Not just the suspended PNP chief, Mr. President

In his televised speech to the nation last Friday, President B. S. Aquino 3rd tried to mime “personal responsibility” for the police operation that resulted in the massacre of 44 commandos of the Philippine National Police Special Action Force (SAF) in Barangay Tukanalipao, Mamasapano, Maguindanaoon January 25—his late mother Cory Aquino’s 82nd birthday—but quickly exempted himself from its logical and necessary consequences.

With a visible pallor of grief, Aquino accepted the resignation of his intimate shooting buddy and suspended PNP chief Alan Purisima, in an apparent effort to calm the nation’s anger over the mass slaughter of the 44 in the hands of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters. But although Purisima had been portrayed as the “unseen principal player” in the botched operation, Aquino evidently had more to answer for it than the police chief himself.