Garci

Hello Garci!

Just as the political storm precipitated by wiretapped material seemed to have blown over, former Comelec commissioner Virgilio Garcillano emerges from the shadows – and, we must say, with much aplomb.

The political storm that passed was a strange one. There was so much contrived outrage over the wiretapped material that was not only illegal but also carefully edited so that the totality of the conversations would not mitigate the most derogatory morsels that the opposition made public.

Opportunists of every stripe jumped on the bandwagon of contrived outrage, tried to stoke popular anger and hoped the tumult would create enough fury to overturn the political arrangement and bring those in the margins to the center of power. This time around, however, the mass of our people proved wiser that the politicians and all the schemers who wished a cataclysm upon the nation: the agitation was contained and eventually rejected.

There was not going to be a people power uprising this time.

When the contrived outrage was at its height, the personalities implicated in the maliciously edited and pre-selected morsels of conversation were subjected to trial by publicity galore, crucified in absentia and given no quarters for their own defense.

At the height of the agitation, Garcillano found it more prudent to disappear from the public eye. Given the temper of that time, anything he said and everything he might have done would have been run through the prism of highly partisan interpretation, twisted to suit the preconceptions of the day, tailored to the storyline the agitators wanted to weave.

When the unfairly treated former commissioner disappeared, the professional speculators of the opposition projected all sorts of phantoms onto the heavy air of a brewing political crisis. Then both Houses of Congress began to behave even more strangely than ever, grandstanding to the rafters and chasing every goblin of rumor.

At the worst moments, it seemed the Keystone Cops had taken over our legislature.

One senator claimed the invisible commissioner was sighted in Bataan. Then, he claimed, the commissioner left by chartered plane out of Clark.

Buying the rumor, the opposition congressmen summoned plane crews from Clark. They asked the Department of Foreign Affairs to badger foreign governments about the whereabouts of Garcillano. Some said he was in London. Others said he was in Canada. Still others claimed to have pinpointed his location in New Jersey, USA.

Senator Panfilo Lacson’s loyal lieutenant Michael Ray Aquino volunteered to track down the missing commissioner in the US. But the latter – a fugitive from Philippine law for the Dacer-Corbito double murder case – was soon arrested by American authorities for stealing information from the FBI.

Scrambling to outdo their Senate counterparts in a long orgy of grandstanding, the opposition at the House offered P1 million in reward money for anyone who can say where in the world Garcillano could be found. In a rather odd and unprecedented way, the House of Representatives issued a warrant of arrest for Garcillano – although the former commissioner has not been charged with any crime in the Penal Code.

It was a bizarre warrant of arrest. It was issued ostensibly because Garcillano did not appear before the House hearings on the wiretapped conversations. There is no showing, however, that the former commissioner was ever served a summons for those forgettable hearings.

In a show of partisanship, no such warrant, however, was issued against Sammy Ong. The former NBI official claims to have possession of the full tape from which the pre-selected "Hello, Garci" snippets were taken. That full tape is vital evidence, weightier than any oral testimony that might be delivered before the House hearings on the matter.

Garcillano, on his reappearance, promised to honor the House "invitation" for him to testify only if the complete tape is made public by Sammy Ong and the high-profile lawyers who took custody of him. Still, the opposition legislators have done nothing to help produce that full tape.

As he surfaced, the former Comelec commissioner filed a suit before the Supreme Court questioning the legality of the "arrest warrant" issued by over-eager congressmen. That makes for an interesting case. Lately, senators and congressmen have freely arrogated the roles of judge, jury and executioner whenever the exigencies of grandstanding demand it.

Last Sunday, Garcillano literally reappeared by way of a TV interview. There he began to build his case before the public and, while at it, threatened to unmask some of the crankiest politicians of the opposition.

I could imagine Garcillano’s reappearance is a hairy event for some opposition politicians with skeletons to keep. They must be chewing on their nails: like a guerrilla, Garcillano appears and then disappears at his own dictate, firing from the shadows, threatening to explode a few political bombs.

Surely this was not the scenario some of the most ambitious schemers of the opposition imagined the Garcillano episode would segue to. They must have imagined a thoroughly tarred and feathered ex-commissioner disappearing for good into the mist, a villain in the public eye, a totally discredited whipping boy.

But that is obviously not how the feisty Garcillano wants this episode to close.

Like an assassin on a vendetta, like an avenging phantom, he lurks in the fringes and fires at will. He dictates the timing of his appearances with great deliberateness. He unveils his version of the truth with cunning.

Now he holds everyone in great suspense. They wanted him tainted as a fugitive. He returns as a stalker on a mission.

If he manages to assemble enough evidence to support what the grapevine says he will say, we might yet see those now biting their nails degenerate into broken politicians chewing on their toes.

The tables now seem on the verge of being turned.