The country’s more than ever is poised for greatness, with the
super majority are both enjoyed in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
A direct cooperation between the legislative and executive
branches of government, a set up never heard of in Philippine politics will
usher a new greatness for the country that has been lagging against its south
east Asian neighbors.
The results of the election, cannot be denied that “Duterte
Magic” played a big role in the shutout of the opposition’s Otso Diretso
senatorial slate. But still there are those who have wronged not only the
president but the country as a whole should be removed to refrain using their
government positions in furthering selfish and political causes.
 |
| Chito Gascon prior to his appointment to head CHR was a loyal and high ranking official of the Liberal Party (photo credit to owner) |
Veteran journalist Mr. Rigoberto Tiglao of the Manila Times
wrote about Commission on Human Rights (CHR) Chito Gascon who in many occasion has
instead of championing human rights has used his post in spreading lies about
the country to the world.
“While impeachment is unfortunately the only official way to
remove Gascon since the CHR is a constitutional body, we cannot allow Gascon to
spread for another three years his lies about the country. Instead of
championing human rights in the Philippines, which is the CHR’s
constitutionally assigned task, he has used his post to spread lies about the
country to the world.”
For purposes of public knowledge and for the sake of
clarity and truthfulness, we are quoting in full the article of Mr.Tiglao
titled ” CHR head Gascon should be impeached” for the convenience
of our reading public.
CHR head Gascon should be impeached
ONE of the first things the new Congress
should do is to kick out of office Commission on Human Rights chairman Chito
Gascon, one of the remaining hold-outs of the Yellow Cult in this government.
A Liberal Party stalwart, Gascon has
been using his position to spread lies to the world about the country, in
effect claiming that Filipinos are afraid, immoral, or stupid that they have
allowed their government to undertake massive human rights abuses, and even
applaud the Duterte regime.
While impeachment is unfortunately the
only official way to remove Gascon since the CHR is a constitutional body, we
cannot allow Gascon to spread for another three years his lies about the
country. Instead of championing human rights in the Philippines, which is the
CHR’s constitutionally assigned task, he has used his post to spread lies about
the country to the world.
I realized, and was shocked at, the
damage Gascon has been doing to the country’s image when even a moronic New
York-based comedian peddled Gascon and the Yellows’ lies in a recent stand-up
comedy skit.
The comedian claimed: “According to the
Commission on Human Rights, since Duterte took office in 2016, the death toll
from extrajudicial killings (EJKs) is 27,000, which is horrific.” That means,
the comedian claimed, that more people were killed here in 2018 “than in Iraq,
Somalia, or the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
Bloody
Yep, that’s how bad the Yellows and
their US-funded local journalists have depicted the situation in our country.
That we’re such a bloody place worse than those countries wracked by civil wars
for years.
I initially couldn’t believe the CHR
would claim that figure so I checked the article from which that comedian got
that information. According to the screen that accompanied his skit, it was the
respected British newspaper The Guardian in a Dec. 19, 2018 article.
The article was titled “Duterte’s
Philippines drug war death toll rises above 5,000,” which was about the
Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency’s report that 5,050 suspected criminals involved
in illegal drugs were killed in gun battles with law enforcers from July 2016
to November 2018.
Buried down in the piece though, the
article reported: “Chito Gascon, the chairman of the Philippine Commission on
Human Rights, said the toll could be as high as 27,000.”
Wow.
Does Gascon have any proof for this
estimate?
Nothing. None at all.
What got my goat is that a few sentences
after citing that “horrific” figure and quoting the news website Rappler as
declaring that the “EJKs” represent the “worst human rights crisis in the
Philippines since the 1970s and 1980s,” the comedian says: “And this is more
shocking: As the body count rises, so does Duterte’s popularity. According to a
recent poll, Duterte’s approval rating is 81 percent.”
Immoral
He explains this: “A lot of Filipinos
support Duterte because he cut taxes, provides free college tuition, and builds
infrastructure.”
This asshole comedian’s implication is
clear: Filipinos are immoral, they don’t care about horrific killings as long
as they are bribed.
Gascon’s kind of lies of course wouldn’t
have spread without such strident anti-Duterte journalists as Maria Ressa, head
of news website Rappler that first exaggerated the casualties in Duterte’s war
against illegal drugs as early as September 2017, and Sheila Coronel of
Columbia University.*
The dynamics of
opinion-making in the US is that its media swallows hook, line and sinker
reports by people whom they consider as “one of their own’, and in their
laziness (or because they cover so many other countries), they don’t bother to
fact-check reports of “their people.” After all, in their newsrooms, the
Philippines is just one of the many countries they report on. That is, if
you’re a newspaper editor here, would you spend time and resources to check for
instance if the New York Times’ reports on Venezuela are accurate?
Misinterpretation
Ressa was a CNN reporter with expertise
on the Abu Sayyaf for a decade until she was given the pink slip when she
allegedly couldn’t deliver after she was stationed in Indonesia. It was Rappler
which first padded the number of drug personalities killed, claiming that from
July 2016 to January 2017 these amounted to 7,080.
While that number was the result of a
gross misinterpretation, probably deliberately made, of official reports (it
included other homicide cases which were not related to the anti-drug campaign),
and even after I in a column and the police itself incontrovertibly showed how
it was false, Rappler has not corrected it to this day. It was Rappler’s false
7,080 figure that the Yellows, especially Vice President Leni Robredo, repeated
again and again in Hitlerian fashion to be believed by the Western press.
They then used this false figure of
7,080 as the EJKs in one year of Duterte’s anti-drug war, and multiplied it by
over three times for the period from July 2016 to 2018 to come up with that
27,000 figure Gascon claimed to the Guardian.
Coronel headed the Philippine Center for
Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) that was bankrolled by the Ford Foundation,
George Soros’ The Open Society, and the US State Department through the
National Endowment for Democracy. She moved to the US in 2006 to become the
director of The Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia
University, and in 2014 became the academic dean of its Graduate School of
Journalism.
Coronel helped the propagation of the
grossly padded figures on the deaths resulting from Duterte’s anti-drug
war when she wrote in the journal Democracy’s June 2017 edition that “the drug
war, which Duterte officially launched on his first day in office, has claimed
the lives of as many as 9,000 suspected drug dealers and users.” If you were an
editor of the New York Times or the Washington Post, would you doubt the report
of a dean at the journalism school of Columbia University, considered by many
as the best for that profession?
Well I did, and asked Coronel in July
2017 through Facebook Messenger where she got that 9,000 figure. She replied;
“Numerous news reports quote that figure.” She provided the links to these
“numerous news reports,” which led to articles that took off from Rappler’s
first false report. One article was even on the police’s debunking of Rappler’s
reports. This kind of lazy and irresponsible reporting, from a Columbia
University journalism school dean, and former head of its investigative
journalism unit, and about her home country.
Renowned
Coronel didn’t reply when I asked her
why a supposedly renowned investigative journalist like her wouldn’t first
investigate if these “news reports’” figure was accurate before reporting it in
her article. She didn’t clarify to that journal that her 9,000 figure was based
on biased sources.
In 2018 though, Columbia University’s
Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism which Coronel formerly headed,
bankrolled a joint project of the Ateneo and La Salle universities called the
Drug Archive, intended to document the casualties in the anti-drug campaign by
compiling media reports on individual killings.
The Archive reported in its website that
there were 5,021 drug-related deaths from news reports between May 10, 2016 and
September 29, 2017—nearly half of the 9,000 drug-related EJKs Coronel reported
in June 2017. The Archive couldn’t even say how many of those 5,021 were killed
in firefights with the police or were found in the streets with the murderers
unknown.
I emailed last month this Drug Archive
(drugarchive.ph@gmail.com) to ask them if I could take a look at their data
bank, which they had boasted about. No reply at all.
These university people
obviously don’t know the meaning of an “archive,” which is a place where
records are kept, which anybody can access, not just their people.
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Report from Manila Times
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