Did seeing too much corruption drive an incorruptible man mad?

Up to now, what former Air Transportation Office Chief and Air Force Colonel Panfilo V. Villaruel Jr. did remains incomprehensible. Villaruel was, throughout his career, a level-headed officer and official. As ATO Chief, he had the rare reputation of being incorruptible – yes, not only honest, but very competent. He knew his job, and had the technological skills and expertise it entailed.

He had his daughter (I think her name was Arlene?) as his chief of staff at the ATO – and, although, as I’ve said, I’m not in favor of officials hiring their children, she, too, was known to be both savvy and straight in all her dealings.

How many times did foreign "agents" and representatives of huge arms and electronic equipment conglomerates complain to each other that Villaruel was "unreachable" and couldn’t be "persuaded" by the usual hidden persuaders. (They were French, Italian, British, American – but I won’t identify them.)

In sum, their gripes were a tribute to Villaruel’s integrity. It wasn’t that the ATO didn’t have the budget – at the time of FVR it was very well-funded but Villaruel, when approached with offers, either decided the radar and other airport stuff the big firms offered were either unnecessary or didn’t come up to scratch.

One representative even warned Villaruel that his firm would go all the way up to Malacañang, hinting boastfully of good "connection" with President Ramos. Without blinking, Villaruel had replied: "Go right ahead. But I’ll tell the President the same thing – the ATO cannot use your equipment, even at a bargain price."

It’s said, indeed, that Ramos didn’t try to order Villaruel otherwise, or importune him, knowing his subordinate’s nature.

So why did a man of such rectitude suddenly snap, and seize the airport control tower in the dead of night? He had never been a violent man, his friends and associates assure me. Yet, he and Navy Lt. (s.g.) Richard Catchillar barged into the airport Tower Complex of NAIA-2, and seized it. So Villaruel could expose widespread "government corruption"? Yet, when interviewed on the radio, on the air up to his last gasping moments, he had raged against the government in general, its failure to adopt some of his inventions, but left behind no bill of particulars or evidence leading to specific acts of graft and corruption.

As I said yesterday, it was an act of futility.

Will Villaruel’s and Catchillar’s deaths shock the present administration into instigating reform? Already you know the answer. Their families, many in the media, and in the public, may be calling them heroes, but what the two did was wrong. It was an Oakwood mutiny, perhaps, in miniature – but a mere two men couldn’t have hoped to topple the pillars of greed and evil, surely, like Samson in the Bible. At least the Oakwood rebels were able to publish their complaints and demands. The Villaruel "list" seems to be missing.

Was, as some government intelligence sources maintain, a "coup" scheduled – but nobody else came? GMA can rest easy. There may in the future be mutinies and Ruritanian-type putsches, perhaps, but our armed forces are so divided they’ll be more prone to quarrelling among each other than successfully mounting a rebellion to overthrow the government.

What then motivated Villaruel, let’s take him in particular? Did he, overwhelmed and frustrated by the sight of so much corruption, simply go mad? Since that‘s the only kind-of-explanation I can grope for at the moment, I won’t for the second time attempt to explain.

Possibly, we’ll never know.

* * *

In the meantime, Senate President Franklin Drilon is right. Transportation and Communications (DOTC) Secretary Leandro Mendoza should take full responsibility for the incident – and, Drilon added, tender his resignation to the President.

If things run true to form, GMA won’t "fire" Larry Mendoza or accept any tongue-in-cheek "resignation" either. And what about NAIA General Manager Ed Manda, another "loyalist"?

The President appears to subscribe to the philosophy that if she gets rid of any of her "loyal" men, the next one to be appointed may prove disloyal. As a candidate, she won’t want to rock the boat in either the police or military, or the airport. This is one of her grievous weaknesses.

What Villaruel and Catchillar did, however earnest might have been their motives, did our country terrible disservice and great harm in terms of international confidence and image. Never mind foreign tourism, which is (despite Desperate Dick’s "bring home one tourist" program and other WOW gimmicks) in the doldrums anyway. Foreign countries, on the other hand, can’t have any shred of confidence left in a country which permits two men to waltz into one of their most vital air transportation guidance and safety control towers and take it over – in the dead of night.

Where were the guards? What security precautions and procedures were in place?

As a war correspondent and foreign-based journalist in the past, I’ve seen it happen time and again. Even airport officials and military camp commanders were always stopped at the guard posts, and not let through until they showed the guards on duty their "pass" and I.D. photograph.

Recently, a military school superintendent was axed in the United States when, one day, he drove up to the guard barrier at the entrance of his academy and demanded entry without bringing out his I.D./pass.

"Don’t you know who I am?" he rasped.

When GHQ got a report on the incident, the officer was unceremoniously sacked – although they obfuscated to the press, as the military always does, about it.

After al-Ghozi, after the NAIA-2 airport tower snafu, who will trust our Philippine security measures? Not even we ourselves.

* * *

Never mind, too, the threatened mass actions and demonstrations today. The pro and anti rallies may, indeed, turn ugly – but they’ll simply be disruptive of public order and safety, and not have any impact on the outcome of the Davide "divide".

Anyway – unless it is overtaken by a "supervening event" through a so-called "covenant" which Malacañang is pushing for – the Supreme Court should be issuing its landmark ruling today on the eleven petitions assailing the constitutionality of the second impeachment move against Chief Justice Hilario Davide.

My sources say that, when issued, the High Court’s ruling promises to be an "activist" decision in which the Court assumes jurisdiction over the constitutional issues involved and strikes down the House of Representatives’ impeachment motion as "unconstitutional" on the grounds that it is the second impeachment initiated against Davide within the same year (the first had been that of ex-President Joseph Estrada’s).

In fact, the rumor was circulating last night that the Court had already voted 12 to 2 to knock out the House move.

The Justices will invoke Section 1 of Article VIII of the 1987 Constitution which entrusts the duty to courts of justice "to settle actual controversies concerning rights which are legally demandable and enforceable, and to determine whether there has been a grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack of jurisdiction on any part of any branch or instrumentality of the government."

If the news really "leaked out" last night, then this may have written finis to last-minute Palace attempts to broker a covenant which would bring "peace" between the proponents of the impeachment drive against Davide and the besieged Chief Justice. It’s possible, but now extremely more difficult, that such a . . . well, "deal" can still be snatched from the teeth of controversy. Otherwise, we could witness an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation today between the militants of the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court.

This is not good. I hope that common sense and good sense will prevail – and that the Rule of Law is upheld.

* * *

The horrible terrorist car-bomb attack on a residential compound west of Riyadh shows that Islamic terrorists don’t respect the Ramadan or holy month of fasting, contrary what so many gullible people have been bleating to justify Ramadan ceasefires or periods of truce during that pious season. Islamic terrorism or rebellion never takes a holiday. Neither, for that matter, do Christian terrorists respect a Christmas hiatus.

The Riyadh blast took the lives of ten and wounded over 100. The explosion shook buildings as far away from the scene as the center of the Saudi capital. Another suicide car-bomb assault last May in another residential compound claimed 35 lives.

Mind you, these atrocities are taking place in the Holy Land of Islam, where the two holiest shrines of the Muslim faith are located – Makkah and Medina. In fact, the royal House of Saud is now paying the price of what it has been doing: Propagating the most fundamental version of Islam throughout the world, financing this spread of Islamic teaching with its petrodollars.

Ibn Saud, the father of the dynasty, had embraced the Puritanism of the Wahabbi’s, a radical sect of Islam. Saudi Arabia has continued to disseminate Wahhabi’ism throughout the globe, building mosques everywhere and instituting religious schools at the grassroots level which taught suspicion and hatred of the Infidel – including us nasty Christians, of course, "crusaders", and Jews.

Look at Turkey, which used to be one of the most liberal-minded Muslim nations on earth in the footsteps of its great Mustapha Kemal Ataturk. Today, an Islamic government holds sway in Ankara and Istanbul. The Saudis had built more than 1,000 mosques there and established thousands of religious schools in just a few years – lo, the transformation.

In Indonesia, thanks to the propagation of Puritanism, many more women are wearing the conventional jhilba than in the years in which this writer covered an Indonesia where women previously played a very prominent and important role, whether in business, science or government. (They used to be unusually fetching in form-fitting sarong kebaya.)

Muhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab was born in Najd in Arabia in 1703. He grew up decrying the decay in purist Islamic practices owing to infidel influences which had allegedly corrupted the pristine principles of the faith. He called for jihad against both the infidel and "corruption within".

The Wahhabis started out by targeting tree-adoration and worship at tombs. His own townmates were alarmed at Wahhab’s radical teachings, so he fled to Diriya in 1744. The chief of Diriya happened to be Muhammad Ibn Saud. Saud became a convert to Wahhab’s cause. Banning luxuries like jewellery, silk and gold, and "decadent" music, dancing and poetry, Ibn Saud went forth and won victories on the battlefield – attributing his successes to the Wahhabi puritan creed he had adopted.

In 1791, the Wahhabi forces under Saud defeated the Sheikh of Makkah (Mecca) and in 1797 reached Baghdad. By 1801, Saud Ibn abdul Aziz, grandson of Muhammad Ibn Saud, could field 100,000 warriors and thus overwhelmed the holy city of Kerbala in 1802. In 1803, he finally captured Makkah.

The rest you know. By spreading Islamic Wahhabism, the House of Saud may have made itself vulnerable to the counter-attack of its worst "puritans," with al-Qaeda today accusing the Royal Family of corruption, hedonism, and betrayal of pristine Islamic ideals. It’s no wonder, although they try to explain it away, that out of the 19 hi-jackers who launched the outrages of 9/11, no less than 15 of the men involved were Saudis.

Everything comes home to roost. The good news is that the Saudis, at long last, seem to have reluctantly bestirred themselves to fight back. Will they re-examine their Wahhabism, too? That’s the question.