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2006-07-21 Southeast Asia
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The linchpin goes missing
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He was been dubbed the region's Osama bin Laden but he's the terrorist no one wants to talk about. When the 44-year-old Hambali was arrested in August 2003, US President George W. Bush described him as one of the world's most lethal terrorists and Prime Minister John Howard proclaimed his capture as a huge blow against terrorism. Now, though, it's impossible to get the authorities to say anything about the Indonesian-born man who went by the name Riduan Isamuddin and is allegedly one of the masterminds behind the Bali bombings and a string of attacks across Southeast Asia. While his Bali bombing compatriots Dulmatin and Umar Patek are being hunted on the Philippines island Mindanao, Hambali remains hidden in a secret prison known only to a few CIA operatives. No one else knows where he is being held.
All requests from other nations to interview the man named as the linchpin between bin Laden's al-Qa'ida and the Southeast Asian-based terror group Jemaah Islamiah have been refused by the US Government despite assurances three years ago by former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage that Australia would be given access to the captured terrorist mastermind. Nor will the US even comment about when, or if, he will be brought to trial.
Howard's office has similarly refused to comment. But during a recent trip to Indonesia, Howard was questioned as to whether Indonesian politicians had asked for Australia's help to get access to Hambali. The Prime Minister said it had not, "to my recollection, been raised with Australia by Indonesia, so if it were raised then I would think about it".
Continued from Page 2
A spokesman for Foreign Minister Alexander Downer says: "We are not in the habit of divulging publicly the nature or outcomes of discussions with other governments on matters of this sort".
Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd says if Hambali is responsible for the Bali murders, he should stand trial like any other mass murderer. "It is imperative that he face the music and Australia should demand nothing less."
Terror expert Clive Williams says the Australian Government could be doing more to bring Hambali to trial. Williams says it shouldn't be forgotten that far more Australians were killed in Bali than Americans. "We have a much greater interest in him than the US," he says. "We are putting pressure on Indonesia about Abu Bakar Bashir (the alleged spiritual leader of JI who was released from prison last month), yet we are not doing anything about pressuring the US on Hambali."
Hambali was not only considered Southeast Asia's most dangerous terrorist but the go-between linking JI and al-Qa'ida until his capture in August 2003. He is accused of involvement in planning the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US and the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. Earlier this year, Bush named him as one of the figures behind a 2002 plot to fly a plane into California's tallest building.
Hambali also has been connected with al-Qa'ida's chief strategist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a plan to destroy the skyscraper in Los Angeles. The pair had been in cahoots for years and as far back as 1995 hatched a terror blueprint that has become known as Operation Bojinka. It was an ultimately unsuccessful plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II during a visit to Manila, to blow up 11 US planes and to fly a Cessna packed with explosives into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Hambali was born in West Java in 1966, the second of 13 children to a local imam in Pamokolan. The area was the heartland of the militant Darul Islam movement fighting for the creation of an Islamic Indonesian state. A devout Muslim, he became heavily involved in religious groups and turned to JI's founder Abdullah Sungkar and Bashir as role models.
Zachary Abuza, in his book Militant Islam in Southeast Asia, says Hambali went to Malaysia in the mid-1980s to work as a labourer before heading to Afghanistan to join the mujaheddin forces fighting the Soviets. There he was trained in bomb making and combat, but Abuza writes that his real skills were organisation, management and logistics. It was through his talent in these areas that he came into contact with bin Laden.
When he returned to Malaysia in the '90s he was involved in recruiting young Muslims and became heavily involved with JI. He was responsible for sending JI operatives as sleeper agents to Australia in the late '90s to set up a terror cell known as Mantiqi4.
He has been accused of being involved in a series of bombings on churches that killed 18 people and became known as the Christmas Eve attacks in Indonesia in 2000. Then there was a series of bomb attacks in Manila that killed another 22 people. He has been charged in absentia with involvement in a plot to smuggle explosives from The Philippines to Singapore with the intention of attacking Western targets.
After the Bali bombings, authorities conducted a regional manhunt and Hambali was captured by the CIA and Thai authorities in the Thai city Ayutthaya in August 2003.
Twenty plain-clothes police stormed the apartment building where Hambali had been living with his Malaysian-born wife, Noralwizah. Neighbours say he had done little to disguise his appearance.
Police confiscated weapons and explosives from the apartment during the raid, saying Hambali had intended to use them for terror attacks against the APEC summit due to be held in Bangkok a few months later. The summit was attended by 21 heads of state, including Bush and Howard.
It has since been revealed that authorities used information from the CIA's monitoring of international money transfers collected by banking co-operative the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications to track Hambali.
At the time Thai officials were reported as saying that Hambali had been captured and sent to Indonesia. But Indonesian authorities denied he had arrived. Subsequent inquiries revealed that Hambali and his wife left Bangkok on a chartered US plane on August 13 at 1pm. Their destination remains unknown.
Since then Hambali has disappeared and is now listed as a "ghost prisoner" by the organisation Human Rights Watch. He and 25 other suspected terrorists are being held in a so-called CIA "black sites" without any legal rights and without access to a lawyer.
Although Guantanamo Bay detainees, including Australian David Hicks, have just won the protections afforded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, it is understood those rights will not extend to the detainees held in the CIA's secret prisons.
Williams, from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, says it is not good enough. "The CIA should be held accountable. Once you start departing from the judicial process, you end up being the same as the people you are criticising ... otherwise you have lost the moral high ground."
Former Australian spy Warren Reed says the US refusal to allow other nations to access or interview Hambali is probably because he is still undergoing extensive and continuous interrogation. Reed, who trained with MI6 and worked for the federal Government's secret intelligence service, ASIS, says the interrogators would be trying to build a relationship with the terrorist. And after three years, Reed says, they are probably only about halfway through the interrogation process.
"They will be playing endless mind games in a battle of wits and wills with Hambali," Reed says.
The state of Hambali's mental and physical health remains unknown. However, terrorist experts predict that, if his interrogators are using the trust-reward method, he would be in reasonable shape.
But Abuza says, at the very least, the Americans should make Hambali available for interviews by regional security services.
"What the US Government is doing is counterproductive," Abuza says. "I believe Hambali should go on trial rather than rot in legal limbo, and Indonesia clearly has more standing than any other country.
"The Aussies have expressed dismay at the US handling of Hambali many times before. But the Bush administration is very unlikely to change course, even if the PM personally appealed to Bush."
Terrorism law expert Greg Pemberton, from Macquarie University's Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, says Hambali may not face trial because, unlike high-profile prisoners such as Saddam Hussein who is likely to be convicted of his crimes, there may not be enough evidence against him.
"Maybe they are not going to trial because there is a real fear that if there is not enough evidence for a court of law to convict, it would be seen to have a negative political impact," Pemberton says.
The head of the International Centre for Terrorism and Political Violence Research's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Rohan Gunaratna, doesn't believe the Indonesians or Australians will ever get access to Hambali.
However, he is more optimistic about Hambali facing court, albeit not in a public hearing. "He should go through the judicial system but not in open court," Gunaratna says. He believes a public trial would reveal far too much about the methodology and strategies used in the hunt for terrorists and the capture of Hambali and that it would be counterproductive for counter-terrorism strategies in the future.
"Very few people would want to say anything in public," Gunaratna says. "The fight against terrorism sometimes needs extraordinary measures."
Following Hambali's arrest, eminent JI researcher Sidney Jones argued that it was the transparency of the Bali arrests and trials that had ultimately persuaded many sceptical Indonesians that they had a real home-grown problem with JI.
Until then many Indonesians refused to believe JI was a terror organisation. "The single most useful act Washington could undertake ... would be to return Hambali to Indonesia for trial," she says. 
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Posted by Fred 2006-07-21 00:00||
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Posted by Fred 2006-07-21 16:12||
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