After all the fire and brimstone, what the Senate Blue Ribbon committee managed to eke out of a controversy that cost a former cabinet official his life was a half-baked report that avoided the issue for which a life was wasted. The stalled hearings resumed and the inutility continued as senators tried to refocus on matters tangential to the resolution that spawned the hearings in the first place.

On the issue of plea bargaining at the Ombudsman’s court, what remains concern remedial measures. On systemic corruption however, outside the Garcia episodes, the evidence has been mostly testimonial. What is documented involves only indications of ill-gotten wealth - the kind of material a dogged tabloid reporter might dig up.

Deep down, the sordid mess that surrounds the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the tragic loss of a valuable life in the name of “honor” reveals an aberrant martial culture we’ve tolerated for far too long.

More than tolerated it, we’ve suffered a clandestine sub-culture, trading-off principles and relegating the realities we deny to that bin of rotten garbage we’ve labeled as necessary evils.

The recent surveys merely tell us what we already know, validated daily on every thoroughfare as uniformed enforcers carry on their business of mulcting. Outside the metropolis, the same is reprised as military checkpoints prey on food delivery routes.

Rampant criminality, terrorism and secessionists continue to justify the existence of martial institutions, whether comprised of law enforcement rejects resurrected as bodyguards, security guards or barangay tanods, or self-styled gunslingers who fashion themselves action stars.

While there are a few good men, we fear the rouge cop or the general with the kitschy lifestyle is increasingly the default. They are behind the drug syndicates and summary executions. They are behind the kidnappings, carjackings, prostitution, extortion, petty larceny, street crimes and the recycling of confiscated dangerous drugs.

We are waking to the realization that the military, police and even private security institutions harbor perhaps the largest criminal network unwittingly funded by taxpayers. We are effectively bankrolling the atrocities they inflict, the protection they provide criminals, and the corruption they nurture. Where they appropriate taxpayer’s money into their private coffers, they are nothing but crooks.

In the order of crooks, they are crooks of the worst kind, stealing not just from the public where economies of scale dilute consequences, but from their subordinates, violating a code of solidarity alternately referred to as loyalty or brotherhood.

Increasing from a previous 8%, the recently polled 49% corruption statistic still does not quite tell of corruption as eloquently as when we delve into doublespeak. The subculture’s lexicon reveals how an institution deodorizes itself and institutionalizes criminality.

The most often used terminology is the word “conversion”. In the financial or mathematical sense conversion involves equal values expressed under different units of measure. In the context of securities, conversion involves the exchange of convertible security.

In the AFP’s criminal underworld conversion is when legitimate appropriations are converted to an unlawful use. The correct technical word is “malversation”. The non-technical word is “stealing”.

Following recent revelations, criminal malversation was institutionalized through the Provisions for Command-Directed Activities (PCDA) reserved for the AFP Chief of Staff and his generals

The PCDA identifies criminality’s provenance. It indicates systematic plunder where star-rank officers wantonly scrape from other budgetary units to sustain prioritized funds in the PCDA.

The process introduces us to two other legitimizing nomenclatures. One is “Float”. The other, “Tradition”.

In finance, a float is the time between the issuance of a financial instrument to the time it is settled. In the capital markets, a float refers to shares publicly held and available for trading. For the AFP, a “float” is a fixed appropriation religiously maintained regardless of need, usage or alternate priorities. Never mind that medicines, protective gear and ordnance might be needed in the battlefields. A predetermined level of cold cash is ensured and kept in a general’s vault for unforeseen expenses, junkets, gifts or whims, wining and dining.

Of the terminologies one of the most abused is the term “Tradition”. According to whistleblowers, the ex gratia remunerations upon entering and exiting a command perpetuate as part of military tradition. By labeling these integral to customs and conventions, they not only institutionalize criminality, they relieve each member in their virtual “la cosa nostra” of personal responsibility thus eroding the foundations from which honor might stand.

To evoke “honor” often emblazoned on a soldier’s symbolic chevrons, members of a militia like to stand proud in a virtual salute. Unfortunately, no amount of pomp and pageantry, stars and stripes, medals and decorations, and even a twenty-one gun salute, the solemnity of Taps or a horse-drawn caisson rolling against the beat of somber drums can restore personal honor tragically lost to a tradition of corruption.