William Marsden in The Windsor Star:

“In contrast (Lila: to the US Supreme Court in its 2012 ruling on strip-searches), the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that “strip searches are inherently humiliating and degrading for detainees regardless of the manner in which they are carried out and for this reason they cannot be carried out simply as a matter of routine policy.” The court added: “Police must establish reasonable and probable grounds justifying the strip search.”

Not so in the U.S., where police and prison guards – and in some cases even school officials – have carte blanche. This led recently to the repeated strip and cavity search of an El Paso woman who was crossing the Mexican border back into the U.S. After a police dog barked at her, police took her into a room and strip and cavity searched her, according to her lawsuit. When they found nothing, they took her to a local hospital, where she was again strip and cavity searched, forced to take laxatives and given a CT scan. Ultimately, police found nothing and released her. The hospital later sent her a bill of more than $5,000 for the procedures.

Incidents of privacy violations happen with such frequency, Americans appear to have lost their capacity even to blink. Strip searching has become regular fodder for comedians. Network TV commentators were more interested in “procedure” and claimed the outcry from India was “cultural.”

More than 60 years ago, the Nazis implemented strict procedures for the murder of more than six million Jews.

In the minds of thousands of Germans who aided and abetted in these state crimes, following procedures – or orders (it amounts to the same thing) – had the effect of absolving them of personal responsibility and, probably in many cases, guilt.

How many people in the U.S. are strip searched each year? Figures aren’t available. But consider this: according to the FBI, in 2011 there were 3,991 arrests for every 100,000 people. That means there is the potential for at least 12.8 million strip searches. That, of course, is if procedures are followed. This week’s report on the NSA’s bulk surveillance programs questioned whether the idea of “balancing” security needs against basic human rights is always a legitimate excuse. “Some safeguards are not subject to balancing at all,” the authors concluded.

“When government infringes the right of privacy, the injury spreads far beyond the particular citizens targeted to untold numbers of other Americans who may be intimidated,” the report noted, quoting the 1976 Church Committee investigation into intelligence gathering.”

Juan Cole:

“Americans think of themselves as brave rugged individualists who enjoy the liberties of an Enlightenment constitution.

In fact, they most often are timid and cowed in the face of the world’s most powerful government, which increasingly acts like a medieval tyrant.

Americans don’t seem outraged that the government is spying on them. The government has put 6 million Americans either in prison or under correctional supervision, and has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world– more than Cuba, nearly twice that of Russia, and more than 4 times that of Communist China! Only 8 percent of inmates in Federal penitentiaries are there for violent crimes. In many states, former prisoners are stripped of the right to vote. These extreme penal practices of course primarily target minorities and function as a racial control mechanism. (Famously, penalties in the US for using cocaine powder, a favorite in the white suburbs, are much less than for crack cocaine, mostly used by poor minorities.)

Not only does the US have an enormous number of people in jail but they subject arrestees (people not convicted of a crime) to routine strip and cavity searches. Women are often forced to be naked in front of the other inmates and to spread their labia for a policewoman.

[These practices have been challenged. The ninth district federal appeals court in California decades ago found LAPD routine body cavity searches unconstitutional. But last year, our Supreme Court– the same one that thinks corporations are people, that doesn’t think big money campaign donors should have to identify themselves, and thinks it is all right for traditionally discriminatory states to pass voter suppression laws against minorities– weighed in. It found constitutional routine strip searches even in minor traffic violations cases.

[Lila: And yet the Rothschild media is in an uproar over the reinstatement of an old colonial law criminalizing “sodomy”? No one has every been prosecuted under it. It merely signals that the Indian SC doesn’t want the Rothschild-funded cultural Marxist agenda of  sterile sexuality, polymorphous perversity, and baby-killing fully implemented.}

Cole:

A guy got a ticket. He paid it off, but it mistakenly stayed on his record. He bought a new house and went out with family to celebrate. He got stopped by police, who ran his registration and found the ticket. They handcuffed him in front of his family and hauled him off to six days in jail during which he was subjected to cavity searches. John Roberts thinks the whole thing perfectly reasonable. (The individual in question is an African-American).

So the strip search to which the deputy Indian consul in New York was subjected was just business as usual in the United States. She is not accused of carrying a weapon or being violent, but rather of underpaying her hired help. That charge is not frivolous, but it wouldn’t obviously call for a search in her internal organs.

While police in India sometimes mistreat prisoners, they are behaving illegally when they do so.

[Lila: At last, some intelligent discernment between a social evil that is not enshrined in policy and a totalitarian government that is,  which is what we have today.]

Cole:

To have the official policy be to humiliate people routinely is outrageous to people outside the United States, especially where it concerns a woman diplomat who functions as a symbol of the nation.

Khobragade’s father said, “It is not Devyani’s insult, but of the nation as she is representing the country. Devyani has been made a target, a scapegoat…. It is the outcome of tussle going on between the Ministry of External Affairs and US State department for the last two years…”

The way our government treats Americans is no longer inspiring to other peoples but rather it appalls them.

“India is full of mediocrities beholden to foreign jurisdictions, whether Anglophiles, Francophiles or the many merely besotted with US $$$. The sheer exhilaration of receiving an invitation to a minor event in the Delhi embassy of a European country seems to extinguish all decorum. And the thoroughly racist Americans have sensed divisions in India over Devyani’s fate, with its purchased media at pains to rationalize the venal US position on intrusive cavity searches. Its actual respect for women is minimal and all the feminist pretence a historic subterfuge that allows vile sexual exploitation in a different guise.

All of India’s moles and agents are crawling out of the woodwork, with scandalous apologetics for Uncle Sam’s propensity for sexual violence against non-white women from insubstantial countries. Presumably, these oh so, superior individuals would have no problem with a woman of their own household being subjected to what is effectively legalised rape. Is this why Delhi is vying for the title of world rape capital? India’s US lackeys refuse to accept that the only issue is the treatment meted out to Devyani. Whether the maid was underpaid and visa rules violated are a separate issue, which can be adjudged by the appropriate authorities. These unspeakable ‘Yankophiles’ are also engaged in mea culpa over poorly paid maids in all of Indian history, for which Devyani must somehow pay!

Contrary to the rubbish being purveyed by the semi-literates who now dominate the public space in India, John Kerry did not apologise, as I pointed out elsewhere. He did regret the consequences of Devyani’s treatment, which was a transparent rebuke for India’s reaction to it. Since morons, loyal to the waitress now royally misgovern the country on her behalf failed to sense John Kerry’s sophisticated command of the English language and its idiom. They also messed up over the appropriate level of retaliatory indignation, perhaps deliberately so because we have a suspect, third-rate EAM.

It was not necessary to remove the largely ceremonial barriers outside the US Delhi embassy since applying strict reciprocity on status accorded to its diplomats would have sufficed for the present. It provoked unnecessary US anger and India is now hoist by its own petard because the US has decided to make the natives crawl, which they duly will in time. The whole point is to come out ahead—not wet your pants in feigned anger for some other reason, which in this case happens to be the pending Maharashtra elections.

Why the US chose to rub India’s nose in the ground is an interesting question to which the MEA almost certainly has the answer although it is unlikely to disclose it. One thing is abundantly clear: the US is not a friend of India and has never been except in the importunate fantasies or self-serving delusions of Indian politicians and bureaucrats, whose extended families increasingly reside there permanently, the prime minister’s included. Their interests have a bigger impact on Indian behaviour towards the US than Indian national interest.

As it happens, the US ruthlessly extracts the last pound of flesh from every country. Even the utterly supine British have been given no quarter despite shared hereditary roots. The US demanded an immediate repayment of all loans from a prostrate Britain the moment WWII ended, indifferent to its parlous situation. India means nothing to the US except that it is now a pawn on the geopolitical chessboard, in their rivalry with China. And like a pawn it will be sacrificed instantly should geopolitics dictate. Indians should seek to recover a modicum of the dignity in its relations with the US that Indira Gandhi, to her eternal credit, fearlessly asserted.”

Philip Goldberg writes about the vile manner in which conversions to Christianity are effected these days by aggressive missionaries:

“Imagine you’re poor and living in a rural area. Your child gets sick. You manage to transport her to a hospital or clinic. To your relief, the condition is treatable. But the cost of treatment is not just beyond your means, it’s beyond your imagining. However, says the kindly health care worker, you can get the treatment free of charge. All you have to do is renounce the centuries-old traditions of your people and convert to a foreign religion.

Such offers are being made to desperate people in the villages and tribal areas of India.

I just returned from a month in that country, to mark the Indian publication of my book, American Veda. In the 18 cities I visited, the most frequently mentioned topic was the shady tactics of certain missionaries.

Not all of them, mind you. Not the intrepid souls who work selflessly to help the poor, the afflicted, and the illiterate, in the spirit of their savior’s exhortation to serve “the least of these.”

Such missionaries have been welcome in India for centuries, and the Hindus I spoke to are grateful for their good works. What is causing consternation and anger is a new breed of zealots, heavily financed by American fundamentalists, who seem driven to pile up numbers like door-to-door salesmen racking up commissions. Determined, fervent, and creative in pursuit of souls to save, they sound more like the snake-oil hucksters of legend than servants of Christ.

Targeting mainly the impoverished and uneducated, some of their tactics make the hospital bargain I described earlier look as reputable as ordering a book from Amazon. I was told of missionaries giving people temporary jobs in return for converting, and then threatening them with job loss — not to mention eternal damnation — if they reconvert to Hinduism. Families have apparently been torn apart because the converts are made to disassociate from the heathen.

I heard about missionaries who dress in orange robes to look like swamis. Gullible and desperate villagers are told that their traditional gods are actually corrupted versions of Christ; that the venerable saints and sages of India’s past were really Christians; that the three horizontal stripes traditionally drawn on the foreheads of Shiva devotees stand for the Holy Trinity; that the Upanishadic prayer that includes “Lead us from darkness to light” was meant as a cry for Jesus to save them.

A mother is sick? A father loses his source of income and can’t feed his family? The bus filled with youngsters suddenly “stalls” on a dangerous mountain road? Well, say the missionaries, try praying to your Hindu gods. Hmmm, imagine that: nothing changes. Well then, see what happens if you pray to Jesus. Wow! Lo and behold! The mother receives medicine. The father gets a one-day job that puts rice on the table. The bus engine starts again! If one prayer to Jesus produces miracles like those, imagine what converting will do!

I heard about people being told that their misfortune derives from their worship of Hindu deities, because the idols are really forms of the Devil; about village strongmen being paid to coerce conversions from other villagers; about women given a choice of walking a mile to haul water from their usual source or using the new well conveniently dug in front of a church. The price? Conversion, of course.

I don’t know if these egregious actions are commonplace or rarities. I do know that they are dishonorable. They’re about coercion, not spiritual conversion; extortion, not the exchange of ideas. And, if I may say so as a non-Christian, they are an affront to Jesus, whom every Hindu I’ve ever met regards as a holy man of the highest order if not an incarnation of God. I can’t help thinking that he would be as outraged by the deception being perpetrated in his name as he was about the moneylenders in the temple.

I told people in India that most American Christians would be appalled if they knew what was being done by their overly aggressive brethren. I was tempted to wait until after Christmas to test that thesis, but I decided that this season of goodwill might be the ideal time. So, what do you think, my Christian sisters and brothers? Is there some cosmic war for souls going on, in which anything goes? Or are there rules of engagement that civilized people should observe? What would Jesus say?”

It seems the Marshals arrested Ms. Khobragade and strip-searched because one of their own didn’t know how to read a visa application or a job contract correctly. So says Daniel Arshak, Devyani Khobragade’s lawyer:

“Arshack said the DS-160 form, which was prepared and submitted online, called for Khobragade’s salary, not that of the babysitter. Khobragade wrote $4,500 per month, whereas the babysitter made about $1,560 a month, the defense attorney said. The U.S. alleged the babysitter in fact made closer to $500 per month, below minimum wage, citing one of two contracts between the two women and the babysitter’s statements.

Arshack said the U.S. government also misconstrued the different payment terms in the two employment contracts.

In a contract prosecutors said Khobragade submitted as part of the visa application, the diplomat said she paid the babysitter $9.75 an hour — above minimum wage as required by law, State Department Special Agent Mark Smith said in the criminal complaint. In a second contract, the diplomat agreed to pay the babysitter 30,000 rupees a month, or approximately $573, the U.S. said, which came out to about $3.31 per hour. New York minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

Arshak said the second contract spelled out payments that were to be deducted from the babysitter’s pay and sent to her husband in New Delhi.”

Saurabh Shukla thinks that the Manhattan District Attorney is not pursuing “justice” as he claims, but a more vulgar…and common…agenda: settling racial scores with Indians:

“Significantly, the US has given asylum to countless pro-Khalistanis. It may be mentioned that American courts have been admitting law suits filed by pro-Khalistani groups against Indian leaders.

“Summons were issued to leaders like Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Union Minister Kamal Nath and even the Congress party in connection with the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

“How are the US courts concerned with a matter that did not occur within its territory?” a senior official wondered.

“The development surrounding Devyani brought back memories of Krittika Biswas, the daughter of an Indian diplomat posted at the Indian Consulate in New York, who was arrested in her school, handcuffed and forced to spend 28 hours in a detention cell for cyber-bullying in February 2011.
It was later found that another student was responsible for the crime.

“India and the US differ on the issue of immunity that should be granted to Devyani. Washington argues that she does not have immunity from arrest. But officials have pointed out a double standard, as witnessed in the case of Raymond Davis, who was arrested for the murder of two Pakistanis in Lahore in 2011. The US State Department had said Raymond cannot be arrested as he was working with the American Consulate.

“As it was later revealed, he was not even a consular employee but a contractor employed by the CIA! It is strange that Americans then argued that he had immunity while now asserting that the Indian Deputy Consul General does not have such immunity. Or, does the Vienna Convention have to interpreted in one way for Americans and in another way for Indians?” a former diplomat questioned.

Diplomats of several countries bring domestic servants from their respective countries and pay them more or less what Indian diplomats pay, but only Indians have been targeted, another official remarked.”

I wish the author had been brave enough to take the next step and fit this provocation into the larger pattern of  the Rothschild elites targeting India, its government, people, and culture.

But then that would have been anti-Semitic. And even the smallest anti-Semitic thought, as we impenitent wogs must learn, is so much worse than the worst anti-Indian action.

Instead, the Western powers and their presstitutes like to set one community against another, so long as the hidden hand stays hidden….or, at least, unmentioned.

Times of India reports that Devyani’s status as a UN advisor  at the time of the arrest means she does indeed have full immunity.

That could open several US officials to damage and liability claims for wrongful arrest.

I’d love to see what Swati Sharma and the rest of the transnational rights brigade are going to do now that their little commie psyop (I’ll elaborate with the details in another post) has fallen flat and the New York NGO (Safe Horizon) and the NY DA (Bharara)  are exposed.

I mean, spicy Vindaloo for Indian babu-neta  goose should be at least hot ketchup for Amriki babu-neta gander, no?

Time for the GOI to fund an American Aam Admi Party with its own Amriki Kejriwal to run New York’s government. Any takers?

Government sources said Khobragade was accredited advisor to the Indian mission to the UN on August 26, 2013 — to help the mission with work related to the General Assembly — and her accreditation was valid until December 31.

As sources here highlighted, the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations Article 4 Section 11A specifies “immunities from personal arrest or detention and from the seizure of their personal baggage” of all representatives of members to the United Nations.

Section 16 of the same Article specifies that the expression “Representative” shall be deemed to include all delegates, deputy delegates, advisors, technical experts and secretaries of delegations. She was accredited as advisor on August 26 and was transferred to the permanent mission after the arrest and is currently holding the position of counsellor.

Because she was attached to the permanent mission only temporarily (until December 31), the State Department was not required to issue its own identity card and it is possible that they may not have known about Khobragade’s status. Sources said this was all the more reason for the State Department to have informed India about the move to arrest Khobragade. As the diplomat was working as acting consul general, the US ought to have notified India about her arrest under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The MEA joint secretary who handles the US, Vikram Doraiswamy, was in that country on the day Khobragade was arrested, but he wasn’t informed about it.

The alacrity with which the US “evacuated” Khobragade’s domestic help Sangeeta Richard’s family, days before the diplomat’s arrest, rattled New Delhi. Bharara later justified this in a statement saying the Justice Department was “compelled” to make sure that victim, witnesses and their families “are safe and secure while cases are pending”. As the case now unravels fast, several US officials, especially those who handled Khobragade’s arrest, may have opened themselves to claims for damages and liability.

The government has also discovered that the amount of $4,500 quoted by Bharara as salary promised to Sangeeta by Khobragade was actually just a mention of the employer’s salary on the help’s visa application form.

The State Department’s own guidelines on diplomatic and consular immunity emphasize that law enforcement officials need to be sensitive because short-term official visitors from other States to the United Nations or to international conferences convened by the UN may enjoy full diplomatic immunity equivalent to that afforded diplomatic agents. “Owing to the temporary nature of their visit, such officials will normally not have the usual official identity documents recognizable in the United States. Law enforcement officials (particularly in New York) should be sensitive to the existence of this situation and always coordinate with the US authorities indicated in the list of Useful Phone Numbers if confronted with an apparent offender appearing to fall into this category’,” it states.

A diplomat’s daughter, Krittika Biswas, had last year filed a lawsuit in a NYC court seeking $1.5 million as damages for her wrongful arrest.

Last year, in blogging about the Rajat Gupta trial and the weird rulings of Judge Rakoff, I researched and found evidence of corruption related to the judicial process in New York, involving prosecutors, judges and others at the blog of Ed Manfredonia. See this piece on how Robert Morgenthau, NY DA covered up the Madoff fraud.

There was also specific information about Rakoff.

Ed Manfredonia was one of the contributors to the Deep Capture website, whose blog was instrumental in starting cases against naked short-selling an other abuses on Wall Street.

Unfortunately, Preet Bharara has shown himself more interested in the low-hanging fruit than anything else.

Today, I find that  Manfredonia’s site was hacked (in October 2012, a few months after I first began linking to it at various sites) and many articles –  relevant to my posts –  “disappeared,” although the author insists he will put them back up.

My comment on a blog on the Gupta ruling in 2012

Lila Rajiva on June 22, 2012 at 7:23 pm said:

Indian Express :

“In a new twist, it has now emerged that senior Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade enjoyed full diplomatic immunity including from personal arrest and detention on December 12 when she was taken into custody by the US authorities in a visa fraud case.

39-year-old Khobragade, who was posted as Deputy Consul General in New York, was also accredited as an “Advisor to the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations” by the UN w.e.f. 26th August 2013 and her status as an Advisor was valid until 31 December 2013. The accreditation was for the UN General Assembly 2013.

Under the “Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations”, Article 4 Section 11A specifies “Immunities from personal arrest or detention and from the seizure of their personal baggage” of all representatives of members to the UN and further the Article specifies that the expression “Representative” shall be deemed to include all Delegates, Deputy Delegates, Advisors, Technical Experts and Secretaries of delegations.

“Her arrest, therefore, on December 12th 2013 was contrary to her status on that date,” sources said. The sources also said India has taken up the matter with the US State Department.

The 1999-batch IFS officer was arrested on December 12 on charges of making false declarations in a visa application for her maid Sangeeta Richards. The diplomat was released on a USD 250,000 bond after being charged with visa fraud.

Subsequent revelations that she was strip searched and held with criminals triggered a row between the two sides with India downgrading privileges of certain category of US diplomats among other steps.

Alex Newman at the New American: (HT to LRC blog):

“What happened in Saddad is the most serious and biggest massacre of Christians in Syria in the past two years and a half,”reported Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh, the Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan of Homs and Hama, saying 45 innocent civilians, including women and children, had been martyred. Many were thrown into mass graves or wells. “Other civilians were threatened and terrorized,” he said. “Thirty were wounded and ten are still missing.”

According to the church leader, whose statement has been widely quoted by Christian sources and alternative media outlets, some 1,500 Christian families were held hostage by rebel forces and used as human shields. All of the houses in the ancient Christian village of about 15,000 people were looted, he said. The churches were desecrated and robbed, with ancient texts being taken. Businesses, schools, the hospital, the post office, and other buildings were all destroyed as well.

Photographs of the destruction were posted online. Videos of the anti-Christian terror and its aftermath appeared on YouTube. So far, however, the establishment press — especially in the United States, where the Obama administration has emerged as one of the top backers of rebel forces — has remained almost entirely silent about the escalating atrocities against embattled Christian communities in Syria.

“The brutal rampage in Saddad featured what is being described as the worst known massacre of Christians in Syria in recent times; and the second worst in the Middle East after the savage 2010 attack against Iraq’s Church of Our Lady of Salvation, the Archbishop said. “We ask if the terrorists are gone permanently, or if there is the possibility of a return for a second massacre,” he added in a statement posted by the Orthodox Church, noting that thousands of Christians were held hostage, yet the world refused to listen.”

Comment:

Such is the result of  interventionist meddling in other countries – the massacre of innocents.  But perhaps that IS the point. Meddle and enrage, bring to power the most hard-line elements, which then turn on anyone they see as “foreign” or aligned via religion with foreigners.