Bert’s latest misfire

Did we hear right? National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales has apparently said that the controversial lobbying contract with Venable could have been helpful in the Aragoncillo espionage case.

How so? Well, Bert asserts that if the Venable contract had been kept in place, the Washington law firm could have worked to repair whatever harm was done to RP-US relations. Say that again? As far as we know, both governments have insisted publicly that the two countries’ relations are as strong as ever.

The alleged breach of security, which may have reached the White House, apart from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was acknowledged by both countries to be a purely internal matter which should be handled under applicable US laws.

In addition, the Philippine government has been most cooperative with Federal prosecutors, to the extent of sending our National Bureau of Investigation chief to and virtually posting an Undersecretary of Justice in Washington D.C. Both officials are coordinating closely with US investigators and prosecutors.

Our government has been quite sympathetic to US declarations that a number of Philippine-based "co-conspirators" might be indicted along with Michael Ray Aquino. FBI analyst Leandro Aragoncillo is plea bargaining and hasn’t been indicted.

Given all that, I wonder what problem Gonzales had in mind, the solution to which Venable would play a key role. I know that Filipino-Americans who are US citizens and are employed in the US government are concerned that their loyalty to their new homeland may come under question. But the only ones who think that way are skinheads and confirmed racists who also think that blacks are naturally this and Chicanos characteristically that. None of this impacts on the "image" of the Philippines per se. Nor does it do any real damage to RP-US relations.

Maybe we’re missing something here. A national security angle, perhaps, which Bert has thus far kept "in pectore"? People are still guessing about the unspecified national security reason he cited in his request for a closed-door executive session, a request which the Senators declined.

The coffee shop gossip is that it his continued silence has a lot to do with the "donor" who generously paid for the lobbying contract, but who needs to remain anonymous because disclosure of the identity of the probable payor, a government "liaison" office abroad, may cause a diplomatic incident with a country which now enjoys de facto hegemony over much of East Asia.

I had thought that where Venable LLP was concerned, Bert would have been wise to keep his head down. Now that he’s offered it for a target, people are reminded that we still don’t know for sure who authorized the contract, who paid for it, whether it was really cancelled and, if so, as of what date the purported cancellation was effective?

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The UAAP board has announced that it will await the results of an internal investigation now being conducted by De la Salle University officials, before the league considers what action it will take in regard to an allegedly ineligible player the school has been fielding in its basketball team since the 2003 season.

The school should now speed up its inquiry to stop speculation and loose talk about exactly who may have been involved in the fabrication or falsification of Mark Benitez’s Philippine Educational Placement Test Certificate of Rating (PEPTCR). This test is administered by the Department of Education to enable one without a high school diploma or transcript of records to gain eligibility as a college student and, hence, be allowed to join the varsity team.

The stance that Benitez may have been a victim rather than the culprit only broadens the field of inquiry. If he never knew his supporting documents were fabricated, then who did? The document was allegedly hand-carried to the school registrar and never verified as to its authenticity. Who brought the paper and why wasn’t it cross-checked?

It was reportedly the school itself which launched an investigation and discovered the anomaly. But a question that could be fairly asked is why it took three years for the school to find out. The possibility of a spurious document allegedly came up only because registrars of other schools complained about De la Salle’s practice of accepting hand-carried eligibility documents.

Skeptics are convinced that Benitez didn’t have, shall we say, the creative acumen to pull this off on his own. The University’s unilateral action, it is claimed, was meant to preempt disciplinary action which the UAAP board was about to slap on the school, a la the one-year suspension meted out to Adamson University in the Marlou Aquino case.

Now it has come out that the UAAP board president (who this year is from, quite coincidentally, Adamson University) was told about the possible rule infraction by De La Salle in the morning of the second game between La Salle and Far Eastern University but was requested to "keep quiet" about it and allow the game to proceed. But his judgment in agreeing to keep mum and allow the game to be played, when other teams would have been clearly affected by the result of the ineligibility case, is open to question.

Not surprisingly, there are ugly rumors of deliberate manipulations of eligibility to get promising players on the De La Salle varsity basketball team. Text messages offer names and specify venues of alleged meetings when the status of Benitez was supposedly discussed. But without independent verification of the facts, I’m not about to quote those messages here.

What’s important is that individual schools in the UAAP check their own procedures to verify that no irregularities have infected their player selection methods. But I understand that other schools have done their checking and found none.

At the end of the day, this incident should serve as a wake-up call for those schools in intercollegiate athletic leagues which have become excessively ardent practitioners of American football coaching legend Vince Lombardi’s fighting maxim: "Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing."

But is winning at all costs, even questionable means, a good lesson to impart to our youth, who one day will take over the leadership of this country? Machiavelli’s ideal Prince notwithstanding, I don’t think so.