Arrogantly claiming during his appearance before the senate that he knows better than all else as he is a lawyer, prosecutor, mayor and president, the boastful resource person lorded over the hearing with narrative. It was the only man standing who ironically is a woman, that had the courage to tell the former mayor, prosecutor and president that what he claims as in accordance with law are all wrong.
Even the vulgar language that the said resource person had taken the luxury to spit as he narrated his tale was called by the lady senator as unacceptable in the upper house where they are hosts and the resource person as mere guest. The ploy to control the senate was too obvious as his two factotums in the senate kept supporting their master.
The rest of the senators were too cautious in the guise of affording respect to the former office of the resource person. With limited time to present their stories, the surviving family members of the victims of extrajudicial killings were hard-pressed explaining the details of their own sufferings. On the contrary, the former president was given all the time he wants to just to express all his tales and justifications. The inequity was too glaring for all to see, both from the gallery of the senate hall and those watching online.
In the course of his mouthful bragging, many revelations were uttered which when traced to previous statements of the former mayor, prosecutor and president as well as other resource persons that appeared before both houses of congress, are diametrically opposed and outright contradictory. He for instance had been insistent that there is no such thing as the Davao Death Squad (DDS) that former senator Liela De Lima investigated while she was justice secretary. But as the hearing continued, he spilled the truth that he indeed has a death squad and the police directors in attendance in that hearing were commanders of such death squads.
Amid vehement denials of the police directors that there were no such death squads, they could not now afford to brand their master as lying and they are the ones telling the truth. Over the years since the implementation of the bloody drug war that was patterned from the reported Davao template, official records on the number of victims that were extrajudicially killed but human rights groups set the number at about twenty thousand. Of the number killed, only eight policemen were convicted, prompting the International Criminal Court (ICC) to conduct its own investigation on the premise that the government had not done it duty to prosecute the killers.
The findings of the senate investigation as well as that of the quad committee of the lower house offer new reasons to pursue the prosecution of the culprits. The staggering number of killed victims is grossly disproportionate with the convictions. Calls from various sectors for the senate to submit the testimony of the former president to the ICC is gaining impetus that could hardly be ignored. All denials by those officials who are being implicated in the bloody drug was had taken a new twist with the author of the drug war bragging.
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