MARIETTA Santos, girl friend of T-Sgt. Vidal Doble, member of the army intelligence team which did the Garci tapes, reminded the Senate Thursday that six months after the emergence of the tapes, the person who ordered the wiretapping remains unknown.
For six months, the public knew it was the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP) which was responsible.
The instant reaction of the Department of Justice was to threaten to arrest anyone listening to the tapes since these were illegally tapped.
***
But there was no effort to find out who ordered the tapping although Sgt. Doble was pinpointed as a member of the team when he was arrested following his team-up with NBI Deputy Director Sammy Ong. He gave Ong the master tapes.
It was not an ordinary person who was illegally tapped, but the President herself. There was no show of outrage, no "heads will roll" reaction, not even a faint attempt to get at the mastermind.
Sgt. Doble should have warned the President the first time he heard her voice, not allowed her to have 14 more conversations.
***
Marietta Santos who frequented the "blue ribbon" where the wire tapping was done, identified all nine members of the team, including boy friend Doble.
She should go to the courts with her story, the AFP spokesman said, because his bosses would not do anything.
Saturday, the AFP ordered all members of the team to stay away from the Senate investigation. Executive Order 464 bars soldiers from attending Congress hearings without permission from higher-ups.
An in-your-face challenge to the Senate? A violation of the civilian supremacy over the military provision of the Constitution? It is all those, plus being the mother of cover-ups.
The lesson to be learned from cover-ups – the jueteng probe, the Garcillano investigation, and now the wiretapping scandal – is that a cover-up gives a scandal a life of its own, a deathless one.
