Ces is back! She’s safe! Whee!
Now, after the love-fest, answers.
- Who kidnapped her?
- Can she identify them from mugshots and such?
- Did she know where she was held?
- What can she remember about the place where she was held? Any geographic landmarks?
- How many people held her?
- How were they armed? How were they provisioned? Who was feeding her captors?
- Did they have a political agenda?
- Why did she refuse the escorts?
- Was she ever in any real danger?
- Was this an abduction in quest of an exclusive?
- Is there a book or movie deal in any of this? If so, who’s gonna play her (LOL!)
Of course, I’m not saying she should be debriefed today. Tomorrow will be soon enough. Or even the day after that. The point is, just because she’s back and unharmed, doesn’t make her off-limits like fragile porcelain. She can play that angle, of course, but I hope she saves it for all the Oprah-esque talkshows, interviews, and magazines that will inevitably mob her.
But for the sake of the rest of us not terribly interested in that saccharine pap, i hope she does get debriefed in deadly earnest. It’s wonderful that she got out of that unscathed, but that experience should at least be mined for lessons. And you don’t get lessons when you handle her with kid gloves.
Or will journalists once again exercise the much vaunted ‘freedom of the press’ to suppress the information they think we don’t need to have (or the information their former captors don’t wish us to have)?
Filed under: journalism, Ces Dilon, debriefing, kidnapping, release
[...] smoke puts it, once the love-fest ends, it will be time for tough questions. As far as one of her [...]
it appears manolo quezon in his blog makes an omnibus indictment of the government (particularly, the president) for the ces drilon saga using the usual partisan generalizations and value judgments. it’s kind of like trashing a basket of tomatoes just because one or two looks rotten. i know there’s a lot of suspicious scenarios. but the only thing that is certain is that, by ces’ own admission, the whole incident was proximately caused by her “hardheadedness” and violation of her employer’s own “rules”.
the government is a vast institution composed of thousands of officeholders of differing agenda, beliefs, prejudices, and loyalties. it is hardly fair to blame the chief executive for alleged wrongdoing of some obscure mayor and his accomplices, or for alleged suspicions of collusions by the pnp or the military. truman’s cliche, “the buck stops here” is a nice credo of every head of state, but it’s not practicable unless he/she is a dictator who has absolute power to make heads roll literally on suspicion or bare accusation. it is on par with the popular philippine dictum “command responsibility”, apparently inspired by the prosecution of yamashita, the “tiger of malaya”, for wartime atrocities. i believe those principles have no place under the rule of law in ordinary circumstances.