Uneasy feeling on Subic rape case

For one, there’s the galling phone call leaked by Katrina Legarda, the victim’s counsel. Says she, on the early morning after the girl was shoved out of the Marines’ van naked and crying, embassy men swayed Justice Sec. Raul Gonzalez to turn over the suspects to them. Gonzalez denies the story. Yet it’s the only explanation by far for the Ologanpo city fiscal’s failure to hold an inquest right away, and for the police to make arrests. They could have been napping on the job, though, which then justifies Legarda’s plea for case transfer to Manila. But Gonzalez nixes that too by saying the fiscal is on the ball. Through it all, US officials have not elucidated how the six servicemen came to be safely in their hands.

The only words from the embassy have been either provocative or tentative. There was the brute that hooted at women picketing the embassy that the victim got what she deserved for riding a van full of strangers. And there’s the line that the legation took custody of the six precisely to present them to RP court if ever, instead of letting them board ship that left on the night of the alleged felony. That only sent senators rereading the Visiting Forces Agreement that they had ratified only recently, and discovering its many flaws and breaches. By provision, the US side should have made a formal request for custody, which it did not, so the issue resurfaces on how the Marines got off Subic hands. By provision, too, RP may seek charge of the accused, if only to ensure court jurisdiction. Only after senators grilled the VFA Commission chief and the Foreign Undersecretary for special concerns did the latter deem it proper to formally inform the US of RP’s desire for custody.

That again is iffy. A history of sad-happy relations makes Filipinos wary of US intents for justice in military offenses. When the US held naval and air bases in Subic Bay and Clark Field for decades, sentries on several occasions had shot Negritoes scavenging in garbage dumps. The invariable verdict was, so sorry, we mistook them for wild boar. The Olongapo fiscal’s office admits that all 30 or so rape cases against US servicemen back then had been dismissed or settled out of court. In one instance, then-Olongapo mayor (now senator) Dick Gordon had to chase a US Navy sergeant all the way to Hawaii for custody – in vain – for the rape of a ten-year-old girl. For Filipinos old enough to remember such events before the bases left in 1991, the outcome of this present rape case is predictably dim.

It has yet to be seen if US policy had since changed. Filipinos in touch with relatives in America are receiving grim messages. Fil-Ams caution that the US, perennially at war all over the world, routinely welcomes back as heroes soldier-boys who may have committed murder, torture or rape. Sometimes a war vet is haunted by conscience, flips, and goes on a shooting spree in a post office – and only then would his war crimes be investigated. Oftentimes the offended parties are forgotten as "consequent casualties of war". Only when the US press uncovers stinks, such as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, sexual abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib, and torment at Guantanamo prison camp, do the White House and Pentagon act with dispatch. In the Subid rape case, Fil-Am lawyer Rodel Rodis notes, only two newspapers in the Midwest carried the story. He asks in his weekly column why those in California or New York, where there are huge Filipino concentrations, had ignored it for days.

The rape report and custody issue broke on the same week that a US functionary flew in to chide Manila about its dismal record against human trafficking. That should have assured Filipinos somehow that the US would not countenance abuse, if true, in Subic. But it didn’t. For, that week too US president George W. Bush was in Panama proclaiming that, yes, he would veto a bill to outlaw torture by US soldiers but, no, "we do not torture." Vice president Dick Cheney also was lobbying on Capitol Hill to exclude spies from any torture ban. A week before, the defense chief flatly denied a Washington Post exposé of CIA torture in secret prisons in Asia and Eastern Europe – although of course he could not confirm that such prisons existed. The farce does not escape local attention. Months back the State department again listed the Philippines as a bad place for human rights. Yet about the same time, the US justice department issued a memo justifying torture as among a US president’s war powers. Simultaneously the Pentagon declared too that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to battles against terrorists or sympathizers. Rape can be a type of torture. So the US pronouncements somehow bear on the Subic case. To add to the irony, the bill that Bush was so vehement against seeks only to correct uncovered abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Afghanistan. It was filed by Bush’s Republican pal, Sen. John McCain, himself tortured in Vietnam, but who says that the technique is nearly always useless since people will admit anything to tormentors. All McCain wants is to set US records and standards right by prohibiting cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment or punishment of US military captives.

A last reason for Filipinos’ skepticism about the Subic rap prospering is their own spotty justice system. The VFA sets one year to resolve any case involving US servicemen. The deadline surely won’t be met. It would take 60 days for preliminary investigation alone. Then, 15 days for appeals, 15 days for the other side to answer, and 60 days for the justice department to rule any which way. After that, 30 more days to file a motion to quash, plus another 30 days to file a motion for reconsideration, and the customary 60 days for the department to make a final ruling. By the time the case reaches court, only three months remain. But pre-trial starts only 30 days after arraignment, and that too takes another 30 days. The leaves only one month for prosecution and defense to make their cases before time’s up.