August 6, 2001 The Philippine Star, Op-Ed, Republicanism on trial; Three events bestir nation: Lacson, SSS, Abu Sayyaf, by Teodoro C. Benigno,

August 6, 2001 The Philippine Star, Op-Ed, Republicanism on trial; Three events bestir nation: Lacson, SSS, Abu Sayyaf, by Teodoro C. Benigno,

(Last of two parts)

It unraveled Jan. 20 when Joseph Estrada heard the angry tumult of People Power II pounding at the gates of Malacañang. He fled aboard a presidential barge like a whipped dog, a ludicrous charlatan with a whelp and a whinny. He didn’t even fight back with blazing, avenging fists as he did in the movies. It unraveled again last weekend. This time Col. Victor Corpuz revealed they were still counting the loot stolen during the Estrada presidency. And now they came up with the amount of $728 million reportedly stashed in US banks mainly by Senator Panfilo Lacson.

The amount, almost a billion in US dollars, was staggering, unbelievable, mind-boggling. The exposé initially looked like an operetta cooked up by the Arroyo government, a snow job, a set-up intended to shame Ping Lacson, scuttle the opposition and end his presidential pretentions once and for all. After all, the guy could be innocent.

Except for three things. At the top of the investigation was Col. Victor Corpuz, a man of valor as he is a man of integrity. He was and remains head of the Intelligence Services, Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP), which oversees and investigates every risk and danger to the state. But that alone was not enough. The ISAFP, very obviously, had the cooperation of top intelligence agencies and offices of the US government having to do with international crime. And these were the Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), necessarily the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI and, very presumably, even State. The White House, I am sure, was hovering somewhere. Lacson is up against the world’s only superpower.

Why? Because the allegation is that much of the $728 million stashed in US banks was booty in the hundreds of millions from drug trafficking. Why again? Because of the mounting fear – maybe already a reality – that the Philippines has become another Colombia, the major transit point in the West for the entry of a whole slew of narcotics into America. Why again? Because the US government considers the traffic of drugs as right now the greatest menace to American democracy, more even than all the Russian missiles whose warheads are electronically guided to hit American targets when the red button is clicked. Those missiles can be stopped. The drugs keep coming.

Drugs have sapped the vigor of millions of American youth. In one of his last speeches, President Bill Clinton declared the main enemy of US democracy was not Russia, or China, or both combined, but "narco-terrorists" who with a war chest of billions (trillions?) of dollars could effectively undermine the security of the US. It is with a chill that I remember only a few months ago, US security forces discovered the Colombian drug lords were building a nuclear submarine inside a mountain hideout. Mother of mercy, they were going nuclear in the transcontinental traffic of narcotics!

There is a third count against Senator Panfilo Lacson. He calls his accusers liars, extortionists, stupid, madmen hallucinating. And yet he refuses to undergo a lie detector test on the lame and grimpy excuse "because all the relevant documents are verifiable." Imagine that. I can't.

No, I am not saying the senator is guilty. But he was a lawman and a police officer, a five-star general who once headed the Philippine National Police and set up what many call Joseph Estrada's Gestapo, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force. If Lacson has any sense of decency, he should take a leave of absence to enable the Senate to investigate him, and the charges against him -- no holds barred. Yes, he must be polygraphed. He cannot hide or duck behind insults, counter-accusing he has "been sent to hell without trial", counter-accusing again "they should all be sent to hell!" The man is angry, you can see that. He never imagined in all his life that he who once called the shots in the criminal wilds in the Philippines was now being branded a criminal, a killer, a kidnapper, a wife snatcher, a drug lord on the scale of Pedro Escobar.

There is one other thing Ping Lacson must know.

Since approximately three years ago, US intelligence operatives were already on his track. They had heard links between Lacson and drugs and some of them came here to probe the terrain. All of Lacson's moves with regard to drugs, I am certain, became known to them. And at that time they could not understand why Lacson had not cracked down on a simple drug lord when drugs were coming in from China and elsewhere by the boatload.

We in civil society were also dumbfounded why despite police reports of record drug busts and hauls, the drugs were never destroyed in public, and not a single drug lord was brought to book. Our suspicion at the time was that powerful Filipinos up high were on the take, giving them protection. Now we know better. As Chavit said, Erap was the lord of all jueteng lords. And who is His Lordship in drugs?

The Senate is also on trial. And as we said earlier our republican system of government.

The Senate must zero in on every nook and cranny. It must investigate all those charges and reports that Lacson was in on the brutal slay of publicist Bubby Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito, the snatch, disappearance and possible murder of Edgardo Bentain, a welter of kidnap-for- ransom cases reportedly staged by Lacson and the PAOCTF, salvagings. The Senate must strip wide open the Kuratong Baleleng massacre of six years ago and Lacson's reported key role as principal. It is possible that Lacson, if he should be cornered and the evidence mounts, could drag in Joseph Estrada in the Dacer-Corbito killings. The tension was never this thick. Compared to the shocking report of Colonel Corpuz and the military-police investigating team that spent a month in the US, the jueteng scandal involving Erap Estrada was just a caper, and Luis Chavit Singson's accusations the mouthings of a petty, truant child.

We now know the real big money was and is in drugs. And how! In the billions! Sometimes I am inclined to believe that like her husband, Senator Loi Ejercito is an accomplished thespian. Despite a near lifetime of being married to Erap, Loi claims she is a wife of the purest ray serene, not once tarnished by the heaving, tossing, splurging swamp and bilge water that flooded into Malacañang which they occupied for three years. The ISAFP report records she has a $180 million account in a Hong Kong bank. If this be proved, she will go straight to prison, she says. Believe her?

Our Senate must behave exactly the way the US Senate did when Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 50s shamelessly violated his republican trust when, among others, he branded that most dignified of men -- General George Catlett Marshall -- a communist. Once they had the evidence, the Senate booted McCarthy out. It is one thing to misbehave. It is another thing to commit grave and grievous crime -- if this can be proved.
* * *
It is a big mess down there in Muslim Mindanao.

How many fighting brigades? How many combat battalions? They promised us, and this includes President Arroyo, it would be over in a jiffy. The best fighting men of the Armed Forces of the Philippines would storm the 200-strong Abu Sayyaf in Basilan and -- pouf! -- they would all fall dead or surrender.

Well, it's many weeks now and nothing of the sort has happened. Just to prove their point, just days ago the Abu Sayyaf captured about 30 other hostages, beheaded about ten, the army claiming in the meantime it had rescued about a dozen. Short of declaring martial law or lifting the writ of habeas corpus in the region, the military has engaged in full-scale arrests of suspected Abu Sayyaf supporters. And subjected many of them -- according to media and some of those arrested -- to torture.

Well, the core of the issue is that the Armed Forces haven't delivered. The military excuse now is that Basilan is wide, long and sprawling terrain, thrice the size of Quezon City and the soldiers and the police cannot be present "in every sitio."

Let's go down to brass tacks. the military is discovering -- or is it? -- what the US military discovered in Vietnam. That they cannot engage in set-piece battles in forested or jungle terrain where guerrillas can move, escape or stage small blocking clashes in stealth with the support of the peasantry. So every time the military thinks the guerrillas have been encircled -- they escape. What to do? Even when the Yankees were here at the turn of the century, they engaged in scorched-earth tactics, killed 100,000, converting villages into "howling wildernesses." So in desperation in Vietnam, American soldiers resorted to wholesale massacres of the innocents like My Lai. To win the war against Japan, they atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To wipe out Abu Sayyaf, the military logic says you have to wipe out all the hostages, including the American couple. And the devil take the hindmost. Can the military do that?

The government must decide. So no more promises.