Progressive Group Slams Planned Bruckheimer Film On Philippine Terror Group

[Flabbergasted]

To Catch a Terrorist

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200702u/bowden-interview

On May 27, 2001, a small militant Islamist group known as the Abu Sayyaf kidnapped 20 vacationers and staffers from a resort on an island in the Southern Philippines. Their hope was to pressure the Philippine government into granting Muslim Filipinos an independent state. Among the hostages were three Americans; two of them, a Baptist missionary couple named Martin and Gracia Burnham, ended up spending more than a year in captivity in the jungle. In his March cover story, “Jihadists in Paradise” Mark Bowden chronicles the hostages’ ordeal and the ultimately successful efforts of the Philippine military—aided by American intelligence—to eliminate the group’s leading figure.

snip

This story, which engagingly details everything from the hostages’ practice of licking candy wrappers clean when hunger pangs were particularly intense to the high-tech surveillance gizmos the U.S. and Philippine militaries employed, sheds useful light on how the U.S. can cooperate with local forces and enters into a larger conversation about the future of the U.S. armed forces.

Progressive Group Slams Planned Bruckheimer Film On Philippine Terror Group

February 18, 2007 1:25 p.m. EST


Komfie Manalo - All Headline News Correspondent
Manila, Philippines (AHN) - A leading progressive group in the Philippines on Sunday slammed a film planned by a U.S. producer. The group said that Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer's film about the al-Qaieda-linked Abu Sayyaf terror group in the southern Philippines was nothing more than U.S. "propoganda."

Gerry Corpuz, spokesman for the group Pamalakaya or Fisherfolk Alliance of the Philippines criticized the movie.

Corpuz said in a statement, "It is a propaganda film and psychological warfare movie aimed to justify the U.S. unwanted, immoral and anti-people intervention in the domestic affairs of the country."

Entertainment magazine Variety reported over the weekend that Bruckheimer had acquired the rights to film "Jihadist in Paradise," written by American author Mark Bowden. The book depicts the life of notorious Abu Sayyaf leaders who abducted over 20 foreign tourists in Sipadan Malaysia then hid them in the jungles in the Philippines.

Bruckheimer's success include "Armageddon" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.

Corpuz said the movie will "promote U.S. war on terror and amplify its (U.S.) tagging of the Philippines as the second front for U.S. military aggression."