The prime minister's expressed confidence that Malaysia will not suffer international sanctions as a result of the Scomi/Scope-BSA Tahir fiasco must have arisen from the genuine lack of mens rea on the part of the government.
The police must be congratulated for its fairly comprehensive investigations that convince ordinary Malaysians like me that our country is not a willful participant in the international racket to proliferate weapons of mass destruction. But whether the international powers-that-be is similarly convinced, remains to be seen.
The fact is, we as a nation, came very close to becoming the unthinkable - an international pariah. Perhaps out of our own negligence and greed, we had inadvertently given the likes of George W Bush and US State Department war-mongering spinners enough material to type-cast and profile us at anytime in the future should it serve their interests.
Recent history have shown that they're quite capable of doing that. Ask Syria and Iran. Is it any wonder then that US airport authorities do not exclude our VIPs from thorough searches?
But we are innocent. Just negligent; somebody slept on his watch. I mean, what's there to check on if the facility partly belongs to a VIP's son. He's not the same as turbaned simpletons having the misfortune to share a house with Islamic radicals while studying in Pakistan. These nobodies needed to be locked up and interrogated under the ISA.
The owners of Scomi/Scope are also not guilty. Just greedy; after all, jumping without due care into any opportunity that promises easy money, is a national obsession. And I am not just talking about the VIP-owner. It includes those of us who jumped on the stock market bandwagon pushing up the value a penny-and-dime drilling-mud producer to celestial heights simply because the guy owns it.
To hell with the fight against cronyism if we can make a ringgit or two out of spillover gravy. And we have been proven right; cronyism in the stock market worked for us! What we had inadvertently done however, was giving credence to the tiny company to suddenly own a multi-million ringgit facility out of nowhere.
This is significant because the corporate culture of a blue-chip organisation would not have allowed such investments without having gone through rigorous examination of the investment and its partners. I cannot imagine Quek Leng Chan not knowing enough about a new project Hong Leong gets into, or Lim Goh Tong not knowing what really goes on in his cruise ships.
But cronyism-induced growth lacks depth. Not a crime in the international political arena, but certainly a huge impediment to the true economic growth potential of our country.
The last doubt to remove over this Scomi/Scope affair is whether there is a secret agenda among our leadership to support the proliferation of an Islamic bomb. Would such an agenda linger in the minds of our leaders?
The truth is, with a big chunk our government's resources dedicated to perpetuating its power in the national arena in order to satisfy the power-structure's ever-consummate obsession in lining its pockets, there is little left for such 'grand' schemes. Certainly not within their myopic parameters. Any diplomat on the cocktail circuit can vouch for that.
Finally, it is good to know that BSA Tahir is still moving around freely in our country, as confirmed by the authorities. To arrest him would imply that a VIP's son had shared a bed with someone suspected of aiding terrorism. In the true spirit of justice, we don't want the unfortunate case of the turbaned students to recur with the VIP's son, do we?