By Matthew Moore October 14 2002

"I told you so" is too brutal a phrase to utter so soon after this carnage, but there will be some in the United States embassy in Jakarta thinking just that.

The US ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, must be one of them.

For a month, Mr Boyce has been warning of a terrorist threat being hatched in Indonesia, a warning that has seen him repeatedly attacked by religious leaders and a host of leading politicians, including Indonesia's Vice-President, Hamzah Haz.

Tensions began to rise in the US mission a month ago when Mr Boyce closed his embassy for five days claiming he had specific information that his staff were at risk of a terrorist attack.

He refused then to detail the nature of that threat but he left many diplomats and political leaders confused about the severity of the threat when he took no special precautions himself, delivering a hotel lunch address with no security the day he closed the embassy doors.

Within days Mr Boyce's actions were explained in Time magazine, which said a senior al-Qaeda member in Indonesia, Omar al-Faruq, had been masterminding a car-bomb attack on the Jakarta embassy when he was arrested in June.

The CIA interrogated al-Faruq after he was deported to the US. He confessed to planning a series of terrorist attacks in Indonesia, the article said and the US embassy confirmed. But few Indonesian leaders were prepared to take this information too seriously. Instead of a considered response to a security threat, the issue degenerated into a debate where the US was flat out defending charges it was anti-Indonesian and anti-Muslim.

"I just can't understand why there is so much hostility to a friend who shares such important information with you," Mr Boyce told a group of some 15 Muslim leaders who felt the US was blackening their religion. [This is beginning to sound very familiar and increasingly false, isn't it?]

Soon after the embassy was re-opened, the US issued a warning of a "credible threat" to the safety of all westerners in the Javanese cultural centre of Yogyakarta.

While the British and Canadian embassies issued a similar warning, the Australian embassy chose not to, apparently unconvinced it was warranted.

The general warning further exacerbated resentment towards the US. Mr Boyce was still attempting to contain the rift emerging between the US and Indonesia when a home-made bomb exploded on the floor of a moving car just 20 metres from a Jakarta house owned and occupied by the US embassy.

The national police chief, General Da'I Bachtiar, claimed at first it was an attack on the US, as the evidence suggested.

But then the police decided the four bombers were intending to scare a person living two doors away from the US house into paying an outstanding debt.

Although police arrested the driver, and several others, no credible explanation was ever provided about why these bombers had explosives, pistols and ammunition in their homes.

No details were provided about who they were, or who taught them to make bombs, or why this was Jakarta's first known use of a bomb in a debt-collecting exercise.

Not surprisingly, US officials quickly abandoned in private their public statements that there was no evidence the bombing was an attack on the US.

As recently as Wednesday, Mr Boyce was publicly praising Indonesian leaders, including the head of the armed forces, General Endriartono Sutarto, for moving closer to acknowledging that foreign terrorists were operating in Indonesia.

Privately, though, Mr Boyce last week met three ministers, including the Security Minister, to complain about a lack of safety for his personnel.

After Saturday night's events, Mr Boyce must surely say in public what he has been saying in private.

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2002