What a dandy trick. By playing in Congress, Ong would have gotten around the illegality of possessing a wiretap, whose realness and validity is still under debate. If played to the press, he will still get around it anyway, since no judge would be present to grill him on illicit evidence, then claim genuineness in the process. No need to tell how he got the tape, not after Sgt. Vidal Doble did a double take that cast doubt on it.
Craftiness of lawyers has long been acknowledged. One of the oldest Jewish jokes is about it. Two farmers were fighting over a cow. While one was pulling the head and the other was pulling the tail, the lawyer was milking the cow.
Non-lawyers like former movie-rating chief Manuel Morato perceive such guile. In a newspaper ad on "concerted efforts" to topple Ms Arroyo, he asked why Frank Chavez suddenly appeared as lawyer of bagwoman Sandra Cam in the Senate’s jueteng inquiry. Too, why Liwayway Vinsons-Chato just as abruptly turned up as Ong’s lawyer. The two are also counsels of Piatco, the company with the graft-ridden deal to build and run NAIA-3. Coupled with the presence at Ong’s seminary hole-out of Gerry Cunanan, Piatco’s would-be NAIA-3 general manager, Morato said, Piatco could be the mystery bankroller of the ouster plot. The main plotters are Opposition figures associated with ex-President Joseph Estrada. The Piatco contract underwent many revisions, favorable to the firm but onerous to the State, during the Estrada tenure. The Arroyo Administration unearthed the mess and took it to the Supreme Court, which voided the contract. So there.
Then again, Morato recalled, NAIA-3 is about to be opened, and arbitration with Piatco is set to begin next month. Too, the government is negotiating payments to the builder. Piatco has no apparent reason to make trouble. Could some other wily person, lawyer or not, be implicating it to cover his own destabilizing tracks?
It would seem so, as in Spy vs Spy. Bishop Oscar Cruz had revealed a plan to smear him with either faggotry or adultery for starting the jueteng probe. Two weeks later sprang a former sacristan crying both. Were Ms Arroyo’s hit men so dumb as to pull such attack? Or was a wily puppeteer from the Opposition behind the sacristan too, to rip the Administration?
Meantime, it took a lawyer to confront the crafty shouts of peers for Ms Arroyo to say once and for all if it’s her or not in many wiretap CDs. Premature for her to talk, said Rep. Salacnib Baterina. Nobody has yet ascertained which of the CDs is genuine. The President thus cannot comment on what could turn out to be criminal material.
It took a non-lawyer, on the other hand, to put the genuineness in perspective. The CD of Natalie Cole’s duet with her dad is real, although taped when Nat King Cole was long dead. Same with Muhammad Ali’s video boxing with long departed Rocky Marciano. Same with the many high-tech Disney fantasies that look so real.
But back to Morato. The man raised many other points in his ad. For one, the timing of release of the wiretap tape and CDs one long year after they should have been presented as proof of election fraud, in contrast to the Florida furor in which a good man conceded defeat. Too, the swift, self-serving "verifications" of the "trueness" of the CDs from Australia and America, courtesy of Sen. Ping Lacson and Kit Tatad. Likewise, a quote from former Comelec chair Christian Monsod that "Garci" is notorious for double-cross, and thus naturally attracts phone calls from worried election candidates. Finally, that Ong makes the wiretapped Ms Arroyo look like Nixon and so must resign, when in fact it was Nixon who did the wiretapping and thus had to go.
But what merits most attention is Morato’s contention of "the hard realities that cheating and vote-buying do occur in Philippine elections." Everybody does it: candidates, their henchmen and supporters, be they from the Administration or the Opposition. This is why another former Comelec chair Harriet Demetriou chuckled at the irony of a man named "Senator" in the CD pleading with a man named "Commissioner" to pad the votes for whatever price. As Demetriou recalled, Sen. Robert Barbers had once complained that Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano cheated in the 1998 elections. Equally ironic was that Senate minority boss Aquilino Pimentel led the opposition to Garcillano’s nomination as commissioner for cheating him in 1995, yet worked for the same appointment in 1999.
This raises the questions: are the CDs presenting only one half of the story, that is, that only Administration bigwigs cheated with "Garci"? Does Ong’s master tape contain the other half, that is, that certain Opposition candidates called "Garci" as well for indecent proposals? Or, was "Garci" the point man for one side, while there was another fixer for the other?
Lacson, who came out yesterday in a press conference like a Sith Lord from "Star Wars", insists that the content of the CDs is the issue, that Ms Arroyo must speak up, for the truth shall set us free. But then, won’t the whole truth set us freer?