PRESIDENT BUSH IS IN trouble. Mrs. Cindy Sheehan is to his politics what the National Guard killing undergraduates at Kent State University in 1970 was President Richard Nixon's. The Watergate scandal was the immediate cause of President Nixon's resignation. There is no way that the controversy over the CIA leak would go away soon, and could well force President Bush to resign. The actions of the two men are similar. President Nixon was on eight months into his second term when he abruptly resigned, the first president ever to do so, when it became clear he would be impeached. But he did what President Bush now does. He offered officials in his regime much as President Bush now does. The latest to go is "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. Karl Rove, who planned President Bush's election, is next. President Nixon had the man who secured him the presidency, John Haldeman, to the baying crowd, and eventually went to jail. President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to jail as the Watergate scandal touched the White House. But Congress went on regardless, and was all set to impeach President Nixon, when he abruptly resigned. The man who succeeded him as president was Mr Gerald Ford, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, instead of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who resigned to save the president. What we see now is the President making sacrificial offerings to save his skin, but it would not save him. The Republicans, his party, are mired in scandals, and the conservative wing to which he anchored his politics are split whether to support him. More officials will be offered for public opprobrium as he tries to wriggle out of his predicament.

The spin on the royal commission report ignores the police shortcomings, ignoring what the police force is for. A man is arrested in a crackdown on illegal immigrants and foreign workers. A Nepali, Mangal Bahadur Gurung, is caught. He has on him photostat copies of his documents. He does not speak Malay. He is in the company of those who did not have official papers. The super efficient police, we are told, could not find out that he had a valid work permit but had on him photostat copies of his documents, did not speak Malay, in fact made him confess the is an illegal – despite one speaking only Malay, the other only Nepali with a smattering of pidgin Malay, rendering both questions and answers mutually incomprehensible – which the super-efficient Attorney-general's chambers echoed to charge him.

AN 18-YEAR-OLD BOY, Ahmad Hafizal Ahmad Fauzi, is the unlikely victim of an elaborate plan to brainwash Malaysian youths to support the National Front (BN) for all time. On May 10, the Kangar magistrate's court fines him RM600 or two weeks jail for missing the mandatory three-month national service training. The DPP demanded an exemplary punishment to warn teenagers of their fate if they defy calls for national service. With a total family income less than RM600 a month, to which he contritbutes a quarter, he could not pay and went to jail. The Perlis mentri besar, Dato' Seri Shahidan Kassim, ever on the look out for cheap publicity and with an eye to the political havoc the opposition PAS could cause, in the state and nationwide, paid the fine. The Attorney-General, who authorised the prosecution, now promises to revise the sentence if "what the boy says is true". The exemplary punishement turns out a damp squib.

But since the government insists he should not have been acquitted, and it believes the judges' obiter is correct, would it not fail in its duties if it did not instruct the Attorney-general's chambers to charge him afresh for the same offence? After all, it wants the man politically dead. This is its golden chance. And it has support from the usual quarters. The former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, is convinced the federal court in wrong, and he is guilty as charged. (This despite his twaddly belief that his successor, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, engineered the acquittal to make him irrelevent.) It was he who first accused him of corruption and sodomy, sacked him from UMNO, where he was deputy president, and the government, where he was deputy prime minister, had him charged and convicted in a political conspiracy that now slowly reveals itself. The Attorney-general and chief justice of the day did his bidding to convict him by playing fast and loose with the law and its procedure. But all underestimated him. If any other member of the cabinet had been damned, he would have stayed damned. Instead, as we know now, all they did was to disturb a wounded tiger.

Corruption is the only means for an aspirant for a job, elective office, or contracts to succeed. It is all the more difficult when the anti-corruption laws are made so tight that fell fall foul of the law, and the anti-corruption agency cannot prosecute – that is a political decision involving the prime minister's department and the Attorney-general's chambers. It is the odd man out who gets what he wants without resorting to corruption.

It is disingenious of Dato' Seri Nazri to now say that since the minister depends on the police to advise him, he must trust it. But he misses the point. It is incumbent on the internal security minister to sift through the police reports and decide if in his own judgement he must detained. This is not done now. The minister accepts the police view, and that is that. In the 1970s, the then Attorney-general, then in the cabinet, promised parliament that he would personally study every prosecution for drugs, for which an automatic death penalty was proposed, and only then proceed. When a 14-year-old Penang schoolboy was sentenced to death, all the Attorney-general, still in office, could respond was that he was swamped with work, and he could not be charged with going through every prosecution. So it is in ISA cases.

Several questions arise from this. If the Mahathir administration was corrupt and rotten to the core, and almost everyone in the former regime is in the new, does it not follow that the Pak Lah cabinet is a cesspit too? He made corruption the corner stone of his populist approach to politics, and is now caught in its quicksand. He had a business man and a cabinet minister arrested for corruption. A cabinet minister said another 18 would be arrested. Pak Lah was not amused. The man was demoted in the post-election cabinet. Then Pak Lah says it was not 18 individuals but 18 groups. Now Dato' Seri Nazri tells parliament it is 18 individuals, of whom 12 have been charged, and six more await the consent of by the Attorney-General's Chambers to prosecute.

Pak Lah deserves his chance to be UMNO president. But he got off to a bad start. He has had to face one crisis after another, which could have been deflected with good advice, that if he does not pick himself up smartly between now and the UMNO elections in September, he could face an opponent then who could well defeat him easily. He contradicts himself so regularly that one does not know where stands on any issue. The former de facto law minister, Dato' Seri Rais Yatim, was demoted in the cabinet reshuffle after the elections for saying the ACA has indentified 18 high profile individuals for prosecution. Pak Lah said the corruption was in 18 sectors, not individuals. On Friday, 28 May, the ACA director-general, Dato' Zulkipli Mat Noor, said the files of 18 high-profile individuals had been referred to the Attorney-General's Chambers for possible prosecution. Pak Lah wanted the results of the investigations made public. Dato' Zulkipli does not agree, and would not comment. It was known then that at least one high profile cabinet minister and his wife are amongst the 18. But he would not say if the list includes mentris besar and chief ministers.

AN INDONESIAN MAID IS tortured and abused. This is not new. Abusing and torturing of foreign maids is taken for granted. No one cares. No one bothers. Apart from a few non-governmental organisations. The government keeps a stiff upper lip. says nothing. Then, last week it comes to light that a teen-aged Indonesian maid named Nirmala Bonat had been horribly tortured and disfigured. It hits the front pages of Malaysia's newspapers. And a hysteria is let loose. Government ministers and others outdid each other to express shock and concern; the NGOs ever shrill to make a point; the newspaper editorials and reports whip up a frenzy; the Attorney-General promises a swift trial and a prospect of 67 years in jail. This threat is part of the trial by hysteria. Law and order has all but broken down. The police cannot do what they must. It forms a 1,000 man force to protect the high and mighty, after a few embassies and residences were robbed. Hysteria led to its formation. But would this help? Not on your life. The police are nowhere to be seen. A mere police presence is enough to deter the wrong doer. The police have decided that the foreigner is more important than the local, his security more important than yours or mine.

But it did not have the impact Pak Lah expected. The newspapers, radio and television gave Tan Sri Eric's arrest extensive coverage but it did grip Malaysians as, for instance, when the government considered serious proposals to cane rapists in public, chemically castrate them, put them to death. The melodrama of his arrest was to show how the ACA, the police, the Attorney-General's Chambers worked in tandem to arrest the man. The Inspector-General of Police said: "Several policemen were deployed to assist in the arrest ..." We are told he was arrested after a dramatic "chase" that began in Sungei Patani. Was it necessary? Tan Sri Eric is a diabetic, is confined to his house, moves about in a wheelchair. If he had been ordered to report to the police station, he would have, without the theatrics.

Constitutional guarantees and Prime Ministerial assertions do not an independent judiciary make. It is in the practice of justice and the conduct of its justices that ensure an independent judiciary. When justice is to the highest bidder, for that is the way it seems in many high profile cases before the court, and denied when the power in the land does not want it, and chief justices and Attorney generals go on holidays with high profile lawyers and their clients, when simple decisions as delayed and denied for the most extraordinary reasons, none of which has any relevance to the issue in court, justice is denied. When it strays into the political arena, any hope of justice is lost.

These are but statements of intent. Pak Lah has been in Tun Mahathir's cabinet for more than a decade. He is home minister for the last five years. Did he act against corruption in his ministry? He did not need Tun Mahathir's permission for that? Yet, the front-line departments he talks of are in his own home ministry. The word 'corruption' is so devalued in the civil service that no civil servant - at any level - is unafraid to demand and accept bribes. He knows that the higher up he is, the easier to find a needle in a haystack than for him to be caught for corruption. The Anti-Corruption Agency, which must investigate corruption, is so toothless that its investigation is seen as a badge of honour. It has no right to prosecute; on the Attorney-General's Chambers can. As a sop, every now and then a policeman, office boy or a middling civil servant would be charged, and that publicised as if to make an example.

The Anti-Corruption Agency once had teeth: its first director, Tan Sri Harun Hashim, in 1969, removed two UMNO mentris besar - of Perak and Trengganu - for corruption. They lived beyond their means. In those days, it was proof enough of corruption. It was in the immediate days of the 1969 racial riots, corruption was a political issue, and the government had to do something about it. But once the two mentris besar, and a few minor functionaries were removed, the government decided the ACA had too much power over politicians, and in the ensuring three decades deliberately and systematically defanged the ACA into the toothless body it is today with no power even to prosecute wrongdoers. The ACA now is in the direct purview of the Prime Minister, without whose consent it cannot investigate politicians and senior civil servants. The prosecutorial powers it once had is now vested in the Attorney-General's Chambers. And it would act only if the Prime Minister orders it to.

That set the cat amongst the pigeons. He was forced to retract his words, and sacked the lot. It did not end there. The Conference of Rulers last weej discussed the conduct of the EC and the Attorney-General's Chambers - whose heads are officers of the Crown and their loyalty is to the King and not the government of the day - and it took exception to the EC as an employment agency. It was announced that seven Puteri UMNO members appointed were sacked. The complaint mentioned seven. But to prove its loyalty to BN and UMNO, it would have appointed many more. Possibly all 45. Of their fate, we know nothing. The EC lies when it can, and like the boy crying wolf, is disbelieved even when it tells the truth. To add to the confusion, the EC secretary, Dato' Wan Ahmad Wan Omar, adds his own spin which makes the Conference of Rulers look foolish and stupid. The EC, he thundered, is never inconsisent about the PU temporary staff and dismissed the seven in June. So it did not lie when asked if it had PU members on its staff. The EC unanimously decided in June to dismiss the seven so it would not be "exploited for political reasons".

IT IS NOW OFFICIAL. THE MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT must end its special election courses for UMNO division and branch officials must end in October. These courses are held before a general election to acquaint UMNO (and only UMNO, not National Front (BN) factotums of issues that could rise during the all-too-brief campaign. The Conference of Rulers, now meeting, is critical of the Election Commission employing Puteri UMNO members as temporary election staff and of the Attorney-General at what it sees as his dereliction of duty. The EC promptly sacked seven Puteri UMNO members; how many were appointed and would now be sacked as well is not clear. It is a feeble attempt to clear the decks before General Election is called. The BN government must call for it by February 2004. After that, it must contend with a worsening economy. But it cannot wait that long. In fact, it has decided it would dissolve Parliament and the state assemblies one week after the Hari Raya holidays in the third week of November, with polling a fortnight hence. Whether it would would depend on how well prepared BN is.

Besides, our old acquaintance, corruption, is so blatant that even Sabahans are fed up with it. The Sabah Land Development Board is one. Its chairman reportedly took RM13 million from its coffers to settle an old business debt and to keep a few ringgit for his retirement. The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, is aware of it. The Anti-Corruption Agency has cleared him, and he is rewarded with a seat in the Malaysian cabinet. The SLDB's chief executive officer was found to have RM92 million in his bank account. The ACA was called in. He remains in office. No action would be taken. The Attorney-General's Chambers is bluntly told he should not prosecute corruption cases involving the high and mighty without express permission.

The UMNO president decided to make an example of his deputy president, and had him jailed in the best traditions of a kangaroo court. Now two senior UMNO leaders when faced with charges similar to what Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim was convicted for, elaborate reasons are found to justify that it is not as serious. All this comes as Dato' Seri Anwar appeals to be allowed bail pending a hearing of his appeals. The Attorney-General's Chambers opposes it. If what I hear is true, the Prime Minister is not averse to allowing bail, but the Prime Minister-to-be is not. That man is too dangerous to be let out for the inherent damage he can cause in Pak Lah's bailliwick.

Look at the fuss here of a jailed leader, the former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who cannot get bail for a bailable offence as his appeals went through the courts. The Attorney-General's Chambers object not on its merits but that his release on bail could make the shaky throne of those who govern shakier. One is not surprised at this. The government reacts to every challenge by further tightening the laws. That pushes the citizenry to defy the law to get what they want. The police has decided it is there only to protect the BN government, so that in states with a non-BN party in power, as in Kelantan and Trengganu, the state government cannot depend on the state police contingent. Elsewhere, in BN-controlled states, the police rush to restrict civic rights when it can.

This view is standard practice. A deputy ministers accuses a municipal council of corruption, which on investigation leads up to the door of a mentri besar and an executive councillor. The deputy minister is moved to another job of the same rank but with no capacity for mischief. Now, the Attorney-General' Chambers charges the officer concerned not for corruption but for an untruth when he applied for the job. The government talk of corruption in the abstract: that it is bad, that it destroys society. But like gambling, it closes one eye to the problem, and action taken only on those who do not matter.

UMNO's options reduce by the day. The death of the former Attorney-General and federal court judge, Tan Sri Mohtar Abdullah, has made all in this conspiracy nervous at their fate. It is he who prefered the sodomy and corruption charges against Dato' Seri Anwar, and pushed hardest to ensure he is convicted and jailed. The Malay ground was so horrified that it instituted a sembayang hajat, regular special Muslim prayers throughout the country for justice and divine punishment for the guilty. Two conspirators and the wives of two others have since died. It is difficult how Dato' Seri Anwar cannot be allowed bail when the federal court sits next week. UMNO knows not what to do. This is reflected in the BN government inaction. But it must. If it wants to survive. But none in the present leadership - in the government and in the BN parties - has the moral authority or the guts to do what he must to save BN. So he resorts to irrelevant actions, like alleging corruption in the Customs or the police. All are aware they are in uncharted boats and about to hit a rock in heavy weather. But a brave front is put to argue for its own destruction. So gone it is that even Dato' Seri Anwar could well not save it.

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