EDITORIAL The asset becomes a liability
Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she was just trying to wriggle out of a hole. Maybe she just threw a red herring. Maybe she was just under tremendous stress that she did not know what she was saying. But when Senator Leila de Lima said that high profile Bilibid inmate Jaybee Sebastian was in fact a government asset, she wittingly or unwittingly opened a door that should never have opened.
If Sebastian is truly a government asset, then he could not have been an asset of the Duterte government, which had been in power for only three months. In all likelihood, he is an asset of the previous Aquino government, of which de Lima herself was a prominent part of as justice secretary. As justice secretary, the national penitentiary at Bilibid was part of her responsibility.
The most notorious thing about Bilibid is that instead of serving as a correctional facility, it is from this penitentiary where potentially the biggest illegal drug operation is being operated, managed and supervised. The drug lords who run the illicit drug trade from inside Bilibid live like kings in every sense of the word. Nothing in their lives, except for the fact that they are in Bilibid, would suggest otherwise.
As a government asset, Sebastian could not have been oblivious to all these. On the contrary, he lived just as charmed a life as the other kings. And when the most notorious ones were removed and transferred to NBI custody, Sebastian was left to reign supreme. And yet, underneath the veneer of prison power, he was, as de Lima would swear, an active functioning government asset.
So where does that stunning disclosure now bring us. For one, it bring us to the fact that the previous Aquino government could not have been oblivious to all the shenanigans happening inside Bilibid, given the fact that it had a virtual ringside seat courtesy of its asset inside, the reigning king of kings of Bilibid Jaybee Sebastian.
Now, given what the Aquino government surely must have known about the shenanigans at Bilibid, it becomes absolutely necessary for no less than former president Noynoy Aquino himself to be compelled to disclose not only what he knew but what he did about what he knew. Unfortunately, it seems only the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption that had the sense to call for Aquino to be summoned to any of the ongoing investigations pertaining to the country's drug problem.
De Lima's disclosure about Sebastian as a government asset inadvertently exposed the possible complicity of Aquino in the travesty that is Bilibid. Aquino can no longer wash his hands of culpability. Only the degree of his culpability remains to be determined. Then all of a sudden, Sebastian gets wounded in a highly-suspicious supposed riot. Now he wants to talk to Duterte. But Duterte, sensing something, says no. Abangan.
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