US FAKING TERROR IN PHILIPPINES
Meiring case unmasks covert campaign to justify intervention
October 10, 2002
Q: Why did the White House rescue and hide Michael Meiring, the CIA-linked American "terrorist" bomber now wanted in Mindanao?
A: The Pentagon wants new bases in Asia, and it is killing civilians to get them.
Filipino media can't keep up with American spook sightings. Despite official denials, one story from Mindanao will not go away:
American blast victim in Davao tagged as terrorist
September 27, 2002
DAVAO CITY - The City Prosecution Office on Friday tagged the American victim of an explosion in his hotel room four months ago as a terrorist.
City Prosecutor Raul Bendico said findings from the investigation of the case indicated that Meiring apparently attempted to set up explosives intended to blow up Evergreen Hotel when the accidental explosion went off, mangling his lower limbs.
Michael Meiring, 65, of California, was rushed to Davao Medical Mission Hospital on May 16 after the blast inside his room at the hotel located on Ramon Magsaysay Avenue here.
Meiring was charged with illegal possession of explosives and reckless imprudence "for failing to practice proper attention and diligence regarding the handling of explosive materials."
But he was reportedly whisked away by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and brought to the United States.
Authorities want Meiring brought back to the country to face the criminal charges filed against him.
THE WHITE HOUSE RESCUES A TERRORIST
What is unusual about the case, The Manila Times reported, is that Meiring was: whisked out of Davao, past the Philippine National Police guarding him at the hospital, and on to a chartered plane, accompanied by what Immigration officials described as agents of the US National Security Agency and agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The National Security Agency intervention, confirmed by Immigration Deputy Commissioner Daniel Queto, sparked intense local speculation as to why an agency that reports directly to the Office of the President of the United States would send an entourage of bodyguards to speed Meiring to a hospital in Manila.
Security tightened around the wounded man immediately. Press were told that only his doctor handpicked by the US Embassy had access, and Meiring was promptly airlifted to San Diego, home to a US naval base. The American Embassy has refused comment. Vice-consul Michael Newbill settled the hospital bills in Davao City.
The Manila Times quoted a friend of Meiring who said he was: told by a Filipino in Davao, carrying a message from the US Embassy that Michael would never be charged with a crime in connection with the explosion. The investigation will end up as a stonewall. Michael will be protected and...the incident will be shortly forgotten, if you re willing to forget it.
Officials in Davao City will not forget. The suspicious blast took place during a wave of terror bombings across Mindanao as US and Philippine troops conducted anti-terror exercises. President Arroyo threatened to declare a state of emergency and demanded that lawmakers rush through her tough new anti-terror bill. Rush it through they did.
Now Prosecutor Bendico says the US-shielded terrorist was trying to blow the hotel up.
The Philippine Star explained why his findings are worrisome:
CIA whisks away Brit-Am blast victim; now in US.
July 9, 2002.
DAVAO CITY - The efforts of government prosecutors here to go after a British-American national who was the victim of a hotel blast on May 16 could very well prove futile as the US Central Intelligence Agency has already taken him in custody in California.
Highly reliable sources told The STAR Michael Terrence Meiring, 65, reportedly was deployed by the CIA, sometime in the early up to the mid 90s, on assignment here in Southern Mindanao...
"He overshot his mandate. That was why the Americans had to find a way that he could be spirited out of the country fast because the CIA has to also take hold of him," the same source said.
WHO IS MICHAEL MEIRING?
Here is the confusing background of the American terror bomber handled by the National Security Agency of the Bush White House, compiled by Dorian Zumel-Sicat and Jeannette Andrade for a three-part Manila Times investigation that ran May 29-31, 2002.
Meiring was born in 1932 in South Africa and later became a naturalized US citizen. His wife Angela is a nurse at a 7th Day Adventist hospital in Loma Linda, California. He has been described as a surgeon, a con-man, a student of medicinal herbs, a treasure hunter and, most recently, a terror bomber.
Charred US federal bank notes were found in his exploded hotel room, with a three-week old fax from Derek S. Fawell, of 3 Glenhurst Avenue, Yorkshire, England that read: With regard to your ordnance disposal problem, I have talked with our experts. They will be at your location upon the time frame that you instruct. The device that you have described is highly volatile and must be dealt with quite delicately.
Meiring s company letterhead, PAROUSIA International Trading, Inc., also lists a UK address: Patchole Manor, Kentisbury Ford, North Devon, England. Under the address are the words: When in residence. The address of record for Meiring in his passport and with US authorities is 381 Smokeridge Trail, Calimesa, California.
He first came to the Philippines in 1992, where he spent almost a year in Metro Manila and North Luzon in the company of agents of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) and under the protection of Ricardo Diaz, the NBI Chief of Interpol.
In and out of Davao City for the past 10 years, Meiring had close ties to well-placed government authorities in southern Mindanao, national government officials and Philippine National Police officials like Colonel Segundo Duran. Others in the circle: former Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) chairman Nur Misuari, Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) chief Hashim Salamat and suspected New People s Army (NPA) leader Father Navarro. Meiring also has close ties with shady people like MNLF Commander Tony Nasa and others in Cotabato who acted as front men for his dealings with the Abu Sayyaf.
He spent millions of dollars while in the Philippines, the source of his funds unknown. According to The Manila Times, his trail leads back to...boxes supposedly containing US Federal Reserve notes and bonds obtained from the Abu Sayyaf.
Meiring told David Hawthorn, an American, he d found a fabulous treasure in US Federal Reserve notes and, in 1992, sold a box full of them worth $500 million plus. That loot was said to be part of an old war chest for American and Filipino guerillas fighting the Japanese.
The MNLF, MILF, and Abu Sayyaf have recently sold similar US bonds and notes to finance their arms purchases. Local authorities have made several arrests.
Meiring fronted for a very wealthy, powerful group in Manila. He and his American and Filipino associates were known to use explosives throughout the south for treasure salvage and to supply other treasure hunters with explosives.
Philippine intelligence officers refused to let The Manila Times publish the names of current treasure hunters in Mindanao because they are all being monitored for links to the MNLF, MILF, Abu Sayyaf, and other radical Islamic fundamentalists.
Older names in the game cleared for release are almost as exotic as Michael Meiring. Many have been linked to undergound Muslim independence campaigns in Mindanao. In 1990-91, Bob Gould from Hayward, California, Filipino-American Frederick Obado and others in Davao City made plans to invade Sabah, Malaysia.
A close friend of Gould from Fremont, California, Nina North maintained contact with Obado from 1990-92. The Manila Times reports that North was linked to the CIA, involved with back door transfers of gold bullion from the Philippines and regularly dealt with representatives of Osama Bin Laden and high officials in the Mid-East.
So, to answer the question directly:
Michael Terrence Meiring is a Manila-controlled CIA-connected White House-protected explosives expert who spent the last ten years in the southern Philippines hanging out with Filipino intelligence and police brass, Muslim rebels and other shady people .
He equipped many of his acquaintances throughout Mindanao with explosives, spent large sums of mystery cash and traded in US Federal Reserve notes with the Abu Sayyaf Group - terrorists who regularly use the notes to buy weapons....a gang that provided the excuse for the new US-Philippine military alliance.
Meiring is an American with a base in England and explosive expert colleagues in England who were contracted to assist him with his ordnance endeavors at the time he blew his legs off while making a bomb in his hotel room during the region-wide terror bombing spree that traumatized Mindanao five months ago.
A boo-boo that earned a chop-chop hush-hush Uncle Sam medevac to San Diego.... for the rebel-friendly man Prosecutor Bendico classified as a terrorist two weeks ago.
NOTES FROM THE US TERROR UNDERGROUND
The Meiring episode is the best substantiated of several wild reports this year that have Filipinos convinced there s a stealth invasion of their country underway. Consistent themes include the involvement of Meiring s favorite Muslim rebel armies the MNLF, MILF and Abu Sayyaf - and the invasion of Sabah, Malaysia.
On February 21, Rosanna Halong, wife of notorious Abu Sayyaf leader Abu Sabaya, phoned Radyo Agong dxMD in Koronodel City and announced that her husband was in on a CIA plot to break Sabah away from Malaysia and fuse it with Mindanao to form an independent country - a plot long popular with CIA-linked treasure hunters like Gould and North.
Halong insisted her husband hatched his version with Jeffrey Schilling. Sabaya took Schilling captive for eight months in the jungle after he suspected the Berkeley grad was a CIA agent. Schilling swore the mix-up was the fault of his friendship with another Zamboanga-based African-American named Shaun, a former Marine the rebels had met earlier.
Perhaps he was also a CIA agent, Schilling said matter-of-factly, and due to my association with him they assumed I was also a CIA agent.
Stories like the following explain why locals assume that every Yankee is a spook in a country where Philippine Senator Aquilino Pimentel describes the Abu Sayyaf as a CIA monster. A group, he points out, whose original members were organized, funded and trained by Ronald Reagan s secret agents in the 1980s and sent to Afghanistan to help kick out the Russians. Twenty years ago, that skullduggery was overseen by exactly the kind of people Michael Meiring hung out with, in exactly the same part of the country.
Four days before Sabaya s wife said her man was an American puppet, the Daily Zamboanga Times reported on a new and improved super-power puppet army in Mindanao. The term Bangsamoro as used below means Filipino Muslim people :
New Rebel Group Wants North Borneo
February 17, 2002
A new emerging powerful revolutionary group in Mindanao yesterday revealed that the Bangsamoro people of Mindanao have now decided to include in their objective the liberation of North Borneo, which they claim as part of their traditional homeland...
The leaders of the group, who refused to be identified for the meantime so as not to preempt their formal declaration of liberation of Mindanao and North Borneo in due time, told the Bangsamoro News Agency that their organization was organized in November last year, has now more than 50,000 strong armed forces in Mindanao and another 50,000 in North Borneo with highly sophisticated firepowers, including anti-tank, anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile (SAM). Their forces, they said, is fast growing in number.
The group claimed they are receiving financial and logistic support from super-power countries, which they refused to identify. But apparently one of these countries is the United States of America (USA).
The group is also highly confident that the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF)* of Chairman Nur Misuari and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)* of Chairman Salamat Hashim and other armed groups in Mindanao fighting against the Philippine government, as well as the people of Sabah and North Borneo....will support their aspiration.
The group is also confident that the development-oriented Christian** settlers in Mindanao will support the independence as one country of Mindanao and North Borneo,
The same group also called on the peace-loving and democracy loving people of Malaysia to reject the arrogant, dictator and greedy leadership of Mahathir Mohammed if they don t want the wrath of the mighty American power , and instead, install a true pro-people, God-fearing and democratic leader.
The group proposed the formation of the United States of Mindanao and North Borneo .
One month later, the Indigenous People s Federal Army (IFPA) went public, calling on the Arroyo government to amend the national constitution. A spokesman for the heavily armed defense forces warned of a social volcano unless Arroyo set up separate federal governments for the indigenous people, Muslims* and Christians**.
Weeks before Michael Meiring blew his legs off while preparing to blow up the Evergreen Hotel, IFPA leader Roger Adamat was identified as the man behind the bomb scares in Manila and Cotabato intended to dramatize the group s bid for a federal state.
The IFPA circulated cell-phone text messages throughout General Santos City that 18 bombs were primed. At 3:15 pm on April 21, a powerful explosion outside the FitMart shopping mall killed 15 people, including four children, tricycle cab drivers, street vendors and a passerby.
And Ms. Arroyo demanded and got her tough anti-terror bill.
Michael Meiring s controversial NSA-sponsored "flight" three weeks later and his new status as a wanted terrorist is of great interest in the wake of the recent mystery bombing that just cost a Green Beret his life, and which has been attributed to the Abu Sayyaf.
This bombing comes as Ms. Arroyo prepares to sign a Mutual Logistics and Support Agreement with the Bush Administration that will give the Pentagon wide-open access to the Philippines.
Securing such access was a major objective before September 11, 2001
WASHINGTON, MANILA, TAIPEI & BEIJING
The future of the American-Filipino anti-terror alliance became clear last month when Arroyo took up the issue of granting landing rights to Taiwanese military pilots.
That move is a US orchestration to formalize a Washington-Manila-Taipei triad in the South China Sea and coincides with the offensive return of the USNS Bowditch.
The same American spy ship that sparked last year s deadly mid-air collision of military planes over Hainan Island was back looking for trouble last month in coastal waters off the People s Republic. The Chinese insist the new intrusions of the Bowditch violate international law. The US Navy says PRC patrol planes harass the crew as they gather data for battle.
Six months after the director of the CIA warned Congress about the 400 missiles Beijing now brackets the Straits with, Congress sent its new Foreign Relations Authorization Act to President Bush. Newly signed into law, the bill upgrades Taiwan to major non-NATO ally status and orders US flags to fly at American buildings on the island Beijing calls a renegade.
The US has been heading towards China via the Philippines ever since Mr. Bush took office.
Months before September 11, The Role of Southeast Asia in US Strategy toward China, a Rand Corporation study, advised Donald Rumsfeld that he must re-base American forces in the Philippines in order to retain US military dominance in Asia.
A Rand board member since 1977, Rumsfeld joins Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as leaders of a militaristic Blue Team that sees China as a competitor which must be contained and kept afraid as part of the hedging strategy recommended in the Rand study. Wolfowitz, an old Indonesia hand, has been particularly outspoken in regards to the Fujian missile bases.
The Rand study helped give birth to the new National Security Strategy of the United States, which justifies pre-emptive strikes to enforce American global economic supremacy and specifically cites the PRC as a top-of-mind target.
AND LONDON?
Meiring s British connections and the Bangsamoro claim to multiple super power sponsors for the rebel army in Mindanao and Sabah raise a very interesting question.
At this stage of the game it is impossible to tell if the robust Anglo-American military alliance is active in Asia. But Philippine Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes has been briefed in London repeatedly and Prince Andrew was recently in Manila promoting stronger naval ties and weapon sales to assist Arroyo with her maritime challenges . The Arroyo government has already authorized anti-terror partnerships between her national police forces and Scotland Yard, the Special Boat Service (SBS) and other British commando.
And Tony Blair is sold on a global crusade he perceives as altruistic. For all the fine reasons spun out by neo-imperialist guru Robert Cooper.
GAMING THE ZONE: WILD MEN IN BORNEO?
An alliance willing to defy the UN and to use first-strike nukes as it sees fit will not hesitate to fudge a little chaos in order to secure long-term power projection bases in Asia. The United States has fudged chaos in the Philippines before.
The first President Bush saluted America s first covert Filipino-Muslim freedom fighters, and his son s inner circle has its own reasons to resurrect the secret Muslim army trick. As soon as Arroyo signs the Pentagon s proposed mutual support agreement, any unrest in Sabah, Zamboanga City or Mindanao means the US must intervene.
The Rand study advised the Pentagon to keep the zone warm militarily. That is the purpose of the current rolling series of anti-terror exercises against the CIA s Abu Sayyaf Group. That was also the likely purpose of the terror-bomber rescued by the Bush White House.
Future events will reveal America s game plan for Southeast Asia and who the confederates are.
Last month, after a series of disturbances in Sabah work camps, Malaysia expelled an estimated 30,000 undocumented Filipino laborers from the troubled state in North Borneo that so many CIA plots seem to target...a state where the Bangsamoro army claimed in February to have 50,000 insurgents armed and funded by the USA and other super-powers.
To protest the expulsion, Arroyo immediately moved to renew the Philippine claim to Sabah. The President has ordered her chief Army officer to prepare for all emergencies and to develop the new rules of engagement we need . To guarantee the safety of returning workers, she has proposed the permanent stationing of a Philippine navy ship off the Sabah coast.
On October 6, she called for even closer security ties with the United States.
Primary research Zamboanga City, Manila, S. Leyte.
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