Browne questions use of airports by US military aircraft

For­mer For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dr Amery Browne has raised con­cerns about the use of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s air­ports by Unit­ed States mil­i­tary air­craft, say­ing the fa­cil­i­ties are in­tend­ed for civil­ian op­er­a­tions.

In a state­ment on his Face­book page, Dr Browne said the coun­try’s air­ports were “de­signed and staffed and se­cured for civil­ian use, not for use as air bases for mil­i­tary air­craft of var­i­ous types for an un­spec­i­fied du­ra­tion.” He said such air­craft car­ry mu­ni­tions and ex­plo­sives that would not be dis­closed to the pub­lic.

It comes a day af­ter the Gov­ern­ment ap­proved the use of lo­cal air­ports by Unit­ed States mil­i­tary air­craft to con­duct what it de­scribes as “lo­gis­ti­cal ac­tiv­i­ties,” a de­ci­sion that has sparked strong crit­i­cism from the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM), which claims it ce­ments the coun­try’s sta­tus as a “satel­lite state” of the US.

Dr Browne said the air­craft would be tran­sit­ing na­tion­al air­space, fly­ing over res­i­den­tial ar­eas and land­ing at lo­cal air­ports. He ques­tioned whether prepa­ra­tions had been made for ac­ci­dents or in­ci­dents and whether peo­ple liv­ing near the air­ports had been in­formed.

He al­so asked whether the safe­ty of civil­ian and car­go air­craft had been con­sid­ered and whether emer­gency and fire fa­cil­i­ties at Crown Point and Pi­ar­co had been up­grad­ed for mil­i­tary sit­u­a­tions.

The Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor said Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar had not ad­dressed the na­tion on re­gion­al pol­i­cy mat­ters for six months. He said she had in­stead re­lied on What­sApp mes­sages to se­lect­ed jour­nal­ists and me­dia re­leas­es.

Dr Browne said this had tak­en place dur­ing a na­tion­wide State of Emer­gency, which the gov­ern­ment has said is not a crime-fight­ing mea­sure.

He ac­cused the prime min­is­ter of re­spond­ing to crit­i­cism by la­belling those who ques­tion her de­ci­sions as “haters of the Amer­i­can peo­ple” and sup­port­ers of “car­tels.”

The state­ment comes amid pub­lic dis­cus­sion on Trinidad and To­ba­go’s re­gion­al role and se­cu­ri­ty arrange­ments, and on­go­ing de­bate on trans­paren­cy and com­mu­ni­ca­tion by the gov­ern­ment.