A War Most Dirty

Counterinsurgency and the role of the US

What happened to Rebelyn is not an isolated incident. This horrendous act is part of the counterinsurgency, counter-terror operations of the AFP, which it learned from the US Armed Forces.

A study of US counterinsurgency operations reveals that it has two underlying principles. First, the guerrilla/terrorist assumes an illegal status and therefore his life is forfeit if apprehended. Second, the guerrilla uses terror to subjugate the local population and can therefore be effectively neutralized with the use of counter-terror by the counterinsurgent.

“Terror Operations,” by the counterinsurgent includes assassinations, disappearances, and mass executions. These terror operations were implemented by the U.S. and its puppet armies in many countries in subsequent decades, and remained as a hallmark of the counterinsurgency state in the 1980s. These types of operations were justified and described in manuals of the US Armed Forces, such as those declassified in the 1990s. The May 1961 U.S. manual on “Operations Against Irregular Forces” described two types of “irregular activities”: overt and covert. It defined “overt irregular activities” to include terrorism by assassination, bombing, armed robbery, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping; provocation of incidents, reprisals, and holding of hostages; and denial activities, such as arson, flooding, demolition, use of chemical or biological agents, or other acts designed to prevent use of an installation, area, product, or facility. “Covert irregular activities,” on the other hand, included espionage, sabotage, dissemination of propaganda and rumors, delaying or misdirecting orders, issuing false or misleading orders or reports, assassination, extortion, blackmail, theft, counterfeiting, and identifying individuals for terroristic attack.

While these manual of operations are four decades old and were used extensively by the US Armed Forces and its “surrogate armies”, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia, during the 1970s and 80s, there are strong indications that these tactics and methods are being used in the US declared “ War on Terror”.

The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review of the US Defense Department revealed that US military operations had and would stress on unconventional, irregular, foreign internal defense, counter-terror and counterinsurgency operations. The implementation of these dirty tactics could be seen in the spate of extrajudicial killings in Iraq, as well as the Philippines, the practice of “rendition” of terror suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency and enforced disappearances by the AFP, and the official approval by the Bush Administration of the use of torture methods such as the infamous water cure, now called as water boarding.

The current thrust of the US Armed Forces is for all of its units to be trained in these types of operations to free Special Forces units which would, in turn, prioritize the conduct of trainings to surrogate armies and conduct special operations. The frequent joint military exercises and trainings dubbed as US-RP Balikatan exercises are part of this thrust. It is also not a coincidence that US Special Forces units have maintained a continuing presence in the country and have been sighted conducting intelligence and combat operations with AFP troops.

An article published in the website of Philstar.com with the title AFP: Other groups behind Pitao slay written by James Mananghaya quoted National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales saying that authorities should look deeper into the “message sent” by the murderers of Rebelyn.

“They have to look into the style by which she was killed,” he said. “It was so brutal and that it was sending some message.” Then he said he also does not know the message the killers were conveying.

Gonzales could not resist the temptation of blurting out that Rebelyn’s torture, rape, and murder is conveying a message. If he was not afraid of the bigger political backlash it would create, he would have even spelled it out: that the family, friends, and supporters of the Communist Party of the Philippines, NPA, and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, as well as other groups opposed to the Arroyo government such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front, are fair game for the AFP.

US counterinsurgency operations have, in the past, been called a dirty war. The abduction, torture, rape and murder of Rebelyn have shown that the counterinsurgency strategy of the Arroyo government and the US-trained AFP is indeed a dirty war. It is time for the Filipino people to likewise send a clear message to the Arroyo government: Enough!(Bulatlat.com)