Editorial : Witness weakness
The presence of Archbishop Oscar Cruz at the Senate hearings-and his repeated vouching for the credibility of the witnesses-is only an apparent strength; his participation does not, by itself, confirm the truth of the various testimonies.
To be sure, an elusive criminal enterprise like the illegal numbers racket does not depend on paperwork, such as purchase orders or memoranda of agreement, that can be subpoenaed. And some of the testimony presented during the seven hearings have proven useful; it is clear that jueteng has made a comeback in some areas, and that some form of local connivance, either on the part of the police or the local government, or both, is responsible for it.
But the evidence for the involvement of the Arroyos in the same racket that brought down the previous and more popular president is based entirely on the word of three witnesses. Two of them have offered what essentially amounts to hearsay; the third said she actually delivered the money to Rep. Mikey Arroyo, the President's son, and Rep. Ignacio Arroyo, the First Gentleman's brother, on at least two occasions. But again, it is her word; the only documentary evidence she could offer proved that she had deposited money in a police general's account.
This is not to say that the two Arroyo congressmen and even the President's husband were not involved in some form in the illegal numbers game; only that, if they were in fact involved, this is not the kind of evidence that could convict them in a court of law. (In the court of public opinion, of course, and if we read the results of the latest surveys of both Pulse Asia and the Social Weather Stations correctly, all three have already been found guilty.)
Now, one of Archbishop Cruz's witnesses, Richard Garcia, has executed a rather melodramatic turnabout. He has not exactly recanted his previous testimony, but he has alleged that opposition senator and ex-presidential candidate Panfilo Lacson had urged him to implicate the Arroyos.
Lacson has since denied Garcia's allegation, and has taken pains to identify Garcia as the archbishop's witness. In one television interview, he even went as far as to say that Garcia was being "handled" by Archbishop Cruz; the word has a special meaning in police work and Lacson, of course, was once chief of the Philippine National Police.
Both Garcia and Archbishop Cruz, however, have said that Garcia had first surfaced through Lacson, and that it was Lacson who actually introduced Garcia to the anti-jueteng prelate. In other words, and as far as the "handling" of Garcia was concerned, he was eminently Lacson's witness.
The twists and turns of this part of the case have started to loop themselves around Lacson; he now has to extricate himself. But the senator's predicament aside, the larger question has to do with the political opposition's jueteng payola case. A weak case has just been made weaker; how did the opposition find itself in this situation?
The answer, in part, lies in our tendency to build cases on personal testimony rather than physical evidence. (It is a tendency shared not only by opposition leaders but by police officers, NBI agents, government officials, even journalists in search of a good story.) The problem with depending on just the words of witnesses is that a lone witness' recantation undermines everything else; physical evidence, such as the paper and electronic trail deposed President Joseph Estrada actually left behind, does not have that kind of vulnerability.
The opposition's long wait for ex-Isabela Gov. Faustino Dy Jr. is yet another symptom of this disease, another sign of investigative unimaginativeness.
Now consider the other alleged impeachable offense that hangs over the President's head: betrayal of public trust through election fraud. There is a wealth of possible evidence that can be mined if only those who feel most betrayed actually buckle down to work, by following up leads in the Garcillano tapes or Michaelangelo Zuce's affidavit. The opposition's tedious task is to tie the knots in a definite pattern; that is how a net is made.
But maybe the opposition is too busy chasing the next I-promise-to-tell-all witness?
