COMMENT | “The truth will out” is a piece of folk belief that people nibbling on the edges of the sensational resort to when they have hit a seeming dead-end.

Their confidence that the truth about matters of great and puzzling importance being able to barrel out of the vaults within which it is buried into the light of public disclosure is not widely shared.

This is because the truth is usually protected by an army of lies which, as Adolf Hitler's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels said, needs only to be dinned often enough for it to be taken as true.

The truth about whether RM90 million of 1MDB funds found its way into the accounts of an opposition party, an Islamist one no less, was going to be difficult to disinter.

That is because when Clare Rewcastle-Brown of Sarawak Report unleashed the story about RM90 million of 1MDB funds having made its way into the accounts of PAS, she made it quite clear that it was widespread speculation on the political grapevine that was her source, not something more substantive.

In legal terms, one can be convicted of wrongdoing on the balance of probabilities, but not on speculation, however plausible.

So Rewcastle-Brown's airing of what was being bruited about on the grapevine was, strictly speaking, as vaporous as morning mist.

Sans the potency of fact as backing, speculation is just that: mist

After Rewcastle-Brown aired the speculation on Sarawak Report, PAS countered that the story was a base canard but they were in no hurry to nail it in a court of law.

This was puzzling for two reasons...