Time to end U.S. Interference

JUST about a month ago during the lasts week of June, Philippine security forces shot dead four suspected Islamic State (ISIS)-linked and Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) terrorists in the combined police and military raid in Don Bosco, Parañaque City.

The joint units from the NCRPO, Parañaque City Police, Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and National Intelligence Coordination Agency (NICA) tried to serve a search warrant in Better Living Subdivision when they were met with gunfire.

In early 2019 a bombing in Jolo decimated the lone Catholic Church in the capital of Sulu province. The incident left 24 dead and was orchestrated by an Indonesian jihadist couple with ties to the Abu Sayyaf. Five months later, suicide bombers struck an AFP counter-terrorism unit and killed five.

A paper posted by Devin Lurie on June 4, 2020 in the website of the American Security Project reports that “COVID-19 has ushered in unprecedented times that terrorist organizations are keen to capitalize upon.

“ISIS is no different. ISIS seeks to utilize the opportunities the pandemic has allowed to continue its propaganda and recruitment tactics.”

And then of course the ISIS recruits will strike, not if but when – and we never know unless keen intelligence operations detect and identify, and anticipate then arrest the suspects, before they act. Yet, past experiences with the slow process of judicial investigation before issuance of warrant allow time and leakages to tip off the suspects.

The anti-terror bill now signed into law by President Duterte sharpens the legal tools of the police and military intelligence authorities to pre-empt the terrorist planners and operators to nip in the bud any attempt to maim and murder lives of both combatants and innocent civilians in the terrorists’ course of waging irregular warfare.

Yet, there are those few but powerfully noisy who oppose the anti-terror legislation that has undergone thorough debate and dissection, provided with safeguards such as immediate information to the Human Rights Commission and the right to counsel for the arrested suspects, plus an extended though still limited maximum period of detention without charges.

For Filipino citizens to question and scrutinize the law is a right that cannot be denied. But when 45 American senators brazenly intervene by demanding that the Philippines act to immediately repeal the law is unmitigated arrogance that smacks of the old imperial and colonial mentality of these U.S. solons and the height of insolence.

Any self-respecting Filipino should not be willing to swallow this insult to Philippine sovereignty and dignity and spit at these American solons who can’t even fix their own bankrupt economy, resolve the racism in their country that has persisted for the past 500 years and exploding today in the Black Lives Matter protests.

Adding further insult and injury, an even higher American official has, in the past few days of July, just added more insult after these 45 U.S. solons.

1. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting on the orders of Trump, ramps up their desperate diversionary propaganda tactics to shore up Trump’s electoral hopes by blaming China for everything from their failure in containing the coronavirus to their sinking poll ratings.

This month Pompeo suddenly reverses what for decades had been the hands-off policy of the US on territorial disputes all over the world, including the South China Sea.

It is on record that the US rejected defense secretary Delfin Lorenzana’s request for a review of the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) so the Panatag could be included in the Treaty – to which the US said “NO”.

Now, Pompeo expects Filipinos to swallow his blatant poisoned lollipop in the likes of dolts such as retired Justice Antonio Carpio, Jay Batongbakal, Richard Heydarian, the Rappler gang and the NUJP.

Probably too, the SWS would conduct a survey to show that 75 percent of Filipinos believe Pompeo’s delusional promise while in a deep schizoid episode.

U.S. interference in the Philippines, Asean and Asian affairs should be stopped and every Filipino media person as well as citizen must help in ending this.

We must not forget that it is also the Americans who are behind the creation of ISIS in the Levant to defeat Bashar Al Assad in Syria and to establishing the terror state of its own – which has thus far been defeated (hence their migration to the Asean archipelagos).