Senate still needs to focus its inquiry

Now, which is which? Senators looking into reports of Sen. Panfilo Lacson’s illegal rackets keep saying their inquiry should merely be in aid of legislation. Yet in the same breath, they demand that Lacson’s accusers give strictly evidence that can stand in court. Lacson partymate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel, for one, hails as "good starting points for verification" two letters of the FBI to the NBI confirming that Lacson and wife Alice have at least five bank accounts in the US. But he also wants the hearing suspended until or unless Justice Secretary Hernando Perez secures from his US counterpart a certification of the letters’ authenticity.

Such statements confound. They also arouse suspicion that senators are out to conceal the truth despite – or because of – new evidence and testimonies piling up against Lacson. Indian businessman Danny Devnani has promised to put in an affidavit for tomorrow’s resumption his stunning revelations in last week’s nationally-televised hearing. He not only professed first-hand knowledge of Lacson’s ties to crime syndicates, but also linked them to Joseph Estrada, his son Jinggoy, and their many business cronies. Another witness named Mar has come in from the cold to confess to being Lacson's operative whose mission until weeks ago was to destroy the credibility of another stool pigeon, Ador Mawanay.

Who knows what other witnesses will surface. Even with only two hearings in two weeks, the inquiry has grabbed national attention the way Estrada’s impeachment trial did last December. As with that trial, people naturally are expecting others in the know to step forward and declare they were just a foot away when crime was plotted. Thus, blatant calls by other Lacson partymates Blas Ople and Tessie Oreta to simply end it all "after two long hearings" also bring to mind the way JOE’S COHORTS voted to trash damning evidence of Estrada using the alias Jose Velarde to conceal multibillion-peso hoards.

Continuing trimedia polls show that the public wants to get to the bottom of exposés on Lacson’s links to narcotrafficking, kidnapping, bank robbery, smuggling and money laundering. Rising to the occasion, reform and anticrime organizations vigilantly are watching the senators. Katotohanan leader Fr. Tito Caluag, to whom Mawanay first went for protection, has gathered commitments from eight senators to pursue the inquiry. The Volunteers Against Crime and Corruptions are helping Devnani and other potential witnesses to prepare sworn statements. Still other groups are checking the senators’ attendance. (On the record, Oreta attended only one "long hearing"; Ople, none; both shunned the executive session during which Corpus and NBI Director Reynaldo Wycoco showed the FBI letters and other pieces of evidence.)

Not to be outdone, radical groups are looking into reasons that could explain certain senators’ leanings. (One such item is that GSIS supposedly forgave a senator’s housing loan during the term of Joseph Estrada, whom Devnani is linking with Lacson to the Kuratong Baleleng kidnapping and robbery gang. Another is how the son and confidential aide of a senator, also a Lacson partymate, recently eluded arrest by narcotic agents. Still another is why a senator, while still a congressman years ago, abruptly dropped his inquiry on a drug lord. Yet another is a senator’s links to a Cebu drug lord.)

Still, there are enough senators on which the public wishes to pin hopes for an honest inquiry. More so now that a division of the Court of Appeals voted four-to-one to not reopen Lacson’s murder case arising from the Kuratong Baleleng massacre of 1995. The decision came on the heels of Corpus’ public lament that drug syndicates have grown so rich they can buy generals and justices. Radicals naturally pounced on it to declare that the system doesn’t work. Prosecutors lament that the ruling was based solely on technicality – a court procedure that limits to only two years the reopening of any case that was already closed provisionally on technical grounds. This, versus the letter and spirit of the Revised Penal Code that sets a 20-year prescription for murder. An appeal to the Supreme Court notwithstanding, the Senate committee on justice and human rights can now take up a resolution filed by Sen. Ramon Revilla to investigate reports that Lacson himself ordered the massacre to take the gang’s loot.

That would add a fourth committee to – and perhaps refocus – the inquiry. At present, Sen. Robert Barbers’s committee on public order and illegal drugs is leading the probe not because of Lacson’s alleged links to narcotrade, but because Corpus mistook a photograph of the senator’s aide for a drug lord. Sen. Ramon Magsaysay’s committee on national defense is into it too, not because the scourge of shabu has become a serious threat to national security, but because of opposition Sen. Tito Sotto’s complaint about Corpus’s spying on Lacson’s bank accounts abroad. Only the committee on public accountability (Blue Ribbon) is taking the other route of investigating Lacson himself, although chairman Joker Arroyo has yet to return from a US medical checkup to direct it.

Reform and anticrime crusaders are calling on two more committees to join the inquiry. The admission by suspected drug lord Kim Wong that he gifted Lacson with cellphones and continues to pay the bills mandates that the committee on ethics steps in. Pimentel himself said the unusual gift is "tantamount to bribery." The FBI confirmation of Lacson’s secret US deposits – unlisted in his sworn Statements of Assets and Liabilities – also warrants the entry of the committee on banks and financial institutions. The Philippines is under time pressure to pass a law against money laundering, or else risk blacklisting by Western governments.

The Senate may well conduct a full-dress inquiry by the entire body. The police recovery last week of long-missing surveillance equipment that Lacson claims he never bought also shows that he lied to senators during Estrada’s impeachment trial. Worse, he could have had them wiretapped all this time.

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