A Complaint Is A Fact?

Written on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 6:18 pm | by Nick

A coup or not a coup? That is the question. Within minutes of the arrest of human rights lawyer Homobono Adaza and four other ex military personnel, many were already calling the arrest a sham of a case, a sham of an arrest, and a travesty of civil rights. In fact, within a day or so of the arrest, we have found out, that indeed, the arrest was baseless.

The chiefs of the Armed Forces, the Army and the Marines on Friday dismissed the existence of a coup plot and said even if there was one, it would not be serious enough to even worry about.

This developed as Philippine National Police (PNP) spokesman Chief Superintendent Nicanor Bartolome admitted that the sworn statement of lawyer Raymond Fortun was the police’s only evidence of the alleged power grab plan so far.

I am afraid, that such actions could be construed as a development towards a police state, where the rights of individuals is trumped by the maniacal minds of those in the armed forces as well as a few in the higher echelons of politics.

I cannot anymore stress the importance of our security, but when it is being led by men who have nothing else but political motivations at hand, then I cannot stand and support such actions. While, I am not exactly a fan of Adaza or some of the individuals he chooses to hang out with, I do not need him to be the poster child of an Arroyo Administration hell-bent on using any amount of force to emphasize that she is as powerful as she says she is.

In any case, here’s one of the most ironic statement that has been made of this situation yet, I hope you catch the irony,

Asked why the police and the military contradicted each other on the alleged coup plot, Bartolome said: “The information [on the plot] was revealed with the apprehension of the five, because there was a case, because there was a mention about the proposal to commit a coup.”

“We do not just concoct a case or any issue. We always base our reports on facts, and in this particular case, there is a complaint,” Bartolome added.

So, we have to ask ourselves, is a complaint a fact? If Bartolome is basing all of his reports and actions on facts, then clearly he believes that any complaint can be understood as a fact. He says so himself.

So, if we are to believe otherwise, that we cannot just go complaining and have anyone arrested, then we must also believe, that yes indeed, the police does concoct cases or issues, based on nothing more than complaints. Complaints that can either be personally motivated, politically motivated, economically motivated, or any other type of motivation other than the search for truth or that of justice.

And in the end, that my friends, is almost always a clear indication of a state, where rule of law has become a facade.

The lawyer said Adaza was not shown the formal charges that were reportedly still being prepared by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group.

“Obviously, they were arrested without a warrant. They should be arrested for something, because you can only be arrested without warrant if you are caught in the act of committing a crime. But at that time, the only crime that they could probably commit was the desire to eat in a birthday party of a daughter of one of his clients,” he said.

And so, an arrest without a warrant, and arrest without any facts, and an arrest based on a sole statement by a very political lawyer, is definitely an arrest that should not have been made in the first place. Such is the poor state of our intelligence, that even if this was a coup plot, the best thing that they could have done was to mount an intelligence and surveillance move in order to find out more information. But they did not do that. Why? Because if this was an actual plot, they would have proceeded to gather more intelligence.

Unless of course, and this is going to be two scenarios now,

1. There was no coup plot, they knew this, they did not need anymore intelligence for this non-existent crime, they just needed to rough up some people and publicize and humiliate these men, in order to grab yet another headline from the media.

2. There was a coup plot, and the CIDG has yet again shown us why we still can’t rid ourselves of terrorists cells in The Philippines, because we have no grasp of what conducting intelligence operations means.

In my point of view, both scenarios have truth in them.

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About The Author: Nick is a passionate Filipino, and a political junkie. His personal blog is at Tingog - The Voice of The Filipino. He is the founder and Editor not Chief of FilipinoVoices.com. He has been blogging since 2006.

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Comments

2 Responses to “A Complaint Is A Fact?”

  1. butch on July 5th, 2008 8:03 am

    Argee Guevara is right in condemning the warrantless arrest of Adaza and company. However, the circumstances relative to the case had been less than compelling as an example GMA’s heavy-handedness against the opposition. It appears, if Archie Fortun is to be believed, that Bona Adaza was not really out to overthrow the government but to extort money from Fortun’s Japanese client. The supposed “coup” was a mere ploy to force the guy to cough up US$ 4 million. So while the case against Adaza et. al. for plotting a coup d’etat might not prosper, the extortion and swindling complaints might. It seems it wasn’t about politics at all but money.

  2. [splice] on July 7th, 2008 3:47 am

    That’s another reason why the words “police” and “intelligence” don’t seem to complement one another.

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