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TEARS.The stout former Quezon City Police District's Chief General Richard Albano shed tears as he bid farewell to his men after he was axed by Interior Secretary Mar Roxas. |
By MORTZ C. ORTIGOZA
Napa-iyak kamakailan sa TV si Chief Supt. (General)
Richard Albano ng Quezon City Police District habang nagpapa-alam sa turn over
ceremony niya. Bakit kaya? 1) Siguro nalulungkot siya dahil nasibak siya ni
Secretary Mar Roxas at ni Director General Alan Purisima, 2) Ma-mi-miss nya ang
mga tao niyang incompetent who could not mitigate the surge of criminality sa
Q.C, 3) O ma-mi-miss niya iyong “perks”
given to a post that entitles a director sa QCPD?
***
It is pathetic to see
the sight of four Police District Directors who were all star ranked in Metro
Manila sacked by Secretary Roxas of the Department of Interior & Local
Government and Police Director Alan Purisima.
Just like their chief
at the Philippine National Police, they look like a toad with their beer belly.
What happens to the
35-inch waistline limits’ PNP Physical Fitness Program vigorously implemented
during the time of then national police chief Panfilo Lacson ?
I am green with envy
every time I see physically trimmed police officials like Lacson, Police
Regional Office Director Chief Supt. Roman Felix, and Pangasinan Police
Provincial Office Director S/Supt. Rey Biay. These officers and gentlemen
probably maintain a strict physical or diet regimen.
Look at General Felix,with
all those well toned body like PC General Job Mayo I met in Mindanao, you would
mistake him to be in his mid-40s.
Iyan ang dapat hindi
lang sa mga generals kundi sa mga colonels, Lt. Colonels, and majors whose "handsome dividends" in their post as chief of police could really make them stout.
***
Talking about good
physique and athleticism one can cite former Urdaneta City's Chief of Police Supt. Pat Pinol, a British trained Royal Marine Commando and former trainor of the elite Special Action Force. Sannamagan, he can still jog 21 kilometers with regularity in my Province Cotabato. I could cite also former president Fidel V. Ramos (USMA
1950) who challenges any captain or major for 100
push up or abdomen flexing contest.
He once challenged me,
although I was only a lowly tanod (watch man) of our barangay then, for 100
pushed up and abs flexing on the river cruise at the pristine Dawel River of
Dagupan City.
I stopped at 95 in
both the two contests in deference to the man who fought along side with my father
against Mao-Tse Tung’s Chinese and North Korean Communist troops in the Korean
War in the 1950s.
***
But a good example of
athleticism, I told police colonels and majors who treated me with booze, was
Army Four Stars General David Petraeus (USMA 1974).When the jogging buff
Petraeus, whose body looks like a 35 years old man according to Bob Woodward’s
book Obama’s War, was the commander of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A), every colonels
who wants to confer with him could find themselves running and discussing with
him in a 5 miles (8 kilometers) speed jog that the general has been
doing regularly. Petraeus, however, was disgraced as CIA Director because of a tryst with a pretty West Point alumna who was writing her Harvard University's dissertation about him.
***
As what Chris McDougal
of The Daily Beast (successor of Newsweek Magazine) described the run-till-you-drop
exercise regimens of Petraues in 2010:” At
57, the newly minted leader of the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan still likes to
start his day at sun-up with a five-mile run, blazing out each of those miles
in under six minutes. Then it’s straight to the weight room, where he ignores
all those cushy-seated machines and heads for his torture device of choice: a
single iron bar, lag-bolted eight feet overhead. A Petraeus pull-up is nothing
as simple as hoisting your own body weight up and down a few dozen times.
Instead, he slowly jack-knifes from the hips until his shoelaces are level with
his face. After 20 of those babies, he drops to the floor for crisp 100 or so
pushups. And to recover from these self-imposed beatings, the general treats
himself to a total of one meal per day
and four hours of sleep. This was from a guy who a year ago was being
treated for prostate cancer and survived getting shot in the chest when a
soldier tripped during a live-fire drill”.
***
Last week I rubbed elbows with San Carlos City's Chief of Police Supt. (Lt. Col) Charles Umayam (PNPA 2000) and Binmaley new
Police Chief Supt. Marlon Castillo (PNPA 1998). I enjoyed talking with these
two down-to-earth officers who have good future that await them. I regaled the
duo at Charles' (my political science student at Lyceum Northwestern) office in
San Carlos City's Police Station about how the Reagan Administration sustained
the Contra rebels versus the Sandinista in Nicaragua by funneling to them the
proceeds of tens of millions of dollars from the sale of U.S spare parts sold
by U.S Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North and the Israeli Mossad (Spies) for the
Iranian U.S made F-14s, F-15s as its fought Iraq in the 1980s.
Castillo, I learned, was assigned as chief of
police of the five towns in Ilocos Sur before he was whisked, through the
intercession of then acting Pangasinan Police Provincial Director S/Supt.
Sterling Blanco, at the Pangasinan’s PPO as legal officer since he is a law
graduate like Umayam. Barely warming his seat at his new post at the Police
Civil Relation Office at the PPO he was reassigned again at the biggest town in
terms of voting population in the 2nd Congressional District.
Umayam told me that he and Castillo vigorously worked
hand in hand in apprehending and discouraging those enterprising folks who run a
bukis or a jueteng (that piggy backs on the winning result of Meridian Jai-Alai)
by crisscrossing the common boundary of San Carlos and Binmaley.
***
Without defending
himself against the barrages of expose’ unleashed by Senators Allan Peter
Cayetano and Antonio Trillanes, Vice President Jejomar Binay chances to be
president in 2016 would be as bleak as the color of the alkitran (asphalt or sealant) used by those in the Ghetto or
squatter area to seal their rusty rooftop.
The significant 15%
plunged of Binay in the latest polls at Pulse Asia only shows that he is
destined to follow the fate of moneyed former Senator Manny Villar when he
became a target of the big guns of his presidential rivals’ demolition team.
If U.S Presidents are
“singed but not burn” as motto of the Annual Gridiron Dinner held by the U.S
Media (Do we have that Philippine version?) for a U.S President, Binay and
Villar have been burned mercilessly by their detractors with corruption issues.
The aggravating
circumstance that would make Cayetano particularly liable was he roasted, the
already razed Jojo as his skins could attest, in his take-no-prisoner’s Senate
Investigation.
Politically double "murder" with ignominy pag nagkata-on ang kaso ng eloquent Senator
Alan Peter Cayetano.
(You can read my selected columns
at http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com and articles at Pangasinan News Aro. You
can send comments too attotomortz@yahoo.com).
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