How leftist activists and biased media fabricated ‘drug war mass murders’

Last of two parts

WHAT makes the International Criminal Court’s case against former president Rodrigo Duterte so abominable is that it is entirely based on a deliberately fabricated deception: That his drug war involved mass murders, with the ICC prosecutor first claiming 30,000 killed, even as the closest kind of investigations by human rights groups and a biased media after since 2016 — and still continuing — claim only 76 killed, the number adopted by the ICC in its charge sheet.

A deception by whom? Mainly the US Deep State, which wanted to make sure Duterte and his daughter Sara totally are removed from the political landscape, so a presidency servile to it isn’t ended in 2028.

As the latest ICC charge sheet put it: “The attack comprised multiple acts.. against the civilian population of the Philippines, including but not limited to the 76 murders, as well as at least hundreds of other murders during the mayoral period, thousands of other murders in the presidential period.”

The ICC simply dismissed the former solicitor general’s comprehensive debunking of the charges which detailed the circumstances of most of these murders, which involved firefights with the police. Government had filed cases against policemen who blatantly undertook extrajudicial killings, the most terrible of which was the killing of a teenager by Caloocan policemen. Those policemen two years ago stood trial, were found guilty, and are now in the Muntinlupa prison.

But even if all 76 cited by the ICC were EJKs, it is totally false to use this as a sample — 0.25 percent of the total — to conclude that Duterte’s anti-drug war involved 30,000 victims, or even 6,000, the figure the police had reported to have been the casualties in that police campaign. A contrary extrapolation would be if the government submitted detailed reports that incontrovertibly show that the 76 other drug criminals were killed in firefights.

Cadres

But it wasn’t logic or reason that mattered for the activists, especially the communist cadres, experienced in propaganda work for decades, as they were manufactured, amplified and cemented by a network of activist groups and NGOs. It began not with facts, but with political design.

The “12,000” figure first appeared in 2017 press releases by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Both organizations were already lobbying the European parliament and the UNHRC to condemn Duterte’s anti-drug campaign.

Their citations? Not court records. Not police data. Not autopsy logs.

Instead, they quoted local activist networks linked to the Communist Party. — among them Karapatan, the Coalition Against Summary Execution, and several “church human-rights desks” — which themselves were merely compiling newspaper clippings and social media reports.

Each group used different definitions of “drug-related.” Some counted anyone killed “by unidentified men.” Others included deaths “possibly linked to drugs,” or even police officers killed in buy-busts.

By mid-2017, the activists’ total reached 12,000. Later, when media overseas repeated it, the number grew to 20,000, then 30,000, as though the rounding-off were proof of accuracy. The data compiled by the PNP, PDEA and Justice Department paint a very different picture.

Legitimate

From July 2016 to June 2022, there were 6,252 deaths in legitimate police operations where suspects resisted arrest.

The numbers are drawn from: PNP Spot Reports and Case Investigation Folders; PDEA post-operation reviews; and DOJ-led Task Force on Drug-Related Killings. These reports are not perfect. But they are traceable, case-based and subjected to audit by the three independent units.

Now compare that to the activists’ 30,000. To reach it, they had to add every unsolved homicides, no matter the motives, during those years — about 25,000 cases, according to PSA data — and simply assume they were drug-related.

The inflation of numbers followed a clear pattern familiar to anyone studying propaganda:

– Broad definition: “Drug-related” was defined so loosely that it covered all homicides in poor districts.

– Media echo: Local reporters, hungry for daily crime leads, labeled every unidentified body found in the street “another casualty of the drug war.” These blurbs were then harvested by NGOs to “update” the running total.

– Echo chamber: Once the number appeared in an NGO report, foreign outlets (BBC, Reuters, AFP, The Guardian) cited it as a “human-rights group estimate.” Activists then pointed back to the foreign reports as “independent confirmation.”

– Institutionalization: Within a year, the inflated figure entered UNHRC resolutions, European Parliament debates and ICC preliminary examinations — all citing each other, none checking the original source.

The result was a self-referential loop: activists quoting journalists quoting partisan activists quoting partisan human rights organizations, adopted as accurate data by the ICC.

Plot

The plot to exaggerate the casualty figure was first executed by Rappler, funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, and run by American citizen Maria Ressa. It falsely claimed that 7,080 were the casualties in the war by September 2017.

But what the police reported at that time was just 2,582 killed; the additional 4,525 Rappler reported were other cases being investigated by the police, which had nothing to do with the drug war. Rappler ignored the police’s protests on its distorted figure. Vice President Leni Robredo believed the Rappler figure and went to town repeating that false figure, especially in her travels.

Columbia University journalism professor Sheila Coronel in 2018 reported a figure — 9,000 — in a prestigious US magazine. When I asked her where she got the figure, she haughtily said she read it “somewhere.” Some investigative journalist, she is! Commission on Human Rights head Chito Gascon, a stalwart of the Duterte-hater forces in 2019, further raised the figure to 27,000 without any explanation, except for a “it-is-widely-believed” phrase.

In a hearing two years ago at the Senate, lawyer Jose Diokno used the same trick Rappler made, that according to the annual report of the president, there were 20,322 killed in Duterte’s anti-drug war. That was a blatant lie: nothing in the report said that. The police’s official tally is 6,252 killed from July 16 to November 2019.

6,252

However, the police’ 6,252 figure hews closely to researches undertaken by private entities, among them:

– Philippine Daily Inquirer’s “Kill List” based on its reporters’ tally of drug-related homicides: 2,174 from May 10, 2016 to February 16, 2017;

– ABS-CBN’s death toll from May 10, 2016 to July 2, 2019: 5,997.

– De La Salle, UP Diliman, Ateneo project funded by the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University: 7,029 from May 2016 to December 31, 2018.

The simple debunking of the ICC’s allegation that 12,000 to 30,000 were killed in Duterte’s anti-drug war involves looking at the overall homicide rate in the Philippines. This went down from 10 homicides from 2015 to 5 in 2018, and to four in 2019. In comparison, homicides in Mexico increased from nine in 2008, to a high of 24 in the course of its drug war. In Colombia during a similar phase, the rate rose from 57 in 1990 to 78 in 1992.

This could not be so recorded if there were “12,000 to 30,000” killed from 2016 to 2019. The decline is very easily explained: It is due to the fact, reported by many, that the overall crime rate fell, as criminals became very afraid of Duterte’s clampdown war, and stayed home.

Another data to show how imbecilic is the claim of 12,000 to 30,000 killed in Duterte’s drug war is the fact that from 2016 to 2019, there were 29,441 homicides due to all causes. The “12,000 to 30,000” would mean that from 40 percent to 101 percent of all homicides were due to the drug war, which is certainly preposterous.

Photo

“Use a picture. It is worth a thousand words.” First appearing in an ad journal in 1911, that had been an adage for the advertising industry, a cousin of the art of propaganda.

In late 2016, the Philippine Daily Inquirer plastered its front page with a photo that depicted a shoeless Jennelyn Olaires cradling the lifeless body of her partner, Michael Siaron. The image was immediately likened to Michelangelo’s “Pietà” for its composition and emotional charge.

The photograph became viral, allegedly illustrating the brutality of Duterte’s drug war, and the popular conclusion that it was the police who killed the young man. It was used by a multitude of international publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic and CNN. A cardboard sign was left with the body reading “I am a drug pusher. Do not emulate me,” so that the people concluded that it was the police that was responsible for the killing.

However, subsequent police investigation found that Siaron was killed by a member of a criminal syndicate rather than by the police. Ballistic tests matched bullets recovered at the scene with a firearm retrieved from Nesty Santiago, a syndicate member, who confessed he was the perpetrator, and who was himself killed months later. The sign was obviously intended to get police investigators off the track.

I am not aware of any claim by the anti-Duterte forces that this explanation is false.

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The post How leftist activists and biased media fabricated ‘drug war mass murders’ first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

How leftist activists and biased media fabricated ‘drug war mass murders’
Source: Breaking News PH