Apparently, The Daily Beast, a popular liberal internet journal, has insinuated that Bob English, a contributor at EconomicPolicyJournal, ZeroHedge, and Russia Today, is  a Russian spy…

or linked to a Russian spy ring….

or  once formulated questions like a Russian spy …

or formulated questions that struck the writers at the Daily Beast as questions that – were they Russian spies – they might have asked..

Or…..well, The Beast isn’t too clear what exactly they’re claiming English is.

Which is very convenient, because it’s tres difficile to deny or refute  a claim you can’t really grasp head or tail of.

Still,  I’m all agog.

D’you mean to say that commenting at EPJ, I might have been rubbing shoulders with a bona-fide SVR (foreign intelligence) operative?

The following exchange was back in 2011, at the start of the Occupy Wall Street operation, when Bob’s career as a spy (sarcasm alert!) was dithering around so much it left him time to post long messages at EPJ:

• Reply
• 
  Lila RajivaOctober 18, 2011 at 9:31 AM

  @Bob English

  I think a French court recently upheld a conviction against Soros. Is there any way to leverage that in the US?

  Reply
• 
  Lila RajivaOctober 18, 2011 at 9:32 AM

  Ellen Brown is for the Toobin Tax…
  She should rethink this, with this information out there.

  Reply
• 
  Bob EnglishOctober 18, 2011 at 10:04 AM

  Nice usage of the word “leverage”, Lila. :->

  Soros is officially out of the trading business (but not really). He’s positioned himself against the big banks and has the activist state AG’s on his side. Who’s going to attack him? Holder? He has his own major problems and can’t afford it. The way to kick Soros in the shin is to take out Schneiderman–a la Spitzer. Unlikely to happen though. Wall St doesn’t have the clout or hootzpah it did in those days.

  I think Soros could come out of the global reset as The Big Winner. It’s really amazing to watch as it unfolds.”

   

And look here, the dastardly editor of EPJ, Bob Wenzel even lists me along with the alleged spymaster in an even more dastardly ring …..of anti-Krugmanites:

And there you have it, very poorly argued comments from the Krugmanites. A really sad group. I’ll match up the EPJ commenters over Krugmanites, any day. I’ll take, Bob Murphy, Bob English, Richard Dale Fitzgerald, Botie, Joe Nelson, Taylor Conant, Hans Palmstierna, Michael Labeit,, Andre Grillon, Joesph Fetz, Melvin Megawitz, Iris Mack, Kaarel Tamm, Christopher Kozlowski, Lila Rajiva, Capn Mike, Vviresh Amin, Zach Bush, Jaison De Montalegre, deft, Skip Oliva, Adam Munter, JFF and many, many more, over the Krugmanites any day

Good Lord.

The dangers I run on this blog…

Getting back to mother-ship Earth, Bob English has denied the rumor/innuendo/sliming/character-assassination  stoutly at EPJ, to wit:

For the record, I, Bob English, am not a spy for the Russian government (or any other).

Monday, Federal prosecutors levied criminal charges against Evgeny Buryakov, one of three Russians alleged to have engaged in espionage against the US.  Several media outlets reported the story, but Shane Harris and M.L. Nestel at The Daily Beast jumped through hoops in a vain attempt to link me and my former employer, RTTV America, to the conspiracy. “

Of course, I needn’t tell Mr. English that any statement beginning “I am not a spy” has about the same ring of conviction to the average ear  as “I am not a crook”.….as Richard Nixon found to his grief.

This is the nature of smearing on the web.

Unless you have a large media presence and hordes of fans or paid hacks to counter the spin, nothing you say can actually undo the damage. It’s more likely to make it worse. That’s been my own dismal experience.

I should add here that I know nothing whatsoever about Bob English (if that is his name) beyond what I read from his pen.

I have never met or spoken to this person, outside the comment section at EPJ.

For aught I know, he  is Putin’s right-hand man and took notes directly from Aldrich Ames.

But since I’ve had many more exchanges with the late Alexander Cockburn (CIA),  Gordon Duff (Military Intelligence), various Bazaar  Inc. (guess who?)  affiliates (some almost certainly working with intelligence),  various blog editors and owners  whom I shall not name (whom I suspect of being Pakistani, Indian, Russian or other intelligence operatives), at least one out-of-control CIA station chief (or near-abouts), and a host of sayanim, hasbara agents, agents provocateurs, trolls, and paid bashers who have plastered their admiration of me all over the net, I’m not about to pass out with worry.

Welcome to virtual reality.

When the entire web is the field of espionage and brain-washing (chiefly by the American, British, and Israeli governments), much of it done via reputable establishment mouth-pieces, corporations, government-funded software programs, spyware, and robots; when foreign lobbyists openly bribe members of Congress for “access”; when any venue of international diplomacy is riddled with bugs and cameras;  when confidential information is passed along in the halls of power like birthday cake; the fact that some writer somewhere echoed some suspected spy’s line of questioning strikes me as underwhelming in the extreme, even if proved to the hilt.

Unproven, it’s just another shade of yellow (belly) journalism.

I am not a purist.

There are too many disinformation agents, intelligence operatives, propagandists, and plain yarn-spinners mixed into the alternative blogs for me to restrict my reposting only to the 100 percent kosher authors.

Which is another way of saying that there isn’t too much in the blogosphere that is 100 percent kosher.

The ones that are pure as mother’s milk are often so tied into knots by ideology or by  habit that they cannot give you compelling interpretations or revealing facts.

That includes all those earnest commies and gender-maniacs who can twist any event into a preformed story-line ending in a rah-rah-rah for their home team.

Then there are the ivory-tower munchkins, too sheltered from reality to even recognize it, let alone shape it.

The ones who do have a grasp, do have the connections, and do have the inside scoop, of course, come tied to the apron-strings of intelligence.

That is, by and large, the way the world works.

So what does a blogger do?

I can be a purist and just quote myself, because I trust no one and nothing else.

Or, I can be a bit smarter and post things from all over the map, as long as the post itself can stand on its own merits.

And that is what I do, regardless of whether the author has slipped up somewhere else, thrown in a pinch of garam masala into a bland tale, regurgitated mainstream cliches, covered his a**, or otherwise been less than a perfect truth-teller.

It’s no secret that conspiracy sites like Alex Jones, Jeff Rense,  Henry Makow, Gordon Duff, many 9-11  sites, and many like them, are rife with disinformation.

Why wouldn’t they be?

Even near-mainstream figures (Seymour Hersh or Noam Chomsky, for example) are laden with disinformation.

Intelligence has a huge budget and dozens of branches, not all at the base of the tree.

It doesn’t mean that the suspect writers don’t also get some things right sometimes.

It doesn’t mean that they can’t voice convincing, powerful, passionate, real opinions.

They can and they do.

And when they do, I will repost their pieces, with suitable caveats.

If there is nothing wrong in them, I will repost  without apology.

As I said, I am not a purist.

In this or in anything else.

Brandon Turbeville at GlobalResearch.ca:

“Kyle seemed to enjoy his torture of the Iraqi people boasting about his number of kills and having a great time chasing them with remote controlled hummers as they screamed, presumably thinking it was some kind of weapon being aimed at them.

Kyle also boasted of his ability to punch cattle so hard back home that he twice broke his hand. It should be noted that, abusing animals, of course, is one indicator of a psychopath.

After his stint in the US military, Kyle moved on to more lucrative pastures – the private sphere of war profiteering. Becoming the president of Craft International, a military tactical firm working with both the US military and law enforcement, Kyle continued to benefit off the wholesale slaughter of innocent people overseas and the increased police state here at home.

War profiteering was not enough, however, as Kyle was then turned loose as propagandist by erroneously claiming that he had once been in a bar fight with Jesse Ventura, whom Kyle claimed had insinuated he was happy about the death of Navy SEALs. Kyle claimed that he became angry with Ventura and punched him in the face. Ventura had been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and painting him as a heartless criminal that rejoiced in the death of American soldiers served to denigrate both Ventura and other critics of the war. Ventura subsequently sued Kyle, but Kyle was killed before the court case was resolved. Ventura was then painted as a heartless troop-hater that sued a poor soldier’s widow. It cannot be overlooked that Ventura won the case and was awarded $1.8 million by a federal jury.

Now, with the release of American Sniper, Kyle is being portrayed as not only a victim of Ventura, but a genuine hero who exuded honor in his actions that were allegedly solely designed to protect Americans and the lives of his “brothers.”

But Kyle’s representation in the media is not only inaccurate, it is disgraceful.

Kyle was bloodthirsty. He was a murderer. And he was proud of his actions.

But Kyle has now become a symbol of “supporting the troops.” With the use of liberal blowhards like Michael Moore as the opposition, the die has been cast – you either love the troops and are a conservative or you hate them and are a liberal. In the mainstream media and, thus, in the minds of the vast majority of the American public, there is no in between and there is certainly no independent thought.

To see such a murderer glorified by the mass media is nothing new. What is truly disgusting, however, is the reaction given to those who dare criticize the new Christ of killing. The complete rejection and borderline violent reaction to anything that resembles a hesitation to rush to war in his country is both frightening and extremely dangerous.

Much of this reaction has come from blowhard reactionaries and entertainment-based commentators. Yet, many average Americans have fallen prey to the culture of militarism and pro-war propaganda to the point that American Sniper has now become akin to what the Passion of the Christ was for Christians. Americans, so overcome with their worship of militarism and so devoid of the ability to tell fact from fiction are now reportedly standing up and giving ovations when the fictional Kyle kills the “bad guy” of the movie.

It is this grouping of individuals who have been the most vocal in their support for a war based on proven lies and virtually every armed conflict that bankers, corporate interests, and the US government have been involved in as well as those in which it may become involved in  the future…

America’s priorities are entirely skewed. Years of Hollywood propaganda and oligarchical domination have seen to it that certain things are not discussed, people are separated from one another, and dialogue is always stopped short. When the United States is done being used as a battering ram for the world oligarchy, its militarism will come back to haunt it. It has no other choice. It has been the same with every empire..””

UPDATE (JAN 30)

Since I posted this, I’ve had time to go and actually watch a few videos of interviews with Chris Kyle and in all honesty I feel that the label “psychopath,” which I thought was plausible from his excerpted writing, is just not right.

Psychopaths tend to be narcissistic people. The Chris Kyle I saw on those videos came off as a modest and likeable person.

So I’m going to withdraw the label for now.

There’s something amiss here and Mr. Kyle just might not be the monster that at first glance  some of his words (and actions) might make him.

I will be posting more on this,   but for now, I will let the piece stand as it is, along with this note.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

At Alternet, via Salon, Syracuse U. student Zaid Jilani dissects the lies propagated by director Clint Eastwood in his new box-office hit, “American Sniper.”

The movie lionizes the crack  sniper Chris Kyle as a heroic, conflicted, All-American hunter of evil “rag-heads.”

The real Kyle, on the other hand, seems to have been a psychopath in love with killing and even more in love with his image as a killer:

The film American Sniper, based on the story of the late Navy Seal Chris Kyle, is a box office hit, setting records for an R-rated film released in January. Yet the film, the autobiography of the same name, and the reputation of Chris Kyle are all built on a set of half-truths, myths and outright lies that Hollywood didn’t see fit to clear up.

Here are seven lies about Chris Kyle and the story that director Clint Eastwood is telling:

1. The Film Suggests the Iraq War Was In Response To 9/11: One way to get audiences to unambiguously support Kyle’s actions in the film is to believe he’s there to avenge the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The movie cuts from Kyle watching footage of the attacks to him serving in Iraq, implying there is some link between the two.

2. The Film Invents a Terrorist Sniper Who Works For Multiple Opposing Factions: Kyle’s primary antagonist in the film is a sniper named Mustafa. Mustafa is mentioned in a single paragraph in Kyle’s book, but the movie blows him up into an ever-present figure and Syrian Olympic medal winner who fights for both Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and the Shia Madhi army.

3. The Film Portrays Chris Kyle as Tormented By His Actions: Multiple scenes in the movie portray Kyle as haunted by his service. One of the film’s earliest reviews praised it for showing the “emotional torment of so many military men and women.” But that torment is completely absent from the book the film is based on. In the book, Kyle refers to everyone he fought as “savage, despicable” evil. He writes, “I only wish I had killed more.” He also writes, “I loved what I did. I still do. If circumstances were different – if my family didn’t need me – I’d be back in a heartbeat. I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” On an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show he laughs about accidentally shooting an Iraqi insurgent. He once told a military investigator that he doesn’t “shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.”

Shailja Patel at Counterpunch:

“Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed naked, on all fours, anus presented as target, are anti-clerical snigger fodder. Unless you and half the men and boys and boy children and baby boys you know and love are named Mohammed.

Unless you and your brothers, cousins, fathers, sons, friends are at daily risk of random causeless stop-and-frisks, patdown-gropes, strip-searches, cavity-searches inside Enlightened Fortress Europe. Because they can.

Unless your grandfather Mohammed was raped and castrated by the French in their concentration camps in Algeria.

Unless your mother survives daily harassment and threats of violence by Front National thugs in her banlieue by invoking the mercy of the Prophet on the ignorant.

Unless all the naked bodies in the Abu Ghraib torture photos look like you. Naked prone men, trailing blood, dragged on leashes by grinning US soldiers. Naked men piled in flesh sculptures by thumbs-up flashing, beaming young GIs. Naked brown Mohammed buttocks branded with cigarette burns like pointillist skin canvases. Mohammeds hooded and wired, bleeding from mouth and ears and anus, as their torturers laugh and strike poses. Naked violated men who look like you, like your brother, like your father, like the man your sweet baby boy will grow up to be.

Unless you and your friends pass around testimonies like dirty stories from survivors of CIA anal rape, also known as rectal rehydration. Survivors of Guantanamo oral rape, also known as force-feeding. Because you need to testify before they happen to you. This is survival lore.

Unless your little sister came home sobbing last week and screamed she would never go back to school, the school your parents dreamed for her before she was born. It took hours of coaxing and comforting to elicit why. The bully who makes her schooldays hell found a delicious new cruelty, one that follows her beyond school like an electronic ankle tag. He put that cartoon up on the classroom whiteboard, and the teacher left it there all day as a lesson in free speech.”

Vineyard of the Saker  blogspot has a trenchant analysis of the Hebdo hoax/psyop/terror theater, which makes several points I’ve made on this blog over the years:

1. Western fundamentalism over free-speech overlooks the injuries  – very real injuries – speech can inflict.

2. Moral or psychic injuries are often worse than physical ones, as the Geneva Convention itself recognizes. Threats of torture and execution are treated as torture in and of themselves.

3.  The loss of the sense of the sacred in the West does not entail its loss anywhere else.

4. Between the West as it is constituted today, as a post-Christian, aggressively atheistic and materialistic society, and the world of Islam, there can be no contest.

Ideas (and ideals) being more powerful than mere flesh, it is not the militarily stronger of the two cultures (the West) that will prevail. It is the side whose ideas are more passionately held. That would be the Muslim world.

5. If there is to be a Clash of Civilizations, the West is unlikely to win it.

The Saker:

“Any psychologist will explain to you that not only does moral pain exist, but it can be worse then physical pain.  This is why some people confess to crimes (whether real or not) when they are told that their family members will be tortured next even though they themselves had found the internal courage not to yield to torture inflicted upon them.  An idea can hurt more then physical pain.

The Geneva conventions specifically forbid mock executions even though all they inflict is fear (a form of moral pain).

In France, it is currently illegal to even question the official version of the so-called “Holocaust” precisely because doing so would cause moral pain to the very few actual “Holocaust survivors” still alive.  This protection from moral pain even extends to the relatives and descendants of “Holocaust survivors” who were born already after the war and how never suffered from any ill-treatment themselves.

At the famous Nurenberg trial Julius Streicher was sentenced to death even though he never committed any other crime then “infecting the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism“.  He was, by the way, also viciously tortured before his execution.  His crime?  He was the founder and editor of a newspaper, Der Stürmer, a nasty racist propaganda paper whose name can be roughly translated as “The attacked” or “The stormer”.  Apparently, hate speech can even get you the death penalty in the West.

The 8th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment” especially if it “degrading to human dignity”.  Apparently, for the Founding Fathers human dignity was an extremely valuable and real thing which deserved to be protected.

Even in GITMO (hardly a bastion of civilization and human rights!) following the 2005 scandals about the desacration of the Quran, it was decided that the rules about the manipulation of the Quran (which had already existed in the past) would be strictly implemented.  So even in waterboarding GITMO insulting the Prophet is considered beyond the norms of civilized behavior.  Apparently not in Paris.

What about law defending against slander?  Are they not here to protect people from the pain resulting from somebody else’s speech? Do we not care if somebody dear to us is insulted or ridiculed?

So who are we kidding here?  Do I need to bring further examples to make my point everybody in the West already knows that caricatures like the one published by Charlie Hebdo really bring on real pain to Muslims.  We are not talking about ruffled feathers or irritation, we are talking about real moral and psychological distress here, the kind which normally western civilizational and legal norms try to protect people form.

The truth which others dare not speak but which I will spell out for you here is simple: western elites have the same attitude towards Muslims as Victoria Nuland has for the EU: f**k them!  That is the real message not only Charlie Hebdo but the entire teary circus around the Paris massacre sends to Muslims worldwide: bleep you, your religion and your Prophet, bleep you and your victims – thousands and even millions of your dead Muslims (Iraq anybody?!) are not worth 12 of our guys, and we get to limit your speech, but don’t you dare limit ours!

And if a Muslim dares to object, he is instantly reminded about “his” stonings, burkas, terrorist attacks, etc. with the inevitable punch line: Islam is in no position to give lessons to the civilized West……….

  ….Why not compare other forms of violence such as warfare or genocides.  Here, even the worst of the worst Muslims (the Ottomans) compare very favorably with the Europeans, I am sorry if I offend the latter, but that is a fact.  Though, of course, there have been plenty of examples of Muslim atrocities (by the Ottomans and the Persians in particular), but compared to what the West did to entire continents (African, North and South America) these are truly minor incidents.  Of course, folks in the West are not too knowledgeable about all this, and the comforting narrative is that Europe was civilized, a heir to the Greek and Roman civilizations (a lie – post Frankish Europe re-discovered antiquity thanks to Muslims and Jews!) whereas the Muslims are just goat herders from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula.  Comforting narrative for sure, but factually wrong.  Muslims, however, are very much aware of this history and don’t like to be looked down by the very westerners which they see as rather brutish and always bloodthirsty.

Third, there is a feature of modern western civilization which does set it apart from pretty much all others.  The quasi-total absence of the sacred.  For a modern, secular and educated person in the West there is very little which is truly sacred.  In the past, wives and mothers still used to be sacred, and telling an Italian or Spaniard “cornuto” or “hijo de puta” could get you knifed. Nowadays a French rap group proudly calls itself “Nique Ta Mère“.  Some will say this is progress, I suppose.  In the USA, the flag is sacred.  At least to some.  And, apparently, for millions of people in France – free speech, including deliberately offending free speech, is sacred.  Except when it is directed a Jews, in which case it can land you in jail.  For most Muslims, the prophets are so sacred that every time they mention their name they add “sallallahu alayhi wasallam” (peace be upon him).  Now, you don’t have to be a Muslim yourself or to approve of the Prophet to be capable of understanding that the Prophet Mohammed is truly dear and even sacred to Muslims.  The fact that there is nothing sacred left in the West does not mean that the rest of the world has slouched down to a similar degree of degeneracy or that those who hold nothing for sacred have a license to impose their lack of anything sacred or their indifference on everybody else and offend them to their (sick) heart’s content…..

One more thing: some of you have expressed outrage at the fact that Sheikh Imran Hosein said that the biggest evil the world has ever seen will rule from Jerusalem.  Clearly, the good Sheikh is a vicious anti-Semite, right?

(Sigh)

I wish that those who speak about the “Christian West” actually knew a little something of Christianity, especially of Christian eschatology.  What the Sheikh was saying is in no way different from what the Church Fathers said, including that the Antichrist would rule over the world from Jerusalem.  A 5min search on the Internet gave me these pretty decent sources:

http://biblelight.net/fathers-on-antichrist.htm
http://www.unitypublishing.com/prophecy/AntichristbySaints.htm
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus-christ.html

Islamic eschatology is, by the way, remarkably similar to the traditional Christian one.  A quick search under the term “Dajjal” yielded these sources:

http://www.islaam.org/al_mahdi/dajjaal.htm
http://islamqa.info/en/8806
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL60F84B368D3270FF

As for Sheikh Imran Hosein’s advice to the Muslims of France to leave while they can, it is fully in line with this admonition of Christ Himself who told his apostles “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.  Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.” (Matt 10:14-15).  One does not have to agree with what the Sheikh says, but that is hardly a reason to call him crazy or anti-Semitic.….

Methinks that the western leaders are both too arrogant and too ignorant to face this reality and that they think that they can outsmart the devil on their own – hence the unleash the Takfiri demon against Muslim world and the Nazi demon against the Donbass.  I say that with leaders like that the West has exactly *zero* chance to prevail.  And considering that with each passing year the western leaders become even dumber, more arrogant, more pathetic and more clueless, I see no reason to believe that the West will win the “clash of civilizations” it itself created.

Now please don’t shoot the messenger.“

From the Black Agenda Report, a reality check for the orgy of amnesiac blather coming out of Paris, where allegedly Islamicist gunmen killed alleged satirists, thereby violating the alleged sanctity of free speech in the allegedly “free”  West:

 One look at Charlie Hebdo cartoons shows that the word satire is being used very loosely. The depictions of cabinet minister Christiane Taubira as a monkey, and the kidnapped Nigerian school girls as pregnant welfare recipients make a mockery of the world satirical. Regardless of how many French politicians are skewered in its pages, it must be pointed out that Charlie Hebdo indulges in racist hate speech.

Their reputation for insult and offense was quickly forgotten and the call to unquestioningly identify with the victims was immediate. Within a few days, #Jesuischarlie was tweeted more than one million times. The propaganda onslaught created an awkward example of hypocrisy for world leaders who are always the worst killers of all.

“Regardless of how many French politicians are skewered in its pages, it must be pointed out that Charlie Hebdo indulges in racist hate speech.”

Barack Obama trotted out tired denunciations, calling the attacks “cowardly” as he claimed to stand up for the rights of a free press. These were strange words coming from a man who on seven occasions has used the discredited Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to the media.

Americans were not alone in hypocritically condemning murder. The convenient selective amnesia of the French people is as stunning as their sense of feeling more aggrieved than anyone else in the world.

France was a party to every atrocity and genocide committed by Europeans in history. France played a major role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, kidnapping approximately 1,250,000 Africans and sending them to work under barbaric conditions in their American territories.

After being forced out of Haiti by the world’s most successful slave rebellion, France then held that nation hostage under threat of re-enslavement and demanded a payment of $60 million francs which were paid from 1838 to 1947. Haiti remains poverty stricken to this day as a result.

France was at the table during the 1884 Berlin Conference which chopped Africa up into European spheres of influence. France engaged in mass slaughter again and again as it attempted to prevent colonies such as Vietnam and Algeria from gaining independence.

After NATO murdered Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, French president Nicolas Sarkozy traveled to Libya to personally gloat over the country he helped to destroy. He was joined by UK prime minister David Cameron, who was also among the killers-in-chief who arrived in Paris looking solemn. France and the UK are part of the NATO effort to destroy Syria and turn it into a chaotic ruin as they have done to Libya.

The corporate media determines who is and who isn’t a worthy victim and people with dark skin rarely make the cut. The thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza included members of the press. Seventeen journalists were killed in Gaza in 2014 alone, yet Israeli president Netanyahu was allowed to join the “unity march” in Paris as if he too were an innocent.

“France and the UK are part of the NATO effort to destroy Syria and turn it into a chaotic ruin as they have done to Libya.”

There is enough horror in the world to cause outrage but the level of outrage seems to depend on who is being treated horribly and who is carrying out the atrocity. The worst acts of terror are committed by heads of state who don’t kill seventeen people as these attackers did in Paris. They kill in the thousands yet are still treated with respect.

It doesn’t say much for the state of human advancement that killings committed by individuals still create so much more concern than those committed by governments. They get away with mass murder because the same corporate media which saturated coverage of Charlie Hebdo say little or nothing about Gaza or Libya or Somalia or Syria or Iraq or Haiti. Instead of pointing out that Barack Obama is a killer too, the pundits criticize him for not being among the sanctimonious liars who gathered in Paris. The group photo should have been a perp walk to the Hague instead of a photo opportunity for the seriously blood thirsty.

Murder is wrong when committed by individual gunmen with grudges and it is still wrong when it comes from a drone strike. A unity march should denounce human rights abuses, of which warfare is the worst. The next time 1 million gather to denounce terror, the anger should be directed at those people who carry it out the most.”

 

 

 

Just as Nobel prize-winning Pakistani women’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai seems to be a media creation, if not an outright fraud, her Indian counterpart too shows feet of clay.

IndiaFacts.co.in has the truth behind the monumental media hype of Kailash Satyarti,  the child-rights activist now being touted as an unsung hero from India:

Satyarthi’s NGO, Rugmark, later changed its name to Goodweave International and it is pertinent to note that a majority of its board members have Christian names and at least two of them are from Western churches that use the alleviation of human suffering as a cover for proselytism, a strategy that has been effectively used by Western governments to destabilize several countries. While one board member, Rev. Pharis J. Harvey, is from the United Methodist Church, another board member, Pat Zerega, is from the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

It also turns out that Tom Harkin was responsible for nominating Kailash Satyarthi for the Nobel Prize, effectively making the prize a quid pro quo for Satyarthi’s services rendered to American politicians.

Although Satyarthi was unknown in India and around the world until he was named as the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize – making the award even more questionable – Western countries seem to have decorated him with many prizes such as the Robert F. Kennedy Award, Defenders of Democracy Award, an award from the US State Department and other awards from European countries. Many of the awards he has received are known to have been used in the past as rewards for advancing the agenda of American and European governments.

Despite the US government honouring Satyarthi with awards, a Wikileaks cable acknowledges that they understand he exaggerates the number of children who are engaged in child labour in India. Others have complained that Satyarthi has made tall claims of rescuing up to 50,000 children but has been unable to provide details of the identities and whereabouts of the children when challenged to do so. Satyarthi has also been accused of staging a ‘rescue’ operation for the benefit of Dutch television cameras by using a child who acted out the part of the victim.

The West has shown that its relationship with India is in bad faith and has sent the message that working for its mercantile agenda by acting against India’s economic interests can be rewarding. It should be noted that among the five Norwegian politicians who form the panel that decides the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, two of them have a history of actively interfering in Sri Lanka and supporting the Sri Lankan terrorist group LTTE. Of the two, Gunnar Stålsett is a former bishop and served as the state secretary of the Ministry of Church Affairs and Education while Thorbjørn Jagland is a former Prime Minister and a member of the Labour Party in Norway which grew out of the Communist movement. It is time for Indians to realize that the Nobel Peace Prize is just an award given by a group of politicians from Norway who pursue their own agendas, and the process of awarding this prize too has had its share of corruption scandals.”

 

I’ve blogged several times about the dangerous collection of private information from Indian citizens, ostensibly to prevent the admittedly vast theft of government subsidies as well as to foil potential terrorists:

1. “Modi Visa-On-Arrival: Trojan Horse for Biometric ID?” November 26, 20142.

2. “Ambani, Manmohan: CIA Spying On India Helps Poor,” MBP, January 22, 20143.

3.  “South Asia increasingly under biometric surveillance,“ MBP, September 26, 20104.

4. “Government to introduce biometric ID in India,” MBP, Sept. 22, 2009.

As I noted, there are other ways in which to foil crime and terrorism:

The simplest one is to cut-back on government welfare.

It only tends toward corrupting and destroying private initiative, while perpetuating vote-bank politics.

Short of that, the use of  two-step authentication and one-use passwords can do everything that the collection of private, sensitive information is purported to do, without the privacy concerns.

An article in FirstPost.com in 2013 pooh-poohed such worries.

Another FirstPost article continued in the same vein.

The subject is the CIA-backed firm In-Q-Tel’s funding of MongoDB, the American firm contracted by the UIDA to implement Aadhar.

MongoDB is small potatoes, writes the author, and if we worry about it, what about the rest of the technology from US companies that we use without a thought?

So the idea that the CIA is covertly back dooring its way in to the UIDAI via MongoDB seems a bit premature and frankly, absurd.

And if we expect the CIA to have a tap on the personal information of Indian citizens then we might as well fear Samsung. If not for reasons that its devices simply hold more personal information of Indian users due to its market penetration, then for it’s investment in Cloudant – a cloud based mobile provider that is also partially funded by In-Q-Tel and soon to be part of the mainstream Samsung cloud network.

There are far more serious technologies foreign intelligence agencies have made that should give us cause for concern like – the TOR network, created by the US Navy and used by Bitcoin fans world over or miniature flying drones being developed by the US Air Force or the series of interconnected computer network made by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, United States Department of Defense – commonly known as “the internet”.

Well, yes.

Of course the entire Internet is the field of surveillance, first by Western intelligence, but also by other intelligence agencies, as well as by aggressive corporate marketers and criminal networks.

But it does not follow from that there should be any less concern over Aaadhar, MongoDB and the CIA.

On the contrary.

It should be of far greater concern than anything the Indian public has expressed so far.

Most of all,  the public should be concerned that the UIDA is so complacent that the public has been sold on its  scheme that it feels confident enough to publicly proclaim its ties to Western intelligence without fear of civic outrage.

OK.  So now it should be clear what was behind the carrot held before NRIs (non-resident Indians) that was supposed to make travel back to the homeland so much easier.

Here’s the cruncher, quoted directly from the Government of India website:

• Biometric details of the applicant will be mandatorily captured at Immigration on arrival in India.

So that’s the price of lightening up some paper-work.

You either supply the government with your ancestral records or be prepared for your irises to be scanned.

If you watched the movie, “I Origins,” the Indian data bank of iris scans – unique in the world – is the central focus of the American microbiologist who is hunting for the perfect match for this dead girl friend’s irises – which turn out to belong to a very young Kashmiri orphan in Delhi.

The movie’s release,  around the same time that the  biometric national ID scheme in India was launched, makes me wonder if that wasn’t somehow a PR piece to soften the image of this monstrous project, one that was rightly rejected in Britain, but is now being foisted on India:

“The United Kingdom—a non-Schengen country—contemplated introducing fingerprints voluntarily as part of abiometricpassport 2.0, but ultimately decided against it. The UK government was preparing to launch abiometricnationalidentitycard, for which it gathered fingerprints from 15,000 volunteers for the project. But the new government“didn‘tbelieveIDcardswouldwork“ and physically destroyed the pilot identity databases. However, in 2010, the UK National Policing Improvement Agency also conducted apilottest to provide police officers with digital fingerprint scanners that could remotely match individuals’ fingerprints against a central database. The outcome of this project is unknown and, when questioned, the agencyrefused to disclose the error rates that resulted from its tests.

In the Netherlands, the database storage of digital fingerprinting for travel documentswas haltedfollowing questions over the reliability of the biometric technology. The Mayor of the City of Roermond reported that21 percent offingerprints collected in the city could not be used to identify any individuals. In April 2011, the Dutch Minister of Interior, in a letter to the Dutch House of Representatives, asserted that the number of false rejections (cases in which there is a “no-hit” for a lawful holder of a travel document) is too high to warrant using fingerprints for verification and identification. Currently, only fingerprints onto Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips in ID documents are being collected.”

Add all this information to the background history of the British firm Cox & Kings, to which the India visa process has been outsourced,  and you have to concede that the British Raj may be back….and most people don’t even know it.