Panday questions PM’s handling of U.S. ‘double tap’ issue

Po­lit­i­cal leader of the Pa­tri­ot­ic Front Mick­ela Pan­day has crit­i­cised Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s han­dling of ques­tions sur­round­ing re­port­ed U.S. mil­i­tary strikes in the re­gion, say­ing her re­spons­es show con­fu­sion, de­nial and a lack of aware­ness about an in­ter­na­tion­al in­ci­dent un­fold­ing close to Trinidad and To­ba­go.

In a state­ment shared on so­cial me­dia this morn­ing, Pan­day said the sit­u­a­tion has moved be­yond pol­i­tics and now rais­es con­cerns about whether the Prime Min­is­ter is mis­lead­ing the pub­lic or is sim­ply out of her depth.

She out­lined the se­quence of events, be­gin­ning with a Sep­tem­ber 2 U.S. Navy airstrike on a Venezue­lan ves­sel in the Caribbean that left eleven peo­ple dead. She said in­ter­na­tion­al re­ports lat­er re­vealed that two peo­ple sur­vived the ini­tial strike and that a sec­ond at­tack, de­scribed as a “dou­ble tap”, was al­leged­ly or­dered to kill them. She added that the Wash­ing­ton Post and the New York Times both pub­lished in­ves­ti­ga­tions, and that glob­al me­dia placed Trinidad and To­ba­go at the cen­tre of the un­fold­ing mat­ter. Ac­cord­ing to the re­lease, the White House con­firmed the sec­ond strike on De­cem­ber 1.

Pan­day said that de­spite wide­spread in­ter­na­tion­al re­port­ing, the Prime Min­is­ter ap­peared un­aware of the is­sue when ques­tioned by jour­nal­ists on De­cem­ber 8.

She quot­ed Per­sad-Bisses­sar as re­spond­ing, “I’m so sor­ry, on the what? The dou­ble-tap strike? I don’t know what that is.” Ac­cord­ing to Pan­day, the Prime Min­is­ter lat­er said she need­ed time to re­search the mat­ter to avoid be­ing “trapped in­to an an­swer”.

Pan­day said that af­ter this re­search, Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s po­si­tion re­mained trou­bling, as she main­tained that the in­ci­dent had noth­ing to do with Trinidad and To­ba­go be­cause “the Unit­ed States is a sov­er­eign na­tion”.

The Pa­tri­ot­ic Front leader said the sit­u­a­tion wors­ened when the Prime Min­is­ter ad­mit­ted the Unit­ed States does not share in­for­ma­tion with her and does not no­ti­fy her about such strikes be­fore, dur­ing or af­ter they oc­cur.

Pan­day said this means the coun­try could be fac­ing sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­na­tion­al de­vel­op­ments while its leader ac­knowl­edges she is “com­plete­ly in the dark”.

She added that when Per­sad-Bisses­sar was asked whether she would make any in­quiry in­to the al­leged sec­ond strike, the Prime Min­is­ter re­spond­ed, “In­quire from whom?”

Pan­day said such an an­swer rais­es se­ri­ous con­cerns about the Prime Min­is­ter’s abil­i­ty to safe­guard na­tion­al in­ter­ests. “Re­spect­ful­ly, a Prime Min­is­ter who doesn’t know who to ask, doesn’t know what hap­pened and doesn’t know how to get in­for­ma­tion is a Prime Min­is­ter who can­not pro­tect a coun­try,” she said.

She al­so ref­er­enced the Prime Min­is­ter’s past use of the phrase “kill them all vi­o­lent­ly”, say­ing it ex­pos­es a deep­er truth about cri­sis lead­er­ship.

“When events this se­ri­ous reach our shores, the great­est risk we face is a gov­ern­ment that doesn’t un­der­stand the grav­i­ty of what’s hap­pen­ing,” Pan­day said.