PHILIPPINES: ANTI-TERROR ACT FURTHER EMBOLDENS FORCES OF STATE TERRORISM (tags)
Even without the Anti-Terror Act, euphemistically called the Human Security Act of 2007, the US-directed Arroyo regime has unleashed the counterrevolutionary military and police forces on the people and spurred them to commit all kinds of barbarities, including the massacre and massive displacement of people in the countryside and the extrajudicial killing, abduction and torture of so many unarmed legal activists. These atrocities are all in line with the Bush global war of terror and its Philippine puppet version called Oplan Bantay Laya I and II. Upon the signing of the Anti-Terror Act by Gloria M. Arroyo, the reactionary military and forces and their special operations teams and death squads are further licensed and further emboldened to commit acts of state terrorism. The main objective of the Act is to suppress the people’s movement for national liberation and democracy and the broad range of legal forces criticizing and opposing the regime. If the targets of the act were only such small groups like the supposedly Al Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf and Jema’ah Islamiyah, the existing system of security agencies and criminal law on murder would have sufficed.