Gail Alexan­der

Gov­ern­ment must im­me­di­ate­ly rein in the Prime Min­is­ter's na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty ad­vis­er, Gary Grif­fith, says Op­po­si­tion Leader Kei­th Row­ley.Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) chair­man, Franklin Khan, is­sued a state­ment in Row­ley's name yes­ter­day, not­ing state­ments Grif­fith made dur­ing an in­ter­view with the UK's Chan­nel Four con­cern­ing al­leged cor­rup­tion re­gard­ing po­lice of­fi­cers, the Ju­di­cia­ry and politi­cians.

The PNM not­ed Grif­fith sub­se­quent­ly apol­o­gised to the Ju­di­cia­ry for "such ir­re­spon­si­ble state­ments,"The PNM state­ment added: "This calls for im­me­di­ate 'rein­ing in' of the ad­vis­er to pre­vent fur­ther ir­repara­ble dam­age to T&T. "At this the point, any ac­tion, act or ut­ter­ance by any­one ca­pa­ble of desta­bil­is­ing T&T will not be ac­cept­ed nor con­doned and will cer­tain­ly be con­demned in the strongest pos­si­ble terms."

The Op­po­si­tion ap­pealed to Gov­ern­ment for much bet­ter man­age­ment of its com­mu­ni­ca­tions is­sued un­der the rubric of of­fi­cial­dom.The state­ment added: "This, far too of­ten, leads to na­tion­wide alarm and trau­ma for so many with­in the pop­u­la­tion. "Any com­mu­ni­ca­tion which may have the po­ten­tial to bring dam­age to the im­age and rep­u­ta­tion of T&T must be dis­cour­aged."

The PNM al­so has chal­lenged state­ments by COP chair­man, Joseph Toney, that Row­ley "di­vulged" na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty in­for­ma­tion which the Gov­ern­ment had shared with him and that Row­ley sought to "play pol­i­tics" with the is­sue. (GA)