To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

Hav­ing cho­sen to make the dis­clo­sure of an al­leged threat on his life pub­lic, even if de­layed by one year, Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning now needs to make the in­for­ma­tion avail­able to the po­lice so that the threat to the life of the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the State can be in­ves­ti­gat­ed by them.

This threat should not be tak­en light­ly and al­lowed to pass with­out the full se­cu­ri­ty sys­tem of the State be­ing put to work on the mat­ter. Whether Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning is "not afraid of any man" is ir­rel­e­vant. The fact must be that peo­ple who would con­tem­plate such a crime against the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly elect­ed leader of the na­tion can­not be al­lowed to ex­ist amongst us to plan fur­ther crimes against the coun­try.

In the in­stance of the al­leged at­tempt to sep­a­rate the Prime Min­is­ter's con­voy of ve­hi­cles, that is a well-known in­ci­dent and the of­fi­cer has been re­port­ed, in­ves­ti­gat­ed and dis­missed from the ser­vice for in­ap­pro­pri­ate be­hav­iour. There how­ev­er was noth­ing in that find­ing which in­di­cat­ed any­thing sin­is­ter in the be­hav­iour of the of­fi­cer. There cer­tain­ly was no ev­i­dence from the in­ves­ti­ga­tion to sug­gest that the of­fi­cer in ques­tion was part of some clan­des­tine plot to as­sas­si­nate the Prime Min­is­ter; punc­til­ious and sil­ly per­haps, but no hint of the of­fi­cer work­ing with oth­ers to as­sas­si­nate the Prime Min­is­ter.

The ques­tion there­fore is why bring this mat­ter up in a con­ver­sa­tion that he was hav­ing with par­ty sup­port­ers about as­sas­si­na­tion threats against the life of the Prime Min­is­ter? Next is Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning's cryp­tic as­ser­tion that it was for­tu­nate that the as­sas­si­na­tion threat made against him was not re­port­ed then as there "would have been blood­shed."

Whose blood would have been shed and by whom? Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning has fall­en in­to the habit of mak­ing as­ser­tions on a range of is­sues with­out giv­ing de­tails or log­i­cal ex­pla­na­tion. This seems to sug­gest that as Prime Min­is­ter all he needs to do is to make a claim which should then be ac­cept­ed with­out ques­tion. But hav­ing been in po­lit­i­cal of­fice for close on 40 years, Mr Man­ning must know that that is not how a democ­ra­cy works. More­over, it is he who has been call­ing on the me­dia to prop­er­ly in­form and ed­u­cate our au­di­ences on mat­ters of the day. It cer­tain­ly can­not be that Mr Man­ning would ex­pect the me­dia to sim­ply re­port the sto­ry he has giv­en with­out in­ves­ti­gat­ing such state­ments which in­volve the se­cu­ri­ty of the na­tion.

So if the Prime Min­is­ter is to be tak­en se­ri­ous­ly with this his lat­est claim that he has been tar­get­ed for as­sas­si­na­tion, then he has to make the re­port to the po­lice, give all the in­for­ma­tion he has and al­low CoP (Ag) Philbert James to set his of­fi­cers to work to find the would-be as­sas­sins. If not, then there would be some who would ac­cuse the Prime Min­is­ter of seek­ing a di­ver­sion to take the heat off his Gov­ern­ment for blunt­ly re­fus­ing to es­tab­lish a com­mis­sion of en­quiry in­to the events of Ju­ly 1990, crime in the coun­try and his re­cent fourth post­pone­ment of lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions.

One of the con­tin­u­ing con­tentions about the Ju­ly 1990 coup at­tempt was the claim that there were in­di­ca­tions be­fore hand that there was some form of clan­des­tine ac­tiv­i­ty go­ing on be­hind the scenes. And that warn­ings were be­ing ig­nored. The al­leged threat could be an­oth­er ear­ly warn­ing sig­nal which the State must in­ves­ti­gate to com­ple­tion.