THE PROTOCOL

  

There were too much teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling among those who were inconvenienced by the very tight security protocol implemented by the Philippine National Police (PNP) during the recent APEC Summit.

But the terrorist attack in Paris fully justified the decision of the APEC overseers to ratchet up to “overkill” level the security measures. The terror attack on Mali also underscored the maxim “better too tight than be sorry.”

This is because both criminals and terrorists exploit laxity and the weaknesses that it brings about. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in fact ,lost seven agents in the 2009 Camp Chapman attack due to laxity.

In that attack, a jihadist Jordanian doctor was able to blow himself up along with the CIA operatives and several others because against a very basic security protocol: he was not frisked.

Had the CIA operatives not pulled weight to stop the American soldiers manning Camp Chapman in Afghanistan, the latter would have found out that the Jordanian had strapped himself with explosives.

For that blunder, the CIA lost the single biggest number of operatives in 25 years. So, there’s no such thing as too tight a security. The APEC protocol was fully justified.