UNKNOWN to many people, Congress—the Senate and the House—cannot investigate a crime. It can only investigate in aid of legislation.
But because of dirty politics in this country, some misguided lawmakers from both chambers are acting as investigators, prosecutors and judges rolled into one.
The worse part of this is that they arrogantly put more premium on publicity, rather than correct social, economic and political injustices, which at best appears to create a perception of guilt on people with higher ambitions to serve the public.
It cannot be denied that both houses of Congress have often violated their own rules, with some lawmakers displaying arrogance and using gutter and other unsavory vocabularies in their line of questioning, which a court of law would never have allowed.
Worse, witnesses called to testify often contradict with one another, while unsupported volumes of documents submitted for investigation often do not establish the existence of facts and circumstances in a coherent manner on how, why, when, where and who actually committed crimes involving billions of pesos in public funds.
A specific issue in point are volumes of documents submitted by Janet Lim-Napoles, Benhur Luy, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as other agencies, that overflow with lies and innuendoes, selectively targeting the innocent and freeing the guilty.
The government itself plays the role of a predator, and it has created its own pattern by systematically targeting the opposition while, at the same time, protecting its own allies.
A good example of this, without touching on the merit of their cases, are high-profile oppositionists Sens. Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla, who are now in jail.
Strangely, the initiators and implementers on the disposal of multibillion-peso public funds are out free, strutting in self-importance and flaunting their wealth in the corridors of power, simply because they are with the ruling administration.
Worse, they have control of the best public-relations agencies to prop up their images and hit their political enemies by subjecting them to trial by publicity.
Why not? Publicity works faster that way, just like what Vice President Jejomar C. Binay is subjected to, dispensing as it does with the usual repetitive claim of due process and fairness.
In trial by publicity, one may not even be jailed for contempt of irresponsible writing; upholding his or her impropriety, the biased press, for one, in this godforsaken country, offers several choices to those who may question their invincibility or crucifixion, or both.
Usually, an irresponsible member of the press may routinely invoke press freedom without the well-established explanation that it is not absolute for it carries a concomitant responsibility to balance the news.
Normally, to charge respondents with a crime, the Ombudsman or the DOJ must find probable cause based on evidence or the body of crime (corpus delicti) on how the plunder was committed.
If the information is filed in court, the prosecution must prove its case beyond reasonable doubt, in accordance with time-honored procedures and rules of evidence.
Since the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) scams came to light, what many citizens saw was nothing but virtual reality, based on conflicting testimonies of witnesses or whistleblowers, erroneous assumptions, opinionated conclusions and malignant motives that served as the yarn of daily propaganda mills, painstakingly woven into the so-called hate- campaign syndrome.
The people behind this prosecution by perception or speculation must have forgotten that history is not static. Indeed, many of the heroes of yesteryears, like Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Saddam Hussein, have been stripped of their perfection.
In my previous articles on this subject (trial by publicity), I pointed out that unflattering, but vital, facts about men of great political and financial influence—previously suppressed in the name of national security, ideological infallibility and presidential policies—have been declassified and incorporated in official historical records, while their updated biographies revealed their cruelty, errors and foibles.
As I said in my book A Country Imperiled, even popes have not always been held sacred; Pope John, who reigned in 1415, was convicted for various scandalous acts, including adultery, incest and sodomy.
Besides, every person has some measure of bigotry, a refusal to consider stories that do not conform to one’s values and beliefs. In fact, the myths about those who benefited at the expense of truth as role models may not escape the vetting eye of the present rationalizing generation.
The purpose of any investigation, including those in the Senate and the House, is not only to prove the guilt of the respondents but also to protect them against hasty, malicious and oppressive prosecution. Trial by publicity has no room for this.
Curiously, what was not mentioned in the NBI, DOJ and the Ombudsman preliminary investigation was that the Department of Budget and Management, the Commission on Audit (COA) and other implementing agencies in 2012 deliberately deviated from their conscientious and prudent role in handling the discretionary spending program authorized by Congress involving the controversial DAP.
The Executive branch that year spent a whopping P21.3 billion in equity, unbelievably way above the P2.1 billion authorized by Congress, or an increase of P19.3 billion, or a total 926-percent deviation.
In addition, the Executive branch also spent a total of P24.1 billion, P6 billion more than the P18.2 billion authorized by Congress for subsidy. Clearly, this is a 32.7-percentage deviation.
Public funds are strictly covered by COA rules on budget releases and project implementation.
Under COA rules, public funds are never released directly to non-governmental organizations or any other people’s organizations, whether they came from the unconstitutionally declared PDAF or other sources of appropriations, like the DAP.
Funds are only released to implementing agencies, which could be a department, an agency or a local government unit under the Executive branch.
Funds are never released to members of the Senate and the House.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com