PRESS STATEMENTS

PRESS STATEMENTS & INTERVIEWS, 2001 - Present

SALONGA IS OBSESSED WITH A LIE
FROM A CIA-FUNDED BOOK

By Ruth de Leon
Executive Director
International DEFEND Committee
22 August 2009

Year in and year out, former Senator Jovito Salonga dishes out the lie that Professor Jose Maria Sison, founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), is culpable for the Plaza Miranda bombing of the Liberal Party meeting on August 21, 1971.

Salonga picks up the lie from some intriguers and from the book of the American Gregg Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement, published in 1989 by Westview Press, a notorious publishing house subsidized by the US Central Intelligence Agency for ideological anti-communist purposes.

Salonga is so obsessed with the lie that he conveniently forgets the following:

As president of the Philippine Senate and in close collaboration with the military, Salonga himself directed the Blue Ribbon and Justice Committees in 1989 to investigate the Plaza Miranda incident and to charge Prof. Sison for it. Atty. Romeo T. Capulong successfully defended Prof. Sison by debunking the charge and the false witnesses dished up by the military.
Failing to destroy Prof. Sison through Senate hearings, the military lawyers proceeded in 1991 to file a complaint against him in the office of the prosecutors of Manila. Ultimately, these prosecutors issued in 1994 a joint resolution dismissing the complaint as based on sheer speculation. For lawyers like Salonga, that should have been the end of the Plaza Miranda lie against Prof. Sison.

Salonga should be ashamed of recycling the lie every year and competing with the Filipino people in celebrating August 21 as the day of the martyrdom of Benigno Aquino in 1983 as well as in commemorating the same day for the proclamation of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in 1971 when Ferdinand Marcos scapegoated the CPP and Senator Benigno Aquino for the Plaza Miranda bombing incident.

Salonga should be most ashamed of the fact that by falsely accusing Prof. Sison he wilfully exculpates the fascist dictator Marcos from the Plaza Miranda bombing and unwittingly justifies Marcos' scapegoating of Prof. Sison, Sen. Aquino and the CPP, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in 1971 and proclamation of martial law in 1972.

It has been a mystery to many people why Salonga seems to unwittingly join the ranks of the Marcos loyalists, paid hacks and cranks who babble that Marcos was too intelligent to mastermind the Plaza Miranda bombing or the murder of Aquino at the airport . In fact, Marcos was intelligent enough in both instances to scapegoat communists and get the most benefits from his crimes before the people caught up with him and ousted him in 1986. ###

If necessary, please contact Ruth de Leon at +31-30-2310431. Thank you.

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