The political lesson of what some are calling "Manninggate", similar to the Watergate (scandal) is this: "Never again must Trinidad and Tobago allow anyone to bypass the Constitution, to undermine the rule of law, to violate sacred rights to privacy and safety," Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said yesterday.

She was speaking during the Interception of Communications Bill in the House of Representatives.

The bill, which the Prime Minister described as "the result of the collective wisdom of both Government and Opposition", was passed unanimously by a vote of 35 for.

Former prime minister Patrick Manning was not in the Parliament when the vote was taken. (He was holding his own news conference in a Parliament committee room. See Page 5)

"There is no greater breach of public trust for a person charged with upholding the law of a country in his governance, to knowingly, wilfully and deliberately violate the sacred trust and the rule of law," the Prime Minister said as she slammed Manning.

"Until a government has a better understanding of the relationship between private performance and public truth, as was demonstrated with... Manninggate, the public has the absolute right to remain suspicious, contemptuous, even, of the secrecy of any government action."

She added that it was this loss of confidence that her Government was seeking to restore. She warned her MPs that they must always assume that whatever they do will come to public attention and to operate on that basis.

Persad-Bissessar said Manning's statements justifying his illegal actions by saying the People's National Movement government would start a programme and if it worked would then give it a "legislative complexion", was "mind-boggling". She said he was saying, in fact, "do not abide with the law... you just do anything you want".

"So whilst people are saying that the People's Partnership Government... is going too slow, it is better to be a little slow and do it right than to do it wrong and do it outside of the law.

"It is better we take some time and that is what we have been doing in putting the governance machinery into place," she said.

Saying that the people wiretapping conversations had "unbridled control over what they were listening to", the Prime Minister wondered whether the private information obtained from wiretapping was being used to blackmail people.

"What if they were using the information to pass it on to the criminal gangs and kidnappers?" she asked.

The Prime Minister said in the face of all of the wiretapping, murders became the order of the day and white-collar crime flourished during the Manning administration.

"Don't forget about Calder Hart. We can't find him anywhere."

On the recent spate of murders, she said: "Every murder is one too many... This Government has been working feverishly to tackle this problem from many angles ... and I am convinced that crime will be addressed by this administration."

She expressed Government's gratitude for the stance taken by Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley and to congratulate him for the collaborative effort which resulted in the amend- ments to the bill.

She said it is refreshing when the Government and Opposition can put their collective wisdom up front in the interest of the people of Trinidad and Tobago. She noted that this was not often done in the past.

"You have shown your skills at leadership," she said.

One of the main changes of the bill is that the Chief of Defence Staff, Commissioner of Police and Director of the Strategic Service Agency are the lawful officers to authorise the interception of private communications, not the National Security Minister.

"It was a cause for concern for all of us, placing power in the hands of politicians... this... serves to depoliticise the exercise of this very intrusive power by placing it in the hands of office-holders, not politicians," the Prime Minister said.

She said another amendment took on board the recommendation that interception should be reserved for serious criminal activity—offences that carry at least a five-year prison term.

She said on the insistence of the Opposition, another change was that the gathering of criminal intelligence via interception is no longer an offence. However, the communication intercepted for this purpose is not admissible in a court of law, she said.

Fines ranging from $250,000, for making a false statement in order to get a warrant; $500,000 if an officer fails to destroy information in circumstances prescribed by the bill; to $1 million for failure by service providers (TSTT and Digicel) to cooperate, were part of the bill.

"This is a fundamental but necessary change in policy to allow, for example, the continuous monitoring of crime hot spots, international drug trafficking, human trafficking, gang leaders, suspected terrorists and other sensitivities that may be vulnerable," Persad-Bissessar stated.

She added, "With this change, although a judicial warrant is not needed for interception being used for gathering intelligence, a citizen is protected by the fact that the intercepted communication is not admissible in a court of law."