By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chief Political Consultant
National Democratic Front of the Philippines
10 March 2007
National security adviser Norberto Gonzales is absolutely wrong and malicious in claiming that I have hatched a plot for sniper teams of the New People’s Army to hit Gloria M. Arroyo, himself and Senator Jinggoy Estrada. It is Gonzales himself who is hatching the plots and false charges against me.
I have no authority whatsoever to “hatch” any “plot” for the NPA or to issue any order to the NPA. The leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the NPA and the NDFP are right there in the Philippines to make decisions about what to do with such enemies of the people as Arroyo and Gonzales.
I think that Gonzales is correct when he estimates that the NPA wants to punish him and his boss Arroyo. He knows very well the crimes of treason, corruption and gross human rights violations for which both of them are culpable. Because of such crimes, the people hate the Arroyo regime and wish the revolutionary forces to arrest, try and punish Arroyo and her worst subalterns.
But I think that Gonzales is definitely lying and is engaged in pure intrigue by claiming that the NPA is after Senator Estrada who is in the opposition against the Arroyo regime. Earlier he also claimed that the NPA was after the former president Joseph Estrada. What is highly probable is that Gonzales and his malevolent ilk have the intention of harming the Estradas and blaming the crime on the NPA.
Gonzales is a notorious member of the coterie of cabinet officials, top military and police officers who have been directing the dirty tactics of denouncing as “communists” and “enemies of the state” unarmed legal activists, subjecting them to extrajudicial killings and then blaming communists and the NPA as the killers.
Gonzales is trying hard although in vain to hatch plots and false charges against me in order to generate sensational news. I have learned that he is hyperactive in using the Inter-Agency Legal Action Group to fabricate at least 1500 criminal charges against me by blaming on me both the tactical offensives of the NPA and the extrajudicial killings committed by the reactionary military and police forces.
Gonzales wants to divert attention from the reports of the Alston mission and Melo commission and from the impending trial of the case of the Filipino people against the Arroyo regime and others before the Permanent People’s Tribunal in The Hague, The Netherlands on 21-25 March 2007.
Gonzales wants to seize the initiative in the current electoral campaign through propaganda and repression and pave the way for electoral fraud and terrorism in May and the implementation of the Anti-Terror Law from July onwards. He is desperately trying to prove to Arroyo that he should not be removed from the cabinet.
There is serious infighting within the cabinet oversight committee on internal security, the presidential anti-terrorist task force and the anti-terrorism council. Gonzales and the executive secretary General Eduardo Ermita are united on the grounds of pro-imperialism and anti-communism but have been competing for personal closeness to Arroyo and the most influence on her on security matters.
Ermita has come out on top as the anti-terrorism czar. He wants to further consolidate his power and push out Gonzales whom he has always derided as a mere snitch, far below the calibre of a senior military or police officer. Thus, Ermita has announced that Gonzales is resigning from the cabinet at the end of the month. He blames Gonzales for grave miscalculations in inviting the special rapporteurs of the UN and representatives of European governments to look into the extrajudicial killings. ###
