic in nature.

This week Mr Howard and his senior ministers have repeatedly defended themselves by saying things look different when you're looking back, not forward.

If the Government had been given intelligence nominating when and where the attack was going to happen it would have acted swiftly and decisively.

But this defence rings hollow to people such as the director of the CIA, George Tenet. He said yesterday before the US congressional committee examining the intelligence failures of September 11 that the whole idea of governments spending such vast amounts of money on intelligence was to provide foresight.

"The most difficult thing to do is have that date, time and place of an event," he said. "Because the truth is there'll be dates and times and all kinds of information and it'll never happen on the date and time."

Foreign Affairs officials in Canberra and Australian embassies and high commissions periodically do risk assessment and emergency planning on areas where Australia has a business and tourism presence.

"We always had to consider the what-if scenario," said Shane Carroll, a diplomat who left the department 10 years ago.

"What would happen if there was a disaster, or an attack on the embassy. I've been told they've been doing them for terrorist attacks and those scenarios included an attack were there was a large congregation of tourists."

According to a spokesman for the department, the Jakarta embassy had done no risk assessments for the past 12 months and none on an incident occurring in Bali.

The risks in Bali were reassessed after the bombing - on Thursday, Mr Downer told Australians who didn't need to be there to get out.

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