LIKE an immature child pointing a finger at somebody else when caught in an infraction, President Aquino is desperately trying to pass off the blame for the Mamasapano debacle in which 44 police commandos were killed. The ploy will not work because the public is not as gullible as Mr. Aquino believes, and the more he tries, the more guilty he looks.
At a prayer meeting of Christian leaders who still support him, the President beat the dead horse that is the sacked chief of the Special Action Force (SAF), Getulio Napeñas, who was the ground commander of the covert Mamasapano operation to capture or kill two wanted terrorists.
In a most un-Christian way, the President spewed a litany of sins that Napeñas allegedly committed, and tried again to peddle the fiction that the SAF chief acted on his own. The SAF commander, Aquino said, disobeyed his direct orders to coordinate the police action with the Armed Forces, failed to get his commandos in place early, and also failed to abort the mission when it was apparent that conditions on the ground had changed.
There was one glaring omission in the President’s tale, however: the role that his close friend, resigned police chief Alan Purisima, played in the whole affair. It was Purisima, after all, who called the shots, even though he was already suspended at the time on corruption charges.
Despite the President’s silence on this point, we now know from testimony before the Senate that Mr. Aquino worked directly through Purisima, who then gave orders to Napeñas. In fact, it was Purisima who had told Napeñas that he would take care of informing the Armed Forces about the operation, and that he should keep the OIC of the Philippine National Police in the dark until the commandos were already on the ground.
This testimony directly refutes Aquino’s incredible claim that Napeñas acted on his own. That the President failed to even mention Purisima makes it all the clearer that he has something to hide, and that Napeñas is being made the scapegoat for the President’s own fatal incompetence.
Encouraged, perhaps, by the fawning supporters at the prayer meeting who “beseeched” him to stay the course and finish his term, the President also used the prayer meeting to lambast his critics, calling them attention seekers (kulang sa pansin) who cannot think clearly, are uncaring and lacking in faith.
But the President was preaching to the choir. Catholic bishops who have been far less gullible and pliant, and who have urged Mr. Aquino to step down over his spectacular failures, were not invited to the prayer shindig. If they were, that would have required that this craven President confront his critics face-to-face, a move that would require much more courage than he has shown thus far with his cowardly and unseemly attempts to deflect blame.