Express TT

requisite measure of journalistic scepticism but we kept factoring in the information we were receiving from our sources including the principals themselves who, whatever their delusional state of mind, saw themselves, in our judgment as men with a mission, and a holy one at that. The decision to go public with the results of our investigations, therefore, was based not so on much on whether we were satisfied that the men had either the will or the means to carry out their threat but on what we believed was our responsibility to alert the public both to their existence in our midst and, indeed, their insidious intentions, albeit self-proclaimed.

Given past experience and the present tempo of the times we couldn’t see how we could have proceeded otherwise given what we considered to be our responsibility as stated above. Our hope was, and continues to be, that in alerting the public, particularly the intelligence and other arms of the protective services, we would see initiated the kind of action that would lead to a scuttling of the plans even if that meant the apprehension of the suspects.

We fully understood, however, that as an independent newspaper, we could play no direct role in the scuttling of those plans and the apprehension of the suspects either by divulging the names and numbers of the suspects or, as has been suggested, by forewarning the police of our visit to the “laboratory” so that they could tail and trail us. The assumption here , of course, is that the people who “opened up” their plans and location of the “lab” to us would not have been prepared for precisely such an eventuality. No media house could long retain its integrity and usefulness to the “public interest” if it becomes in any way perceived as just another arm of the government’s protective services. The distinction has to be clinical.

We would have hoped that the government would be among the first to understand this but we would be less than honest were we not to admit to being surprised, if not shocked, by the reaction of the ruling politicians who would have the public believe that our reports of this radical Muslim group is, as the National Security Minister Howard Chin Lee has put it, “deliberate misinformation” and, according to his colleague, Planning Minister Keith Rowley, part of a “UNC conspiracy”.

What this means is that rather than launching their own independent, intensive and sustained investigation, the better to thwart what may well be a manifest threat to the population, our ruling politicians have rushed to shoot the messenger without once demonstrating that they have analysed the full measure of the message. Instead of doing all they possibly can to stand up and be counted in the defence of the republic what we have instead been beholding is the traditional retreat to the politics of paranoia and victimhood—the thrust here being not to protect the citizenry— which they are mandated to do as the first duty of government- but to protect their own political hides as if this newspaper has, in any way, put this Muslim plot at any PNM door.

It is in this context that we insist that Trinidad and Tobago remains in peril- and, possibly, in more ways than one. We, for our part, are determined to continue investigating not only this group but all those new “mimic men” who embrace fashionable extremist doctrines to the detriment of our republic. Exposure in the public interest is our real responsibility and, indeed, sacred duty.