Setting the record straight on the political killings

Martin Montana
Spokesperson
Chadli Molintas Command
New People's Army - Ilocos Cordillera Region
November 30, 2006

"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will soon believe it." This is what the Arroyo regime's military propagandists hope to achieve in spreading the lie that the activists assassinated or abducted by the military are victims of a purge by the revolutionary movement. There is no purge going on in the Party and the people's army. There is no truth at all to the Nolcom's paper "The Truth Behind the So-Called Political Killings" released to the media last November 13.

The paper's wild presumptions were sprinkled with half-truths so as to sound credible. It is a desperate and malicious attempt to malign the revolutionary movement. It shifts the blame to the NPA for the military's heartless murder of Jose "Pepe" Manegdeg and Albert Terreda�o. Earlier, 21st IB CO Lt. Col. Francis Eugenio Lardizabal also tried in vain to blame the NPA for the ambush on the Claver family.

Who's who?

It is the military, not the NPA, that the victims, witnesses, and relatives are pointing to as responsible for the killings and abductions. Not one of them would even entertain the idea that the NPA was responsible for the murder of their relatives. Despite the testimony of witnesses who have positively identified some of the killers and described the circumstances heavily implicating the military, no arrests or credible investigations have yet been made by the military or police. Of course, they would not prosecute their own assets.

It is the Arroyo regime, not the CPP-NPA, that highly respected international human rights groups, foreign legislators, lawyers, judges, government officials, church groups, religious leaders, journalists, civil libertarians, and fact-finding missions are holding responsible for the serial murder of activists based on the overwhelming evidence and testimonies.

It is the military, not the NPA, that has the motive to kill the leaders and members of legal progressive organizations. Most of the victims were activists opposing the Arroyo regime's corrupt and brutal rule. It is absolutely absurd and idiotic to claim that the NPA would kill those are who are fighting for social changes that the revolutionary movement is also fight for.

It is the military, not the NPA, that has operatives and personnel in the cities and towns centers that can carry out assassinations and abductions of innocent civilians on a massive scale, in public places, in the vicinity of police stations or military detachments, and in broad daylight, with no fear of detection, interception, or prosecution.

It is the military, not the NPA, that has enormous funds and logistics to conduct surveillance and assassinations�including special pistols with silencers, tinted vans and motorcycles that can get away with having no plate numbers, expensive bugging devices and high-tech cellphone interceptors that can identify phone numbers, monitor voice calls, send anonymous death threats through text messages, and track the location of activists using GPS. The MIG and ISAFP were forced to admit the existence and use of such equipment by the military during the "Hello Garci" expos�. One unit costs $200,000 or P10 million and is "available only to government or military agencies," according the US manufacturer's website.

And yet, the military's forked tongues continue to spit out ridiculous lies with a poker face in a last-ditch effort to demonize the revolutionary movement. This is part of Gloria Arroyo's boastful and ambitious "endgame strategy" of crushing the "lingering insurgency problem" in two years. Why?

Money, money, money

The military's "psywar experts" are obsessive-compulsive but highly trained liars. This merely reflects the lying, cheating, and virulent character of their fake president, the mother of hypocrites who is desperately clinging to power. Gloria Arroyo is copying from George W. Bush's strategy of exaggerating the threat of terrorism to justify its war on Iraq, inventing lies such as the existence of weapons of mass destruction (never found), or Saddam's connections with the al Qaeda (never proven). The whole world knew that Bush's real motive was Iraqi oil, but Bush lied with chutzpah.

In the Philippines, Arroyo and her coterie of generals know, but will never admit, that they can not and could not win the war against the revolutionary movement as long as the corrupt system flourishes and unwittingly provides the NPA with a regular batch of fresh recruits. Fidel Ramos himself has openly criticized Gloria's endgame strategy and predicted its failure. So, why do Gloria and her lackey marshmallow generals insist on such bold claims?

America's military aid to the Philippines amounted to a whopping $114 million in 2003 and $164 million in 2005 (P8.2 billion), aside from $148M in surplus logistics and $2.7 million for "military education."

Gloria and her generals know that they can enjoy a steady stream of multi-million dollar support from America if and only if they suck up to the US imperialist's "war against terrorism." They know very well that without a war, they cannot justify a bloated military budget and cannot achieve "military modernization." And so, what better way to "generate funds" from America than to declare total war against the revolutionary movement in the name of "anti-terrorism"? The generals have gleefully joined in the fake president's impossible target because that is the only path for them to gain medals and promotions, career advancements, kickbacks, scandalous retirement benefits, and juicy positions in civilian government after retirement.

In short, the crafty and greedy generals hope to shoot three birds in one shot: kill oppositionists, advance their careers, and get rich in the process.

Top Secret

The government's official but unwritten policy is to "kill the Leftists and blame it on the Left." By doing so, the government has provided its death squads with a ready-made alibi and granted them virtual immunity from being caught and prosecuted. They are licensed to kill all they want, with no fear of punishment.

The Arroyo regime's bloody campaign plan against the Legal Left has been hatched in a top secret meeting of the Cabinet Oversight Committee for Internal Security (COCIS) that includes Gloria Arroyo, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales, former Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz Jr., AFP Chief of Staff Hermogenes Esperon and Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez. The plan is couched in the seemingly harmless phrase "neutralizing the insurgency's political infrastructure" which actually means "a sustained and widespread elimination of leaders of CPP-NPA front organizations so as to sow a climate of fear that will discourage membership in such groups, paralyze their anti-government activities, and deprive the CPP-NPA of political and financial support."

The COCIS cabal has secretly transmitted this policy to all AFP battalions through trusted commanders such as Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan, in close coordination with the ISAFP, MIG and other intelligence agencies. The entire project is funded directly from GHQ and will not undergo auditing, a fact that caught the rabid interest of the corrupt generals. This top secret plan has been confirmed by certain officers in the military who are revolted by the Arroyo regime's barbarity and have leaked the information to the revolutionary movement.

Modus operandi

To operationalize the plan, the battalion commander, battalion S2, and head of the intelligence unit are tasked with the formation of a death squad from the battalion's personnel, CAFGU, and even rebel returnees so that the killing can be blamed to a purge in case they get caught. The rebel returnees would later be "silenced" and blamed again to a purge. The assassins are provided with the necessary firearms, ammunition, motorcycles, tinted vans, safehouses, and other logistics. The battalion commander, S2, and head of the intelligence unit then come up with a list of targets for assassination. Each battalion is assigned a pre-arranged "window" of time in which to carry out an assassination, with some "priority regions" having a bigger quota than others, so as to achieve an "optimum, sustained, and nationwide terror effect."

Further proof of the military's bloodthirsty campaign can be found in the AFP's powerpoint presentation "Knowing the Enemy" that categorizes progressive party list and other organizations such as Bayan, Bayan Muna, Anakpawis, and many others as "communist fronts" and are, therefore, "enemies of the state" that can and should be considered as military targets. Even the CBCP, UCCP, Philippine Independent Church, and Free Legal Assistance Group are included in the list. The same line can also be found in the book Trinity of War which is Bible of AFP and PNP generals in their counter-insurgency campaigns.

Declassified US documents also reveal that US "military advisers" and the CIA have directed the formation of deaths squads in 43 countries including the Philippines, Vietnam, Latin America, and many other countries.

The butcher Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan has also arrogantly and inadvertently admitted to the media in a slip of the tongue that the victims of political assassinations were "collateral damage" in the counterinsurgency war. The GHQ directive is: "Make no distinction between armed rebels and unarmed civilian supporters." This is a blatant violation of international humanitarian law and rules of war. Arroyo's praise for Palparan in her State of the Nation Address is a tacit approval of the killings.

This reflects the depths to which Arroyo and the military's fascist mentality has truly sunk. For them, it is justified to kill communists. It is right to kill all their supporters and sympathizers, even if they are unarmed civilians. Such people have no rights and may be treated like animals for slaughter. "Might is right!" "The end justifies the means!"

This is utterly barbaric and cowardly. Unable to defeat the NPA in honorable combat, Arroyo's butchers have turned to maiming and killing defenseless and unarmed civilians�be they lowly peasants, eminent bishops, struggling journalists, or innocent children�in the name of "anti-terrorism."

Masters of deceit

The Arroyo regime's lust for power does not end with the rabid persecution of the Left, but includes all other political oppositionists. None other than Gloria Arroyo's husband directs the regime's dirty tricks department. He played a leading role in brokering her wife's fake victory by doctoring the 2004 election results, to the extent of bribing, kidnaping, or threatening unsympathetic COMELEC officials and their relatives, or reassigning "unfriendly" military officers. Also part of the regime's dirty tricks is Mike Arroyo's more than 40 libel suits against journalists, kidnaping and death threats against the families of Senate witnesses and political oppositionists, burning electoral documents to destroy evidence of cheating, fake bomb threats, fake assassination plots against Arroyo, fabricating and planting evidence against rivals, fake witnesses, trumped up charges against the Batasan 5 plus torture for the Erap 5, vindictive actions and demolition jobs against political rivals such as the attempted suspension of Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay, "calibrated preemptive response" against demonstrators, etc.

Meanwhile, Gloria Arroyo can pretend to know nothing about these. She has no qualms as her henchmen do the dirty work for her, using the government's entire arsenal for a whole range of sordid tactics to destroy their enemies.

Another favorite tactic of the military's psywar department is the use of fake mass graves such as the ones in Bukidnon, which the governor and other officials of Bukidnon strongly disputed and denounced as false. Furthermore, the movement's errors of twenty years ago have long been repudiated and corrected through the rectification movement, and the errors' masterminds have been expelled from the Party.

Arroyo may think that the issue of political killings will just die and fade away like the Hello Garci scandal, but she is dead wrong.

George Bush's lies have started to backfire on him and his utra-rightist gang. International condemnation has now swept even the American people into repudiating Bush. So, too, will the lies of Gloria Arroyo and her generals backfire, and with a terrible vengeance. The Philippine military's psywar experts may have learned their lessons well from their American tutors. But they failed miserably in their lessons from the Filipino people's revolutionary history.

Once again, the revolutionary movement does not resort to killing activists just to discredit and embarrass the government or gain political mileage. The Arroyo regime is already doing an excellent job of embarrassing and damning itself with its scandalous, corrupt, deceitful, and terrorist rule. The CPP-NPA and the revolutionary movement are not terrorists. They are a legitimate belligerent force fighting for national liberation from foreign domination, local feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism.

If Gloria and her generals only knew, the solution to the "insurgency problem" is simple�implement genuine agrarian reform and nationalist industrialization, uphold national sovereignty and the people's democratic rights, and repudiate the three basic problems in Philippine society. #


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