On the Renewed Campaign of Vilification Against my Person
Press Statement of Prof. Jose Maria Sison
July 20, 1991
I am not surprised by the renewed campaign of vilification against my person concerning the Plaza Miranda bombing in 1971.
My immediate response to such malicious campaign is to laugh it off and consider it as something long regarded by the people as the ugly sound of a broken record played repeatedly.
In the previous Senate hearings on the same Plaza Miranda case, nothing beyond self-contradictory and perjured statements, hearsay and multiple hearsay and the like was ever presented against me by notorious agents of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).
The most obvious instigators of the campaign of vilification are the military psywar experts and their American mentors in the scheme of the low-intensity conflict.
In order to cover up their crimes, the gross violators of human rights in the AFP fabricate charges of human rights violations against the advocates of national liberation, democracy and just peace.
The Philippine Commission on Human Rights (PCHR) is a notorious propaganda agency of the AFP and the Aquino regime. It has the criminal record of condoning the human rights violations perpetrated by the AFP under the Marcos and Aquino regimes.
The campaign of slander against me is meant to counter the recent criticism by Amnesty International of the gross human rights violations by the AFP under the Aquino regime.
Some political rivals and enemies of the Aquino ruling clique wish to revive the old discredited charge of Marcos that the late Senator Aquino had something to do with the Plaza Miranda bombing. But it is also clear that the Aquino regime is being misled by US and AFP psywar experts to think that a renewed campaign of slander against me will distract the attention of the people from the social and natural calamities, the ever worsening crisis and the treacherous terms of the draft US-RP military bases treaty.
The worst elements in Philippine society, inside and outside the AFP, are also trying to sabotage and stop the peace process being proposed between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front (NDF). These malicious elements are seeking to discredit the contribution which I have made as a consultant to preliminary talks about the said process.
When I was under political detention from 1977 to 1986, the Marcos regime and its military minions exerted a great deal of effort upon me, including torture, in an attempt to produce a semblance of truth to the claim of Marcos that Aquino and the NPA had been responsible for the Plaza Miranda bombing. They failed.
It would, indeed, be a great irony if now under the Aquino regime the AFP and its propaganda agency, the Philippine Commission for Human Rights, succeed even by vile propaganda alone to make people believe that the responsibility for the Plaza Miranda bombing was not that of Marcos and his henchmen, twenty years ago.
