Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar was ill-ad­vised to make last week's "wire­tap­ping" rev­e­la­tions since she may have com­pro­mised T&T's na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, Con­gress of the Peo­ple vice chair­man Ver­non de Li­ma has said. The COP is a mi­nor­i­ty Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship part­ner in the Gov­ern­ment. COP chair­man Joseph Toney on Tues­day, not­ing to­mor­row's de­bate of Gov­ern­ment's "wire­tap­ping" bill, said: "We urge re­straint... we're deal­ing with the del­i­cate is­sue of T&T's se­cu­ri­ty and that should be in mind up­per­most–let's not make this in­to a po­lit­i­cal foot­ball."

De Li­ma added: "I'm aghast at the num­ber of peo­ple who were list­ed last Fri­day as be­ing 'tapped.' That was wrong and the mech­a­nisms em­ployed there are in­de­fen­si­ble. So Mr Man­ning and the PNM are not blam­less since one of these so-called spy agen­cies ex­ist­ed since 2004." "Why is it that they did not move with alacrity to en­sure these agen­cies were giv­en le­gal cov­er?" He said: "It seemed they ne­glect­ed to do that on pur­pose be­cause maybe if they had, there would have been cer­tain stric­tures they were not pre­pared to abide by.

"How­ev­er, the Prime Min­is­ter's un­for­tu­nate de­ci­sion to re­veal de­tails etc of the modus operan­di of these agen­cies could com­pro­mise na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

"We've heard a lot about lo­cal ves­sels be­ing in­ter­cept­ed in var­i­ous parts of the world with drug hauls, who is to know whether or not this was as a re­sult of these agen­cies' work–and now you come and blow their cov­er? "When you come to mat­ters like na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty one should al­ways err on the side of cau­tion and the up­per­most con­sid­er­a­tion of any any­thing should be T&T's se­cu­ri­ty. "There­fore I won­der if it was right to do what was done in Par­lia­ment last week and I think it was not. If some­one has been ad­vis­ing the PM on this, it was clear­ly not pru­dent ad­vice. If I'm wrong, I'll ac­cept that but we are a small state and we must guard our se­cu­ri­ty close­ly."

De Li­ma al­so said the PM's idea for a com­mis­sion of en­quiry on the is­sue would be wrong. "That would cer­tain­ly com­pro­mise se­cu­ri­ty even fur­ther due to what in­for­ma­tion might flow from this probe," he said. "We have this week's ex­am­ple of what took place in the UK where the UK gov­ern­ment re­fused such an in­quiry on the same grounds where the is­sue of sev­er­al Guan­tanamo pris­on­ers was con­cerned."