Bungling the truth on Mamasapano and DSWD

Nazi chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels once quipped, “A lie told a thousand times assumes the substance of truth.” In this country, the Aquino regime has always engaged in propaganda and monkeyed with the truth; this is why we questioned then Sen. Grace Poe why she didn’t insist on having a Senate investigation on the Mamasapano massacre. This includes the Office of the Ombudsman who was so quick to clear Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III for any culpability on the Mamasapano tragedy.

Then out of the blue, last Tuesday just when the Filipinos have began to forget that 44 Special Action Force troopers died unnecessarily in the fields of Mamasapano, Maguindanao, Pres. PNoy announced that several government agencies are still trying to find out what exactly happened in January 25. This time, the president used the word “alternative truth” that he was trying to get from these agencies.

Come now, what really is an “alternative truth”? Isn’t it just another lie pretending to be the truth? Why then is the president trying to move the focus of the Filipino people away from the up and coming elections? While I submit that we never had a closure on the Mamasapano tragedy, more so that strange things happened in Mamasapano when the hut where Malaysian terrorist and bomb maker Zulkifir Abdhir Kifli was reportedly killed was razed to the ground for no apparent reason weeks later. Worse, there was no investigation on this incident, as to why this nipa hut was burned to the ground? In my book, it was burned in order to cover someone’s tracks. 

So why has the ghost of Mamasapano returned at this time when we are now focused on the presidential race? Well, it could be many things. One theory is that, I heard that a group of soldiers are planning to expose the real truth as to what happened on that fateful day in Mamasapano, which is why all of the sudden, the president is searching for an “alternative truth?”

I got this piece of “rumor” from friends who believe that with Pres. PNoy’s “anointed one,” former DILG Secretary Manuel “Mar” Roxas doing so poorly in the polls and surveys, the only way Daang Matuwid can continue on its “crooked path” is to disturb the military to the point that it might trigger a coup and PNoy himself would neutralize this coup and declare a provisional government. Call this far-fetch but this is what happened when the Filipino people are not told the whole truth about what government is doing.

Finally, two years after the greatest storm that hit planet earth, super typhoon Yolanda and destroyed Tacloban, Leyte, Guiuan, Samar, northern Cebu and Capiz, we read that news report that the Commission on Audit cited the total and spectacular failure on the job of the Department of Social Welfare and Development, where millions of pesos worth of unused cash donations and food aid wasted, chronic multiple entries in the conditional cash transfer program, and delays and shortcomings in the delivery of social services by DWSD.

Now why in heavens name did COA take this long to learn what we have suspected all along that the typhoon victims didn’t get what the world sent them as aid when they needed it the most? The COA report said that P382.072 million in local and foreign cash donations for the victims of Yolanda were kept idle and locked in the DSWD’s bank accounts. The amount represented 33 percent of the P1.151 billion that the DSWD received from November 2013 to December 2014.

As expected, DSWD officials blamed an evacuation center in Legazpi City where those undistributed goods were purportedly prepositioned at the National Resource Operations Center in preparation for the eruption of Mt. Mayon. It is easy to pin the blame on other centers. What really happened here is simply mismanagement in a grand scale by DSWD Secretary Dinky Soliman. All we get are lame excuses for their incompetence! I don’t know how many times we have demanded the resignation of this woman.

It was because we wrote a column that we quoted by a British newspaper the Daily Mail where they exposed that street children and their families were taken off the streets during the visit of Pope Francis. A DSWD official then wrote me a letter denying this story and much later no less than Soliman denied that all this happened.

But after the Pope returned to Rome, the real truth surfaced that the DSWD did in fact go out of its way to remove the street children and homeless families from the streets of Manila. Sec. Soliman suddenly admitted in public that some 500 children and their families were loaded on tour buses and brought to the Chateau Royale Resort in Nasugbu, Batangas. It was then that we demanded for the resignation of Soliman. But there was no investigation on this scam from Liberal Party allies in Congress. Now will we see a Senate investigation on this expose by COA? I doubt it!

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