‘Garci tapes digitally altered’

President Arroyo could ask the House of Representatives to throw out the impeachment complaint against her for allegedly cheating in last year’s presidential election on the grounds that the main evidence has been digitally altered, her spokesman said yesterday.

Environment Secretary Michael Defensor, Mrs. Arroyo’s acting spokesman on the impeachment case, said Malacañang will present to the House committee on justice a technical analysis of the audio recordings allegedly detailing Mrs. Arroyo’s phone conversations with an election official to prove that they had been "spliced."

But Sen. Panfilo Lacson, skeptical of Defensor’s claim, challenged the administration yesterday to have their respective copies of the audio recordings analyzed together — a challenge that Defensor accepted.

The committee will begin hearings on the impeachment complaint next week to determine whether it is "sufficient in form and substance" to be sent to the Senate for trial.

Defensor said while it was possible that the voice heard on the tapes was Mrs. Arroyo’s, bits and pieces of different telephone conversations she had with other people could have been digitally stitched together to give the impression that the voices were conspiring to rig the May 2004 presidential vote.

"The tapes they made us hear are full of lies. That was her voice but she was not the one talking. The conversations have been manipulated," Defensor said at a news conference where the Arroyo administration released a technical study of the tapes earlier provided by the opposition loyal to deposed President Joseph Estrada.

"It is an electronic and digital manipulation to link the President to cheating and rigging," he said.

Unless the opposition lawmakers that sponsored the case can prove that the tapes were not tampered with, "then the impeachment complaint should be thrown out," Defensor said. "No technical studies have been done on the recordings."

Defensor disclosed that a copy of the tape was sent to an American expert on sound analysis, Barry Dickey, to determine the recordings’ authenticity.

Dickey is a forensic expert of Audio Evidence Lab, a Texas company that specializes on analyzing audio and video evidence.

Dickey had examined a tape of Saudi terror mastermind Osama bin Laden in which the al-Qaeda leader exhorted Muslims around the world to declare a "holy war" on the United States.

The tape was found in a house in Afghanistan by US soldiers shortly after the 2001 invasion.

AEL’s website states that the company has experience in examining evidence from over 1,000 cases in the United States and Europe.

Dickey has provided "expert testimony on issues involving both audio and video evidence. Utilizing DSP technology, analytical equipment, and microscopic resolution, Mr. Dickey employs scientifically accepted techniques to provide the critical evidence required in the courtroom," according to the company website.

Citing Dickey’s report, Defensor said some parts of the recordings were "questionable due (to) the sudden change in male voice/verbal pattern and surrounding events" while other segments were "not consistent with the rest of the recording."

"The incriminating quotes were spliced. They spliced the sentences, doctored the conversations to make it appear that there is an intention to rig the elections," Defensor said.

He said the recordings were sent to Dickey through a local sound engineer, Jonathan Tiongco, who had met with Defensor recently.

Tiongco told the same press conference that he had presented his own initial analysis of the recordings to Defensor and told him that he doubted the recordings’ authenticity. That prompted Defensor to seek Dickey’s expertise.

Using an approach called "audio method of time expansion" which analyzes the pronunciation of words, Tiongco said the part of the tape in which Mrs. Arroyo was purportedly heard "rigging" the vote count had been manipulated or altered.

When slowed down and broken into syllables, Tiongco said, the now well-known phrase "yung dagdag, yung dagdag (the additional votes, the additional votes)" came out as "gal-ban-binalbag."

Two other local sound experts, Jim Sarthou and Arnold Jallores, also doubted the recordings’ authenticity. Sarthou said clicking sounds raised the possibility that the recordings were spliced together while Jallores pointed out that the sound patterns were inconsistent.

Malacañang said Dickey’s findings vindicated Mrs. Arroyo but acknowledged that the public in the end would have the final say.

"What we are saying is that what many believe may not have any basis in fact," Press Secretary Bunye told reporters. "It’s very clear that the tapes were tampered with."

President adviser for political affairs Gabriel Claudio said the findings showed that "the root of all the political turmoil we are in is a sinister and utterly malicious attempt to link the President to electoral fraud where none exists."

"It’s tragic how audiotapes that turn out to be fabricated or tampered could have brought about so much political conflict, turmoil and instability to our nation," he said.

Administration congressmen Prospero Nograles of Davao City and Monico Puentevella of Bacolod City said the impeachment complaint should be junked if the audio recordings were proven to be fake.

Original Or Bootleg?

Lacson said while he did not question Dickey’s expertise, he pointed out that Defensor may have sent an edited copy of the recordings and not the original, which Lacson said he possesses.

It appears that there are two versions of the recordings, according to Lacson: one that came from Alan Paguia, a former lawyer of deposed President Joseph Estrada, and another which Defensor had sent to Dickey.

"If he submitted only one set of tapes, then we have two different sets, the public may have reason to get confused," Lacson explained. "If you submit garbage, the authenticator would say that it is garbage. Garbage in, garbage out."

Lacson had commissioned his own tape analysis last June at UniQuest Pty Ltd of the University of Queensland in Australia, which concluded the tape was authentic.

The former national police chief suggested that he and Defensor send their respective tapes to Dickey and UniQuest for verification. "If we submit similar tapes both to UniQuest and Dickey, they should have the same finding," he said.

Defensor was amendable to Lacson’s suggestion and added he was willing to shoulder the cost in the "spirit of cooperation."

On June 5, Malacañang announced there was a fresh attempt to destabilize the administration with renewed accusations that Mrs. Arroyo had fixed the results of last year’s presidential election.

Bunye released a pair of CD recordings the following day as part of a preemptive effort to counter the expected poll fraud claims.

The opposition had widely been expected to release copies of the audio recordings, in which Mrs. Arroyo appeared to press for a million-vote margin over action film actor Fernando Poe Jr.

Poe had accused Mrs. Arroyo of robbing him of victory but his electoral protest was junked by the Supreme Court shortly after he died in December of a stroke.

In a news conference Bunye played two CDs for reporters, one which he claimed was a wiretapped cell phone call between Mrs. Arroyo and an election official known only as "Gary," and the other that he claimed used snippets of that call spliced with the voice of a fake Commission on Elections official.

In July, Mrs. Arroyo apologized to the nation for what she described as an improper telephone call to an unidentified election official before Congress could proclaim the winner of the election.

However, she insists she committed no crime and has refused to resign, urging critics to channel their complaints through the impeachment proceedings.

The opposition has also raised other issues in its impeachment complaint, including allegations that Mrs. Arroyo’s family was on the payroll of illegal gambling barons and that Mrs. Arroyo had allegedly engaged in anomalous contracts.

Malacañang, meanwhile, announced that Mrs. Arroyo had appointed three members of a Manila law office as her lead counsel in the impeachment case.

Opposition congressmen filed an impeachment complaint on July 25, the same day Mrs. Arroyo delivered her annual State of the Nation Address.

The opposition had initially shunned the impeachment route, anticipating that Arroyo allies — who outnumber them in the House and the Senate — would block it.

They had hoped to pressure Mrs. Arroyo to leave office through "people power" pressure, but decided to make an impeachment bid after anti-Arroyo protest rallies drew disappointing crowds. — With Marvin Sy, Paolo Romero, Cecille Suerte Felipe, AFP