Trinidad's Prime Minister Urges Media Against Publishing Misinformation Regarding SSA

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley has urged the media in Trinidad and Tobago against being “chained up …to write misinformation” as he denied reports that former employees of the Strategic Services Agency (SSA) were filing lawsuits.

On Monday, the Ministry of National Security Monday denied reports that several former SSA employees have been rehired saying the operations of the agency remains under “active police investigation.

“No terminated former employee has been rehired by the SSA. The reason for the establishment of the unapproved TRT (Tactical Response Team) and its operations during its existence are the subject of immediate and active Police investigation,” the ministry added.

Speaking at the weekly post Cabinet news conference on Thursday, Prime Minister Rowley told reporters that the media should not allow itself to be duped into reporting misinformation on the situation involving the SSA.

“You have somebody who is not a part of the agency running a political party with himself and two other friends telling you what is happening in the SSA and you just run and publish that just so as a fact.

“And, of course, having put that there, you then make an analysis that the government doesn’t know what it is doing and the government is afraid of a lawsuit so the government hired them back, all because you want to make the government look bad,” Rowley said in an apparent reference to former police commissioner of political leader of a opposition party here, Gary Griffith.

“I could tell you that in no country, none…once you (the government) lost confidence in people in national security positions, you put them (back) there knowingly to run national security,” Rowley said, adding “so for somebody to be telling you that we fire them last week and we hire them this week, that is their story, that’s not the government story.

“There are some people with cocoa and some who are trying to tailor the national narrative to give you the impression that what the government is saying or doing is either capricious or just plain stupid…But that would not lead the government astray. The police will do their investigations and their findings will determine what happened,” the prime minister said.

Earlier this month Prime Minister Rowley said that an audit of the SSA had found that it adopted an “unapproved organizational design and structure and staffing” without the required knowledge of the competent authorities.

In March, the government confirmed Major Roger Best’s removal as SSA director and replaced him with Ambassador Brigadier Anthony Phillips-Spencer, who had been recalled from Washington, where he served as the country’s ambassador to the United States.

Major Best is among just over a dozen people fired from the SSA since the government announced that something amiss was happening at the agency. The self-proclaimed spy Pastor Ian Brown, who is under police investigation, was fired as a Special Reserve Police officer on March 19.

In a statement made in Parliament, Rowley said that the SSA was established in 1995 to guide the formulation and implementation of national policies on illicit trafficking of dangerous drugs and related criminal activities.

But he told legislators that since March 4 this year, an extensive internal review and audit of the SSA has been ongoing and that it had been discovered that the “unapproved organization structure and staffing “ had been undertaken without the required permission of either the Cabinet, the National Security Council or the Minister of National Security.

Rowley told reporters on Thursday that the police investigations are continuing and dismissed statement being made in the public domain that “nobody ain’t get lock up.

“When do you get locked up in this country? Evidence is gathered, collated and presented…to the courts. So let us not get carried away by people who have their own agendas. These are very serious matters and some of them are quite dangerous.

“The government will protect the public interest by doing what has to be done. So you in the media, don’t let people chain you up to write misinformation. It will help if when they come to you with those things, to go to the source and get it confirmed,” Rowley told reporters.