I criticized left and right, like I was a some big-time crisis management consultant.
Why didn't a sniper take him out when he was standing by the bus door earlier? Were the authorities being soft on a fellow uniformed man? Were they perhaps sympathetic to his cause, regardless of how stupid his means of getting it out?
Why didn't the police come prepared with masks if they knew they were to use tear gas? They looked stupid and unprofessional holding hankies over their faces. They didn't inspire confidence, to say the least. Talk about getting caught with your pants down while the world watches!
Why didn't anyone think of pulling out the spec sheet for the bus? The police obviously didn't know about the shatter-proof windows and the emergency door. I kept posting comments on FB about how operations should always be backed by relevant intel, and about how this one clearly wasn't.
Why didn't they immediately cordon off the site to keep people away? Not only so they won't get in the way of police operations, but for their own safety. The media and the curious onlookers (mga 'usisero,' as they're called here) obviously got in the way. And the whole world saw that.
I had a lot more nasty things to say, the nasty person that I am and this being the mother of all nasty hostage crises I've ever 'witnessed' by proxy (through media). But now that the smoke has cleared, and I've calmed down somewhat, I realized a few things:
- This is not a plot from a Tom Clancy novel, and the maneuvers I've read in Rainbow Six may not be workable in actual situations where real lives are at stake. A real-life hostage situation is always volatile. You can never predict where it will lead. There is no simple if-and-then logic at work, especially since hostage takers are usually suicidal and impulsive and are rarely rational.
- The ground police team did what they could--which, it turned out, wasn't much--given the resources at their disposal and the time constraint. Except for what I heard on the radio, and read from tweets and blogs and FB posts, I wasn't privy to the circumstances that led them to do what they did, and not do what I thought they should have done. But a postmortem of the incident should be in order, not so much for blame pinning but so they could better prepare for similar cases in the future.
- The police is still smarting from accusations of brutality and overkill, that's why they allowed the media to cover the negotiations. They made sure there was transparency so they wouldn't be accused of excessive use of force or human rights violations, in case they saved the hostages but ended up with a dead hostage-taker.
Remember that military officer who hijacked the flight control tower some years back? No one else was hurt but he ended up dead. The police was accused of excessive use of force. But what would have justified the use of such force? A downed airplane? Unfortunately, such was the case today. Because some hostages were killed and others were hurt, the killing of the hostage-taker was justified in everyone's eyes.
But to wrap this up, I noticed there's one missing piece in this puzzle. How come the Palace is silent? The world just saw us shit in our pants and now we're stinking up the place. Where is PNoy? I understand if he chose to distance himself while the crisis was ongoing, but it's over now, and we are suffering from a collective national shame! Where the f*ck are you?!
Oh boy, there's nasty me again.
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