PM PLAYS POLITICS WITH SECURITY

MIXING national security with partisan politics makes a dangerous and toxic brew.

But that’s what Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley did when he commandeered Parliament for 45 minutes last week for what he pronounced as a serious and urgent state of affairs.

Still with the bogey of the bogus “emailgate” over his head, Rowley uttered an inflammatory concoction of an attempt to hijack a crucial security agency to overthrow the Government.

And he further demonised a former police commissioner who has mutated into a political foe.

At the end of the Prime Minister’s rant, the nation was asking several burning questions.

How does Rowley’s invective move the needle in the fight against crime fuelled by illegal weapons?

Why has no one in the sinister coup attempt been charged for treason and sedition?

After all, the authorities recently threw the sedition book against a well-meaning videographer who was recording the life and times of underworld characters.

How did the well-equipped security and intelligence agencies permit the build-up of arms and ammunition that Rowley identified?

After the obvious lapses listed by the Prime Minister, how is the Minister of National Security still on the job?

What is the role of the National Security Council – a Committee of Cabinet – if not to avert such breaches and protect the lives of citizens?

What difference would Rowley’s so-called expose make in securing and safeguarding nationals amid the current crime epidemic?

The nation did not hear of any plans to secure wide-open landing strips around the islands, where illicit weapons and drugs, mercenaries, illegal migrants and bootlegged products land at will.

The Prime Minister did not assure of a resolve to stop drug trafficking, an endemic multi-million-dollar crime linked to elites in society.

He did not announce any crackdown on criminal gangs, the wellspring of Trinidad and Tobago’s worsening crime epidemic.

Instead, he adopted a posture of injured innocence, suggesting that the Strategic Service Agency (SSA) had been captured by trusted lieutenants who morphed into aspirant coup-makers.

The fact that the alleged sinister action proceeded so far along and there were no arrests is particularly troubling in light of the dark history of the 1990 bloody insurrection.

The report of the Commission of Enquiry into that coup attempt revealed a dramatic breach in the national security apparatus.

Yasin Abu Bakr and 113 other Jamaat Al Muslimeen operatives were charged with treason and other high crimes.

That shocking development should have been a wake-up call about preventing the-fire-next-time.

Instead, Rowley undertook a torturous three-month enquiry and muddled the issue with a pointed jab against friend-turn-foe Gary Griffith.

Griffith, who says he has been denied natural justice in the claims against him, is correct that the pressing issue pertains to illegal weapons – not officially-approved guns.

Rowley’s provocative statement could be a worrying omen of what lies ahead along the road to the general election.

Under parliamentary immunity, he has blended life-and-death national security with prejudicial politics, and the country does not know where one ends and the other begins.

The Prime Minister may well have stemmed a scheme to overthrow his regime and to import an arsenal of weapons with ill design.

But his stark and erratic attempt to play politics on the issue has robbed Mr. Emailgate of credibility.

And it leaves the people of Trinidad and Tobago still at the mercy of deadly criminals.