The belligerent responses of Major General Antonio Parlade and Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy to IBON’s filing of an administrative case against the two and Secretary Hermogenes Esperon only bolster the case against them, said the research group. Speaking from their positions of authority, Maj. Gen. Parlade still insists on made-up facts while communications Usec. Badoy’s runaway imagination weaved a fantastic tale.

IBON on Monday filed administrative charges against Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Southern Luzon Commander Maj. Gen. Parlade, Presidential Communications and Operations Office (PCOO) Undersecretary Badoy and National Security Adviser Esperon for their relentless and unfounded terrorist-tagging of IBON.

Respondents Parlade and Badoy are members and Esperon is vice-chair of the National Task Force to End Local Communism and Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC). Citing provisions from the Ombudsman Act of 1989 and the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees, IBON asked the Ombudsman to hold the respondents answerable for their malicious abuse of authority and negligent performance of duties as public officials, among others.

The responses of Parlade and Badoy are rife with simple factual errors, said the group. “They insist that IBON’s textbooks ‘radicalize children and incite them to rebel against the government’. Parlade, for instance, is fond of saying that IBON tackles the Jabidah Massacre to discredit the AFP yet none of the textbooks we publish even mentions this.”

Parlade repeats that spouses of the insitution’s Editorial Board are Communist cadres or members of the New People’s Army (NPA), added IBON, yet each of them are fully-documented and quite visibly living and working in the cities. “He also insists that it is the International League of Peoples’ Struggles (ILPS) that red-tags IBON and identifies it as a communist front, when the ILPS does no such thing in its website or voluminous documents,” said the group.

IBON also said that for her part, Badoy weaved a tale of the research group being at the center of a huge secret conspiracy to overthrow the Duterte administration and, among others, funding terrorism and implicated in teaching 5-year-olds to be ‘child warriors’ and 8-year-old ‘killing machines’. The group added: “She also again accuses IBON of biased and inaccurate data and ‘manufacturing ‘imperialist statistics’ ”.

The group further said, “Badoy’s errors, false accusations, and fantasies are too many to refute one-by-one but it is notable that she could not even get IBON’s organizational structure, filed at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), straight. She erroneously refers to ‘IBON Foundation and IBON Philippines (plus IBON International)’ when we are simply IBON Foundation and IBON International. Usec. Badoy only exposes herself to further ridicule with her wild unsubstantiated claims.”

“The statements of Parlade and Badoy are malicious and, indeed, already clearly libelous”, IBON said. “We are however refraining from filing a libel case on the principle that the criminalization of libel has been used by the government against advocates of freedom of the press and freedom of information, as many friends in media will attest to.”

IBON said that it still hopes that the respondents to their complaint will cease with their baseless accusations, but takes solace in how the outbursts of Parlade and Badoy provide additional evidence for the Ombudsman of the officials’ misdeeds and misconduct. ###