In Camera – Diaries of a Documentary Cameraman | 79 min. | 2010 CAMERA & DIRECTION: Ranjan Palit EDITING & SOUND DESIGN: Tarun Bhartiya SOUND RECORDING: Ranjan Palit, Surjo Deb SOUND MIX: Julius L Basaiawmoit
The streaming begins and what you witness through Ranjan Palit’s lens is never a linear story. In Camera – Diaries of a Documentary Cameraman places before a viewer, collages—haunting landscapes and lives—from the fault-lines of Indian democracy. What makes Ranjan appear extremely intimate to me is his perseverance—permeating images from Bhiwandi and Bombay to Kashmir and Shillong—coupled with harsh reflectiveness. The terrains are the least homogenous: labour, human displacement, military impunity, poetry, performance, memory …
Throughout the film, there are apprehensions, which appear to be conscious, honest and poignant: when does one stop filming? Does a camera insulate one from reality? Who are you when you record an act of dissent? How closely can one, being an outsider, comprehend resistance? How does the resistance conceive a storyteller—who is all but transient?
In Camera leaves one with a galaxy of agitations. Ranjan is continually striving to comprehend the world around him, without ceasing to doubt his own repertoire. At one level he points: Where does film end and reality begin? Or are they even distinct at all? Towards the end he also asks: Has time now come to tell my story? The collages containing the sharp vagaries are companions to his questions—while they do not offer definitive conclusions at every point, appear to be indispensable to the flux of the interrogation.
The revelations offered are the most luminous too. For Ranjan, Kashmir makes documentary stranger than fiction; there remains a chasm, between the narrator and an affected person, which renders most reportage insufficient; and a very pensive and personal one: looking through a camera is more sincere than looking away. These and many others, along with the never ending anxieties, compile a tableau of explorations, amplifications, conversations—confronting the filmmaker and the world.
I am perhaps doing an unpardonable disservice by describing Ranjan’s work to somebody who has not seen it. Some narrations, and their auteurs, are almost impossible to sketch with precision, and In Camera could offer a distinct glance towards Ranjan’s oeuvre and his ways of seeing. Constancies and uniformities inevitably present in a description only amounts to digressions and betrayals; therefore the only way of reading Ranjan is directly through his films. I cannot review Ranjan Palit: he lives—to quote Arundhati Roy—between hope and impatience.
The first time I heard about Guda Anjanna (1 November 1955 – 21 June 2016), through my classmate and Anjanna’s nephew (brother’s son) Guda Rajendar, in 1989, when I was studying in 8th class. Anjanna belongs to Lingapur village of Dandepally Mandal in Adilabad District. At the time, I was studying in the Dandepally social welfare hostel, and Anjanna’s nephew Guda Rajendar was my classmate. Anjanna had two more well-educated brothers I knew at the time. Anjanna’s elder brother, Dr Guda Chandraiah (MBBS), was a Dalit leader and activist too. Later, after I left hostel, I heard that Dr Chandraiah died at an young age. Guda Shanthaiah, Guda Anjanna's younger brother was also a poet and songwriter; he too died at a very young age. I saw all of the three brothers of Guda family in my student life. They were all inspiring people.
The context of hearing about Guda Anjanna's name through his nephew was because our hostel in Dandepally was the centre for PDSU (Progressive Democratic Student Union) politics. The PDSU hostel committee was so strong that the same hostel committee was declared as the Adilabad district committee back then. We were introduced to revolutionary literature and songs. As usual, we used to listen to the very popular song “Vooru Manadira” – this song became so famous that there will be no village in Telangana region without some working people singing it. Here is a translation of the opening lines of the song*:
The village is ours! This wada is ours! The village is ours! Every job needs us! The hammer is ours! The knife is ours, The crowbar is ours! The hoe is ours, The cart is ours! The bullocks are ours! Why do we need the Dora! Why do we need his tyranny over us, why do we need the Dora! Why do we need his tyranny?
This song has now become famous throughout the country and has been translated into several languages. According to Mallepally Laxmaiah, this song was the signature song for the Naxalite movement. When some activists were singing this song, Guda Anjanna’s nephew Guda Rajendar informed me that this song was written by his father’s brother (uncle). Guda Anjanna was working as a pharmacist in the Utnoor government hospital then. I heard from Rajendar later that Guda Anjanna had shifted to Hyderabad on the suggestion of cine director, Narayana Murthy.
In 2000, I also shifted to Hyderabad and joined law. I saw Guda Anjanna in several meetings of people’s organisations, and I had a long meeting with him, in his house in Ramnagar, when I went there to meet Rajendar, who had come to see him. This was in 2004. I strongly remember this meeting and conversations with Anjanna because, he gave a completely different and path breaking outlook on the then existing Telangana movement. It was the time when Telangana mainstream political movement was in peak. Anjanna explained that the mainstream dominant politicians have vested interests in Telangana movement and he explained this very interestingly through a short story.
Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) joined the separate Telangana movement in 2002. Before his joining, the separate Telangana movement was headed and propagated by only left wing intellectuals, and their front organisations. With KCR joining, the separate Telangana movement and the formation of the Telangana Rastra Samithi (TRS), a mainstream political party, many feudal dominant caste leaders started joining the Telangana movement and the TRS party. There were lots of debates and criticisms against the joining of feudal leaders in the movement, since there would always be the risk of the movement becoming status quoist for the benefit of the feudal Reddys, Komati, Velama and Brahman and upper Shudra castes in Telangana. Now it is realized that with the formation of a separate Telangana state, it has resulted in the transfer of state power to the Telangana dominant castes, and atrocities on Dalits have also drastically increased since then.
Post-independence, the first generation of feudal landlords became MLAs, MPs and leaders in all political parties, be it Congress, the Communist parties, BJP, or regional parties such as TDP (Telugu Desham Party) and TRS (Telangana Rastra Samithi). Many of the first generation feudal landlords also became IAS, IPS, lawyers, doctors, engineers and other professionals. Except for those who were in politics, the others left villages due to the Naxalite movement and settled in cities such as Hyderabad, or migrated to western countries such as America, Canada, Australia and UK with the advantage of modern education. The second generation also became doctors, engineers and other professionals apart from being in politics. The third generation of feudal castes are not much aware about Telangana villages because most of them were born and brought up in either foreign countries or in metro cities; they are mostly into software and other modern professions. One needs to be aware of the cultural differences between societies in foreign countries and feudal societies such as Telangana.
The first generation of feudal families enjoyed the exploitation of Dalits and marginalised communities in Telangana villages with the practice of Vetti, bonded labour and Jogini. Those were the times when no one from the marginalised communities dared to wear shoes and rumal (the traditional headdress of man) before the feudal landlords. When the feudal landlord entered the village, the people of marginalised communities were required to remove their shoes and their rumal. They were compelled to stand and fold their hands. In western societies, the situation is completely different. In this context, Guda Anjanna explained the attitude of the Telangana feudal dominant castes and their participation in the separate Telangana movement in a short story of three generations of a feudal family of Telangana.
Anjanna spoke to me, "A first generation man (grandfather) from a feudal family from Telangana visited his grandson in America. The grandson took him around in America in an expensive car, and they partook of all the modern facilities there. One fine day, the grandson told his grandfather, 'you are lucky to have your grandson, me, in America; I have shown you many things here in addition to going around in a big car and living in a big bungalow with all modern facilities, be proud of this'. The boy repeatedly mentioned this.
The old man got fed up with the comments of his grandson, and said 'I enjoyed more when I was in my village than in America. Have you seen anyone folding their hands in respect for us, or anyone touching your feet here, or standing up on your arrival, or removing their shoes and rumal in respect of you in your presence? No, but it was different in my childhood in our villages. Whenever we entered the village, everyone used to stand up, remove their shoes and rumal, and fold their hands in respect. We used to get whatever we wanted free of cost (referring to Vetti, bonded labour and Jogini system) and that is our background. Now, who cares about us here in America? Who recognises us here? My life was much better in a Telangana village in comparison to your life in America”.
When the grandson expressed his desire to visit a Telangana village, the grandfather replied, "we can visit the village, but those golden years when all the people of the village used to come and work for us free of cost and serve us like our slaves are gone now because of the Naxalite movements. However, the situation has improved after the formation of the Telangana Rastra Samithi; now-a-days when we go back to our villages, people come and pay respect to us”. They both visited their ancestral village, the grandfather in this story is a political leader who was fighting for a separate Telangana. Just as the grandfather had said, all the village people arranged welcome banners; people came to their bungalow and paid respect while standing with folded hands, some of the village lower caste people also touched their feet.
The grandson felt happy to see this, and said, "It is nice that a whole village pays attention to us". The grandfather replied, "It was much better during my childhood days". The grandson asked, "Is it possible for those old days to return?”, to which the grandfather replied "why not, if we get a separate Telangana, we will get our old pride and golden days'.
The above story was used by some of the activists to make fun, but that is the truth about Telangana. Feudalism has come back after the formation of a separate Telangana state and Telangana NRIs want to come back to their villages. This story also tells us about the kind of politics that was played in the Telangana region in the name of a separate Telangana movement and which eventually led to the formation of the Telangana state. This story was told by Anjanna in 2004 when the Telangana political movement was at its peak.
Anjanna had foreseen the Telangana politics and imagined the public life. He was a great intellectual and artist apart from writing thousands of songs and stories, I remember one of his stories published in a small magazine that was run by Skybaba few years ago. The story was title “Beeripuri”, and in it he explained the life of a Dalit orphan boy, and how he was branded as a mad man by the village, I read that story a decade ago but I still remember the way he depicted Telangana Dalit life. Many of his works are unpublished, many of his songs published without his name. This note is my sincere tribute to this great man in my personal capacity. I hope his literary friends will write more about his literature that I am not capable to write now. He will be remembered for several generations and his songs will keep inspiring us.
The views expressed in this this article are the author's own and do not reflect the opinion of any organisation he's associated with.
*Please find the full translation here, and some other songs here. ~~~
Sadgati is a Hindi TV film directed by Satyajit Ray and released in 1981. It is an adaptation of Munshi Premchand’s short story of the same title published in 1931. The film explores the cruel and ruthless nature of the exploitative caste system in the South Asian subcontinent with cinematic precision. Unfortunately, both the story and the film remain relevant in 2016 as news of a Dalit college girl being forced into consuming a toilet cleaner makes headlines.
It is not the worst manifestations of physical violence meted out to lower castes, but the everyday exploitation they face, which is cinematically represented. The issue of caste is also linked to the superstitious practices of Hinduism in the film.
The film revolves around Dukhi, a Dalit who wants to fix an auspicious date for his daughter’s engagement according to Hindu customs. Despite being ill he goes to the house of the village Pandit with a large amount of fodder as gift, which he carries on his head and requests him to fix the date. The Brahmin priest, seizing the opportunity of getting free work done orders Dukhi to clean the terrace. After Dukhi comes back with the hope that the priest will tend to his services now, is again sent to clean the stable and also asked to chop a huge block of wood.
Having not had anything since morning and being ill, Dukhi is exhausted and unable to cut the wood. He sleeps off due to exhaustion. When the Pandit finds him napping, he wakes him up and asks him to get on with his work. Despite Dukhi pointing out that he had not had anything to eat since morning, the Pandit asks him to continue and have food once he gets back home. What follows after this is tragic.
The strength of the cinematic adaptation does not lie solely in its storytelling, but also in its precision to detail while exploring something as complex as caste. Dukhi refers to the Pandit as Ji even while conversing with his wife, showing how he respects the man responsible for exploiting him.
Scene where a drained Dukhi is labouring free for the Pandit should sensitise anyone who hires workers in the country at dirt cheap prices, or in many cases for free. Or where the Pandit while conversing with his wife tells her that they should be glad that the work is being done for free, will convince one that the only way the lower castes can get salvation, is through their own political struggle.
How caste and Hindu superstitions affect everyone is beautifully crafted visually. Dukhi’s wife, his daughter, the Pandit’s wife and other characters make their presence felt and caste is shown as a complex phenomenon where the oppressor is insensitive and the oppressed has internalised inhumane hierarchies.
It’s a brutal indictment of a society which is not only ravaged by class but also caste. It is not the need for money which makes Dukhi work for free. It is a strong belief in superstition. The film makes a strong political point about caste, which is not just seen as a superstructure of economic inequalities, but as an exploitative tool in itself tied closely with religion. This film should especially be seen by those individual who either tend to ignore or downplay caste. And most definitely by the ones who want to bring an end to caste based reservations in the country.
Family courts in the prosperous, southern state of Kerala ruled on just over five divorces every hour in 2014–130 every day–more than any of the 12 Indian states that compile such data, according to government data.
Although India does not appear on the world divorce statistics records, a global divorce repository (compiled by the University of Illinois, USA), because it lacks nationwide data, the volume of divorces handled by courts in Kerala and the other 11 states indicates that couples are more willing than ever to separate than stay–as tradition still demands–in bad marriages.
The number of divorces appears large in a nation where courts tend to be conservative in granting legal separation, but they may be a fraction of failing or failed marriages because many Indian women stay married despite abuse, as we later explain.
The data–in this March 2015 government reply to the Lok Sabha, Parliament’s lower house–are compiled from family courts in the 12 states and are inadequate to compare India’s divorce rates clearly with other countries or across states. The government does not maintain divorce statistics.
It is hard to estimate the divorce rate–calculated against the number of married people, not the general population, as is done with, say, with crime and accident rates–because India does not maintain any divorce data. Most use the term “divorce rate” loosely in India, since the data do not reveal divorces, only cases before the courts.
What is clear is that divorce cases before family courts are steadily growing.
However you look at it, Kerala has most divorces
For the year 2014-15, almost every state reported more divorces awaiting court verdicts than were settled in 2014, according to the government’s reply to Parliament.
However, none of the other 11 states–five of which are more populous–had more divorce cases than Kerala: 47,525 cases in 2014.
Maharashtra witnessed half as many divorces as Kerala, which has a population a third the size of Maharashtra.
As we cautioned, it is hard to say why divorces are growing after analysing data from 12 of 36 states and union territories.
We did find that three of the top five states reporting divorces–Kerala, Maharashtra and Karnataka–have more literate women than the all-India average; women’s participation in the labour force in these states is also slightly higher than the all-India rate.
The correlations are not always evident.
For instance, female literacy in Madhya Pradesh–number three in divorce cases–is 6 percentage points lower than the national average and female labour force participation rate is equal to the national average.
In Haryana–number five in divorce cases–the female literacy rate is equal to the national average of 65%, but female workforce participation is 12 percentage points lower than the Indian average. The state is among the top five states for divorce cases because data are only from 12 states–Haryana had 80% fewer divorce cases than Kerala.
Women in India often remain in abusive marriages for a variety of reasons, including a lack of economic independence, poor knowledge of legal rights and family pressure.
Six of 10 men surveyed in India had admitted perpetrating violence against their wives at some point, IndiaSpendreported in November 2014, quoting an extensive study by the United Nations Population Fund and the International Center for Research on Women.
Clashing egos and differences in expectations are among reasons for divorces in cities, according to media reportage.
The number of people displaced from their homes due to conflict and persecution last year exceeded 60 million for the first time in United Nations history, a tally greater than the population of the United Kingdom, or of Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined, says a new report released on 20 June 2016 on World Refugee Day.
In Yemen, internally displaced children stand outside their family tent after the family fled their home in Saada province and found refuge in Darwin camp, in the northern province of Amran. Photo: UNHCR/Yahya Arhab
The Global Trends 2015 compiled by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) notes that 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, an increase of more than 5 million from 59.5 million a year earlier.
The tally comprises 21.3 million refugees, 3.2 million asylum seekers, and 40.8 million people internally displaced within their own countries.
Measured against the world’s population of 7.4 billion people, one in every 113 people globally is now either a refugee, an asylum-seeker or internally displaced – putting them at a level of risk for which UNHCR knows no precedent.
On average, 24 people were forced to flee each minute in 2015, four times more than a decade earlier, when six people fled every 60 seconds.
Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia produce half the world’s refugees, at 4.9 million, 2.7 million and 1.1 million, respectively.
Colombia had the largest numbers of internally displaced people (IDPs), at 6.9 million, followed by Syria’s 6.6 million and Iraq’s 4.4 million.
While the spotlight last year was on Europe’s challenge to manage more than one million refugees and migrants who arrived via the Mediterranean, the report shows that the vast majority of the world’s refugees were in developing countries in the global south.
In all, 86 per cent of the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate in 2015 were in low- and middle-income countries close to situations of conflict.
Global Trends – Forced Displacements in 2015; Trends in a glance – 2015 in review
Worldwide, Turkey was the largest host country, with 2.5 million refugees. In terms of the refugee-to-population ratio, Lebanon has the highest proportion, with nearly one refugee for every five citizens. Distressingly, children made up an astonishing 51 per cent of the world’s refugees in 2015, with many separated from their parents or travelling alone, UNHCR said.
“Our responses to refugees must be grounded in our shared values of responsibility sharing, non-discrimination, and human rights and in international refugee law, including the principle of non-refoulement,” UN Secretary-General said in his message on the Day.
“World Refugee Day is a moment for taking stock of the devastating impact of war and persecution on the lives of those forced to flee, and honouring their courage and resilience,” he said, noting that it is also a moment for paying tribute to the communities and States that receive and host them, often in remote border regions affected by poverty, instability and underdevelopment, and beyond the gaze of international attention.
Last year, more than one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe across the Mediterranean, in unseaworthy dinghies and flimsy boats. “Thousands did not make it – tragic testimony to our collective failure to properly address their plight,” Mr. Ban said.
With anti-refugee rhetoric so loud, it is sometimes difficult to hear the voices of welcome. But these do exist, all around the world
He stressed that meanwhile, divisive political rhetoric on asylum and migration issues, rising xenophobia, and restrictions on access to asylum have become increasingly visible in certain regions, and the spirit of shared responsibility has been replaced by a hate-filled narrative of intolerance.
“With anti-refugee rhetoric so loud, it is sometimes difficult to hear the voices of welcome. But these do exist, all around the world,” he said, acknowledging an extraordinary outpouring of compassion and solidarity shown by host communities.
The UN chief drew attention to the General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on addressing large population movements on 19 September, which he said will offer an historic opportunity to agree a global compact, with a commitment towards collective action and greater shared responsibility for refugees at its core.
This year, hopeful signs are hard to find
UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said that each year, UNHCR seeks to find a glimmer of hope in the global statistics, but “this year the hopeful signs are hard to find.”
He warned that instead of burden sharing, nations are closing their borders and that instead of political will, there is political paralysis. And humanitarian organizations like his are left to deal with the consequences, while at the same time struggling to save lives on limited budgets.
The colourful vouchers can be exchanged by Burundian refugees for food of their choice, in camp Lucenda, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), at food fairs organized by WFP with local merchants. Yellow is for corn flour, red is for beans, blue is for salt. Photo: WFP/Leonora Baumann
Yet, there is cause for hope. Citing host communities, individuals, and families opening their homes, he said “these ordinary people see refugees not as beggars, competitors for jobs, or terrorists – but as people like you or me whose lives have been disrupted by war.”
“UNHCR sees 2016 as a watershed moment for the refugee cause,” he stressed. As wars spiral out of control, this must be a year to take collective responsibility and action to end the conflicts which force people to flee and also a year to help the millions of people whose lives have been destroyed by violence.
“World leaders can no longer watch passively as so many lives are needlessly lost,” he said, also noting that the upcoming General Assembly meeting on addressing large movements of refugees and migrants will put all to the test.
For its part, UNHCR launched last week the #WithRefugees initiative to generate momentum towards that meeting, he added.
Numbers do not capture hardship of displaced
Mogens Lykketoft, UN General Assembly President, said the numbers do little justice to the pain and trauma that this crisis is causing for individual women, men and children across our world.
“They fail to capture the hardship of those who flee and the fear of those who wait anxiously behind. They fail to capture the hopelessness of those held in detention centres or the final thoughts of those lost at sea without even a whisper,” he said.
The numbers do little justice to the pain and trauma that this crisis is causing for individual women, men and children across our world.
He highlighted several points, including that the international community must intensify its efforts to find political solutions to conflicts, as they are the main drivers of humanitarian need.
The UN and other institutions and agencies must be provided with sufficient and predictable resources needed to fulfil their mandates and respond to the incredible levels of need.
In 2014, children constituted 51 per cent of the refugee population, with half of these missing out on primary education, he said. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to leave no one behind has placed a new obligation on all to reach those in situations of conflict, disasters, vulnerability and risk.
Citing that almost nine out of every 10 refugees, 86 per cent, are in regions and countries considered economically less developed, he urged the international community to enhance its solidarity with refugee hosting countries.
Given the scale of the crisis, current levels of third-country resettlement need to be reviewed, he pointed out. In 2014, only 15 per cent of the global resettlement needs were met.
At least fifty thousand persons, including thousands of children died in the past two decades while seeking to cross international borders. Governments must create safe, orderly and regular pathways for refugees to move to other countries.
Violations of international humanitarian and human rights law are of grave concern. All must speak out in the face of serious violations of international law.
Xenophobic and racist rhetoric seems not only to be on the rise, but also to be becoming more socially and politically acceptable. This needs to change, he said.(Source: UN).
A young boy pushes a large cart full of vegetables up a street in Tamil Nadu, India. Mat McDermott/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
The 2016 Global Slavery Index finds that 40% of ‘modern slaves’ live in India. A new trafficking bill seeks to lower that number, but it will fail in its current form.
On 31 May 2016 the Walk Free Foundation released its 2016 Global Slavery Index. The foundation, headed by Andrew Forrest, an Australian mining magnate, grabbed headlines around the world when it claimed that there were 45.8 million ‘modern slaves’ around the world, of whom 18.3 million were to be found in India. Although Forrest’s preface to the 2016 Global Slavery Index was interspersed with kind and appreciative words for Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, there was no mistaking that the world balked at India’s shame.
Perhaps in anticipation of this indictment, the Indian Ministry of Women and Child Development recently proposed the Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2016 (hereafter the trafficking bill), on which comments are solicited until the end of June 2016. I argue that the trafficking bill needs serious reconsideration to prevent it from becoming a missed opportunity. There is an urgent need for the Indian government to go back to the drawing board to formulate a comprehensive, effective anti-trafficking law.
Keeping up with the Joneses
In order to appreciate the trafficking bill, some understanding of the history of international and domestic anti-trafficking law is essential. Against this backdrop it will soon become clear that the proposed law will do little to alleviate India’s shame of harbouring the highest number of the world’s ‘modern slaves’. It also seems to be a shallow attempt to ape a highly carceral, western approach to a juridically constructed problem of ‘trafficking’ undertaken in perfect amnesia of a richer, more systemic, and indigenous legal approach to the exploitation that has long afflicted vulnerable sections of India’s work force. Herein lies the irony of poorly thought out laws meant to act as band-aids on the long festering problem of severely unequal wealth and resource distribution.
Now onto a brief overview of the international legal framework on trafficking. Although there has existed since the turn of the twentieth century an international legal regime around the ‘traffic’ of women and children into prostitution, the legal concept of ‘trafficking’ received its legal definition only relatively recently in the 2000 UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereafter the UN trafficking protocol) supplementing the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime 2000 (hereafter, the UN organised crime convention). According to Article 3(a) of the UN trafficking protocol:
“Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs; (b): The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used.
The UN trafficking protocol is an instrument of transnational criminal law wherein countries negotiate a crime suppression treaty which does not take effect on its own; instead the crime that countries agree to supress has to be enacted into domestic criminal law. Herein lies the key to the ineffectiveness of the UN trafficking protocol more generally. Countries have symbolically adopted the definition of trafficking but how they define its core legal concepts of coercion and exploitation – both of which are irreducibly political ideas – varies widely.
Little wonder then that, despite the extraordinary speed at which the UN trafficking protocol was ratified and despite the magnificent estimates of the number of ‘modern slaves’ around the world today, the number of prosecutions against traffickers remains abysmally low. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that governments, activists, and scholars alike are struggling to demarcate the exact conceptual parameters of trafficking and cognate phenomena, including forced labour and modern slavery, all of which are used interchangeably by the global opinion-making elite.
Another layer of complexity comes from trafficking’s long history of association with prostitution. Historically, and more recently under the Bush-run US administration, trafficking was conflated with trafficking for sex work and, indeed, with sex work itself. When the US government then started ranking governments annually in the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Reports in terms of their actions to prevent trafficking and prosecute traffickers, and then withholding “nonhumanitarian, non-trade-related” aid from the worst offenders, governments scrambled to amend their anti-sex work laws in order to be placed higher up in the TIP rankings. Regions of the world like south Asia, meanwhile, became playgrounds of sexual humanitarianism, as religious evangelicals and liberals alike sought to rescue third world sex workers and purchase their ‘freedom’.
Competing legal traditions and government inaction
It is in the context of these international developments that we need to assess the Indian trafficking bill. Like most countries around the world, India has a growing architecture of anti-trafficking law, put into place at different points in time to address varied manifestations of extreme labour exploitation. Several provisions of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC), dealt with aspects of trafficking, such as: kidnapping or abduction (Sections 365, 367); procuring, buying and selling minors for prostitution (Sections 366A, 366B, 372, 373); slavery (Section 371); and unlawful compulsory labour (Section 374). In 2013, new offences of trafficking were added (Sections 370, 370A).
Yet the Indian Penal Code does not define the terms slavery, bondage, forced labour, or begary (where a person has been forced to work against his will and without payment). Many of the labour-related provisions in the IPC were a product of colonial rule, and thus they reflected the realities of that time. They also often furthered the colonial government’s interests in extracting compulsory labour from the natives (which would make it lawful and therefore not subject to Section 374).
Meanwhile, the Indian Constitution, as a self-styled radical legal document reflecting postcolonial aspirations for modern nationhood, is concerned with indigenous forms of servitude. Under Part III, which deals with fundamental rights, Article 23 prohibits the traffic in human beings, begary, and other similar forms of forced labour, making the contravention of this provision an offence punishable in accordance with law. However Article 23, much like the Indian Penal Code, does not define these terms.
The Indian government needs to pause and dig deep into its own long and complex legal history, as well as its unique vision of dealing with extreme forms of exploitation that today travel under the conceptual banner of ‘trafficking’.
All of these laws counter extreme forms of labour exploitation that are now commonly included under the term trafficking. Their intervention models are comprehensive, multi-pronged, community-based, and aimed at systemic reform – several notches above any simplistic attempts at rescue and rehabilitation. The BLSAA, for instance, not only prohibits and penalises existing and future bonded labour; all bonded labourers are set free and, by law, their obligation to repay the debt is extinguished.
The BLSAA has several elaborate provisions rendering existing and future legal action arising from the debt void. Creditors accepting any repayment for an extinguished debt can face imprisonment and fines. Local district magistrates have to ensure the act’s implementation, the eradication of bonded labour, and the rehabilitation of bonded labourers so as to prevent their becoming bonded again. Vigilance committees with representatives of the state, the affected community, social workers, rural development institutions, and credit institutions are to assist the executive in this, while also defending suits against freed bonded labourers. The CLRAA and ISMWA, meanwhile, address chronic exploitation by intermediaries and sub-contractors by imposing on them the obligations of the employer.
Women carrying soil during the construction of national highways in India. Asian Development Bank/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
In the 1980s, the Indian Supreme Court, faced with the lack of implementation of these laws by the state and indeed the state’s own reliance on these forms of labour in vast infrastructure projects through subcontracting arrangements, interpreted the concepts of force and exploitation quite broadly to restore the dignity of the Indian worker. For instance, the term force – for purposes of ‘forced labour’ – was interpreted to include the kind of economic coercion that required workers to accept a job under poor conditions over starvation. Similarly, any work where the remuneration was less than the minimum wage was considered exploitative. To combat the executive’s inaction in enforcing these regulations, the activist Indian courts relied on expert state bodies such as the National Human Rights Commission to push recalcitrant provincial governments to enforce these laws.
Still chasing sex workers
Meanwhile continuing on from twentieth century international laws against the traffic of women was the domestic anti-sex work criminal law, namely the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, 1956. Section 5 of this act criminalises procurement for sex work, with or without the consent of the person; inducing a person to become an inmate of a brothel; taking a person from one place to another or bringing them up to take up prostitution; or inducing a person to carry on prostitution. In 2005, in response to India’s low ranking in the US TIP reports – it was placed on the ‘tier two watch list’ – the Indian government came close to amending the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, 1956 in order to criminalise the customers of sex workers. It was due to the disagreements within the government itself, particularly between the home ministry and the health ministry, that the amendment did not pass muster.
After all, India had since the 1990s spent an enormous amount of money on preventing HIV amongst so-called ‘high risk groups’ including sex workers; any law that criminalised a core stakeholder in the sex industry such as the customer was bound to undo decades of public health work by pushing the industry underground.
India ratified the UN trafficking protocol in May 2011. In 2013 as part of sweeping rape law reforms, (prostitution) abolitionist anti-trafficking NGOs prevailed on the Verma Committee to introduce a separate offence for trafficking, proposing an offence that conflated voluntary sex work with trafficking. Sex workers’ groups successfully protested this conflation. The Indian Parliament then introduced a new section on trafficking into the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013: Section 370 criminalises trafficking and Section 370A the use of the services of a trafficked person. Section 370 mirrors the UN trafficking protocol’s definition of trafficking, except that it dropped two key terms. The first was “an abuse of a position of vulnerability”, which could be interpreted very broadly to cover any economic or social coercion. The second was “forced labour”, which had already been interpreted expansively by the Indian Supreme Court.
A positive spin on these innocent omissions is that Indian law already included robust labour law provisions to counter forced labour, and thus Section 370 could omit this. A more plausible (and perhaps cynical) interpretation, in my view, is that the Indian Parliament was trying to curb the scope of the crime of trafficking given the broad interpretation of the term ‘force’ by the Indian Supreme Court.
The close association of trafficking with sex work was handy here; prioritising trafficking for sex work was a convenient way for the Indian government to look the other way from the hundreds of thousands of workers labouring in extremely exploitative conditions. To illustrate the point: in the lead up to the passage of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, the government initially proposed to criminalise anyone who engaged trafficked persons irrespective of the sector in which they worked. Ultimately, Section 370A only criminalised those who engaged trafficked persons or minors for sexual exploitation, but not the users of trafficked persons in domestic work, agriculture and the construction industry.
The 2016 trafficking bill
The 2016 trafficking bill is only the latest (proposed) addition to the existing patchwork of Indian laws against trafficking. Can the trafficking bill achieve what it sets out to do, namely, “to prevent trafficking of persons and to provide protection and rehabilitation to the victims of trafficking and to create a legal, economic, and social environment against trafficking of persons and for matters connected therewith”?
I claim that the bill in its current form will not be able to achieve its stated objectives. This is because there are at least three sets of laws that are applicable to the various manifestations of domestic trafficking in India today: the generally enforceable Indian Penal Code (IPC); the specialist criminal law; and the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA), which is applicable to the sex sector as well as to a range of specialist labour legislations covering bonded labour, contract labour, and inter-state migrant work. As indicated, they all arise from different legal sources and harbour varied ideas about what constitutes ‘trafficking’ or extreme exploitation, which arise in turn from divergent political understandings of coercion and exploitation. Finally they envisage radically different regulatory mechanisms to go about addressing exploitation.
India needs a comprehensive anti-trafficking law that not only consolidates these varied streams of anti-trafficking laws, but also their very different political visions of what constitutes extreme exploitation and the best regulatory means of addressing them.
This difference of approach is visible in many respects. While the IPC and ITPA are embedded in a carceral approach, labour laws relating to bonded labour, contract labour, and inter-state migrant work envisage elaborate administrative and labour law mechanisms that operate at the local level. While the criminal laws are focused on targeting ‘bad men’ traffickers (rotten apples), the labour laws assume that exploitation is endemic in Indian labour sectors and use a combination of penal provisions and labour law doctrines to impose obligations for better working conditions on a whole range of intermediaries. While the older IPC provisions are rarely used (see NCRB data on statistics relating to prosecutions under Sections 371, 372 and 373; these amounted to less than 100 in 2014), and it is too soon to assess the effectiveness of the more recently legislated Sections 370 and 370A, the huge enforcement gap of the labour laws despite activist judges, the National Human Rights Commission and several dedicated officers from the Indian Administrative Service is a painful reminder of the callous indifference of sections of the executive and of Indian society to labour exploitation.
The government has considered changes to these different forms of anti-trafficking law several times in recent years, often in opposite directions. The Ministry for Women and Child Development has repeatedly considered amending the ITPA to criminalise customers of sex workers in accordance with the Swedish model. The National Advisory Council under the erstwhile United Progressive Alliance government headed by the Congress Party, meanwhile, commissioned reports on the reforms of laws relating to bonded labour.
On the face of it, the trafficking bill seeks to build out the infrastructure around Section 370, a provision that was hastily passed as part of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. However, India needs a comprehensive and effective anti-trafficking law that not only consolidates these varied streams of anti-trafficking laws, but also their very different political visions of what constitutes extreme exploitation and the best regulatory means of addressing them. Unfortunately, the trafficking bill is not the consolidated legislation that we need.
The key features of the trafficking bill
The trafficking bill envisages the creation of district and state level anti-trafficking committees. These will consist of government officers and NGO representatives in charge of mobilising efforts to prevent, rescue, protect, and rehabilitate victims of trafficking in addition to providing medical care, psychological assistance, and skills development.
Under its current layout, a victim after rescue is to be first brought to the district committee or a police station either by the investigating officer, public servant, social worker, or the victim herself. The bill envisages the creation of protection homes to provide for shelter, food and clothing, counselling, and medical care of rescued victims, while special homes provide long term institutional support. The government is required to formulate schemes and programmes for rehabilitation, support, after care, and reintegration services. The state governments are to form specialised schemes for women in prostitution or any other form of commercial sexual exploitation. There is then an underdeveloped provision on placement agencies requiring that they register. However no further protections are available to victims who may be duped by such placement agencies other than a fine payable by the placement agency itself. A Central Anti-Trafficking Advisory Board will advise the government on the implementation of the bill.
The trafficking bill creates certain new offences. It criminalises using a narcotic substance, alcohol, or psychotropic substance for the purpose of trafficking (Section 16); administering any chemical substance or hormone to a trafficked woman or child to enable early sexual maturity (Section 17); and revealing the identity of a victim or witness to a crime of trafficking. In cases where such information is published in the media, the offending media person and the owner of the media venture can both be punished. The bill also penalises the contravention of the registration requirements for protection homes, special homes, and placement agencies.
Offences relating to the administration of chemicals and hormones are cognizable and non-bailable (in the IPC ‘cognizable’ refers to situations where a complaint is not necessary in order for a police officer to arrest an offender). Various other provisions enable the confiscation, forfeiture, and attachment of property where anyone has committed offences under Section 16 and 17 of the proposed act or under or Sections 370-373 of the IPC. The latter deals with trafficking; engaging a trafficked minor or person for sexual exploitation; habitual dealing in slaves; selling or disposing of or hiring a minor for prostitution. The burden of proof as to guilt for these offences is also reversed, such that the commission of the crime is presumed unless proved otherwise.
Special courts are to be instituted for the prosecution of offences under Sections 370-373 of the IPC and offences under the act; experienced prosecutors are to be appointed as special public prosecutors. In addition to the prescribed penalties for committing an offence of trafficking, the bill provides for the payment of back wages, which is a welcome move. An ‘anti-trafficking fund’ is to be set up to fund the implementation of the act, but with no financial commitment from the government (unlike say the Nirbhaya fund for the safety, security and empowerment of women and girl children); the fund is somehow supposed to attract “voluntary donations, contributions or subscriptions as may be made by any individual or organisation”. Perhaps this is an invitation to philanthrocapitalists to bankroll the government’s anti-trafficking initiatives?
Good intentions perhaps, but likely ineffective
In effect, the trafficking bill proposes the creation of a separate criminal law infrastructure to deal with trafficking. The district trafficking committee is the first port of call where a range of social actors, governmental and otherwise, must report a victim of trafficking. It is not clear which agency undertakes the raid and rescue, but the victim is housed at the protection home, the police investigate the crime, and the special public prosecutor initiates prosecution in a special court. This classic raid-rescue-rehabilitation model is grounded in a robust criminal law system with stringent penalties, reversals of burden of proof, provisions for defanging traffickers by stripping them of their assets, and a parallel adjudication machinery consisting of special courts and special public prosecutors.
Protective homes under the ITPA have produced perverse consequences, such as state officials sexually abusing women and colluding with brothel-keepers and pimps.
The trafficking bill thus proposes to make the prosecution of trafficking under Section 370 meaningful and on paper it looks workable. However the bane of the Indian legal system historically, and particularly in relation to bonded labour, has been the inability of the executive to meaningfully translate law on the books into action. The raid-rescue-rehabilitation model built into the ITPA has similarly been a failure; protective homes under the ITPA have in fact produced perverse consequences, such as state officials sexually abusing women and colluding with brothel-keepers and pimps.
Compounding the proposed replication of the failed model of rescue and rehabilitation is the complete lack of clarity regarding how the infrastructure proposed by the bill interacts with the existing vigilance committees under the bonded labour laws and the protective homes set up under the ITPA. In the absence of any financial commitments from the government, one is left to conclude that the trafficking bill is an empty gesture meant to appease modern-day abolitionists and secure a better ranking in the Global Slavery Index and away from its current ‘hotspot’ status.
Worse still, India has had a strong history of sex work exceptionalism. In other words, Indian policy makers have often viewed trafficking purely through the lens of sex trafficking and sex work – whether it was the changes to the ITPA proposed in the wake of the release of the US TIP reports, or the bias in Section 370A towards users of sex trafficked victims. Several provisions of the trafficking bill highlight this continued emphasis on sex work, including the creation of offences under Sections 16 and 17 and the rehabilitative measures to facilitate women’s exit from sex work.
Labourers in an Indian brick field. UNDP/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
Recollect that Indian anti-trafficking NGOs are predominantly anti-sex work/abolitionist groups, whereas organisations working against bonded labour find little resonance in the trafficking label. The proposed law is thus perceived at being directed primarily at victims of commercial sexual exploitation, a convenient distraction for the government from the millions of men and children working under extremely exploitative conditions in brick kilns, stone quarries, construction sites, rice mills, carpet workshops and agri-business. Thus, where the trafficking bill could have consolidated existing statutes and enforcement machinery while also lending conceptual coherence to the term ‘trafficking’, what we have instead may be token legislation that makes a mockery of a serious drive to counter labour exploitation.
What could India do instead? To begin with India might acknowledge that many countries have a patchwork of legislation on trafficking and have worked to consolidate them (the UK Modern Slavery Act, 2015 is an example). So far I have discussed trafficking within Indian borders. But the Indian government also needs to revisit, as part of any comprehensive anti-trafficking law, the predicament of the hundreds of thousands of Indian migrant labourers who have for decades faced precarious working conditions in the Gulf.
It needs to consider further that situation of hundreds of thousands of workers toiling within the global supply chains of western corporations that manufacture in India through elaborate sub-contracting arrangements. Above all, the Indian government needs to pause and dig deep into its own long and complex legal history, as well as its unique vision of dealing with extreme forms of exploitation that today travel under the conceptual banner of ‘trafficking’. It then needs to work out the precise relationship between the varied streams of anti-trafficking law in India and consolidate them, conceptually (in terms of the relationship between forced labour, bonded labour, the legal status of the debt and/or advance, trafficking, procurement), definitionally and in regulatory terms while prioritising improved labour conditions and the redistribution of wealth and resources.
Indian lawyers, bureaucrats, judges, and activists have long debated every single conundrum that anti-trafficking advocates grapple with today, whether it is over the scope of the offence of trafficking; the nitty-gritty meanings of the various forms of exploitation that its umbrella definition covers; the futility of trying to demarcate the worst forms of labour exploitation from endemically exploitative practices in a given labour sector; the division of labour between private and public law responses to intractable and socially embedded labour practices; and the failure of rescue and rehabilitation in the face of executive inaction.
Last but not the least, the starting point for any responsible government in power should be what a labourer once told a young bureaucrat investigating bonded labour and the “immoral trafficking of women”, namely that efforts to deal with her predicament through nariniketans (women’s homes), widow pensions, checkposts, police raids etc., are all fun and games. She said: “buy freedom for our men, give them land and only land. It is this land, these green fields, which will protect their girls. Nothing else can”. It is this call to redistribution that the Indian government must heed.
(Prabha Kotiswaran lectures in Criminal Law at King’s College London. She is the author of Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, published by Princeton University Press (2011) and co-published by Oxford University Press, India (2011). She also blogs for the Interdisciplinary Project on Human Trafficking).
Far too many facts pertaining to the Orlando massacre by Omar Mateen raise serious questions about the ghastly killing of American citizens as a False Flag opertion of the FBI. The fact that the gory incident came within days days of the death of Mohammed Ali, whose passing away had re-awakened American and global interest in the Islam he lived also raises questions of whether the spectacular terror act was aimed at burying, along with him the idea of a principled and non-violent Islam. 14 Questions FBI Must Answer.
Two Faces: The late Mohammed Ali, 'The Greatest' (left) and Omar Mateen
If the FBI, America’s extremely powerful military-security-surveillance complex and the corporate media are to be believed, the Orlando massacre was the gruesome handiwork of Omar Mateen – a “gay-hating Muslim fanatic”, a “homegrown, radicalised lone-wolf” – who single-handedly slaughtered 50 people and injured as many in a killing spree at the Pulse bar on a night dedicated to the Gay Latino community. The massacre, we are told, lasted three hours before the Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT) finally brought down the mass murderer.
However, eyewitness statements, several news reports and video clips of the gory incident raise serious questions that suggest yet another False Flag operation. Here below are facts which have surfaced in the aftermath of the massacre which the FBI must address:
Mateen himself was a gay. This discredits the narrative of the massacre as a homophobic hate-crime. Why is the FBI desperately trying to suppress this fact?
Mateen’s links to radical Islamists – Moner Abu Salha, the first American suicide bomber in Syria – are being downplayed by the FBI as “minimal.” Why?
Mateen had links with Islamist preachers Abu Taha Marcus Dwayne Robertson and the blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, both of whom have been terror operatives with proven links to the CIA? How could the FBI be unaware of this fact?
What about Mateen’s links to FBI handlers for a period of 10 months during 2013? The statement of Florida’s St. Lucie county’s Sheriff Ken Mascara alleges that the FBI had dispatched an informant to "lure Omar into some kind of act and Omar did not bite". Is this not a clear indictment of the FBI and it’s fatal policy of entrapment to commit acts of terror.
The all-powerful G4S security agency has named a psychiatrist who had conducted a psychological evaluation to certify Mateen’s fitness for a job with the agency. But the psychiatrist claims she never saw Mateen and that she was not even living in Florida at the time the test is claimed to have been conducted. Why is the G4S lying?
Why are the FBI’s version and the timeline of the terror attack on Pulse bar put out by the corporate media so incoherent and misleading? An off-duty cop along with other officers had confronted the heavily armed Mateen who started shooting outside the Pulse Bar before going inside? Why was he not followed into the bar by the armed cops? Why is there no mention of the Pulse bar’s own security? How is it that no CCTV cameras were operational?
The 3-hour delayed response of the SWAT Team needs to be explained by the authorities. Why did the police and the SWAT team fail to follow the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), which states that they have to intervene and enter the premises if the shooting is underway?
Mateen purchased the guns from a gun store owned by Ed Henson, a former NYPD Officer. Another gun store owner Robert Apell affirms that he had alerted FBI to a 'suspicious' customer on a shopping spree weeks before the Orlando shooting. Why did the FBI not act on the information?
Eye-witnesses are on record saying that there were anywhere between 2-5 shooters, that Mateen was not the lone shooter. Who were the other shooters and where are they? Why is this key evidence being suppressed?
Why doesn’t the shooting math add up? FBI states that only 202 rounds were fired. Why are experts challenging the supposed facts?
James Wesley Howell, who himself was to attack a Gay Pride Rally in Santa Monica on that very day in a parallel operation told the local police that both Mateen and he were trained by the CIA in Virginia. Is it true that Mateen was part of a hit-squad team for Orlando and who was supposed to get away alive?
Is it true that Wackenhut – the world’s largest private security corporation, with whom Mateen was employed for a period – is a front for the CIA and has an extremely dubious track record
The FBI has a known record of creating terror, entrapment and manufacturing terrorists and masterminding false flag terror operations. Was the Orlando massacre part of this ugly past of the FBI?
Each of these questions are examined in detail below.
Omar Mateen in his NYPD T-Shirts (New York Police Department)
Mateen himself was a Gay
That Omar was himself gay was stated by his former wife Sitora Yusufiy who was married to Mateen in 2009 for three months. She made this disclosure on Brazilian television station SBT Brazil, as reported by the New York Post. Her fiancé, Marco Dias, speaking in Portuguese on her behalf, said Yusufiy believed that Mateen had “gay tendencies” and that his father had called him gay in front of her. Dias also claimed “the FBI asked her not to tell this to the American media.”
In a news report under the headline, ‘Ex-wife’s bomb shell claim: club shooter was gay’, the New York Post revealed:
The bombshell came as a male former classmate of Omar Mateen said he had been asked out romantically by the mass killer, who reportedly was a virtual regular at the Pulse nightclub, having visited it more than a dozen times over the years.
The former classmate said he would hang out with Mateen, hitting gay bars after attending class at Indian River Community College police academy in 2006 — and one time Mateen asked him out “romantically,” according to the Palm Beach Post.
“We went to a few gay bars with him, and I was not out at the time, so I declined his offer,” the former classmate told the paper.
The classmate’s claims came after reports emerged that Mateen frequented the club for years before Sunday’s massacre.
“It’s the same guy,” Chris Callen, a drag queen who performs under the name Kristina McLaughlin, told the Canadian press. “He’s been going to this bar for at least three years.”
Callen’s husband, Ty Smith, recalled seeing a drunk Mateen being escorted from the club. “Sometimes he . . . would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent,” he told the Orlando Sentinel.
At least four Pulse clubgoers remembered seeing Mateen at least a dozen times in the past. But authorities said they had no further information when asked about the sightings on Monday.
Callen and Smith shot down claims that Mateen had snapped after seeing two men kissing each other in public. “That’s bullcrap, right there. No offense. That’s straight-up crap. He’s been around us,” Smith said. “Some of those people did a little more than (kiss) outside the bar … He was partying with the people who supposedly drove him to do this?”
Kevin West, another regular at Pulse, told the Los Angeles Times that Mateen used gay dating apps on a regular basis and even messaged him on a gay dating app, Jack’d. He even saw Mateen an hour before the shooting, which is again a remarkable fact, not being reported by the MSM.
Mateen’s ties with a terrorist
Moner Abu Salha, the first US suicide-bomber in Syria with whom Omar Mateen is recorded to have contacts.
Omar’s links to radical Islamists have been downplayed by both the FBI as “minimal”, as well as by his employer G4S-Wackenhut, the world’s largest private security firm, linked closely to the CIA.
In the aftermath of the attack, authorities are trying to ascertain how it’s possible that Mateen cleared four background checks, two with the company and two with the FBI, without raising sufficient alarm.
Former superior court judge from New Jersey, Napolitano stated that Mateen qualified for the highest level of weaponry that one can qualify for in Florida, calling this an "extraordinary breakdown" within the G4S security system, in the background checks required for someone in his position.
The FBI in 2014 investigated a potential connection between Mateen and Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha – the first American suicide-bomber in Syria who blew himself up killing government soldiers in 2014 –, according to an NBC report.
Omar and Salha were also reported to have met up at parties according to a former classmate who wishes to remain anonymous. This further proves that the interaction between the two was a red flag which should have been heeded, which again the FBI seems to have missed out.Or then did they? Were the FBI just allowing another one of their terror entrapment programmes to play out to its logical conclusion?
Mateen’s links to Salha were well-known, yet the FBI brushed this connection off as being “minimal.”
The common link between the radicalisation of both Salha and Mateen is Anwar al-Awlaki. Both are said to have heard the cleric’s fiery sermons, which finally led them to commit the acts of terror.
In his article, ‘I Reported Omar Mateen To The FBI; Trump Is Wrong That Muslims Don’t Do Our Part’, Muhammad A Malik, also reaffirms the point that both Moner and Mateen were radicalised by the Awlaki tapes.
Anwar al-Awlaki – the radical spiritual leader linked to several 9/11 attackers, the Fort Hood shooting, and the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an airliner – was a guest at the Pentagon in the months after 9/11, a Pentagon official confirmed to CBS News.
Awlaki was invited as "…part of an informal outreach program" in which officials sought contact "…with leading members of the Muslim community," the official said. At that time, Awlaki was widely viewed as a "moderate" imam at a mosque in Northern Virginia.
In this important video, Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer a retired US army reserve lieutenant colonel who gained fame for his claims about mishandled intelligence before the September 11 attacks and for the censoring of his book, Operation Dark Heart, goes on to reveal that Anwar al-Awlaki was an FBI asset.
Mateen’s radical Islamist preachers
Cleric Abu-Taha Robertson & Blind Cleric Omar Abdel-Rehman, both linked to the FBI-CIA and the World Trade Centre Bombing of 1993
Mateen was a follower of cleric Abu-Taha (Marcus Dwayne Robertson), a former US Marine who acted as a bodyguard for the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman. Robertson was the imam of the Orlando-based ‘Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary’, where Mateen had enrolled online.
In addition to working with the CIA, Robertson was an FBI informant for 15 years. He is linked to the blind cleric Sheikh Abdel Omar Rahman, al-Qaeda and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. One of the main operatives the CIA had utilized in its war against the Soviets was Sheikh Abdel Omar Rahman. The CIA utilized Rahman because of his influence over the Mujahadeen then brought him into the US on a CIA-sponsored visa.
To the CIA, which pumped more than $2 billion into the fourteen-year Afghani resistance effort, Sheikh Omar was what intelligence officials call "a valuable asset”.
According to the UC website, www.constitution.org:
The use of former enemy soldiers, criminals, and terrorists for their dirty work is also a time-honored tradition among intelligence agencies, who stand to gain the "plausible deniability" so coveted in the world of covert operations.
One of the main operatives the CIA had utilized in its war against the Soviets was Omar Rahman. The CIA utilized Rahman because of his influence over the Mujahadeen, then brought him into the US on a CIA-sponsored visa. While the Sheikh was eventually convicted for conspiracy to bomb targets in the US, prosecutors encountered resistance in pursuing him and other World Trade Center bombing suspects because of their ties to the Mujahadeen, and their ties to US intelligence.
During a conversation between a 20-year veteran FBI agent and one of his top undercover operatives, the operative asked:
"Why aren't we going after the Sheikh Adbel Rahman?" demanded the undercover man."It's hands off," answered the agent."Why?" asked the operative."It was no accident that the Sheikh got a visa and that he's still in the country," replied the agent, visibly upset. "He's here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA, and the CIA." The agent pointed out that the Sheikh had been granted a tourist visa, and later a green card, despite the fact that he was on a State Department terrorist watch-list that should have barred him from the country. He's an untouchable, concluded the agent.
Following the Orlando massacre Abu-Taha Robertson and several associates have been rounded up for questioning, according to law enforcement sources. Robertson’s school may not have been the only source of Mateen’s spiritual guidance. Mateen was at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce with Imam ShafiqRahman two days before the nightclub attack, according to The Washington Post. That mosque was frequented by American-born Al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda of Syria) suicide-bomber Salha who blew himself up in Syria in 2014 and the two knew each other, according to officials. Mateen’s association with Salha led the FBI to interview him in 2014. Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Mike McCaul told Fox News law enforcement determined at the time their contact “was minimal.”
In his brilliant and path-breaking book, Visas for Al Qaeda – CIA Handouts that Rocked the World – An Insider’s View, J Michael Springmann documents the role of the CIA in the creation of the Arab-Afghan Legion, that later transmogrified from the Mujahedeen into the Al Qaeda and from there to the ISIS of our present times.
Conclusion: Omar Mateen was no Lone-Wolf. It is clear that he was in contact and thus in all probability been influenced by radical Islamists, closely associated with the FBI and the CIA and thus set up as the patsy, the fall-guy who finally takes the blame, all in connivance with the G4S.
Mateen and his FBI handlers:
In their path-breaking article, ‘Before Omar Mateen Committed Mass Murder, The FBI Tried To 'Lure' Him Into A Terror Plot” – New revelations raise questions about the FBI’s role in shaping Mateen’s lethal mindset’, Max Blumenthal and Sarah Lazare have come out with astounding revelations that prove beyond doubt that the FBI was trying to lure Mateen into committing an act of terror under the influence of his handlers as stated on record by Sheriff Ken Mascara.
While self-styled terror experts and former counter-terror officials have criticized the FBI for failing to stop Mateen before he committed a massacre, the new revelation raises the question of whether the FBI played a role in shifting his mindset toward an act of violence. All that is known at present is that an FBI informant attempted to push Mateen into agreeing to stage a terror attack in hopes that he would fall into the law enforcement dragnet.
Trevor Aaronson, a journalist and author of, Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror, revealed that nearly half of terror cases between 9/11 (2001) and 2010 involved informants – many of whom were themselves criminals raking in as much as $100,000 from the FBI. “Is it possible that the FBI is creating the very enemy we fear?” Aaronson wondered.
The revelations of FBI manipulation cast Mateen’s case in a uniquely troubling light. Though he refused to “bite” when an FBI asset attempted to push him into a manufactured plot, he wound up carrying out a real act of spectacular brutality, and allegedly swore loyalty to ISIS in the midst of it.
Now the question is whether the FBI was right to pursue Mateen before he could kill, or whether it played an influencing role in shaping his attitude towards politically-motivated violence.
While the full extent of Mateen’s contact with the FBI is unknown, it is clear that it extended into the realm of planning a bogus terror attack. The question now is whether manipulation by a FBI informant had any impact on Mateen’s deadly decision.
“The FBI should scrutinize the operating procedure where they use undercovers and informants and pitch people to become informants,” said Rowley a former FBI agent. “They must recognize that, in this case [with Mateen], it had horrible consequences if it did, in fact, backfire.”
It is now confirmed that in addition to two investigations and two interviews, Florida terror suspect Omar Mateen was also approached by "informants" working for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over a period of 10 months.
This further connects the missing links in Mateen’s radicalization and the seemingly invisible hands that likely guided him to carry out his act of terror.
Mateen first appeared on authorities’ radar in 2013 after the security guard’s colleagues alerted the FBI to inflammatory statements he made to colleagues claiming “family connections to Al Qaeda,” according to Comey.
Nevertheless, FBI investigators investigated Mateen, who was born in New York, for 10 months. They introduced him to confidential informants, spied on his communications and followed him.They also interviewed him twice.
Here’s more from Cartalucci:
The significance of this cannot be understated. “Informants” in this context, according to FBI affidavits regarding similar counterterrorism investigations, refers to individuals posing as members of terrorist organizations who approach suspects; coerce them into planning and preparing for terrorist attacks, before finally aiding the FBI in the suspect’s arrest before the attack is finally carried out. The article also refers to the other cases of entrapment whereinJames Medina, a homeless man with mental problems, and 23-year-old Cuban-American Harlem Suarez both believed that they were working for the ISIS in a make believe world created by the FBI.
In the case of Rezwan Ferdaus, whose mental wellness had deteriorated so much that he was wearing adult diapers at the time of his arrest on terrorism charges, he was led to believe that he was working for the Al Qaeda!
Rezwan Ferdaus, like Medina, was provided assistance by the FBI every step of the way, including being provided 24 lbs of C4 explosives, 6 fully automatic AK47 rifles, and 3 grenades – the FBI’s own affidavit reveals (.pdf). He was brought deep into a fictional world where he believed he was working directly with Al Qaeda for nearly a year – told that “detonation devices” he constructed and passed on to FBI informants were “used” in Iraq to “kill” American soldiers.
Mateen’s connections to the FBI are further affirmed by Steven D Kelley, a former CIA/NSA Contractor.
“This event was clearly just one more false flag event. The individual that’s being named as the shooter clearly is very closely connected to the US government all the way up to his family, and there’s a long history of involvement with government agencies on either side of different issues”.
Why is the G4S lying?
Omar Mateen’s Wackenhut ID-Card
The G4S claims that Mateen had cleared all the medical and psych-evaluation tests conducted before being hired. But in an another intriguing development, Dr. Carol Nudelman who is said to have certified Mateen claims that the tests were not conducted by her, she has never met Mateen and was not even in Florida during that period. The psych certification clears the employee concerned to bear arms and thus this report is crucial to the mounting evidence against the G4S and its history of dubious dealings.
Following the denial by Dr Nudelman, G4S has retracted its statement, claiming a “clerical error” and that another psychiatrist had conducted the psych-evaluation. The name of the “other psychiatrist” has still not been made public.
Seven months into a job as a prison guard in 2007, Mateen was fired for threatening to bring a gun to class. He settled on a career as a low level security guard for G4S Security Solutions, a global security firm that employed him for nine years. Though Mateen’s applications to two police departments were rejected, he was able to pass a G4S background check and receive several guard assignments. (The world’s third largest private employer, G4S has accumulated a staggering record of human rights abuses, including accusations of child torture.)
Despite all these rather worrying indications, the G4S/Wackenhut, the world’s leading private security corporation, never fired him.
Why the conflicting versions from FBI, corporate media?
The Pulse Bar, the Entrance on the left as a narrow door & passage, the Dance Floor in the middle, the Patio in the front and the Rest Rooms at the back.
The timeline as offered by the New York Times is very sketchy at best and is certainly misleading.
The timeline which mentions Mateen’s entry into the Pulse at 2.02 am has very little information about the 3 crucial hours leading to the final assault by the SWAT Team at 5.00 am.
The official narrative states that Mateen was apprehended by Adam Gruler, an off-duty security officer (with a dubious past of police violence against civilians), a gun-fight broke out, soon supported by “additional officers”, Mateen entered the Pulse and then started shooting killing 50 and injuring as many.
Adam Gruler, the off-duty cop who was supposedly on scene looking for a patron with a fake ID and is being promoted as a hero, was exposed by Copwatch 2011 as a violent policeman.
This weak narrative of the off-duty cop and the other officers who apprehended Mateen must be challenged for the following reasons:
It fails to describe the battle with an off-duty police officer and the other officers who on hearing the gunshots came to the aid of Gruler, even as Mateen entered the bar and began to shoot away as per the official version.
According to CNN, an off-duty police officer who was at the Pulse nightclub “engaged the shooter as he entered the club”.
Engaged? As he entered the club? A gunfight, where none were injured or killed? What precisely transpired?
Why didn’t Gruler and the other cops follow Mateen and enter Pulse even as they supposedly were shooting at Mateen?
Not a single mention about the private security guards and bouncers that all bars have at their entrance and inside to deal with unruly violent customers – where were/are they? Where were the CCTV cameras?
One report stated that the CCTV cameras were under maintenance and thus non-functional. In fact all of the mainstream media reports have refrained from even mentioning the CCTV cameras. It is for this reason that we have no footage at all from within the Pulse, or from its external area in the car-park. How very convenient!
3-hour delayed response of SWAT Team
The arrival of the SWAT Team three hours after the terror attack has been criticized by many security experts and begs a logical explanation. The key element is that as part of the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP),
"Police are trained that if there's an active shooter in progress, you go in and confront the shooter at any risk. When an active shooter is shooting, you go in and shoot the shooter," says Chris Grollnek an expert on active-shooter tactics and a retired police officer and a SWAT team member.
"This was a catastrophic failure on police SWAT tactics," charged Chris Grollnek, who served on a SWAT team in McKinney, Tx., for seven years and now runs a company training civilians and law enforcement to prevent and respond to active shooter incidents.
Grollnek heaped criticism on the Orlando SWAT team commander for waiting to breach the Pulse nightclub after gunman Omar Mateen stormed in at about around 2 a.m. Sunday, slaughtering 49 people and wounding 53 others — the deadliest mass shooting in the nation's history and the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11.
Cops were on the scene in less than two minutes but it wasn't until 5 am that 11 SWAT members entered the club and fatally shot Mateen, said police chief John Mina and Grollnek, who spoke with law enforcement officers familiar with the investigation.
Asked if he had any doubt the delay between arrival at the scene and breaching the club cost lives, Grollnek responded tersely, "None."
Grollnek also “reserved his anger for the police commanders in Florida who didn’t allow the SWAT team members to enter until several hours after the shooter began the attack”.
Worse, when the SWAT did finally break-through from the rear end in the Rest Rooms, they reportedly killed many of the terrified desperate people seeking to escape from the opening provided.
Conclusion: The standard operating procedure for the police and the SWAT team should have been to intervene when the firing was on and the people were being massacred, but they chose to wait for three hours before launching their attack. The picture is far too murky and the official timeline fails to address the glaring anomalies.
FBI was alerted about 'suspicious' customer?
Mateen purchased his guns prior from a Gun Shop St. Lucie Shooting Center owned by a retired NYPD Officer Ed Henson, prior to the terror attack on the Pulse Bar. The shop has been closed till further notice.
Ed Henson, a retired NYPD detective is known to be very Islamophobic. Henson is reported to supply weapons to the police department. Was Ed Henson a “Patsy-Minder”, providing services for the FBI in lieu of lucrative offers?
TheNew York Daily Newsreported that the store’s owner, Ed Henson, an ex-NYPD officer, had posted on Facebook in December a meme that said, “F— Islam, F— Allah. F— Muhammad.F— the Koran. F— people who support terrorism,” as well as a comment in November calling for Obama to be “handcuffed, removed from Office and charged with Treason and then publicly executed!” “How can the American People and military stand by and do nothing while this piece of sh– puts everyone of us in danger.”
Ed Henson does not appear to be a person who would be very happy selling guns to Muslims… But would he not if it was meant to lead to a false flag and thus further his political agenda?
Apparently, Robert Abell the owner of Lotus Gunworks had a greater sense of responsibility than former NYPD detective Ed Henson. Mateen wanted to purchase body armour that raised suspicion. Abell refused after which Mateen inquired about bulk purchase of ammunition, on which again he was cross-questioned. Omar made a call, spoke in a foreign language and left, after which Abell contacted the FBI and reported the matter. But the FBI took no serious notice of the incident and never visited the store or investigated further.
Clearly the FBI is far more efficient in the Hollywood TV serials!
Ed Henson’s role in the supply of weapons to terror patsies and criminals linked to the FBI should be investigated.
Eye-witnesses claimed there were 2-5 shooters
Why is this fact going unreported in the media? The following videos and eyewitness reports clearly support this overwhelming evidence.
A victim of Sunday’s early morning terror attack at the Pulse nightclub gave a bombshell interview to an ABC reporter after being released from a local hospital.
During the interview the eyewitness, who played dead for several hours during the attack as a strategy to stay alive, said that he had overheard a phone conversation that the shooter was engaged in. The eyewitness said that the shooter made mention that he was the “fourth shooter” and that there were “three others,” “snipers,” along with a ‘female suicide bomber’ that was playing dead.
Additionally the witness said that the terrorist on the phone also mentioned “to stop bombing ISIS.”
This is an absolute bombshell info that is being suppressed by the mainstream press! This information should be the focus on every mainline channel!
Janiel Gonzalez, 26 an eye witness told the palmbeachpost.com he heard another gun from a different direction, so he wonders if there were two gunmen.
“Everybody dropped to the floor. We were trying to look for an exit. But the main exit was right next to the entrance where the shooter was shooting,’’ he said.
“In a moment of desperation we were all crawling on the floor trying to find a place to exit. I looked to my right and I could see people going through some curtains. We were digging through the curtains and found a door.’’
But he said the door was blocked by a man. He wasn’t sure if it was a club security person or an accomplice to the gunmen.
“Fifty people were trying to jump over each other trying to exit the place. There was a guy holding the door and not letting us exit. He’s like ‘Stay inside, stay inside.’ As he is saying that, the shooter keeps getting closer and closer and the sound of the bullets is getting closer. Everyone starts to panic. People are getting trampled. Let us out, let us out!’’’
Gonzalez’ first thought was that it was a hate crime. “This guy is trying to prevent us from leaving. Maybe they’re working together,’’ he said.
Javer Antonetti, 53, told the Orlando Sentinel newspaper that he was near the back of the dance club when he heard the gunfire. "There were so many (shots), at least 40," he said. "I saw two guys and it was constant, like 'pow, pow, pow,'.
“I saw the report first hand on CNN about 2 or 3 hours after it broke the news so probably 5 am Florida time and it never played again and I haven't been able to find it. It was an older Hispanic lady in her late 40s or early 50s that didn't speak English to well. She was telling reporters that she was on the phone with a club patron that was with her son at club. He told the Hispanic lady that he saw TWO SHOOTERS standing next to each other that opened fire on the crowd before the mother’s son was wounded by three gunshot wounds. The footage only played once and I have not been able to find it online. I knew I should've recorded it.”
Cody Agnew: Narrating an eyewitness’ account from woman who was shot with 12 bullets as 2 other men were in the club firing at people.
An audio clip of the Orlando terror attack reveals two or more guns firing simultaneously.Additionally witnesses said that "they" are shooting
Yet another eyewitness to the attack, who was inside the nightclub when it happened, was giving his testimony on the attack, after being trapped inside the club, live on-air, to a mainstream news source when he was abruptly cut off after providing a crucial detail. The eyewitness said that during the attack “there was a guy there that was trying to […] hold the door closed so that we couldn’t exit,” as pointed out by an investigative reporter on YouTube.
In yet another clip we see ‘crisis actors’ carrying an “injured person” then let him stand as they get past the cameras and then talk to each other after a job well done. Astounding!
Conclusion: Evidently there are multiple eye-witness reports stating that there were two or more shooters. Clearly this was not the job of a single shooter. The fact that both the FBI and the corporate media are suppressing these obvious facts further points to the Orlando incident being a false flag terror attack, where Mateen was the fall-guy, while there were other far more professional shooters, who were allowed to slip away in the general mayhem and confusion once the job was done.
As per the official narrative Mateen was shooting away with his AR-15 Assault Rifle, even as he found time to change magazines plus make telephone calls to 911 and certain news outlets ostensibly to reveal his identity and his links to the ISIS. Says, Robert David Steele (former FBI/CIA Contractor), “The tape pledging allegiance to ISIS is patsy perfect.”
Conclusion: Thus this time it was not about a terrorist(s) leaving behind an ID-card or a passport but about phone calls made, to ensure that an identity is created, which can be then played upon by the investigating agencies and the corporate media. This sounds like a slight tweak on the part of the FBI False Flag section, as they have been laughed at and scorned in the recent past where passports were supposedly found on the person of dead suicide-bombers blown to smithereens.
How the shooting math add up
“There is a 0% chance that only 202 rounds were fired in Pulse,” says Mike Cernovich – a popular non-fiction writer and a licensed attorney whose legal writing has been cited in federal court opinions and academic journals – as he deconstructs the shooting episode and posits certain key facts and questions. He affirms that the shooting and the murderous mayhem that followed cannot be explained on the basis of one shooter and asserts that there were more.
He also challenges the police statement that 202 rounds were fired.
“Let’s play with that 202 number. Therefore 202 rounds – 12 (shot before entering Pulse) – 30 (shot into ceiling). That leaves 160 rounds in total. Remember that 160 rounds includes shots fired by police. There were 102 dead and wounded. That’s a bullet-to-casualty ratio of 1.6 to 1. In other words, there were 1 dead or wounded for every 1.6 rounds fired. Has this ever happened in the history of mankind? Is there anyone in the Special Operations community who has witnessed a ratio of 1.6 to 1? Again, that math includes rounds shot by police. How many rounds did the shooter fire himself?”
“Again, do the math. The media is saying that 202 rounds were fired in total. This includes all shots fired. We know the shooter fired rounds before going into Pulse and also fired rounds into the ceiling. There has never been a mass shooting where only 1.5 rounds took out one person.”
A parallel second terror operation planned for the same day?
The writer Danny Quest essentially states that there were two terror operations underway on that very day. One was to hit the Pulse bar in Orlando, Florida and the other a Gay Pride parade in Santa Monica, California.
The second terror operation was being led by James Wesley Howell. When he learnt that Mateen and his accomplice Brandy had been killed, Howell panicked and contacted the Santa Monica police department. Howell realised that he had been setup by the CIA and he too was going to be killed.
Howell stated that he had been recruited by the CIA through the online fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary course where he got to know Mateen. Both were then trained in Virginia by the CIA to shoot and make bombs and carry out simultaneous operations in Orlando and Santa Monica.
Two differing and contradictory versions have emerged from within the Santa Monica police department (SMDT). The first version as per the LA Times, quoting Santa Monica police chief Jacqueline Seabrooks was that Howell had been caught and arrested with explosives and that his interrogation revealed he was to harm the Gay Pride parade.
But after the FBI tookover the case, the SMDT version soon changed to say that they were unaware of the suspects intentions.
The following are excerpts of a the article by Danny Quest on June 15, which provide details of two-CIA trained hit-squads and the subsequent cover-up underway.
The real truth of the story was released to a former Los Angeles County prosecutor who works for “Get Off the BS” by two Santa Monica police officers that have been issued gag orders under threat of Federal prosecution for talking further talking about the incident.
According to two department sources, Howell called the Santa Monica police on Sunday morning claiming that he needed protection from the CIA. Howell further elaborated to the dispatcher stating that he “had been set up by the CIA – they are going to kill me.”
According to Howell, he was in LA to meet with another person in a collaborated attack on the gay communities in both Florida and Los Angeles.
Howell additionally stated that, “everything has gone south. Dan was gone when I got here. They killed the leader of the Florida attack this morning. They are going to kill me. I need protection.”
According to sources within the police department’s investigation Howell indicated to officers who first made contact with him that Howell claimed he was one of five people involved in a planned Sunday attack on both the east and west coasts.
Howell stated that he was supposed to “hook up” late Saturday night with his contact in LA who was supposed to have more weapons and chemicals to mix with the Tannerite he was in possession of.
When I got here, Dan was gone. I went to his apartment and he had cleared out… I tried calling him but he never answered me,” said Howell.
When questioned about the other four people involved in the plot, Howell was only familiar with the first names of three of the alleged suspects, naming his contact in LA – Dan and two of the three contacts in Florida,Omarand Brandy.
Speaking of the suspect killed in the Pulse Bar massacre in Florida, Howell stated, “Omar was not supposed to be killed. They lied to us – Omar and Brandy were supposed to get away.”
When Howell was questioned about how he and his conspirators knew each other, he said that, “We were all familiar with each other through an online fundamental Islamic knowledge seminary course[1]– we were recruited through the course and trained together at a camp in Virginia – we were taught how to shoot and make bombs – everyone knew their part – something went wrong….”
Before the officers could further question Howell, agents working for the Los Angeles office of the FBI quickly swept in and took over the case. Santa Monica detectives were never allowed to talk with Howell.
In summary, it appears that Howell was on his way to “hook up” with another conspirator (Dan) to set off explosives and shoot people at the gay pride parade in Hollywood California on Sunday.
Finding his contact missing when he got to LA and having heard thatOmar Matteen had been killedby an FBI SWAT team in Orlando, Howell determined he had been double crossed by the CIA and feared for his own life
Howell was taken in to custody by the FBI before Santa Monica police officers could further question him about the motives behind killing gay people on both coasts of the US on Sunday.
However, in absence of further information and or anyone who will officially go on record, there is no doubt that the American public is not being told the truth about the Orlando, Florida shooting and the arrest of Howell on Sunday.
It is a shame that the Fed’s got to the Santa Monica police chief on Sunday before she was silenced, however we are very thankful that at least two officers have risked their jobs and freedom to reveal what she would of most likely Tweeted had the Fed’s not got to her.
Would you like to make odds that it was just a “coincidence”, as the mainstream media reports, that Howell armed to the teeth with assault rifles and explosives, was on his way to a gay pride parade the same day as the massacre in Florida?
Wackenhut's dubious track record
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was said to have rebuffed Wackenhut’s effort in the 1980’s to purchase a weapons propellant manufacturer in Quebec with the remark "We just got rid of the CIA, we don’t want them back."
"It is known throughout the industry," said retired FBI special agent William Hinshaw, "that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut." Phillip Agee, the left-wing former CIA agent who wrote an expose’ of the agency in 1975, said, "I don’t have the slightest doubt that the CIA and Wackenhut overlap."
The Wackenhut board of directors includes powerful men from the American military and intelligence establishment, as well as political leaders who walk the corridors of power in the White House, reveals William Corbett.
William Corbett, a terrorism expert who spent 18 years as a CIA analyst and is now an ABC News consultant based in Europe, confirmed the relationship between Wackenhut and the agency.
"For years Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA and other intelligence organizations, including the DEA," he told SPY. "Wackenhut would allow the CIA to occupy positions within the company in order to carry out clandestine operations."
Wackenhut maintains an especially close relationship with the US federal government in other ways as well. While early boards of directors included such prominent personalities of the political right as captain Eddie Rickenbacker; general Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, current and recent members of the board have included much of the country’s recent national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley, former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci, former defense intelligence agency director general Joseph Carroll, former US Secret Service director James J. Rowley, former marine commandant PX Kelley, acting chairman of President Bush’s foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as Reagan’s CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut’s outside legal counsel.
Conclusion: Can there be any doubt that Wackenhut operates as a front of the CIA?
The company has 30,000 armed employees on its payroll. Source Watch wanted to know more about this special relationship; but the government was not forthcoming. Repeated requests to the Department of Energy for an explanation of how one company got the security contracts for nearly all of America’s most strategic installations have gone unanswered.
Here is a detailed report on various human rights violations, corruption and management failures documented by the Jewish Voice for Peace.
G4S is a British multinational corporation that has grown to be the largest security company in the world. The company operates in120 counties, and employs more than 50,000 employees in the U.S. It provides a broad array of security services to government, corporate, and industrial clients. G4S has been plagued by scandals and negative media coverage linked to violations of human rights, ripping off taxpayers, and gross mismanagement. As a result, the company has come under sharp criticism from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Examples of high profile G4S problems include:
G4S Involvement Israeli Prisons and Check Points
Critical Failures in Employee Screening, very relevant in the case of Omar Mateen
Gross Mismanagement of Florida Youth Detention Centers
G4S Contracts in Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Who Profits, a research project of the Coalition of Women for Peace, has done extensive research on G4S and its role in supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. (WeDivest.org website)
Palestinian legislators and human rights activists held in G4S equipped prisons. Many Palestinians have been jailed in G4S equipped prisons for engaging in non-violent protests.
Damning reports of the private prisons and juvenile homes in the US being managed by G4S, with detailed reports of sexual abuse to torture.
Another worry is that Wackenhut-G4S procured Securicor and as part of the deal Argenbright Security, which was managing the Dulles Airport during the 9/11 Terror attacks.
Conclusion:Wackenhut today is the third largest employer in the world after Walmart (USA) and Foxconn (Taiwan) employing more than 650,000 people across the globe. It provides services ranging from security guards at housing complexes, embassies, airports and nuclear plants. Wackenhutis clearly aligned with the global-military-industrial-security-surveillance-complex. In the age of the privatization of security and surveillance, Wackenhut has gained enormous profits and power, is all pervasive and has grown into a gargantuan lethal Frankenstein.
FBI’s dubious record in masterminding false flag terror operations
The evidence is so overwhelming that it is barely an issue of debate, as the facts have been well documented, recorded and present in the public domain.
In an excellent article, Glenn Greenwald – who along with Edward Snowden has single-handedly exposed the global surveillance programme run by the American NSA, CIA and the FBI – says that the dearth of genuine terrorists in America is so acute that the FBI actually has to go out of its way to find and create terrorists.
The strategy of the FBI is as follows. It sends in its vast network of informants, criminals and/or agents into the communities looking for individuals that they can prey on and radicalize. Once they zero on the prey, they begin the process of ideological radicalization, supply of money, training in arms and weapons and finally set them up to carry out a terror attack. This entire programme could carry on for over a year if required. Then at the very last moment the patsy is apprehended with dud weapons supplied by the FBI, which essentially takes the credit for preventing a terror attack and defending the homeland from terrorists.
The FBI setting up a patsy, providing him with a suicide-bombing vest
Judge Napolitano is a former New Jersey superior court judge, a senior judicial analyst, a syndicated columnist and a distinguished professor at the Brooklyn Law School. He has written nine books on constitutional, legal, and political subjects. He has also been waging a struggle to expose the FBI and the policy of entrapment of innocent citizens.
In this popular video, “The FBI Creates, Then ‘Foils’ Terror Plots – False Flags Exposed”, Judge Napolitano goes on to expose the FBI and its false flag terror operations.
In his brilliant article in the New York Times published in April 2012, David Shipler makes a strong case to expose the strategy whereby the FBI are manufacturing terror plots and entrapping ordinary citizens:
“The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the FBI, whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.”
Thomas Fuentes, the former FBI assistant director goes on to explain the economics that perpetuates the cycle of national security budgets and the strategy of false flag terror operations.
The answer is simple. In thewordsof former FBI assistant director, Thomas Fuentes: “If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half.”
In their path-breaking study, John Mueller and Mark Stewart analyse the politics of terrorism and the sheer futility of the current strategy to combat terror, merely “chasing ghosts”, a problem that they say is highly overblown and exaggerated. This leads to increasing drain on national resources and more worryingly a crackdown on civil liberties and the increasing reach of an opaque security state. The odds that an American will be killed by a domestic terrorist any given year is about one in 4 million.
In “Chasing Ghosts: The Politics of Terrorism”, Mershon affiliates John Mueller and Mark Stewart show that the effort has not, statistically speaking, been efficient or successful. Only one alarm in 10,000 has proven to be a legitimate threat – the rest are what Mueller and Stewart call “Chasing Ghosts.” The ghosts are enormous drains on resources and contribute to a countrywide paranoia and has resulted in widespread support for (and minimal critical questioning of) massive expenditures and infringement on civil liberties, including regular invasions of privacy and legally questionable imprisonments.
Mueller and Stewart contend that the “ghost chase” occupying American law and enforcement agencies and fuelling federal spending persists because the public has been led to believe that the terrorism threat is significant. As they show, it is not as significant threat – certainly not large enough to justify the vast security state apparatus that has emerged to combat it.
The chance that an American will be killed by a terrorist domestically any given year is about one in 4 million. Yet despite the statistically low risk and the extraordinary amount of resources put towards combating threats, Americans still worry and the government still spends billions.
Until the true threat of terror is understood, Mueller and Stewart argue that the country cannot begin to confront whether our pursuit of ghosts is worth the cost.
(John Mueller is a senior research scientist and Wood Hayes Chair Emeritus at the Ohio University. He is the author of 18 books, including “Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them (Free Press, 2006). Mark Stewart is director of the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at the University of Newcastle in Australia. He has more than 25 years of experience in probabilistic and vulnerability assessment of infrastructure and security systems.)
In conclusion
Just a few days prior to the Orlando False Flag, for the first time in years, American Muslims held their heads high, even as their nation and all of the world, discussed the greatness of Muhammad Ali, the legendary boxer and truly the greatest of all times. Muhammad Ali’s life was discussed, his views on politics, which very few successful sportsmen truly have the courage or the vision to speak-out, thus very significant for the times that we live in. His stand against the Vietnam War, his support for Palestine, his outspokenness and contribution to the movement for racial equality were all widely appreciated with adulation. His views on liberal Islam were also widely discussed and he stood for the co-existence of people of various religions, cultures and ethnicities, he believed in the celebration of our diversities.
Muhammad Ali was once again the hero of a new generation of Muslims and secular liberals across the world. All this made it possible for American Muslims to stand up with a degree of pride and self-respect, in being both good Muslims and Americans – with Muhammad Ali being the role model!
All of a sudden it was chic and cool to be an American Muslim!
But the Orlando False Flag terror attack has ensured that the gains of the last few days have once again been sadly reversed, with the possibilities of dire consequences which cannot be understated.
Thus it is being widely discussed that one of the key reasons for the Orlando False Flag was to counter the gains that the American Muslim community made due to the positive discussions that emerged around the passing away of the Great Muhammad Ali. There are many vested interests both within America and the global level who wish to see the state of affairs carry along the path of divisions, intolerance, hatreds, of more violence, wars and suffering.
In the aftermath of the Orlando terror attack, leading American Muslims had issued a statement on June 13. Excerpt:
On behalf of the American Muslim community, we, the undersigned, want to extend our deepest condolences to the families and friends of the victims of the barbaric assault that occurred early yesterday morning at Pulse, an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida. We unequivocally say that such an act of hate-fueled violence has no place in any faith, including Islam. As people of faith, we believe that all human beings have the right to safety and security and that each and every human life is inviolable.
Three days ago, Americans honored the memory of one of the greatest and most beloved men in American history: Muhammad Ali, who was a devout Muslim. The Islam Muhammad Ali followed is one of love, tolerance, and respect for all. American Muslims everywhere felt that he ended, once and for all, the vacuous claim that one cannot be both Muslim and American.
We, as American Muslims, follow the openhearted and inclusive Islam of Muhammad Ali and completely reject the hatred, provincialism, and intolerance of those who trample upon the rights of others, besmirching and defiling the name of Islam. The criminal who took the lives of dozens of patrons of the Orlando nightclub and injured many others was an aggressor, plain and simple.
The Orlando terror attack once again lays bare the imperial neo-conservative strategy of “controlled chaos”, leading to a perpetual state of fear, confusion, visceral hatreds and divisions, whereby the masses are more pliant to control under the “unchallengeable” slogan of “national security”. The increasing tentacles of the surveillance system, the crackdown on civil liberties, the promotion of more interventionist wars abroad, the muzzling of dissent and the increasing control of the corporate media and its hegemonic narrative, create an atmosphere whereby democratic and constitutional principles and institutions are being ceaselessly weakened.
The politics of false flag terrorism, whereby the national security agencies, in close coordination with private security corporations, justify their ever-expanding budgets by planning and orchestrating terror attacks has now been well documented and proven beyond doubt. There have been many whistleblowers from within the security system that have courageously stepped forward to expose the rot and the corruption that lies within the corridors of power. They have exposed the evil designs of the ruling elite who play with the ordinary lives of billions of people across the world.
In the course of the last two decades, the slogan ‘War against Terror’ has only led to a cycle of even more wars and more terror, with suffering caused to millions of dead and even millions more who are seeking refuge to escape their war-torn nations. The world has not witnessed a tragedy on this scale since the dark days of WWII, unfolding before our very eyes.
Even as the world hurtles towards a precipice, more people across the world than ever before are aware of the nefarious plots of the globalist cabal and the challenges that confront us. But how do we resist and expose this gargantuan monster is the question.
The answer lies in reaching out to each other as human beings, across religions and cultures, across nations, sharing information and insights, speaking out with courage, asking questions, seeking answers – where there are none. Yet, stating the truth with a belief in our individual conscience, in the ‘still small voice’ that Mahatma Gandhi referred to in times of great distress, a belief in our collective humanity and the common destiny that awaits us all.
When politics decides your future, decide what your politics should be !
Shehla Rashid (AISA), Vice President JNUSU, speaks at a student protest, during the ‘Occupy UGC’ Movement
The recent government constituted panel‘s (headed by former cabinet secretary T.S.R. Subramaniam) report on student politics is unconstitutional, highly regressive and politically motivated, and signals the upcoming onslaught of total commercialisation of education and imposition of Hindutva ideology in universities. The TSR Subramaniam Panel’s report is the logical follow up to the Birla Ambani report (which was submitted in 2000), following which student unions across the country were banned. The Birla Ambani report had lamented that student unions are not allowing commercialisation of education: we accept the charge and take pride in it! We believe that education should be a right of everyone, not a privilege of a handful of people.
After the report, tremendous restrictions were put on student union elections in the form of Lyngdoh Committee recommendations (2006), but students resolved not to give up, but to intensify the fight against imposition of austerity on education. Student groups over the past several years have resisted the commercialization and saffronisation of education and that is why the present government is fighting a proxy war against students. Students across the country are being targeted for democratically raising their voices. Interestingly, the only students organization which does not face any action is the perpetually violent ABVP, the student wing of the regressive RSS, whose members are well known for their rogue and abusive behaviour!
We warn the government not to engage in any measures to restrict political activity by students, as these will be in violation of Article 19 of the Constitution of India.
Student activism has made academic practices better and richer. JNU, HCU and FTII, for example, are some of the finest institutions of learning in the country. That is not “despite” student politics, but “because of” the progressive student politics of these campuses. Modiji has the luxury to tell us to leave studies and do politics. What does he have to say to those who will never be able to enter these educational institutions, due to the policies of UPA & NDA governments? It is for those that we fight, and will continue to.
The TSR Subramaniam panel asks for restrictions to be placed on student groups organized along identitarian lines. In the garb of banning student groups based ‘on caste and religion’, the government (if it acts on these recommendations) will end up terrorising student groups of minority and Dalit, communities and not upper-caste Hindu supremacist organisations such as ABVP which openly engage in anti-women, anti-Dalit and anti-minority propaganda. It is shocking that the government is mulling interference at such deep level in campuses. It appears that the people on the panel do not have knowledge of the Indian Constitution which empowers all citizen groups to form unions and associations. Students are no different, and have the right to form associations and unions. The fact that students do not like Modi and Modi doesn’t like students can’t be used to curb our voices.
It is ridiculous to ask students to leave studies to do politics. (Meaning, as the minister Venkaiah Naidu said recently, ‘If students want to do politics, they should stop studying, quit universities, and then join politics’: Kafila).
When the BJP comes to seek votes of students, does it ask us to leave studies? Then why does it get threatened when we intervene in politics? What comes next? Will they ask farmers to leave agriculture and then come to politics? Why don’t they ask the Yogis, Sadhus and Sadhvis in their party to leave religion and then come to politics? Why don’t they ask lawyers in their party to leave advocacy and then come to politics? Most of all, why don’t they ask Gajendra Chauhan to leave BJP and then run the FTII? It is ironic that a government which has flooded educational institutions with mediocre saffron puppets has the audacity to lecture students on political neutrality! The govt should stop making a joke of itself and stop interfering in campuses. The ruling party representatives are there in the campuses and are active in student politics, and should be enough to carry the ruling party ideology. The increasing isolation of ABVP on campuses is causing the govt so much anxiety that they are desperate to politically intervene in one way or the other, to save the sinking ship of the ABVP.
This report goes on to imagine ghosts and makes ridiculous statements to the effect that, students stay in hostels for several years for political motives! On the contrary, it’s when students don’t get hostels and can’t pay the shockingly high rents outside campuses, that they join the fight against budget cuts in education. Why shouldn’t a student get a hostel for the entire duration of the study? What is ABVP’s response on this shameful denial of hostel facilities? Weren’t they screaming in student Union elections that they will ask their govt to build more hostels? Why is their government targeting students who are lucky enough to get hostels?
In addition to all this semi-literate chatter, the committee suddenly says that Yoga must be encouraged in campuses. While we have no problem with Yoga, why is the government politicising Yoga? The only time in the history of mankind when Yoga got negative publicity is when Narendra Modi tried to forcibly impose it on people and politicise it. What does Yoga have to do with a report on student politics? Why make it sound as if students need a rehab? There are many tribal practices which are very good for health. Why doesn’t the govt include those too in this trashy report?
This report is a deliberate provocation to instigate the next phase of unrest on campuses. This will be followed by further fee hike and commercialisation of education, reduction of scholarships, aggressive Hindutva activities and, by declaring students as violent, it already lays out the justification for the use of institutional violence on them in case they protest, just like in the case of Rohith Vemula, and now JNU, BHU, AMU, MANUU, Guwahati University, etc.
The Modi government must stop attacking the opposition and start working now. It has been two years of total failure of the government. They can’t silence people who protest against the government’s failures. We are also elected representatives, and in addition to fighting state repression, we are also working for students. If Modi needs some lessons in progressive politics, he can come to JNU. JNU Students’ Union can be a model for him. We deliver and struggle for most things that we declare on our election manifesto. We don’t go around attacking the opposition, beating them up, abusing them on social media, etc. We work. We invite all BJP persons for lessons in progressive politics from student representatives.
Shehla Rashid is a student at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (JNU) and the Vice President of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU). She is an activist with the All India Students Association (AISA).
This text is a version of what was first posted as a status update on Shehla Rashid’s Facebook Page.
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