CLARK FREEPORT – Are members of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other American intelligence units holding office and interrogating detainees at the PNP Custodial Center in Camp Crame?
Militant groups said yesterday they are, and they want PNP Director General Nicanor Bartolome to explain why.
The Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya) and Anakpawis party list cited a letter sent by “political prisoner” Alan Jazmines to human rights group Karapatan saying that “elements of FBI and other intelligence agencies of US are being allowed to interrogate political detainees suspected of having links with alleged terrorist organizations.”
“The PNP chief should not tell us the FBIs are there for a visiting stint under the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) or Washington’s intelligence operatives are there to attend a cocktail party inside the police custodial center,” Pamalakaya chair Fernando Hicap said.
Hicap said “Bartolome should reveal who instructed him to allow the US FBI to hold office in and transform the police custodial center into an interrogation center of Washington D.C in the country.”
He said it is likely that the presence of the American agents at Camp Crame had the blessings of the Office of the President, the Department of National Defense, and the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Jazmines, a political consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) in the peace talks with the Government of the Philippines (GPH), also claimed that three of the prisoners detained at the custodial center were Indonesian nationals who were arrested in Malaysia and Indonesia, and who were apparently brought to the prison facility in the country allegedly at the behest of the US government.
He claimed that the Indonesians were given false Filipino identities to ‘legalize’ their detention in PNP Custodial Center.
“The intelligence operations of the FBI within the sovereign territory of the Philippines are being undertaken underhandedly and without the Filipino people’s full knowledge.
The absence of a formal treaty allowing such operations makes such spy operations and renditions illegal even from the point of view of the laws of the reactionary Philippine government,” Jazmines said in his letter.
Hicap, also the vice-chairperson of Anakpawis party list, said “the PNP leadership should break their silence on the issue of allowing the US FBI agents to conduct covert intelligence operations inside the Philippine territory.”
“Worse, it (PNP) has offered the country’s detention facilities for political interrogations and imprisonment of individuals suspected by the US government of having links with terrorist organizations,” he lamented.
Pamalakaya and Anakpawis urged the Senate and the House of Representatives to “conduct a joint or separate congressional inquiry on the reported clandestine operations and basing of US FBI agents inside the PNP Custodial Center in Camp Crame.”
