– labels organization capricious, political
A FORMER aide to U.S Democratic Senator, Paul Sarbanes (ret.) of Maryland, yesterday described reports coming out of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) as “often dubious” and “generally unable to stand up to scrutiny.” Called upon to give an objective analysis of an article published by COHA, in which the non-governmental organization labels Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo as a leader who, whenever he demits office, will have left behind a “tattered legacy,” the aide blames the organization’s predisposition on its seeming alignment “with political ambitions.”
Paul A. Bonner, now a research fellow in Washington DC, says the U.S senate pays very little or no attention to anything that has the name COHA attached to it, and that further, there is not a single member in the senate that endorses the organization, as it is often considered a political lobbying tool paid by foreign opposition forces to gain attention in Washington for the benefit of their political movement outside of the United States, primarily around election-time.
While admitting that he knows nothing much about Guyana’s political climate, Bonner reiterated that his research and inquiries over the past few hours have proven contrary to the COHA report, and stressed that the Guyana government should be mindful of the fact that COHA is an organization that is usually driven by ulterior motives.
“Simply put, the Guyanese Head-of-State should let anything COHA says comes through his right ear and leave through the left,” Bonner said, adding that it would be “dim-witted” of the Guyana government to pay any mind to an insignificant political lobbying body such as COHA.
Most of the organisation’s reports, he contended, are fly-by-night articles written by persons just out of school, in school, or are interns, and haven’t got a single clue about the country they are asked to do a report on.
In Guyana’s case, he says, the purported main writer of the article, one Robert Cavooris, is a young inexperienced student attending the American University in Washington DC. Cavooris, Bonner said, “is a little lad who is in university just about twelve months now, studying international relations,” and who he is certain may not have had a clue as to what his name was really appended to.
The other name associated with the publication, one Elcin Chang, he feels, may have been a pseudonym used to add credit to the article.
Though efforts by a correspondent for this newspaper in Washington D.C to reach Cavooris prior to the publication of this article have proven futile, a woman who identified herself as a relative of his has promised to have him return the call.
Previous publications by COHA on other countries such as Venezuela and Mexico, Bonner said, later turned out to be fictitious and penned by ghost writers after the Government of those countries launched their own investigations.
The Guyana government has not yet expressed any intention to investigate the report, as a government source suggested that it might just turn out to be a waste of taxpayers’ dollars to investigate a story that is clearly not the fact.