Betrayed once again

It isn’t the fact of the transfer but the manner in which the transfer was carried out that turns my stomach.

I can’t debate on and won’t pretend to understand all the legal complexities of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with regards to the issue of custody of a convicted American soldier vis a vis the order of a Regional Trial Court judge and the filing of motions before the Court of Appeals, since an abogago...er...abogado I surely am not. But to have the prisoner spirited out of the Makati City Jail at near midnight on the eve of a long holiday weekend–and on top of that to be told that this midnight maneuver was done in order to avoid traffic is a slap on our poor Pinoy face, plus a glob of spit for good measure. That’s how gago our government thinks we are.

I can’t fault the Americans for insisting on getting their hands on one of their own, using every card in their deck, every ace up their sleeve; that’s what governments are supposed to do for their citizens, especially one of their soldiers, one of their "boys." Why, the Chinese Embassy tried to get their hands on the 30 Chinese poachers/fishermen now jailed–and hopefully will remain so–in Palawan, just as they before tried to get their hands on the kidnappers of Jacky Tiu, insisting on their innocence even though they had been positively identified by the victim and some of them were caught red-handed with the ransom money. Joint U.S. Task Force commander Col. David Maxwell might insist that it happens only on television, but one episode of the series "E Ring" about an American soldier (surnamed Navarro, by the way) held in Basilan showed that the boys in the Pentagon would go to any and all lengths to "bring our boy back home," in the present case at least back home to American soil in the embassy compound.

If indeed the VFA binds us to giving over the convict to U.S. custody until all appeals have been exhausted, then fine–the government should have done that from the beginning, stood its ground on what it believed was its treaty obligation, no matter how unpopular that might have been. Instead it again chose what was popular, playing to the mood of the moment, basking in the aura of national sovereignty kuno–and I guess when the Kanos took out the big stick, the government pulled a fast one on us. What’s next? Will the guy suddenly be "deported"–just like several other criminals have been in the not too distant past–on a midnight train/flight to Georgia?