… The examiners (forensics)
Your Eyewitness has been confused by our inability to get a proper forensic laboratory to go. What could be more embarrassing sending a piece of evidence of Henry cousins crime scene to St Lucia for processing. Yes, St Lucia !! Where the population is 182,000 !! Less than Georgetown, for shouting out loud!
But a $ 1.049B Forensic Lab was commissioned, back in July 2014 in Turkeyen, just before the PNC coalition slipped into office. With their heavy-duty safety brass, we assured the Guyanese people that we would have our own CSI units cracking cases faster that you can “rack back and crack” nuts in a cricket match !! But they soon told us they had to spend US $ 248,000 or Gy $ 50,000,000 to “purify the air”! So, what happened between 2015 and 2019? God only knows !!
Because it was only in mid-2019 that Munster Ramjattan Public Security assured us, after four years of waiting, that we finally had a DNA analysis machine – which cost some $ 98 million. The man who was to spy Russian spies into the rigging of our elections assured us that the (pathetic) days of sending samples abroad for DNA testing were over. So, what happened? PNC Govt and Ramjattan brain trust didn’t think ahead to train technicians to use the equipment? The pictures in the newspapers are just to show that they are “doing something” about solving crime just before the elections.
Now, your Eyewitness had followed the development (or lack thereof) of Forensic Abilities with fierce interest. Not only because he has skin in the game (as a citizen who could be assassinated at any moment by raiders who come off the scotch) but because he is a fan of the “crime sleuths crauth” whose feats which he has wiped out from the days of his undying youth Had he not even remembered the seven “Principles of forensic science”?
Yes, dear reader, there are seven principles to this “scientific discipline directed at the recognition, identification, individualization and evaluation of physical evidence.” And what are these, you ask? There is a “law of individuality”, which states that all objects, natural or man-made, have unique characteristics, such as fingerprints. Then there’s the “Principle of exchange”, or the “Locard exchange principle” – which is the favorite of your Eyewitness. This states that “when an offender or his crime instrument comes into contact with the victim or the objects around him, they leave traces, and the offender or his instrument removes traces from the same contact.” To be picked up by Forensics!
But, unfortunately, there is the Progressive Change Act: “everything changes with the passivity of time – including crime scenes.”
As we hope it didn’t happen in West Berbice!
… Brinkmanship Maduro
As Maduro continues to “play the fool” on our Essequibo border, let us focus on the word “play”, because Maduro is no fool; there is a method to his madness. One theory is that it is trying to drag the US and China into what is called “The Thucydides Trap”.
As we learned back in high school, Thucydides was the former General who wrote the classic account of the Great War between the superpowers of the ancient world – the leading Sparta and the rising star of Athens. He called it the Peloponnesian Wars.
Some say that there is a similarity between this current situation, when the superpower for the last century – the USA – is being challenged by China’s rise. Back then, the two powers weren’t silly enough to try it directly – it was like “mutually assured destruction” (MAD)! But they all had allies, and these allies went to war and dragged the super powers in.
Is Maduro counting on China to back it up against the US ally, Guyana?
… Debt ceilings
Winston Jordan got stuck in a knot because Finance Minister Ashni Singh had just announced permitted internal and external debt ceilings for our country.
When Jordan moved from the Budget Office to become Minister, did his bank not increase its debt ceiling?
