Smear pawn, perjurer

Lascañas has been pulled from the dirty tricks drawer and is now spewing lies of grander proportion as he now implicates Duterte and his children.

Proof that the destabilizers are stoking the rift forming between the camps of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte is the sudden sprouting, like an adolescent’s pimple, of SPO3 Arthur Lascañas.

The former Davao City cop first appeared before the Senate to deny the allegation of a fellow clown, Edgar Matobato, that he was a member of the fabled Davao Death Squad.

Suddenly, however, after Senators Antonio Trillanes IV and Leila de Lima got to him, he changed his tune. He started to mouth the litany, which he recites until now, about being one of the hitmen of Duterte.

His testimonies in the Senate were thus dismissed as perjured, with even then Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights head Richard Gordon pounding on his peers to deny Lascañas to use the Senate as a platform for his deceptions.

“When Lascañas first testified, he was asked under oath if he was telling the truth, and suddenly, he conveniently changed his tune. All of a sudden, his conscience supposedly bothered him. He claimed to have seen God after an operation,” Gordon said, dismissing the flip-flopping witness.

Lascañas, in a press conference arranged by the plotting duo of Trillanes and De Lima, admitted he was one of the leaders of DDS and that they took orders from Duterte when he was still mayor of Davao City.

DDS was then tagged in the death of at least 2,000 petty criminals during Duterte’s incumbency as city mayor for more than two decades.

Other senators condemned the turnaround of the witness. “By admitting to lying under oath before the Senate Justice Committee during the October 2016 hearings on alleged extrajudicial killings, Lascañas has made a mockery of the solemn proceedings of the Senate,” one of the senators said.

Key findings of the Senate panel, in its report on the extra-judicial killing allegations, were that there were no state-sponsored summary killings, that the DDS was an urban legend, and there is an urgent need for reforms in law enforcement and the criminal justice system to stop killings with impunity.

Gordon, who replaced De Lima as chairperson of the Senate panel, saw through the goal of using Lascañas as a weapon.

He said Trillanes, who is not a lawyer, did not understand the need to prove allegations, which was what even the combined forces of the yellow mob failed to do in the charges hurled against Duterte.

Gordon added that Trillanes has been plotting as his wont because what he wanted did not come out in the committee report.

The report indeed included recommendations for the Senate to sanction De Lima and Trillanes for bad behavior during the hearings.

The report cited the histrionics that de Lima resorted to when her witness against Duterte, Edgar Matobato, was grilled and was proven to be spewing out lies.

The report also cited Trillanes’ decision to allow Matobato to leave the Senate premises without waiting for the committee hearings to finish and De Lima’s “material concealment” regarding the kidnapping case filed against the confessed hitman.

Matobato claimed that he used to be a member of the DDS, which allegedly had the “blessings” of Duterte during his term as Davao City Mayor.

The report said Matobato’s testimonies “were full of inconsistencies and contradictions.”

Lascañas has been pulled from the dirty tricks drawer and is now spewing lies of grander proportion as he now implicates Duterte and his children, including Vice President Sara Duterte, of involvement in the summary killings.

As before, those are lies that only the veteran destabilizers Trillanes and De Lima can pull off.

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Credit belongs to: tribune.net.ph