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Thursday, July 07, 2005
Garci talks: It’s doctored
MANILA -Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman Benjamin Abalos said former commissioner Virgilio Garcillano should now come out in public, after he admitted having talked to President Arroyo during the election period last year.
“Come out in the open and tell the truth. At least that is fair enough with the people,” Abalos urged Garcillano.
The poll commissioner, who has been in hiding for weeks, denied plotting to rig the vote in comments published yesterday. He said the secretly recorded tape had been tampered with.
“Many of these conversations were doctored,” Garcillano said in an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
“Tell the people that the conversations that have publicly come out of the tapes are untrue,” Garci-llano said. “I never did anything to destroy the electoral process. I am not that stupid.”
The tape’s emergence last month has caused a political storm that has threatened to bring down Arroyo, who took over when Joseph Estrada was ousted in 2000 over corruption allegations.
Survey
Public distrust for Arroyo has soared to 53 percent, with 48 percent of Filipinos saying that she should no longer serve as President, a June 20-23 survey of Pulse Asia showed.
The survey, which involved 1,200 respondents in Metro Manila and was reportedly commissioned by the opposition, was conducted less than a week before Arroyo made her public admission that she was the woman in the tape on June 27.
At the House inquiry looking into the wiretapping scandal, lawyer Alan Paguia said former senator Francisco Tatad is the source of the tapes on the wiretapped conversations.
Paguia said Tatad gave him the two audiotapes last May 15 in his Quezon City house. He said, however, that Tatad did not come to him as a client but asked him to conduct a legal study on the tapes.
Tatad, for his part, confirmed in a television interview that he gave the tapes to Paguia, but he does not know where it came from because it came through mail.
He also said he did not change the contents of the audiotapes.
Master tapes
Paguia earlier vowed to name the source of his tapes when the time comes to prove to the people that he was not hiding anything with regard to the truth behind the audiotapes.
He made disclosure after finding out that Tatad himself admitted that he was the source of the two audiocassettes in the July 11 issue of Time magazine.
“So to my mind, that releases me from the confidentiality agreement between the client and the lawyer,” he said.
Eastern Samar Rep. Marcelino Libanan asked the committees to subpoena Tatad to testify in the next hearing. Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Villafuerte, for his part, asked that former National Bureau of Investigation deputy director Samuel Ong should also appear in the hearing.
Ong had announced in a press conference that he has the master tapes. He has been charged with inciting to sedition following his announcement.
Partido ng Manggagawa party-list Rep. Renato Magtubo, on the other hand, insisted that Garcillano should also be compelled to testify in the House investigation.
Last Tuesday night, the House investigating panels played Paguia’s three-hour tapes that contained conversations of different people, including the President’s chat with Garcillano.
Most of the conversations on the tapes were about the national and local elections last year.
Replacement
The administration congressmen said annotations before every conversation made them suspect that Paguia’s tapes were “edited.” They asked the committee chairs to have the tapes of Ong and of other people who claimed to have the “original” copy of the conversation between the President and Garcillano also aired in an open session.
Malacañang, meanwhile, said they welcome Garcillano’s decision to come out, even though in a print interview, so that he can reveal other politicians who talked to him.
Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said Garcillano’s statements clarified that it was not only the President who had called the election official but other candidates as well, including those from the opposition.
Ermita said they will await further word from Garcillano when he testifies in the congressional hearings and in the Comelec investigation.
The President also named Court of Appeals Justice Romeo Brawner as Garcillano’s replacement at the Comelec.
For the opposition congressmen, Paguia’s tapes only confirmed that electoral fraud indeed happened in last year’s presidential elections.
Threats, bribes
Akbayan party-list Rep. Mario Aguja said Congress should do something to prevent a repeat of the incident by drafting a law that will criminalize talks between a candidate and a Comelec official during an election period and prohibit the participation of any military personnel in the elections.
Air Force Technical Sgt. Vidal Doble also told the House inquiry that Ong had used threats and bribes to persuade him to say he made the tapes.
“They intimidated me and threatened my family to say these things,” Doble said.
Doble, a member of intelligence services, said Ong paid him P2 million to tell a television interview that he bugged Arroyo.
Asked if he was still under threat, Doble said: “I am afraid for my family up to now. I am afraid of the people of Attorney Ong.”
Rep. Roilo Golez, a former Arroyo ally, has described listening to the three-hour tapes as something “like undergoing a seminar for electoral fraud.”
According to the Pulse Asia survey, close to half or 49 percent of respondents believe that Arroyo did not win the 2004 presidential elections, against 22 percent who believe she won. Thirty-two percent of respondents find credible the allegations of vote count manipulation against Arroyo while 44 percent are still undecided. (Sunnex/AFP)
(July 7, 2005 issue)
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