The Smallest Atonement
The full text of Makati Rep. Teodoro Locsin, Jr’s speech at the Joint Session of Congress on Proclamation No. 1959 (Martial Law in Maguindanao), 10 December 2009.
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Senate President,
This is how I sum up the government’s case.
It is not without irony that I stand here defending martial law. But I do defend it. Nowhere and at no other time has it been better justified nor based more sufficiently on incontrovertible facts.
Facts that call, indeed, cry out for the most extreme exercise of the police power, which is nothing less than martial law.
Facts, not legal quibbles.
Facts, not semantic distinctions of debatable validity. Look at the bodies, look at the arms stockpiles.
Is rebellion as defined by the Penal Code a necessary condition for the validity of a proclamation of martial law? Then where is the definition of invasion in the Penal Code for the validity of martial law in that case?
Since the repeal of the Anti-Subversion Act, ideology is not a component of rebellion.
I submit that rebellion here is not an exclusive reference to a particular provision of a particular law; but to a wide yet unmistakable, general but not indiscriminate allusion to a state of affairs that has deteriorated beyond lawless violence, beyond a state of emergency, to an obstinate refusal to discharge properly the functions of civil government in the area, by, of all people, the duly constituted but now obstructive authorities therein.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 11th, 2009 at 15:19
Thanks for sharing.
I learned a new word – Piddling.
December 11th, 2009 at 22:09
I like that word: Slaked.