Statement of FSGO
We are former senior government officials who from experience know that
strong democratic institutions are crucial to our progress as a whole nation.
The most important institution our people depend on is the Office of the
President. The responsible exercise of Presidential power is an important
instrument for serving our nation's interests. A President that leads with
righteousness and wisdom is a great blessing. A President that serves evil is
a terrible curse. To secure a blessing and avoid a curse in the Presidency, the
founding leaders of our democracy established a system of checks and
balances.
The failure of checks and balances on the Presidency has allowed many past
scandals to descend to a limbo of unresolved crimes against the public trust.
Fertilizer scam. Election cheating. Shopping bags of cash in Malacanang.
The NBN-ZTE scandal is just the latest monster in a larger pile of garbage
from previous scandals. Our people are not going to let this one slip into the
limbo again. Our search for truth, accountability and reforms must advance
by getting our institutions to confront and resolve the corruption and cover
up of this deal.
Our people have asked: Is President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo part of the
NBN-ZTE corruption and cover up? She must act to help bring out the full
truth about this deal if her hands are truly clean. The Arroyo Presidency
must shelter the truth or it will be judged as a fortress for lies.
Our previous statement asked the President to take actions that were
intended to demonstrate that indeed, like the people, she is against
corruption and is angry at those engaged in it. Ordinary citizens can
recognize the actions we asked of the President as reasonable under the
present conditions: let the primary witness, Secretary Neri, testify without
limitation; surrender all pertinent public documents on the deal to the
Senate; follow usual administrative procedures by placing under preventive
suspension those people under a cloud of doubt while an investigation is
proceeding.
Since the President had already cancelled a deal that she judged tainted by
corruption, these actions are logical and prudent. We demanded these
actions not as an interest group but as a straightforward way for Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo to demonstrate that she is a blessing not a curse in the
Office of the President. We got involved because we saw it as our civic duty
to help start the repair and rehabilitation of our institutions already severely
damaged from past scandals. By doing the actions we called for, the
President would have shown her respect of the system of checks and balance
of our democracy by cooperating fully with the Senate to give our people the
full picture of the corruption and cover up of the NBN-ZTE deal.
Even as we issued our statement, however, the President's spokepersons
were summarily dismissing these demands. Later her advisers even
criticized and threatened us for making these demands. The President is very
poorly served by these spokespersons and advisers.
Revoking EO 464 does not serve the truth if Neri still invokes executive
privilege and does not testify and, if, despite previous statements to the
contrary, all records of the NBN-ZTE project have still not been submitted
to the Senate. We believe the Supreme Court or the Senate must do their
respective duties to serve the truth, but the President has a greater obligation.
She has the greatest stake in the Senate investigation coming out with the
truth or the people will conclude she hides behind lies and uses the power of
her office to smother the truth.
We conclude that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo refuses to serve the
people's demand for truth about a matter of great public interest. We see in
this refusal, despite ample chances and many sound reasons, a clear basis for
our people to find her complicit with and, in fact, at the center of, the
corruption and cover up of the NBN-ZTE deal.
We express our loss of confidence in her. As a consequence wequestion not
only her moral authority to govern, but also her ability to govern given the
mounting garbage of lies and obfuscation that she is constrained to build to
cover up the increasing stench of corruption in her administration.
We ask those directly appointed by the President if they believe, in their
heart of hearts, that they are keeping faith with their signed oath to defend
and protect the nation¢s Constitution and its laws in the face of blatant,
shameless corruption and violation of individual rights.
We ask those in the civil service and foreign service to examine their
conscience to discern if their continued service in this Administration is not
in fact helping prop up a regime that, at best abets large-scale corruption, lies
and coverup, and at worst is a party to them.
We call on our fellow citizens to press their demand for a just resolution of
governance issues and violation of the public trust raised against the
President.
For our part, we pledge to use our combined knowledge, capabilities and
influence to help as many of our people understand the issues and explain
the known facts surrounding the many instances of corruption and encourage them to act in accordance with the dictates of their consciense.
We shall work with other sectors to put forward and apply other measures to
make our other democratic institutions work better in preventing, exposing
and punishing corruption at any level of our government starting at the very
top.
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