CASE OF… the missing Facebook page

Your Eyewitness is a die-hard mystery and whodunnit fan – but with some recent developments involving Sanction Man he gotta say – move over Sherlock Holmes!! Guyana’s got a mystery worthy of Scotland Yard – The Case of the Missing Facebook Page!! Nabbed by the Police for surveilling President Irfaan Ali’s residence with a drone – a mere stone throw from the Leonora Police Station!! – Sanction Man claims the Government deleted the WIN Facebook page after the drone and his and two colleagues’ phones were seized!!
Sounds like one of those Le Carre novels about spycraft behind the Iron Curtain in Communist East Germany, eh?? Three men…a drone…phones seized and then a Facebook page disappears – allegedly!! And of course, this being taken from the WIN playbook, the Government gets the blame!! The script practically writes itself in the secret Cabinet operation – “Comrades, we’ve seized the phones”; “Excellent…What about the drone?’ – “Grounded!!”; “And the Facebook page?” – “Gone with the wind!!”
Clearly the Government’s acquired powers even the CIA would envy – not just being able to investigate people – but to reach into cyberspace and erase Facebook pages at will!! Now as your Eyewitness said, he’s an old mystery buff – so he knows that there’s three elements necessary to pin this crime on the government – motive, opportunity and means – MOM!! Well for the motive, Sanction Man’s sisters – who runs WIN’s PR machine – say the Govt fears their 500,000 followers – even though everybody knows these are generated by bots!!
For “opportunity”, they say the police – which they equate with the government!! – has Sanction Man’s phones, Fair enough!! But there’s the not-so-small matter of HOW – the method! – the Facebook page was deleted. Cause even if Sanction Man ain’t the brightest bulb in the room – he knows the page’s Administrator’s password is needed to do the dirty!! And not being the brightest bulb, we can safely assume Sanction Man didn’t come up with the password – since he’d have used something obvious like his birthday!!
But of course, this being WIN and Sanction Man, it gotta be that Government did it – “Look at the timing!!!” And there we have WIN’s Law of Political Causation – if A happens after B, then it’s a cert that B must’ve caused it!! So, as we’ve seen before, Sanction Man gets a traffic ticket after leaving court, the magistrate ordered it!! And for sure, if his Facebook page vanishes after his phone’s seized, President Ali personally pressed the button!! But Your Eyewitness sees an even more delicious irony – Sanction man was using a drone to watch the President’s residence and now complains Pressie’s the baddie!!
It’s like being caught peeping through his neighbour’s window and then demanding an investigation into why the neighbour noticed him!!

…mutual backscratching
Your Eyewitness finds something refreshingly old-fashioned about the Yanks and us discovering the diplomatic value of mutual backscratching!! Washington wants to get rid of folks it no longer wants via its immigration system while we have a rather different challenge – an economy expanding faster than its pool of suitably skilled manpower!! So why not see whether the two problems can solve each other?
The first six—four Cubans and two Afghans—have now arrived, after being vetted as skilled and without criminal backgrounds. Furthermore, the arrangement’s temporary – with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) handling the programme and with the yanks, covering the costs – here US$10M!! If properly managed – no criminals, no troublemakers, no burden on the Guyanese taxpayer and preferably people with skills this is a win-win situation!! America gets to say it’s deporting – we get an opportunity to recruit!!
Your Eyewitness says, let’s continue saying – Send the résumés along with the deportation papers!!

…inauthenticity
In this Amerindian Heritage Month, let’s acknowledge that we’re still bowing to Euro-centric notions of “proper” by avoiding the reality that Amerindian men and women wore only woven cotton (not grass) wrapped around their waists – plus decorative tattoos and feathers!