Beating the air

April 7, 2018 Opinion Sideglance

While the Supreme Court may have gotten its wish to look into the records of the drug war campaign being waged by the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte it may have also begun a quixotic attempt to pry into matters already considered as a foregone conclusion particularly when it comes to promises made by the president himself.

In fact the Philippine National Police should not even have come out with an announcement that while they are willing to comply with the order of the High Court to produce and submit documents on the drug war campaign they will only do so on a case-to-case-basis.

Why state the obvious?

Isn’t already a rule of the thumb and as a policy of the PNP that those documents to be submitted especially when it is for public consumption is more or less redacted in some of its particular details in order to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information pertaining to intelligence gathering and use of so called informants?

It also becomes obvious that the PNP cannot in any practical manner submit all documents pertaining to its drug war since for all intents and purposes some information in these documents are still being utilized by the authorities to gain insight and follow-up leads in their investigations of drug syndicates.

So there is no need to tell the court that the PNP will only submit documents on a case-to-case basis since this must be a standard operating procedure for all case sensitive materials, otherwise it might be perceived by the public that the authorities are deliberately trying to hide its errors in the campaign to rid drugs in the country.

On the other hand how would the Supreme Court attempt to scrutinize the documents to be submitted by the PNP when they know well enough that what they would be reading are well recorded but sanitized versions of the records of the drug war. Also, it may well take them a very long time to evaluate the thousands of officially recorded neutralization of alleged drug users and drug pushers and determine whether the drug war campaign is illegal or unconstitutional.

For now the drug war of President Duterte is being carried out incessantly with hundreds more being arrested or at the worst killed for allegedly resisting arrest and we can only surmise that indeed the drug problem in the country is much worse than earlier perceived if the number of those arrested or killed as well as the volume of illegal drugs is to be taken into account.

This is not to belittle the efforts of certain sectors in our society from trying to put a stop to all those so called extra-legal killings but to my mind it might just be beating the air attempting to do so by using records coming from the PNP.