The Philippine Senate never fails to amuse me. As a background, yesterday, the Senate Committee of the Whole met to discuss a fellow senator’s (Sen. Manny Villar) alleged unethical conduct for “inserting” an additional P200-million in the 2008 national budget. The budget was used for the construction of a road that would pass through his property which thereby hiked up the value of his real estate. Those supporting and against Villar met head-to-head.

This mudslinging is entertaining as it is exasperating. And to think that Sen. Miriam-Defensor Santiago was out sick. That woman can give a soundbite.

Jump to 2:46.

Gloves come off in Senate session

Sen. Roxas: I say no. I had no insertion on any matter. In fact, I have no insertion, period. Because we’re in the minority! Let alone an insertion for a road to pass through any such property.

Sen. Pimentel: Well, well, I am sure that after your marriage, you had some insertions.

Pimentel FTW!

When I was a journalism student, there were few people I looked up to. While I have nothing but deep respect for and am truly grateful to all my journalism professors, I still have this vile feeling towards them, which perhaps stems from the fact that they managed to make me feel, ummm, less than adequate, every time they returned my papers with their corrections, which, according to some, had a semblance to menstruation–the red ink from their pens penetrating every page, reducing my elaborate story on the President’s State of the Nation Address into a children’s story.

Run-on sentences, like the one before this, and euphemisms like “less than adequate,” were their favorite and my weakness. The idea is to make everything simple to understand. Guide the reader, but don’t spoonfood him. Back then, Maria Ressa was still working for CNN. She’s now the Head of ABS-CBN’s News and Current Affairs.

Blowback: The Massacre in Maguindanao – Maria Ressa

You can’t escape the laws of physics. Newton’s third law of motion states: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In the world of governments and their security forces, it’s called blowback – a term first coined by the US Central Intelligence Agency in classified documents to describe US and British covert operations in Iran in 1953. They helped overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh, setting in motion a chain of events which inspired the revival of Islamic fundamentalism around the world.

Blowback happened again in Afghanistan in the late 80’s when the US funneled more than $3 billion, through Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, to build up the Afghan resistance against the Soviets. That sowed the seeds for 9/11 and the major terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia from 2001 to 2009. Among the key beneficiaries was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who helped train Osama bin Laden and thousands of Southeast Asian militants including the founder of the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, some of the Bali and JW Marriott bombers.

Blowback happened in Maguindanao in the southern Philippines – where warlords with private armies funded by the state wield political power.

It’s a complex situation: the power structure of government is a thin overlay on top of a complex social hierarchy based on families or clans. These clans periodically clash – feuds known as rido, which can be ignited by the flimsiest of reasons – a quarrel over women or a verbal slight. Clans became the foundation of electoral politics and determined the distribution of power and resources.

Add the fight against Muslim insurgents, first the MNLF or Moro National Liberation Front. Now it’s the Moro Islamic Liberation Front of MILF, which provided training and sanctuary to numerous Islamic militants, including members of Jemaah Islamiyah, Al-Qaeda’s arm in Southeast Asia.

The Ampatuan family’s rise to power began in the Marcos era, when it closely allied with the military to fight the Moro National Liberation Front or MNLF. When the MNLF signed a peace agreement with the government in 1996, the enemy changed to the MILF, now the largest Muslim insurgency in the country.

Read the whole story here.

PHOTO CREDITS
www.pep.ph

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour talks to ABS-CBN’s Maria Ressa

With machinations almost Shakespearean in nature, the generations-long feud between two political clans in Buluan, Maguindanao—a rural area located in the southern part of the Philippines—has risen to heights in what observers can only describe as a “gruesome massacre” “unequalled in recent history.”

On Monday, a group of at least 36 people, mostly composed of women identified with Buluan vice mayor Dato “Toto” Mangudadatu and 12 journalists, were abducted and later killed by close to a hundred gunmen allegedly led by members of rival Ampatuan political clan. As of Wednesday, the number of bodies found rose to 52.

More than the fact that helpless and unarmed journalists were killed, is the fact that all people in the group were helpless and unarmed.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has placed Maguindanao under a state of emergency, ordering the Philippine National Police to go after the perpetrators.

Four days after the filing for candidacy was opened and at six months before the elections, this is the first election-related crime to hit headlines. Shakespeare had it better. Clearly, we’re in a tragedy.

PHOTO CREDITS
Associated Press (Aaron Favila, Noel Celis)
www.worldphotos.com
www.wn.com

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s 2009 State of the Nation Address

Jump to the 1:00 mark and try to keep your seething anger in.

“As a country in the path of typhoons and in the Pacific Rim of Fire, we must be as prepared as the latest technology permits to anticipate natural calamities when that is possible; to extend immediate and effective relief when it is not….The mapping of flood- and landslide-prone areas is almost complete. Early warning, forecasting and monitoring systems have been improved, with weather tracking facilities in Subic, Tagaytay, Mactan, Mindanao, Pampanga….

We have worked on flood control infrastructure like those for Pinatubo, Agno, Laoag, and Abucay, which will pump the run off waters from Quezon City and Tondo flooding Sampaloc. This will help relieve hundreds of hectares in this old city of its age-old woe….

Patuloy naman iyong sa Camanava, dagdag sa Pinatubo, Iloilo, Pasig-Marikina, Bicol River Basin, at mga river basin ng Mindanao.”

Now where the f*ck are all those things?