Senators are not keen to conduct an inquiry into the reported “Red October” power grab plot to oust President Duterte, which, according to a declassified military intelligence report, was allegedly being hatched by disgruntled elements linking leftist and right-wing groups with the political opposition.
Sen. Gregorio B. Honasan II, chairman of the Senate Committee on Defense and National Security, expressed his misgivings on Thursday about holding a Senate hearing on coup talks as this may not be in the public interest.
According to Honasan, “it is not good for the country” for the Senate Defense Committee to still call a hearing on alleged plots against the government.
“We do not want to fan public anxiety,” he told the BusinessMirror in a brief interview, adding that calling the defense and military officers to a public hearing “will distract authorities from their work of securing the State.”
A bemedalled Army colonel-turned-senator, Honasan indicated he now believes that unrest in the military cannot be resolved through coups or mutinies, blurting out this message to anyone tempted to mount any of these: “Do not do what we did.”
Honasan, a military hero in the 1986 People Power uprising that began as a mutiny, later got on the wrong side of the law for involvement in several coup attempts against the new democratic government he helped install.
This developed as another rebel soldier-turned-lawmaker, Sen. Antonio F. Trillanes IV, is facing arrest after the Duterte administration revoked the amnesty granted to Trillanes for alleged lack of documentation.
Trillanes, however, remains under Senate custody even after posting bail on a rebellion case in a Makati court.
Senate President Vicente C. Sotto III, in a separate interview, confirmed that Trillanes, as a sitting senator, cannot be barred from staying at his office in the Senate.
“As far as I know, he is still there and nobody can stop him if he opts to sleep there. That is his office. He can do what he wants in his office except that I am not allowing the maintenance engineers to not follow their standard operating procedure [SOP],” the Senate President said, adding, “And their SOP is that at 10 p.m. up to 6 a.m., they put off the air-conditioning of the entire building.”
Sotto pointed out that “the entire building is six floors, it is a huge building with centralized air-conditioning. We do not want the people to say we are paying for a huge sum for electricity [to run the centralized air-con system] just for one office.”