Don’t insult us Mr Al-Rawi

THE EDITOR: Mr Faris Al-Rawi should stop insulting the intelligence of the citizens of this beloved country. His political leader, Dr Keith Rowley, our current Prime Minister, decided to read some 31 e-mails that made preposterous allegations directed against the leadership of a sitting elected government.

Dr Rowley claimed that he held on to the information which he received from an unknown source for six months during which he agonised and prayed over whether he should or should not release the damning allegations into the public domain. I ask every right-thinking and the reasonable person reading this: had any one of you received the same package of unclaimed correspondence at your doorstep what would you have done with them?

The following facts should help you decide. It took just a few hours for almost everyone against whom allegations were made, to refute them as spurious for the simple and logical reason that the e-mail addresses that were written were non-existent – they were not owned by any of the people purported to be their owners. Every one of the addresses quoted was a fabrication. None of the persons implicated had to agonise and pray over the contents of that package before he or she unequivocally condemned it as rubbish! They knew as the nonsense was being read!

So I ask: as an adult Member of Parliament who had the responsibility as the then leader of the opposition, and unencumbered by malice or an ulterior motive, could Dr Rowley not have circumvented all of this apparent mischief by simply picking up the telephone and asking each person whether or not the addresses written down belonged to them? If he had reason to question the veracity of the replies he got, could he not have simply used the addresses quoted and tried to send messages to the alleged owners of the addresses? Would that not have been what any right-thinking person might have done? In the unlikely event that he still harboured doubt, could he not have done what those whom he accused had done? It took them less than a couple of weeks to establish and verify both from Google and the United States Department of Justice that the e-mail addresses – and logically, therefore – the e-mails themselves (their “substance”) constituted nothing but the malicious figment of a twisted imagination! Would any fair-minded person who might be reading this have given serious consideration to that heap of horse-dung?

The individual who would suddenly receives an inexplicable and mysterious “package” through pure serendipity and accord it serious consideration is someone who is immersed in conspiratorial fiction or who is sufficiently simplistic to believe everything anybody told him. A right-thinking person of good intent would have deposited that package behind him in the same place he puts his used toilet paper! While national and international investigators have reiterated that Rowley’s production was just fictional theatre, Al-Rawi drones on that the “substance” of the e-mails require further investigation!

Can I ask Dr Rowley to use his now-famous Texan/Tobago boots to deal with Faris!

Steve Smith via e-mail