GMA in Indonesia, Angie Reyes in Paris: Who’s in charge here?

Frankly, although friendly visits to other chiefs of state are important, I cannot help but deplore the timing of President Macapagal-Arroyo’s visit to Jakarta to dialogue with Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri. When your own home is being battered and deluged by a killer typhoon, is that the right time to go visiting your neighbors?

If I’m not mistaken, this is President GMA’s seventh foreign expedition. At this pace, she may even overtake the record of our former supreme traveler ex-President Fidel V. Ramos. Not even Eddie Ramos at the height of his penchant for peregrinations scheduled his Presidential trips in such rapid succession. This is because the President, no sooner than she unpacks her bags will be packing them anew for her journey to the United States, climaxed by a meeting in the White House with US President George W. Bush. Be careful, Ma’am, that the title of Gloria Labandera doesn’t turn into Gloria Viajera.

In these times of crises, disasters and storms, it’s imperative for the captain of the ship to personally rally the crew and keep her hand on the tiller.

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The terrible fact is that hundreds are still missing in the wake of Typhoon Nanang (internationally known as Typhoon Lingling) and more than 120 bodies have been recovered by search and rescue teams, who sometimes had to dig the corpses up in Camiguin island with their bare hands.

It was confirmed by a phone call from Honolulu yesterday that the US military have been waiting for a call for help in the ongoing search and rescue mission but have, as of this writing, received no such appeal. Is this because nobody’s home to make that call?

As for the official who is supposed to be directly supervising those operations in our typhoon-ravaged provinces in Camiguin and the Visayas, National Defense Secretary Angelo T. Reyes, he was strolling leisurely yesterday along the Champs Elyseés in Paris, enjoying the weekend as a tourist. I can only exclaim: Sanamagan!

Has Reyes forgotten? Aside from being DND head, he’s concurrently Chairman of the National Relief and Disaster Council. He knew that powerful typhoon was on the way when he left on his junket to Paris last Wednesday. When the extent of the devastation became known, Reyes should have dropped everything and rushed home. Yet, he’s even serenely going through with his flight to London for his next round of talks with defense officials and socializing today or tomorrow.

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True enough, Reyes fulfilled his official schedule in France last Thursday by meeting with French Defense Secretary Alain Richard. That meeting should have completed Reyes’ itinerary – but no, he stayed on to be jollied by the giant French companies which are desperately (perhaps successfully?) bidding for juicy Philippine government contracts totaling at least P1-billion, yep, even billions. These contracts are being bidded out by the Armed forces on November 20 – later this month – which is why I had warned Reyes face-to-face that his trip to Paris was untimely and ill-advised.

But he had made up his mind: Inspite of the inevitable cascade of criticisms if these French corporations win their bids, he was determined to go.

He even assured me at our dinner in La Dolce Fontana (I paid as the host, which is not why I’m sore, you wiseguys) that he didn’t know any of the French agents and suppliers. He further argued that businessman Randy Limjoco did not represent the French company Thales (Thomson CSF), which is downright bullshit, since everybody knows that Limjoco is the Thales inside man here, through his agency named Intrade Corporation.

Reyes even said that he thought Limjoco represented the Belgians, not the French. Salamabit, why did he play dumb when even the most callow cub reporter could have checked that out and found the DND Secretary’s denial false?

A congressman, in fact, who was Reyes’ classmate in the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), has been meeting with Thales representatives here, dickering for a 15-percent commission on a multimillion-peso deal which he (the solon) claims will be going to Reyes. If he doesn’t know about this, then Reyes had better kick the congressman in the shins for this arrant and greedy namedropping.

No wonder in military and defense department circles, they refer to these commissions and "thank you" sums as the "pension fund." Is Reyes unsure that he will be confirmed by the Commission on Appointments? There’s an old expression that, I hope, doesn’t apply to guys like him: Make hay while the sun shines.

In my previous columns I mentioned several major items being bidded for by Thales with the General Headquarters, Armed Forces of the Philippines Bids and Awards Committee. But I failed to mention possibly the biggest item on the proposed agenda, a fat radar deal which looks like the replacement for the canceled GEC-Marconi "contract" with the British which had to be junked by ex-President Estrada and his Cabinet owing to the stink that it generated.

This "offering" is being represented for Thales, quite openly, by the same Randy Limjoco.

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Was Secretary Reyes lying to me? Or completely blind?

In Paris this weekend, he did precisely what I had warned him against doing: Not only did he confer with the French companies bidding on November 20, but he was their guest of honor at a lavish banquet. This was more dismaying than an exhibition of supreme arrogance and a lack of delicadeza.

The luncheon was given in honor of Reyes by Thales, another firm GIAT (which is bidding to upgrade our cannon from 105 to 155 howitzers), and other interested French groups. Again, Thales was the firm which mainly underwrote the affair.

The luncheon was masterminded by Thales International Asia president Bernard Baiocco, who has been bragging that Thales is "unstoppable" and will get those DND-AFP contracts, as well as another biggie from the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC).

With regard to the DOTC, that blow-hard Biaocco is correct: the multimillion-dollar contract was signed by former acting DOTC Secretary Josie Trinidad Lichauco during the Estrada administration. On the other hand, incumbent DOTC Secretary Pantaleon "Bebot" Alvarez has been trying to cancel it, although Thales – quick as a flash – has been swift to compromise our government by delivering the first components of this arrangement.

Isn’t it terrifying how Thales can wheel and deal with such impunity?

To return to that monster contract for which the French giant is bidding, it involves the supply and establishment of radar systems for the military, the NAIA international airport, and other civilian airports. It’s no wonder that the Thales Asia Traffic Management (ATM) Division and the Communications and Electronics Divisions, were very prominent at the luncheon meeting.

Also prominently on hand were the top officials of the Thales Opthronics Division which is bidding for the sale of Night Vision Goggles (NVG) and Night Vision Scopes (NVS) for the Army, Navy and Air Force. These proposals are, once again, being pushed by Limjoco – of whose activities, remember, Angie had unblinkingly professed ignorance.

The same Division is also offering hand-held radios for the Armed forces and DND. Susmariosep! Someday we may have to call our DND-AFP not merely "The French Connection" but even "The French Monopoly."

As for GIAT, it already failed the accuracy tests by one kilometer. This would mean our artillery might be hitting our own troops instead of the enemy. Yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if they won nonetheless.

I submit, once more with feeling, that it was a mistake for DND Secretary Reyes to have been hobnobbing so chummily with the French suppliers.

The late President Carlos P. Garcia, who was a good man in most ways, outraged the nation at one time with a careless remark. When his leading Cabinet member was accused of using his Palace position for profit, CPG had remarked: "Is it wrong for a man to provide for his future?"

On the contrary, as I wrote then and I reiterate now, it is dead wrong. I trust that General Reyes wasn’t acting these past few days with an eye to such a future. Sayang.

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It’s evident that both Sandiganbayan Presiding Justice Francis Garchitorena and Third Division Chairman Justice Anacleto Badoy have been ignoring Chief Justice Hilario Davide’s "ceasefire" order.

They’ve been banging away at each other and defending their personal positions with assertions simultaneously corny and deplorable.

Just the other day, 115 employees belonging to the Sandiganbayan Employees Association issued a statement declaring that "the contents of the letter which our Presiding Justice sent to the Honorable Chief Justice with regards to the state of affairs in the Sandiganbayan were entirely true and correct." In that letter, Garchitorena had accused Badoy of incompetence and absenteeism.

Even if Garchitorena’s signature, much less his initial, does not appear on the employees’ public statement, the manifesto supporting him against Badoy is still a breach of the Chief Justice’s "shut up" directive. Don’t tell me that statement was an unsolicited one.

Apparently reacting to that adverse manifesto, Justice Badoy the other night was interviewed by popular newscaster Kiko Evangelista, and fulminated for fully five minutes (ignoring Evangelista’s agonized signals for him to cut his remarks short) on his "sufferings" which had begun when he was assigned the Estrada plunder cases, describing these tribulations as "offerings" which ought to reduce his stint in Purgatory. True enough, Badoy is a former seminarian who ended up taking Law at San Beda where he graduated in 1959. But if Badoy’s "calvary" had begun on his assumption of the Estrada plunder cases, couldn’t it be said, as well, that he had brought these problems on himself?

For those familiar with the canons of judicial ethics, the two Sandiganbayan gladiators have grossly violated the dictates of the Code of Judicial Conduct. In their infantile exchange of barbs, they had done a disservice to the vital principle that justice be even-handed and – as Aristotle put it in ancient Greece – dispensed "without passion." (Incidentally, I rediscovered this Aristotelian nugget of wisdom not in some ponderous legal tome but in that ribtickling movie about a pretty but "dumb" blonde who went to Harvard Law and came out a winner, Legally Blonde.

The two Justices, for their part, are coming out too illegally outspoken. Mischievous observers are already saying that the two magistrates are afflicted with "psychological incapacity" to discharge their judicial functions over the perjury and plunder cases against former President Estrada.

In the case of Badoy, his antics have become bizarre. For instance, there was his "stopping" of the Sandiganbayan clock at 4 p.m. to justify continuing the trial of Estrada, in which he invoked a legislative practice of Congress stopping the clock to extend the proceedings the last day of sessions.

Then there’s the weird incident in which Justice Badoy attended a San Beda affair last October 27, although he was not one of the awardees at the event ("Bedans of the Century", I think it was). Horsing around, I’m told by those present, Justice Badoy "genuflected" in front of former Senator Rene Saguisag, who is one of the counsels of Estrada. Even if he had done this just for fun, it was demeaning for a Justice of the Sandiganbayan who’s presiding over what can be termed "The Trial of the Century." It was the gaffe, perhaps, of the century.

As for Presiding Justice Garchitorena, he’s in hot water, too. The Presiding Justice is not merely in trouble owing to the acrimonious "word war", but with regard to the hundreds of cases which have been sleeping the sleep of the dead in the Sandiganbayan, some of which had been submitted for resolution as long as several years ago.

Garchitorena and Badoy have talked too much and said too much in the past week and a half. They must not be let off the hook with just an admonition or a reprimand. They have, by their conduct and verbosity, put the judiciary to shame. In fact, they have placed in serious doubt their capability to continue hearing the Estrada cases.

Those who want to see justice done in these plunder and perjury cases are already saying that both should bow out. Otherwise, how can the public be reassured that it is witnessing a credible trial presided over by competent, sober and independent-minded magistrates who will "not be swayed by public clamor or considerations of personal popularity". Those quotes are taken verbatim from the Code of Judicial Conduct.