Terror and counter terror: upsetting a rubbish mountain

This comment is being written ahead of the normal Friday deadline for printing the Sunday Island due to the forthcoming New Year holidays - that is before sittings of Parliament commenced on Thursday to debate the Batalanda Commission report.

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But it has also drawn on some of what was said in the early stages of that debate. This widely anticipated discussion will continue for a second day next month after parliament adjourned for the New Year on Thursday evening.

Batalanda and the torture chamber run there in the wake of the JVP's second adventure between 1987 and 1989 has received a great deal of publicity, particularly in the electronic media, in recent weeks. As readers are well aware, former President Ranil Wckremesinghe, who began his parliamentary career in 1977 from the Biyagama electorate where Batalanda is located, is specifically targeted.

Earlier this year, Wicremesinghe fared disastrously in Al Jazeera's Head to Head program, modeled on BBC's Hard Talk, which famously interrogates interviewees with rapidly fired questions, where a very hard time is given to whoever is interviewed in what are often unequal exchanges. We have in this space previously said that it was clearly apparent during the program, which attracted global publicity, that the former president seemed to have knowingly walked into a trap for reasons that are not easily fathomable. Knowingly because the line of questioning was to be expected and the program host's strategy of embarrassing the guest would have been obvious. But RW accepted an invitation to appear on a show that put him through a mincing machine. The Sinhala idiom illagena parippu kanawa neatly sums up what eventually happened to our former president.