Cynthia Jaramillo testified that her husband, Arnold, was one of nine unarmed men killed in a massive military operation that lasted almost a month. Although Arnold was a member of the NPA, "They were not killed during a legitimate running battle," she said. "The state of their bodies when recovered clearly indicated the torture, willful killing and desecration of the remains."
Arnold was taken alive and killed at close range by multiple gunshot wounds, his internal organs lacerated, his jaws and teeth shattered. This violates the Geneva Conventions and constitutes illegal extrajudicial killing off the battlefield.
Continuing the Bush policy of the pivot to Asia-Pacific, as a counterweight to China, President Barack Obama enlisted the Aquino government last year to negotiate the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. While paying lip service to the Philippines' maintaining sovereignty over the military bases in their country, it actually grants tremendous powers to U.S. forces.
The United States also wants to return to its two former military bases at Subic Bay and Clark, which it left in 1992. Those bases were critical to the U.S. imperial war in Vietnam. A U.S. return would violate the well-established right of peoples to self-determination enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) includes a prohibition on aiding and abetting liability for war crimes. An individual can be convicted of a war crime in the ICC if he or she "aids, abets or otherwise assists" in the commission or attempted commission of the crime. This includes "providing the means for its commission."
Between 2001 and 2010, the U.S. government furnished more than $507 million in military aid to the Philippine government, enabling it to commit war crimes. U.S. political and military leaders could be liable in the ICC for war crimes as aiders and abettors.
The United States planned and helped carry out the botched Mamasapano raid on Jan. 25, 2015. Dozens died when commandos from the Special Action Force of the Philippine National Police entered Mamasapano, where the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front had a stronghold.
The Obama administration had put a $5 million bounty on terror suspect Marwan's head. According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, U.S. drones identified Marwan's hiding place, led the commandos to it, and provided real-time management capacity for the operation off the battlefield. Marwan was killed but his finger was severed and disappeared. It then appeared at an FBI lab in the United States a few days later. DNA tests on the finger confirmed it was Marwan who had been killed.
Murder, torture and cruel treatment constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute and the Geneva Conventions. Both the United States and the Philippines are parties to the Geneva Conventions. But although the Philippines is a party to the Rome Statute, the United States is not. In fact, the U.S. government offered the Philippine government $30 million in additional military aid to secure an agreement that U.S. soldiers in the Philippines would not be turned over to the ICC.
The jury in the tribunal found defendant Aquino and defendant Government of the United States of America, represented by Obama, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. "Indeed," the panel wrote, "the Prosecution has satisfied the burden of proving satisfactorily that the Defendants, in concert with each other, willfully and feloniously committed gross and systematic violations of Filipino people's basic human rights."
The jurors decided, "The killings and disappearances follow a pattern. The victims are vilified as members of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and subjected to red tagging ... after vilification, the victims are subjected to surveillance and then later killed or abducted."
The panel noted, "These are not random violations." They are "not isolated, but state-sponsored, part of a policy deliberately adopted to silence the critics of the government." The jurors called it "state terror," drawing an analogy with the military and authoritarian regimes in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, which were also supported by the United States.
"Terrorist tagging," according to the jurors, is not just intended to define military targets but also to "sabotage the peace process between the National Democratic Front (NDF) and the Philippine government."
In fact, Jose Maria Sison, the NDF's chief political consultant, has been classified by the United States as a "person supporting terrorism." Sison's assets have been frozen and he is forbidden to travel, in violation of the ICCPR. The European Union's second-highest court ruled to delist Sison as a "person supporting terrorism" and reversed a decision by member governments to freeze assets. Yet he remains on the U.S. terrorism list.
Moreover, the jury determined, "the failure of the Philippine government through Defendant Aquino to identify, investigate and/or prosecute the perpetrators of these violations is among the contributing factors to the prevailing impunity in the Philippines."
The jury urged the defendants to undertake "proper remedial measures to prevent the commission or continuance of such illegal and criminal acts, to repair the damages done to the Filipino people and their environment, compensate the victims and their families for their atrocities, and to rehabilitate the communities, especially indigenous communities that have been destroyed by the criminal acts of the Defendants."
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