Mamasapano: Was there an order to stand down?

Did Commander-in-Chief Noynoy Aquino order the army to stand down as police commandos were being massacred by Moro separatists? That reportedly is what opposition senator Juan Ponce Enrile will try to squeeze out of today’s rehearing of the Mamasapano debacle of Jan. 2015.

P-Noy must be squirming all over again. Already a Senate committee had deemed him “ultimately responsible” for the wipeout of 44 members of the PNP-Special Action Force. It blamed him for letting his bosom friend, the then-suspended PNP chief Alan Purisima, meddle in field operations. Mamasapano was no ordinary police work; it was a top-secret mission to eliminate three international terrorists in the heart of rebel territory. P-Noy should have been circumspect with persons he brought into the Malacañang situation room. His military generals were castigated for late and feeble actions to help extricate the encircled commandos from the pincer of rebels with whom P-Noy supposedly has a cease-fire.

The Senate case has since been closed, though oddly with no plenary approval, only signatures of majority of the committee members. Today Enrile proclaims to have new information to justify reopening of the probe. P-Noy’s role publicly would be questioned anew.

Spokesmen have said P-Noy will not attend the hearing. He had avoided the earlier Senate and House of Reps inquiries, on the precept of “no talk, no mistakes.” Still, letting only his Interior Secretary Mar Roxas and the generals do the explaining for him only deepened public doubts. Under oath, the officers fumbled and contradicted each other about what time P-Noy was first informed of the unfolding massacre. Also, about what he instructed them to do, if any, to save the SAF from annihilation.

P-Noy himself kept changing stories, especially about Purisima’s criminal interloping. None of his three nationally televised blah-blahs from Malacañang worked. For a semblance of truth, one of those even had bishops of various faiths as interviewers – to no avail.

None of the hearings and presidential invocations fleshed out the reasons for the generals’ conflicting statements. Were they fighting over credit and the US State Department’s $7-million reward for taking down the terrorists? Were there other motivations? Like, was P-Noy after global fame as a military genius, at the same time aspiring for a Nobel Peace Prize in forging a settlement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front?

And why were P-Noy, Roxas, and the generals so evasive about the firing of warning artillery for the rebels to back off? Government peace adviser Teresita Deles insists, with no P-Noy official refuting her, that she never told P-Noy to restrain the military from helping the beleaguered commandos. Yet somebody did seem to hold them back. And so Enrile’s $64,000-question: was there an order from on high for the generals to stand down?

Reportedly, Enrile will present photographs and logbooks of what P-Noy and Roxas did in Zamboanga City on that fateful day. It was the birth anniversary of P-Noy’s late President-mother Cory Aquino. Instead of quietly marking the day with family as usual, he flew to the western Mindanao city.

Purportedly P-Noy was to inspect the site of a terrorist car-bombing two days prior. It was all unscheduled, so there was no press coverage. By P-Noy’s own reckoning, he woke up at 7 o’clock that morning, turned on his mobile, and read an onrush of texts about the SAF’s O-Plan Exodus having been launched at Mamasapano, in central Mindanao, before daybreak.

Taking the presidential plane, P-Noy arrived in Zamboanga at 10 a.m. Roxas tailed him in another plane. Before that, the latter at 8:30 a.m. received word of the SAF being pinned down in a cornfield, picked off like in a shooting gallery by surrounding rebels with .50-caliber sniper rifles.

There’s talk that P-Noy lingered in Zamboanga on the chance that the SAF assault team would bring out the terrorists, dead or alive, not just a finger of one of them. Whereupon, he would have flown to Mamasapano to receive the commandos’ catch. Never did it occur to him that the commandos needed rescuing. He might actually have instructed the army to hold artillery fire lest the truce be broken, and his other dream of a Peace Prize be broken.

Enrile reportedly would show P-Noy to be stalling for time. For five hours he visited the families of two bombing fatalities, and several of the wounded in three hospitals. It is supposedly uncharacteristic of P-Noy to be so concerned, shaking hands with and patting the backs of plain folks. He would return to his usual self days later, in snubbing the arrival rites for the SAF-44 in Manila, in favor of test-driving a new car at the factory launch.

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