WHEN the police colonel admitted that she had married the Abu Sayyaf leader whom she met when she was assigned to interrogate him after his capture, you could hear a mixture of groans and snickers from Batanes to Jolo. How could a sane, presumably intelligent, woman do such a stupid thing?
The same reaction greeted a much earlier admission by a senator of her liaison with her driver. She was feasted upon by a section of the public that claims to have been scandalized by her maintaining an affair with someone whose station in life was so low compared to hers. Some legislators took advantage of televised hearings that were supposed to be in aid of legislation to abuse and strip her of her dignity.
The cases of Police Col. Maria Christina Nobleza and Sen. Leila de Lima are similar in that they succumbed to what the latter has described as the “frailties of a woman.” That and the fact that they met their romantic partners in the course of their work.
But Ronnie Dayan was/is not a terrorist like Reneer Lou Dongon was. In fact, he has not been accused until now of having committed a crime or done something that put the country’s security at risk. In this sense, Nobleza’s indiscretion was potentially more harmful to the country than de Lima’s.
That distinction has to be made because I believe that human frailty by itself does not invite the kind of public bashing that de Lima and Nobleza got unless we’re trying to atone for or hide our own indiscretions by false claims to righteousness. Neither is it an affair of the State unless there is reason to believe that the relationship may have resulted in secrets being shared with the enemy.
Such was the case of Daniela Green, a translator of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who, like Nobleza, married the man that she was investigating. A translator in the FBI’s Detroit field office, was sent to Syria to investigate a former German rapper, Denis Cuspert, who joined the ISIS and whom the U.S. has labeled as a “specially designated global terrorist.”
Six months after she came back from her first trip, Green asked for permission to visit her parents in Germany. In truth, she returned to Syria via Turkey to marry Cuspert. Apparently, she soon found out that marrying a terrorist (he once appeared on video holding a freshly decapitated head) was not a bed of roses because she fled after one month but not before telling her husband that he was being investigated by the FBI.
Green went back to the U.S. and confessed to the crime. She was sentenced to imprisonment in federal prison for two years. She had just been released, according to BBC.
The FBI took steps to “identify and reduce security vulnerabilities” in the light of Green’s indiscretion, the BBC also reported. I wonder if we did the same after Nobleza’s arrest.