Fear and loathing in Jakarta, CNN style

How appropriate that The Sunday Post, July 11 edition has "blessed" us with two articles that clearly link up the circle of fear and loathing that have cemented the international image of Indonesia as a haven for terrorists over the past two years.

David Kennedy's "In tense times, demand up for expat counseling" (page 4) puts a real face on the underlying current of paranoia that has run through the expat community since the Bali bombings in 2002 and the subsequent blast at the JW Marriott last year.

If this can be considered as the "effect" of the terror phenomenon, the "cause" can be found a few pages further on in the fawning, puff piece of a book review by Rich Simons of The Seeds of Terror, penned by CNN's Jakarta Bureau Chief Maria Ressa. One need not wonder why the shrinks are having such a field day when a collection of misinformation, disinformation and highly questionable "intelligence" leaks such as Ressa's tome is taken as literal fact.

More than any single person, Ressa, through her voice on CNN, has been responsible for sowing those "seeds of terror" amongst the foreign community here and the international community that has resulted in irreparable damage to the image and reputation of this country. Potential investors and tourists in droves have given Indonesia a big "miss" due to the unsubstantiated perception of the country as a hotbed of radical Islam with ties to the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.

The truth is that this connection has never been proven; not in the Bali bombings or the JW Marriott bombings, both of which have been decreed by Ressa to be not only al-Qaeda linked, but suicide attacks, a claim for which there is no forensic or eyewitness evidence. In her book, Ressa, an American of Filipino descent, has relied not on her skills as an investigator, but almost exclusively on information provided by CNN intelligence sources, the same folks who brought us the case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

While she has spent several years roaming the region as a CNN correspondent, Ressa seems to have learned little about internal political strife in either Indonesia or the Philippines, or if she has, tends to ignore it for the larger, "big picture" aims of CNN and its unabashed support for the Bush administration's "war against terror".

The problem is that at least 90 percent of the information, as leaked to Time magazine and sister media outlet CNN, turned out to be provably and outrageously false -- black propaganda to those in the spy trade. But then, how could one expect Ressa or anyone else to get the truth on this story when al Faruq has been held incommunicado by U.S. intelligence since he was unlawfully spirited away from Indonesian authorities?

As we are beginning to see in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, intelligence is often skewed and manipulated to suit geopolitical goals. That's fine; we have always known that governments lie. But we expect better from the press, which is supposed to give us a balance. Maria Ressa, and by extension Rich Simon, have failed us in that respect.

JOEL D. PALMER Jakarta