Just who is Norie Unas whose testimony against former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo our justice secretary swears by, the Commission on Elections chief very distastefully boasts will put her in jail by Christmas, and the presidential spokesperson claims is “very solid evidence”?

When they presented Unas to media Oct. 3 as a “new witness” against Macapagal-Arroyo, Leila de Lima and Sixto Brillantes introduced him as if he were just some bureaucrat from the boondocks, “the Provincial Administrator of Maguindanao.”

That’s like identifying Heinrich Himmler as once a German Interior Minister, without mentioning that he was the brains and executor of the Holocaust.  A hyperbole that may be, but just as Himmler with his gas chambers mechanized the murder of six million Jews, Unas ordered the mechanization in digging the mass grave for 57 people, including at least 32 journalists, cold-bloodedly murdered in November 2009, purportedly upon orders of his boss Andal Ampatuan Sr. and his son.

According to Maguindanao Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu, whose wife was among the victims, Unas ordered the provincial government’s tractor backhoe be deployed to the killing field so that the corpses could be swiftly and deeply buried and hidden.

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