President Duterte has claimed that the recent shootings of teenage boys — apparently by anti-drug police — were attempts to sabotage his anti-narcotics crusade. While his finger of blame has pointed towards his usual critics, he has given no clue as to how they might have launched such a deadly and clandestine operation. Writing from her prison cell today (Saturday, September 9), jailed Senator Leila de Lima has responded to the president’s accusation:
Duterte is on the retreat. He has taken the cue from the Philippine News agency [PNA — the government’s official news service] and has started re-angling the teen murders of his death squads as a sabotage of his war on drugs.
As if his drug war was all compassionate, caring, peaceful, and harmonious, he is now blaming the murders he has ordered en masse on the opposition.
Duterte did not expect the public relations backlash that the killings of the teenagers has produced. It is not as if these are new. Since day one of his drug war children and teenagers already started to fall like flies.
His Davao Death Squad was famous for the killing of children and minors aged 12 to 18. Because they could not send them to jail under the Pangilinan Law, which Duterte occasionally criticises, they just killed them right after letting them go.
Most of them were knifed to death instead of being shot, to make it appear that they were killed in gang wars.
Sabotage claim is just spin
Now that public opinion is against the killings of these minors, like the PNA, he re-angles the murders he has sanctioned as sabotage.
Duterte of course is not fooling anyone, except his die-hard fanatics, the same fanatics who screamed for blood and the mass murder of drug addicts. They are all now saying that the murders they lusted after are being used by the opposition to give those same murders a bad name.
Take that for a spin. Wrap your minds around it. Discombobulate your brains until it makes sense.
But it won’t, because this is the logic of the sociopath, where empathy is not even an itch that the deranged President can feel.
Mr President, the fact that Carl Angelo is your relative, even if it is true, and I doubt it, does not mean you didn’t order his murder. It only means you really don’t care who is killed in your drug war.
There is no way you can spin that to bring 13,000 people – children, teenagers, and all – killed in your drug war back to life.
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