Was Ninoy’s death a US operation?

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

08/23/2010
The Aquino children’s repudiation of the reopening of the Ninoy Aquino slay inquir
y, under the pretext of “having already forgiven the perpetrators,” is facile and un
acceptable. The Filipino people are entitled to know the truth in their continui
ng conduct of history; and the unclosed chapter is unfair to Ferdinand Marcos et
al. who were long condemned as the masterminds through insinuations by the Aqui
no family and the Establishment media.
Take Billy Esposo’s logic, written in 2007: “…The responsibility falls squarely on the
Marcos regime… The compelling reason for ordering the Aquino assassination was to
remove the all-too-real threat of Aquino rallying the opposition…” That same facile
logic about the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing — which has been proven absolutely fal
se to waylay the nation — created chaos and almost absolved the real perpetrator,
Jose Ma. Sison.
Esposo, echoing the logic of all those still simplistically blaming Marcos or th
ose around him, argues: “The power dynamics of the Marcos era was such that the Aq
uino assassination could only have been undertaken with the go-signal of Marcos
or someone who could act on his behalf in ordering the military to undertake the
elaborate operation.”
But could Marcos have forced the US not to renew the visa of Ninoy Aquino and hi
s family? And why exactly didn’t the US extend the visas of the Aquinos, since the
re were countless humanitarian grounds to grant this, particularly the alleged t
hreat of physical harm to his family in the event they returned to Manila? Could
Marcos have arranged the acceptance of the obviously faked passport of Ninoy (u
nder the name “Marcial Bonifacio”) through the British in Hong Kong and the Taiwanes
e authorities? Could he have imposed upon these governments to let a fake passpo
rt holder slip through?
Ken Kashiwahara, Ninoy’s Japanese-American brother-in-law, writing his firsthand a
ccount in 1983 of that last plane leg at the Chiang Kai Shek International Airpo
rt before arriving in Manila (republished by The New York Times last week), said
: “Ninoy had no problems going through immigration as Marcial Bonifacio… but as soon
as he left the counter, the two ‘security’ men escorted him around the corner. I pa
nicked. ‘This is it,’ I muttered. ‘He’s been discovered.’ I hurried through the immigratio
n, rounded the corner and there was Ninoy, grinning. ‘That was the Taiwan garrison
commander,’ he said, ‘and he just wanted to make sure I got through O.K. Can you im
agine? A general?’”
The point I am driving at should be clear by now: There has always been a power
that could supercede Marcos and any other president to this day. (Erap tried to
insist on his way and got ousted, too.)
The official investigation of Ninoy’s assassination stops at Sgt. Pablo Martinez,
the identified gunman. But after decades of incarceration and religious guidance
from Msgr. Robert Olaguer, assigned by the late Cardinal Sin to minister to the
spiritual needs of the 10 soldiers implicated in the assassination, Sgt. Martin
ez decided to come out with his personal knowledge of who the mastermind was.
On November 2007, Gloria Arroyo pardoned the convicted Ninoy Aquino killers on h
umanitarian grounds. And as the Aquino siblings denounced this decision, Msgr. R
obert Olaguer came up to defend the soldiers to insist on their innocence.
Meanwhile, Esposo, in his aforementioned 2007 article, came to Danding’s defense s
aying, “What rules out Danding Cojuangco from being the mastermind is the fact tha
t (he) was only in the money game during that time but was nowhere in the line o
f succession. He neither had the title to vie for it nor had command of the legi
ons to be able to grab it...”
Years after the fall of Marcos that began with the Ninoy Aquino assassination, m
any US State Department bigwigs, among them former State Secretary George Schult
z and then ambassador to Indonesia Paul Wolfowitz, have come out to claim credit
for the former leader’s ouster. They’ve stated this either in their memoirs or in v
arious speeches which I have accessed by patiently searching on the Net.
The fall of Marcos caused a reversal of his nation-building programs; then resto
red and reinvigorated the power of the old privileged elite; demolished trade pr
otection; and accelerated privatization and deregulation, which all led to the g
reatest transfer of wealth from the Philippine state’s coffers (and the people’s poc
kets) to global transnational corporations and their local partners. From then o
n, the sinister program to obliterate the existence of a sovereign Philippine Re
public has all but ended with finality.
(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on
1098AM; watch Politics (and Economics) Today, Tuesday, 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., with r
eplay at 11 p.m. on Global News Network, Destiny Cable Channel 21 about “Ninoy’s Dea
th: A False Flag Operation?”; visit our blogs, http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com a
nd http://hermantiulaurel.blogspot.com)