Activist Marc Rodrego, member of the Malaya Movement USA, confronted and slammed warfreak and warmonger US Representative Darrell Issa (R-California) while speaking at a conference discussing the military presence of the US in the South China Sea. The representative spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ 14th annual conference in Washington, DC on July 11.

Issa is a member of the US-Philippine Friendship Caucus and the US House Foreign Affairs Committee. He is pushing a resolution in the US Congress to grant an additional $500 million to the Philippines in military aid to buy “drones and other military equipment for surveillance.”

Activist Rodrego emphasized Issa’s and the US imperialists’s accountability in the murders and repression committed by the Marcos regime and the previous Duterte regime against the Filipino people. Malaya Movement USA called for Issa to withdraw the resolution. The group said these drones and military equipment will only be used to monitor Filipino activists in the Philippines and to suppress any resistance to US interference in the country.

Rep. Issa’s actions are aimed to “defend US interests in the Philippines at the expense of the lives of the Filipino people,” Rodrego said. The imperialist US is killing Filipinos by funding war criminals like the Marcos regime and its military, police and other security forces in the Philippines, he said.

Last May, democratic organizations launched the International People’s Tribunal 2024 in Brussels, Belgium to address indictments of war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law in the Philippines. Accused in the tribunal are President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr, former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, the Government of the Republic of the Philippines, President Joseph R. Biden, and the Government of the United States. The entire tribunal found the accused guilty of all charges of war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law contained in the indictment.

Andrew Much, from the Baltimore Committee of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (Baltimore-CHRP), mocked Issa and said that he does not represent the interests of the people of California and the American people. “We as Americans don’t want the presence of US troops in the Philippines. We are against the US waging war in the Philippines. We are against the militarization of the West Philippine Sea,” he said.