A big joke
HIDDEN AGENDA By Mary Ann LL. Reyes
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Our coffee shop habitués have observed that our senators who have been holding overextended public hearings on the scuttled national broadband network project (NBN) project
seem have betrayed their hunger for media mileage or publicity. Not all but most of them, especially those who kept on repeating sound bites thrown their way by NBN critics like Rodolfo Lozada and Dante Madriaga.
They say that the inclination by some senators to mouth Lozada’s bubukol and Madriaga’s tongpats every chance they get has exposed their lack of imagination and lack of desire for any real evidence to be unearthed.
On the 12th episode of the NBN telenovela, Senator Panfilo Lacson came up with his surprise witness Leo San Miguel and got the shock of his life. To say that he was surprised by his surprise witness is an understatement.
While Lacson tried to discredit or impeach his own witness, San Miguel came through unscathed under heavy grilling by hostile senators like Lacson, Jamby Madrigal, Mar Roxas and Kiko Pangilinan.
Dared by Roxas if he would be willing to undergo a lie detector test to back up his dismissal of Madriaga’s claim that bribery attended the NBN project, San Miguel said anytime. San Miguel was so cool under fire that he could only have been telling the truth.
Observers say that belatedly, Madriaga, Lozada and losing NBN proponent Joey de Venecia also agreed to take the polygraph test but only because San Miguel readily agreeing to the test impeached their credibility as witnesses.
Come to think of it, San Miguel only had to deny saying everything that Madriaga claimed he (San Miguel) had said. This because to start with, Madriaga’s previous NBN testimony was pure hearsay, our coffee shop friends noted.
Madriaga’s claim was that his erstwhile boss, San Miguel, had told him how tens of millions in US dollars had been paid as NBN bribe money to a group of Filipinos, including San Miguel.
It’s just a case of he said, she said, with San Miguel saying, straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak, that Madriaga’s claims were all nonsense.
That’s the problem with the Senate’s NBN probe. Without any real evidence being presented, a simple denial like what San Miguel has done rebuts the allegations.
Senate Blue Ribbon chair Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano had gotten his premise all wrong when he said that the preponderance of allegations against the NBN project prove that it had been tainted by anomaly.
Stumped by San Miguel’s flat denial of Madriaga’s claim, Cayetano stuttered that it was just one witness, San Miguel, against three anti-NBN witnesses in the persons of Madriaga, Lozada and De Venecia.
Three people saying the same thing does not mean what they are saying is true, since they can be working in band or can be in conspiracy with one another. The truth is not a numbers’ game. It’s never how many people are saying the same thing.
The problem with many senators’ appreciation of the truth is that even before they begin their search for it, they already have made up them mind as to what it is. Thus, Madrigal, Lacson, Cayetano and Pangilinan saw red when San Miguel’s version of the truth did not hew to what’s on their mind.
What’s wrong with many of our senators is that in their apparent attempt to grandstand, they assume the roles of prosecutor and judge. One even threatened to lock up San Miguel just because he did not follow the anti-NBN script.
This vaudeville at the Senate had ceased to be entertaining, and the curtains must be brought down on it already. It’s a shame because these Senate hearings are draining precious taxpayers’ money.
We pay senators our hard-earned money to craft laws, not to strut like peacocks and display to us their bloated egos.
The Senate NBN hearing is a big joke, but it ain’t funny.