Uncle Dick and Lolo Abat By Antonio C. Abaya
When former general, former defense secretary and former ambassador Fortunato U. Abat proclaimed a “revolutionary transition government” last Dec. 13 and declared himself its president, with Club Filipino as the seat of his government and an unnamed group of 15 as members of his Cabinet, there was a lot of snickering from all points of the political compass.
The Arroyo Government, especially, found this new challenge to its authority an amusing footnote in the ongoing political crisis. The government’s most eminent legal authority, Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez, dismissed the Abat caper as a manifestation of “senility” and “second childhood.”
This was even after the 80-year-old Abat defended his proclamation as “in exercise of the sovereign right of the people to act and do the necessary to save the country from a governance which is morally bankrupt, distrusted by over two-thirds of the citizenry and which is in paralysis, unable to provide effective and competent leadership that will produce results for the people.”
Abat was, perhaps, expecting rogue elements of the military and the police to withdraw support from the Arroyo Government and for thousands of the middle class to mass outside the Club Filipino to support his alternative government, in a hoped-for repeat of Edsa-1.
But, except for one Oakwood military officer-mutineer who escaped from detention and surreptitiously joined the alternative “government,” Abat’s proclamation has not caused any perceptible ripple, either among the middle class or among the mainstream military and police organizations.
Within 48 hours, however, of belittling the efforts of Abat in revolutionary politics, the Arroyo Government seems to have had a change of mind and has decided to take Abat more seriously. On Dec. 15, the government sent plainclothes police officers to pick up Abat and his three lieutenants, without an arrest warrant, to “invite” them for questioning at police headquarters and to file a complaint against them for “inciting to sedition.”
Abat et al. have since posted bail (P12,000 each) and have been released from detention, while the lawyers of both sides prepare for a legal battle on what constitutes the weightier element of “incitement to sedition,” the “dangerous tendency rule” or the “clear and present danger rule.” He has also taken out a full-page ad in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (which cost about P150,000) to explain what he was doing and to express his lament that younger leaders have not taken up the cudgels for him.
I do not know what caused the government to suddenly change its mind about Abat, but I suspect it has something to do with the contents of an e-mail which I received around noon of Dec. 15, from someone with a German-sounding name but who, as far as I know, is not even in our e-mail distribution list.
The sender passed the information for comments by me as “the very astute observer and insightful commentator on these precarious times we live in” (Thank you. ACA). The contents of that e-mail may also have been sent to someone in the Arroyo inner circle, but apparently not to anyone in the opposition (otherwise they would have already made a big to-do about it).
The essence of the e-mail is that
US Vice President Dick Cheney — Uncle Dick to American editorial cartoonists — is or may be behind the plots to remove President Arroyo from Malacañang, including this latest challenge from Gen. Abat, Lolo Abat.
The e-mail consists of two articles from
www.rense.com, which turned out to be the Web site of American talk radio host Jeff Rense, who seems to be hospitable to any and all shades of political opinions.
The two articles were actually written by one Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist in the mold of Jack Anderson (who, by coincidence, died last week at age 83). Madsen has his own Web site,
www.waynemadsenreport.com, where his bias against the neo-conservative cabal (headed by Dick Cheney) that rules Washington is very evident.
Nevertheless, Madsen has some interesting information. In the article “All Roads Lead Back to Cheney,” dated Dec. 14, 2005, Madsen asserts that Cheney’s oil company, Halliburton, and its subsidiary operating in Iraq — Kellogg, Brown and Root or KBR — have a business link with
an airline, Aerocom/Air Mero, based in Moldova and owned by one Viktor Lout. A search engine that I consulted says Viktor Lout has at least five aliases and holds several Liberian diplomatic passports, plus two Russian and one Ukrainian.According to Madsen, Cheney’s KBR and the Lout airline fly “low wage earners from East Asia in to Dubai and on to Iraq where they work for paltry salaries in sub-standard living conditions.” KBR has
“sub-contracted to a shadowy Dubai-based firm, Prime Projects International Trading LLC or PPI which ‘trades’ mainly in workers from Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and other poor Asian nations.” (Recall that about two weeks ago, 88 Filipino workers got stranded in Dubai and could not proceed to Iraq, but refused to come back to the Philippines. They may have been part of the KBR-PPI involvement in what Madsen calls “low wage slave trading in the Middle East.”)
Madsen says the Arroyo Government banned PPI — which operates from P.O. Box 42252, in Dubai — from further recruiting Filipino OFWs for the Middle East, after a Filipino was killed during a terrorist attack on Camp Anaconda in 2004. PPI also supplied Cheney’s Halliburton with Filipino OFWs for the construction of the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“Inside sources report that PPI has some high-level financial partners, including the Narayan royal family of the UAE and Cheney.” Madsen claims there is a connection between PGMA’s “ordering the repatriation of Filipino workers home from Iraq and Kuwait and the discovery that
US Marine Corps and FBI spy Leandro Aragoncillo, a Filipino-American who worked as a Marine security aide inside Cheney’s office... who was arrested by the FBI last October, had stolen dossiers from Cheney’s office that were considered damaging to Mrs. Arroyo.” [And where did the information in these dossiers come from? NSA? What was Cheney's office doing with them? Is that how Cheney's office is operating with all foreign leaders?-- getting info from NSA and funnelling them to his extra-legal rogue operators? Is this appropriate foreign relations for the WH? For a VP? For the US? Extortion and blackmail? Eavesdropping? ]
“Aragoncillo passed Cheney’s reports on Macapagal-Arroyo, some of which were obtained from National Security Agency intercepts (which means wire-tapping of landline conversations and electronic eavesdropping on cellphone conversations. ACA),
to (Joseph) Estrada, a political opponent of Macapagal-Arroyo... Estrada was planning a coup against Macapagal-Arroyo with US support.” (Emphasis mine. ACA).
That last paragraph is significant because it confirms what I have written several times, that
the neo-cons in Washington, who are led by Cheney, want to see Arroyo removed from office, for a) withdrawing the Filipino contingent from Iraq; b) signing an oil exploration agreement with the Chinese on the Spratlys; and c) failing to dismantle the Jemaah Islamiyah training camps in Mindanao. See my article “Replacing GMA” (June 14, 2005). For more on Cheney and the neo-cons, see “Uncle Dick and the PNAC” (Sept. 7, 2004).
That last paragraph also confirmed what I wrote when the “Hello Garci” scandal first broke out in June, that
“the Americans here certainly have the capability of eavesdropping on President Arroyo’s cellphone or landline conversations and recording whatever incriminating statements they can find for future use, when she is no longer useful to them. And she, apparently, is no longer useful to them... (“Junta? Maybe. Erap? No,” June 7, 2005).
So when the AFP and the ISAFP refuse to divulge who ordered the wiretaps or electronic eavesdropping, we now understand why. And we also understand why the one who first broke the Garci tape was Alan Paguia, one of the lawyers of Erap. Everything is falling into place.
Finally, that last paragraph from Madsen also confirmed my belief that
the neo-cons favored Joseph Estrada to replace Mrs. Arroyo because of the “total war” that he waged against the Muslims in Mindanao when he was president. See my article “US Loves Erap” (Sept. 25, 2005). In that article I mentioned that Estrada’s chief political lieutenant, Boy Morales, was summoned at least twice to Washington, once in November 2004, the next time in March 2005, both times meeting with the staff of Cheney.
But, unfortunately for Morales as well as for the other luminaries whom he had enticed into his Solidarity “caretaker transition government,” Uncle Dick’s neo-cons no longer love Erap, and they may have found their man in the group of Abat, not in Lolo Abat himself. This will be discussed in a later article, in January, as I will take a Christmas break.
A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.
Reactions to acabaya@zpdee.net or fax 824-7642. Other articles in
www.tapatt.org December 22, 2005
