“Useless gun talk!” That is UNC deputy leader Dr Roodal Moonilal’s dismissal of Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley’s statements about the findings of the audit of the Strategic Services Agency (SSA).
“The information the Prime Minister revealed is not credible, but incredible,” Moonilal added.
“I challenge the Prime Minister to show the public the full audit report and send it to Parliament’s Joint Select Committee on National Security. Or else it’s simply useless gun talk.”
NTA leader Gary Griffith also dismissed the Prime Minister’s statements. Both commented yesterday after Dr Rowley delivered a statement in Parliament on Wednesday on the findings of the audit done in March.
The audit was launched when the National Security Council, which Rowley heads, was provided with information by the TTPS’s Special Branch. The probe revealed increased purchases by the SSA intelligence agency of weapons from 2017 to 2022, including military-grade weapons and large amounts of ammunition.
Rowley said it had also been discovered that the SSA was infiltrated by people belonging to a cult that was arming itself while preaching a doctrine for trained military and paramilitary personnel with a religious calling “to be the most suitable to replace the country’s political leadership.”
The SSA’s director sent on leave was fired in May, and 28 other people were also fired.
Yesterday, Moonilal said, “First, if something so bombastic occurred, it occurred under the watch of the National Security Council and the National Security Minister, who have statutory oversight for the SSA.
“However, the actual report of Major (Ret) Brigadier Anthony Phillips-Spencer, who did the audit, must be laid in Parliament and produced to the public for us to look at. One can never tell what the basis of that report is—did they interview people? Did people make submissions orally or in writing? Have they consulted the Auditor General who has oversight for statutory organisations like SAA?
“Dr Rowley spoke of an ‘attempted coup,’ then one should ask him if he’s prepared to undertake a commission of enquiry into the SSA’s ‘attempted coup’ as was done for the 1990 coup attempt.”
Moonilal said the “SSA people” may not know it, but the SSA was used as a training agency for approximately eight different law enforcement divisions, including the TTPS.
“So if SSA ramped up weapons and ammunition, everything must have been done with a paper trail and accountability of some kind, and that requires a deeper independent public investigation to ascertain whether or not Dr Rowley is telling the truth because Dr Rowley has reached the point where nobody believes him anymore. Never forget he told T&T they’re not closing down Petrotrin.”
Moonilal said the Government has now embarked on a pattern of proposing external civilian personnel to conduct sensitive investigations, “arrive at conclusions, then keep the reports secret and reveal them in Parliament, where they’re protected by privilege. Very damaging statements on personnel and events, all in secret reports, which they then use as a basis for policy and personnel change and changing laws.”
He said this was a very dangerous, dictatorial tendency. “One has to be extremely careful and sensitive to this pattern of dictatorship where secret reports become the basis for public policy. We saw it in the change of law with the Legal Affairs Ministry’s Solicitor General’s office, with the change in the Firearms Users Licence issue, and now with this gun talk about the SSA and ‘coup’.”
Meanwhile, Griffith claimed the PM’s statement only brought out certain things and not everything. He claimed the people at SSA were polygraphed and all passed. He took issue with some of them being called a “cult”.
“You had eight people in a religious organisation out of 400 employees and he referred to this as a cult?!” Griffith claimed they were now being labelled “similar to a Jim Jones type.”
He challenged Rowley to call names outside of Parliament if he was so sure they were a cult, “What he’s doing is Emailgate reloaded!” Griffith opined.
Griffith said that claiming there was an attempted coup to destabilise the Government was a very serious allegation, and he asked why no one had been charged with treason. He said Rowley had failed to disclose that his Government had allegedly transferred all of Cumuto barracks to the SSA, and that involved hundreds of weapons and ammunition that belonged to the TTPS and T&T Defence Force under the control of the SSA.