EDITORIAL - Free-for-all

For the Oakwood mutineers, the Senate hearing last week was one of their lowest moments. But neither did the senators earn brownie points with the voters they were hoping to impress. If anything, the Senate hearing on the July 27 putsch reinforced public perception that the chamber is nothing but a circus, with several senators no better than clowns who are completely clueless about legislation.

Watching the senators take turns grilling the mutineers and the government’s top security officials, one can almost understand why the junior officers smoldered with contempt throughout much of their testimony. A great deal of the contempt had political undertones – the mutineers were eager to answer questions from opposition senators, and were only too happy for any chance to gripe, whine and gripe some more. But some of the senators, administration and opposition alike, certainly deserved contempt – although this is nothing new to a nation grown weary of the grandstanding of its lawmakers.

The senators had ignored suggestions that they keep their hands off the mutiny probe, if only out of delicadeza since at least two of them have been implicated in a purported power grab. Sen. Gregorio Honasan remains in hiding, his days on the run bankrolled by Juan de la Cruz. Sen. Luisa Ejercito, who did not have the grace to inhibit herself from the hearing, broke her customary silence at the chamber to get the mutineers to clear her of complicity.

The senators didn’t know which way they wanted to take their probe, and it showed. Or perhaps they knew exactly where to take it – before the TV cameras – in which case they attained their objective, although with mixed results. With the senators getting day-long press coverage, the House of Representatives is unlikely to pass up its own chance, and its probe is bound to be just as rudderless. After that free-for-all at the Senate, only congressmen have any appetite left for a piece of those junior military officers. If the mutineers’ cause had been the abolition of Congress, they might have mustered people power.