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In the ongoing effort to assign culpability for terrorists’ violent attacks, the situation in the Philippines is typical. There are large numbers of widely-scattered attacks following varied tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP). Many, but not all, are claimed or defi nitively attributed publically by authoritative sources to specifi c groups; many are not. The Institute for the Study of Violent Groups (ISVG) database is a huge compendium of public sources on attacks around the globe, and is relatively complete since 2003. Using the data in the ISVG database, we submit the roughly two thousand violent attacks (armed assaults, bombings, hijackings, and hostage-takings) reported between 1/1/2003 and 6/3/2009 to a modern update of one of the earliest, but still reputable, classifi cation technique – Nearest Neighbor. The technique turns out to be remarkably accurate, and serves well to underscore the critical, even defi nitive, role of location for culpability attribution in the Philippines.