EDITORIAL - Parlade clearly can’t tell who the enemy is

It seems Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr., chief of the Armed Forces Southern Luzon Command and spokesman of the National Task Force to End Local Armed Conflict, is at it again and barking up the wrong tree.

Fresh from calling three women communists for merely expressing their views and lending their voices to an advocacy --and essentially threatening one of them-- Parlade is again on the warpath, this time against female journalist Tetch Torres-Tupas.

Parlade apparently did not like the report that Torres-Tupas wrote about the case of two Aetas who were arrested for terrorism and whose counsel now wants to intervene in the Supreme Court's oral arguments on the Anti-Terrorism Act.

Instead of seeing it for what it was --a mere news report-- Parlade seems to see it as an attack against the government. Then when asked if he will file charges against Torres-Tupas, he did not mince words.

"Aiding the terrorists by spreading lies? PUEDE," Parlade said on social media.

Also recently, it seems Parlade also threatened the groups who filed a petition against the Anti-Terrorism Act, lumping them with the communist movement.

“The Day of Judgement (sic) is upon you and the Filipino people, who have suffered enough from the malignant hands of the CPP-NPA-NDF of which you are part of, sit in Judgement (sic). Very soon, blood debts will be settled. The long arm of the law will catch up on you, and your supporters,” a post of NTF-ELCAC read.

We should laud someone who is passionate about his job, and it does seem that Parlade is zealous about what he does. However, if that fervor is paired with the cluelessness Parlade has displayed in the past and continues to display now, he is in a position to really do a lot of damage to those who don’t deserve it.

Someone who sees enemies where there aren’t any doesn’t deserve to be in the position he is in, especially with the controversial Anti-Terrorism Act looming over those who just want some positive changes in the government, as opposed to those who totally want to overthrow it.