Muckrakers

Senator Panfilo Lacson wraps Michael Ray Aquino and Leandro Aragoncillo in the flag and calls them patriots. Then he mounts a tirade on the administration, accusing it of serving US interests while the two looked after Filipino interests.

That is a sly public relations ploy. It is an effort to take public consideration of this issue way off tangent.

There are several flawed propositions in that ploy.

First, it assumes that it is alright to commit a crime abroad, cause a diplomatic incident and compromise a strategic alliance in the name of some self-appointed "national interest." Recall that Aquino is not an agent of the Philippine government and is in fact a fugitive from our laws while Aragoncillo is an American citizen and an FBI agent with strange partisan affinities in the homeland.

Second, it presumes that filching files from a foreign agency and passing these on to local political players to further their partisan agenda are acts on behalf of national interest. The consequences of filching files from the FBI damages the national interest and compromises the conduct of our diplomacy. The partisan interest of local troublemakers, using filched information, could hardly be described as advancing national goals.

The fact is that Aquino and Aragoncillo are now detained and facing indictment for espionage.

The fact is that an electronic trail has been found establishing that confidential documents from the FBI have been sent to at least three major political personalities here, creating the possibility that they may be named as accomplices to the crime.

The fact is that Lacson has admitted receiving documents from both Aragoncillo and Aquino through his email, although he claims that the documents were not confidential in nature. Nevertheless, if the information was illegally acquired, there might be some culpability there.

The fact is that both former president Joseph Estrada and San Juan mayor JV Ejercito have admitted knowing and communicating with Aragoncillo. The former US marine and current FBI agent visits Estrada whenever he is in the country. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, unless investigation by US authorities establish that Aragoncillo was acting as an agent of Filipino politicians.

Maybe Aragoncillo was paid to do espionage. We don’t know that yet.

Maybe Aragoncillo was simply trying to ingratiate himself with local power brokers for whatever purpose, volunteering his unique access to secret FBI documents as leverage. We don’t know that yet.

What we do know is that Aragoncillo was under surveillance for a while before he was finally arrested. The FBI agent is now in serious trouble for abusing his access and breaking the confidence the agency invested in him.

What we do know is that Aragoncillo interacted quite frequently with Aquino, who has his own problems with US immigrations authorities. From what little we now know, it was Aquino who introduced Aragoncillo to Lacson.

It might be premature to say that there was an active conspiracy in place, involving a disloyal FBI agent, a Filipino fugitive and local power players. That is for the US courts to establish.

But there is a clear communications network established through the e-mail trail. That we now know.

I do not know how valuable the filched information could be. As a general rule, our local political factions ought to be able to produce superior analysis of the political situation here than their foreign counterparts.

The only unique value of looking at American intelligence assessments of the Philippine situation is to gauge how they think about this situation. That is helpful for local power players only if they are inclined to tailor their utterances, their posturing and their actuation in order to suit the Americans.

That does not seem to me to be a patriotic inclination on the part of local power players who are beneficiaries of Aragoncillo’s stolen information. Why then would Lacson want us to consider Aragoncillo and Aquino patriots?

Lacson’s attempt to wrap this bungling duo in the flag is vain and flawed.

The only other imaginable residual value of the filched information is the possibility that the Americans might have found derogatory information that local power players can use to smear their enemies. In which case, the only real value of the bungling duo for their local patrons lies in muckraking.

If they find dirt in the confidential files of the FBI, that dirt could have political value domestically. The dirt could be recycled into ammunition for the politics of mudslinging.

In which case, the bungling duo were engaged not so much in serious espionage but in the intelligence equivalent of ukay-ukay. They are poring through the trashbin of a foreign intelligence bureau for material reusable for domestic political intrigue. There is no patriotic glory in this.

But it seems to fit Lacson’s preferred mode of conducting politics perfectly.

In his brief tenure at the political stage, Senator Lacson distinguished himself not as an advocate of visions but as slinger of mud. He grandstands on the basis of derogatory information and intimidates by ruining reputations on the basis of dirty detail.

There is little public debate on policy options that could be conducted in a climate of low-grade character assassination. Which is the reason why Senate hearings have tended to degenerate into carnivals of contrived scandal rather than as edifying forums for the nation.

Which is the reason why Senator Joker Arroyo once dismissed his colleague Senator Lacson as a mere "troublemaker."

In that context, no dignity could be found in the crime for which the bungling duo is now charged before a US court.