Click. Girls of six sold into sex slavery.
Click. Rice's Soaring Career Hits a New High.
Click. CONDITIONAL COMPASSION.
Click. The State of Utah is buying federal dollars with the blood of our children.
An Observer investigation has discovered that the children from developing countries are being sold by their families and smuggled into the UK on planes and ferries.
Bewildered and unable to speak English, we found girls who had been kept prisoners in brothels and forced to have sex with businessmen.
Clients pay up to £500 for every half-hour they spend with a child, some of whom have not reached puberty. Although rumours have been circulating for some time about the trend, police have been unable to find evidence because the children are constantly supervised.
But The Observer interviewed a number of trafficked children on the streets of London who have escaped their 'owners'. Many are homeless and addicted to drugs. All are terrified and refuse to trust any adults.
'The problem of girls being trafficked for sexual purposes is a major one, but this is worse than anything we have encountered,' said Detective Inspector Paul Holmes, head of Scotland Yard's drugs and vice unit. 'This is the first concrete intelligence that we have a problem in relation to young children rather than mid-teen girls.'
The children that escape are at more risk on the streets than other young prostitutes because they often cannot understand what punters are asking for, may agree to something dangerous and are less attuned to warning signs.
Gemma, 15, a prostitute in Brixton, south London, who has worked on the streets since she was 11, said: 'I can see violent men a mile off because I understand the signs. These girls don't understand anything and can't speak enough English to ask.' Traffickers of people risk a simple fine or less than two years in jail, compared with the 10-year minimum sentence for those convicted of drug trafficking.
Rice's Soaring Career Hits a New High
WASHINGTON
Now, as President-elect George W. Bush's choice for White House national security advisor, Rice faces what may be the toughest challenge of her meteoric career: managing the foreign policy agenda of the world's only remaining superpower at a time of rapid global change.
"I think she will do a great job," said Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor in the administration of Bush's father. "She has the personality for it. She has the background for it. She starts off with a very powerful set of credentials."
Rice was senior director for Soviet and Eastern European Affairs on Scowcroft's National Security Council staff from 1989 to 1991, working closely with then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, now vice president-elect, and Gen. Colin L. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now Bush's choice for secretary of State.
While the president-elect may be best known for mangling the names of foreign leaders and displaying an uncertain grasp of global issues, the trio of Cheney, Powell and Rice gives the incoming administration a substantial core of foreign policy expertise.
There is really no way to be sure how Rice, Powell and Cheney will split up the task of shaping U.S. foreign policy. On paper, the national security advisor runs what amounts to a private White House think tank, while the secretary of State runs the agency charged with carrying out policy. In some previous administrations, the security advisor has been paramount, while in others it has been the secretary of State. Sometimes they work cooperatively. Sometimes they are obvious rivals. Henry A. Kissinger held both jobs simultaneously for a time.
Like Kissinger, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Rice brings to the White House a reputation for intellectual brilliance that far outshines the public's perception of the president's brain power.
"It is not my sense that George W. is uncomfortable with people who are smarter than he is," Scowcroft said in a telephone interview. "He is quite ready to use the talents of people and not worry about things like that."
Rice was a piano prodigy at 3, a college graduate at 19, a college professor at 26, a senior White House advisor at 34 and provost--a combination of chief operating officer and chief financial officer--of Stanford University at 36.
"She has a nice combination of three kinds of experience: scholarly intellectual knowledge, real experience working in government and responsibility for administering a large institution," said Philip Zelikow, director of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. He worked with Rice at the White House and wrote with her a book on the reunification of Germany.
Kissinger had academic credentials when he became national security advisor but no government or managerial experience, Zelikow noted. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor in the Carter administration, had both academic and government experience but no managerial expertise.
"This is an unusual combination," Zelikow said of Rice.
Zelikow dismissed suggestions that Rice may suffer from hubris, the intellectual arrogance that has brought down generations of "best and brightest" government officials.
"She is pretty level-headed," he said. "She never displayed an overly large ego, elbowing people out of the way. She never had that kind of reputation at all."
Rice prides herself on a hard-headed, pragmatic approach to foreign issues. She told interviewers earlier this year that she considered herself a Democrat until 1979, when Carter confessed that he was shocked and saddened by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For Rice, a young professor specializing in the Soviet Union, it was a damaging admission of ill-informed sentimentality in foreign affairs.
Rice has made it clear that she expects the U.S. government to put its own national interests first in setting any plan of action. For instance, as Bush's chief campaign advisor on foreign policy, Rice said that the United States should not be deterred by overseas criticism from developing an antimissile system. She said she hopes that Russia will agree to modify the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, signed in 1972 by the United States and the Soviet Union, to allow the missile defense program to proceed. But if Moscow balks, she said, Washington should be ready to repudiate the pact unilaterally.
Missile Defense Provokes Allies
To be sure, promoting an antimissile program was popular campaign rhetoric. It is now up to Bush and his advisors to determine whether the system is technologically feasible and worth the high cost, both in budgetary dollars and in diplomatic friction. Foreign governments on both sides of the Cold War divide have objected strongly to any U.S. action that would undermine the ABM treaty, which has been the cornerstone of arms control efforts for almost 30 years.
Rice sparked a controversy in October when she said in an interview with the New York Times that a George W. Bush administration would pull U.S. peacekeepers out of the Balkans. That task should be left to European armies, she said, while the United States concentrates on preparing to fight wars.
The suggestion produced a wave of anxiety among North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. A little more than a week later, NATO Secretary-General Lord Robinson said he had been assured that Bush would not withdraw American peacekeepers unilaterally.
Rice was born Nov. 14, 1954, in Birmingham, Ala., the daughter of a college administrator father and music teacher mother, a family that was a fixture of the rigidly segregated city's black middle class. There can be no doubt that the mid-century Alabama of segregated water fountains, segregated amusement parks and, of course, segregated schools had an effect on the young African American girl.
She was 9 years old when a bomb exploded at a Baptist church a few miles from Westminster Presbyterian Church, where the Rice family attended. Four black girls were killed, one of them a kindergarten classmate of Rice.
Since the election, Rice has declined interview requests. But last summer, in advance of her high-profile speech to the Republican National Convention, she told interviewers that her father became a Republican in 1952 in reaction to the racial policies of the Democrats in the one-party South of that era. For Condi, as she was called, surviving the racial climate of the time only strengthened her determination to excel in a world that was not defined by race.
The Rice family moved to Denver in 1967. Two years later, at age 15, Rice enrolled at the University of Denver as a music major, intending to prepare for a career as a concert pianist. But music, which had dominated her life from birth, when her mother named her for a musical term meaning to play with sweetness, was pushed aside by a new love: international politics.
Rice's new career was shaped by her professor of international relations, Josef Korbel, a former Czech diplomat, refugee from communism and the father of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. And, like the outgoing secretary of State, Rice's area of specialization has long been eastern and central Europe--the Soviet bloc of the Cold War.
After receiving a doctorate from the University of Denver in 1981, Rice joined the faculty at Stanford, where her class became one of the most popular on campus among undergraduate students. In 1986, she was a Council on Foreign Relations fellow at the Pentagon and, from 1989 to 1991, she was the top Soviet expert in the White House. From 1993 through 1999, Rice was provost of Stanford, ranking just below the university president on the operational chart.
It is the sort of career pattern that usually generates envy and not a small amount of animosity. But in Rice's case, even rivals seem a bit in awe.
Dimitri K. Simes, director of the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, and a rival of Rice's in the esoteric world of expert Kremlin watchers, began an interview by asserting that, unlike most people in Rice's orbit, "I am not a close personal friend."
Nevertheless, Simes said, "I talk to people at Stanford who do not agree with her politics and are jealous about her rise. They all say she was an impressive provost."
Rice's specialization in European affairs has caused some government watchers to suggest that there may be holes in her knowledge of such crucial regions as the Middle East. But Simes dismisses that.
"I am sure she knows more about some regions than others," he said. "But it is more dangerous to think you know something and have it wrong than to realize there are gaps in your information. As long as she realizes that she is stronger in some areas than in others, and I am told she realizes it, that is as good as you can get."
On "conditional compassion" - Fascism requires that we create in and out
groups and justify and narrow our extended hand to come to the aid of only
those within our circle. Outsiders are to be viewed and treated differently.
Just pause and think how so much of our contemporary culture reinforces this
'valuable us and not so valuable them' theme. Ronn D. 12/17/00 Futrsource
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Revealed: why evil lurks in us all
Study shows that crude loyalty to our social group and blind obedience
make tyranny possible anywhere
Martin Bright, home affairs correspondent Sunday December 17, 2000
The Observer (London)
Psychologists have struggled for decades to explain why ordinary
people participate in atrocities such as the Nazi Holocaust or the
Stalinist purges.
Now experiments carried out in Britain reveal that most people obey
authority unquestioningly and would also walk past an injured stranger
who did not come from their own ethnic or social group.
The findings will shake the long-held British belief that this country
is immune from the kinds of tyranny found in other parts of the world.
Research carried out at Lancaster University on football supporters
found that they failed consistently to come to the aid of an injured
supporter from a rival team. Secret cameras filmed individual
Manchester United fans as they ignored a Liverpool fan played by an
actor while he writhed in pain on the floor. When the actor wore a
Manchester United shirt, the supporters helped him in 80 per cent of
cases. When he switched to a Liverpool shirt, all but a handful walked
straight past. The results of the research will be revealed in a BBC
programme, Five Steps to Tyranny , on the nature of evil to be
presented by Sheena McDonald this week.
A separate experiment - again filmed with secret cameras - shows the
majority of people on a train complying with a stranger's order to
give up their seat. When the stranger is accompanied by a man in a
uniform, not a single person chooses to disobey.
McDonald said she was shocked by what the experiments showed: 'The
majority of people have a psychological tendency to obey and conform.
All of us involved in the programme found ourselves looking at our own
lives and examining whether we were beginning on the first step to
tyranny.'
Dr Mark Levine, the psychologist who developed the football fan
experiment, said: 'These are ordinary people. If you ask people
whether they would help a stranger in distress, they say they would.
But in reality they just don't do it. When we asked people afterwards
why they didn't intervene, they said they didn't consider the pain as
serious when they saw the person was wearing a Liverpool shirt.'
Colonel Bob Stewart, former commander of UN forces in Bosnia, said his
experiences in the Balkans left him in no doubt that, given the right
circumstances, similar human rights atrocities could be committed in
Britain. 'What makes a man go for a drink with his neighbour one
moment and shoot him the next? We still don't understand what causes
normally good people to go over the edge. Until we do, there is the
possibility that it will happen here.' The controversial programme
argues that everyday prejudice can quickly develop into full-blown
oppression and even genocide. The first step to tyranny, it suggests,
is the creation of 'in' and 'out' groups based on irrational
prejudice. The tabloid attacks on asylum-seekers are given as evidence
that we are not immune to such blind hatred.
The new research draws on experiments such as the one in an Iowa
school two decades ago when teacher Jane Elliott split her
primary-school class into blue-eyed children, told they were superior,
and brown-eyed children, told they were stupid and unattractive.
Within hours the blue-eyed 'in group' were bullying their classmates.
The researchers demonstrated that little had changed since 1961, when
Stanley Milgram, a young psychologist at Yale, discovered how easily
ordinary citizens could become perpetrators of evil. Volunteers were
taking part in an experiment to test people's ability to learn. They
were then told to administer electric shocks to a stranger behind a
screen when they failed to perform a simple task of memory, and
gradually increase the severity if they continued to make mistakes. To
Milgram's horror, two-thirds of the volunteers were ready to
administer potentially lethal doses of electricity when encouraged to
do so by a researcher in a white coat.
Professor Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University tells the programme
that more crimes are committed in the name of obedience than
disobedience: 'It is those who follow any authority blindly who are
the real danger.' Zimbardo carried out a famous experiment in 1971 at
Stanford University when volunteer students were split into guards and
inmates in a makeshift underground jail. The experiment had to be
abandoned after the guards began violently assaulting the inmates and
several of the prisoners had breakdowns.
'It demonstrated the ease and speed with which things can get out of
control. Within days the guards were behaving sadistically and the
prisoners were acting pathologically.' But Zimbardo said there were
some positive aspects: the research was used in Congressional
inquiries into prison riots.
Throughout America, an average of 3,000 children a day are stolen from their homes and placed in foster care to fuel a multi-billion dollar money-making machine. Utah’s system is typical, and provides a case study in both the tactics of the government and how individual citizens can defend themselves and their families. To you, your children are your life. To the thousands of caseworkers, supervisors, therapists, judges, and doctors whose salaries are paid by this machine, your children represent job security. Fresh meat. Despite what they may have told you, your case is not a weird exception. They’re doing this to everyone.
.... The federal government pays the State of Utah at least $25,000 for each child the State can remove from its family and place in foster care. The more children the State can take, the more federal money its child "welfare" system can rake in. Each year, hundreds of families throughout Utah fall prey to the Gestapo tactics of the Division of Child and Family Services.....
Utah's Juvenile Courts Operate in Secret!
Did you know that the following Constitutional rights are prohibited in Utah's Juvenile courts?
A detailed discussion of the problems with Utah's child welfare laws is articulated very well by the Hon. Arthur G. Christean, a retired Utah juvenile court judge in an article entitled, "The Child Welfare Reform Act of 1994: Is the Cure Worse than the Problem?" ....