Sturge: T&T had no advance notice of US military movements

De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge is deny­ing re­ports that this coun­try was com­plic­it in the ex­trac­tion of oust­ed Venezue­lan pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro by al­low­ing a Unit­ed States air­craft to use the coun­try’s air­port in the ex­trac­tion.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions dur­ing a me­dia brief­ing at the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress head­quar­ters yes­ter­day, Sturge said Trinidad and To­ba­go had no ad­vance no­tice of the US strike.

“The Pres­i­dent of the US him­self stat­ed quite clear­ly that not even mem­bers of his own in­ner cir­cle knew what was go­ing on. John Je­re­mie (At­tor­ney Gen­er­al) is not in that in­ner cir­cle, nei­ther is the Prime Min­is­ter, and nei­ther am I,” Sturge said.

“I have nev­er spo­ken to Mr Ru­bio or Mr Trump. So, if they didn’t tell peo­ple in their own cir­cle, how are they go­ing to tell me? How would I know?”

Sturge said the Trinidad Ex­press ar­ti­cle that made the claim spoke of an open-source doc­u­ment that de­tailed the US air­craft leav­ing Trinidad, but did not say where it went.

He said if the open source was as cred­i­ble as the ar­ti­cle sug­gest­ed, it should be able to de­ter­mine where the air­craft went.

Last week, dur­ing an­oth­er Gov­ern­ment me­dia con­fer­ence, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Je­re­mie chose not to an­swer when asked if any as­sets of the US, be it man or ma­chine, were de­ployed from this coun­try in Maduro’s cap­ture or the fa­tal air strikes lead­ing up to his ex­trac­tion.

Asked point­ed­ly yes­ter­day if the US used this coun­try as a launch­ing pad, Sturge said: “I do not have any such in­for­ma­tion. I do not know, and if I was to haz­ard a guess, I would say it was not, and the Prime Min­is­ter al­so made the state­ment clear.”

Sturge ad­mit­ted there is con­tin­u­ous train­ing be­tween the US and lo­cal mil­i­tary, but opt­ed not to say if there are any planned train­ing ex­er­cis­es on­go­ing or set to hap­pen soon.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, in­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions ex­pert, Pro­fes­sor An­tho­ny Bryan, said there was no rea­son to doubt Sturge.

“Such things could hap­pen, the Gov­ern­ment need not be in­formed. It is up to Civ­il Avi­a­tion to track those air­craft and de­ny them per­mis­sion if they wish. So, I don’t see any mys­tery there.”

Last year, the Gov­ern­ment ap­proved the use of lo­cal air­ports by US mil­i­tary air­craft to con­duct what it de­scribed as “lo­gis­ti­cal ac­tiv­i­ties.”

In a me­dia re­lease, the Min­istry of For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs an­nounced that ap­proval was in keep­ing with es­tab­lished bi­lat­er­al co­op­er­a­tion.

“The Min­istry has grant­ed ap­provals for Unit­ed States mil­i­tary air­craft to tran­sit Trinidad and To­ba­go’s air­ports in the com­ing weeks. The Unit­ed States has ad­vised that these move­ments are lo­gis­ti­cal in na­ture, fa­cil­i­tat­ing sup­ply re­plen­ish­ment and rou­tine per­son­nel ro­ta­tions.”

The Gov­ern­ment al­so al­lowed the US to set up a mil­i­tary radar to de­tect air traf­fic in To­ba­go. Both the Gov­ern­ment and the US South­ern Com­mand claimed the radar is for block­ing il­le­gal drug trans­ac­tions.

This, how­ev­er, was re­fut­ed in a New York Times re­port, which point­ed out a sig­nif­i­cant tech­ni­cal con­tra­dic­tion. The ar­ti­cle claimed the radar is de­signed for air sur­veil­lance and de­fence, and not for track­ing “go-fast” boats that are typ­i­cal­ly used by drug traf­fick­ers.