SOFA, Secrecy and the Rising Risk to T&T  

Every step closer to war raises the risk for Trinidad and Tobago. Yet we’re being dragged along in near-total ignorance, made worse by a run of unforced diplomatic blunders and a government posture that seems to confuse secrecy with strategy.

Look at Guyana. It has far more to lose and a far clearer threat: Venezuela is openly hostile, and the target is real. Georgetown has kept its head down, stayed disciplined, and avoided drama, while presumably coordinating closely with Washington. That’s what a small state does when it’s living next to a matchbox.

Trinidad and Tobago is doing the opposite: drifting into danger, then pretending surprise.

In the US, officials have been forced into the open. In just three and a half months, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have appeared before congressional committees more than 20 times, briefed, questioned, pressed for detail, and demanded to account. That’s what oversight looks like when war is on the horizon.

Here? Nothing comparable. Parliament has not been given the information needed to judge whether US military activities in Trinidad and Tobago are lawful, limited, and truly within the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). The public is being asked to accept the biggest kind of risk on the smallest kind of evidence.

The only thing we know is that we don’t know.

And the questions are not complicated. What exactly did the US request of Trinidad and Tobago? What exactly did our government approve, in writing? What was off-limits? What are the boundaries on operations, personnel, assets, surveillance, and movement? If those boundaries are crossed, who would tell the country, and when?

A SOFA is not a blank check. It’s a framework. And frameworks are only as meaningful as the limits inside them and the oversight around them. Without disclosure, we have no way to tell whether we are providing routine cooperation or being quietly positioned as a platform in a conflict we cannot control.

In a war environment, an information vacuum doesn’t keep people calm. It breeds rumour, fear, and resentment. “Trust us” is not a national security plan. It’s a way to dodge accountability until the consequences arrive.

Even worse is the silence from the institutional class, professional bodies, civic groups, and organizations that always have something to say when the issue is safer. If this moment doesn’t demand public scrutiny, then what does?

And if the Persad-Bissessar government refuses to level with the country, the Opposition has no right to hide either. The PNM signed the SOFA now being invoked. Its senior figures were there. Several of its leaders, including former prime ministers Dr. Keith Rowley and Stuart Young, former foreign affairs minister Dr. Amery Browne, and former national security minister Fitzgerald Hinds, were present at the signing ceremony. They can’t pretend this is someone else’s mess. Explain what was signed. Explain what it allows. Explain whether today’s US military activity fits the agreement or stretches it.

This isn’t anti-American. It isn’t pro-Venezuela. It’s pro–Trinidad and Tobago: the basic insistence that if our territory, airspace, ports, or security infrastructure are being used in an escalating confrontation, the public has a right to know the terms.

Small states don’t get the luxury of ambiguity. When big powers move, confusion becomes vulnerability. And the price of not knowing is usually paid all at once, later, and in full.

Sarge

The SOFA agreement is not a secret document, and anyone who wishes for the details can find it. The above is written to deceive, and is written in the hope that most people don't do their own research, and would just fall for the misinformation.

The truth is, the past Prime Minister, even before the elections, had held a press conference to dispel the notion that the USA could use T&T as a base to launch military attacks against other countries. That was after a newspaper article indicating that. The PNM, after the elections, has repeatedly condemned the stance of the present government. Nowhere in the SOFA agreement gives the right of the USA to use T&T's territories to launch military attacks against, or create regime change in other countries. Nowhere in the agreement permits Trinidad and Tobago the right to support criminal bombing of ships in the Caribbean, killing over 100 persons so far, with no evidence to show.

As the writer attempts to cover for the unlawful activity of the administration, by trying to implicate the former, the Prime Minister in recent days have had to come out clearly and state that she supports the UDA against Mudaro: that he is a narco government; that his regime is illegal, having stolen the elections. She was cornered, because Trump and others in his regime had also stated their clear intentions about regime change. In fact, he emphatically claimed that Venezuela's oil belong to him. It is all in the open now, and the Trinidad PM could no longer hide that the USA's presence in the regional waters is her government's policy.

Stop the deceit. One of the biggest problem in the Caribbean is that we never tell our friends when they are wrong. We support them to death, never paying heed to the damage that their actions create in the long run. Always putting the blame on others.

I want to repeat, with a little digression here, that Trinidad's crime problem is internal, and has a long and brutal history. I will address that when in the mood.

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You post a pile of BS , irrelevant to what is on the thread.

It's sad when one can profess to read and cannot assimilate what is written.

Please ignore my threads; start your fcking own....😡