The ATA is practically a bill of attainder insofar as it seeks through the ATC to proscribe and criminalize and subject to punitive sanctions entire parties, organizations like the CPP and NPA and their leaders and members effectively without any real due process beyond the inadequate and deceptive semblance of it in the ATA. The ATA uses the long-discredited notion of guilt by association in order to criminalize and subject an expanding number of people to punitive sanctions without truly any due process and without the presumption of innocence before personal guilt is actually proven in court.

The ATA is far more oppressive than the Anti-Subversion Law of 1957. This earlier oppressive law at least required the two-witness rule and a full judicial process before any one could be adjudged a “subversive” and subjected to punishment. But under the ATA, a supra-executive organ like the ATC relying on its political bias and on dubious and uncontested intelligence reports can practically adjudge any party, organization or natural person a “terrorist” and subject this to punitive sanctions.

The ATA can be used to pressure, persecute or punish any party, organization or individual beyond those already proscribed and persecuted. The Arroyo regime can easily use the ATC to expand the targets of attack under the catch-all provisions of the ATA. The Council can arbitrarily designate suspected officers, sympathizers and members of any organized entity or any individual for that matter as accomplices or accessories in the crime of terrorism or in a supposed conspiracy to commit terrorism.

The Arroyo regime can use the ATA in an unlimited way to serve its selfish economic and political interests and intimidate and suppress the broad range of opposition, including the legal progressive and conservative forces. We have already seen how the regime has generated waves of human rights violations against the legal patriotic and progressive organizations and progressive party-list groups, the social, peace and human rights activists among the religious, truthful journalists and other forces in the broad range of opposition to the regime.

The ATC can unleash against the political opponents of the Arroyo regime a series of oppressive actions, such as wiretapping and other forms of surveillance against which the victims have no prompt remedy; indefinite proscription and freezing of financial assets and accounts; fabricated charges of terrorism to cause the permanent imprisonment on the ground of non-bailability or house arrest which result in the curtailment of the freedom of expression, movement, communications and other rights; the three-day detention limit (easily extendible upon a mere claim by security officials of an “imminent terrorist attack”) either to force a confession and consequently imprison victims indefinitely on the ground of non-bailability or to eliminate witnesses and evidence of forced disappearances and thus to ensure impunity for the minions of the regime in committing torture, murder and other atrocities against their victims.

The entire nation and the people of the world have witnessed how the Arroyo regime has used the Cabinet Oversight Committee on Internal Security and the Anti-Terrorism Task Force (predecessors of the Anti-Terrorism Council and its Secretariat) to direct the murder, kidnapping and torture of hundreds of legal activists (including workers, peasants, women, youth, teachers, journalists, religious, human rights activists, lawyers, NDFP consultants and other people) and the large military campaigns to intimidate, harm and displace more than a million people from their homes and land under Oplan Bantay Laya I and II.

Given the license and weapon like the ATA, the Arroyo regime and its military and police minions are set to escalate human rights violations. Under such circumstances, we can expect the broad masses of the people and the revolutionary forces to intensify all forms of resistance. The Arroyo regime is bent on killing the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations with the use of the ATA. It can only fuel the flames of the armed revolution by escalating human rights violations in the futile effort to use brute military force to subjugate and pacify the people and the revolutionary forces. Posted by
(Bulatlat.com)

*Prof. Jose Maria Sison is chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) and chairman of the International Coordinating Committee, International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS).

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