Gloria Arroyo is hiding the truth

THE SLEW of anti-democratic measures that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has tried to implement ever since her return from the UN General Assembly in New York City, only prove that she does indeed have something to hide regarding massive and systematic cheating during the May 2004 presidential election.

The opposition has not given up on exposing these acts of treasonous cheating committed by the Arroyo camp, but it is the president herself who is trying to flip the tables and make the dissenters look like the bad guys.

First, she ordered that the Philippine National Police (PNP) strictly enforce the "no permit, no rally" rule, which has been in the books for a long time, but enforced sporadically. This enforcement was put into effect on Monday, when 11 opposition activists were arrested in Manila for holding a rally without a permit.

Most of the mayors of Metro Manila were ready to enforce the "no permit, no rally" rule with the major exception of Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay, a die-hard Arroyo opponent and activist survivor of Ferdinand Marcos' jails during martial law. He said that he would continue to issue permits to anti-Arroyo demonstrations and would not necessarily have those arrested who didn¹t have permits. This stance put the PNP in a quandary: Would it arrest protesters in Makati City who hadn¹t bothered to get a permit, of course with a wink from Binay, or defer to the mayor's ultimate authority of controlling what happens in his own city?

The head of the PNP was asked that same question on television, and when pressed admitted that the police could not overrule the democratically elected mayor of any city, even if the protesters had no permit. But he did say that the issue of allowing rallies without permits could, in theory, be raised to a higher authority, such as the Supreme Court.

The President's latest assault on democratic values was the issuance of Executive Order 464, barring all key government officials, including military ones, from appearing before a Senate investigation committee without prior written approval of herself. What nonsense! The last time I checked, Congress -- the Senate and House of Representatives -- was a co-equal branch of government, along with the Executive branch (the President) and the Judiciary (the Supreme Court).

What a clearly desperate president is trying to do is use the threat of dismissal from government office if any official dare testify in the Senate without her approval. And one wonders, what does Arroyo have to hide if she is as innocent and "fairly" elected as she claims to be?

Senate President Franklin Drilon and many other politicians have called the executive order "unconstitutional," which clearly it is. Despite this, Malacañang on Thursday tried to defend itself by saying the order was supposed to shield government officials from "persecution." What a joke.

Perhaps defeated vice-presidential candidate Loren Legarda can give us some much needed answers by showing how massive and well-organized cheating by the Arroyo camp helped rob both presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. and herself of their deserved victories.

Legarda's protest before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal is finally moving more than a year after being filed. She says 147 of 200 ballot boxes containing contested election returns from the provinces of Lanao del Sur, Lanao del Norte and in five towns of Surigao del Sur province are missing.

The House of Representatives, where the ballot boxes are being kept under armed guard, can't even produce the missing boxes and admits that the security camera surveillance tapes, which could show whether or not the boxes had been tampered with or pilfered, have been erased! How convenient for the Arroyo administration.

Legarda claims that a new form of cheating took place last year. She says that instead of altering ballots in the voting precincts, which was how it was done in the past, the cheating was done on the actual election returns themselves.
Legarda says a special force of 200 people in two places in Metro Manila worked on producing the altered election returns before the presidential election even took place in May 2004, and then switched the real election returns with the fake ones when the canvassing of the votes was taking place.

Die-hard Arroyo supporters will wail that this doesn't prove that massive cheating took place, but the fact remains that the Commission on Elections admits that it had overprinted 32,000 election returns and cannot account for all of them.

And now President Arroyo is punishing two military officials by firing them from their posts for testifying before the Senate committee investigating the "Hello, Garci" wiretapping scandal. Philippine Military Academy (PMA) assistant superintendent Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani and assistant commandant of the PMA corps of cadets Col. Alexander Balutan will also face court martial.

Gudani had told the Senate wiretapping inquiry that he was relieved as commander of the First Marine Brigade in Lanao del Sur province during the 2004 elections, because the government felt he was pro-opposition. Gudani's name was mentioned by then-election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano in the wiretapped phone conversations he had with President Arroyo.

If all of this evidence does not prove that Arroyo stole the 2004 election, plus the fact that she is now trying to stop officials from testifying before Senate committees because she fears the truth coming out, then Arroyo supporters have been blinded to the truth.

The President and her cronies may have hidden some of the truth for more than a year now, but luckily for the country and democracy, the truth is pouring out from all sides and this veritable tsunami of truth will wash Arroyo and her minions away.

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