TriniTuner.com | Latest Event:
Moderator: 3ne2nr Mods
16 cycles wrote:^ alot of past skeletons came out of the closet in that debate on both sides---even remarks by Wade Mark as a senator in the past.....
K. Rowley's comments aired by R.Moonilal really hit hard.....good research on his part...
As a resident of the Arouca / Maloney constituency which she hopes to serve as a Member of Parliament, Alicia Hospedales already has a vision for the area which embraces education, youth development and the creation of strong family structures.
Alicia is currently a School Social Worker at the Ministry of Education where her responsibilities include student assessments, the facilitation of student, teacher and parent work shops, and consultations with teachers and parents to determine the best solutions for issues affecting specific children.
Her previous professional experience includes positions at the New Life Ministry Drug Rehabilitation Centre, Ministry of Local Government, St. Mary’s Children’s Home, Cascade School for the Deaf and Family Court of Trinidad and Tobago.
While at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Alicia earned an undergraduate degree in the Science of Social Work and a Masters of Science in Criminology and Criminal Justice.
She is the current Secretary of the Deaf Pioneers Life Centre, Co-Director of the Nekevah Rescue Centre and a member of the Formulation Committee of the Ministry of Education.
The PNM believes that Alicia is the embodiment of our Vision 2020 philosophy that advocates equal opportunities for personal growth, self-expression, enjoyment of life and participation in the development process.
16 cycles wrote:^ it would have been political suicide if they didn;t - but they did propose a series of measures / conditions before agreeing - eg consultation and education of the public on the legislation....good job at that suggestion....
Moonilal knocks Rowley for locking up Seepaul
By ANDRE BAGOO Monday, September 5 2011
GOVERNMENT Chief Whip yesterday urged the nation to remember the victims of crime, as he launched an attack on the Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley for his record of supporting a state of emergency in 1995 called to deal with former Speaker Occah Seepaul.
“We have not heard the view of the families of crime victims,” Moonilal said during debate of a motion to extend the state of emergency. “Of mothers who had to bury their children. Today we act on their behalf and behalf of all citizens in Trinidad and Tobago who desire to live in peace.”
Of the 1995 Occah Seepaul impasse which saw then PNM Prime Minister Patrick Manning call for a state of emergency, Moonilal said back then the PNM gave no reasons to the Parliament for its actions.
“To lock up one woman under house arrest you had to call a state of emergency,” Moonilal said.
“A little lady on Mary Street, St Clair, who had to drink coconut water for five days. The Speaker was under house arrest and did not have food supplies.”
Quoting from Hansard, he said Rowley, the then Diego Martin West MP, defended that state of emergency and famously argued, “If the Speaker knew she had no food at home then she should have behaved herself.”
“This is the member for Diego Martin West speaking in support of the pre-emptive action to lock up Occah Seepaul,” Moonilal said. “And today they come and tell a tale for 14 hours non-stop. What was the reason for that state of emergency? What was the reason? What was the reason when you had the Speaker woman locked up?”
Rowley fired back by noting that the events of August 1995 were peculiar.
“The history would show that in Trinidad and Tobago at that time there was a Speaker at that time who set about to reduce the Government majority by suspending members,” he said. In relation to the current state of emergency, he once more asked the Government: “What is the specific threat? That is what we have been asking for the last two days.”
Moonilal responded. “I think we now have to talk in Hindi. We have told you there was this drug seizure, gang violence, deaths and a bloodbath expected. What more? How much more should die?”
pioneer wrote:cacasplat3 wrote:hustla_ambition101 wrote:racy lady wrote:pioneer wrote:Isn't divali around oct 26th?...SOE should end nov 7th
why does everyone keep saying the 3 month extension of the SOE ends in November???
3 months from September 6 is not in November...
Should be around the 21st Nov not so?
i believe the 3 month extension is from tomorrow, not from the day the SoE was announced. so it should end 4th Dec.
My bad you're right
Habit7 wrote:I have no experience in National Security but...I don't think it is wise to tell the public that the police woulnd now be using metal detectors to find buried guns
Dangerous Seductions
Amid An Enveloping Power Vacuum by By SUNITY MAHARAJ, Trinidad Review
These are dangerous times. A government too weak to govern under terms of a democracy has decided to govern on the borrowed strength of a State of Emergency. A people lost without leadership, grasping at straws, ready to hold on to anything, including the lull of a false calm.
Forty one years ago, a government that had broken faith with the population turned its guns on the people and, thereafter kept the peace by the untouchable Randolph Burroughs, the charismatic leader of the Police Flying Squad who lived by the credo of ‘by any means necessary’.
Twenty one years ago, another government that had lost its legitimacy after fracturing and expelling a key partner, precipitated this country into crisis by insisting on its electoral right to carry on. Into the yawning chasm of distrust between the government and the governed rode a former officer of the Mounted Branch now turned Imam, Yasin Abu Bakr, and his band of 114. For those who don’t remember, Bakr was the untouchable of the eighties, the bombast that everyone preferred to be on the right side of or nowhere around at all.
He alone dared to do what so many wanted and urged but didn’t themselves dare to do: Move Robinson from power. Well, he did- and failed- because when he looked around, the multitudes were gone.
Come 2011 and nothing has changed.
The Partnership of 2010 has long fractured, papered over only by the smiling face of Kamla Persad-Bissessar in carefully structured, ethnically-sensitive photo-ops with strategic positioning for Tobago, the COP and whoever else as the situation warrants. Under the mask, the UNC is rampant. In government, its partners have all been brought to heel, reduced to begging for talks that never materialise. But while the leaders stay in the cabinet, claiming to be fighting for their people from inside, the people, like Longfellows’ Arabs, have silently folded their tents and are silently stealing away.
From Tobago to Westmoorings to Point Fortin, the cry for representation is everywhere. With its partners reduced to impotence, the Persad-Bissessar administration is already a government without legitimacy. Across the parliamentary aisle sits an Opposition still naked from being exposed as too coward and too enamoured of power to stop a runaway zealot leader from taking us all over the cliff.
And so, as it is wont to do in moments such as this, Trinidad throws up substitute leaders, colourful, charismatic, laws unto themselves. For now that person is TV host Ian Alleyne. A man already untouchable, perfectly in sync with the distressed masses and finely tuned to the wavelength of the country. While Bakr had to shoot his way into TTT in 1990, Alleyne is orchestrating his movement from the unenviable platform of the number one television station, Monday to Friday, 90 minutes at a bite. Unbridled and unstoppable. MP for the Masses. At least for now.
And so it goes in this land where elections repeatedly fail to deliver representation.
For those who harbour the hope that this State of Emergency might succeed in cleaning up the crime dens, cast your minds forward to the next general election and ask which party would be brave enough to attempt to win office without running the money into the hands of these very same denizens. In the absence of real politics and real engagement, bribery and patronage have become the stock in trade of our politics, creating in turn the power bases that run things from outside parliament.
Ask yourself, too, how many of the gang leaders and ‘community leaders’ being hunted down today were in the pay of the parties in the 2010 election. The badder they were, the bigger the fee for organizing people, bringing out the crowds and getting out the vote on time. Pity the innocents living among them, cowering in fear but knowing that the murderous badjohns are protected by the big boys and girls in power.
If we are victims of the criminal gangs, the gangs too are victims of the cynical politics that took root in the dawn of Independence almost fifty years ago. Overwhelmed with the challenge of transformation from colony to democracy, we opted for the quick-fix and the blind loyalist. The independent mind was declared a threat to political stability. The seeds of destruction now flowering blood-red in the hills of Laventille, Morvant and beyond were planted in a soil stripped bare of the ambitious independent tradesmen and women and the decent public servants who had spread out from the plantations and settled along the East-West Corridor, hoping to raise the next generation above the poverty line.
These were the people who were washed away as the Prime Minister’s Special Works Projects sucked the life out of ambition and created new poles of power dependent on government money.
After 1995, the henchmen spawned by Special Works were organized and harnessed into a sophisticated force under the laser focus of Sadiq Baksh. By then, no one really knew where the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen began and government ended. Certainly not Patrick Manning and his political babysitter Joan Yuille-Williams who had led the little boy by the hand in the art of real politics.
Today, we reap the whirwind of the corruption of our political lives. Once, we had longed for freedom so that we might have the right to a say in our land; in our innocence, we handed that right to those we believed best represented us. But none, from Williams down, has been up to the challenge of representation. Under pressure, each has buckled and surrendered to the easy fix, using bribery where possible, coercion where not- and often with the full complicity of the professional classes, deluded as they are by the false protection of power, position and privilege. That is, until the heavy hand of arbitrary power rests on their shoulder, and then all hell breaks loose.
Notwithstanding the very many good people with noble intentions that stood under its shade, there is no denying the truth that the Government of the People’s Partnership was born in bribery, an overnight arrangement crafted by a man willing to promise everything to people who were glad to get anything.
How ironic that at the centre of the politics, there was no politics, if we are to take politics to mean something more than horse-trading. As flawed as it was, however, no one with an interest in this country could deny the sense of relief at having stopped the Manning bullet train. But it was clearly not going to be enough.
The transformation of what Best called “a pick-up-side” into a coherent political force was quickly aborted; the prime minister’s cabinet took precedence over the political leadership of the alliance and with that one act, killed the possibility of graduating from bribery to something approximating representative politics with a reasonable prospect of tackling the core problems of the nation. Having dismissed the partnership and failed to institute a mechanism for rational policy-making based on shared and declared principles, the Persad-Bissessar administration has had no choice now but to govern by extempo.
On Sunday August 21, panicked by the rising tide of disenchantment, as expressed by protesting trade unions and communities, and overwhelmed by blood-strewn front pages, the Prime Minister went into extempo mode and bungled us all into a State of Emergency. It was a bizarre piece of her theatre, delivered from her private home, her ministers crowded into the picture. Why she was not at the official residence in St Ann’s, and why CNMG had to jump several technical hoops to go live from south Trinidad at the expense of a full media presence remains unexplained. Genuine security fear or sheer paranoia? The mis-steps and mis-speaks that followed are now a matter of historical record, although, in time, even this government might figure out how to finesse the hand.
Worrying indications, however, suggest that it is acquiring a dangerous taste for order imposed under the gun. For make no mistake, this is the sub-text of the Prime Minister’s repeated assertion that the State of Emergency has brought safety and peace to the land. In democratic countries, States of Emergency do not bring peace; they create space under specially-approved conditions for action designed, ultimately, to allow peace under democratic government that guarantees the rights and freedoms of all. The sublimal suggestion from the Persad-Bissessar administration that it can provide peace and safety only if the population gives up its rights, is a leap onto the road of totalitarian government at the rate of a galloping dictatorship.
If the Prime Minister is appalled at this view of her actions, she should ask herself whether she ever expected to be ringing the emergency bell. Certainly not with all the solutions she assumed she had for dealing with the country’s crime problems. But where we are is exactly where extempoing will get us all as we stumble ever so innocently from one state of disaster to another.
Perhaps, between the purple prose of her speechwriters and the siege mentality within the inner circle, a State of Emergency might seem an exercise in tough love from the ‘Mother of the Nation’.
But the Prime Minister’s selection of Anand Ramlogan as spokesperson for the government suggested differently. Not even Karl Hudson-Phillips in the infamy of the Public Order Act was as brutal in language and as hardline in attitude as Ramlogan. Thrown on the defensive after repeated mis-steps, Ramlogan’s preference for bullying and threatening the population cut the ugly figure of the power drunk politician. Ultimately, however, he is nothing more than the iron fist in the Prime Minister’s velvet glove, seemingly happy to be the Chosen One, this time, as the convenient foil to the carefully crafted maternal image. Good cop/ bad cop, as was played out in the scenario involving the errant teenager of facebook fame.
The gravest danger, however, is not Ramlogan, but the enveloping power vacuum as, once again, the population is failed by the entire political system. The signs are ominous. We have been this way before, We should therefore consider ourselves warned.
Jealousy at the root...
The fall of Randolph Burroughs
Francis Joseph
Published: 11 Jul 2009
Ever since this column started one year ago, I have received e-mails, calls and letters from the public, asking the same question—Who was really behind the plot to get rid of Randolph Burroughs? It really remains a mystery as to why Burroughs, in the pinnacle of his career as Commissioner of Police, was brought crashing down. Was it jealousy from within the Police Service or did the government at the time feel he was “too big for his shoes?”
Despite what people may think about “The Fox,” they really wish that Burroughs was around now to deal with the crime problem and the high murder rate. It was so ironic that Burroughs, who led an assault against criminals, and who was responsible for putting many of them in prison, was served a dose of his own medicine. Burroughs, who had a quick rise to the top, was dealt a serious blow by the George Chambers government. The then government established a commission of enquiry which later produced the Scott Drug report.
Burroughs and his dreaded Flying Squad were on trial. Allegations were made against 52 police officers. Testimony was taken in private before the then chairman the late Justice Garvin Scott. Witnesses and underworld characters gave evidence against police officers, mostly members of the Flying Squad. The secret testimony also brought down Burroughs, a man who had put his life on the line and who has been credited with dealing with many criminals, even though many did not agree with his methods.
Rise and Fall
No one could forget the job Burroughs and his men did when the country was threatened by members of the National Union of Freedom Fighters (NUFF) in 1973. No one could forget how Burroughs and his men went after the guerrilla fighters. These NUFF members were threatening the stability of the country, they were robbing banks and shooting up the place. They had the country in fear, and at one time, the then Prime Minister Dr Eric Williams threatened to flee the country. Burroughs took on the job and, who did not get killed, ended up badly wounded. Very few survived the assault from the Flying Squad. In 1976, Burroughs, as assistant commissioner, was at the centre of an international incident. After the Cubana Airlines crash off Barbados, Burroughs nailed the suspects, Jose Vasquez Garcia, and Freddy Lugo at the Holiday Inn, Port-of-Spain.
After a brilliant career, someone felt that this man was more powerful than the prime minister. There was a two-prong attack on Burroughs. Firstly, he was charged with conspiracy to traffic cocaine at Carli Bay, Couva. The State took the evidence of a notorious criminal, Cuthbert “Scotty” Charles, to say that he was present when Burroughs was at Carli Bay, offloading cocaine. It came as no surprise that Burroughs was cleared of that charge. Not satisfied with the not-guilty verdict, the State moved against Burroughs again. He was charged with conspiracy to murder two wanted men on the Lady Young Road, Morvant. He was committed to stand trial, but the case fell apart before Justice Jean Permanand in the Port-of-Spain High Court in 1987.
Died of a Broken Heart
Although he was acquitted, his credibility was in shambles and he retired early from the Police Service. It is said that Burroughs died of a broken heart on October 9, 1996, over the “ungrateful treatment” he got from a country he risked his life for. Since his early retirement, Burroughs sat at his Pinewood Gardens, Petit Valley, home, daily, speaking about the plot to get him off the job. He used to call names, some of them are dead while others are still alive. Burroughs was convinced that a certain man, still alive today, was behind the move to get rid of him. All members of the Flying Squad were recalled to duty more than two years later. Some took early retirement, others worked until the retirement age and two achieved the rank of Assistant Commissioner of Police.
There were allegations years ago that executed murderer Dole Chadee had police officers on his payroll, one of the reasons as to why he was never caught with cocaine. There was one instance when police said they seized cocaine from inside a washing machine at Chadee’s Piparo home. But after Chadee was executed, his wife Chandra was freed in the San Fernando High Court by Justice Anthony Lucky. Chadee was considered a major player in the drug world, but he was never caught with cocaine. He was wanted by the American authorities, but he was never extradited. Allegations were made that some very senior officers used to tip off Chadee when a raid was going to take place at his Piparo mansion. Chadee had a close connection at the Princes Town Police Station in the 1980s. That connection, according to allegations, did his bidding for him, even to the point where a main witness was killed before a trial.
Some say Chadee was related to Burroughs in some way and that is why he was protected for a long time. After Burroughs’ demise, Chadee was arrested and charged three times for murder but was acquitted each time because the main witness was killed. One of these witnesses was Charles. Burroughs was very media-friendly and a no-nonsense man. T&T was safe during Burroughs’ days. There is the cry on the streets that there should be another Burroughs-type leader in the Police Service. But before that can happen, there must be a committed person to take on the criminals.
Caribbean alarm grows over Venezuela drug trafficking11/10/2009
The clandestine flights originate from an area of eastern Venezuela which lies to the east of Maturin and Tucupita, near the Orinoco River Delta.
The small aircraft fly towards the Atlantic Ocean, with Trinidad & Tobago on the port side of the outbound flights, sometimes flying 150-200 miles out to sea before returning to Venezuela.
Somewhere on the outbound or return trip, the aircraft dump bales of cocaine into the ocean where they are retrieved by small boats or persons piloting jet skis.
The cocaine is then loaded aboard mother ships en route to southern European ports or, increasingly, ports in West Africa. Caribbean counter-drug authorities have tracked dozens of these flights over the past 12-24 months. Their frequency is growing, officials tell Caracas Gringo.
FARC militants based in Venezuela are believed to be heavily involved in these clandestine drug flights.
“We have confirmed the FARC has a permanent operational presence in Guyana and all the way out the Caribbean to St. Lucie,” a Lt. Commander with a Caribbean state navy says.
But clandestine flights are only part of a larger tactical problem facing Caribbean counter-drug forces.
Eastern Venezuela is also the point of departure for hundreds of “pirogues” – the small fiberglass fishing boats equipped with between two and four outboard motors.
These pirogues transport cocaine out to sea where the drugs are offloaded to other pirogues, or to larger boats that carry the drugs further out to sea where mother ships wait.
The drug pirogues sailing out of eastern Venezuela’s delta region are very fast and very difficult to detect by radar.
Increasingly, Caribbean counterdrug patrol boats intercepting pirogues over the past year have reported coming under semi-automatic and automatic weapons fire.
Caribbean naval intelligence sources operating from islands like Barbados and Trinidad were alarmed when Colombia’s government reported in August the capture of several Venezuelan-owned AT-4 rockets in FARC camps.
Caribbean naval strategists and tactical operations experts are war gaming scenarios in which counter-drug forces could be attacked by swarms of pirogues armed with RPG’s, AT-4’s or perhaps newer Russian-made Strela or Igla manpads.
Strela and Igla manpad SAMs are designed for anti-aircraft defense. But Caribbean naval sources say that in trained hands a Strela or Igla manpad could be a terribly effective weapon against a patrol boat.
Caribbean naval intelligence sources also say that the government of Trinidad & Tobago is increasingly concerned about systematic, ongoing efforts by agents of President Hugo Chavez to corrupt key officials and institutions of the island’s government and business groups.
“We know Chavez has his eye on Trinidad’s LNG and petrochemical infrastructure,” an official says. “But the question is whether Chavez ever would attempt to take control by force of Trinidad’s energy industry? Or, alternatively, would he facilitate terrorist strikes launched from Venezuelan territory against Trinidad’s energy infrastructure?”
http://caracasgringo.wordpress.com/2009 ... afficking/
16 cycles wrote:^ think it was highly suspected in WWII that we might be a target hence the US presence here - can someone confirm?
16 cycles wrote:^ think it was highly suspected in WWII that we might be a target hence the US presence here - can someone confirm?
Return to “Ole talk and more Ole talk”
Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 99 guests
