The massive damage to the destroyer USS
Fitzgerald suggests that the container ship, the ACX Crystal, might have
slammed into it at a significant speed. This has raised questions as to whether
there was proper communication between the two vessels, particularly given how
busy the waters in the area are.
The container ship was seen making a U-turn before the collision on some ship trackers, a move that has raised questions about what happened. All of the ACX Crystal's 20-member Filipino crew were safe, according to Japanese shipping company Nippon Yusen K.K., which operates the ship.
The waters where the collision occurred see as many as 400 ships pass through every day, according to Japan's coast guard. They are especially congested in the early hours of the day, with ships carrying cargo for early morning delivery in Tokyo. The waters also have fast currents, making it a tricky area that requires experience and skill to navigate.
Marine traffic records show the Crystal made a series of sharp turns about 25 minutes before the collision, which in crowded seas might have caused a cascade of maneuvers by other vessels as they tried to avoid one another.
The ACX Crystal weighs 29,060 tons and is 222 meters (730 feet) long, much larger than the 8,315-ton destroyer. The container ship's left bow was dented and scraped, and it did not appear to have sustained any major structural damage when it was docked in the Tokyo bay late Saturday.
But on Sunday, a group of accident investigators from the Japanese transport ministry found damage to the container ship that had been hidden under the waterline when it arrived in Tokyo the previous night. Footage from Japanese broadcaster NHK showed a sharp horizontal cut across the bow area, which looked like a shark's mouth. Many scratches were also seen in the frontal area.
The Japanese coast guard questioned
crew members of the ACX Crystal, and is treating the incident as a case of
possible professional negligence, said Masayuki Obara, a regional coast guard
official. But a case of possible terrorist attack was not ruled out completely
yet.
Why Did The Crystal Pinoys Report The Collision Only 1 Hour Later?
Tracking records show the ACX Crystal, a 30,000-ton container ship, was bound for Tokyo from Nagoya before the collision. It left at about 5:30 p.m. Friday and steamed east at a brisk 17 knots, or close to 20 miles per hour, for the next seven hours. The Japanese Coast Guard said that at about 1:30 a.m. the ship struck the U.S.S. Fitzgerald.
Who is the Pinoy Captain of ACX Crystal & what is his religion? He killed 7 American Sailors! |
Tracking records show the ACX Crystal, a 30,000-ton container ship, was bound for Tokyo from Nagoya before the collision. It left at about 5:30 p.m. Friday and steamed east at a brisk 17 knots, or close to 20 miles per hour, for the next seven hours. The Japanese Coast Guard said that at about 1:30 a.m. the ship struck the U.S.S. Fitzgerald.
Records show the ship turned sharply to
the right around that time. The route of the destroyer is not shown on these
maps because commercial tracking data doesn't include military ships, but
damage to its starboard side indicates that it would have been bearing south at
the time of the collision.
The container ship continued east for another half hour before reversing
around 2:00 a.m. and returning to the scene. The Japanese Coast Guard and U.S.
Navy initially said the collision happened at 2:20 a.m. because the ACX Crystal
did not report it until 2:25 a.m.
At about 4:30 a.m., the ship resumed
its eastward course, eventually docking in Tokyo in the afternoon. The
Fitzgerald was towed by tugboats to Yokosuka, where it is based.
According to the Japan Coast Guard the collision happened around 1:30 Am but according to the U.S. Navy that time of collision was at 2:20 Am. So who is correct or who is lying? The strangely abnormal movement of ACX Crystal recorded by the real-time ship trackers is telling two completely different stories depending on which time of collision between two ships. Just look at the trace of ACX Crystal below.
Who Is Lying, US Navy Or Crystal’s Pinoys?
According to the Japan Coast Guard the collision happened around 1:30 Am but according to the U.S. Navy that time of collision was at 2:20 Am. So who is correct or who is lying? The strangely abnormal movement of ACX Crystal recorded by the real-time ship trackers is telling two completely different stories depending on which time of collision between two ships. Just look at the trace of ACX Crystal below.
Philippino crew's version of collision which is disputed by US Navy. |
If the time of collision was 1:30 Am
the incident clearly was an unfortunate accident, but if it was 2:20 Am the
case clearly was a deliberate ramming of USS Fitzgerald by ACS Crystal. May be
we will never know even in this day and age of GPS and satellite watching over
us 24/7.
then made a U-turn before T-boning USS Fitzgerald.)
Philippines President Duterte Says U.S. Special Forces Should GTFO
After 15 years fighting terrorists in Mindanao, at a cost of more than $400 million and 17 American lives, elite U.S. soldiers are no longer welcome:
MANILA, Philippines—In Rodrigo
Duterte’s mystifying quest to bite the hand that feeds the Philippines, he
plans to bar the United States from the battle against the long-running
insurrection in the country’s mostly Muslim south that has killed an estimated
120,000 people.
“These special forces, they have to go,” said the tough-talking
Philippine president, who has bragged about killing criminals himself in years
past, even claiming he once threw a man out of a helicopter.
Not least to avoid the moral and
political censure of Washington, he has been pushing to loosen diplomatic,
military, and economic ties with the United States, even as he cozies up to the
less punctilious government of China.
So, Duterte says he wants to oust
American special operations forces and advisers who have operated for about 15
years in Mindanao, the island group at the center of insurgent activity by
several jihadist factions, some of them pledging allegiance to the so-called
Islamic State that is centered in Iraq and Syria.
The U.S. military presence on this
secretive battlefield—a total of almost 1,500 personnel over the years—already
has diminished since Duterte took office in June, and he says he will review
permitting the Americans to stay in the fight at all.
The man who has called President Barack
Obama a “son of a whore” says the Americans could inflame the situation—and
also claims that he doesn’t want them to be killed or kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf,
the most well-known insurgent group, which is infamous for abductions.
That’s right: The Philippine leader
says he wants U.S. military personnel to leave for their own safety. Not to put
too fine a point on the idea they’re a foreign presence in Mindanao, Duterte noted, “There
are many white men there.”
Corrupt & Coward Philippine Army Do Not Want To Fight
For decades dating back to the 1970s,
Muslim extremists in majority-Muslim Mindanao have waged a low-grade insurgency
to achieve either greater autonomy and a larger share of national resources, or
outright independence. The bodies have piled up through an onslaught of
bombings, kidnapping attempts, assassinations, and executions.
The Moro National Liberation Front,
founded in 1971, launched the pro-independence drive. But radical cadres,
angered by the MNLF’s 1996 peace deal with the government—which vouchsafed an
autonomous but not independent region in Mindanao—broke away to establish smaller,
more hardcore groups. They include the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu
Sayyaf, the most feared faction. With a hard core of 400 soldiers, the group
has become infamous for staging spectacular, brutal attacks and for kidnapping
people for ransom.
“They’re less ideological and more
violent and they’re more interested in their own survival, in making money,”
says Marielle Harris, a research analyst with the Counter Extremism Project.
“The average Abu Sayyaf fighter would fail a basic test on Islam.”
Abu Sayyaf raked in almost $7.5 million
from ransom kidnappings in the first six months of 2016, according to a
confidential report from the Philippine government. The group, which operates
mostly in the Sulu Archipelago and Zamboanga Peninsula, has been turning to
kidnapping the crews of foreign tugboats, according to the military/police
threat assessment report.
Harris calls Abu Sayyaf “a
decentralized organization of bandits” that raises money from kidnapping for
ransom, extortion, weapons smuggling, and drug trafficking—primarily marijuana.
“Despite its small size, Abu Sayyaf has many, many more sympathizers who grow
and harvest [drugs] for them, primarily in the Sulu Archipelago,” she says.
Muslim Terrorists Have Been Doing Whatever They Want
Like the so-called Islamic State in
Syria and Iraq, Abu Sayyaf combines profiteering with lethal attacks, but its
record is longer. Abu Sayyaf militants killed more than 50 people in the
southern town of Ipil in 1995—after robbing banks and stores and burning down
the town center.
In 2000 it launched an attack in
Malaysia, kidnapping 21 tourists, some of them Europeans. The hostages
eventually were freed after Libya reportedly paid millions of dollars. Just a
year later, Abu Sayyaf kidnapped another 21 tourists, three of them American,
from a resort in Palawan province. Several captives were killed, including two
of the Americans.
In subsequent years, the group carried
out fatal bombings, the most devastating of which targeted a ferry in Manila
Bay in 2004 and left 116 people dead. The following year, bombings in three
different cities killed more than 100.
In November of 2015 Abu Sayyaf fighters
brazenly beheaded a Malaysian man in Sulu while Obama was attending an
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Manila. Last April, the
fighters beheaded Canadian John Ridsdel, also in Sulu, which is part of the
Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
And in a huge insult to Duterte, just
this past September the group bombed a night market in Davao City, the
president’s hometown that he served as mayor for more than two decades—and
which he was visiting at the time.
Duterte, who just a month before had
ordered troops to “seek them out in their lairs and destroy them,” responded to
the Davao blast, which killed 14 people and injured more than 70, by declaring
a “state of lawlessness” in the country and vowing to “confront the ugly head
of terrorism.”
(One good bit of news: Malaysian
security forces recently killed reputed Abu Sayyaf kidnapping czar Abraham
Hamid and two of his henchmen in a shootout near the town of Semporma in Sabah
province, Malaysia. Hamid reportedly had led a squad that seized tourists,
sailors, and fishermen in Sabah as well as Sulu.)
If Abu Sayyaf’s attacks seem as
pointless as the intermittent Baghdad bombings by ISIS that kill dozens but
accomplish little—apart from unnerving residents—analysts note that the group
does retain a political goal. “They do want to fight for their caliphate,” says
Harris.
Duterte agrees. He told soldiers in a
speech in September that Abu Sayyaf radicals are not interested in negotiating
for such things as better local services or more resources. “They are hungry
for a fight to establish a caliphate in Southeast Asia,” he said. “The problem
is that they do not talk on the basis of what school you can give them. It's
either the caliphate or nothing.”
The country’s new armed forces chief,
Lt. Gen. Eduardo Año, promised earlier this month to keep military pressure on
Abu Sayyaf and other groups “with the guidance of our commander in chief.”
$50 Million A Year Every Year US Military Assistance
And one would think the Philippine
military could use all the help it can get in this long-running
counter-insurgency: just the kind of thing U.S. Special Operations Forces are
highly trained to do. But if Año’s boss has his way, the general will have to
make do with no U.S. help—which certainly has been extensive.
Beginning in 2002, U.S. Special Operations Command worked in tandem with
the Philippine military, battling Abu Sayyaf and other extremist groups from a
base in the south. At any given time some 500 U.S. military personnel—Army,
Marines, and Navy SEALs—participated in the Joint Special Operations Task
Force-Philippines. The mission ended last year, having cost 17 American lives.
Few see many concrete benefits from the cash injection. Analyst Zachary
Abuza, of the U.S. National War College, calls the effort “a waste of money.”
It has been “a terrible investment [of] $50 million a year since 2002 with very
little to show for it,” he told The Wall Street Journal. The return on
America’s investment will dwindle even further with Duterte maneuvering to
marginalize the U.S. military.
Duterte now says he is considering
talks with the Maute group, an insurgent force that has links with the
so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS, and even Abu Sayyaf—although he
insists the military will keep working to prevent more attacks by the Mindanao
extremists.
Abu Sayyaf, led by “emir” Isnilon
Hapilon, operates independently, but one of its faction also has pledged
allegiance to ISIS—which signaled a year ago that it was looking at the
Philippines as a new breeding ground for jihadists.
ISIS released a propaganda video that
shows a training camp in the Philippines and commanders exhorting Filipinos to
go join up in Syria. The overseers also claim in the video that ISIS already
has a terror camp in the Philippines. Footage shows militants completing
assault drills while a few recruits practice with weapons and go through basic
training.
12-Yrs Old Meth Boys Have Constantly Beaten Corrupt Army
This month Japal Guiani Jr., the mayor
of Cotabato City in the south, warned that yet another ISIS-linked group, Ansar
Al-Khilafa Philippines, is recruiting youths. He claimed Ansar already has
recruited 1,000 people from across central Mindanao, targeting minors, school
dropouts, and youths interested in the Quran.
Harris estimates that about 100
Filipinos have traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight alongside ISIS, but that no
ISIS members travel to the Philippines to recruit or fight, and that most
recruiting occurs online.
She adds that Abu Sayyaf also recruits
hundreds of “mostly young boys” for home-grown terrorism. “It’s very
clan-based… these are orphans of war, as young as 14,” she tells The Daily
Beast.
Indeed, a 12-year-old boy was among 11
Abu Sayyaf members who surrendered to the government in Basilan province in
October, telling authorities they were tired of combat. The youngsters “are
given crystal meth before they go battle the Philippine military,” Harris says.
“There’s just rudimentary training and then they are asked to do roadside
killings and bombings.”
For now, there typically are between 50
and 100 U.S. military advisers in Mindanao—the people Duterte says he wants
gone.
Displaying an inconsistency shared by
his soulmate Donald Trump, the president has mandated a crackdown, said he will
talk to rebels, and suggested suspending habeas corpus in Mindanao, meaning
warrant-free arrests. Small wonder some Filipinos are bracing for a declaration
of martial law.
With Duterte vacillating and the rebels in no hurry to abandon their lucrative brand of terrorism, Mindanao may be saddled with what feels like never-ending violence—whether the Americans stay or get tossed out. “The status quo will continue,” says Harris.
With Duterte vacillating and the rebels in no hurry to abandon their lucrative brand of terrorism, Mindanao may be saddled with what feels like never-ending violence—whether the Americans stay or get tossed out. “The status quo will continue,” says Harris.