Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 22:46:00 02/26/2008
MANILA, Philippines -- The Palace likes to try out its messages on weekends, so that when the working week starts, it will have had time to refine them. This attitude toward official statements -- that they are only true for as long as the administration hasn’t come up with a new variation or mutation of what it originally said -- is why the public is now finding it increasingly hard to believe what President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo says.
Over the long weekend, the President personally said she was made aware of possible anomalies in the ZTE national broadband network (NBN) contract on the eve of the contract’s signing. She then claimed that she proceeded to move to rescind the deal, after smoothening whatever feathers might be ruffled on China’s part.
Immediately, people saw the flaws in the President’s “admission.” As veteran journalist Inday Espina-Varona put it, the President’s disclosure required full disclosure and good faith, but her weekend remarks were characterized by neither. She did not find out about the anomalies the night before.
“That is a lie. That is not even a half-truth. It is an outright lie,” Espina-Varona wrote in her blog last Sunday. “Anyone who has followed the Senate inquiry into the ZTE scandal knows that her former economic secretary … Romulo Neri, claimed to have told her long before the contract signing of the P200-million bribe offer from then Commission on Election Chair Benjamin Abalos. Neri also told the Senate inquiry that Ms Arroyo brushed off his report, telling him not to accept but to approve the project. It was also clear that Neri -- and Finance Secretary Margarito Teves -- had vehemently opposed the deal, because it veered away from Ms Arroyo’s directive to focus on build-operate-transfer projects and spare the government having to offer guarantees.”
Not to mention the flimsiness of the President’s excuse that while she made up her mind, immediately, rescinding the deal took five months, and it was blamed on her critics and not on any flaws in the deal.
Indeed, all official statements revolved around the stubborn insistence of the President’s alter egos, in her Cabinet and down the line the bureaucracy, that they had investigated the deal and found the charges baseless. Although as Espina-Varona noted, no one could recall, when asked, if they’d ever actually been asked about the deal. In other words, a ghost investigation, leading to a ghostly substitute for real findings, was what took place. And let no one forget the Palace’s stubborn insistence, until Saturday, that the deal was a casualty of “political noise” and nothing more.
Not to mention the insistence, until last Saturday, that the deal was sound and everyone implicated in it was blameless, too.
Not to mention efforts to excuse the President by pointing out that she left her husband’s bedside as he lay gravely ill to witness the signing not of a contract, but of an agreement, which was only the initial stage in formulating the contract. Which only raises further questions of why she lent her prestige to the preliminaries of a deal she claims she intended to abort, when she had as good an excuse as any to withhold her personal stamp of approval on the project.
The President exposed her subordinates as liars. When, in turn, her admission was exposed as a lie, too, what happened?
A denial. On Tuesday, the Palace said the President never said the contract was flawed. But her statement was clearly recorded. And reported.
So we are back to 2005 when, in response to the “Hello, Garci” tapes, Michael Defensor said, “That is the President’s voice, but it isn’t her talking.”
The President and her people have engaged in so much lying that they can no longer recognize the truth even if it stared them in the face. The truth is so devastating that it needs, to borrow Winston Churchill’s phrase, to be protected “by a bodyguard of lies” -- never mind how clumsy, crude, and colossally illogical the lies are becoming.
Which is why even moderate appeals to revoke Executive Order 464, the chief bodyguard of her lies, have been ignored. With the continuing rejection of this appeal, the President has made inevitable the only weapon the public has, short of exercising people power. She has made inevitable a national stay-at-home strike. We should now turn our homes into sanctuaries from official lying.
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