THE EDITOR, Sir:
BOTH THE People's National Party and the Jamaica Labour Party are to be commended for adopting a common crime plan. This refreshing rapprochement has opened a window of opportunity for both parties to further agree to the establishment of a National Intelligence Service, shorn of the many organisational constraints of our military and police forces; insulated from partisan political manipulation and able to attract and retain the best brains in our country.
Now that the dangers of fragmentation of a $2000 billion per year intelligence system in the US has been exposed by 9/11 in New York, we should not sit by and await our mini-version but urgently attend to the debilitating fragmentation characterising Jamaica's intelligence organisations.
September 11, Jamaican style, is not a remote possibly anymore due to rapidly changing geographical realities and globalisation.
Jamaica's liberal immigration policy, relatively insecure ports, minimally protected archipelagic waters, and territorial seas along with cut-rate and willing contract murderers, have made it attractive as a drug transhipment port. Along with the fact of widespread US assets within our border these factors do serve to make us a tempting target for hostilities against US interests, despite our protective proximity to the world's lone superpower.
Much more could be understood; clearer pictures would emerge and more crimes of all kinds solved if MIU Special Branch, and other agencies, such as, Customs and Immigration are legally mandated to supply all their processed intelligence to a national co-ordinative analytical and investigative intelligence agency and to subject their data bases to queries from such an agency.
It would also make more sense if the police narcotics division assume prime responsibility for intelligence relating to firearms since it is claimed that drugs are so intricately associated with guns. If system rationality is to be maintained then the current functions and the staff and other resources of National Firearms and Drug Intelligence Centre (NFDIC) properly belong to a reorganised police narcotics and firearms division.
It should be obvious to any thoughtful layman that the echoes of pre-Independence orthodoxies and post-Independence political caution have served to deform the architecture of our national intelligence organisations making it vital to impose greater integration.
There is no better man to do it than Minister Phillips with the support of Her Majesty's Leader of the Opposition and there is no better time than now.
I am, etc.,
HAROLD CROOKS
Lluidas Vale P.O.
St. Catherine
