Ka-Blog!

Pure harassment

It is typically stupid of the police to be pointing fingers at just about anyone to find blame on rebel soldier Nick Faeldon’s escape at the height of the Manila Peninsula seige.  They are bent on blaming everyone but themselves.  Instead the police blame the media for their incompetence.

          In the papers today, the PNP tagged veteran journalist Dana Batnag of Jiji Press as responsible for Faeldon’s escape.  They accuse Dana of giving Faeldon a media ID to enable him to escape.

            We were with Dana in the said coverage.  I even asked her for a stick of cigarette and smoked it beside her.  I congratulated her for her Palanca win in the short story category.  I can say for sure she was not given any special privilege and allowed inside the conference room where the putschists were holed up.  She was with us while waiting for the personalities to give statements. I did not see her being chummy with any of the rebels. 

            What the police are now saying is that they have footage of a “lass with curly hair” giving what is alleged to be a media ID to Faeldon.  Well, Dana’s hair looked ruffled that day but I would not automatically say hers is curly.  Heck! every media person on the scene that day looked ruffled.  Even the pretty Pinky Webb sat and laid down on the carpet because the day was quite tiring and long.  But if this is all they’ve got on Dana (or Ellen Tordesillas or Ces Drilon who were also there and have curly hair) I only see pure harassment that the police even mention journalists’ names.  I even think that Gonzales put the police up to this to justify his patently illegal and immoral order to arrest journalists on the scene of police operations. 

I also know Dana’s mother and sister.  They are not the kind of women who back down from a just fight.  Dana herself challenged the police to just go to court. 

If Dana is up against a stupid policeman, however powerful, she will emerge victorious in the end.

Pigs!

They did it again.

Read this first:

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/metro/view/20080120-113603/2-teeners-shot-dead-in-Quezon-City

And then my previous post “Tales of my city”:

http://bukaneg.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2006/10/index.html

Notice the similarities between the two incidents. As soon as suspected criminals were let go from station 6 of the Quezon City Police District they were gunned down by motorcycle-riding men shortly after . If you think this is coincidence, you’re dumb. 

Is this the Philippine National Police’s way of ridding society of “undesirables”? The victims’ families have no other suspects but the police. And they have no excuse for letting this happen to anyone, moreso on kids who have just come from their station.

Here’s a piece of advice to persons arrested by police officers of QCPD Station 6: even if they release you from jail, stay in. Do what you have to so they charge you with another crime—admit to killing Magellan, I don’t know. Freedom is dangerous to your health.

We should have done more

There is a full page ad in the papers today paid for by the Partido ng Masang Pilipino. In gist, it quoted the analyses of international political scribes published in well-known newspapers with global circulation that People Power II was illegal. I myself have no legalistic counterpoint to their arguments. I am not a lawyer nor do I claim to be a political analyst.

 

Having been involved in the event, I am sometimes confronted by the question of whether we erred in kicking Estrada out of office—all the more because his replacement turned out to be worse.

 

But however these analysts decry the “mob rule” the issues for us then were clear. Estrada was an immoral President who deserved the fate that befell him. While the Constitution may have been circumvented, it was only because Estrada had complete control of the political processes that shored up his immoral administration to the detriment of the people’s interests. What were we to do but assert our right to reject immorality in government? Between the two, we simply believed that we deserved a fresh start rather than continue to suffer Estrada—regardless of whatever that was set aside. 

 

I do not begrudge the writers for thinking the way they did. They were from countries with political systems that did not allow for persons like Estrada (or gma for that matter). They did not know our desperation for genuine social change and justice. Their constitutions were so respected by their politicians that their peoples were not forced to “supplant” them for higher and moral objectives.

 

No, I do not feel I need to apologize for my decisions and actions in 2001.

 

What I deeply regret though is that gma was the constitutional successor at the time. Had we known then that she is worse than Erap, we should have supplanted the Constitution more and disallowed her to profit from our sacrifices and dreams.