the week: lie hard 2 - lie hard with a vengeance
The week starts with the resignation of Raeesah Khan from the Workers' Party (WP). After the events of the past month, I do not think this came as a surprise to anyone. The real surprises came later in the week, after Raeesah Khan (corroborated by Loh Pei Ying and Yudhishthra Nathan) revealed in the Committee of Privileges (COP) hearings that Pritam Singh, Sylvia Lim, and Faisal Manap (the WP senior leadership) knew about the lie as early as 8th of August. This was confirmed in the WP press conference on the 2nd of December. This revelation was merely Little Boy, Raeesah would drop Fat Man in the hearing as well, alleging that: 1) Pritam Singh had told her that there would be no judgment by him even if she chose not to disclose the truth in the 4th October sitting of Parliament; and 2) she was instructed by the WP senior leadership to "take the information to the grave".
The Facts
Before we even begin to explore the narratives that the WP or the People's Action Party (PAP) are trying to push, it is important to examine the facts. All too often the truth becomes secondary to the narrative, and I fear that in this instance it may be already too late. The truth is only known to the four people at the meeting: Raeesah Khan, Pritam Singh, Sylvia Lim, and Faisal Manap. What we can do here is try our best to reconstruct the truth based on the evidence provided.
A summary of the facts and timeline as best reconstructed is as follows:
On the 3rd of August, Ms Khan makes the speech in Parliament;
On the 7th of August, Ms Khan tells Mr Singh about the lie;
On the 8th of August, a meeting is arranged where she tells Ms Lim and Mr Faisal about the lie. After the meeting, Ms Khan texts Ms Loh and Mr Nathan that she was instructed to "take the information to the grave";
On the 3rd of October, Mr Singh visits Ms Khan at her home, where he tells her he anticipates that she might be pressed on her lie. He assures her that he would not judge her. This is corroborated by Ms Loh, who was told about this meeting by Mr Singh;
On the 4th of October, Ms Khan is questioned by Minister Shanmugam, and she repeats the falsehoods once again. After the Parliament sitting, Ms Khan meets with Mr Singh, Ms Lim, and Mr Faisal to discuss the next steps;
On the 1st of November, Ms Khan reveals that she had lied in Parliament;
On the 2nd of November, the WP sets up a disciplinary panel;
On the 30th of November, Ms Khan resigns from the WP; and
On the 2nd of December, the WP holds a press conference where Mr Singh reveals that he knew about the lie since the 8th of August. The COP starts proceedings on the same day.
While there are many inconsistencies among the various accounts, the main contention is that Mr Singh, Ms Lim, and Mr Faisal maintain that they had never instructed Ms Khan to "take the information to the grave", while Ms Khan maintains that they had given that instruction. Given two contradictory statements, at least one party must be lying about this. And not just lying about this, but lying under oath, which is a criminal offence.
The Evidence
If there was a word of the week for the COP, it would be "contemporaneous". If one were to play a drinking game where one would take a shot every time someone said contemporaneous or any of its derivatives, one would be dead from liver failure. But that was the key part of the evidence, the texts sent and events that happened contemporaneously supports the version of the story that Ms Khan tells more than it supports the version that was told by the WP senior leadership. Of course, this is not a court of law. My opinions have not gone through any particular rigour, nor are they weighed against the strict standards of beyond reasonable doubt. My opinions very loosely weigh on the balance of probabilities, and even then may fall short of that. But I will try my best to put forth a balanced argument based on the facts that we do know from the COP.
The most important event that happened contemporaneously was the meeting on 8th August between Ms Khan and the WP senior leadership, which was followed by the text Ms Khan sent to Ms Low and Mr Nathan. The text was used as circumstantial evidence that Ms Khan was indeed told by the WP senior leadership to "take the information to the grave", or simply put carry on with the lie. In my view this was pretty strong evidence, while not necessarily foolproof, it is enough at least raise the suspicion that the WP senior leadership had indeed given the instruction. The alternative would be twofold: 1) that Ms Khan was lying again; or 2) that Ms Khan in anticipation of a COP hearing had planted false evidence to cast suspicion on the WP senior leadership.
The first alternative is a reasonable one, after all Ms Khan was a known liar and the if she had lied once, why should we trust anything she has to say at all? Shouldn't anything she says be doubted for all of eternity? But most people don't lie all the time, and most people don't lie without reason. Given that the correspondence was between herself and her two most trusted political aides Ms Low and Mr Nathan, there seems to be little reason to lie about what transpired in the meeting, given that she regularly confides in them and seeks advice from them. The COP had identified this line of reasoning as well, why should she lie to the people closest to her, and whom she had never shown any inclination to lie to in the past? In fact, these were the first few people she had told about the untruth in Parliament, second only to disclosing this to Mr Singh and her husband. You might say, well she could lie in Parliament, which is a grave and serious offence, why can't she lie to her friends? It is one thing for her to lie in furtherance of what she saw was a worthy cause, and another to lie to her closest confidants. Lying to them flies in the face of logic, and I struggle to believe that she would do so.
There is another reason she might lie at all, which Mr Singh brought up during his COP testimony: she might be suffering from dissociation. I am conflicted about Mr Singh bringing up Ms Khan's admission that she might be suffering from dissociation, which was told to him in confidence. On one hand, I don't think mental conditions which were told in confidence should be publicly aired to discredit someone, but on the other hand, I do understand that certain mental conditions could be pertinent as evidence in understanding one's actions. In this case, I'm not sure that Mr Singh's suggestion was warranted here: does it mean that because she suffers from dissociation that she necessarily lies about everything? In fact, Minister Tong in questioning asked if she had any problems carrying out her regular duties as a Member of Parliament, to which Mr Singh had said she did not. Notwithstanding the fact that a psychiatrist evaluation had declared that she was not suffering from dissociation1, but if she did not exhibit any signs of being impeded by her supposed dissociation in her day to day activities, then does it only come out when someone wants to conveniently accuse her of telling a lie? Further, the lie told in Parliament wasn't something said in the spur of the moment, it was written into her speech at least a day before the sitting, and she had reviewed it at least once when Mr Singh had asked her to substantiate it. I understand the narrative that Mr Singh is trying to push here: that Ms Khan suffers from a mental condition which causes her to compulsively lie, and that would cast doubt over the entirety of her testimony. It would be one thing if Mr Singh had reason to believe that Ms Khan's dissociation affected her day to day performance and therefore had suspicions that she was compulsively lying because of it, but another to throw it out as a way to discredit Ms Khan.
On the second possibility that Ms Khan had deliberately planted false evidence in anticipation of a COP hearing, I find it very hard to believe. This paints Ms Khan as a mastermind skillfully manipulating a trail to absolve herself, when in reality if she were that skillful she would never have been caught in the lie in the first place. Applying Occam's razor to shave off this overly convoluted plot, I truly doubt Ms Khan had the foresight all the way back on the 8th of August to plant this false evidence.
This is further corroborated by several other key points: 1) if indeed the need to tell the truth was so pressing, why did the WP senior leadership sit on the truth for 3 months; and 2) Mr Singh's instructions to Ms Khan was intentionally vague and left room for interpretation. While each of these points are individually weak, taken together they seem to point to the fact that Ms Khan's testimony was more believable.
On the first point, the WP senior leadership had offered several explanations as to why they had sat on the truth for so long: 1) Ms Khan had not told her family about her sexual assault, and as such they wanted to give her time to settle her own personal affairs before clarifying it in Parliament; 2) the untruth was told in Parliament, and so the record could only be settled in Parliament; and 3) the untruth must be settled by the person who told the untruth. On the first point, I can understand the compassion that they had shown to Ms Khan, but if this were indeed an important point, and in fact one of the only things stopping the untruth from being corrected, then you would think that it would be important for Mr Singh to know when Ms Khan had settled it. However as per his own testimony, Mr Singh had not inquired once about whether Ms Khan had settled her affairs, which seems to suggest that this was not very important to him after all. On the second point, I can accept this line of reasoning, and I do think that matters of Parliament should stay in Parliament. On the third point, while I can see some merit to having Ms Khan clarify her lie, given that anyone else might have given information which was factually wrong and could have unintentionally worsened the lie, I do think that once Ms Khan had persisted in lying on the 4th of October, the WP senior leadership had the duty to call out her lie in Parliament. Not doing so while knowing that the lie was perpetuated is akin to being accessories to the lie. All this is to say that this lines up with the narrative that at worst, the WP senior leadership had indeed told Ms Khan to perpetuate the lie, and at best they had wanted to wait it out in the hopes that the lie would not be questioned again. Neither sheds a good light on the WP, though one is certainly far worse than the other.
On the second point, that Mr Singh's instructions were deliberately vague to Ms Khan, I believe that this was done so Mr Singh could avoid culpability, by refusing to give outright instructions to Ms Khan. It has been pointed out many times, both by the COP and the members of the public, that Mr Singh is fully capable of expressing himself in the clearest and most unambiguous terms. In fact, in the COP hearings themselves Mr Singh displayed a very keen attention to diction and language. All this suggests that Mr Singh was intentionally vague with not only Ms Khan but also Ms Loh, who had corroborated Ms Khan's understanding of the 3rd October meeting where Mr Singh had told Ms Khan that she would not be judged. The phrase in that case was understood by both Ms Khan and Ms Low to mean that Mr Singh was leaving the decision of whether to tell the truth to Ms Khan.
All this points to two possible narratives: 1) at best, the WP tried to weather the storm, hoping that the matter would be forgotten without clarifying the truth, and had instructed Ms Khan as much; or 2) the WP had instructed Ms Khan to deliberately obscure the truth further, but on realising that it was no longer a tenable position to hold, instructed her to tell the truth, and thereafter cut her loose.2 Neither are particularly flattering outcomes, but I can understand the former, given the incredibly warped landscape than an opposition party has to play on in Singapore, it is understandable that navigating such fraught waters leads to compromises at the best of times, and when a political misstep as grave as this arises, sometimes there is no good solution.
The PAP Narrative
Edwin Tong's questioning during the entire COP left much to be desired. It became very clear very quickly that despite claiming repeatedly that the COP was merely on a fact finding mission, the PAP was trying to push a certain narrative. I understand that in trying to uncover who was culpable in this matter the COP has to understand what role the WP senior leadership played in instructing Ms Khan. But the relevance in some lines of questioning, particularly about the events surrounding the disciplinary panel strike me as irrelevant. Certainly, that the WP had convened a disciplinary panel comprising only the WP senior leadership without disclosing beforehand to the party that the three of them had known about the lie for three months is a failure of due process, and raises questions about conflicts of interest and how the WP handles internal matters and possibly casts aspersions about the character of the WP senior leadership, but I fail to see how it was relevant to the actual question of measuring culpability of Ms Khan or anyone else. This might actually be my favourite quote from the COP:
"Well, we use different words, but I think we all know, uninformed view because if you don't know if the people leading the inquiry had in fact given advice to the very person under inquiry, and that person acted in accordance with the advice, rightly or wrongly, that would be a very uninformed view, it would be maybe even a biased view… and I think that is where [Mr Nathan's] and Ms Low's reservations were, that if you invited a broader party discussion on this, without informing people of these facts, you would naturally have a very different view and characterisation of the conduct… and in many ways, not dissimilar to what this committee here is doing: if Ms Khan had acted on her own volition, suppressed information, kept it away from anyone else, on a frolic of her own, that is one state of mind. It would be a very different state of mind if one made a mistake, consulted with senior party leaders, owned up to it in a full and frank fashion, sought advice and counsel, got that advice and counsel, acted in a manner completely consistent with that counsel, and then be subject to an inquiry by the very same people who had given her that advice, I think that is the heart of the matter that I'm getting to… that I think creates in your words an uninformed, a biased, and I would say completely jaundiced, and I would add further, I would say self-serving disciplinary panel by the Workers' Party."
Edwin Tong
This was my issue with Minister Tong's questioning through the entirety of the hearing. Instead of trying to trap the various individuals into making admissions, he decided barrage them with his narrative repeatedly, perhaps trying to wear them into submission. I think the quote above summed up the PAP's intentions - to use Ms Khan as a stepping stone to the WP senior leadership. Once again the PAP fails to show restraint in application of blunt political force, and whatever good will they had at the start of this investigation has quickly evaporated. This single tool in their arsenal has worked very well for them over the years of course, and it remains to be seen if the Singapore population at large will ever tire of these tactics. While the PAP's narrative may have merit, as I have also set out above, the means is surely as important as the ends. Justice must not only be done, but also seen to be done. The optics of the COP hearings surely do not sit well with many Singaporeans, especially if they do not have the time to sift through nearly 20 over hours of content.
The End(?)
The conclusion to this sordid affair I suspect is that supporters of either party will dig in even harder in their entrenched views, the PAP supporters believing that the WP leadership is corrupt and immoral, and the WP supporters believing that the PAP is trying to destroy the WP by means of political brute force. The truth is perhaps somewhere in between, should either side have the patience to find it. But like I said before, I suspect the truth is already secondary to the narrative, and all that matters now is which party you had initially supported.
As an aside, I want to note this strange phenomenon surrounding opposition politics in Singapore. I have come to realise that any wrong the WP or in fact any opposition party does in Singapore reflects poorly on the whole. This is because of the strange alliance opposition parties find themselves in Singapore. The opposition parties are so small compared to the PAP, that to survive outside the herd is nearly impossible. The end result is that in the perception of the public opposition is now amalgamated into this singular mass which will sink or swim as a whole.
The reverse however is not true: whatever right moves the WP makes does not reflect well on the opposition as a whole, it seems to only benefit them. This has resulted in an incredible imbalance in reputational gains and losses for any non-WP opposition party. It remains to be seen if this imbalance can and will be corrected, or if it is already too late for the future of other political parties in Singapore, and we have settled into a two party state.3
1 As an aside, I find the line of questioning from Dennis Tan laughable: Why is someone emotional when describing past trauma? Does that mean they are suffering from a mental disorder? I've paraphrased his question, but Dr Cheok hits the nail on the head when he says that he would find it more disturbing if someone spoke about their trauma without getting emotional. I understand that Mr Tan is trying to establish that although she does not meet the threshold of a psychiatric disorder, she might still suffer symptoms which caused her to lie. But this just seemed like a very tenuous line of questioning, especially after multiple rounds of clarification from Dr Cheok.
2 If we take Mr Singh's words at face value, that he did not think any wrong had been done to the police, then I can see why he did not think the matter was an urgent or in fact important matter to clarify. I disagree that no harm had been done to the police. A reputable police force is of great importance to any country. Just look at the defund the police over in the USA over the last two years. Trust is important in our institutions, and any allegations which may cause the loss of trust must be taken very seriously. Trust once lost, as Mr Singh and the WP would surely discover from this incident, could take a lifetime's worth of work to rebuild.
3 I think that a two party state with PAP and WP would essentially be the same as a one party state, though I very much hope that I am wrong.