Why Senator Ping Lacson?

A small reminder before I begin this column: If you are concerned about our country be in Luneta tomorrow morning to make a stand against pork barrel corruption.

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To me, the most intriguing question in the pork barrel shebang is the suggestion to assign Senator Ping Lacson to head the investigation. The picture of a political agenda is emerging.

There is indeed something very wrong when a politician as high as a senator can go around the world with no one knowing where he was.

When he returns, there is a new government. He is welcomed as a hero.

I feel sorry for the Dacer-Corbito families, how frustrated they must feel with the turn of events on the case after the 2010 elections.  Read it and weep.

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Here’s from ABC News:

“Both the FBI and CIA are calling it the first case of espionage in the White House in modern history.

Officials tell ABC News the alleged spy worked undetected at the White House for almost three years. Leandro Aragoncillo, 46, was a US Marine most recently assigned to the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.

“I don’t know of a case where the vetting broke down before and resulted in a spy being in the White House,” said Richard Clarke, a former White House advisor who is now an ABC News consultant.

Federal investigators say Aragoncillo, a naturalized citizen from the Philippines, used his top secret clearance to steal classified intelligence documents from White House computers.

In 2000, Aragoncillo worked on the staff of then-Vice President Al Gore.

When interviewed by Philippine television, he remarked how valued Philippine employees were at the White House.

“I think what they like most is our integrity and loyalty,” Aragoncillo said.

Officials say the classified material, which Aragoncillo stole from the vice president’s office, included damaging dossiers on the president of the Philippines. He then passed those on to opposition politicians planning a coup in the Pacific nation.

“Even though it’s not for the Russians or some other government, the fact that it occurred at the White House is a matter of great concern,” said John Martin, who was the government’s lead espionage prosecutor for 26 years.

Last year, after leaving the Marines, Aragoncillo was caught by the FBI while he worked for the Bureau at an intelligence center at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

According to a criminal complaint, Aragoncillo was arrested last month and accused of downloading more than 100 classified documents from FBI computers.

“The information was transferred mostly by e-mails,” said US Attorney Christopher J. Christie at the time of Aragoncillo’s arrest.

Since that arrest, officials say Aragoncillo has started to cooperate. He has admitted to spying while working on the staff of Vice President Cheney’s office.

Aragoncillo began working at the White House in 1999. Officials are now trying to learn how he landed the job, when he started spying, and how he escaped detection for so long.

“Of course, it is a source of embarrassment when you find out that this kind of activity has been carried out literally right under your nose,” said Martin, the former espionage prosecutor.

According to friends, in addition to his work for Cheney and Gore, Aragoncillo claimed he also worked with President Clinton and Condoleezza Rice when she was the national security advisor.

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This is part of a column I wrote on February 26, 2010 “Decolonizing Edsa.“

…The adverse information about the workings of the Philippine Government to the political opposition was delivered to them directly by a Philippine-born US marine working in the White House by the name of Leandro Aragoncillo and, in some cases, indirectly through a former assistant of Senator Ping Lacson, Michael Ray Aquino, who had fled to the United States to escape indictment in connection with the Dacer-Corbito murder case. According to the sources, “the material had been prepared by the US Embassy in Manila.”

Dr. Gonzalo Jurado, vice-president for finance and development and concurrently Professor of Economics of Kalayaan College asks:

 (1) Could the political and economic forces that got together on that day of June 2005 to unanimously demand the resignation or impeachment of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo have come together by accident or where they organized and coordinated by an Unseen Hand? The diversity of the anti-GMA forces on the one hand and the uniformity of their demand and timing of their actions on the other seem to rule out spontaneous combustion.

(2) How could Leandro Aragoncillo, a US marine whose financial future was assured, or any sensible human being for that matter, have been so short-sighted and so reckless as to jeopardize his lifetime security by violating his government’s State Secrecy Act through delivery of information to anti-government politicians in a foreign land, who were not even in power?

 (3) How explain the breadth and depth of the vilification campaign against the President, mobilizing not just the opposition politicians and the anti-Gloria newspapers and television stations but also a business club, an opinion survey entity, leftists groups, and even a few academics acknowledged for their principled championship of nationalist anti-imperialist causes?

You’ll have to read the full article to connect the dots between the Garci tapes and America’s displeasure (then under President Bush) when President GMA acting in behalf of a citizen of her country, the truck driver, Angelo de la Cruz, pulled out of Iraq.

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Sen. Miriam Santiago today: “A policeman cannot be adviser to a Senate committee probing the pork barrel, because this is a question of law. He has no clue on how the law proceeds in these cases. ….Lacson has no acquaintance with the law, but has revealed his propensity for citing the law after confused coaching by his lawyers. A self-taught lawyer is a menace to society.



In the investigation of the pork barrel scam, the last thing we need is a self-interested politician. I stand by my original proposal that if the Senate insists on conducting its own probe, the result should be submitted to an independent impartial panel of investigators consisting of former Supreme Court chief justices and associate justices.”

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But then Lacson has friends in high places where it matters.