Absolute terror 01/29/2007
MANILA, Philippines--Don’t look now, but we could wake up tomorrow in absolute fear for our lives. Courtesy of a government that likes springing nasty surprises on us while we sleep.
That’s what’s going to happen to us if we allow the current anti-terror bill to pass. It won’t stop terror, it will unleash terror. The people standing in its way in the Senate are few, though quite formidable in the strength of their convictions. They include Nene Pimentel and Jamby Madrigal, both of whom have been raising shrill warnings about the new iniquity. As both point out, the anti-terror bill will mount full-blown martial law in this country.
The new terror bill ups the ante on the terrorist methods of fighting terror. Pimentel points out the exceptionally fascistic ones: One, it authorizes the surveillance, interception and recording of messages of suspected terrorists. Two, it allows the arrest without warrant and imprisonment of suspects on the basis of the say-so of anonymous informants and assets. Three, it allows the ironically named law enforcers access to the bank deposits and other property records of suspects. And four, it allows the same ironically named law enforcers to seize those same deposits and assets.
As Pimentel points out, the arrest without warrant of people on the say-so of hooded figures brings us straight back into the days of the Makapili. Well, what can you expect from a Macabebe? Metaphorically that is, she is a daughter of Lubao. But the comparison with the Japanese Occupation is accurate: We are living in similar times, under another Occupation, and with much the same results.
That such an obscenity has no place in a country that pretends to be sane—never mind democratic—is patent. But what makes it even more obscene from where I stand are three things.
First off, all that anti-terror posturing is no better or worse than all the gaya-gaya—from Elvis to basketball, from anti-communism to anti-terrorism—we’ve done with things American. Until George W. Bush took it upon his head to pose as God’s avenging sword after 9/11, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo couldn’t even spell the word terrorist, she was busy just trying to survive with Erap’s loyalists making life miserable for her. Well, the very premises of Bush’s anti-terror campaign, which GMA merely imported wholesale along with flour, are now being questioned not just by the world but by America itself. Certainly the American voters have rejected the idiot who spawned it, the one who said idiotically, “You are with me or against me,” making the choice an easy one—would anyone in his right mind be for him? Americans have since rediscovered their right minds and turned him into a lame duck in the last elections—as Filipinos will do to GMA this coming May. But the point is clear: This is not fighting terror, this is mounting terror. This is not defending democracy, this is pulverizing democracy.
More than that, the way things are today, we need the kind of anti-terror bill being loosed by GMA and one Ponce Enrile, who shares with GMA a talent for lying—he mounted a fake assassination attempt on himself to justify Marcos’ martial law—like a hole in the head. We already have most of the elements of martial law, as it is. We have political activists and journalists being slaughtered with impunity. We have elected local officials being ousted from office on one pretext or another, while the father of all liars, that fellow named Hello Garci, continues to thrive, and will probably become an elected official after May, “elected” in the same way his boss, GMA, got “elected” in 2004. We have dissent and protest being silenced by law and lokohan, by corruption and coercion, by madness and murder. Do we want a legal instrument that justifies all that, too?
But still even more than that, look at the utter stupidity, if not monstrosity of it all. Under the new anti-terrorism law, suspected terrorists will have themselves surveilled, will have their conversations tapped, will have their property confiscated, and will languish in jail after being deemed to have committed, or plotted to commit, or being capable of committing acts of terrorism against the citizens of this country.
Well, by God, by Allah, and by your leave, we have someone who has committed an act of breathtaking terrorism against the good citizens of this country, whose guilt has been proven beyond a shadow of doubt by a serendipitous act of official Isafp monitoring (never mind surveillance), but who has not had her property confiscated, who has not had her name entered in the list of the world’s most wanted criminals, who is not rotting in the wilds of Muntinlupa, the key to her cell delivered somewhere in the bottom of the Philippine Deep. She is in fact the self-appointed president of this country.
What can be a more terroristic act committed against the citizens of this country than planting a bomb at the heart of their vote? Planting a bomb in a church or schoolhouse doesn’t come close to it. What could be more ironclad proof of it than the self-appointed winner of the elections caught on tape, in all the glory or terror of her distinctive, inimitable, DNA-imprinted voice, plotting with a Comelec commissioner not just to steal the vote but also to steal a public school teacher-cum-poll watcher, and to hold up the truth she carries in her heart for ransom? Better to admit as evidence the word of characters with bayongs on their faces?
We want to push back terror in this country? We want to stop terror in this country? We want to obliterate terror in this country? Easy.
Just throw the one person guilty as hell of it to the bottom of the Philippine Deep.
The rest is just fomenting terror. Pure, venomous, and absolute terror.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=46155
That’s what’s going to happen to us if we allow the current anti-terror bill to pass. It won’t stop terror, it will unleash terror. The people standing in its way in the Senate are few, though quite formidable in the strength of their convictions. They include Nene Pimentel and Jamby Madrigal, both of whom have been raising shrill warnings about the new iniquity. As both point out, the anti-terror bill will mount full-blown martial law in this country.
The new terror bill ups the ante on the terrorist methods of fighting terror. Pimentel points out the exceptionally fascistic ones: One, it authorizes the surveillance, interception and recording of messages of suspected terrorists. Two, it allows the arrest without warrant and imprisonment of suspects on the basis of the say-so of anonymous informants and assets. Three, it allows the ironically named law enforcers access to the bank deposits and other property records of suspects. And four, it allows the same ironically named law enforcers to seize those same deposits and assets.
As Pimentel points out, the arrest without warrant of people on the say-so of hooded figures brings us straight back into the days of the Makapili. Well, what can you expect from a Macabebe? Metaphorically that is, she is a daughter of Lubao. But the comparison with the Japanese Occupation is accurate: We are living in similar times, under another Occupation, and with much the same results.
That such an obscenity has no place in a country that pretends to be sane—never mind democratic—is patent. But what makes it even more obscene from where I stand are three things.
First off, all that anti-terror posturing is no better or worse than all the gaya-gaya—from Elvis to basketball, from anti-communism to anti-terrorism—we’ve done with things American. Until George W. Bush took it upon his head to pose as God’s avenging sword after 9/11, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo couldn’t even spell the word terrorist, she was busy just trying to survive with Erap’s loyalists making life miserable for her. Well, the very premises of Bush’s anti-terror campaign, which GMA merely imported wholesale along with flour, are now being questioned not just by the world but by America itself. Certainly the American voters have rejected the idiot who spawned it, the one who said idiotically, “You are with me or against me,” making the choice an easy one—would anyone in his right mind be for him? Americans have since rediscovered their right minds and turned him into a lame duck in the last elections—as Filipinos will do to GMA this coming May. But the point is clear: This is not fighting terror, this is mounting terror. This is not defending democracy, this is pulverizing democracy.
More than that, the way things are today, we need the kind of anti-terror bill being loosed by GMA and one Ponce Enrile, who shares with GMA a talent for lying—he mounted a fake assassination attempt on himself to justify Marcos’ martial law—like a hole in the head. We already have most of the elements of martial law, as it is. We have political activists and journalists being slaughtered with impunity. We have elected local officials being ousted from office on one pretext or another, while the father of all liars, that fellow named Hello Garci, continues to thrive, and will probably become an elected official after May, “elected” in the same way his boss, GMA, got “elected” in 2004. We have dissent and protest being silenced by law and lokohan, by corruption and coercion, by madness and murder. Do we want a legal instrument that justifies all that, too?
But still even more than that, look at the utter stupidity, if not monstrosity of it all. Under the new anti-terrorism law, suspected terrorists will have themselves surveilled, will have their conversations tapped, will have their property confiscated, and will languish in jail after being deemed to have committed, or plotted to commit, or being capable of committing acts of terrorism against the citizens of this country.
Well, by God, by Allah, and by your leave, we have someone who has committed an act of breathtaking terrorism against the good citizens of this country, whose guilt has been proven beyond a shadow of doubt by a serendipitous act of official Isafp monitoring (never mind surveillance), but who has not had her property confiscated, who has not had her name entered in the list of the world’s most wanted criminals, who is not rotting in the wilds of Muntinlupa, the key to her cell delivered somewhere in the bottom of the Philippine Deep. She is in fact the self-appointed president of this country.
What can be a more terroristic act committed against the citizens of this country than planting a bomb at the heart of their vote? Planting a bomb in a church or schoolhouse doesn’t come close to it. What could be more ironclad proof of it than the self-appointed winner of the elections caught on tape, in all the glory or terror of her distinctive, inimitable, DNA-imprinted voice, plotting with a Comelec commissioner not just to steal the vote but also to steal a public school teacher-cum-poll watcher, and to hold up the truth she carries in her heart for ransom? Better to admit as evidence the word of characters with bayongs on their faces?
We want to push back terror in this country? We want to stop terror in this country? We want to obliterate terror in this country? Easy.
Just throw the one person guilty as hell of it to the bottom of the Philippine Deep.
The rest is just fomenting terror. Pure, venomous, and absolute terror.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=46155
posted by dqfan06 @ 11:57 AM
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