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AMPARO means protection in Spanish. It is the courts’ and the
citizenry’s weapon to protect individuals from being killed
extra-judicially or forced to disappear by state agents.
The Arroyo administration has invented an
effective new weapon of abuse with the same name, but in English:
“police protection” or “government protection.” It’s
nickname can be “Atienza’s Pro-Life Way” or “Atutubo’s
Tubal Exit.”
But since the true writ of amparo’s name is
Spanish, we may also call the Arroyo allies’ new Byzantine
protection method “La Ausencia de la Virgen de Mascariñas.” Or
“Valeroso pa el Otro.” Or “Razon Perdida.”
The ZTE scandal has felled not just Benjamin
Abalos, to whom many attribute the massive fraudulence of the past
elections. It has destroyed the credibility and pestige of Secretary
Lito Atienza, Secretary Romulo Neri and PNP Chief Avelino I. Razon.
Ninoy assassination
It has also exposed those who were responsible
for giving the reluctant Senate witness Rodolfo Noel Lozada Jr.
“government protection” and the way out of the airport terminal
that only presidents and very very important persons are allowed to
use.
The airport manager, his deputy and head of
security were shown to be either liars or incompetent, or negligent,
or ignorant of the law and the rules that govern the airport, or
disloyal to the Truth and their oaths of office. Or all of the
above.
Their answers to the senators’ questions
confirmed that both the head of airport security, retired general
Angel Atutubo, and the PNP’s designated “protector” of Lozada,
Senior Supt. Paul Mascariñas, did not know SPO4 Roger Valeroso from
Adam.
From Atutubo’s testimony we learn that
Valeroso misrepresented himself by using a spurious PNP ID with the
false name “Roger Valeroso.” And from Chief of PNP Razon we
learn that the man with the fake ID must be retired Philippine Army
sergeant Rodolfo Valeroso who is now an employee of the Aviation
Security Group. The ASG is a unit of the PNP.
These officers of the Philippine security forces
were swearing that their mission was to protect Lozada from a
killer. But none of them seemed to have taken the trouble of finding
out who the killer was supposed to be. Their body language and
manner of speaking reminds one of the way similar officers—people
also associated with airport security—replied to questions in the
Agrava Commission searching for facts about—and the courts trying
the accused in—the Ninoy Aquino assassination.
Fear of the unnamed
Senate President Manny Villar was right to speak
in defense of the upper house. For the implication of the strange
“mission” to protect Lozada by kidnapping him for his own good
is that he was being protected—by the mysterious Valeroso, the
probably deluded and blindly-obedient-to-superiors Mascarinhas and
Atutubo and their men—from the senators themselves.
The Senate probe of two days has confirmed that
it was his being forced to appear in the hearings that Lozada
originally dreaded. But it was not the senators’ ability to kill
him that terrorized him. It was his knowledge that he would not be
able to keep himself from telling the Truth (which is another name
for God Almighty, whose other names among others are Being, Beauty,
Love and Life). And death, in Lozada’s mind, awaited him if he
spilled all the beans.
Finally, one of the senators asked him to
identify whom it was who he feared would kill him. His answer was
“Abalos.” But that answer lacked the ring of the total Truth. He
obviously had someone or several other persons to fear bodily harm
from—if he told the whole Truth. They were expecting him to
observe the Mafia’s code of silence.
More people now suspect that the Arroyo
administration’s other unnamed dons (bosses) commissioners (people
who have commissions?), and consiglieri are what the officials and
security officers who appeared in last Tuesday’s hearing were
really out to protect. They all wanted to do as Lozada originally
asked Neri, Atienza and Usec Manuel Gaite to give him—freedom from
having to tell the Truth in the Senate. But they gave their help not
really to protect Lozada. They were answering, as the Hebrew
National Hotdog company ad says, “to a higher authority.”
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Of the senators supportive of Malacañang, only
Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile shone as his same young self. He used his
cross-examination skills to try to trip Lozada but failed. He did it
with dignity and with an appreciation that the
whistleblower—admitting to being less bold and less virtuous than
he wished he were—should not be treated like trash because he was
very intelligent and bent on telling most of the Truth.
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