Today’s Views

Self-Serving Interests at Stake in Cha-Cha

The advocates of constitutional change, most especially former President Fidel Ramos, House speaker Jose De Venecia and President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, cannot claim to be sincere adherents of constitutional principles when their track record in governance says otherwise.

By the Policy Study, Publications and Advocacy (PSPA) Program
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)

MANILA — The advocates of constitutional amendment are in their last-ditch efforts to rush the approval of their project following the junking of their petition by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) last week. Considering the brains behind this exercise, their political motives and the means they have used to clinch their objective, all the more is there reason to oppose it and to shy way from complacency.

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Who?s Behind the Bombing Experiment?

AMIRAH ALI LIDASANThis has been the question nagging me for days now as I follow the story of an anti-terror expert who ran an experiment of bringing explosive materials and who passed through the security personnel of an airline carrier and two major airports in the country, airports that had, in the past five years, survived bombing attacks from ?terrorists.?

The authorities, from airport security to Davao City officials to Malaca?ang, are after the head of Samson Macariola, the anti-terror expert who showed to a journalist his feat of testing the security measures of the airline and the Manila and Davao airports by carrying real explosives and assembling them inside the airplane.

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Extrajudicial Killings and Sham Investigation

The presidential order forming the commission is widely seen more as a political gimmick rather than as a major step toward stopping the extrajudicial killings. It was meant to mollify public outrage over the killings and clear the constitutionally impaired presidency of possible accountability.

By the Policy Studies, Publication and Advocacy Program
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)

MANILA — Unless the Melo Commission gets to the bottom of the extrajudicial killings, it will suffer the same fate as previous presidential probe bodies. The task that challenges the commission is to make itself credible by holding an impartial and independent investigation of the political killings even if this would mean summoning the president for ?command responsibility? as the armed forces? commander-in-chief.

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