Postscript to the murder of truth

“The court denies with finality the motion for reconsideration. No substantial arguments were raised in the MR.” So said the Supreme Court spokesman Jose Midas Marquez.

The case has to do with the Truth Commission. Last year, the Court voted 10-5 to scrap P-Noy’s first executive order creating it. It violated the “equal protection clause” of the Constitution, the Court said, and could serve only as a tool for “vindictiveness and selective retribution.” The government appealed the decision, and the Court voted to reject it.

I blame both the government and the Supreme Court for the murder of truth.

The government for simply and frustratingly failing to grasp the essence of a Truth Commission. From the start, it saw it merely as a politically expedient solution to the problem of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo having left as one of her booby traps in government a lackey for an ombudsman. That lackey was Merceditas Gutierrez. Impeachment being time-consuming with no guarantee of success, the government thought a Truth Commission would be a way of getting around it. In short, it saw the Truth Commission as taking the place of the Office of the Ombudsman.

At the very least the rub there was that it was legally infirm. Joker Arroyo and several Arroyo allies immediately protested the superfluity of the office, arguing that it would merely duplicate, at great expense to the taxpayers, the functions of the Office of the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice. A perfectly reasonable argument, whatever its motivations. You don’t create a new office to do what an existing office does simply because you don’t control it. That sets a dangerous precedent.

At the very most the problem was that it missed an incredible opportunity to set things right. A Truth Commission is not another name for Ombudsman, it is not another office for the justice department, it is not another initiative to recover ill-gotten wealth like the Presidential Commission on Good Government. As the various Truth Commissions all over the world show, it is there to give justice to the victims of a deceitful regime, to rectify the wrongs of a murderous regime, to arrest the effects of a vicious regime. A Truth Commission is there to expose the lie of a government claiming to be one.

If a Truth Commission is there to fight corruption at all, it is only to fight corruption of another order, a far more lethal form of corruption. It is there to fight the spiriting away of everything that gives a people self-respect. A Truth Commission is not there to punish crooks, it is there to punish oppressors. It is not there to stop pillage, it is there to arrest an outrage. It is not there so a people can cry, “Oh no, not again,” it is there so a people can vow, “Never again!”

For all my appreciation of what the government is doing to push back thieves and crooks—and P-Noy gave a good accounting of himself in that respect in his State of the Nation Address—I remain frustrated by its inability to see beyond that framework. To see the full scale of wrongdoing, or the true depths of perversion, the previous regime wrought. That was what doomed the Truth Commission from the start.

Of course you cannot expect the Supreme Court to appreciate that distinction, or allow something like that to exist if they do. Many of the justices owe Arroyo, not least its chief, Renato Corona. The last thing this Court has shown itself able to do is appreciate its own reason for being, which is to practice law in the grand manner. Which is to see beyond the letter of the law to the spirit of the law. Which is to see beyond one’s nose and glimpse what lies beyond the horizon. Which is to see the difference between supreme wisdom and supreme folly.

How is it possible to be a justice and not fail to be outraged by what Arroyo did with the law? Which, like Marcos, was to use the law to thwart the law, to use the law to foment lawlessness, to use the law to wreak all sorts of kalokohan. It wasn’t just Marcos who was a stickler for the law, who used it to justify the most lawless acts, Arroyo was too. She herself judged herself for talking to “a Comelec official” and found herself not wanting. She had a law that prevented all public officials from testifying without her permission that she stole the vote. And she had a law that conferred on her the privilege to do wrong with impunity, also called “executive privilege.”

You are a justice and you are not flailed by conscience to do something about that?

And how is it possible to be a justice and not fail to be outraged by what Arroyo did with justice? The revelations about Arroyo’s theft of the vote are just confirmations of what we already knew for a long time. A theft of the vote that entailed, not quite incidentally, the unleashing of monstrosities like the Ampatuans, cutthroats ready to cut throats for the greater glory of Gloria. There is a difference between justice and vindictiveness. And why on earth shouldn’t retribution be selective? You punish only those people who commit crimes, and you punish especially epically only those people who commit epic crimes.

You are a justice and you cannot see that?

Twice, a Truth Commission has been needed in this country. First in the aftermath of martial law, and second in the aftermath of Arroyo’s rule. Both times to undo the effects of the past, both times to flog those who flogged the country, both times to make sure another Marcos or Arroyo won’t rise again. The first one was never contemplated during Cory’s time, the second was contemplated wrongly during P-Noy’s time. For which a Supreme Court, eager to find any excuse to strike down an initiative that would bring some of its members down, eagerly struck it down.

Well, life cannot move on from a wrongful death.

Let alone the murder of truth.