Tuesday Feb 04, 2025
Tuesday Feb 04, 2025
Tuesday, 4 February 2025 00:47 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Intelligence gathering in Sri Lanka is no doubt necessary but must be subject to the rule of law
It is time that the Anura Kumara Dissanayake administration acts in line with the recent determinations and recommendations of the Supreme Court in the Easter Sunday attack fundamental rights case and bring the vital intelligence entity and the national security apparatus under a clearly defined Act of Parliament ensuring the protection of fundamental rights and democracy in Sri Lanka.
The seven-member bench of the Supreme Court headed by retired Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya PC in SC FR 163/2019 expressed “shock and dismay at the deplorable want of oversight and inaction…pertaining to Security, Law and Order”. The country’s highest court underscored “the urgent need to place the National Security Council on a statutory footing…” and to “revamp the security systems and intelligence structures”.
Government leaders here cleaning streets and drains, although welcome are matters best left to the local authorities! Meanwhile, ministers and parliamentarians might take a lesson from US President Donald Trump, though not the best of leaders to emulate. Trump soon after assuming for the second time, the world’s most dangerously powerful seat, pledged to “…clean out all of the corrupt actors in our (US) national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them”, he declared signing the ‘Executive Orders’ bringing them into force.
The US President declared that he will “dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy”. He said “… faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians or the left’s political enemies, which they are doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible”. Trump said further, in order “to expose the hoaxes and abuses of power that have been tearing our country apart, we will establish a truth and reconciliation commission to declassify and publish all documents on deep state spying, censorship and corruption.”
“…we will make every (state) Inspector General’s office independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee, so that they do not become the protectors of the deep state,” the president pledged! The US leader’s reference to the “deep state” is to the American security institutions including the intelligence, which analysts believe operate as a state within the state, outside the law and below the radar!
They also believe that the US military-industrial complex, a dangerous union between the US defence establishments and the agents of the American arms industry, collaterally collaborating for wars in third world countries. At least three American Presidents Dwight Eisenhower in 1961, Donald Trump in 2020 and Joe Biden in 2025 publicly stated at the end of their respective terms as President, that they failed to break the American military-industrial complex!
Intelligence gathering in Sri Lanka is no doubt necessary but must be subject to the rule of law. The so called ‘deep state’ must remain within the law and legitimised by an Act of Parliament, which the State is obliged to enact!
(The writer is a former Member of Parliament.)
