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EDITORIAL
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Thursday, March 15, 2018
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WHEN an agency drops charges against self-confessed drug lords amid a so-called campaign to rid the country of illegal drugs, what does that make the agency?
When the same agency implicates more than 600 individuals without an iota of evidence against them and stubbornly peddles the narrative that said individuals are “terrorists”, what does that make the agency?
If this is not a travesty and an indication of the department’s lack of credibility, integrity and basic common sense, we don’t know what is.
We yield this space to the statement of Sen. Leila de Lima due to its timeliness…
“The travesty of the fake war on drugs is that it has never eliminated drug lords or the sources of drugs. It has always targeted those at the lowest level of the drug chain, dealing on them the capital penalty of death without trial and on mere suspicion. In the meantime, big-time dealers are given a free pass for supposed lack of evidence, even if they admitted to being drug lords under oath.
“There can be no excuse to both the Philippine National Police’s and the Department of Justice’s failure to bring real drug lords to court and before the bars of justice. They seem to have no problem filing fake drug cases against political opponents of the Duterte administration. It appears that the law enforcement and justice machinery of the government under this administration has already forgotten how to file and prosecute real drug cases. They have become such experts in filing fake drug charges that they have become completely incompetent in the case build-up and the filing of real ones. This makes the drug war useless, as it is fake.
“If the Duterte government is consistent in anything in its drug war, it is in the lack of interest in going after the drug lords and drug deals that matter. In the meantime, thousands are killed for possession of a few ounces of shabu, most of it even planted after a supposed shootout.
“It should be clear by now that Duterte’s drug war is a big joke, except that the thousands killed in its name are not laughing. Because they are all dead. It is only the real drug lords who are laughing — all the way to the bank.
“And the biggest joke of all? The government tried to hide the dismissal of the cases from the public since December of last year. And now Duterte is pretending to huff and puff at this dismissal. It’s either they were hiding it because they were complicit in the deal with the drug lords, or they are so incompetent as to be completely ignorant of the dismissal a full three months after the fact.
“The corruption, or the incompetence — pick your choice — is incredible.”
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