MADE IN THE USA
Ghost guns!Expert warns Jamaica to be on lookout for weapons coming in partially assembled
Unlike these weapons, ghost guns come partially assembled and do not have serial numbers.
Saturday, December 18, 2021
BY ALICIA DUNKLEY-WILLIS
Senior staff reporter
BY ALICIA DUNKLEY-WILLIS
Senior staff reporter
JAMAICA OBSERVER
dunkleywillisa@jamaicaobserver.com
A former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent has urged the Jamaican Government to create a fusion centre that would use intelligence to combat the island's crime problem, warning that the country should shore up its capabilities to detect the flow of weapons into the island as the emergence of “ghost guns” will present the State with an even bigger dilemma.
“The point is, pretty soon you won't need to import guns into Jamaica because with the advent of ghost guns you can make a 3D gun on a machine that costs less than US$400; so pretty soon this [guns for drugs and meat trade] will be something we won't even have to discuss. The problem will be how do you stop those machines from coming into making those guns and selling them,” Wilfred Rattigan, who is now an attorney-at-law, said during a virtual panel discussion on December 5 exploring how the Diaspora can assist in solving Jamaica's crime problem.
“Just recently they caught a 13-year-old in Atlanta who sold hundreds of these guns and they are untraceable. The fusion centre will certainly help with that because it's considered an emerging threat,” added Rattigan.
Ghost guns are firearms which are about 80 per cent complete and are sold online as DIY (do it yourself) kits and can be assembled at home by a buyer. However, they are untraceable as they carry no serial numbers — a crucial bit of information that law enforcers use to trace firearms from the manufacturer to the gun dealer to the original buyer.
Rattigan — who was an FBI special agent serving across the world from 1987 to 2017 in several capacities in the bureau's counter-intelligence, counter-terrorism and intelligence divisions — argued that Jamaica does not need another study to understand its crime problem. Instead, the Government should create the fusion centre, merging the various intelligence agencies which, he said, are presently operating “in silos”.
“What I am suggesting is that we need to harness all the information we have. Based on my knowledge of what's going on in the Jamaican intelligence circles, they are operating in silos. Knowledge is power, and they tend to see the picture, not in a panoramic manner, but in a myopic way. So, everyone is looking at their piece of information not realising that the full picture can be gleaned when you share information, and that's because they share by exception. They don't share by rule,” he said.
“The FBI suffered from that; not only the FBI, but US intelligence services suffered from that,” Rattigan pointed out.
“You are going to need a fusion centre, you have parts of that with MIU (Military Intelligence Unit), NIB (National Intelligence Bureau), the Major Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA) and C-TOC (Counter-Terrorism and Organised Crime Investigation Branch). The Ministry of Tourism has something called a resilience centre, all of these you can bring them under one roof and have people pipe their information in and you have the analysts who are there to assess the information and disseminate,” he explained.
“So, for example, if there is a crime problem it would be sent to this centre and they would start combining their information, combining their efforts, and in the end a product would go out that would address the issue. There is a lot more to it than that, but that is something that is woefully needed in Jamaica,” added Rattigan, who, at one point was also in charge of the FBI offices in South Africa with territorial responsibility for 16 countries.
In the meantime, he said while funding should not be an issue it will take political will to deal with the fusion centre.
“You are gonna have to have the will of your Government because it's a tall order and there's no restrictions with where you can go with it. I have seen it in operation in New York, I have participated in it in South Africa and all over the world. It requires a significant financial investment to begin with, but I don't think that's a problem because on February 2 of this year the Jamaican Government announced in Parliament that it was committed to spending $1.2 billion on the Plan Secure Jamaica Initiative, so I believe that there is enough funding there to do what I am suggesting,” Rattigan said.
Another panellist, Herb Nelson, who spent 24 years in the United States military and more than 15 years in the US intelligence community, agreed with Rattigan.
“One of the effective things that has occurred has been the advent of the C-TOC and fusion centres. All the research that has been done, all the mapping, all that we are talking about belongs in C-TOC or the fusion centre. We've proposed before, regional fusion centres — Cornwall, Middlesex, Surrey — the three counties in Jamaica,” Nelson said.
“It has been attempted before, where special review forces were brought in to intercept the guns for food, guns for drugs coming out of Haiti, and it was found out that in the six to nine months that the coast guards scanned that area, that the guns were coming through the airports and the illegal seaports,” he told the forum.
Nelson, who is the security chair for the Crime and Security Community Group with the Institute of Caribbean Studies, added: “You need giant X-ray machines at our sea ports and you need the same thing at the airports to X-ray every bit of equipment or so-called cartons filled with equipment to identify what's inside, and it should use an artificial intelligence process to identify gun parts or the parts of other known weapons.”
dunkleywillisa@jamaicaobserver.com
A former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent has urged the Jamaican Government to create a fusion centre that would use intelligence to combat the island's crime problem, warning that the country should shore up its capabilities to detect the flow of weapons into the island as the emergence of “ghost guns” will present the State with an even bigger dilemma.
“The point is, pretty soon you won't need to import guns into Jamaica because with the advent of ghost guns you can make a 3D gun on a machine that costs less than US$400; so pretty soon this [guns for drugs and meat trade] will be something we won't even have to discuss. The problem will be how do you stop those machines from coming into making those guns and selling them,” Wilfred Rattigan, who is now an attorney-at-law, said during a virtual panel discussion on December 5 exploring how the Diaspora can assist in solving Jamaica's crime problem.
“Just recently they caught a 13-year-old in Atlanta who sold hundreds of these guns and they are untraceable. The fusion centre will certainly help with that because it's considered an emerging threat,” added Rattigan.
Ghost guns are firearms which are about 80 per cent complete and are sold online as DIY (do it yourself) kits and can be assembled at home by a buyer. However, they are untraceable as they carry no serial numbers — a crucial bit of information that law enforcers use to trace firearms from the manufacturer to the gun dealer to the original buyer.
Rattigan — who was an FBI special agent serving across the world from 1987 to 2017 in several capacities in the bureau's counter-intelligence, counter-terrorism and intelligence divisions — argued that Jamaica does not need another study to understand its crime problem. Instead, the Government should create the fusion centre, merging the various intelligence agencies which, he said, are presently operating “in silos”.
“What I am suggesting is that we need to harness all the information we have. Based on my knowledge of what's going on in the Jamaican intelligence circles, they are operating in silos. Knowledge is power, and they tend to see the picture, not in a panoramic manner, but in a myopic way. So, everyone is looking at their piece of information not realising that the full picture can be gleaned when you share information, and that's because they share by exception. They don't share by rule,” he said.
“The FBI suffered from that; not only the FBI, but US intelligence services suffered from that,” Rattigan pointed out.
“You are going to need a fusion centre, you have parts of that with MIU (Military Intelligence Unit), NIB (National Intelligence Bureau), the Major Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA) and C-TOC (Counter-Terrorism and Organised Crime Investigation Branch). The Ministry of Tourism has something called a resilience centre, all of these you can bring them under one roof and have people pipe their information in and you have the analysts who are there to assess the information and disseminate,” he explained.
“So, for example, if there is a crime problem it would be sent to this centre and they would start combining their information, combining their efforts, and in the end a product would go out that would address the issue. There is a lot more to it than that, but that is something that is woefully needed in Jamaica,” added Rattigan, who, at one point was also in charge of the FBI offices in South Africa with territorial responsibility for 16 countries.
In the meantime, he said while funding should not be an issue it will take political will to deal with the fusion centre.
“You are gonna have to have the will of your Government because it's a tall order and there's no restrictions with where you can go with it. I have seen it in operation in New York, I have participated in it in South Africa and all over the world. It requires a significant financial investment to begin with, but I don't think that's a problem because on February 2 of this year the Jamaican Government announced in Parliament that it was committed to spending $1.2 billion on the Plan Secure Jamaica Initiative, so I believe that there is enough funding there to do what I am suggesting,” Rattigan said.
Another panellist, Herb Nelson, who spent 24 years in the United States military and more than 15 years in the US intelligence community, agreed with Rattigan.
“One of the effective things that has occurred has been the advent of the C-TOC and fusion centres. All the research that has been done, all the mapping, all that we are talking about belongs in C-TOC or the fusion centre. We've proposed before, regional fusion centres — Cornwall, Middlesex, Surrey — the three counties in Jamaica,” Nelson said.
“It has been attempted before, where special review forces were brought in to intercept the guns for food, guns for drugs coming out of Haiti, and it was found out that in the six to nine months that the coast guards scanned that area, that the guns were coming through the airports and the illegal seaports,” he told the forum.
Nelson, who is the security chair for the Crime and Security Community Group with the Institute of Caribbean Studies, added: “You need giant X-ray machines at our sea ports and you need the same thing at the airports to X-ray every bit of equipment or so-called cartons filled with equipment to identify what's inside, and it should use an artificial intelligence process to identify gun parts or the parts of other known weapons.”
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