THIS FARCE CANT GO ON By Francisco S. Tatad Manila Standard Today, October 23, 2013 After months of high-octane public expositions on the corruption and other crimes of the Aquino administration, we have to wonder why it is still there and we have been able to put up with it until now. It will have to be said over and over again that in any civilized country this political corpse masquerading as a government should have gone long ago, pushed out, deposed, fallen, resigned. Why not here? Have we not at all been touched by the liberating juices of modern civilization? Or do we simply have an infinite capacity to withstand the lawless, twisted, and oppressive conduct of the little pharaohs of our time? As practicing Christians, we try to turn the other cheek and walk the extra mile. But we are not supposed to relish the perversion of our laws, the rape of our institutions, the idiotization and naked exploitation of our people. We have a duty to show any petty tyrant that our sense of right and wrong is not easily vaporized or trampled upon. Whatever the despot has done so far, we have a right and duty to assert that this is our country, for which we shall fight, and if necessary die and kill for. This is the bottom line. What began as an alleged P10-billion pork barrel scam, allegedly masterminded by the 49-year-old businesswoman Janet Lim Napoles, and involving some “opposition” lawmakers, has since morphed into a wild jungle of crimes involving the entire Aquino administration. The criminal conversion into loot of the so-called Priority Development Assistance Fund, through the use of ghost projects by some bogus non-governmental organizations, pales in comparison to the criminal misuse of the so-called “Disbursement Acceleration Program” to bribe lawmakers in order to impeach and remove a sitting Chief Justice, to railroad a constitutionally infirm and highly divisive Reproductive Health Act at the behest of foreign interlopers, and to control our automated elections. Whether or not the money is legally sourced, bribery is a grave moral evil that no head of government should ever perpetrate to achieve any of his political ends. It is the gravest of all the crimes that have been unmasked since the media made Napoles the queen to PNoy’s pork barrel king. Some of my more charitable friends would like to believe that Aquino remains essentially pure, untouched by the crimes for which his Cabinet members and lawmaker-allies should be held accountable. That is an empty pleading. Not all his crimes have been laid bare, but the evidence from government shows the bribery of Congress to convict Chief Justice Renato Corona was the President’s own doing. There seems now a carefully orchestrated effort to bury that crime under the DAP bubble. The media have been flooded with repetitive and redundant articles on the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of the DAP, without any mention of its use to bribe the senator-judges on the 2012 Senate impeachment court. It is apparently calculated that by not talking about the bribery of the senator-judges, the public will no longer want to talk about the congressmen who signed the Articles of Impeachment without reading the document, and of P25-billion fund to ensure the railroading of the RH Law against the solid opposition of serious constitutionalists and majority of the country’s churchgoers. We cannot allow this to happen. Whatever the Supreme Court finally says on the DAP’s validity, it should not smother the bribery case, which is the central issue against the Aquino government. Even though Aquino’s partners in crime will not allow him to be impeached for bribing Congress, his non-impeachable minions should not be spared from criminal prosecution and punishment. Before leaving the DAP issue for now, I should like to clarify two points. In summarizing the DAP releases to the 19 of the 20 senators who had convicted Corona, Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said the total of P1.1 billion represented only 0.9 percent of the total DAP funds, then estimated at P132.7 billion. If this were true, what happened to the 99.1-percent? And while we are on this issue, what happened to the missing P130 billion from the Malampaya special fund? May we have a full accounting, please? It appears that in 2011 the Department of Transportation and Communication got P4.5 billion from the “DAP” for the purchase of trains for MRT-3. But since MRT-3 is a private corporation, the DOTC could not legally acquire trains for it. So the money was parked with Light Rail Transport Authority. But why was it given in the first place? Assuming there is a legal mechanism to spend the money as a “stimulus fund” on MRT3, why has it remained “frozen” until now when it was supposed to have been quickly spent? What exactly is the play? Back to where we started, it now appears that despite the lyrical press reports about Senate President Franklin Drilon yielding to popular pressure to summon Napoles from her police detention to Sen. Teofisto Guingona III’s Blue Ribbon Committee hearing, he failed to sign the subpoena after all. This does not surprise me at all. Having been photographed too many times with Ms. Napoles and her family, attended too many of her parties inside her late mother’s mausoleum at Heritage Park, it cannot be easy for him to sign that piece of paper. But for that very same reason, he just cannot not sign it without being branded as a Napoles hireling, accomplice or protector. But let’s face it, it is a worthless exercise. Guingona is hoping to use this hearing to project himself as somebody’s possible vice presidential candidate in 2016 just as Alan Peter Cayetano and Chiz Escudero would like to use it for their own purposes. But under the strictest rules of correct procedure, the Senate should cease and desist from any investigation since Napoles is now under detention and under investigation by the Ombudsman on plunder charges. Guingona’s hearing “in aid of legislation,” (more accurately “in aid of higher political ambition”), has no superior rights to those of the Ombudsman or Napoles’s jailers. I say this despite the decision of the Makati RTC judge allowing Napoles to appear before the Guingona production. As defense counsel Lorna Kapunan has said that Napoles will simply invoke her right not to answer any question that might incriminate her. This will merely give the imperious and arrogant senators an opportunity to grandstand. They will browbeat Napoles and threaten to hold her in contempt of the Senate (as though being inside a maximum security jail in Laguna is not yet enough) just to show the frustrated public that they have tried to ferret the truth out of her. I want to see Napoles’s accusers prove her guilty in a fair trial. But I don’t want to see a spectacle, procured at our people’s expense, where bribe-taking senators who should be investigated and prosecuted for their own crimes are the ones doing the investigating like lords of a new Inquisition.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:35:02 +0000
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