In questioning the group responsible for this attack, I believe it fair game to consider some covert ops 'group' could be considered responsible for these reasons ...

1) The nature of this attack - not typical Al Qaeda by any measure
2) The incredible political timing of the attack in regard to Australian Iraq politics in support of Bush
3) The fact that this attack will harm Indonesia a lot more than Australia - Indonesia had been disputing the US ambassador in regard to his pressure than Indonesia harboured terrorist elements. The Indonesians kept saying that there was no credible Al Qaeda threat within the country - now the Indonesians are on the back foot.
4) The economic harm to Indonesia and Bali in the short to medium term will be devestating. It may even prove crippling if the world perceives that the 'terror' threat hasn't gone away.

But again the point I 1st made (and is still there) was that it could either be Muslims from Java or some covert op people intent on redirecting public opinion. If it were Muslims from Java I doubt it was an approved Al Qaeda attack. I think people are beginning to forget what Al Qaeda is/was about.

It is clear that the target was more than just Aussies as there were Brits , Kiwis, Chinese etc: etc: that were killed there. Bill, you usually offer good insights when you think, can you give an analysis of how this attack could hurt Australia. Being from Australia and knowing this region well, I just can't come up with any rationale as to how this attack hurts Australia politically or financially.

This bombing has achieved quite a bit but mostly in the opposite direction to what many people perceive. The only real losers are Indonesia, the Balinese & the poor tourists caught up in the middle. The Muslims in Indonesia look like losing from this as well as will ay group than can be *labelled* as Muslim extremists. Australia loses nothing politically & financially apart from the citizens & wearing the agony of the losses. I will leave it to the reader to consider who might gain greatly or greatest, from this incident. Had this attack occured in Australia, I might have quite a different view - embroiling Indonesia in the terror just does not gain these groups one iota of benefit.

Cheers

Doug

#added point 4 & expanded last para

These islamic extremists killed Sadat & have tried to kill Mubarak (the current PM). They ere at that time happy to bring down their own county's economy.

It is not impossible that such elements are emerging in Indonesia but to give that line credit is to ignore the more obvious ones.

Cheers

Doug

stepping in at US behest to counter the growing power of Muslim elements in Indonesia.

The facts are ...

After end 2nd world war in a joint military meeting of key nations controlling the Pacific it was agreed that countries that couls become independant were & were to include:- Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia/Singapore, Australia, NZ, (etc:), and also eventually Figi, Samoa, Tonga & Papua-New Guinea could become independant, *but* no other nation would be allowed to break their colonial bonds unless part of the approved nations (French Polynesia is a case in point - no independance & backed by all Pacific power nations).

When Portugese pulled out of Timor after a leftist coup in the homeland, they created a problem. The problem was that leftwing elements from Portugal had gained influence in the Fretlin who were the leading party in Timor. Apodeti, the pro Indonesian group had next to none. [link|http://www.defence.gov.au/army/asnce/history.htm|Short history of East Timor] (this document is very sobering reading).

The US gave Indonesia's Sukarno the green light and the weapons for them to secretly invade East Timor to put down the Fretlin takeover. Australia was told to pull its head in and shut up (at the time there was a new Labour (left wing) govt in power in Australia & Gough Whitlam was PM - he did exactly as he was told 'shut-up' & he also shut up the mouths of the union movement who were incensed by the Indonesian actions - Sukarno invaded but the world was told that there was no invasion but that loyal Indonesian elemnts (APODETI & UDT) were fighting the Fretlin.

Now in the 2000s we have US telling Australia to put heat on Indonesia to allow Timor to have a referendum on independance (approx 1/3 of Timorese population had been slaughtered between 1970s & 1990s by Indonesian army).

US had discovered that East Timor had large oil reserves (go use google to check) and that by promoting independance for Timor, it would fragment Indonesia's growing Islamic militancy. Bin Laden followers had been sponsoring the attacks on Christians in Ambon & got behind the growing war (going on since the 1960s)in
Aceh province ([link|http://www.geocities.com/aroki.geo/0208/INA-aceh0207.html|Ache - Indonesia's civil war]

The Indonesian's were royally pissed off at the about face from Australia& US over Timor, but they had handled the situation so badly (tried to kill/export the remaining Timorese after their vote for independance) and had failed to grasp that the US no longer supported them in Timor. In short order they failed to track the shift in their own fortunes as US did in perceiving that Indonesia was the plump, prime goal for Bin Laden's Andalusian empire of the East. Indonesia was as I said 6-12 months ago, a smoking timebomb (one can search our own archieves on these posts).

It is a fact that Australia became the proxy fighter to wrest Timor away from Indonesia despite US having once told Indonesia to go invade Timor, & that US would help them & help hide the deed. People like Marlowe who live in fairy-land re covert ops & world history & politics, can't wrap their brains around facts like these but whilst I have no idea what qualifications Marlowe has to judge international events by other than possibly reading comic books, I was an Air Defence officer in the Air Force when most of these earlier events took place & can provide anecdotes & stories & links to details that back up these points. I was there at the airbase in Australia that sent USAF U2s on spying missions over Indonesia (The 57th Weather Recon Squadron).

Cheers

Doug Marker


Just going to add this self justification - particularly re events in Indonesia...
If at times I seem harsh to people (such as Marlowe)who open their mouths & step in where angels fear to tread (often up to their necks in their own crap), it is because I am usually speaking from in-depth awareness of the events being discussed and will have concluded that they know f***-all about the topic. Am willing to give them leeway based on inexperience, youth and lack of travel in the hope they will learn but if they (like Marlowe) keep crapping piles of obvious s*** I will rub their own noses in it.
My major was in modern history & it has been a speciality ever since. Studying cults & religions was a later speciality. The south East Asain region is a particular area of expertise. It has helped enormously by living in & visiting nearly all S/E countries.


**************

#2 Added the following links re US oil etc: interests in Indonesia

[link|http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2001/aug/0813stakes.html|Exxon & Aceh]

Excerpt ...

" In Indonesia, maintaining territorial integrity means continuing the Army's bloody repression campaigns in the oil- and mineral-rich provinces of Aceh and West Papua.

The RAND and CFR papers argue that revenues from these areas are vital for a stable Indonesia. They are also the sites of two of the largest U.S. investments in Indonesia:

* in Aceh, the Exxon-Mobil natural gas facility, which according to the Wall Street Journal, produced nearly a quarter of Mobil's earnings worldwide in the early 1990s
* in West Papua, the huge mining development of Freeport-McMoran

It is hard to imagine that any campaign to insure territorial integrity in these areas could be compatible with democracy and human rights. Some 6000 people have been killed in Aceh in the last decade -- more than 1000 of them in the last six months .
"

..............

" The Pentagon continued to train Kopassus secretly as part of another program until all U.S. aid was finally terminated in 1999, after a paramilitary rampage, orchestrated by army units including Kopassus, killed more than 600 East Timorese. "

..............

[link|http://www.isnet.org/~djoko/Reformasi%201998/Time%201/KillingFields.html|Reality alert as to who does what in Indonesia (Time Magazine)]

"
Reasons for that silence include Indonesians' fear of the authoritarian Suharto, the complicity of many of them in the butchery, and the break-a-few-eggs ethos of the Cold War. Unlike the Khmer Rouge, Suharto's army did not monopolize the killing duties -- it also whipped up a frenzy of anti-communist, anti-Chinese sentiment and then distributed arms and lists of suspected communists to civilian Indonesians, urging them to wipe out the country's 3.5 million-strong Communist Party (PKI). Suharto's willing executioners, then, may number in the tens if not hundreds of thousands.

Image
One Day, Son, All This Will Be Yours... Suharto pictured with son Tommy, then 5, in 1968. The Suharto family were among the biggest beneficiaries of the wave of economic growth presided over by the president following the bloodbath of 1965-6. (AP photo/Warbung/stf)
The West remained silent as Indonesia's army and its civilian militia went from town to town, rounding up suspected communists and ordering them to dig their own graves before killing them; sometimes decapitating the bodies and displaying the skulls. Teachers and other civic leaders were forced to draw up death lists of influential townsfolk (which many of them did in order to save themselves and others); while, in the words of a subsequent British intelligence report, the victims were "often no more than bewildered peasants who give the wrong answer on a dark night to bloodthirsty hooligans bent on violence." Eventually -- whipped up by the official anti-Beijing propaganda -- the mobs turned on masses of apolitical Indonesians of Chinese origins.

"


[link|http://www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins99/tim99-9-6.html| Who trained the Kopassus Army death squads in Indonesia]


I won't add any more such reports - I don't want to cause poor Marlowe to die from a fit of appoplexy. (actually, it may not matter because there are probably far to many 'big words' for him to comprehend).