Aguirre’s gobbledygook

As we go to press, the breaking news is that Sen. Leila de Lima has been ordered arrested. But what should we make of the Department of Justice’s filing of multiple nonbailable illegal drugs cases against her at the Regional Trial Court of Muntinlupa? Is it based on something more solid, more credible, than the self-serving testimony of convicted drug lords accorded special treatment and paraded in public?

Despite Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre’s hopeful remarks about cooperation with the Anti-Money Laundering Council, the joint resolution that his prosecutor general approved on Feb. 14 does not offer any hard evidence of a paper or electronic trail. In lieu of evidence, we get words. Lots of words.

Incomprehensible words.

We read: “Far from debate, illegal use of drugs and dependency distort the normal perception capacities and functions of the brain.” Apparently, so does legal hackwork in Aguirre’s jurisdiction.

Consider this stunning turn of phrase: “Even the most ideological leader in spiritual realm can be manipulative by means of the pervasive fallacy of power and indulged in onslaught drugs and corruption issues.”

Set aside the obvious mistakes in style or usage (the lack of the article “the” before “spiritual realm,” the use of “manipulative” instead of “manipulated,” the missing “of” after “onslaught”); we understand that in the rush to place De Lima behind bars there is simply no time to proofread. The clash in concepts, however, is breathtaking. What does “the most ideological leader in spiritual realm” mean? When Karl Marx described religion as the opiate of the masses, could he have possibly foreseen this mishmash of categories?

And this leader can be manipulated, not by the power of fallacy, but by the “pervasive fallacy of power”? Surely that means that the ideological or spiritual leader has been deceived by the powers that be, such as, let’s see, the Department of Justice. That’s what it means, right—at least if we base our comprehension, however tenuously, on the words actually used.

Perhaps we are making too much of the Aguirre lawyers’ poor prose. But writing requires thinking, and legal writing requires some familiarity with the law. What are we to make of this head turner of a passage? “Drug traders and consumers resort to felonious acts in pursuit of their dubious drug related activities.” Again, words are being abused, for sheer lack of thought. Drug traders and consumers do not resort to felonious acts, for the simple reason that drug trade and drug consumption are, by definition under the law, already felonies. This is like saying “Kidnappers resort to kidnapping in pursuit of their dubious kidnapping activities.”

In the rush to see President Duterte’s chief critic behind bars, the President’s men in the Department of Justice have gone Orwellian: using prefabricated language as a substitute for thought, in order to hide the indefensible.

There are other whoppers in the joint resolution, including this attempt to deflect De Lima’s accusation of bias—in a sentence marked by a precipitously dangling modifier and unapologetically melodramatic prose: “Stand charged and bruised beyond redemption by popular opinion, the issue of fraternity affiliation of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, Secretary Vitaliano N. Aguirre II and the chairman, Senior Assistant State Prosecutor Peter L. Ong, became a lame excuse to insist on the inhibition of the Panel of Prosecutors … to afford impunity.” The real subject of that sentence is De Lima (she is the one who stands charged), but grammatically she is not even in it.

But as constructed by Aguirre’s legal writers, it seems that “the issue of fraternity affiliation” of the three lawyers, the President and the justice secretary is the subject that is “bruised beyond redemption.” Do they know something we don’t?