Director of Public Prosecutions Roger Gaspard will decide if criminal charges are to be laid against anyone for illegal tapping of citizens' phones by the Security Intelligence Agency (SIA), Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said yesterday. At the time she was responding to questions on the matter following an address to an ICT symposium at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain. "Those will be decisions for the Director of Public Prosecutions. I cannot prejudge and compromise a decision to be made by an independent legal officer of the State–the Director of Public Prosecutions," she said. The PM was asked if she knew of the work of the SIA, which was in existence during the administration of the Basdeo Panday Government between 1995 and 2001.
Persad-Bissessar acted as Prime Minister during that period and was also Attorney General, which meant she would have served on the National Security Council. She responded: "I cannot recall when the SIA was set up but it is my firm view, and I am very committed to that, that no citizens phones should be tapped outside of the law. It must be within a regulated framework." She continued: "At no time did anyone in the National Security Council or otherwise with the (security) intelligence... no one, no one at any meeting ever said a single word about phones being tapped. There was a definite silence on that issue." She said only last month she got a text (message) about "a meeting taking place between certain people, where a request was being made for transcripts and tapes from that particular unit."
The Prime Minister recalled the sequence of events that followed: "When I got that information I actioned the Special Branch, I spoke with the Commissioner of Police and it was reported back to me by the branch that such a meeting was in fact taking place at the time and venue that the source had indicated." The PM said: "It was only when we were advised on the evening of October 22 that there appeared to have been some attempts to sanitise what was happening in there (SIA) that the Commissioner of Police undertook the operation that he did on the Saturday (October 23) and shut down the place." She said the offices of the SIA had remained shut since then. Asked about the future of the SIA officers, Persad-Bissessar said: "The police will have to investigate (and) where there is wrongdoing the law will take its course." She said Deputy Commissioner Stephen Williams is heading a team which is investigating the matter.
"They are putting things in place to have a forensic audit because of the massive amount of cash that was found at the location and indeed how it was being spent because there is no paperwork to support it," the PM told reporters. She confirmed that the operations of the SIA was shut down on her instructions last month. Persad-Bissessar said she could not say how many names were on the list. "It's a database and I don't know the total offhand. We await the report of the investigators," the PM added. She said the plan was to restructure "all of these intelligence agencies and setting up one national intelligence agency." A report on that matter was expected next month, the PM added, and the Williams Committee has been discussing the matter with US officials. Persad-Bissessar said the authorities were considering informing other people not identified in her statement to Parliament last Friday that their names were on the list. She said it would be up to those persons to announce it publicly if they so wished.
"It's a further invasion of their privacy to be putting their names all over the newspapers as being persons whose (phones) were tapped," she said. The PM said the Government was seeking comments on the possibility of citizens taking legal action against the State and a Joint Select Committee of Parliament or a Commission of Enquiry is being considered to deal with the matter.