Is it all Navy fuel we’re storing for the US,or is there so much more?

Is it all Navy fuel we’re storing for the US,or is there so much more?

In the last Manila Times report, Sen. Maria Josefa Imelda “Imee” Romualdez Marcos, the President’s elder sister and chairperson of the Senate foreign relations committee, was quoted as asking the Department of National Defense (DND) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to explain the reported storage of 39 million gallons of fuel for the US Navy in Subic, Zambales.

Subic is the former home port of the US Seventh Fleet, which was returned to the Philippines upon the termination of the 1947 Philippine-US Military Bases Agreement (MBA) in 1991.

Four years before that, the 1987 Philippine Constitution banned foreign military bases, troops or facilities from Philippine soil, except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate and, if Congress so requires, ratified by the electorate in a national referendum held for that purpose, and recognized as a treaty by the other contracting state. In 2014, this constitutional ban was directly contradicted by the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), an executive agreement rather than a treaty, that “granted” the US operational sites inside Philippine military bases to pre-position its troops, war materiel and facilities in a possible war with China over Taiwan.

This highly unconstitutional agreement was quickly “constitutionalized” by a Supreme Court ruling penned by President Benigno Simeon Aquino 3rd’s “puppet” chief justice, Maria Lourdes Sereno, who came into office after Aquino had bribed members of Congress to impeach and remove Chief Justice Renato Corona on a solitary trumped-up charge. Sereno was later removed by her peers in a quo warranto proceeding initiated by the solicitor general without the benefit of an impeachment process. EDCA is widely regarded as highly unconstitutional and has failed to bind many Filipinos in conscience.

Senator Marcos pointed out that since Subic is not one of the “agreed locations” where the US is “authorized,” even unconstitutionally, under EDCA, to pre-position its troops, war materiel and facilities against China, what is the legal basis for allowing this vast quantity of fuel to be reportedly transferred from Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii (a place well-remembered for its role in Japan’s attack on the United States at the start of the last Pacific war), to Subic? She raised not only a foreign policy and national security question but also an environmental concern. The clear implication is that the Marcos government has granted the US more military “sites” than it has officially told the Filipino people or that EDCA has become an “open-ended” proposition.

The US Embassy has confirmed the fuel transfer, reportedly from its military facility at Pearl Harbor to a commercial storage facility in Subic. We will ask Senator Marcos to respond to this confirmation and tell us whether or not it answers all her questions. But I have an even more important question: Is the US Navy fuel the only thing we are keeping in Subic for the US armed forces?

I ask this question based on how we have allowed our Constitution to function. Our Constitution renounces war as an instrument of national policy, prohibits foreign military bases, troops or facilities within its territory, and proclaims the Philippines as a nuclear weapons-free state. Yet our government has not allowed the Constitution to operate according to its letter and spirit, as far as our sovereign rights are concerned. Based on Senator Marcos’ exposé, the Filipino people have not been told about all the military arrangements between the US and the Philippine government, assuming the former has informed the latter of everything it is doing within our territory.

Does the Philippine government know, at the appropriate official level, what kind of weapons of mass destruction, if any, have been pre-positioned inside the US EDCA military sites? And is there any reasonable assurance that they will be used only for defense, as President Marcos Jr. has assured us, and not for any “offensive action”? What assurance do we have that our status as a nuclear weapons-free state is not being violated, with or without the knowledge of our government, with the hypothetical or actual installation of US nuclear weapons on our soil?

It will be recalled that in 1969, at the US Senate foreign relations committee hearings chaired by Sen. Stuart Symington, it was revealed that US nuclear weapons (of an unknown quantity) had been stored in the Philippines without the knowledge and consent of the Philippine government. At the time, the official US policy was to neither confirm nor deny the existence of nuclear weapons in any particular location. What worried the Symington committee, however, was the possibility that the nuclear secret could leak out anytime and become an explosive political issue during the Philippine presidential election where President Ferdinand E. Marcos was running for reelection. Marcos was eventually updated on the issue, and the secret never acquired a life of its own in the public domain.

In 1971, the US National Security Council revealed that the authorized ceiling of nuclear weapons deployed to the Philippines was 201, including 115 tactical bombs on Navy ships. In 1973, the same source revealed that the authorized number of nuclear weapons at Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base had reached 260. It is not clear though whether this was with the full knowledge and consent of the Philippine government.

I cannot say the Marcos government is better informed today than its predecessors were on the deployment of US nuclear weapons to the Philippines. But until the US adopts a policy of complete transparency with its allies on this issue, and our own government adopts a policy of complete transparency with the Filipino people, we shall continue to inhabit a world that is full of speculation, suspicion and mistrust. Sen. Imee Marcos’ plate will remain full.