As Antigua & Barbuda slips further into totalitarian
barbarism, free speech has become the next target of a government
which is not embarrassed to demonstrate its contemptuous disregard
for democratic concepts of human rights and universally established
standards of decency.
As long ago as June 1999, Douglas W. Payne of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies reported Antigua's
manipulation of the media and its abuse of the legal system in his
report into the Failings of Governance in Antigua and Barbuda.
Since that time, numerous reports to the US Congress and in the
international press have recorded a long list of adventures into
the various forms of corrupt practices, from collusion with R.
Allen Stanford's Ponzi empire to money laundering, from
expropriation of privately owned property to human trafficking. The
total lack of transparency does not, however, hide the malfeasance
from the public, as the physical results of the Government's
actions
