Senate must finish job / NCCA: Laya must resign

It is now being argued, andante lamentoso, that since there is no paper trail, no direct evidence, no concrete and irrefutable proof so far, the Senate probe of Sen. Panfilo Lacson should be terminated forthwith. There is also the sweet, syrupy sonata – chanted as gospel by Lacson’s defenders – that he should be accorded the presumption of innocence until he is proven guilty. All this is topped by Sen. Sergio Osmeña’s exponential but absolutely idiotic and preposterous (that word again) non sequitur: But what if we find Senator Lacson innocent? You mean his dollar deposit – confirmed by the FBI – in a US bank amounting to about 50 million is fake? Whereinell did he accumulate so much money? How come he accepted two cellphones as gifts from suspected drug lord Kim Wong who until now pays the bills?

This, gents and mesdames, is the babble of baboons in the jungle at high noon when they hear and feel the first stirrings of an earthquake about to smash into their bivouac. The first instinct is to evacuate and flee.

This is the dilemma now facing the Senate. There is in its midst a fellow senator accused by Col. Victor Corpus of being the archest and vilest of criminals, a cold-blooded and serial killer, a drug lord beyond compare, a money launderer stuffing tens of millions of US dollars into foreign banks, and kidnap-for-ransom hoodlum masquerading as a decent, strapping police officer, a bank robber of monster proportion. And, to boot, a man who would bootleg the presidency in the year 2004 with drug money and convert the Philippines into a stinking, revolting narco-state, supine as a wretched mongoloid baby is supine in its deformity and helplessness.

The dilemma is compounded by the fact that the public has found a new hero in Colonel Corpus.

They believe his charges against Lacson to be true or at least believable, and worse, they now perceive the Senate as Limahong’s Lodge, a Senate the citizenry now abjectly hates and would eviscerate from the face of the earth. Sen. Edgardo Angara, guesting in Gene Orejana’s On Line, found this out just days ago. When the phone-in messages came through, he was besieged from brow to belt-line with such stinging insults that he cowered. Was it not possible, he asked Orejana, that On Line’s staff was selectively editing the phone calls, choosing only those that criticized him and the Senate? Orejana, an honest talk-show host, assured him such was not the case. The public was simply mad, and the Senate was getting it in spades.

Proof positive that Angara – not to mention, Senators Blas Ople and Tessie Oreta who want the Senate probe of Lacson aborted – has lost contact with reality.

Ah, the unmitigated cheek of these two! Blas wants the probe cancelled because his "guns of August" – supposed to roar with a vengeance on Gloria and Mike Arroyo – are now spewing cannonball on the Senate and Lacson. Oreta wants the "story-telling" (read fairy tales) cut short because it’s wasting her time. Her time? Gahd, what did she do to our time when she danced her jig in the Senate night of Jan. 6, a dance so wicked and so obscene, it was like Salome writhing in bed, and expelling her lust.

So what does the Senate do?

I say, go ahead with the probe wherever this leads to. Right now this probe is the only game in town, riveting the people to their TV sets the way the Senate impeachment trial did, because a lot of vital and dramatic information is spilling out.

Without the Senate probe, we would never have learned about Indian businessman Danny Devnani, who testified he wined, dined and gambled with "evil men" – meaning Joseph Estrada, son Jinggoy and Atong Ang – who plotted crimes like kidnap for ransom at Club 419 (Wilson St. Greenhills) with the top henchmen of that dreaded crime-killer syndicate Kuratong Baleleng. Story-telling? Maybe yes. And again maybe not. Devnani looks and sounds credible and he was putting his life on the line. Why would he do that? In this town, even until now, it takes a lot of guts to go against Erap Estrada and Ping Lacson. Who reportedly have guns for hire. We too wouldn’t have learned about Kim Wong, suspected drug lord, whose face and protestations on TV look and sound like Mata Hari insisting she is Mother Teresa.

All that talk about no paper trail, no concrete and solid evidence so far, is a lot of malarkey. And leaves me cold.

There was no paper trail, no such concrete and inconvertible proof when Judge Amelita Tolentino convicted Hubert Webb to a life stretch in Muntinlupa for the Vizconde massacres. The conviction simply and almost wholly relied on the verbal testimony of one Jessica Alfaro, a drug addict and inveterate liar. And yet when you had all the evidence, all the proof, such as Judge Adoracion Angeles had when she convicted more than a dozen Aquila Legis cutthroats for the brutal fraternity slay of law neophyte Lenny Villa in the early 1990s, the Court of Appeals sat on the case. Until today, not a single Aquila Legis felon has spent a day in jail.

Now the same Court of Appeals has just ruled a two-year prescription period has passed. And no longer can Ping Lacson be hailed to court for the massacre of eleven Kuratong Baleleng gang members even if there are now four additional witnesses pointing to him as the principal.

This is justice? This is law and order? That two-year prescription period is for the birds. It is more likely that as Truman Capote once said, some people in power have "the morals of a gorilla and the guts of a butterfly." I, of course, eventually found out the Court of Appeals is littered with Aquila Legis Grand Archons or high priests or what not. I fully agree with Colonel Corpus when he said the judiciary is shot through and through with incompetents, mediocrities and mercenaries. And, I might add, so is the Senate. Just look at the mooney, lalapaloosa face of Robert Jaworski who, I bet you, cannot spell Constantinople.

What the Senate is now performing – and it’s a blessing in disguise – resembles the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after the hideous face of apartheid blew up and Nelson Mandela strode forth like a marble statue in the Valley of the Fallen taking life. Through this commission, which had no power to convict or acquit, witnesses lined up to unravel the horrors of apartheid, the brutality of the white Afrikaner, the crimes committed by the secret police. Some of the latter appeared in the Commission to testify, and they beat their breasts in regret and repentance, some weeping, brokenly and asking for forgiveness. They were just obeying orders, they said.

Of course, we cannot expect Ping Lacson to own up to the charges of Corpus and apologize. Like his boss Erap Estrada, he cannot and will not. Though the heavens fall and hell freezes over.

But if Lacson should ever testify, I’d like to see his face, his reactions, his body English, his eyes, yes his eyes, for even as they seek to remain gelid and graven, they have a way of shifting, this time looking like the nose of a gun barrel, this time like a heaven’s snout sniffing at the air before disappearing into a hole, this time like the chill metal glare of impending death. I’d like columnist Ramon Tulfo to testify. He seems to know Ping Lacson very well. Weren’t they once buddy-buddies?

I’d like Sen. Loren Legarda to do the grilling of Lacson. She may have slipped on a banana peel, but I haven’t given up on her. Loren is the only senator so far who has served notice she wants to get to the bottom of the charges against Lacson. She has expressed her dread and trepidation of narco-politics, instinctively feels drugs and drug money combine into a boa constrictor coiling around the nation’s belly and must be slaughtered. She asks the best questions in the Senate as the Senate impeachment trial proved. She and now Education Secretary Raul Roco who unfortunately is no longer in the Upper Chamber.

The probe must go on. The Senate retreats and it collapses.

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There has been some hullabaloo about the National Commission on Culture and the Arts, its present leader Jimmy Laya refusing to step down even when President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has already chosen his successor. I do not know why Laya is sticking like a leech. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go. GMA has handpicked Leticia Shahani to take over the NCCA but Laya has figuratively barricaded the entrances reportedly with the support of some members.

Laya is a holdover from the Marcos dictatorship and I just don’t like these characters. He was Central Bank governor during martial rule at a time when the World Bank, I think, discovered hundreds of millions of dollars missing from its vaults. The flight of Marcos dollars? Laya, if I remember right, was cashiered because of this. As Eccelesiastes said, there is a time to begin and a time to end, a time to arrive and a time to leave.

What’s he waiting for? GMA to get a whiplash and drive him out of the NCCA?