Dead issue? Not so fast!

Whoever says the Garci issue is dead, a "closed book" or "insignificant" is luxuriating in wishful, even delusional, thinking.

Those who propose that the matter be left to an "academic review," or a scholarly exercise without immediate relevance and removed from immediate reality, demean members of academe who demand that GMA be more forthcoming with the truth.

But in fact, one of the primordial purposes of academic research is the pursuit of truth, or as yet new and undiscovered truths. Academic work focuses not only on positing and testing new ideas, but also on looking at facts, or alleged facts, and determining their consistency with reality or with objective standards against which they are judged.

Thus, when administration spokesmen declare the Garci issue dead because all legal avenues have been exhausted and "the opposition" has failed in all the processes it has resorted to, they are miles off the mark.

These spokesmen do not assert that the truth has been fully established. They can cite all the surveys and exit polls in the world to prove their candidate’s poll victory. They can even point to an electoral protest which was ended because the principal complainant happened to pass away. None of this is proof of the ultimate truth.

The fallacy is that in an election, what matters in the end is not preference surveys or exit polls, not even the results of election contests before courts or tribunals, but whether the purported result reflects the will of the people as expressed in their votes which, in turn, have been accurately and honestly accounted for.

If all you are willing to discuss is the count as officially announced by the COMELEC, then you ignore the fact that the count itself, albeit based on official documents, may reflect a tainted process where the documents themselves were tampered with, falsified or otherwise doctored to distort the people’s actual verdict as to who among several candidates they chose, for whatever reason.

In that sense, the Garci tapes themselves are not the crux of the matter. The truth people seek is only secondarily whether the alleged taped conversations with GMA are authentic or not, and whether they were legally obtained.

The people’s quest goes beyond legal niceties and is centered on one simple question, and several related questions which spring from that basic query: Was there cheating in the 2004 presidential elections in sufficient magnitude to alter the results?

If not, then GMA’s mandate is unassailable and she and her supporters have absolute legitimacy in not only imploring but insisting that the nation now turn to the more urgent task of focusing on economic development and political reform. But if the answer is in the affirmative, then her mandate does not exist and her pleas for national unity are bogus because they are aired by a usurper.

GMA cannot be faulted for her firm stance that she has a valid mandate. Neither can those who maintain that she does not. Her legal victories, however, are widely viewed as hollow because no legal proceeding ever got to the point that the issue of cheating was threshed out in a comprehensive, sober and straightforward fashion.

As a result, we have legal aberrations such as the Citizens Congress for Truth and Accountability, as well as the fatuous response of a Citizens Congress for Truth Also. Both inanities would be totally unnecessary if there were a viable legal alternative for processing the facts and discovering the truth. The trouble is that GMA’s advisers, most of whom fancy themselves as specialists in realpolitik, are telling her that the best way to the truth is also the fastest road to perdition.

So, to reiterate what we’ve said several times in this space, we’ve got a royal impasse here, a grand bottleneck, an historic standoff. We have not reached closure on any lingering issue, be it Garci, Bert Gonzales or Joc-Joc Bolante. We lurch from one crisis to another, until there are so many we mount our usual retreat into denial of the crisis and into illusion that things will somehow normalize.

Or that the issues are dead, that they are a "closed book," or are "insignificant." Not even the proponents of those delusional ideas, I suspect, believe their own B.S., I mean, propaganda.

In the meantime, the plot thickens in the investigation of that Ortigas incident where three alleged carjackers were killed by Traffic Management Group operatives.

Two new witnesses – a former mayor who lives in a condominium with a clear view of the incident, and a taxi driver who was right behind the suspects’ car and the pursuing "Revo" of the TMG agents and who witnessed the events after both vehicles turned into Garnet Street – are prepared to testify that the agents immediately fired at the suspects and that there was never any gunfire from the suspects in the blocked car.

These testimonies, if true, tend to support the UNTV videotape which showed that the suspects were shot while slumped in their seats, possibly still alive but already disabled. The video also seems to show that guns, a Jericho 9 mm and an Ingram machine pistol, were planted on the suspects by the police after the shooting.

The video and the eyewitness testimonies appear to belie police claims that the suspects fired first. The videotape indicates that the windows of the suspects’ vehicle were closed. The eyewitnesses swear they didn’t see any shots coming from that car.

TMG spokesman should cease feeding media stories of alleged carjacking victims identifying one or all of the dead suspects as among the perpetrators. The principal issue here is not whether the suspects were upright members of society or vicious lawbreakers, but whether the TMG operation was botched and the suspects clumsily killed or deliberately rubbed out.

The TMG has delayed submission of its investigative report. Some skeptics claim they already know what that report will say. If they’re right, the web of cover-up and obfuscation is much wider than first thought. It will also be proved yet again that some people will do anything to avoid being caught with odoriferous foot in capacious mouth.