prayer and protocol

A composite team (photo, part of a bas-relief of Napoleon Abueva)

is usually created whenever various agencies or units have to coordinate with each other; like, if they have the same tactical or short-term objective, they would put together the most skilled personnel of their agency or unit to sit in the team and to work together. If that list of five or six military men (two from MIG of ISAFP, one from the Army, one from the 56^th IB, one from the Escort and Security Battalion) to be invited by the NBI for questioning on the Jonas Burgos “forcible disappearance”, is a composite team, then, we’re probably breaking a protocol for disclosing their identities; and they probably now have to be dismantled; one only hopes that if it were a special operations unit or composite team, that it wasn’t created for the purpose of kidnapping civilians; that their assignment was a legitimate and legal operation and their targets, only combatants. Otherwise, or, stated differently, if their operation is not legitimate and their targets are NGO workers, there is every reason to investigate them. We are not breaking any protocol. These soldiers are supposed to take orders from civilian authority.

Or do we even have a prayer on that?