AFTER having financed our way of life for too many years, our powerful neighbour to the north, the USA, has decided not just as the one which calls the tune, to tell the piper to “play another tune”, it has, in the latest US Drug Report on Jamaica, told us to pipe down, straighten up and fly right.

In its most pointed accusation (Country’s Actions against Drugs 2009 sub-headed Corruption) it said, “Indeed, Jamaica’s delay in processing the US extradition request for a major suspected drug and firearms trafficker with reported ties to the ruling party highlights the potential depth of corruption in the government.”

Based on the geopolitical maxim as best espoused by Henry Kissinger in the 1970s that America has no friends, only interests, the US – without Cold War considerations and with an economy that is increasingly going up the down escalator – has little time to be splitting hairs with a dead-broke, corrupt, crime-ridden, politically insignificant country such as ours.

The best that a last diplomatic vetting of the report could have provided for that sentence was the word, “potential” used to modify “depth of corruption in the government”. One suspects that that word “potential” was a last-minute addition to the report in an effort to provide the JLP administration an escape clause that would run the US’s way and to satisfy international protocol.

The government’s position on its refusal to hand over Tivoli “president” Christopher “Dudus” Coke is that the information as gathered through wiretapping of his phone was done in breach of Jamaican law. The government’s position is as outlined in the prime minister’s statement to Parliament last Tuesday: “In one important respect, however, it was found to be in violation of the law. The Interception of Communications Act makes strict provisions for the manner in which intercepted communications may be obtained and disclosed. The evidence supporting the extradition request in this particular case violated those provisions. So serious an offence is this violation that the penalty provided by law is a maximum fine of $5 million or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or to both such fine and imprisonment. The law further requires that for intercepted communication to be admissible in any criminal proceedings, it must have been obtained, disclosed and used in accordance with these provisions. This was not done in this case. This was highly irregular.”

One assumes that for the electronic interception (fancy name for wiretapping) to have been legal, it would have to have been sanctioned through the courts and may be approved through some parliamentary committee. All of this in a small country and a situation where Dudus and the system which gave him birth and street legitimacy have politically genetic links to the ruling JLP (administration) and the JLP of the past.

Even though “the law” in a democracy was designed to bring order and balance to such a society, the language of law is nothing more than a secret code between members of a fraternity who sit at the top of most societies. It was never designed to be understood by the common man, and at times, it seems that it was deliberately coded to confuse the vast majority of those making up most societies.

For this reason legal minds in Jamaica have brought their own tribal political baggage with them in explaining aspects of the Dudus extradition in various media.

To me, a few positions present themselves readily. One, it is obvious that Dudus as a “man of interest” to the US authorities, wields more power than all of the other people extradited from Jamaica for alleged drug involvement in the last five years. Two, is it not more than likely that of those so extradited, some of the “evidence” was gathered by illegal wiretapping? Did we hear anything from the JLP Opposition in those years in terms of protecting the rights of

those individuals?

Third, would someone like Dr Peter Phillips, easily the most competent of the spokespersons in the Opposition PNP, be prepared to say definitively that not a single case of extradition order made in his time as security minister was supported by illegally obtained wiretapping?

In the 1970s when the mercurial Eric Gairy was prime minister of Grenada, he had a band of thugs (the Mongoose Gang) attached to his party. He was interviewed by, I think, a British journalist who pointed out to him that many of those forming the Mongoose Gang had criminal records and were cut-throats.

Gairy’s reply? “Well, it takes a thief to catch a thief.”

In the late 1990s when then police Commissioner Francis Forbes set up an outfit called The Special Intelligence Unit, it was Roderick “Jimmy” McGregor who was put in charge of it. To me, it was the best move ever made, even though there were more than indications that illegal wiretaps had been made. In some of the documents which I surreptitiously obtained from computers attached to the disbanded SIU, some of the very names being mentioned now were taped in conversation talking to other “men of interest”. And of course, it appears that Jimmy had no specific political leanings as people loyal to both sides were being listened to electronically. Including high-ranking politicians in

the PNP!

McGregor himself was a highly trained operative who had links to Israeli Intelligence and other intelligence-gathering agencies in the US. Plus, in his undercover work, at times the lines became blurred in what he did.

Let us not fool ourselves that wiretapping can be legally sanctioned in a small, corrupt country like Jamaica where every politician knows a man of interest and every superintendent of police is a potential invitee to that link.

America, through its chief surrogate, the IMF, has parted with its money and Jamaica is the beneficiary. As a spin-off, China has made us a soft loan of US$400 million to fix roads. This is an obvious political boon to the JLP, especially if the majority of this work can be clustered around the months leading up to the 2012 elections.

Having given us US$400 million of the first tranche of US$1.2 billion, the USA, through the IMF, wants the unwritten conditions of the Standby Agreement to trip in. The Dudus extradition is, I believe, a main one.

One gets the impression that action at Jamaica House, depending on the nature of it, must first be sanctioned on other home fronts not necessarily so endowed with prime ministerial trappings. But, sometimes a prime minister may find that when he becomes just as scared as the rest of us, he is merely a second-tier leader on the real rankings.

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