Philippines Supreme Court Chief Justice denounces Cheney's World War III doctrine for destruction of the Philippines.

April 23 (EIRNS)--Although he does not name Dick Cheney, nor use the word "fascism," Philippine Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno has directly denounced Cheney's "mindless war on terrorism" for leading the world to dictatorships and global war. Chief Justice Puno's graduation speech to the University of the East in Manila on April 18, carried on the Supreme Court website, says that terrorism is bad enough, "but the mindless, knee-jerk reaction to extirpate the evil is more discomforting," noting that the "quickie solution is to unfurl the flag, sing the national anthem, and issue the high-pitched call to arms for the military and the police to use their weapons under the theme 'victory at all costs.'" He denounced the U.S. use of "bruising aggressiveness," including in the Philippines. "In less polite parlance, the search and destroy strategy gave little respect to the sovereignty of states and violated their traditional borders," he said, while also trampling on civil liberties, "for laws are silent when the guns of war do the talking."

Chief Justice Puno, who was appointed by President Gloria Arroyo with the expectation that he would swing the Court's vote in favor of her administration's explicit and regular breaches of the Constitution, and support her effort to change the Constitution altogether, instead has enumerated the crimes of the Arroyo administration, including warrantless searches and the rampant death squad murders, while laying the ultimate blame on the Bush/Cheney Administration: "The threats to our national security and human rights will be aggravated if we have a state weakened internally by a government hobbled by corruption, struggling with credibility, battling the endless insurgence of the left and the right, and by a state weakened externally by pressure exerted by creditor countries, by countries where our trade comes from, by countries that supply our military and police armaments. A weak state cannot fully protect the rights of its citizens within its borders just as a state without economic independence cannot protect the rights of its citizens who are abroad from the exploitation of more powerful countries."

The Chief Justice concluded by noting that "it is poverty that truly terrorizes people," as death by hunger is a far greater fear than that of "some invisible suicide bomber."