What Nicole Doesn't Know

I am Live Blogging the promulgation of the Subic Rape Case Decision in the Comment Thread to get a nice time stamp on each entry.

Later today, a verdict in the Subic Bay Rape Case will be handed down by the Makati City Regional Trial Court. I wrote a lot about this issue because it started a few weeks after this blog was resurrected in late 2005--

Six US Marines Held for Raping a Filipina in Subic
Visiting Forces Aggrievement
The Left and the Trapos United
Anti-VFA Forces Fall Silent For Now
Angst of the VFA Abrogationists
A Little Yellow Journalism
Exploiting Nicole

Annual Statistics of the NSCB show that between 2500 and 3200 Filipino women report being raped every year by Filipino men. But the Subic Bay Rape case involves an exception... Probably, only "Nicole" and US Marine Lance Corporal Daniel Smith know the ultimate truth about what happened on November 1, 2005 in Subic Bay. She says he raped her in a parked van; he says they had consensual sex after partying in a night club.

No matter what that verdict is -- Guilty or Not Guilty -- certain people that Nicole thinks are her friends and supporters, will surely find a way to prove that we have been victimized yet again and it is time to rally once more in their dozens at the U.S. Embassy to protest it. The truth is they would much rather the verdict be Not Guilty because it would prove their bigger ideological points and provide a continuing stage for the drama they best love to put on for the public--Our Victimhood.

Defeat and Victimhood are essential to the Philippine Left's modus vivendi.

Ultimately, they are not even interested in Nicole's personal battle. Below PDI's yellow journalism provides a soapbox for some blackmail to be published as the statement of an "alternative law group"--(much as PDI/SWS tried to pressure the Supreme Court last month before the people's initiative decision by headlining the cleverly predicated lie that 67% of the Filipino people didn't trust it to make a fair decision):

Marlon J. Manuel: “The international community is watching the Philippines and is waiting on whether we would issue a verdict submissive to the whims of the world’s lone superpower or we would finally change course and stand up for the dignity of our many ‘Nicoles’ [the name by which the complainant is publicly known] who were stripped of their right to justice ever since we played the role of an over-friendly host to not so woman-friendly US military troops,”

Yet, who has denied Nicole justice? Is it not those who turned the case into a political circus? They've used Nicole to attack the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and to propagandize against the joint anti-terrorism activities of the US and RP. They used Nicole as a Battering Ram. This really isn't about 'Nicole' and Corporal Daniel Smith. It's about William McKinley and Benevolent Assimilation. It is only incidentally about Rape because the real target is US Imperialism. But have a look at how the two are deftly connected by a Major Convenor of the Lynch Mob:

Rina Jimenez David (PDI, We Are All Nicole)

Doesn’t Nicole’s story just make you want to tear up? In many ways, we are all like Nicole in our relations with Americans: naïve, trusting in their innate goodness, blind to their human frailties—or geo-political pragmatism, but, unlike Nicole, intimidated into silence and passivity

We did have our “Nicole-moment.” That day when the Philippine Senate voted to reject the RP-US bases agreement. But even that resounding victory for the nationalist cause would ultimately be eroded by the VFA and the continuing presence of the American military on our soil. Which just goes to show that when Americans want to f—k with you, they’ll f—k you any which way.

It's not just Nicole that has allegedly been raped, but ALL the Filipino People, in Rina Jimenez David's hyperbole. But the Lynch Mob was fired into its earliest frenzies with this incendiary column a week and half after the alleged rape occurred -- Cry Rape! by Conrado de Quiros -- in which he blithely recites certain "facts" that became the Official Canon of the Subic Bay Rape Case:

The second thing that struck me about the case was the viciousness of it. The girl was plied with drink and God knows what else in a bar, shoved into a van, and raped inside by an American serviceman while his four buddies egged him on with cries of "F__k! F__k! F__k!" Later, she was lifted out of the van by her hands and feet by two men like a pig ("parang baboy") and deposited on the pavement. She had on only a shirt and a panty, a condom still sticking to her panty. Someone from the van threw a pair of pants in her direction, and the van drove off.

These sensationalized details and many more telling and retellings of them, were printed by the Philippine Daily Inquirer in hundreds of thousands of copies and still floating around online, where people still read them and believe them as Gospel truth.

Reportedly through the intercession of Rev. James Reuters, S.J., who took it upon himself to be "spiritual advisor," Lance Corporal Daniel Smith, the US Marine accused of raping "Nicole" in Subic Bay on Nov. 1, 2005 along with three others, recently appeared on TV to be interviewed by Tina Monson Palma of ABSCBN News (ANC). A human face has at last been put on the accused in this case. When Ms. Palma asked Daniel Smith for his strongest defense against the charges, he said his strongest defense was just the truth that he and Nicole had both agreed to have sex. But I can see why Fr. Reuters recommended the live interviews of Daniel Smith. Fr. Reuters is probably a pretty good judge of character, both American and Filipino. If you are at all interested in the Subic Rape Case, try to catch replays of that interview on ANC all week long as the day of Decision draws nigh. Fil-Ams can catch it on TFC The Filipino Channel in North America.

The first "issue" raised by the Leftist Lynch Mobs and their media comrades was that it is an insult to Philippine sovereignty that the VFA allowed the accused Marines to be held in US custody during the investigation and trial, instead of in Philippine jails (which seem to be a bit full of thousands of child prisoners mixed in with adult inmates).

Before she knew it (and I'm not even sure she already does!) Nicole became a convenient battering ram in the expert hands of the Femme-Nationalist Pink Skirts and their political and ideological soul-mates in the Mass Media. This was the same Axis of Propaganda Pressure that successfully spooked Gloria Macapagal Arroyo into loading up the entire Philippine Humanitarian Force in Iraq into one HumVee and fled to Angeles, Pampanga with Angelo de la Cruz in 2003, after paying the terrorists a ransom in prestige and cash.

Hmm...I wonder if anyone has seen the television interviews of ABSCBN's Ms. Pinky Webb and Ms. Tina Monson-Palma with the accused rapist, 22 year old Marine Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith?

Alfred North Whitehead once said that "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." I was thinking about the awful truth in this quote as I prepared above selection of Philippine Commentary on the Subic Rape Case over the past year sinceNovember, 2005. For once, I am sorry for having guessed correctly at exactly what could happen when a self-righteous Lynch Mob gathers to fight the great good fight against both Rape and Imperialism.

MAGGIE DE LA RIVA was rising young ABSCBN television star in 1967, when she was abducted, raped and tortured by a notorious gang of young men led by Basilio Pineda and Vicencio Jose. Unlike most other rape victims, however, she decided to accuse the rapists publicly and in a dramatic series of court appearances won their conviction and death sentences. As a young man, my family lived just blocks away from the Swanky Hotel in Pasay City, where the incident took place. I remember vividly the newspaper pictures of those men with shaven heads just before they were fried from brain to balls in the electric chair. For many of my generation, that seared in our young minds forever this message: Rape is EVIL! The victory of Justice in this case was self-evident in the grace, bravery and enduring humanity that lives on in Maggie de la Riva. The other interesting guest of Ms. Lazaro was RENE SAGUISAG, who was discussing the eternal struggle between the "right of the public to know" and the "rights of privacy." He brings up the point that in the Subic Bay Rape Case, there is nothing in the law that requires the identity of the accused to be divulged. But in this country, we have far many more serious examples of the violation of the principle of the presumption of innocence. I was disappointed that Cheche Lazaro did not ask her other guest, Rina Jimenez David to explain her published claim that the real significance of the Nicole rape story is that it is really not about one woman and four men, but about the entire American military raping the entire Filipino nation because that is the way Americans are.

In the Subic Bay Rape Case, the alleged rape victim is only known to the public by the alias, "Nicole", and from glimpses of her entering or leaving the Court with her head fully covered. I think it is a terrible thing that the stigma of rape causes most victims to hide their identity. It is Nicole's legal right to do so, but I think it weakened her case and did nothing to actually keep her identity private. I have no curiosity about her personal identity and circumstances. On the other hand, there is surely a stigma attached to being a Rapist, too. I thought it certainly strengthened Daniel Smith's case that he made defended himself before the Unblinking Eye of television (and Tina Monson Palma) and forthrightly said that his greatest and only defense was the plain truth.