AS sessions are about to open soon, here’s a good reminder that 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 acted in the past as investigators, prosecutors and judges rolled into one.
The worse part of this was that they arrogantly put 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 vocabulary in their line of questioning, which a court of law would never have allowed.
Worse, witnesses called to testify often contradict one another while 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 were the volumes of documents submitted by Janet Napoles, Benhur Luy, the NBI, the Department of Justice, as well as other agencies, which overflow with lies and innuendoes, selectively targeting the innocent and freeing the guilty.
The government itself played the role of a predator and it had 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 pending cases, are high-profile opposition personalities.
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 were then with the ruling administration.
Worse, they had control of the best PR agencies to prop up their image and hit their political enemies by subjecting them to trial by publicity.
Why not? Publicity works faster that way, just like what happened to former Vice President Jojo Binay, without due process and fairness.
In trial by publicity, one may not even be jailed for contempt or irresponsible writing; upholding impropriety, the biased press, for one, offers several choices to those who may question their invincibility or crucifixion, or both.
Usually, an irresponsible member of the press would routinely invoke press freedom without the well-established explanation that it is not absolute for it carries a responsibility to balance the news.
Normally, to charge respondents with a crime, the Ombudsman or the Department of Justice (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 and Disbursement Acceleration Program scams came to light, what many citizens saw was nothing but virtual reality, based on conflicting testimonies of witnesses or whistle-blowers, 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 Tse-Tung, 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 benefitted 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 were not mentioned in the NBI, DOJ and Ombudsman preliminary investigation was that the Department of Budget and Management, COA and other implementing agencies (IAs) in 2012 deliberately deviated from their conscientious and prudent role in handling the discretionary spending program authorized by Congress involving the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (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.
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.
Public funds are strictly covered by COA rules on budget releases and project implementation.
Under COA rules, public funds are never released directly to NGOs or any other people’s organizations, whether they came from the unconstitutionally declared PDAF or other sources of appropriations like 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.