Liar! ‘Langkak!’

COMMUNITY BILLBOARD

Simon “KaFiliw” Naogsan 

Col. Miguel Puyao, spokesperson of the 5th Infantry Division Philippine Army, has a long penchant for fabrications and distortion of facts.

Despite the latest investigation reports of the Philippine National Police itself that there were no casualties in the foiled raid of the  54th Infantry Battalion Philippine Army on a temporary New People’s Army  camp last April 21, the Armed Forces of the Philippines spin master insists that there were seven Red  fighters slain, including a 48-year old amazon allegedly from the province of Kalinga.

He also insists that the NPA was out to disrupt a medical mission, much like the claim in July 2010 that the Division Recon Coy unit ambushed in Samoki, Bontoc was also preparing for a medical mission. In truth, there was no medical mission scheduled that week, much less an AFP-assisted health project.

               

The Colonel, a native of Natonin who long wanted to make himself a folk hero, no doubt wanted to deliver the heads of Red fighters during the town fiesta that day. But after having thrown blows at emptiness and achieving nothing, he now concocts the lie that the NPA suffered casualties, fictitiously airlifted the bodies and brought them to the nearby town of Alfonso Lista, Ifugao then transferred the same to a morgue in Santiago City, Isabela.

               

Feeding on speculative assumptions and spinning lies one after another to buttress his earlier blatant lie that six NPA combatants were killed in its foiled raid in Barangay Banawel, Natonin, Mountain Province, he claims that the daring ambush at Tinoc, Ifugao four days later by a unit of the Nona del Rosario Command-NPA Ifugao was in direct retaliation of the former because it was just a “few kilometers” from Barangay Banawel.

               

The colonel has to be reminded that the road distance between Barangay Banawel, Natonin, Mountain Province and Tinoc

Ifugao is about a hundred kilometers and therefore is not just a few kilometers distance! Likewise, in his frenzied effort to cover up his lie, he probably mixed up Barangay Banawel, Natonin with the town of Banaue, Ifugao. This colonel is ignorant of his geography.

               

The spin started even before the foiled raid. On April 20, a day before the attack, the Army’s tactical command post set up in Poblacion, Paracelis, ostensibly to direct and monitor the massive operation, surreptitiously spread out information that some six casualties were incurred by the NPA in an undisclosed place.

               

Indeed, overzealous to gain pogi points, even before the actual operation military officers are wont to release prepared press statements only to be withdrawn or revised later just as what Col. Posadas did last February in its invented raid on an NPA camp in Sallapadan, Abra where three NPAs were allegedly killed.

               

Not to be outdone, Col. Puyao still insists on an indefensible lie even when it was flatly contradicted by a subsequent PNP investigation report. No doubt these AFP psy-war experts assiduously adhere to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ dictum that a lie repeated a thousand times will be absorbed as truth by the unsuspecting masses. The indigenous people of Ifugao have a better term for this: Langkak!(Simon Naogsan is the spokesperson of the Cordillera Peoples Democratic Front – ed)