Meiring, murder, subversion, and treason: Duterte’s beef with US

[bemildred]

Mr. Lee always has interesting things to say.

Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s spokesperson recently stated that the coolness between Duterte and the U.S. government — well, Duterte’s disdain for the U.S., which he expressed as “hatred” when the subject of American finger-wagging came up — goes back to the Michael Meiring case in 2002.

But that’s just the tip of a big, bloody iceberg.

Meiring, a US citizen, was sharing a hotel room in Duterte’s town of Davao City on the island of Mindanao with his ammonium nitrate bomb, which exploded on May 16, 2002. Meiring was severely injured; nevertheless, US government agents appeared at the hospital and spirited him away, first to Manila and then to the United States. Unsurprisingly, it was widely suspected that Meiring was some sort of U.S. agent engaged in local skulduggery.

On May 13, 2016, the New York Times engaged in a rather feeble exercise in hand-waving the problem aside in a piece titled Mysterious Blast in Philippines Fuels Rodrigo Deterte’s ‘Hatred’ of U.S. It included gems like:

But a former C.I.A. official who served in the Philippines discounted the possibility that Mr. Meiring was a C.I.A. operative. While the former official was not familiar with details of the Meiring case, he said keeping explosives in his hotel room and joking about “Christ in Action” would be obvious violations of agency protocol.

http://atimes.com/2016/05/meiring-murder-subversion-and-treason-dutertes-beef-with-us/