We just have to ask.

Why hasn’t the ABC News outfit retracted its damning story about our Prime Minister Bruce Golding?

Surely ABC knows by now that the US State Department’s Mr Philip J Crowley has denied having knowledge of any official document linking Mr Golding and Mr Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke?

Don’t they believe him?

We would have thought that ABC would have rushed, in the name of fairness, to publish Mr Crowley’s response to queries concerning its scandalous story.

But no, the last time we checked, the website was still boasting that story, plus another to the effect that Mr Coke was in the process of negotiating his surrender and extradition to answer drug and gun-running charges, with the US Government.

“US law enforcement officials have put Drug Enforcement Administration Air Wing pilots on alert and planes on standby as they wait out the ongoing discussions between alleged Jamaican drug lord Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke and the US Government — and wait to see whether Coke will be brought out of hiding in handcuffs or in a body bag,” reads the report penned by writers Richard Esposito and Mark Schone.

Messrs Esposito and Schone, who along with Mr Luis Martinez penned the earlier story about the US Government report, go on to claim that US officials are working hand-in-hand with senior Jamaican military and police officials to effect Mr Coke’s surrender and extradition.

Can these things be true?

Or are these gentlemen just making them up as they go along?

Either way it is very disturbing.

For if these men are speaking the truth, it would mean that once again, the officials upon whom we are supposed to be depending for the truth have failed us.

And if that is the case, how can we trust them going forward?

If ever there was a time when we can’t afford untrustworthy leaders, it would have to be in these perilous times when the lives of so many are at stake. In times like these, lying leaders will be the literal death of us.

That’s why we are so troubled at the fact that a powerful network like the ABC, which we know is familiar with defamation laws and their consequences, is still carrying a story which the prime minister has so angrily denied and dismissed as “part of a conspiracy” to undermine his Government.

We can’t pretend to know everything the prime minister or anyone else does, and only time will reveal all things. But we know that had the shoe been on the other foot, we are sure that no local media, no matter how rich and powerful, would risk a lawsuit of this nature unless they were dead sure that they were on a solid legal foundation.

If we did, we’d never be allowed to get away with it.

Neither should the ABC.