More evidence in this piece that the human trafficking crisis is one created by the NGOs (backed by the CIA and the Rothschild cartel)with little purchase in reality:

“Facts, lies and statistics

One of the pre-requisites for dealing with this problem is the availability of accurate data from reliable sources. Media coverage on trafficking of women and children clearly reveals scanty and unverified data. Often, data is cited without quoting the source, and even when sources are quoted, the data is varied and contradictory. What is of more concern is that inaccurate ‘facts’ are regularly recycled in the media in the face of evidence that reliable data is scare. Discrepancy in agency reports is particularly significant, because the same report is picked up by publications across India, almost assuming the status of ‘fact’.

There are conflicting statements given out on these issues by organizations such as the UN and the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau). One such instance is about the main region from where the majority of women are trafficked. Nepal, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal are variously quoted, with these reports finding their way into the press. Another such glaring dichotomy is evident in that a Press Trust of India (PTI) report quotes Malini Bhattacharya, member of the National Commission for Women, India, calling human trafficking a “kind of international terrorism”. Yet, the same news item says that it is estimated that 90% of India‘s sex trafficking is internal. The usual stereotype in press accounts is of equating trafficking with prostitution, as evidenced by the “selling girls for prostitution” reported from various police stations in the country. Further, by mentioning ‘girls’, it is not clear if it actually means minors, or whether ‘girls’ also includes adult women. Such ambiguity does not enable an accurate assessment of the problem.

Very little data is available on the actual implementation of the anti-trafficking law, and convictions arising out of this. A rare report can be found on nepalnews.com date November 2, 2007 (‘5,000 sex workers in Valley: A study’). According to this report, “About 7% out of the total of 2,210 prisoners are serving jail terms in the Kathmandu

valley in cases related to human trafficking. Most of the imprisoned male traffickers are from Sindhupalchok, Nuwakot, Dhading and Makawanpur districts.” However, no source for this data is quoted.

Recycling unverified data

The analysis of newspaper clippings and electronic clips revealed that published data tends to make the rounds of media outlets. Even if the data is not attributed to any reliable source, it is quoted repeatedly. The following is one such example:

The Dainik Bhaskar (Hindi), New Delhi, of January 14, 2007, in a report titled ‘Deh vyapar ka karobar ek lakh karod ka’ (Flesh trade to the tune of one lakh crore) contains some interesting facts and figures:

1. After drugs and arms trafficking, trafficking in children and women is the next biggest money-spinner in the world.

2. These women and children are used in the sex trade, and the business amounts to 10 billion dollars annually.

3. India shares 1/4th of this booty.

4. In India, 1 crore women are trafficked, and 1 lakh crore rupees change hands.

5. In Mumbai, the women involved in sex trade goes up to 1 lakh.

6. In India, there are 500,000 women from Nepal and Bangladesh.

7. Every year, around 10,000 women from Nepal, and 7,000 women from Bangladesh are trafficked to India on the promise of employment and better marriage prospects.

8. Most of these are below 16 years of age.

9. The girls from Nepal are sold for Rs 2000-60,000.

10. According to the Centre for Development and Population Activities, 200 women are added to the sex trade in India everyday.

A point to note is that the source for the data for points 1 through 9is attributed to “various human rights agencies and NGOs” without naming them.

Significantly, these statistics were quoted in two news reports on major TV channels in India: The report ‘Tackling Trafficking’, aired on NDTV 24×7 on December 4, 2007, while reporting the newly launched Ujjwala scheme, quotes the Dainik Bhaskar data, but no primary source. Similarly, a report on Doordarshan on the same day (December 4, 2007) on the Ujjwala scheme, also quotes the same Dainik Bhaskar figures. Journalists must be alert to the process of recycling data without checking original sources, especially when the data thus quoted is contradictory.

Getting off the beaten track

The majority of the reports that appear in the media can be called hand-out journalism – either from official sources, press releases, or NGO publicity materials.”

And here is a detailed academic analysis: The NGO-ification of the anti-trafficking movement in the United States,” Jennifer Musto, University of California, Los Angeles.

It deals with the confusion in the way the issue is conceptualized; the extensive government funding of these so-called “non-governmental organizations”; the ambiguity and falsity in measurement and statistics churned out by the industry; and the problems for victims, tax-payers, and sovereign nations, created by the funding imperative.

Yet again, you have to turn to the conservative papers to find one dissenting voice in the rest of the media-driven babble.

Didn’t anyone learn anything from the build up to the Iraq war? Remember all the rhetoric about Iraq, Iraqi culture, their mistreatment of women? Did anyone actually bother to dissect the statistics?

Brendan O’Neill in The Telegraph does that:

“Why is the secretary general of the United Nations making solemn statements about the dreadful rape and murder of a woman in Delhi?

[Lila” Because this is an NGO manufactured crisis, to be followed by deconstruction of the unreconstructed Indian male, not before first subjecting to him a barrage of pornography and drugs, courtesy of the heroin trade (beloved of the BCCI and the CIA black ops) now routed through Goa and Kochi.]

Since when was it the job of the UN to comment on horrific crimes that are executed, not by states or armies or guerrillas, but by a handful of depraved men? I don’t remember the UN aiming stern warnings at the United Kingdom when, in 2006, the Ipswich serial killer murdered five prostitutes, or at Belgium in the late 1990s when a warped man raped and murdered five girls. Yet now, following the death of the physiotherapy intern who was gang-raped on a bus in Delhi on 13 December, the UN is telling India to get its act together and protect its women.

The reason for this double standard seems pretty clear. The Ipswich killings were not seen as being indicative of British culture in general, as a sign that British society and all those who inhabit it are rapacious and repulsive, but the Delhi gang rape is being treated as the logical end result of the allegedly depraved culture and attitudes of India and its “hyena-like” populace (as one Times writer refers to Indian men). The Delhi rape/murder is being held up, not simply as evidence that the men who carried it out are craven individuals who deserve the severest punishment, but as evidence that India itself is craven, that its hundreds of millions of men have been so warped by “macho culture” that they are one Bollywood film screening away from becoming rapists. That is why the UN is getting involved: the Delhi rape is being used to induce collective guilt in India, over everything from its morals to its mad males to its economic growth.

Almost as soon as it was announced that the still unnamed rape victim had died, Western observers rushed to condemn all of India. In The Times, Libby Purves skated on very thin ice when she decreed that “murderous, hyena-like male contempt is a norm [in India]”. Echoing those Victorian ladies who visited faraway continents and were shocked by the sexual depravity of foreign menfolk, Purves claimed that in the subcontinent “sexual harassment and assault” are looked upon as a “male birthright”, especially in Delhi, where there are “tens of thousands of newly urbanised [men], from villages still almost medieval”. Other female columnists have used the Delhi rape case to riff about the time they were propositioned or felt up by men in India, as if unwanted sexual attention and the most horrific gang rape you could imagine are just different sides of the same coin of “macho culture”; as if there is not a profound difference between experiencing a come-on from an over-eager Indian male and suffering an extreme violent assault on a bus.”

The author makes a further excellent point:

“A handful of observers have challenged the sweeping demonisation of India and its people in the wake of the Delhi rape – but strikingly they have done so on the basis that we in the West are just as rapacious as the “hyena-like” men of the subcontinent. In the past, progressives would have critiqued the heaping of collective guilt on to foreign nations on the basis that it was inhumane and inaccurate; now they critique it on the basis that rape is not just “a cultural phenomenon in India”, but is “endemic everywhere”, with verbal or violent misogyny “happening all around us”, including in civilised countries like Britain. In other words, it isn’t just Indian men who are hyenas – all men are.””

And at the Eurasia Review,  Gajanan Khergamkar makes the same point about the vastly higher rape rate in the US.

The Reformed Reader.org

“1:19 And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew {g} women [are] not as the Egyptian women; for they [are] lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them.

(g) Their disobedience in this was lawful, but their deception is evil.”

I have been trying to learn more about the Geneva Bible, the original translation into English by William Tyndale, to find out how its attitude to the state differed from that of the more familiar King James Version. The King James Version was based on the Geneva Bible, but it was authored by the very powers that had persecuted Tyndale.

Anyway, in researching the Geneva Bible,  I came across the passage I just quoted.

The passage describes how during the Egyptian captivity of the Jews,  Pharaoh was worried that the Hebrews were multiplying faster than the Egyptians and would overtake them in power.

He orders all Hebrew male children be killed.

Two  Hebrew mid-wives defy his order and deliver the children, making up a story that the Jewish women were livelier than the Egyptian women ( more animal-like) and thus gave birth even before the arrival of the mid-wives.

In this way, the Hebrew children were saved.

The Bible records that God blessed the women for this act of disobedience.

But, what the Geneva Bible adds, and the King James version doesn’t, is that while God approved of the midwives’ disobedience, he also regarded the “deception” they used as sinful.

This version of the story clarifies the Bible’s teaching on something that has been worrying me.

To what degree can we be deceptive when flouting what we consider unjust state actions?

For me, this translates into the question of how can one justly deconstruct imperial propaganda without being guilty of the kind of subversion/revolution that the Bible condemns?

Apparently, the Biblical answer is that if one challenges the state, for the challenge to be moral, it has to be done in the open.

Incidentally, this is exactly what Gandhi also taught.

In other words, you cannot hide your purpose in deconstructing or opposing what you consider unlawful authority. You can’t fly under false colors. No red herrings.

In that sense, Wikileaks, Greenwald, and many others, who, I believe, do genuinely oppose the unlawful actions of the state, are proceeding immorally  – from the point of view of this text – by trying to use subterfuge to avoid the wrath of the state.

Self-preservation seems like a rational and logical (and moral) thing to do for “natural man.” After all, human nature demands self-preservation.

Unfortunately, it’s not what Christianity seems to demand.

Christianity seems to require a degree of fool-hardiness.

I don’t know if it expects you to stand in front of tanks, but, at least here, the Bible seems to say that there is a degree of subterfuge in disobeying  authority that is unacceptable.

You’d think that healthy subterfuge would make the chances of defeating unjust laws much better.

But the Bible doesn’t say that.

It suggests instead a degree of openness, of vulnerability, in confronting something wrong. It’s as though one’s expected to convert one’s opponent, not just defeat him. …

And to convert him, you have to show him your neck…

You have to trust him in some way.

At least, that’s how it reads to me.  Even though it’s not particularly a message I want to hear….

Times of India:

“In a letter to the judge, prosecutors said there was no need for an arraignment because Khobragade had “very recently” been given diplomatic immunity status and left the United States on Thursday.

The letter said the charges will remain pending until she can be brought to court to face them, either through a waiver of immunity or her return to the US without immunity status.

“We will alert the court promptly if we learn that the defendant returns to the United States in a non-immune capacity, at which time the government will proceed to prosecute this case and prove the charges in the indictment,” the letter from the office of US attorney Preet Bharara said.

Lawyer says Devyani remains in US

The lawyer for an Indian diplomat accused of lying about how much she paid her housekeeper says she’s still in the United States, despite a prosecutor’s claim that she left.

Attorney Daniel Arshack said in a statement on Thursday that Devyani Khobragade was at her New York City apartment. Shortly after he issued the statement, a spokesman for federal prosecutors said the state department had told prosecutors that it had asked her to leave the country on Thursday afternoon.

Questions about her whereabouts arose after prosecutors announced that she’d been indicted on criminal charges of visa fraud and making false statements.”

A Malayali Christian (the same state and religion as the Devyani maid, Sangeetha Richard) is the  SAC chief trader who got nabbed by Preet Bharara in his quest to nail one of the biggest racketeers on Wall Street,  Stephen Cohen.  I have no problems with that, except that Bharara is again missing the big picture.

SAC’s Cohen hasn’t even been charged and the real racketeering between Goldman and the Fed Reserve is nowhere addressed.  Meanwhile, insider trading with expert networks was MARGINAL to the crisis of 2008, which was a crisis of cheap money compounded by off-shore and other book-cooking (manager looting of firms via account control fraud), in some of which the intelligence agencies (AIG’s Hank Greenberg who is tied to the CIA) were fully involved. Thus has the whole investigation into Wall Street been skewed.

Dealbook:

“SAC hired Mr. Martoma to help Mr. Cohen gain that edge. The son of Indian immigrants, Mr. Martoma was born Ajai Mathew Mariamdani Thomas, but changed his name in 2003, according to legal records. Raised in Merritt Island, Fla., outside Cape Canaveral, Mr. Martoma graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 1995, where he studied biomedicine, ethics and public policy. After college, Mr. Martoma worked in Washington at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

He spent a year and a half at Harvard Law School, then dropped out to earn a business degree at Stanford University. He blended his passion for medicine and a desire to work on Wall Street by pursuing a career as a stock analyst covering health care companies. After a stint at a smaller hedge fund, Sirios Capital Management in Boston, Mr. Martoma joined SAC.

He became part of a new unit, CR Intrinsic, which was set up as a research engine of SAC. CR Intrinsic (the CR stands for Cumulative Return) was led by Matthew Grossman, an ambitious young analyst who became Mr. Cohen’s right-hand man. Mr. Grossman had worked at Tiger Management, the hedge fund known for its rigorous research and longer-term investment horizon.

With a deep network of contacts in the pharmaceutical and biotech fields, Mr. Martoma made a mark at CR Intrinsic. The volatile health care stocks in which Mr. Martoma specialized had long been favorites of Mr. Cohen’s, offering the potential for big returns through betting on the outcome of events like clinical trials for promising drugs.

To bolster his knowledge, Mr. Martoma tapped into expert-network firms, which employ consultants who match money managers with industry specialists, including public company employees.

For an information-driven hedge fund like SAC, the temptation to exploit the expert-network relationship was immense, two former employees said.

Two of the former SAC employees who have admitted to insider trading said they used expert-network firms to obtain secret information about public companies. And of the roughly 70 insider trading cases that federal prosecutors in Manhattan have brought in the last three years, more than a dozen have involved expert networks.

Mr. Martoma’s case began in 2006, when the expert-network firm Gerson Lehrman Group connected him to Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan and a specialist in Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Gilman, who moonlighted as a consultant for Gerson Lehrman, helped oversee clinical trials for bapineuzumab, or bapi, a new Alzheimer’s drug being jointly developed by Elan and Wyeth.

He also brazenly leaked to Mr. Martoma secret data about the trials throughout 2008, according to the government, violating his duty to the drug companies and breaching his agreement with Gerson Lehrman not to divulge confidential information to money managers. Dr. Gilman earned $108,000 from his work for SAC, the government said.”

From EconomicPolicyJournal.com:

Overstock CEO: I May Accept Bitcoins But I Am Not Holding On To Them
I just had this illuminating twitter exchange with Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.

Patrick M. Byrne @OverstockCEO Follow

Patrick M. Byrne @OverstockCEO Follow

Brett Stevens at Amerika. org points out the fraudulent crisis of rape in India being pushed by the Western Cultural Marxist media, showing that even with the increase of violence against women in the last ten years (which has everything to do with the neo-liberal shredding of the social/cultural fabric), the statistics do not back an Indian “rape crisis”. The only thing this heroic blogger gets wrong is that India is ALREADY chock full of leftist feminists. No need to import them. In the cities the whole anti-family agenda is in full swing …..

“Right now, the Western liberal elite media is hive-minding about rape in India. See here, here, here, here, and here (CNN reporting on its own crowd-sourced report).

This fits into the modern narrative of “putting out fires”: overworked, we soldier on, but then we notice a problem so urgent that we must even break out of the normal drudgery of modern life. Rape! That’s as bad as racism… wait, nothing is as bad as racism… it might be racist, but at least one of these victims is white, so… almost as bad as racism. But still very bad.

Finding a problem like this justifies our intervention. It justifies summoning up ten thousand Slutwalks, several Public Dialogues, many collaborative art projects, thousands of investigative journalism pieces, at least a dozen public speeches, and perhaps the sale of 1.2m self-help books about rape, how to avoid it, and how feminism will save us.

And that last point is worth noting: how feminism will save us. The point is to use this justification for action as a backdoor to bring in Western liberal elite-style feminism, which requires a backdrop of Social Marxism, which in turn requires the liberal concept of progress and with a few quick steps, we can dominate this society with our neurosis too.

Cynics like myself think that the point of this expansion is power, with a side dose of “misery loves company.” Or in other words, we’re not going down alone. Everyone must join us in our maniacal quest for Ideological purity and if it destroys us, it will destroy them, and we’ll all be equal in destruction.

But how real are these claims? A helpful BBC article provides some statistics:

It says that the city of Delhi, home to 7.5 million women, recorded 585 cases of rape in 2012, compared with a total of 484 cases from the cities of Mumbai (232 cases), Calcutta (68), Chennai (94) and Bangalore (90 cases). Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta are megacities with populations of more than 10 million people.

Let’s compare that to statistics from major American cities. New York had 1,092 rapes in 2011. Los Angeles had 828 rapes in 2011. Chicago had 1,439 rapes in 2009 (the most recent year they reported statistics). Houston had 771 rapes in 2011.

In other words, Delhi probably has fewer rapes than most big American cities. Where’s the outrage? Oh, we already have feminism. Time for another Slutwalk.

Western elites spread their cancerous liberalism through jihads such as the manufactured “India rape crisis.” By ignoring statistical evidence, and instead picking a few of the inevitable crimes of a big city, the media can make it appear as if a crisis appears where none exists.

[Lila: The anti-trafficking and “modern slavery” campaign” is more of the same. It’s all political and imperialist and follows the exact script used in drumming up support to bomb Iraq to save Iraqi women from Saddam’s allegedly misogynist society. Of course, no one gave a damn that after the war, the entire society was plunged in misery, resulting in a real crisis of rape among Iraqi women – which was the subject of a series of long articles I wrote on the topic – which found very little media attention. So it goes.  Will anyone remember this? Will the media stop and say, wait a minute, we’ve been here before? No. Will any left or right-wing “controlled opposition” alternative bloggers delve into this going-on-right-now psyop instead of keeping on rehashing old psyops from twenty years ago? Nope. Because, of course, they controlled opposition sites TOE the government line, because they want their media presence and money making talks and books, so they fall silent….”

The audience for this media, naive in the belief that the news somehow reports on factual reality, will see the increasing frequency of stories and assume that there is an increasing frequency of crime, when in fact the rate of crime is lower than where they live.

However, this gives the left their true source of power, which is socialization. In every chattering circle, people can talk about rape in India as if they knew something. This embarrasses Indians, and motivates them to atone for that by importing Western-style liberalism and with it, cultural Marxism and other forms of social control.

It’s time to hold our press accountable for the vast amount of damage they do in the name of their own holy jihad of spreading the religion of liberalism to every corner of the globe.”

UPDATE: After reading through this again, my eye caught a few things.

1. Why does Padma Subrahmanyam take care to defend the UN charter on women and distinguish it from contemporary feminists, who still see themselves as in line with that charter? (see below)

2. Why does she not mention which schools in Chennai were going to introduce condoms and were instructing girls to sleep with their friends? (see below)

3.  Akhilia Sreenivasan, the business woman funding the movement, is active in the Art Of Life foundation, the movement of Sri Sri Ravishankar

You can see it mentioned here involved in co-sponsoring an interfaith vigil in remembrance of the Mumbai terrorist attack of 26/11 (notice the similarity to 9/11)

The site notes that the foundation is affiliated with the UN:

“The Art of Living Foundation is an international non-profit educational and humanitarian organization that works in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. Its educational and self-development programs offer powerful tools to eliminate stress and foster a sense of well-being.”

I must admit this makes me feel that the “Chennai Declaration” is co-opted from above. It’s a way of creating an anti-Western feminist Indian movement that is still within the confines of the socialist UN agenda.

ORIGINAL POST

The great classical Indian dance Padma Subramanyam has declared war on modern feminism, taking for her starting point the introduction of condoms into Chennai schools. So glad to see India’s great classical artists have not drunk the kool-aid that some of her literary lions have (like Vikram Seth and Arundhathi Roy).

Declaration’ at January 23 convention
The Pioneer /Chennai

Traumatised and shocked by the action of certain schools in Chennai installing condom vending machines on the school premises and the authorities counselling parents that “there was nothing wrong in their daughters having sex with friends,” a group of eminent women have come together to fight for women’s respect.

The New Year resolution for women would be in the form of Chennai Declaration which is expected to bury the failed and outdated women’s liberation movement. The new demand is respect for womanhood.

“The women’s liberation movement of the late 60s has been found to be a total failure and the reason behind the ever growing attacks on women. Concept of feminism itself has changed drastically from what it was in the early 1970s. What the women need today is respect. If women are respected there will be no rape, harassment and molestation,” said Dr Padma Subrahmanyam, the legendary danseuse and scholar.

To give a new thrust and direction to the fights against injustice meted out to women all over the world, Dr Subrahmanyam and a group of renowned women who have excelled in their fields of work launched a collective on Monday. Named Swami Vivekananda 150 Women’s Initiative (SV150 WI), the movement will create awareness and sustain the spirit of Indian womanhood.

The SV 150 WI has convened a massive convention at Chennai on January 23, 2014 where the participants will bury the women’s lib movement once and for ever and launch a new initiative with the objective of making the world respect women.

“When you come across news that school managements have installed condom vending machines in the school and advice parents of girl students that there was nothing wrong in their daughters having sex with their friends, it is time for us to intervene. Otherwise this country will end up in ruins,” said the eminent danseuse. She declined to reveal the names of the schools.

She said Swami Vivekananda had great confidence and trust in Indian women. “The 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda is being observed all over the world. We feel this is the right occasion to launch such an initiative. The kind of feminism being practiced all over the world right now is the root cause of all our problems,” said the eminent danseuse.

She pointed out that some women in India aped the western concept of individualism and modernity. “For them modernity and individualism mean total individual freedom without any concern for family or human values. In the United States, this has led to breaking down of more than 60 per cent of the marriages. More than 50 per cent of the second marriages break down. This is as per the data of the US Government itself and is described as the major reason for the economic ruin of that country,” said Dr Subrahmanyam.

She said modernity and individualism has been defined by the United Nations Charter. “But what we see today in the name of modernity and individualism has no resemblance to what is mentioned in the UN charter,” she said.

More than 1,000 women are taking part in the January 23 convention and is expected to come out with the Chennai Declaration, which DR Subrahmanian and women like her feel would set the agenda for women for the next century. Instead of burning brassieres, the Indian women would set fire to the western concept of feminism and ideology of women lib and ask the world to respect womanhood.

Akhila Srinivasan, corporate honcho, who represents an equal mix of modernity and tradition and one of the moving spirits of the WI said women alone could mould the destiny of the nation, people and families. Well, it is time for Simone de Beauvoir, icon of the western world, who declared that traditional family represses women sexuality, to move over and usher in the Indian woman!”

Via LRC blog, Nick Turse on Special Operations Command Center (SOCOM), the military’s own black operations (covert operations) center and its manipulation of academia, media, and aid organizations:

“One unsung SOCOM partner is U.S. AID, the government agency devoted to providing civilian foreign aid to countries around the world whose mandate includes the protection of human rights, the prevention of armed conflicts, the provision of humanitarian assistance, and the fostering of “good will abroad.”  At a July 2013 conference, Beth Cole, the director of the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation at U.S. AID, explained just how her agency was now quietly aiding the military’s secret military.

“In Yemen, for example, our mission director has SVTCs [secure video teleconferences] with SOCOM personnel on a regular basis now. That didn’t occur two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, five years ago,” Cole said, according to a transcript of the event.  But that was only the start.  “My office at U.S. AID supports SOF pre-deployment training in preparation for missions throughout the globe… I’m proud that my office and U.S. AID have been providing training support to several hundred Army, Navy, and Marine Special Operations personnel who have been regularly deploying to Afghanistan, and we will continue to do that.”

Cole noted that, in Afghanistan, U.S. AID personnel were sometimes working hand-in-hand on the Village Stability Operation initiative with Special Ops forces.  In certain areas, she said, “we can dual-hat some of our field program officers as LNOs [liaison officers] in those Joint Special Operations task forces and be able to execute the development work that we need to do alongside of the Special Operations Forces.”  She even suggested taking a close look at whether this melding of her civilian agency and special ops might prove to be a model for operations elsewhere in the world.

Cole also mentioned that her office would be training “a senior person” working for McRaven, the man about to “head the SOF element Lebanon” — possibly a reference to the shadowy SOC FWD Lebanon.  U.S. AID would, she said, serve as a facilitator in that country, making “sure that he has those relationships that he needs to be able to deal with what is a very, very, very serious problem for our government and for the people of that region.”

U.S. AID is also serving as a facilitator closer to home.  Cole noted that her agency was sending advisors to SOCOM headquarters in Florida and had “arranged meetings for [special operators] with experts, done roundtables for them, immersed them in the environment that we understand before they go out to the mission area and connect them with people on the ground.”  All of this points to another emerging trend: SOCOM’s invasion of the civilian sphere.

In remarks before the House Armed Services Committee, Admiral McRaven noted that his Washington operation, the SOCOM NCR, “conducts outreach to academia, non-governmental organizations, industry, and other private sector organizations to get their perspective on complex issues affecting SOF.”  Speaking at the Wilson Center, he was even more blunt: “[W]e also have liaison officers with industry and with academia… We put some of our best and brightest in some of the academic institutions so we can understand what academia is thinking about.”

 

Not content with a global presence in the physical world, SOCOM has also taken to cyberspace where it operates the Trans Regional Web Initiative, a network of 10 propaganda websites that are run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate news outlets.  These shadowy sites — including KhabarSouthAsia.com, Magharebia which targets North Africa, an effort aimed at the Middle East known as Al-Shorfa.com, and another targeting Latin America called Infosurhoy.com — state only in fine print that they are “sponsored by” the U.S. military.”

The USG’s unconscionable behavior in the Khobragade case (compounded by 24/7 propaganda on behalf of the despicable Bharara) continues, but some voices of sanity still exist.

Here’s a good piece in the Asian age:

“The concern for the poor that the Americans, and some Indians with colonised minds, are displaying seems to spring from guilt. It is visible in the children of wealthy elites who want to expiate their guilt with lip service to equality, while having benefited all their lives from the systemic inequalities that their ancestors bequeathed to the world, and them. The spectacle of “lords” and Brahmin men with American accents claiming to represent subaltern positions, while Dalit mobs of the Republican Party of India in Mumbai raged against the stance they supported, was ridiculous.
If you really want poor people from India or anywhere to earn the fancy wages of Sangeeta, the maid ($4,500 is `2,79,000), then ask for America to open its doors and hearts wide to immigrants from all classes of society. At present, it only welcomes investors with more than $1 million to invest in the US, those with “superior specialist skills”, and similar. The chances of Sangeeta ever getting a visa by herself to even set foot in America would be negligible.
People of her class see the real face of American immigration policy towards poor people when they try to emigrate. They often migrate via Mexico, paying enormous sums to human smugglers in the hopes of better lives in the US. They are greeted with fences 21 feet high, guard dogs, and heavily armed border patrols.
Why not change the immigration laws so that women like Sangeeta can migrate without having to implicate their employers, perhaps falsely, in order to obtain visas for themselves and their families as victims of human trafficking?
Obviously, that will never happen.”