Senator Grace Poe during the committee hearing on the Mamasapano encounter where 44 PNP SAF were killed.
INQUIRER PHOTO/RAFFY LERMA
Despite Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile questioning police and military officials for hours, Sen. Grace Poe saw nothing new in the Senate’s reinvestigation Wednesday of the Mamasapano incident that would overturn or change the committee’s earlier findings.
It was Enrile who sought the reinvestigation.
According to Poe, who chaired the hearing, certain issues were made clearer and expounded on, but there was nothing that would warrant any substantial changes in the committee’s earlier findings.
“From the start, we said that we stand by our committee report and in my view, that has been strengthened now,” she told reporters after the hearing.
Poe said the committee’s earlier findings that the President was ultimately responsible for the incident would stay, but she pointed out that the hearing Wednesday also showed that the Chief Executive did not do certain actions he was speculated to have done.
For instance, it was shown that President Aquino did not order authorities to withhold assistance to the beleaguered Special Action Force (SAF) commandos when they were in a clash with Moro fighters, she said.
“His responsibility is still there, but we saw that there were accusations against him that weren’t true, such as that he may have ordered the military not to help the SAF,” she said.
It was also shown that Mr. Aquino was not immediately informed of the gravity of the Mamasapano incident and was not given enough details about it, she said.
What was shown as well was that there was a lot of misinformation with regard to the incident, and that there were shortcomings on the part of officials involved in the Mamasapano operation, she said.
According to her, SAF chief Getulio Napeñas did not observe operations that could have made the Mamasapano operation safer for the police commandos. There were also lapses in the planning for the mission.
Poe also said the Senate would make public the transcripts of the Senate’s executive sessions on the Mamasapano issue, save for a video that would disclose the identity of one resource person.
The transcripts would show that Napeñas had not been forthcoming initially on certain topics.
“You will see from the transcripts that at the start, Napeñas himself did not say who were the people behind this, the involvement of foreigners. He only revealed it at the end and did not share everything,” she said.
Poe noted that Napeñas shared new related information about the US role Wednesday, prompting senators to remark that he was sharing data piecemeal.
What was made clearer after Napeñas’ testimony Wednesday was that there was an ongoing coordination between the Philippines and the United States because of the counterterrorism program, she said.
As to whether the President was negligent in doing everything he could to help the SAF, Poe said he was not given enough information.
This was why the chain of command was important, because the President was also preoccupied with so many things, she said.