READ BETWEEN THE LINES OF THE INDICTMENT; IT GOES BEYOND THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT!
READ BETWEEN THE LINES:
By Professor Gilbert Morris
Nassau, NP, The Bahamas
Remember you and I and our governments use terms just to sound good mostly. Those same terms are used by the U.S. as “policy framing mechanisms” …they trigger policy options from warnings to bans to sanctions!
If you’ve spent time around U.S. Defence Intelligence, you learn they aren’t just descriptions, but evolving “operational frames”:
1. “Third Border” - seems nebulous and familiar, but it’s a prioritisation. If it’s a border at all then there must be a policy to deal with it. I was invited to give a lecture to the MOFA staff in 2002, at which I offered: “the notion of a third border is not new. But we use it casually/conceptually, whilst the U.S. uses it strategically”. What we fail to grasp is they will build a vast policy edifice around that. I advised so long ago that we shouldn’t just use this phrase to celebrate our proximity. We should build on the strategic options proximity presents us, so that we define the meaning of this border before they define it, which isn’t likely to be in our favour. Too late!
2. ”Vast disjointed territory” - one of the things that impressed me about @Leon Williams, the engineers at BTC and Bahamasair pilots is their “whole concept of The Bahamas”. There are many nations that lack a whole concept, even central/western Canada does not enjoy this concept in respect of Quebec. That we 
are an archipelago and every Bahamian thinks every other Bahamian from Abaco to Inagua is Bahamian is quite extraordinary; especially given our enigmas of arrival. The term ‘vast disjointed territory’ is not how we see ourselves. But the manner in which the term is used in the Indictment is a “management or area control risk assessment” masquerading as a simple phrase. They even managed to make “700 islands” sound like a scheme for wickedness. In their process - as they should - they’ll add social definitional criteria to that phase giving it hard differentiations and attempt implement strategy within that frame. As such, that phase has an active generator function that could become a definitional weapon, such as:
The Bahamas is a place Bahamians can never control because it’s 700 islands, a “vast disjointed territory”!
That’s a framing statement that would be used for all future policy considerations. This is how policy is developed: name, frame, defame!
3. ”Trafficking vector” - that phrase was central to a PhD (2002) done at the LSE by Dr. P. Tosti (who is the last princess of the house of Qajar of Iran). Her father was here in Nassau with the Shah when he was deposed. (I recalled arguing against the framing of the term “transshipment point” as a euphemism for drug trafficking). That phrase “trafficking vector” replaces transshipment in a manner that cannot be euphemised, and is a generator from (2.) above, and so is already framing The Bahamas as a risk vortex on the ‘third border’ in a ‘vast disjointed territory’.
You must be aware that they have far more evidence than they are letting on: they have technologies that allow them to clone electronic devices. They’ve been listening, perhaps for years…they know who has done what.
As such, those terms did not come from the Justice Department alone. They are operative evolving definitions by which State Department and Homeland Security frames The Bahamas and that will determine policies going forward.
