“Facts Before Facebook — Except When Crossfire Needs Them”

“Facts Before Facebook — Except When Crossfire Needs Them”

OP-ED BY: Staff Writer —August 2026

A response to Michael Younge’s “Crossfire” column on the Mohamed river interception

Mr. Younge  opens by demanding Guyana “pull itself back” from a culture where allegation substitutes for fact. The Board agrees completely. Which is why his own column deserves the standard he invokes.

The timing he doesn’t examine. Crossfire accepts at face value that a “routine” joint Coast Guard–Police patrol happened to be on the Demerara River at 9:45 p.m. But this publication has already documented, in real time, the government’s own stated position that maritime and Coast Guard response capacity does not extend reliably to nighttime hours — that was the explanation offered for the delayed MV Barima rescue response. 

Crossfire does not ask why a “routine” patrol was active at night, on the exact evening the Leader of the Opposition was known to be returning from a humanitarian visit to Barima survivors in Region One — a visit that was itself public and reported. We do not assert this was a directed stakeout; we do not have the evidence to say so, and neither does Crossfire have the evidence to call it routine.

The honest position is: this contradiction has not been explained, and the government owes the public that explanation before anyone, Crossfire included — gets to call the encounter self-evidently lawful.

The footage that doesn’t exist. 

Crossfire repeats the officers’ claim that a bag was thrown into the river, unable to say by whom or what it held. He does not ask the obvious next question: where is the bodycam footage? A joint-services maritime operation, ending in the arrest of a sitting Leader of the Opposition and a sitting MPs, is precisely the kind of encounter bodycam policy exists to document. None has been produced. None has even been referenced by the police, MARAD, or the government’s defenders — Crossfire included. An unproduced recording is not corroboration; it is a gap. Guyana does not resolve gaps by filling them with the officers’ word and calling that “facts before Facebook.”

The line Crossfire crosses himself. 

Crossfire devotes real estate to the conduct of MPs Odessa Primus and Natasha Smith-Lewis, reaching for a “comedian” and “devout Muslim” framing that reads less like accountability journalism and more like personal characterization of two women parliamentarians. If the standard is that public office demands restraint and seriousness, that standard applies to columnists describing MPs as much as it applies to the MPs themselves.

The admission buried in his own conclusion. 

Crossfire closes by demanding “the government must enforce the law.” Set aside the rhetoric , that sentence concedes the very thing under dispute.

In a functioning constitutional order, the Guyana Police Force and GDF Coast Guard enforce the law on their own institutional authority, not as an arm directed by the executive. 

If Crossfire believes government must be the one enforcing it, he has conceded the opposition’s underlying complaint: that this operation carries the fingerprints of political direction rather than routine policing. That is not a defense of institutional independence. It is a description of its absence.

None of this requires believing Mohamed’s account over the police’s, or vice versa. It requires believing that MARAD’s licensing finding, the unexplained overnight patrol timing, the missing bodycam footage, and the loose talk of government “directing” enforcement are all facts that belong in the same column that lectures Guyana about facts.

Mr. Younge asked the right question — accountability for everyone, regardless of power or popularity. The Board simply insists he answer it about the state as rigorously as he answers it about the Leader of the Opposition.

—The Board