If Binay deserves to be jailed for the 2007 Manila Peninsula Siege, so does Trillanes!

November 17, 2014

by benign0

Vice President Jejomar Binay cannot stop the “Senate hearings” and the social media chatter surrounding his alleged ill-gotten wealth and dynastic leanings, but he can get to the source of the cough — phlegm. By simply flying under the radar, ignoring the noise, connecting with the masses (his electoral bulwarck), and focusing on what he does best (looking and smelling good), Binay will winthe 2016 presidential elections. He just needs to starve his detractors of the hearsay “information” they feed on and have so far been using to sling the traditional pre-election mud at him.

Mutineer-turned-‘senator’ Antonio Trillanes IV committed a fatal flaw in his continued efforts to demonise Binay by admitting that he had made a deal with him back during his mutineering days in the 2000s. According to Trillanes, Binay had assured him a civilian backing a-la Philippine-style “people power” when he led a band of rogue soldiers in an armed assault of the Manila Peninsula in 2007…

Binay then promised that he would use his position to mobilize the employees of Makati City Hall, the urban poor, the students of the University of Makati, even the Makati traffic enforcers and police, according to Trillanes.

“On the eve of the Manila Pen incident, we were able to bring in our guns to Makati City Hall so we could use these for our revolt. Up to that point it was clear he was with us,” he said.

But when the day of the siege came, when the Magdalo soldiers had walked out of their trial, Binay and his promised group of supporters were nowhere to be seen.

“He put the whole group in trouble,” he said. “Not even the shadow of Vice President Binay was seen in Makati that day.”

‘Senator’ Antonio Trillanes IV led a rebellion against the Republic in 2007 that could have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.

What seems to fly over the pointed head of this criminal ‘senator’ is that he is building an entire adolescent tantrum on top of a lame rationalisation of his far more grave past criminal behaviour — criminal behaviour that, in most normal countries, would have ended with its perpetrators being put in front of a firing squad. Trillanes’s actions and involvement in the July 27, 2003 Oakwood Mutiny, the February 2006 Marines Stand-Off, and the November 29, 2007 Manila Peninsula Incident and related incidents put innocent civilian lives at extreme risk. Furthermore, his “military adventurism” created an entire future of political instability and, with it, the ill perception of the Philippines coming from the global community. All that was to become ultimately detrimental to the ordinary Filipino who continues to struggle to this day to find sustainable livelihood as it is. This highlights the irony of how said popular will is actually a disservice to the “people” who are supposedly its source.

Suffice to say, the only real mistake former President Gloria Arroyo and the Philippine Army, then under her command, committed was capturing Trillanesalive. He could have been simply taken out by a sniper or any member of an assaulting force on sight right there and then and that would have been the end of that — a clean shooting when one considers the gravity of what Trillanes was doing in 2007 — an act of rebellion against the Republic. Instead, he is now a Philippine ‘senator’ thanks to the insult-on-the-intelligence presidential pardon he was granted by Philippine President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III in 2010. That’s Philippine society and its limpdicked sense of “justice” for you.

Indeed, no less than Senator Miriam Santiago chimed in on the heels of Trillanes’s tirade over Binay’s “chickening out” from the debate and declared that if Binay was indeed, part of Trillanes’s consipracy to overthrow the Philippine government, he should be put in jail for it…

Santiago said “merely agreeing and deciding to rise publicly and take arms against the government for the purposes of rebellion is already punishable under the crime of conspiracy to commit rebellion.”

“Thus, it was immaterial that Binay allegedly failed to mobilize the supporters, and was nowhere to be seen during the Manila Pen siege,” she said in a statement.

“While Trillanes and the other participants of the Manila Pen siege, and their civilian supporters were granted amnesty by President Aquino in 2010, the amnesty did not apply to Binay,” the senator said, referring to the uprising by Trillanes and fellow soldiers from the Magdalo Group at the Manila Peninsula in Makati City.

The core point many Filipinos will have missed here is that it is only on the back of the privilege of President BS Aquino’s politically-motivated pardon that keeps Trillanes out of jail today — the same jail that Santiago asserts Binay would belong in if found to be complicit in Trillanes’s hienous 2007 crime against the Republic. But trust Filipinos to keep their silly smiles plastered on while that one sails right over their heads.

Today’s Op-Ed piece written by the Inquirer editor captures the essence of the rot at the core of Philippine society at work here…

One day, an underpaid construction worker, desperate about his miserable fate, steals groceries in a nearby wet market to feed his family, gets caught, is mauled, and is put in jail that very day, where he stays for many years.

On the other hand, hardened criminals rob a bank, kill the security guards, tellers and bank clients. The question hangs: Would they ever be hauled to court and imprisoned?