2.15.11

And still another one I like:

Editorial
BRAZEN LIES
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:53:00 02/11/2011


LIAR, LIAR, uniform on fire.

If for nothing else, given the helpless outrage you feel at the bald attempt to make a fool of you and your sound faculties, you’re tempted to resort to schoolyard name-calling when confronted with the recent testimony—sworn testimony, let’s be clear about that—of retired Lt. Gen. Jacinto Ligot before the Senate.

At the recent blue ribbon committee hearing looking into the massive corruption involving hundreds of millions of pesos of misused funds in the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Ligot, the military comptroller when Gen. Angelo Reyes was AFP chief of staff, was confronted with records showing that his wife traveled to the United States 42 times, and bought two houses there, one of which she paid for in cold cash amounting to $183,868 in 2002.

The Ligots are said to own, in all, eight pieces of real estate in the US. On one trip, to San Francisco in 1999, Ligot’s wife Erlinda traveled with Reyes’ wife Teresita, and they were gone for three months. In the next five years, they would travel together 12 more times.

Think about it: Ligot is a retired three-star general. You couldn’t rise to that rank without more than a modicum of brains. He must have distinguished himself in his long military career, else why the stars, the medals and the lofty honorific? As comptroller, he held, for several years, one of the most influential positions in the AFP: guardian and dispenser, no less, of its seemingly bottomless cash box.

You wouldn’t know all that, however (you would think you were dealing with a forgetful old fool, except you knew better) from hearing Ligot’s answers to questions raised at the hearing about his wife’s propensity to travel and shop for properties abroad. And, more importantly, where she got all that money to bankroll her lavish lifestyle.

Confronted with the number of times his wife was hopping in and out of airplanes for extended sojourns in the US, Ligot flatly denied knowing about the trips. He was completely in the dark—because his wife might have kept her trips “secret,” he said. At one point Erlinda Ligot was gone from their home for three straight months, but na-ah, the three-star general never noticed.
The houses? It was the first time he saw them, Ligot claimed. And when he asked his wife, in the wake of forfeiture cases by the Sandiganbayan, how on earth they had ended up owning two expensive new houses in a country not known for giving away prime property just like that, especially to foreign visitors, he said he had to stop the questioning pronto because his wife became hysterical. And that was that—subject closed.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this. One, Ligot must think his countrymen watching the proceedings on primetime TV are stupid enough to fall for such hogwash. Two, such is the seduction of the charmed life all that illicit hoard must have afforded him and his family that Ligot is now willing to risk public ridicule—the loss of any semblance of logic, common sense and truth in what he says, among the basic qualities that would mark him as fit to wear his military uniform—if only to defend and hold on to that almighty kitty.

Here, in a larger sense, is the true tragedy of corruption: the way it transforms men of erstwhile intelligence and distinction into sorry facsimiles of themselves, unable to account for their deceitful actions except through transparently ludicrous fibs and prevarications.

Ligot’s nonsensical rejoinders deserve to be laughed out of the room. But the matter cannot end with painless, inconsequential hilarity—because there is that other, more pressing, matter: the pesky oath he took before his testimony.

The withering, incredulous reactions by his interrogators notwithstanding—“Even our pet dogs or cats, when they go astray, we look for them. What more if it’s your wife missing,” Sen. Jinggoy Estrada observed—Ligot was reminded not once during his appearance that he was speaking under oath, that everything he had to say carried the penalty of perjury should it prove to be untrue.

That he could proffer such unbelievable excuses for the questionable wealth of his family testifies to Ligot’s confidence that none of his bald-faced falsehoods would get him in trouble. In this country, lying through one’s teeth, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, is a no-brainer.

Well then, beginning with Ligot and his AFP cohorts, it’s high time people like them were disabused of such cozy thoughts.


REFLECTIONS
Numbers 34-36

When the Lord assigned Canaan to the Israelites by designating borders and distributing the land evenly to the tribes, it does make one feel that our own lot in life has been pre-selected with its boundaries and limitations. Does that include what station we will occupy in life, what length, what scope, what breadth, what limitations?

Numbers 35:10-12
When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, select some towns to be your cities of refuge, to which a person who has killed someone accidentally may flee. They will be places of refuge from the avenger, so that a person accused of murder may not die before he stands trial before the assembly.

This is cool.
A man is considered innocent until he is proven guilty.
But in our present time, he chooses his own city of refuge.
Until he is found out.

Numbers 35:20-21
If anyone with malice aforethought shoves another or throws something at him intentionally so that he dies or if in hostility he hits him with his fist so that he dies, that person shall be put to death; he is a murderer.

This is the legal definition of what murder is: with malice aforethought.

Numbers 35:33
Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it.

And in this generation, how liveable it the land?
When too much blood has been drenched to perpetuate humanity?

Numbers 36
Your own lot is your own.
You are responsible to keep it.
You are not to assign it to anyone else.
Your choices are what make you.