Swami Agnivesh-The Traitor of Holy Movement

Swami Agnivesh did the same,for which he was known.First he went to Chhattisgadh to extend the support to Naxalites and swallowed the pill of public wrath.Then embedded himself into Anna Hazare's Jan Lokpal movement only to break it up. Watch his video.

Evangelical Christianity: Devils in high places

By Yogesh Pawar

In his explosive new book The Armies Of God: A Study In Militant Christianity, British-born, Malaysia-based academic Iain Buchanan blows the lid off a subject that most scholars and journalists tend to shy away from: the rise of US evangelism as a force in global affairs.

His book looks at how some of the powerful evangelical outfits operate — often as US government proxies — in countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, and of course, India, and the disastrous effects this has had on the relationship between the Christian West and non-Christian cultures, religious communities and nations. He also unmasks the role played by the seemingly secular 'success motivation' industry, and its leadership gurus such as Zig Ziglar and Ken Blachard, who are not only management experts but also conscious agents of US-style Christian evangelism. Excerpts from an interview:

What led you to write this book?

I grew up in an agnostic family with respect for spirituality of all kinds — from animism to true Christianity. I suppose one of my strongest incentives for writing the book was to show how, in the West, inherently decent things like liberal secularism and Christian spirituality (no necessary conflict here!) are so deeply corrupted by political power and so dishonestly vaunted as marks of cultural superiority.

Not many would want to come out in the open and talk about the issues raised in your book. Was that a concern for you?

In the West, certainly, there is a reluctance to enquire too deeply into the affairs of organised Christianity — both at home and overseas. Western culture is a deeply, subliminally Christian culture, and even committed secularists have trouble avoiding Christian parameters in their arguments, and recognising the Christian capacity for wrong-doing. Among other things, this leads to a rather benign view of the behaviour of our missionaries overseas — fed partly by ignorance, and partly by a sense that the Christian mission can be equated with civilisation. And such myopia has increased dramatically over the past 40 years, as the secular West has managed to define a global order largely in its own terms, with decisive help from its Christian missionaries.By contrast, of course, the behaviour of non-Christians (especially Muslims) is scrutinised ruthlessly, misunderstood, and demonised.

Academics who have attempted to study the work of missionaries in India have been accused of helping the right-wing Hindutva brigade. Has this been your experience too?

The glib response to this would be to say that religious extremism of any kind needs to be exposed. But it is more complex than this. There is a need to go beyond the purely religious objection to Christian missionising, and examine the global forces which define it, and which are subverting countries like India in a far more comprehensive and profound way than most people realise.

A key contention of my book is that the extremism of Christian evangelicals is no more benign than the extremism found in non-Christian religious groups. Indeed, its local impact can be hugely destructive — precisely because of its ability to draw upon a vast global network of forces (including powerful secular ones), and its ability to penetrate and shape local forces, whether they be ethnic, religious, political, or social, according to alien priorities.

You speak at length of the US's use of Christianity for it own geopolitical designs. Is this manifestly part of US strategy worldwide?

Most Western leaders (not just Bush and Blair) will claim they are inspired by their Christian beliefs. Sometimes, as with both Reagan and George W Bush, they quote chapter and verse in support of policy, although usually it is not so blatant. Certainly, deep in Washington, self-professedly Christian pressure groups (like the Fellowship Foundation and the Council for National Policy) have a highly influential membership and a powerful grip on policy.

Of course, one can debate whether US strategy is manifestly Christian in inspiration-few Americans would say it is not, although most would probably insist that such strategy is guided primarily by secular concerns.

But there is no doubt at all that US strategy makes deliberate (and somewhat cynical) use of Christian agencies in pursuit of foreign policy — and that the distinction between the religious and the secular is deliberately blurred in the process. There are over 600 US-based evangelical groups, some as big as large corporations, and between them they constitute a vast and highly organised network of global influence, purposefully targeting non-Christians, and connecting and subverting every sector of life in the process.

Most of the major evangelical corporations (like World Vision, Campus Crusade, Youth with a Mission, and Samaritan's Purse) operate in partnership with the US government in its pursuit of foreign policy goals. World Vision, which is effectively an arm of the State Department, is perhaps the most notable example of this. There is also the benefit of a custom-built legislation, with the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 providing necessary sanction to bring errant nations into line.

This means that evangelisation is an intensely secular pursuit, as well as a religious one. In turn, of course, the secular powers, whether they be departments of state or corporate businesses, find such evangelicals to be very effective partners.

Indeed, most missionaries are not obviously religious. A case in point is the Success Motivation industry.Many of the most popular 'leadership gurus' — Zig Ziglar, Paul Meyer, Os Hillman, Richard DeVos, John C. Maxwell, and Ken Blanchard, for example — are not just management experts, they are also evangelical Christians and conscious agents of US-style evangelisation. Conversely, groups which, on the face of it, are primarily religious, may also serve a powerful secular agenda, such as the collection of intelligence, the grooming of political or commercial elites, or the manipulation of local conflicts.

Some accuse the church of fomenting dissent among poor tribals by exploiting them; others say the church is a liberating force. This debate has gone on for decades in India's North-East. What is your view?

The situation of India's tribal people, like that of tribal people elsewhere in Asia, is certainly tragic. And it may be that Christian activity offers an opportunity to escape the various forms of homegrown oppression — state and corporate abuse, Hindu contempt, and so on. But Christianity in India is a very diverse thing. There are many situations where the Christian church has taken firm root, and is deeply involved in local administration, social welfare, education, and so on. Nagaland is a case in point. There are movements for tribal welfare elsewhere which are Christian-inspired and doing excellent work.

But there are many cases, too, of evangelical missions which go into tribal areas with little respect for local realities, and with an agenda far removed from tribal welfare. In this, they may be no better and no worse than the home-grown oppressor. But there is an important difference. Such missionaries often belong to an evangelical network whose strategic purpose is defined elsewhere, and which has little loyalty to the local population, its cultures, its communities, and its welfare, let alone to the nation as a whole. This is particularly true of the new breed of US-inspired evangelicals, led by Baptists and Pentecostalist/Charismatics, who have spearheaded evangelisation over the past 50 years. It is the working of this wider, and self-consciously global, structure of behaviour which is of concern.

It is unfortunate that missions doing good work in tribal areas have their efforts tarnished by others whose approach is more opportunistic and exploitative. For the new evangelicals, distaste for paganism is just part of the equation — oppressed tribal groups are a relatively easy target to penetrate in a much wider war against non-Christians generally, and for influence in strategic (especially border) areas. In this respect, even a relatively long-established Christian presence — as in Nagaland — has utility as a strategic outpost.

These are turbulent times for India as its number of hungry and poor are growing exponentially even as the wealthy in the cities are becoming billionaires. Does this make harvesting of souls easy? Do missionaries love turbulence?

It certainly seems, sometimes, that evangelicals thrive on suffering and disaster. India's own KP Yohannan, for example, welcomed the tsunami of 2004 as "one of the greatest opportunities God has given us to share His love with people" — and he was only one of many expressing such sentiments. There is no question that many evangelicals exploit the poor and marginalised for reasons which have a lot to do with narrow theology and political self-interest, and relatively little to do with long-term practical help.

But evangelicals court the wealthy and the powerful of a society with equal passion. One of the most telling features of the new evangelism is the way it has turned Christianity into a force for protecting the rich and powerful. US Protestantism, in particular, has worked hard to undermine the impulse in the church towards social justice and reform. A measure of its success has been the defeat of Liberation Theology and the remarkable expansion of US Pentecostalism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. More than a quarter of all Christians now belong to Pentecostalist and Charismatic churches.

In these, as in most new evangelical churches, great attention is paid to a 'theology' of economics which stresses individual profit, corporate obedience, the sanctity of making money, and the power of "miracles, signs, and wonders." This 'theology' is a key part of modern imperialism: it offers something to both rich and poor, it is safely counter-revolutionary, and it ties tightly into the wider global network of more secular influences (in business, government, education, the media, the military) which underpins Western expansion.

So the evangelical church has a key role to play in a society as disparate as India's. It is a form of social management: it gives divine sanction to the rich, it gives hope to the struggling middle class, and it cultivates discipline (and distraction) amongst the poor — and it does all this with a keen eye to the West's self-interest. This is not to suggest that India does not have its own mechanisms for doing the same things. But such evangelisation, as a concomitant of Westernisation, is bound to strengthen as India urbanises and looks ever more Westwards.

A recent issue of the Texas-based magazine, Gospel For Asia, says: "The Indian sub-continent with one billion people, is a living example of what happens when Satan rules the entire culture... India is one vast purgatory in which millions of people .... are literally living a cosmic lie! Could Satan have devised a more perfect system for causing misery?" How and why does such propaganda work in a developed country like the US in the era of the Internet and the media?

There are two important points here. First, we must not assume that the 'developed' West is free from wilful ignorance. Indeed, wilful ignorance is often a very useful weapon. We need enemies, and, as religious people, we need demons. The utility of Islamophobia is a case in point.Besides, there's a useful role for such bigotry within the system: as a foil for the liberal powerful to prove their liberal credentials.

But such attitudes are nothing new, of course. Christians have waged such 'spiritual warfare' against their enemies for centuries, and with the same kind of language. What is new is the vastly increased facility, offered by the electronic media, for fighting such a war. And this is the second point.

New technology is spreading, and hardening, such bigotry. Since the mid-1960s, the evangelical movement has systematically computerised its entire global operation, creating huge databases of information on its non-Christian enemies, centralising administration, and linking some 500 million 'Christian computers' worldwide for the purposes of fighting 'spiritual warfare' against non-believers in strategic places. And 'spiritual warfare', for the evangelical Christian movement, is not just a matter of prayers and metaphor: it is also, very decisively, a matter of 'virtuous' troops, tanks, and drones.

Legal Notice Issued To Congress President & Digvijay Singh By RSS Leader

Legal Notice Issued To Congress President & Digvijay Singh By RSS Leader

Senior RSS leader from Maharashtra and national convener of RSS arm Samajaik Samarasata Manch,Mr Dada Idate issued legal notice to Congress Natioanl General Secy Digvijay Singh today.Ratnagiri based experienced criminal lawyer Adv Pradip Parulekar,has served a legal notice to Digvijay on behalf of Mr Dada Idate for his repeated objectionable and defamatory comments against RSS and other Hindu organisations.Also Adv Parulekar has warned that,when Digvijay Singh made these comments,Congress Party has never distanced itself from his views and hence Congress Party is also party in this case and if Digvijay Sing do not apologizes for his comments regarding his comments both ( Digvijay and Congress President) may have to face criminal case.For original legal notice Click HERE

For more detail:

Call:Adv Pradip Parulekar:09422052329

Notice Digvijay Sing Dada Idate

Legal Notice Issued To Congress President & Digvijay Singh By RSS Leader

Senior RSS leader from Maharashtra and national convener of RSS arm Samajaik Samarasata Manch,Mr Dada Idate issued legal notice to Congress Natioanl General Secy Digvijay Singh today.Ratnagiri based experienced criminal lawyer Adv Pradip Parulekar,has served a legal notice to Digvijay on behalf of Mr Dada Idate for his repeated objectionable and defamatory comments against RSS and other Hindu organisations.Also Adv Parulekar has warned that,when Digvijay Singh made these comments,Congress Party has never distanced itself from his views and hence Congress Party is also party in this case and if Digvijay Sing do not apologizes for his comments regarding his comments both ( Digvijay and Congress President) may have to face criminal case.For original legal notice Click HERE

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New York police covert operation within Muslims

With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas

NEW YORK- Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.

These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.

The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.

Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what's going on.

Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit.

A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency's payroll, was the architect of the NYPD's intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency's spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.

And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.

In response to the story, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading Muslim civil rights organization, called on the Justice Department to investigate. The Justice Department said Wednesday night it would review the request.

"This is potentially illegal what they're doing," said Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney with the organization.

The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. Police operations have disrupted terrorist plots and put several would-be killers in prison.

"The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there's not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. "And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard."

AP's investigation is based on documents and interviews with more than 40 current and former New York Police Department and federal officials. Many were directly involved in planning and carrying out these secret operations for the department. Though most said the tactics were appropriate and made the city safer, many insisted on anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak with reporters about security matters.

In just two episodes showing how widely the NYPD cast its net, the department sought a rundown from the taxi commission of every Pakistani cab driver in the city, and produced an analytical report on every mosque within 100 miles, officials said.

One of the enduring questions of the past decade is whether being safe requires giving up some liberty and privacy. The focus of that debate has primarily been federal programs like wiretapping and indefinite detention. The question has received less attention in New York, where residents do not know for sure what, if anything, they have given up.

The story of how the NYPD Intelligence Division developed such aggressive programs begins with one man.

___

David Cohen arrived at the New York Police Department in January 2002, just weeks after the last fires had been extinguished at the debris field that had been the twin towers. A retired 35-year veteran of the CIA, Cohen became the police department's first civilian intelligence chief.

Cohen had an exceptional career at the CIA, rising to lead both the agency's analytical and operational divisions. He also was an extraordinarily divisive figure, a man whose sharp tongue and supreme confidence in his own abilities gave him a reputation as arrogant. Cohen's tenure as head of CIA operations, the nation's top spy, was so contentious that in 1997, The New York Times editorial page took the unusual step of calling for his ouster.

He had no police experience. He had never defended a city from an attack. But New York wasn't looking for a cop.

"Post-9/11, we needed someone in there who knew how to really gather intelligence," said John Cutter, a retired NYPD official who served as one of Cohen's top uniformed officers.

At the time, the intelligence division was best known for driving dignitaries around the city. Cohen envisioned a unit that would analyze intelligence, run undercover operations and cultivate a network of informants. In short, he wanted New York to have its own version of the CIA.

Cohen shared Commissioner Ray Kelly's belief that 9/11 had proved that the police department could not simply rely on the federal government to prevent terrorism in New York.

"If anything goes on in New York," one former officer recalls Cohen telling his staff in the early days, "it's your fault."

Among Cohen's earliest moves at the NYPD was making a request of his old colleagues at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. He needed someone to help build this new operation, someone with experience and clout and, most important, someone who had access to the latest intelligence so the NYPD wouldn't have to rely on the FBI to dole out information.

CIA Director George Tenet responded by tapping Larry Sanchez, a respected veteran who had served as a CIA official inside the United Nations. Often, when the CIA places someone on temporary assignment, the other agency picks up the tab. In this case, three former intelligence officials said, Tenet kept Sanchez on the CIA payroll.

When he arrived in New York in March 2002, Sanchez had offices at both the NYPD and the CIA's station in New York, one former official said. Sanchez interviewed police officers for newly defined intelligence jobs. He guided and mentored officers, schooling them in the art of gathering information. He also directed their efforts, another said.

There had never been an arrangement like it, and some senior CIA officials soon began questioning whether Tenet was allowing Sanchez to operate on both sides of the wall that's supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business.

"It should not be a surprise to anyone that, after 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency stepped up its cooperation with law enforcement on counterterrorism issues or that some of that increased cooperation was in New York, the site of ground zero," CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said.

Just as at the CIA, Cohen and Sanchez knew that informants would have to become the backbone of their operation. But with threats coming in from around the globe, they couldn't wait months for the perfect plan.

They came up with a makeshift solution. They dispatched more officers to Pakistani neighborhoods and, according to one former police official directly involved in the effort, instructed them to look for reasons to stop cars: speeding, broken tail lights, running stop signs, whatever. The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior. An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant.

For Cohen, the transition from spying to policing didn't come naturally, former colleagues said. When faced with a decision, especially early in his tenure, he'd fall back on his CIA background. Cutter said he and other uniformed officers had to tell Cohen, no, we can't just slip into someone's apartment without a warrant. No, we can't just conduct a search. The rules for policing are different.

While Cohen was being shaped by the police department, his CIA background was remaking the department. But one significant barrier stood in the way of Cohen's vision.

Since 1985, the NYPD had operated under a federal court order limiting the tactics it could use to gather intelligence. During the 1960s and 1970s, the department had used informants and undercover officers to infiltrate anti-war protest groups and other activists without any reason to suspect criminal behavior.

To settle a lawsuit, the department agreed to follow guidelines that required "specific information" of criminal activity before police could monitor political activity.

In September 2002, Cohen told a federal judge that those guidelines made it "virtually impossible" to detect terrorist plots. The FBI was changing its rules to respond to 9/11, and Cohen argued that the NYPD must do so, too.

"In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long," Cohen wrote.

U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. agreed, saying the old guidelines "addressed different perils in a different time." He scrapped the old rules and replaced them with more lenient ones.

It was a turning point for the NYPD.

___

With his newfound authority, Cohen created a secret squad that would soon infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods, according to several current and former officials directly involved in the program.

The NYPD carved up the city into more than a dozen zones and assigned undercover officers to monitor them, looking for potential trouble.

At the CIA, one of the biggest obstacles has always been that U.S. intelligence officials are overwhelmingly white, their mannerisms clearly American. The NYPD didn't have that problem, thanks to its diverse pool of officers.

Using census data, the department matched undercover officers to ethnic communities and instructed them to blend in, the officials said. Pakistani-American officers infiltrated Pakistani neighborhoods, Palestinians focused on Palestinian neighborhoods. They hung out in hookah bars and cafes, quietly observing the community around them.

The unit, which has been undisclosed until now, became known inside the department as the Demographic Unit, former police officials said.

"It's not a question of profiling. It's a question of going where the problem could arise," said Mordecai Dzikansky, a retired NYPD intelligence officer who said he was aware of the Demographic Unit. "And thank God we have the capability. We have the language capability and the ethnic officers. That's our hidden weapon."

The officers did not work out of headquarters, officials said. Instead, they passed their intelligence to police handlers who knew their identities.

Cohen said he wanted the squad to "rake the coals, looking for hot spots," former officials recalled. The undercover officers soon became known inside the department as rakers.

A hot spot might be a beauty supply store selling chemicals used for making bombs. Or it might be a hawala, a broker that transfers money around the world with little documentation. Undercover officers might visit an Internet cafe and look at the browsing history on a computer, a former police official involved in the program said. If it revealed visits to radical websites, the cafe might be deemed a hot spot.

Ethnic bookstores, too, were on the list. If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn. The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny. If a restaurant patron applauds a news report about the death of U.S. troops, the patron or the restaurant could be labeled a hot spot.

The goal was to "map the city's human terrain," one law enforcement official said. The program was modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank, a former police official said.

Mapping crimes has been a successful police strategy nationwide. But mapping robberies and shootings is one thing. Mapping ethnic neighborhoods is different, something that at least brushes against what the federal government considers racial profiling.

Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said the Demographic Unit does not exist. He said the department has a Zone Assessment Unit that looks for locations that could attract terrorists. But he said undercover officers only followed leads, disputing the account of several current and former police and federal officials. They do not just hang out in neighborhoods, he said.

"We will go into a location, whether it's a mosque or a bookstore, if the lead warrants it, and at least establish whether there's something that requires more attention," Browne said.

That conflicts with testimony from an undercover officer in the 2006 trial of Shahawar Matin Siraj, who was convicted of planning an attack on New York's subway system. The officer said he was instructed to live in Brooklyn and act as a "walking camera" for police.

"I was told to act like a civilian — hang out in the neighborhood, gather information," the Bangladeshi officer testified, under a false name, in what offered the first narrow glimpse at the NYPD's infiltration of ethnic neighborhoods.

Officials said such operations just made sense. Islamic terrorists had attacked the city on 9/11, so police needed people inside the city's Muslim neighborhoods. Officials say it does not conflict with a 2004 city law prohibiting the NYPD from using religion or ethnicity "as the determinative factor for initiating law enforcement action."

"It's not profiling," Cutter said. "It's like, after a shooting, do you go 20 blocks away and interview guys or do you go to the neighborhood where it happened?"

In 2007, the Los Angeles Police Department was criticized for even considering a similar program. The police announced plans to map Islamic neighborhoods to look for pockets of radicalization among the region's roughly 500,000 Muslims. Criticism was swift, and chief William Bratton scrapped the plan.

"A lot of these people came from countries where the police were the terrorists," Bratton said at a news conference, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. "We don't do that here. We do not want to spread fear."

In New York, current and former officials said, the lesson of that controversy was that such programs should be kept secret.

Some in the department, including lawyers, have privately expressed concerns about the raking program and how police use the information, current and former officials said. Part of the concern was that it might appear that police were building dossiers on innocent people, officials said. Another concern was that, if a case went to court, the department could be forced to reveal details about the program, putting the entire operation in jeopardy.

That's why, former officials said, police regularly shredded documents discussing rakers.

When Cohen made his case in court that he needed broader authority to investigate terrorism, he had promised to abide by the FBI's investigative guidelines. But the FBI is prohibited from using undercover agents unless there's specific evidence of criminal activity, meaning a federal raking program like the one officials described to the AP would violate FBI guidelines.

The NYPD declined to make Cohen available for comment. In an earlier interview with the AP on a variety of topics, Police Commissioner Kelly said the intelligence unit does not infringe on civil rights.

"We're doing what we believe we have to do to protect the city," he said. "We have many, many lawyers in our employ. We see ourselves as very conscious and aware of civil liberties. And we know there's always going to be some tension between the police department and so-called civil liberties groups because of the nature of what we do."

The department clashed with civil rights groups most publicly after Cohen's undercover officers infiltrated anti-war groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. A lawsuit over that program continues today.

During the convention, when protesters were arrested, police asked a list of questions which, according to court documents, included: "What are your political affiliations?" ''Do you do any kind of political work?" and "Do you hate George W. Bush?"

"At the end of the day, it's pure and simple a rogue domestic surveillance operation," said Christopher Dunn, a New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer involved in the convention lawsuit.

___

Undercover agents like the rakers were valuable, but what Cohen and Sanchez wanted most were informants.

The NYPD dedicated an entire squad, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, to developing and handling informants. Current and former officials said Sanchez was instrumental in teaching them how to develop sources.

For years, detectives used informants known as mosque crawlers to monitor weekly sermons and report what was said, several current and former officials directly involved in the informant program said. If FBI agents were to do that, they would be in violation of the Privacy Act, which prohibits the federal government from collecting intelligence on purely First Amendment activities.

The FBI has generated its own share of controversy for putting informants inside mosques, but unlike the program described to the AP, the FBI requires evidence of a crime before an informant can be used inside a mosque.

Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, would not discuss the NYPD's programs but said FBI informants can't troll mosques looking for leads. Such operations are reviewed for civil liberties concerns, she said.

"If you're sending an informant into a mosque when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, that's a very high-risk thing to do," Caproni said. "You're running right up against core constitutional rights. You're talking about freedom of religion."

That's why senior FBI officials in New York ordered their own agents not to accept any reports from the NYPD's mosque crawlers, two retired agents said.

It's unclear whether the police department still uses mosque crawlers. Officials said that, as Muslims figured out what was going on, the mosque crawlers became cafe crawlers, fanning out into the city's ethnic hangouts.

"Someone has a great imagination," Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said. "There is no such thing as mosque crawlers."

Following the foiled subway plot, however, the key informant in the case, Osama Eldawoody, said he attended hundreds of prayer services and collected information even on people who showed no signs of radicalization.

NYPD detectives have recruited shopkeepers and nosy neighbors to become "seeded" informants who keep police up to date on the latest happenings in ethnic neighborhoods, one official directly involved in the informant program said.

The department also has a roster of "directed" informants it can tap for assignments. For instance, if a raker identifies a bookstore as a hot spot, police might assign an informant to gather information, long before there's concrete evidence of anything criminal.

To identify possible informants, the department created what became known as the "debriefing program." When someone is arrested who might be useful to the intelligence unit — whether because he said something suspicious or because he is simply a young Middle Eastern man — he is singled out for extra questioning. Intelligence officials don't care about the underlying charges; they want to know more about his community and, ideally, they want to put him to work.

Police are in prisons, too, promising better living conditions and help or money on the outside for Muslim prisoners who will work with them.

Early in the intelligence division's transformation, police asked the taxi commission to run a report on all the city's Pakistani cab drivers, looking for those who got licenses fraudulently and might be susceptible to pressure to cooperate, according to former officials who were involved in or briefed on the effort.

That strategy has been rejected in other cities.

Boston police once asked neighboring Cambridge for a list of Somali cab drivers, Cambridge Police Chief Robert Haas said. Haas refused, saying that without a specific reason, the search was inappropriate.

"It really has a chilling effect in terms of the relationship between the local police department and those cultural groups, if they think that's going to take place," Haas said.

The informant division was so important to the NYPD that Cohen persuaded his former colleagues to train a detective, Steve Pinkall, at the CIA's training center at the Farm. Pinkall, who had an intelligence background as a Marine, was given an unusual temporary assignment at CIA headquarters, officials said. He took the field tradecraft course alongside future CIA spies then returned to New York to run investigations.

"We found that helpful, for NYPD personnel to be exposed to the tradecraft," Browne said.

The idea troubled senior FBI officials, who saw it as the NYPD and CIA blurring the lines between police work and spying, in which undercover officers regularly break the laws of foreign governments. The arrangement even made its way to FBI Director Robert Mueller, two former senior FBI officials said, but the training was already under way and Mueller did not press the issue.

___

NYPD's intelligence operations do not stop at the city line.

In June 2009, a New Brunswick, N.J., building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room.

The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.

From that apartment, about an hour outside the department's jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.

The NYPD has gotten some of its officers deputized as federal marshals, allowing them to work out of state. But often, there's no specific jurisdiction at all.

Cohen's undercover squad, the Special Services Unit, operates in places such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, officials said. They can't make arrests and, if something goes wrong — a shooting or a car accident, for instance — the officers could be personally liable. But the NYPD has decided it's worth the risk, a former police official said.

With Police Commissioner Kelly's backing, Cohen's policy is that any potential threat to New York City is the NYPD's business, regardless of where it occurs, officials said.

That aggressiveness has sometimes put the NYPD at odds with local police departments and, more frequently, with the FBI. The FBI didn't like the rules Cohen played by and said his operations encroached on its responsibilities.

Once, undercover officers were stopped by police in Massachusetts while conducting surveillance on a house, one former New York official recalled. In another instance, the NYPD sparked concern among federal officials by expanding its intelligence-gathering efforts related to the United Nations, where the FBI is in charge, current and former federal officials said.

The AP has agreed not to disclose details of either the FBI or NYPD operations because they involve foreign counterintelligence.

Both Mueller and Kelly have said their agencies have strong working relationships and said reports of rivalry and disagreements are overblown. And the NYPD's out-of-state operations have had success.

A young Egyptian NYPD officer living undercover in New Jersey, for example, was key to building a case against Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte. The pair was arrested last year at John F. Kennedy Airport en route to Somalia to join the terrorist group al-Shabab. Both pleaded guilty to conspiracy.

Cohen has also sent officers abroad, stationing them in 11 foreign cities. If a bomber blows himself up in Jerusalem, the NYPD rushes to the scene, said Dzikansky, who served in Israel and is the co-author of the forthcoming book "Terrorist Suicide Bombings: Attack Interdiction, Mitigation, and Response."

"I was there to ask the New York question," Dzikansky said. "Why this location? Was there something unique that the bomber had done? Was there any pre-notification. Was there a security lapse?"

All of this intelligence — from the rakers, the undercovers, the overseas liaisons and the informants — is passed to a team of analysts hired from some of the nation's most prestigious universities. Analysts have spotted emerging trends and summarized topics such as Hezbollah's activities in New York and the threat of South Asian terrorist groups.

They also have tackled more contentious topics, including drafting a report on every mosque in the area, one former police official said. The report drew on information from mosque crawlers, undercover officers and public information. It mapped hundreds of mosques and discussed the likelihood of them being infiltrated by al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.

For Cohen, there was only one way to measure success: "They haven't attacked us," he said in a 2005 deposition. He said anything that was bad for terrorists was good for NYPD.

___

Though the CIA is prohibited from collecting intelligence domestically, the wall between domestic and foreign operations became more porous. Intelligence gathered by the NYPD, with CIA officer Sanchez overseeing collection, was often passed to the CIA in informal conversations and through unofficial channels, a former official involved in that process said.

By design, the NYPD was looking more and more like a domestic CIA.

"It's like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world," Cohen said in "Securing the City," a laudatory 2009 book about the NYPD. "What would you do if you could begin it all over again? Hah. This is what you would do."

Sanchez's assignment in New York ended in 2004, but he received permission to take a leave of absence from the agency and become Cohen's deputy, former officials said.

Though Sanchez's assignments were blessed by CIA management, some in the agency's New York station saw the presence of such a senior officer in the city as a turf encroachment. Finally, the New York station chief, Tom Higgins, called headquarters, one former senior intelligence official said. Higgins complained, the official said, that Sanchez was wearing both hats, sometimes acting as a CIA officer, sometimes as an NYPD official.

The CIA finally forced him to choose: Stay with the agency or stay with the NYPD.

Sanchez declined to comment to the AP about the arrangement, but he picked the NYPD. He retired last year and is now a consultant in the Middle East.

Last month, the CIA deepened its NYPD ties even further. It sent one of its most experienced operatives, a former station chief in two Middle Eastern countries, to work out of police headquarters as Cohen's special assistant while on the CIA payroll. Current and former U.S. officials acknowledge it's unusual but said it's the kind of collaboration Americans expect after 9/11.

Officials said revealing the CIA officer's name would jeopardize national security. The arrangement was described as a sabbatical. He is a member of the agency's senior management, but officials said he was sent to the municipal police department to get management experience.

At the NYPD, he works undercover in the senior ranks of the intelligence division. Officials are adamant that he is not involved in actual intelligence-gathering.

___

The NYPD has faced little scrutiny over the past decade as it has taken on broad new intelligence missions, targeted ethnic neighborhoods and partnered with the CIA in extraordinary ways.

The department's primary watchdog, the New York City Council, has not held hearings on the intelligence division's operations and former NYPD officials said council members typically do not ask for details.

"Ray Kelly briefs me privately on certain subjects that should not be discussed in public," said City Councilman Peter Vallone. "We've discussed in person how they investigate certain groups they suspect have terrorist sympathizers or have terrorist suspects."

The city comptroller's office has audited several NYPD components since 9/11 but not the intelligence unit, which had a $62 million budget last year.

The federal government, too, has done little to scrutinize the nation's largest police force, despite the massive federal aid. Homeland Security officials review NYPD grants but not its underlying programs.

A report in January by the Homeland Security inspector general, for instance, found that the NYPD violated state and federal contracting rules between 2006 and 2008 by buying more than $4 million in equipment through a no-bid process. NYPD said public bidding would have revealed sensitive information to terrorists, but police never got approval from state or federal officials to adopt their own rules, the inspector general said.

On Capitol Hill, where FBI tactics have frequently been criticized for their effect on civil liberties, the NYPD faces no such opposition.

In 2007, Sanchez testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was asked how the NYPD spots signs of radicalization. He said the key was viewing innocuous activity, including behavior that might be protected by the First Amendment, as a potential precursor to terrorism.

That triggered no questions from the committee, which Sanchez said had been "briefed in the past on how we do business."

The Justice Department has the authority to investigate civil rights violations. It issued detailed rules in 2003 against racial profiling, including prohibiting agencies from considering race when making traffic stops or assigning patrols.

But those rules apply only to the federal government and contain a murky exemption for terrorism investigations. The Justice Department has not investigated a police department for civil rights violations during a national security investigation.

"One of the hallmarks of the intelligence division over the last 10 years is that, not only has it gotten extremely aggressive and sophisticated, but it's operating completely on its own," said Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer. "There are no checks. There is no oversight."

The NYPD has been mentioned as a model for policing in the post-9/11 era. But it's a model that seems custom-made for New York. No other city has the Big Apple's combination of a low crime rate, a $4.5 billion police budget and a diverse 34,000-person police force. Certainly no other police department has such deep CIA ties.

Perhaps most important, nobody else had 9/11 the way New York did. No other city lost nearly 3,000 people in a single morning. A decade later, police say New Yorkers still expect the department to do whatever it can to prevent another attack. The NYPD has embraced that expectation.

As Sanchez testified on Capitol Hill: "We've been given the public tolerance and the luxury to be very aggressive on this topic."

Courtsey:

Associated Press

About the RSS involvement in the movement against corruption

By-Shri Ashok Chowgule

August 26, 2011

Many communal leaders are making it look like that the involvement of
the RSS and its cadre in the movement against corruption as
'saffronising' the event. Of course, the term 'saffronising' for them
is with an intention to demonise the movement and make it look like
something that will harm the nation.

While the communal leaders are doing what would be expected of them,
this refrain has been picked up by the so-called secularists and
so-called intellectuals. Once again they have exposed themselves as
being on the same page as the communal leaders on issues.

If the RSS involvement in movements of importance to the nation is to be
seen as the movement causing harm to the nation, then one should say
that the fight against the Emergency of 1975 was also a communal affair.
It is well known that nearly 80% of those who were jailed during this
period were picked up ONLY because they were members of the RSS. While
many 'intellectuals', etc., talk with pride about their involvement in
the movement against the Emergency, they will never bring out the fact
that the foot soldiers belonged primarily to the RSS activists.

Some have acknowledged this fact, but only in passing, and that too once
or twice. Kuldip Nayar once wrote: "One day in July, at five in the
morning, there was a knock on my door. I was arrested and sent to Tihar.
The place was full of RSS workers."
http://vivekrk.8k.com/iemergency.html

Of course, these RSS workers were not there as jailers, but as jailed!

If these 'secularists' and 'intellectuals' persist on ignoring this
fact, then perhaps they should be reminded what Jayprakash Narayan had
said, namely: "I believe you have a historic role to play.... I have
great expectations from this revolutionary organisation which has taken
up the challenge of creating a new India. I have welcomed your venture
wholeheartedly. Sometimes I have offered you my advice and have even
criticised you, but that was as a friend...There is no other
organisation in the country which can match you...The RSS should think
over this: how to bring about economic transformation? How to transform
the villages? [Jayprakash Narayan, in an address to a RSS training camp
in Bihar, November 3, 1977.]

It is yet another exposure of the bankruptcy of intellectualism in India
that they are able to resort to an argument only on the basis of labels
and not logic.

What Irom Sharmila Will Do With Anna Hazare?

There is sense of outrage prevails in North-East India over Team Anna's invitation to Irom Sharmila to take part in a Anna's fast at Ram Leela maidan in New Delhi.Irom Sharmila, lady from Manipur,a North-East Indian state,is fasting since last 10 years against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act-1958(AFSPA).This peculiar act has been imposed in Manipur and many other North-East Indian states at various times to control notorious militant organisations shedding blood of security forces and innocent civilians.
AFSPA gives few strong powers to Security Forces engaged in anti-terrorism activities to search,arrest,detain and in rare cases to shoot suspected persons without any warning or in absence of any court warrant to do so.This special act has proved extremely effective in curbing militancy in N-E Indian states due to it's fast action taken by forces in case of emergency.
Irom Sharmila is fasting to press for demand of repealing AFSPA from Manipur.Security and Intelligence agencies suspect that militant groups are working secretly,under the guise of human rights groups to make AFSPA ineffective.If AFSPA gets repealed from militancy hit areas,then security forces will become toothless tigers and would continuously fell prey of militant strikes.Also powerless forces will face constant threat of being dragged in to human rights violation cases.
In such a scenario,if Anna Hazare,Kejriwal,Kiran Bedi or anyone associated with this movement invites Irom Sharmila to take part in a fast with Anna ji,the morale of security forces would hit the bottom.And the issue of repealing AFSPA would again become a national issue unnecessarily.
At present raising anti-national and pro-militant,pro-naxalite issues has become a status symbol for Indian intelligentsia, focusing Irom Sharmila on national level with Anna ji would needlessly target Security Forces fighting bloody battle with terrorists all over India.
Today,the people of North-East India are experiencing peace only due to incessant tactical and strategic pressure maintained by armed forces on militant groups.So the invitation by Anna's team to Irom Sharmila has surprised people of North East India and security apparatus also.
All are demanding immediate clarification from Team Anna.

Vatican's Ramadan gift to Muslims!!!

We are spiritually very close to you: Vatican's Ramadan message to Muslims Wednesday, 24 August 2011

Rome, August 24: Vatican's office of interreligious dialogue has called Christians and Muslims as spiritually very close to each other. The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue which issued this letter to all Muslims lists important challenges that two of the largest faith-based communities face and ask for cooperation for the common good. Dear Muslim friends, 1. The end of the month of Ramadan offers the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue a welcome occasion for sending you our most cordial wishes, hoping that the efforts you have so generously made during this month will bring all the desired spiritual fruits. 2. This year, we have thought to give priority to the theme of the spiritual dimension of the human person. This concerns a reality which Christians and Muslims consider to be of prime importance, faced as we are with the challenges of materialism and secularisation. The relationship that every human person has with the transcendent is not a moment in history, but is part of human nature. We do not believe in fate; we are convinced – moreover it is our experience – that God guides us on our path! 3. Christians and Muslims, beyond their differences, recognise the dignity of the human person endowed with both rights and duties. They think that intelligence and freedom are indeed gifts which must impel believers to recognise these values which are shared because they rest on the same human nature. 4. This is why the transmission of such human and moral values to the younger generations constitutes a common concern. It is our duty to help them discover that there is both good and evil, that conscience is a sanctuary to be respected, and that cultivating the spiritual dimension makes us more responsible, more supportive, more available for the common good. 5. Christians and Muslims are too often witnesses to the violation of the sacred, of the mistrust of which those who call themselves believers are the target. We cannot but denounce all forms of fanaticism and intimidation, the prejudices and the polemics, as well as the discrimination of which, at times, believers are the object both in the social and political life as well as in the mass media. 6. We are spiritually very close to you, dear Friends, asking God to give you renewed spiritual energy and we send you our very best wishes for peace and happiness.

How Osama was killed-What happened that night in Abbottabad.

In an astonishingly detailed reconstruction published Monday by the New Yorker, reporter Nicholas Schmidle goes deep inside the planning and execution of the May 1 raid. The scope of specificity and suspense in Schmidle's article makes for a powerful reading.

 

Shortly after eleven o'clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters' pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan's military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India. Because of this obsession, Pakistan's "principal air defenses are all pointing east," Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of "Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within," told me. Senior defense and Administration officials concur with this assessment, but a Pakistani senior military official, whom I reached at his office, in Rawalpindi, disagreed. "No one leaves their borders unattended," he said. Though he declined to elaborate on the location or orientation of Pakistan's radars—"It's not where the radars are or aren't"—he said that the American infiltration was the result of "technological gaps we have vis-à-vis the U.S." The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters' exteriors had sharp, flat angles and were covered with radar-dampening "skin."

The SEALs' destination was a house in the small city of Abbottabad, which is about a hundred and twenty miles across the Pakistan border. Situated north of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, Abbottabad is in the foothills of the Pir Panjal Range, and is popular in the summertime with families seeking relief from the blistering heat farther south. Founded in 1853 by a British major named James Abbott, the city became the home of a prestigious military academy after the creation of Pakistan, in 1947. According to information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency, bin Laden was holed up on the third floor of a house in a one-acre compound just off Kakul Road in Bilal Town, a middle-class neighborhood less than a mile from the entrance to the academy. If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden's guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

The helicopters traversed Mohmand, one of Pakistan's seven tribal areas, skirted the north of Peshawar, and continued due east. The commander of DEVGRU's Red Squadron, whom I will call James, sat on the floor, squeezed among ten other SEALs, Ahmed, and Cairo. (The names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.) James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer's frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A "blowout kit," for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James's back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

• During the ninety-minute helicopter flight, James and his teammates rehearsed the operation in their heads. Since the autumn of 2001, they had rotated through Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, at a brutal pace. At least three of the SEALs had participated in the sniper operation off the coast of Somalia, in April, 2009, that freed Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama, and left three pirates dead. In October, 2010, a DEVGRU team attempted to rescue Linda Norgrove, a Scottish aid worker who had been kidnapped in eastern Afghanistan by the Taliban. During a raid of a Taliban hideout, a SEAL tossed a grenade at an insurgent, not realizing that Norgrove was nearby. She died from the blast. The mistake haunted the SEALs who had been involved; three of them were subsequently expelled from DEVGRU.

The Abbottabad raid was not DEVGRU's maiden venture into Pakistan, either. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid. Most of those missions were forays into North and South Waziristan, where many military and intelligence analysts had thought that bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. (Only one such operation—the September, 2008, raid of Angoor Ada, a village in South Waziristan—has been widely reported.) Abbottabad was, by far, the farthest that DEVGRU had ventured into Pakistani territory. It also represented the team's first serious attempt since late 2001 at killing "Crankshaft"—the target name that the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, had given bin Laden. Since escaping that winter during a battle in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan, bin Laden had defied American efforts to trace him. Indeed, it remains unclear how he ended up living in Abbottabad.

Courtesy: New Yorker

Muslim college teachers of Manipur demanded introduction of Urdu in schools

Muslim college teachers of Manipur demanded introduction of Urdu in schoolsTwoCircles.netAll Manipur Muslim College Teachers' Association (AMMCOTA) raised some of the issues faced by the Muslim community in the field of education in Manipur at the … Continue reading 

US intel investigating al-Qaida link to Eilat attacks'

08/23/2011 

'Washington Times' quotes US intelligence official as saying Gaza-based PRC was involved in terror attacks but not the brains of operation.

US intelligence agencies were investigating reports that terrorist groups connected to al-Qaida played a major role in carrying out last week's multi-staged terror attacks near Eilat which killed eight Israelis and wounded dozens more, the Washington Times reported on Monday.

According to the report, a US government assessment of the attacks came to the conclusion that the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) or the Gaza-based Army of Islam (Jaish al Islam), a Palestinian group sympathetic to al-Qaida, carried out the attacks which emanated from Egypt's Sinai peninsula.

Israeli officials have blamed the PRC for the attacks and killed several of the Gaza-based Palestinian terror organization's members in IAF air strikes, including the group's  secretary-general , Kamal al-Nayrab. 

The PRC, who played a key role in the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit in June 2006, has denied all connection to the attacks.

According to the Washington Times report, an initial US intelligence assessment of the attacks identified a new group who may have been connected to the incident, al-Qaida in the Sinai Peninsula.

Egyptian security officials have acknowledged that new groups affiliated with al-Qaida have begun to gain a foothold in the Sinai desert. Egypt launched "Operation Eagle" earlier this month in hopes of eradicating the groups which have repeatedly blown up the natural gas pipeline in Sinai which delivers gas to both Jordan and Israel.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Defense Minister Ehud Barak complained that Egypt had lost control of the Sinai peninsula and terrorist organizations were operating there undeterred.

A US intelligence official stated that while the PRC may have been involved in the attacks, they were not the organizers of the operation.

"PRC was clearly involved, [but] they were not the brains or the brawn of the operation. They were the scouts," the official said. "Because the PRC squawked after the operation, they became an immediate target. It is not an unjustifiable reaction."

Courtesy:Jerusalem Post

Press Release by RSS General Secretary Bhaiyyaji Joshi at Ujjain Today

Ujjain,August 20-2011

Sri Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi, Genereral Secretary of RSS
has conducted a press meet during the ongoing SAMANWAYA BAITAK.

Inspired by a single motto, the chief personnel of various Sangh Parivar
organizations that are active in social and national spheres assemble together
every 3-4 years with the intention of contemplation and planning. During the
meeting, there is a mutual exchange of various experiences too.
In the chain of these meetings, the interactive gathering at Ujjain has just
concluded, where discussions have been held on various aspects. Along
with this,
there has also been a deep pondering over the current social scenario as well.
Retrieval of black-money and prevalence of corruption has become a matter of
serious deliberation all over the nation. Against this glaring issue that has
been causing deep distress to the general public, the citizens' voice is now
being articulated as a sharp agitation. Be it the "Youth Against Corruption"
campaign launched by ABVP or the protest for implementation of ideals under the
initiative of Swami Ramdevji's "Bharat Swabhiman Trust" or the uprising under
the leadership of Anna Hazareji for the implementation of Janlokpal Bill, the
public participation and consent received in favour of these agitations are
indicative of intense nationalism and devotion to a cause.
The resolution passed at the "Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha" organized by
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which concluded on March 2011, has stated clearly
that any form of protest voiced against corruption will be supported by Sangh.
Following this, the Swayamsevaks have been active participants in any such
demonstration. In a nutshell, this endeavor of ours will continue. Also, we
strongly believe that there is the necessity for an integrated and coordinated
effort by the different campaigners. It is vital that everyone moves forward as
one, in unity.
The decision of the ruling class was to stifle the agitation that has been
moving forward peacefully. The issuing and implementation of detention
against a
non-violent and organized campaign, instead of conducting peaceful negotiations
and deriving at amicable solutions is indeed beyond comprehension. In a
democracy, the duty and responsibility of the elected representatives
is to take
decisions and usher in peace, taking into consideration the citizen's views.
The Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill, 2011, to be
passed by the
National Advisory Council will prove to be disastrous to the social harmony and
national unity. The bill will wound the very roots of our
constitution. Not only
this, it is also bound to sow and reap the seeds of distrust and dissolution.
This has highlighted the communal and divisive mindset of NAC, which has
proposed the very Bill.
The proposed bill will disband the federal accord created by the constitution
and will destroy the rights bestowed on the nation. Hence, the government is
requested to nip the bill off, in the bud itself and ensure the nation's
security. By implementing this kind of bill, the NAC's commitment to national
integrity itself becomes dubious.
The Bill will be opposed tooth and nail by various organizations of
the country,
at different levels. It is the government's duty to make serious deliberations
before implementing something that poses grave threat to social
interactions and
national integrity.

Poor Christians demands Church Lokpal to curb corruption within Church

21/08/2011

New Delhi : Christian Organisation Poor Christian Liberation Movement (PCLM) announces to give its support to anti-graft movement being led by social activist Anna Hazare. Christian leader and movement persident R L Francis said that Anna’s movement reflects people’s anger towards the movement. However, unfortunate thing is that government is consistently ignoring popular will of people. Protest of people is very natural and everybody knows that how critical is their participation in this movement against corruption and graft.

Christian leader R L Francis has expressed its surprise over criticism of Anna Hazare by Catholic Bishop Conference of India (CBCI). He said that how it is possible that church was portraying Anna, few days ago, as a true hero and suddenly they have realized that he is not hero but a villain. Poor Christians are demanding for Church Lokpal for a long time to eliminate corruption in the church. So, we support cause of Anna Hazare and his concern on the issue.

The dollar debacle:-S Gurumurthy

How it affects the world The market society-based economic-financial model of the US, touted as the most efficient and defined, drove the process of globalisation from the early 1990s. Its neo-financial theories had cast aside the classical ideas of a savings-investment based economy and opted for a credit-consumption driven model. The world began blindly following the US. But there is a sudden turn. The neo-economic-financial model of the US is now facing a serious challenge to its rationale, and survival, since the global meltdown in 2008. The meltdown is not only questioning whether the US market-society model is suitable for the rest of the world, but is also interrogating whether the US model is suitable for the US itself. The debate, led surprisingly by US allies France and Germany, is intense in the world, but feeble in India. This may be because, fortunately, India has been slow to adopt the US financial model. But the story of the rise and downgrading of the US financial model is an important lesson for India. "Standard & Poor's (S&P) has downgraded America from AAA to AA+". This news flash from the US on August 5 stunned the world, sent stocks crashing, and made governments and central banks sleepless. Before analysing the stated causes of the downgrading of the US economy by S&P and what its impact is on the US and the rest of the world, here is a brief for the uninitiated about some basics. Many may think S&P is a public or multilateral body. It is not like IMF or World Bank or WTO. It is a privately-owned entity. It has evolved over 150 years as a financial agency that rates the creditworthiness of companies and countries, even unsolicited (See boxes on Page 2 for what S&P is, and how it does its ratings and what ratings like "AAA" symbolise).

What 'AA+' means

Till August 5, the US rating was 'AAA', indicating "extremely strong capacity" to meet its obligations. After the downgrade, it is now 'AA+' with just "strong capacity" without the prefix "extremely". The addition of '+' indicated that the US is still better than countries with an 'AA' rating. What does the loss of prefix "extremely" signify? In S&P norms, the prefix indicates the high capacity of a country to withstand extreme levels of economic stress and still meet its obligations. The extreme levels of economic stress which S&P has cited as general illustrations are, ironically, the stresses the US economy has undergone in the past and still met its obligations, like the 26.5 per cent decline in GDP during 1929-33; unemployment topping 24.9 per cent in 1933 and remaining above 20 per cent during 1932-35; 85 per cent fall in stock prices during 1929-33; 47 per cent fall in industrial production during the same period; 80 per cent fall in home building. What S&P has now questioned is the future capacity of the US to withstand acute levels of stress and still pay its debts.

The cited cause

The causes cited by S&P for robbing the US of the AAA grade are stated in technical terms. Shorn of the technicalities, the S&P concern is about the balance sheet of the US government, how its expenses are uncontained, how its revenues are not rising, and therefore how its liabilities are disproportionately high and going up. Added to that is the perception that there is no political consensus in the US. In sum, the S&P focus is limited to government finances and politics. But the situation is graver than it has been perceived it to be. So what the S&P has not looked at is more important than what it has looked at. But that falls beyond the current economic paradigm, which S&P cannot recognise or handle. That's the epilogue.

The US and 19 others

There are still 19 other countries with an 'AAA' rating which today stand above the downgraded US. But most of them are insignificant. The 19 do not add up to US in human or financial numbers. Three of them—Isle of Man, Liechtenstein, and Guernsey, tax havens handling world's dirty money—have populations of less than one lakh each; the next 10—Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Austria, Denmark, and Finland—have less than 100 lakh; two of them—Australia and Netherlands—have less than 3 crore. The total population of all of them is less than America's. The aggregate GDP of all 19 nations accounts for less than 80 per cent of the US GDP; the total GDP of the first 15 nations is some 27 per cent of the US GDP; the GDP of the big four, just 58.5 per cent of the US'. So, whether the first 15 nations have or lose the 'AAA' rating will matter little; even if the other four individually have or lose the AAA rating will equally mean nothing. Given the size of the US and its economy, any setback to the US economy impacts the world. But this is only the preface to the story. The US impact on the rest of the world economy can only be understood in terms of three critical elements: one, the penetration of the US dollar in the world economy; two, the huge forex holdings of other countries consisting of US dollars; three, the gargantuan trade deficits incurred by the US, which translated into both markets for other countries and also supply of US dollars for the world.

Dollar penetration

Take the first element, the US dollar penetration in the global economy. Two-thirds of US dollars printed during 1980-2005 are consistently held outside, as if by design! That the figure remains unchanged for 25 years is a miracle. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, US dollars in circulation were $829 billion in 2007 and now, in March 2011, the figure has crossed $1 trillion. Applying the same 2/3 ratio, the total amount of dollars held outside will top $660 billion now. According to Bank of International Settlements, the total daily forex business is $3.98 trillion, of which the US dollar accounts for 42.5 per cent, that is $1.69 trillion a day! The euro is at less than half, 19.5 per cent. The high share of the dollar is due to the huge dollar stocks held outside and transacted. QED: half the forex market is dollar-based.

Forex holdings

Take the next, the share of US dollars in global forex reserves. Of the total reported forex reserves of all countries, two-thirds are in dollars. This huge share is also due to the fact that two-thirds of US dollars printed or digitised are held and transacted outside the US. The US dollar held outside is not idle; it circulates. That explains why 42.5 per cent of world forex business, including trade, investment and also derivatives, is transacted in dollars. This in turn translates into forex stocks in others' hands. Forex holdings in others' hands mean investment in US securities by the holders. The total forex reserves of the world are $9.7 trillion. If two-thirds are in dollars, that will be $5.8 trillion, 8 per cent of the global GDP in cash!

US trade deficit

The third element, the most important, is US current account deficit. It is a long story that has built the US economic and financial model. The US dollar became globally accepted in the post World War II period, because under the original IMF model, the US had guaranteed that the dollar would be convertible into gold at 35 dollars per ounce of gold. A run on US gold stocks in 1971 forced US President Nixon to suspend convertibility. But, with the dollar and gold having the same status, by that time world nations had hugely invested in dollar-designated securities, and over 40 per cent of the dollars printed by the US Federal Reserve were held by others outside. So those who had invested in the dollar had but to hold on to it, very much like a honeybee that had fallen into the honey pot!

But with the rise and rise of the US, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, gold became relatively less valuable than the dollar. This turned out to be the power of the US as well as its nemesis. With the dollar as its domestic currency as well as foreign exchange, the US evolved and instituted a financial capitalist model with the dollar as the no-alternative global currency. The US imported goods and services and just exported dollars to pay for them; the result, as The Economist wrote in early 1990s, dollar printing became a most profitable industry! The direct consequence of it was the increasing and huge current account deficit of the US from 1976. This was nothing but importing goods more than what the US exported and paying for the difference in dollars, which are just IOUs, or promissory notes. Between 1976 and 2009, the US incurred current account deficits of about $8.5 trillion, that is, it issued promissory notes for $8.5 trillion. That turned into forex reserves of different world nations. For instance, China, whose factories worked non-stop to satisfy the US consumers, got in return trillions of dollars which accounts for the largest part of its forex reserve of $2.6 trillion! Now understand why the US downgrade shook global markets?

US financial capitalism

The three elements constitute the cornerstone of what was touted since the 1990s as global capitalism, but it is actually US financial capitalism. With its penetration and domination, the dollar became the de facto global currency. The US Federal Reserve became the de facto global central bank. If the Fed raised the interest rates, the world followed. If the US Fed chief Alan Greenspan hinted, by his remark that the Japanese stocks are high because of "irrational exuberance", the Japanese market fell by 2.5 per cent that very day! That power inevitably translated into financial and political arrogance. The US became even more profligate. Greenspan even theorised that there was no need for US households to save; there is a global "savings glut", with Asians in particular oversaving. He almost asked what the stingy Asians would do with their savings if the US were not there to borrow and spend!

Globalisation drivers

It is a combination of the three elements—dollar penetration, the trillions of dollar assets held by others, and the US current account deficit—that drove globalisation since the 1990s. The US current account deficit deepened dollar penetration; the combined effect of this was the huge accumulation of dollar assets outside. This defined the very idea, process and institution of globalisation. There could have been no globalisation without a global currency. There could be no supply of that currency unless its issuer was willing to incur current account deficit by importing more than exporting. So, only the currency of the country that runs deficits can be the global medium of exchange. As the US ran continuous deficits, the dollar admirably filled the bill. The US Fed, which controlled dollar supply and interest rates, encouraged Americans to be profligate. But this was not a game that could continue for long. The fundamentals struck. The US household profligacy—spending more than earning—led to the subprime crisis.

Corporates enriched

The US Fed policies to make the people spend beyond their current income, virtually bankrupted the government and families, and enriched the corporates. Family savings gradually declined over three decades and collapsed from 80 per cent of both to negative savings of 20 per cent in 2005, and as a result, corporate savings rose to 120 per cent of both. The US government was broke as early as the 70s; US households had funded the government but their savings came down since 1990s, crashed in 2005 and, from 2006, went negative. The steep cut in the interest rates from over 20 per cent in the 1980s to 9 per cent in the early 1990s to just 1 per cent in 2001, was intended to force households to spend, not save. During this period, consumer credit rose from $808 billion in 1990 to $1.7 trillion in 2000 and to $2.4 trillion in 2006. And during 2000-05, US households borrowed $3 trillion against the appreciation of their home values—called "home equity" in US financial jargon—and splurged it. Promoting consumption at the cost of savings made the US economy grow high during 2001 to 2007. But it bankrupted families and enriched corporates, leading to the 2008 crisis. The overborrowed households, unable to pay back the home mortgages, generated the shocks that became the sub-prime tsunami. Greenspan declared in March 2008 that US corporates have "soaked away more than half a trillion in cash" and that would save the economy. But the corporates did not spend one dollar to save the economy.

S&P is still missing it

But S&P has looked at only the balance sheet of the US government. It has not seen the balance sheet of US households. It committed the same mistake prior to 2008 when it rated the consolidated home mortgage bonds (CDOs) of US households. It looked at only the balance sheets of consolidating intermediate debtor banks, not the balance sheets of the households, the underlying debtors. The households were known to be living beyond means, which Greenspan even considered a virtue of the US economic model! The debt-burdened households generated shocks and tremors, which caused the financial tsunami in 2008. The financial state of US households—declining savings, turning into negative, is obvious. Yet, before 2008, S&P did not look at the household economics before AAA rating the CDOs. It has not done so even now. And had S&P considered this unalterable truth on August 5, it might have re-thought about the AA+ rating. Logic is self-evident: a nation cannot be more prosperous than its people; it cannot be more solvent than its people; it cannot be more liquid than its people. People need to have cash, not debt in their hands.

Standard & Poor's - What is S&P?

Standard & Poor's (S&P) is a financial services company based in the US. It belongs to The McGraw-Hill Group, which publishes financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds. S&P is well known for its stock-market indices, the US-based S&P 500, with similar indices for Australia, Canada, Italy and India (S&P CNX Nifty). S&P, which used to credit-rate only companies and their securities, started assigning rating to countries from 1941. It is one of the Big Three credit-rating agencies, the other two being Moody's Investor Service and Fitch Ratings. Its revenue is $2.61 billion (2009) and it employs 10,000 people. This is what S&P claims in its website: About $1.1 trillion in investment assets is directly tied to S&P indexes; more than $3.5 trillion is benchmarked to the S&P 500—more than any other index in the world; S&P 1200 index covers about 70 per cent of the global market cap; outstanding debt rated by S&P globally is about $32 trillion, in 100 countries; in 2009 alone, Standard & Poor's published more than 870,000 ratings, including new and revised ratings.

What is rating?

S&P rating is an expression of its opinion on the overall credit worthiness of countries and companies. S&P opinion is forward-looking and not based on historical facts. Rating is a relative ranking, namely that someone is more creditworthy than another or others. The likelihood of default is the centrepiece of creditworthiness, which encompasses both capacity and willingness to pay. S&P associates high rating with the capacity to withstand successive economic stresses. S&P rating is vital to the investment worthiness of a country or company. It divides ratings into Investment grade and Non-Investment grade (Junk). The grading of the capacity to meet financial commitments is indicated by the following normative symbols—Investment grade 'AAA': Extremely strong capacity, highest grade; 'AA': Very strong capacity; 'A': Strong capacity, but somewhat susceptible to adverse economic conditions; 'BBB': Adequate capacity to meet financial commitments, but more subject to adverse economic conditions; 'BBB': Considered lowest investment grade by market participants. Non-Investment grade 'BB+': Considered highest speculative grade by market participants; 'BB': Less vulnerable in the near-term but faces major ongoing uncertainties; 'B': More vulnerable to adverse conditions, but currently has the capacity to meet commitments; 'CCC': Currently vulnerable, dependent on favourable conditions to meet financial commitments; 'CC': Currently highly vulnerable; 'C': Currently highly vulnerable to obligations and other defined circumstances; 'D': Payment default on financial commitments. Sometimes, grading is suffixed by '+' or '–' to show that if a country with grade AA is better than other countries with the same grade, it is graded as 'AA+'; if it were worse than others with the same grade, then it is graded as 'AA-'. But the rating standards of all agencies including S&P were heavily criticised for helping to create the financial bubble that led to the financial meltdown in 2008. Time said, "Both agencies granted 'AAA' rating to Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) that were chock-full-of crap mortgages, thereby helping to precipitate the 2008 financial collapse. The Washington Post wrote, "Standard Poor's didn't just miss the bubble. They helped cause it." So the S&P reputation suffered heavily during the 2008 crisis.

Courtesy:Express Buzz

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