Were US weapons used to kill Marines?

"A MILF commander showed me several M-16 assault rifles equipped with night vision scopes." -- American journalist Eliza Griswold It's been another heart-breaking news week. Fourteen mostly young Marines killed, ten of them beheaded and mutilated, in Tipo-Tipo, Basilan in an ambush by the MILF. GMA News' man Jun Veneracion and his crew, JC Catibog and Donnie Ramos, were there, covering much of the seven-hour battle while flat on their stomachs. A bullet grazed Donnie's unhelmeted head. They had enough wiggle room to videotape mortar shells that wouldn't fire. Duds. In the heat of battle. That has provoked outrage from all corners, including senatorial upstart Antonio Trillanes who has his first issue tailor-made for him. (Let's just hope, for the sake of his former comrades in arms, that he performs better in the senate than he did as a rebel leader. I recall sitting in GMA7's studio in the early morning of the Oakwood uprising and reading Trillanes's incoherent statement to the public, just a step up from the wild rants issued by the crazy Cho before going amok at Virginia Tech.) Jun Veneracion reported that the Marines in Tipo-Tipo were badly outgunned: mortars that wouldn't fire, ineffective air support. That would seem strange, if one just considers the amount of firearms being shipped to the armed forces' hands. A recent report by the US-based Center for Public Integrity claims: "The $245.6 million in military aid that the Philippines received from the United States in the three years following 9/11 was up from just $14.6 million in the three years before the terrorist attacks -- a staggering increase of more than 1,500 percent." So just as staggering would be the notion of being outgunned by a rebel group without a steady weapons supply from foreign benefactors, until one considers another assertion in the same report:

The Philippine military has a sordid history of complicity with the same insurgent groups it ostensibly fights, which includes a long-standing practice of selling weapons to the rebels, said Eliza Griswold, a journalist who has covered South Asia extensively; her stories have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic and other major publications. "The United States has supplied the Armed Forces of the Philippines with high-tech weaponry that some members of the [Philippine military] have gone on to sell to the insurgents," she said. Last year, Griswold traveled to the southern Philippine island of Mindanao and interviewed members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an Islamic separatist group that has fought the government since 1977. "I have never seen the level of military hardware that I saw in the MILF camp," she said. "A MILF commander showed me several M-16 assault rifles equipped with night vision scopes. So not only does the Philippine military have those, but [the MILF commander] has also bought them from the Philippine security forces." Griswold said the MILF commander told her that the increased presence of high-tech weaponry is leading to a higher casualty rate on both sides of the fight.

We have been hearing of weapons being sold to the Abu Sayyaf ever since Father Cirilo Nacorda reported seeing boxes of American-made ammunition in his captors' Basilan camp while he was a hostage in the mid 1990s. The details of those first forays by the Abu Sayyaf are in the excellent book by Joe Torres, Into the Mountain. While charges of complicity are nothing new, the main difference today is the extra US influence that one presumes comes from a 1,500 percent increase in US military aid since 9/11. The Americans must realize that complicity with an Islamic terrorist/rebel group is a threat to US interests as much as it is to Philippine soldiers and civilians. The Arroyo government is regarded as an important US ally in the fight against terrorism. But if Arroyo's military officers aid the enemy without ever getting punished, or even seriously probed, one must start to wonder if this is a true ally or simply a weak regime afraid of its own military. If it's the latter, then Filipino generals will bow down to no one except for their American benefactors. One US embassy official formerly based in Manila caused some bilateral heat by comparing Mindanao to Afghanistan as a haven for foreign terrorists. No one would want the US to start bombing Mindanao and complete the analogy. But at the very least, it may want to use that extra influence to stop the clandestine sale of US weapons to their enemies. Some of those same weapons may have been used to kill the young Marines in last week's ambush. They could also be aimed at US soldiers now stationed in Mindanao. ---------- The tragic episode in Tipo-Tipo reminded me of another time journalists got caught in the crossfire in Basilan, back in June 2001, at the infamous seige of Lamitan, where newly trained, supposedly elite Army Scout Rangers too were badly outgunned, before the surrounded Abu Sayyaf leadership -- Janjalani, Sabaya, and Sulaiman -- escaped with most of their hostages, who included the American missionary couple, Gracia and Martin Burnham. Official probes into that debacle got nowhere, despite investigations in aid of legislation in both house of Congress that pointed to senior military officers having secret transactions with the Abu Sayyaf.