Iran's Press TV Pits EIR's Billington vs. the London School of Economics on the Crisis in the Philippines

Jan. 7 (LPAC) - EIR's Asia correspondent Mike Billington had the opportunity to square off with the London School of Economic (LSE) Asia expert James Putzel, as the two were guests on the Four Corners program on Press TV, the English language station in Iran. The subject was the continued insurgency by both the Philippine Communist Party's National People's Army and the Islamic forces in the South, and the governments failed efforts to deal with it. While Putzel presented an academic description of the problem, correctly describing the insurgency as feeding off the poverty and the extra judicial killings of the social activists by military death squads, but blaming it on the Filipinos alone, Billington located the cause in the George Shultz/Paul Wolfowitz coup against Marcos and his development programs—especially the nuclear power plant—in 1986, under their puppet Gen. Fidel Ramos, and the loss of sovereignty in the Philippines since that time. Billington also traced the extra judicial killings to the "Operation Condor" death squads in Chile under Pinochet, whose regime was also created by Shultz, showing that the death squad approach was introduced into the Philippines under Shultz's continued control over Ramos and his clique.

The LSE's Putzel became quite unhinged with this discussion, interrupting the Iranian host to protest that this is "all a bit far-fetched. Mike Billington sometimes comes out with theories like that, along with the organization he's associated with." But the host was far more interested in the reality of the "regime change" policies of Shultz and his neoconservative allies. Naturally, the Iranians are particularly interested in how Shultz and Wolfowitz "cut their teeth" (as Billington put it) on the Philippines coup, especially the destruction of the nuclear power facility, in running anti-nuclear regime change policies. Billington concluded by emphasizing that in his recent trip to the Philippines, he found most Filipinos, including leading people in government and in the private sector, now realize how they had cut their own throats with the 1986 coup against Marcos, and now are fighting to revive the nuclear based industrial development programs.

The half hour show can be watched at http://www.presstv.com/pop/wmp.aspx?id=37797. The second half of the program, on Iran-US relations, allowed Billington to present LaRouche's perspective on the Iran NIE, the Annapolis meeting, and the British Operation Chaos. [MOB]

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