Word: blasting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last weekend's Bali bomb blast that killed upwards of 180 people is a bloody "wake up call" to Indonesia to get tougher on the terrorists in the archipelago. So says Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and arguably the Bush administration's most ardent champion of Indonesia. "We've been talking with them for a long time about the seriousness of this problem, and the need to take it on seriously," said Wolfowitz, who served as the U.S. ambassador in Jakarta from 1986 to 1989. "While they've made progress, there's still obviously a lot more...
Over the last several weeks, al Qaeda has reemerged on the terrorist scene. In Bali, a powerful bomb killed 181 people, mostly foreigners; both President Bush and the Indonesian government have tied the blast to al Qaeda. In Kuwait, two men shot two American soldiers, killing one; the leader of the attack professed his allegiance to Osama bin Laden in a videotape. In Yemen, a French oil tanker was apparently rammed by a smaller craft packed with explosives in an attack reminiscent of the U.S.S. Cole incident two years ago. President Bush has said these incidents prove the need...
Until now, fear of a devastating domestic backlash has restrained Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri from cracking down on her nation's increasingly vocal and active supporters of Osama bin Laden. Now, she may have no choice but to bite the bullet. The weekend bomb blast in Bali that killed 189, mostly foreign revelers at two local nightclubs could force Megawati to choose between Washington and the mainstream Muslim political parties on whose support she has been partly dependent...
...officials also helpfully (for Megawati) referred repeatedly to al-Qaeda, and the idea that foreign terrorists were using Indonesia as a safe haven - a line enthusiastically embraced by some Indonesian officials, and certainly helped by forensic evidence suggesting the blast had been caused by sophisticated C4 plastic explosive, suggesting the perpetrators had international links. Still, the problem for the Indonesian president is that her country's radical Islamist movement is mostly homegrown, despite strong links with al-Qaeda to the highest level...
...specifically Abu Bakr Bashir, a charismatic cleric alleged to be JI's spiritual leader (a charge he denies; in fact he denies that JI exists) with terror plots. Bashir denies any connection with violence, but is openly supportive of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. And he blamed the Bali blast on the U.S., accusing it of trying to implicate Indonesians in terror. Even if they don't agree with him, Bashir has some defenders in high places - including Vice President Hamza Haz, who echoed Bashir's accusation that the Bali blast had been "engineered...