Defensorgate Explained

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Trust Malacañang and loyal aide Mike Defensor to come up with yet another neat trick to confuse the Filipino people, and more importantly, provide their allies in Congress “justification” not to sign the impeachment complaint, which can be taken to mean that they are now in danger of losing some of their allies in the House on the impeachment complaint.

Defensor, in a press conference yesterday, showed the media a report from a reputable American tape recording analyst and merely on two tape tracts, saying the tape submitted to his company by Defensor was spliced and deemed “anomalous.”

The first sign of Malacañang's and Defensor's dirty tricks was that he had submitted the alleged Paguia edited tapes, which contained 14 to 15 recorded conversations between Gloria Arroyo and a poll commissioner said to be Virgilio Garcillano, and as Defensor claimed, was downloaded from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) Web site and not the three-hour tape.

It should be pointed out that the House of Representatives has a copy of both the Paguia-edited tape and the three-hour tape, yet instead of getting a tape copied from the tapes submitted to Congress, whether of the three-hour variety or the Paguia-edited tape, Defensor, as admitted said this was downloaded from the PCIJ Web site. Why get this from an unofficial Web site when congressional copies of the tape could be had, and easily, since Defensor is a former member of Congress and the House majority are allies of Gloria? And why not do it together with the minority so no questions would be raised as to its source and authenticity?

Very elementary. The Defensor tapes shown cannot be checked out for clear authentication by way of their origin, which is what was intended in the first place, for him to claim that the opposition had electronically and digitally manipulated two tracts of the claimed Paguia tape, where the contents focused on the 1 million lead and the dagdag-dagdag phrase, which, it should be pointed out, was admitted by the minority congressmen to have been enhanced, precisely because that phrase was muffled.

Therefore, if the tape submitted for authentication to the American company by Defensor is, from the start, edited and spliced, enhanced and even dubbed over and evidently by Malacañang itself rather than the opposition, it stands to reason that the US tape analyst would have to come up with a finding that the tape's integrity and contents are in question and that this has been spliced, edited and dubbed over and “anomalous” with a different voice added in.

Stated differently, Defensor et al. tapped the technical expertise of a US tape authenticity firm precisely to get it to state, on the basis of a clearly doctored tape submitted by Defensor and his dirty tricksters, that the tape without referring to its origin was altered, edited and everything else.

That would be akin to submitting to the US firm the Bunye-claimed original, which was obviously doctored to cover up the crime. The conclusion would be the same.

The second sign of the dirty tricks of Defensor is the fact that while he asked for an analysis from this American firm, it was only for two tracts. Why so? Why not the entire three-hour tape to get to the root of the issue? Defensor claimed lamely it was too expensive to have more than two tracts analyzed. Tell that to Marines — not when Gloria blows billions of public funds to get herself elected, proclaimed, and now, to ensure the impeach rap dismissal.

The third dirty trick performed by Defensor was the fact that he presented two tape studies — one from the US forensic expert and another from a couple of local sound engineers, who apparently do not even belong to to a specific sound analysis company, then merged the studies, as though the US expert also claimed the same conclusion the Filipino “experts,” one of whom is a Jonathan Tiongco, who can hardly be called a voice or tape authentication expert. This is the same Tiongco whom the Senate dismissed as a witness in a CA hearing.

It was noted during the press conference that the Filipino “sound engineers” except for Tiongco, who can hardly pass for an expert, were very careful not to destroy themselves and their reputations by not making categorical statements on the tape's authenticity or its source, only to state that yes, there was splicing, yes, there was alteration and no, they are not voice analysts.

So who is Tiongco? Suddenly he becomes an expert at examining a tape whose source cannot even be established?

Why is an unknown Tiongco whose credentials as a tape authentication expert have not been established and is largely unknown to the tape experts community, tapped by Defensor, along with the US expert?

The answer clearly rests on the fact that this had to be resorted to by Malacañang and its dirty tricks department to confuse the public and provide the military generals and the congressmen with yet another fabricated evidence to defend their stand.

That's how dirty they play the game. But who believes them?