Trillanes will just bungle probe of Duterte son

Expect no elucidation from tomorrow’s Senate hearing on a “Davao connection” to smuggling at Customs. As advised by daddy, presidential son Pulong Duterte will remain silent on questions about P5-million bribes to whisk out contraband from the Manila ports. Administration senators will even skirt that issue altogether in allegiance to President Rody Duterte. And the accusing Sen. Antonio Trillanes as usual will mess things up by losing his cool and badgering witnesses in vain to confess to crime. It has happened so many times before.

Senate inquiries no longer are learning experiences for officials and the public. They’re more like predictable zarzuelas that leave the audience laughing or crying but not any more informed. Resource persons of the opposition and administration sides merely exchange verbal charges. Evidence is not fleshed out by documents and deduction but mere allegation and alibi. That’s what will happen to the sensational linking of Pulong Duterte and presidential son-in-law Mans Carpio to Customs corruption. Their intervention allegedly led to last May’s entry from China of 605 kilos of shabu (meth).

Customs broker Mark Taguba has been identified behind the heinous narcotic shipment. Shabu warrants no-bail trial and life sentence. Only 26 years old and seeing his future crumbling before him, he ratted on accomplices – the Customs bigwigs who facilitated the entry of the illegal drug. Without much prodding he also pointed to protectors from Davao City: one Tita Nannie and Jack who advised him to pay P5-million “entrance fee” to the protected circle, and councilor Nilo Abellera who supposedly fronts for Vice Mayor Pulong Duterte in the protection racket. Davao City, from where President Duterte hails, is the new center of power these days.

Trillanes pounced on the revelations to further his opposition to President Duterte. Offering Senate protective custody, he wrung from Taguba snippets about weekly bribes to the Davao Group for speedy processing by Customs appointees of brokered cargo containers. Then came the other senators’ turn to cross-examine Taguba. Trillanes resented and branded as “pag-aabogado (lawyering) for Duterte” their line of questioning. He was oblivious of the fact that he too was in effect lawyering – for the prosecution, so to speak – in his manner of examining Taguba. He then accused the senators of badgering the witness, forgetting how he had done the very same to Taguba and many other resource persons in past Senate inquiries. He had also coerced them to confess to crimes, or else be detained indefinitely at the Senate garage.

The best thing for Trillanes to do tomorrow is to studiously prepare questions for Pulong Duterte and Carpio to answer with silence. Then he should sit down and patiently watch as the administration senators take turns asking shallow questions of their own in front of national television cameras. The intelligent public would discern from that an obvious

cover-up of crime in high places. But then, Trillanes can’t help being himself. He will rant and rave, stomp his feet and curse Duterte and Carpio, turning them into underdogs with whom the public will sympathize. Trillanes will blow his chance to get to the truth, that’s for sure.

** * Filipino info-technologist Leo Querubin won’t let pass un-refuted Smartmatic’s rejoinder to his earlier exposé of election manipulation (“Smartmatic: 89% want us”, Gotcha, 4 Sept. 2017). The Venezuelan seller of voting machines denied any hanky-panky and cited opinion polls of voters overwhelmingly supporting its automated elections system. To which Querubin rebuts:

“I read with amusement the response of Smartmatic general manager Eli Moreno. He said that, ‘As has been explained by PPCRV, in the 2013 election Smartmatic pointed to PPCRV a flaw in their aggregation system; PPCRV rectified it. This aggregation system is not an election server.’ Attached is the screen cap of PPCRV’s Facebook page explaining the double count in 2013. Also attached is a copy of the Comelec Advisory Council report in 2013. On page 18, the report states the deletion of files and the installation of an ‘intermediary’ server.

“As for the ‘ñ’ change, Smartmatic claimed it 'was authorized by Comelec to execute such change.’ But at a press briefing at the Philippine International Convention Center – the operations center of the National Board of Canvassers – Commissioner Rowena Guanzon said Smartmatic should have sought permission from the Comelec en banc before making what the firm said was a cosmetic change. This was from a PhilStar article http://www.philstar.com/ headlines/2016/05/13/1582811/smartmaticliable-breaking-protocol-script-change-saysguanzon.

“As for the queue server/secret server, please see the video attached. It may also be good to view this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULs6ipT4oLM&feature=youtu.be.

“I mentioned that SmartmaticTIM is a foreign vendor because the documents filed in the UK show that Smartmatic-TIM is 100% owned by Smartmatic Limited (refer to page 27 of the attached Smartmatic Limited Annual Report and Consolidated Financial Statements).

“I also want to add that I joined Indra in 2015, after all the biddings for the 2016 national/local elections were completed. In one of those bids, Indra was the sole qualified bidder for the Voter Verification System, the centerpiece of the Comelec’s ‘No Bio, No Boto’ program. But instead of awarding the contract to Indra, Comelec scrapped the project and defied the Commission on Audit by realigning the budget to purchase more voting machines from Smartmatic. Unbelievable.”

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The senator is so adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Too bad for the truth.