Bello Damagum, the Press,  and the SSS

By

Ahmed Yahaya Joe

ahyajoe@yahoo.com

The well honed security professionals who hastened the well deserved demystification of Tai Solarin and his acerbic South-West acolytes seem to have taken an early retirement. It was a thoroughly humiliated social critic turned irritant that had to face the Nation on NTA dazed at an edition of Ebony magazine allegedly containing embarrassing details he probably picked up at an Ikenne beer parlor. If the Washington Post reporters that broke the Watergate break-in story during the Nixon years had been Nigerians in this democratic dispensation they would have had some dungeon as their permanent habitation. The US documentary film-maker Michael Moore had his comeuppance when the maverick Karl Rove carefully contrived responses to the issues raised by Fahrenheit 9/11 to the American electorate's overwhelming satisfaction without the bearded director hounded into detention and his offices sealed up.

When security agencies panic as they often do due to political pressure it's normally symptomatic of the tragic failure of intelligence which include operational overestimation, underestimation, over-confidence, complacency and the inability to join the dots of snippets of information and when there is no proper Intel the agency is at the mercy of events and that is when members of the Press become the fall guys. In more civilized societies human and electronic surveillance takes precedent over brazen display of naked power and when evidence piles up agencies clinically move in with no fuss and gun-toting convoys.

George Tenet lost his job not because he was incompetent but because he became partisan. Since the WTC attacks some at least  100 attacks were repelled using electronic snooping methods and computer data-mining during his watch, he is also credited for reducing translation and breaking of codes to 12 hours before the end of 2001.On Sept.10 2001 two messages where intercepted by the CIA  Echelon supercomputers that would have changed the course of history but were not translated till Sept.12 2001 for his professionalism (that would have made Markus Wolf proud) he was to continue in office despite being first appointed to office by a Democrat President until a lame duck 43 had his State of the Union speech doctored and eventually the Greek immigrant's son " bought the bullet ".

So if in an election year our esteemed Operatives seek to stifle the freedom of the Press without the legal recourse for alleged libel then they have become accredited ruling party agents. And if it is true that any thing that annoys a Head of State is a threat to national security then shop-owner Mohammed Al Fayad who is torn between factual sequence of his son's last moments and a wild imagination must be lucky not to have abused his hospitality in a typical Third World country. Today the security world has moved on beyond SS-Waffen tactics to high-tech sensors and listening devices that can be used to monitor alleged enemies of the state.

Even if there is any shred of conspiracy linking the publishers of LeadershipNigeria, Abuja Inquirer and Malam Bello Damagun with untoward over zealousness collaborating hardcore evidence can be diligently amassed and triangulated to the minutest details without counter-productive storm-trooping as was with the nipped July 20 2005 London bombings. Intelligence communities worldwide have a near collective aversion for Judicial due process  because it compromises human sources and methods that is the more reason even James Bond heavily relies on cutting edge Technology. It is said that the ever pervading presence of "an enemy at the doorstep whether real or imagined" is crucial for masking Government ineptitute.

How else can the Chinese government be described by the gag on  Dr. Jiang Yanyong who blew the whistle on the initial 2003 SARS epidemic cover-up that would have contained the virus in the first place ? Little wonder in the Niger Delta waterside urchins have graduated from hassling oil companies for "welfare" to sea-jacking ship loads of Filipinos and setting off explosions with GSM calls and as the near future scenario becomes even more scary the Derby bowler hats of the South-South elites they unashamedly wear indoors become more silky. Is the possibility of a Nigerian version of Team B far fetched ? The esoteric Team B  was first set up during the Gerald Ford presidency which became a permanent  feature in subsequent US administrations to "second guess" the FBI and CIA  fitting a particular prognosis peculiar to the agenda of the day, recently it helped create some WMDs in Iraq and blow the cover of Mrs Joseph Wilson, these close circuit cells peopled by Straussians so-called after the Philosopher Leo Strauss who advocated conjuring "noble lies" to protect the State can no doubt in Nigeria incubate a diversionary feud with the VP to perpetuate the notion amongst others that only southern leaders are incorruptible.

The French security and intelligence services are reputed to be one of the world's best, during the 11 years De Gaulle was president they thwarted  31 major plots against his life the most dramatic fictionalized as The Day of the Jackal.That wealth of experience and the "lone gunman" controversy of the November 22 1963 Dallas assassination( perhaps the world's most sensational "suicide involuntary administered" ) helped Western outfits attain the dexterity of separating chaff and cranks from real threats to national security as such when they goof they apologize. Brandon Mayfield a Portland Oregon lawyer was mistakenly indentified and subsequently detained as a "material witness" in the plot of the Madrid bombings. The FBI publicly apologized and admitted its then short comings in matching damaged fingerprint specimens.

The October 15 2006 edition of the Nation On Sunday (page 16) had the EFCC boss Malam Ribadu calling some prominent promoters of TranscorpNigeria "gangsters" down memory lane similar corporate bandits had helped foist a former St. Petersburg mayor  V. Putin on the presidency of the Russian Federation only for Mikhail Khodorkovsky to cool his heels in jail and Boris Berezovsky scamper into premature exile after the FSB regained its patriotic calling at the end of the disastrous tenure of Boris Yeltsin.How does a criminal elite camouflage its massive commanding gains if not by creating  The Manchurian Candidate ?

The corresponding challenge to our security people is to effectively profile after the 2007 Elections certain "economic drivers and bridge-builders" as the true enemies of Nigeria and treat accordingly. These lazy and unimaginative capitalists are more adept at cornering prize Federal Government real estate and snapping up "failed public enterprises" than transforming the marketplace. When a frontline OPEC nation's business class are predominantly rent-collectors and importers of refined petroleum products they and their highly placed Government cronies present a "clear and present danger" to Nigeria rather than the journalists that eke out an existence under some Rocket Science Reforms that seem to only benefit a select few.

On May 25 1961 President John F. Kennedy vowed to his country to send men to the Moon and back by the end of the decade, two Presidents after his life on July 29 1969 "one step for man" became "a giant leap for mankind" in Nigeria security considerations would have ensured the farthest any such space program would have blasted to is Otta exactly like the highly laudable PTF.

Nigerian taxpayers have consistently been fed the crap of the detailed satellite imagery security and emergency response advantages of Nigsat 1 and  Nigsat 2 yet the Bellview and Dornier 228 crash sites were all located by peasant farmers and if it is only now that the Minister of Aviation is celebrating a partial nationwide Radar coverage the  Apartheid Air Force would have decimated the Lagos Lagoon to a Pearl Harbor destruction of course the prattler would not have known he was then reportedly marooned in rehab.

But come to think of it, the Nigerian radar could not even guard itself. Only recently we heard in the news that at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, all the radar cables and other security gadgets were "safely" cut-off by persons undetected by the radar.

So much for Nigeria and it's security.