Thursday, December 29, 2022

West’s Double Standards: Pursuit For Human Rights Or A Tool For Dominance – OpEd

December 29, 2022 
By Eurasia Review

With the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan, it was hoped that the world especially the eastern part of the globe would have at least peace at borders and within. The regional power competitors were looking for regional prosperity through development and multilateralism.

However, the emerging situation in Ukraine since 2014 was a preparation for another regional chaos, which exacerbated as the Ukraine – Russia war. The US planned and secretly pushed the war to Russian borders. US since 2014, has provided around $22.1 billion to Ukraine in security assistance for training and equipment, and to help maintain its territorial integrity, secure its borders, and improve interoperability with NATO. In response to Russia’s unjustified war against Ukraine, US and its allies sided with Ukraine and supported it to safeguard it sovereignty and territorial integrity. Furthermore, other than military assistance, disinformation is also employed as one of the chief weapons to manipulate the international arena with fabrication.

Moreover, in controlling states’ behaviour, weapon modernization – a tactic to engage the world into arm race to ensure negative peace and stability through deterrence is massively employed. On one hand, through weapon modernization, countries come under heavy debt, the donors’ economy flourish and these recipient states suffer at home due to multiple encumbrances. Security assistance in that regard is a trap by U.S.

Secondly, under the banner of peace, U.S. itself is playing a role of war promoter by supplying all sorts of weapons and equipment to other states. It is arming the states with an aim to destabilize the globe at large. Despite Joe Biden’s election pledge to not “check [America’s] values at the door” when it comes to arms sales, the US has increased, not decreased, its weapons sales around the world, according to a new report of Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington-based thinktank.

Furthermore, as Pera Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) study, the United States accounted for 39 percent of major weapons deliveries for the five-year period from 2017–21, this is twice as large as Russia’s share, and over eight times China’s share to the world market. Defense Security Cooperation Agency director James Hursch said “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing conflict has helped spur a greater demand for U.S. weapons, particularly from European nations who find themselves needing to replenish their own munitions stockpiles or have begun rethinking their own defense needs.”

“In this time of uncertainty, we have a clear way forward: Help Ukraine defend itself. Support the Ukrainian people. Hold Russia accountable,” Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State said in a statement in February this year when Russia launched an offensive against Ukraine. However, US arms sales would also pose challenges to its own security by promoting conflicts, provoking other regional powers, encouraging arms races, and drawing the US itself into excessive or counterproductive wars. US arms sales is also facilitating human rights abuses by associate states like India in Occupied territory i.e. Kashmir.

The definition of ‘Human’ and ‘Human Rights’ is different under western countries lens. From, last seven and half decades, the Muslims of Palestine and Kashmir are under occupation by Israel and India, but not a single western country came forward with military or security assistance. A question for Western Powers, ‘Who will hold India and Israel accountable?’. The hypocrite nature and double standards of major international players are making this world – a war zone. The issue of Palestine and Kashmir, and aggression done by Israel and India is far graver. However, no Human Rights advocate (Western States) pushed to at least take some proactive measures to end these two prolonged occupations.

The international arena is clouded with ‘Double Standards and Hypocrisy’. The US always wanted to be in East because of many reasons for instance natural resources, threat to its hegemony, emergence of a powerful eastern bloc, and to counter China and Russia’s rise as global powers. Furthermore, in this reference, one of the key measures taken were also to weaken the Muslim bloc by preoccupying Muslim countries with terrorism and counter-terrorism. Pakistan — the only nuclear Muslim state — is going through challenging time due to political instability and terrorism. Pakistan is suffering for being frontline non-NATO Ally in US war against terrorism. Additionally, in last few decades, we have witnessed a strong effort by some states to push propaganda against Islam and Muslims using overt and covert means including media outlets, academia, civil societies, and contaminating media (social, electronic, and print) with disinformation.
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Whose rule of law is it anyway? 
What’s universal isn’t settled yet
29 Dec 2022, 

In the early 2000s, there was a near consensus among academic lawyers that the absence of the rule of law was strictly a “third world problem", meaning one that the advanced economies of the Global North had solved. Yet, just over a decade later, the United States elected as president a man who would go on to incite an insurrection at the US Capitol, conspire to overturn an election that he lost, abscond with classified documents when he finally left the White House, and then call for “termination" of the US Constitution.

How did a quintessentially ‘third world problem’ become a ‘first world problem’ as well? In fact, it was always thus. The purported differences in kind between the Global North and the Global South have always been a product of colonial triumphalism, rather than reflecting an accurate scientific taxonomy.

This was the core insight of ‘law and development’, a beleaguered area of study that came into (modest) prominence in the 1970s. At the height of the Cold War, organizations like USAID and Ford Foundation pushed law professors and legal scholars to take more of an active interest in evangelizing Western-style law (which is a bit like a pharmaceutical company paying a laboratory to ‘find’ that one of its proprietary drugs is indeed effective). But, as a few of that academic field’s scholars pointed out, law is not always ‘potent’ or ‘good’, even at ‘home’ in the West.

Ignoring this inconvenient truth, Western organizations proceeded to foist their vision of the rule of law on the rest of the world anyway. While law and development professors were unwilling to play ball, economists steeped in the Washington Consensus agenda (fiscal discipline, deregulation, trade and capital-market liberalization, privatization and so forth) were all too happy to fill the void.

In the years since, waves of economistic engagement—from ‘law and economics’ and new institutional economics to legal origin theory—have crashed onto the shores of the Global South. The consistent message has been that low-income countries must modernize their legal systems, replacing all traditions and social conventions rooted in ‘magical’ and ‘mystical’ thinking (as Max Weber once put it) with cold, calculable legal ‘rationality’.

The West, under the auspices of programmes such as the United Nations Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor and the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, has launched multiple initiatives not only to ‘export’ a valuable commodity—a Western-style legal system, i.e.—but also to quantify and measure its uptake. One influential effort, which I was involved with at its inception, is the American Bar Association-backed World Justice Project. Among other things, the WJP assesses the health of the rule of law in ailing developing countries (usually designated ‘corrupt’) and then prescribes treatments—typically shock therapy-style elixirs—to bolster property and contracts regimes.

The good works of Western law have continued apace in locations ranging from Vietnam and Iraq to Afghanistan. Yet, none of these initiatives was ever supported by any evidence that simply ‘transplanting’ legal regimes would succeed. On the contrary, many millions of dollars were spent on a two-decade-long reform effort in Afghanistan, and still, before the Taliban’s reconquest, the country ranked 134th of 139 in the WJP’s 2021 Rule of Law Index

There are undoubtedly problems with this kind of empirical approach, as the controversy surrounding the World Bank’s Doing Business report shows. But even more problematic is the underlying theory. As the 2008 global financial crisis did with orthodox economics, the Trump presidency exposed core flaws in rule-of-law scholarship that had long been buried or obscured. Chief among these is the assumption that law will play a decisive part in eliciting good behaviour, or that it will exert what legal scholars call “general normative force" on the society in question.

But now, no one can deny that the prevailing epistemic apartheid—the marginalization of those studying the ‘problems’ of establishing and maintaining the rule of law—within law schools has damaged Western countries as much as the rest of the world. This is evident even in the WJP’s own reports, which showed a marked decline in the US’s rule-of-law ranking for five consecutive years from 2017 to 2021.

Although the US recovered somewhat from Trump’s contempt for the rule of law in 2022, it might not be so lucky next time around. Trump has already announced his campaign for the 2024 presidential election, and dismissed the House’s 6 January Committee as a “kangaroo court".

Moreover, a fully Trumpified Republican Party seems committed to eroding the values that underpin the rule of law.

The emergence of social order via the establishment of law-like systems is a universal phenomenon. It happens when individuals join an emerging social consensus in support of such a system, and this process tends to follow the same pattern no matter the country. But understanding the rule of law’s basic structure and normative merits doesn’t really help us understand its underlying mechanics

Fortunately, now that we are seeing the global nature of the challenges associated with maintaining the rule of law, important but long-neglected areas of legal scholarship (including empirical legal studies, law and psychology, law and economics, and law and emotions) are getting the attention they deserve.

The more emphatically we can bring rigorous scientific analysis to the study of the rule of law, the better we can understand and protect it, both in the ‘third world’ and in the ‘first’. ©2022/Project Syndicate

Antara Haldar is associate professor of empirical legal studies at the University of Cambridge.

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Chomsky: Wars could break out all over the map

December 29, 2022
Z Article
Source: Dhaka Tribune



Possibilities of a settlement of the Russia-Ukraine conflict are diminishing, the MIT professor says in an exclusive interview with Dhaka Tribune

American linguist and philosopher Prof Noam Chomsky predicts a grim future for the world as the superpowers are at loggerheads over establishing supremacy centering on the Russia-Ukraine war.

In April, soon after the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, he had suggested that Kyiv should settle its disputes with Russia by making some concessions.

“There have been possibilities for a settlement all the way along. They are diminishing. The prospects are grim…blame is widely shared,” Prof Chomsky, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, said in an interview with Dhaka Tribune on Wednesday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview aired on Sunday that he was ready to negotiate with all parties involved in the war in Ukraine but Kyiv’s Western backers, who have been providing military and diplomatic support, have refused to engage in talks.

Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most deadly European conflict since World War Two, leading to a worsening of economic and geopolitical crises in most countries around the globe.

“The longer the conflict continues, the more harsh the conditions that each side imposes and the harder it is to find a diplomatic solution to bring the horrors to an end,” Chomsky said.

Asked if this war could have been headed off at the first place, the MIT emeritus professor said: “The war could have been averted long ago, and is continuing up to the last minute.”

With the conflict starting to wane and Russia talking about negotiations and Ukraine’s aides remaining nonchalant about striking a peace deal, there arises a concern that the war may shift to somewhere else.

Chomsky said: “Wars could break out all over the map. Language [of heads of states] is a minor factor.”

Asked for a solution to the economic recession and skyrocketing inflation in many low- and middle-income countries as a result of the Ukraine crisis just after the serious blow of the Covid-19 pandemic, Chomsky said: “There’s no simple answer. Each problem has to be dealt with in its own complex terms.

“No one knows… They have opportunities to follow different paths, but it’s not easy.”

He is, however, hopeful of a peaceful world despite the fact that the world’s superpowers remain envious of and aggressive towards each other, create divisions, and promote war or their form of democracy in a third country.

“History is full of such horrible cases. In 1945, it was almost impossible to imagine that Germany and France could become allies with friendly relations. It happened. We can only try our best,” he told Dhaka Tribune.

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Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books. He has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, and particularly international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky has been a writer for Z projects since their earliest inception, and is a tireless supporter of our operations.
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Sudden Russian Death Syndrome

It’s not a great time to be an oligarch who’s unenthusiastic about Putin’s war in Ukraine.

The Atlantic
DECEMBER 29, 2022

Here is a list of people you should not currently want to be: a Russian sausage tycoon, a Russian gas-industry executive, the editor in chief of a Russian tabloid, a Russian shipyard director, the head of a Russian ski resort, a Russian aviation official, or a Russian rail magnate. Anyone answering to such a description probably ought not stand near open windows, in almost any country, on almost every continent.

Over the weekend, Pavel Antov, the aforementioned sausage executive, a man who had reportedly expressed a dangerous lack of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, was found dead at a hotel in India, just two days after one of his Russian travel companions died at the same hotel. Antov was reported to have fallen to his death from a hotel window. The meat millionaire and his also-deceased friend are the most recent additions to a macabre list of people who have succumbed to Sudden Russian Death Syndrome, a phenomenon that has claimed the lives of a flabbergastingly large number of businessmen, bureaucrats, oligarchs, and journalists. The catalog of these deaths—which includes alleged defenestrations, suspected poisonings, suspicious heart attacks, and supposed suicides—is remarkable for the variety of unnatural deaths contained within as well as its Russian-novel length.

Some two dozen notable Russians have died in 2022 in mysterious ways, some gruesomely. The bodies of the gas-industry leaders Leonid Shulman and Alexander Tyulakov were found with suicide notes at the beginning of the year. Then, in the span of one month, three more Russian executives—Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev, and Sergey Protosenya—were found dead, in apparent murder-suicides, with their wives and children. In May, Russian authorities found the body of the Sochi resort owner Andrei Krukovsky at the bottom of a cliff; a week later, Aleksandr Subbotin, a manager of a Russian gas company, died in a home belonging to a Moscow shaman, after he was allegedly poisoned with toad venom.

Anne Applebaum: The Kremlin must be in crisis

The list goes on. In July, the energy executive Yuri Voronov was found floating in his suburban St. Petersburg swimming pool with a bullet wound in his head. Think Gatsby by the Neva. In August, the Latvia-born Putin critic Dan Rapoport apparently fell from the window of his Washington, D.C., apartment, a mile from the White House—right before Ravil Maganov, the chairman of a Russian oil company, fell six stories from a window in Moscow. Earlier this month, the IT-company director Grigory Kochenov toppled off a balcony. Ten days ago, in the French Riviera, a Russian real-estate tycoon took a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs.

To reiterate: All of these deaths occurred this year.

One could argue that, given Russia’s exceptionally low life expectancy and unchecked rate of alcoholism, at least some of these fatalities were natural or accidental. Just because you’re Russian doesn’t mean you can’t accidentally fall out of an upper-story window. Sometimes, people kill themselves—and the suicide rate among Russian men is one of the highest recorded in the world. For Edward Luttwak, a historian and military-strategy expert, that’s at least part of what’s happening: an outbreak of mass despair among Russia’s connected and privileged elite. “Imagine what happens to a globalized country when sanctions kick in,” he told me. “Some of them will commit suicide.” But the sheer proliferation of these untimely deaths warrants a closer look.


After all, this is what the Kremlin does. There is precedent for this phenomenon. In 2020, Russian agents poisoned—but failed to kill—the Putin critic Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent; a decade earlier, they succeeded in a similar attempt on the Russian-security-services defector Alexander Litvinenko. In 2004, when Viktor Yushchenko ran against a Kremlin-backed opponent for Ukraine’s presidency, he was poisoned with dioxin and left disfigured. Thirty years earlier, the Bulgarian secret service, reportedly with the help of the Soviet KGB, killed the dissident Georgi Markov by stabbing him on the Waterloo Bridge in London with a ricin-laced umbrella tip. Russian agents often “turn to the most exotic,” Luttwak told me. “People who do assassinations for commercial purposes look at [their methods] and laugh.”

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Suicides are more difficult to decipher. For oligarchs who have failed to show sufficient loyalty to Putin, coaxed suicide is not an implausible scenario. “It is not uncommon to be told, ‘We can come to you or you can do the manly thing and commit suicide, take yourself off the chess board. At least you’ll have the agency of your own undoing,’” Michael Weiss, a journalist and the author of a forthcoming book on the GRU, the Russian military-intelligence agency, told me. Did Antov really fall out his window in India? Was he pushed by a Kremlin agent? Or did he get a call that threatened his family and made him feel he had no option but to leap? “All of these things are possible,” Weiss told me.

In the Kremlin’s Gothic murderverse, imagination is key.

Defenestration has been a favorite method of removing political opponents since the early days of multistory buildings, but in the modern era, Russia has monopolized the practice. Like Tosca’s climactic exit from the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo, death by falling from a great height has a performative, even moral aspect.

In Russian, this business of assassination is known as mokroye delo, or “wet work.” Sometimes, the main purpose is to send a message to others: We’ll kill you and your family if you’re disloyal. Sometimes, the goal is to simply remove a troublesome individual.

A few years after the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny died while jogging outside London in 2012, at least one autopsy detected chemical residue in his stomach linked to the rare—and highly toxic—flowering plant gelsemium. “These are the clues of evidence that the Russians are fond of using,” Weiss told me. A calling card, if you will. “They want us to know that it was murder, but they don’t want us to be able to definitely conclude it was murder.”

Robert Service: Back in the U.S.S.R.

Poisoning has that ambiguity. It is literally covert, concealed, sometimes hard to detect. Defenestration is a bit less ambiguous. Yes, it could be an accident. But it’s a lot easier to conclude it was murder—an overt assassination.

“Things that mimic natural causes of death like a heart attack or a stroke, the Russians can be quite good at doing that,” Weiss said. The deaths range in their showiness, but they’re all part of the same overarching scheme: to perpetuate the idea that the Russian state is a deadly, all-powerful octopus, whose slimy tentacles can search out and seize any dissident, anywhere. As the Bond franchise had it, the world is not enough.

The war in Ukraine is not universally popular among Russia’s ruling elite. Since the conflict began, sanctions on oligarchs and businessmen have constrained their profligate and peripatetic lifestyles. Some are, understandably, said to be unhappy about this. High-level Russian elites feel as if Putin “has essentially wound the clock backwards,” Weiss said, to the bad old days of Cold War isolation.

This year’s spate of deaths—so brazen in their number and method as to suggest a lack of concern about plausible, or even implausible, deniability—is quite possibly Putin’s way of warning Russia’s elites that he is that deadly octopus. The point of eliminating critics, after all, isn’t necessarily to eliminate criticism. It is to remind the critics—with as much flair as possible—what the price of voicing that criticism can be.


Elaine Godfrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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Fox News co-host blames capitalism for Southwest Airlines meltdown: 'This is not even about Pete Buttigieg'

NEWS
CHRIS ENLOE
December 29, 2022


Fox News contributor Richard Fowler, guest co-host on "The Five," blamed capitalism on Wednesday for the Southwest Airlines meltdown.

Southwest Airlines, previously thought to be one of the better airlines to fly on, has left tens of thousands of travelers stranded over the holiday season after the company canceled thousands of flights. Indeed, the vast majority of canceled flights over the holiday season have been Southwest flights.

Outdated systems and brutally cold winter weather are being blamed for the problems, but that is no consolation to stranded travelers.
What did Fowler say?

Republicans, and even some Democrats, are partially blaming Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for the meltdown. They argue he has abdicated his vocational responsibilities, which include responding to transportation crises.

Fowler, however, completely rejected the argument.

"Democrats had a lot of hope in Pete Buttigieg. Are they embarrassed of just how he's performed over the last couple of years?" co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked Fowler.

"This is not even about Pete Buttigieg, though," he responded, amused by the suggestion.

"Ninety percent of the flights canceled in the United States today are from Southwest Airlines because you have a bad management, they have bad software," he went on to say. "You can't blame the flight attendants, you can't blame the pilots, you can't blame the ramp agents.

"You have to blame the people who sit in the corporate suites of Southwest Airlines for canceling flights. Period. The end of story," Fowler declared. "To blame Pete Buttigieg for the fact that Southwest can't manage their planes is ridiculous."

Instead, Fowler blamed capitalism for the meltdown.

"Once again, this is about capitalism and an airline that cannot manage it," he claimed. "Don't fly Southwest Airlines."



Anything else?

Southwest chief commercial officer Ryan Green issued a new apology on behalf of the airline Wednesday.

"My personal apology on behalf of myself and everyone at Southwest Airlines for all of this," Green said in a video message.

The airline executive said Southwest Airlines is committed to re-earning customers' trust and will start doing so by giving travelers increased "flexibility" for travel arrangements impacted by the meltdown and reimbursing them for expenses directly related to Southwest's problems.


"$7 billion taxpayer bailout": Sanders tells Buttigieg to hold Southwest's CEO accountable for greed

The Vermont senator blasted Southwest's "unacceptable" meltdown and demanded the Transportation Department step in

By JAKE JOHNSON
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 29, 2022
Bernie Sanders | Southwest Airlines (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday urged the Transportation Department to ensure Southwest's chief executive pays a price for mass U.S. flight cancellations that have left passengers and employees stranded around the country, throwing lives into chaos and drawing further attention to the company's business practices.

"Southwest's flight delays and cancellations are beyond unacceptable," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter. "This is a company that got a $7 billion taxpayer bailout and will be handing out $428 million in dividends to their wealthy shareholders. The U.S. Department of Transportation must hold Southwest's CEO accountable for his greed and incompetence."

Bob Jordan, who has worked for Southwest for decades and became the company's CEO earlier this year, acknowledged on Tuesday that the airline needs to "upgrade" its outdated scheduling system and other technology that flight attendants and pilots have been warning about for years.

"For more than a decade, leadership shortcomings in adapting, innovating, and safeguarding our operations have led to repeated system disruptions, countless disappointed passengers, and millions in lost profits," the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) said in a statement Wednesday. "The holiday meltdown has been blamed on weather that had been forecast five days prior, but this problem began many years ago when the complexity of our network outgrew its ability to withstand meteorological and technological disruptions. SWAPA subject matter experts have repeatedly presented years of data, countless proposals that make Southwest pilots more efficient and resilient."

Instead of investing more heavily in such critical upgrades, Southwest pumped billions of dollars into stock buybacks in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jordan took over as chief executive in February, receiving a generous compensation package that could amount to $9 million for the year. Earlier this month, just weeks before the airline began canceling thousands of flights per day, Jordan announced that the company would reinstate its quarterly dividend, which was suspended at the beginning of the pandemic.

The current payout of 18 cents per share, set to reach shareholders next month, will cost the company $428 million a year.

In an internal message to employees on Tuesday, Jordan said of the ongoing meltdown, "This stops with me."

"I'm accountable for this and I own our issues and I own our recovery," Jordan added.

Like Southwest's management, the Transportation Department—headed by Pete Buttigieg—knew there was potential for a holiday travel crisis. The department is currently investigating the ongoing flight cancellations.

"Before the debacle, attorneys general from both parties were sounding alarms about regulators' lax oversight of the airline industry, imploring them and congressional lawmakers to crack down," The Lever reported Wednesday. "Four months before Southwest's mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg's agency 'failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse' to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines' customer service."

"Weeks before that, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) sent Buttigieg a letter warning of 'the deeply troubling and escalating pattern of airlines delaying and canceling flights' particularly during holidays," the outlet added.

In November, Buttigieg leveled fines totaling $7.25 million against six airlines for "extreme delays in providing refunds" to customers whose flights had been canceled or significantly altered.

But critics said the punishment was far from adequate, and neither Southwest nor its main competitors were among the companies ordered to pay penalties. The Lever noted Wednesday that Southwest "has spent more than $2 million on lobbying since Biden took office and Buttigieg became secretary of Transportation," and he has faced withering criticism for refusing to take on the increasingly consolidated airline industry.

According to Bloomberg, Buttigieg told Jordan on Tuesday that the Transportation Department "expects that Southwest will meet its obligations to passengers and workers and take steps to prevent a situation like this from happening again."

The Christmas travel crisis isn't the first time this year that U.S. airlines have faced backlash over mass cancellations. Around the July 4 holiday, major airlines including Southwest canceled or delayed thousands of flights amid a travel surge.

At the time, Sanders wrote a letter calling on Buttigieg to strengthen federal regulations to impose a fine of "$27,500 per passenger for all domestic flights that are delayed more than two hours and all international flights that are delayed more than three hours when passengers are forced to wait on the tarmac."

The senator also urged the Transportation Department to fine airlines "$55,000 per passenger if they cancel flights that they know cannot be fully staffed."

Buttigieg has yet to do either.

Sen.-elect John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who joined Sanders in calling for a crackdown on the airline industry earlier this year, wrote on Twitter Wednesday that "airlines have a responsibility to their customers."

"When they fail," he added, "we must hold them accountable."
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Netanyahu’s new government could lose a critical constituency: American conservatives

BY RON KAMPEAS DECEMBER 29, 2022 

Likud leader MK Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with Religious Zionist party head MK Bezalel Smotrich during a vote in the plenum session at the assembly hall of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, Dec. 20, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)


WASHINGTON (JTA) — The op-ed was typical of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page, extolling the virtues of moderation in all things.

The difference was that the author of the piece published Wednesday, Bezalel Smotrich, has a reputation for extremism, and the political landscape he was imagining is in Israel, not America.

Experts who track the U.S.-Israel relationship say the op-ed had a clear purpose: to quell the fears of American conservatives whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long cultivated as allies and who may be rattled by his new extremist partners in governing Israel.

Those partners include Smotrich, the Religious Zionist bloc leader and self-described “proud homophobe” whom Israeli intelligence officials have accused of planning terrorist attacks — and who was sworn in as finance minister in Netanyahu’s new government Thursday. They also include Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted of incitement for his past support of Jewish terrorists, who will oversee Israel’s police.

The presence of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and their parties in Netanyahu’s governing coalition has alarmed American liberals, including some in the Biden administration. But insiders say conservatives are feeling spooked, too.

“The conservative right was with [Netanyahu] and now he seems to be riding the tiger of the radical right,” said David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who just returned from a tour of Israel where he met with senior officials of both the outgoing and incoming governments. “And I think that is bound to alienate the very people who counted on him being risk-averse and to focus on the economy.”

In his op-ed published on Tuesday, two days before the new Israeli government was sworn inLINK TK, Smotrich sought to persuade Americans that the new government is not the hotbed of ultranationalist and religious extremism it has been made out to be in the American press.

“The U.S. media has vilified me and the traditionalist bloc to which I belong since our success in Israel’s November elections,” he wrote. “They say I am a right-wing extremist and that our bloc will usher in a ‘halachic state’ in which Jewish law governs. In reality, we seek to strengthen every citizen’s freedoms and the country’s democratic institutions, bringing Israel more closely in line with the liberal American model.”

The op-ed is at odds with the stated aims of the coalition agreements; whereas Smotrich says there will be no legal changes to disputed areas in the West Bank, the agreements include a pledge to annex areas at an unspecified time, and to legalize outposts deemed illegal even under Israeli law. He says changes to religious practice will not involve coercion, but the agreement allows businesses to decline service “because of a religious belief,” which a member of his party has anticipated could extend to declining service to LGBTQ people.

Netanyahu has alienated the American left with his relentless attacks on its preference for a two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he perceives as dangerous and naive. (He also differs from them on how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.) He has instead cultivated a base on the right through close ties with the Republican Party and among evangelicals, made possible in part because he has long espoused the values traditional conservatives hold dear, including free markets and a united robust Western stance against extremism and terrorism.

But his alliance with Smotrich and others perceived as theocratic extremists may be a bridge too far even for Netanyahu’s conservative friends, who champion democratic values overseas, said Dov Zakheim, a veteran defense official in multiple Republican administrations.

“Traditional conservatives are much closer to the Bushes, and Jim Baker and those sorts of folks,” he said, referring to the two former presidents and the secretary of state under the late George H. W. Bush.

Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the op-ed was likely written at Netanyahu’s behest with those conservatives in mind.

“The Wall Street Journal piece was designed to appeal to traditional conservatives,” he said. “It was designed to send a message to the American public writ large that the way in which Smotrich and perhaps [Itamar] Ben Gvir have been described is based on past utterances and not necessarily their forward-looking policies.”

The immediate predicate for the op-ed, insiders say, was likely a New York Times editorial on Dec. 17 that called the incoming government “a significant threat to the future of Israel” because of the extremist positions Smotrich and other partners have embraced, including the annexation of the West Bank, restrictions on non-Orthodox and non-Jewish citizens, diminishing the independence of the courts, reforming the Law of Return that would render ineligible huge chunks of Diaspora Jewry, and anti-LGBTQ measures.

Smotrich in his op-ed casts the changes not as radical departures from democratic norms but as tweaks that would align Israel more with U.S. values. He said he would pursue a “broad free-market policy” as finance minister. He likened religious reforms to the Supreme Court decision that allowed Christian service providers to decline work from LGBTQ couples.

“For example, arranging for a minuscule number of sex-separated beaches, as we propose, scarcely limits the choices of the majority of Israelis who prefer mixed beaches,” Smotrich wrote. “It simply offers an option to others.”

In the West Bank, Smotrich said, his finance ministry would promote the building of infrastructure and employment which would benefit Israeli Jewish settlers and Palestinians alike. “This doesn’t entail changing the political or legal status of the area.”

Such salves contradict the stated aims of the new government’s coalition agreement, Anshel Pfeffer, a Netanyahu biographer and analyst for Haaretz said in a Twitter thread picking apart Smotrich’s op-ed.

“Smotrich says his policy doesn’t mean changing the political or legal status of the occupied territories while annexation actually appears in the coalition agreement and his plans certainly change the legal status of the settlements,” Pfeffer said.

Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said foreign media alarm at the composition of the incoming government was premature.

“I suspect that the vast mass of people will maintain the support that they have for Israel because it hasn’t got anything to do with the passing of one government to another and has everything to do with the principle that Israel is a pro-American democracy in a region that’s pretty important,” she said.

That said, Pletka said, the changes in policy embraced by Smotrich and his cohort could alienate Americans should they become policy.

“I think a lot of things can change if the rhetoric from Netanyahu’s government becomes policy, but right now, it’s rhetoric,” she said. “What you tend to see in normal governments is that they need to make a series of compromises between rhetoric that plays to their base and governance.”

Pletka said Netanyahuu’s stated ambition to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords to peace with Saudi Arabia would likely inhibit plans by Smotrich to annex the West Bank. In the summer of 2020, the last time Netanyahu planned annexation, the United Arab Emirates, one of the four Arab Parties to the Abraham Accords, threatened to pull out unless Netanyahu pulled back — which he did.

“It’s not just the relationship with the United States,” she said. “This might alienate their new friends in the Gulf, which, at the end of the day, may actually have more serious consequences.”

Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to relay the impression that he will keep his coalition partners on a short leash.

“They’re joining me, I’m not joining them,” he said earlier this month. “I’ll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel. I won’t let anybody do anything to LGBT [people] or to deny our Arab citizens their rights or anything like that.”

Zakheim said that Netanyahu, who is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, from 1996 to 1999 and then from 2009 to 2021, has proven chops at steering rangy coalitions — but there are two key differences now.

Netanyahu wants his coalition partners to pass a law that would effectively end his trial for criminal fraud, and so they exercise unprecedented leverage over him. Additionally, Netanyahu in the past has faced the greatest pressure from haredi Orthodox parties, who are susceptible to suasion by funding their impoverished sector. That’s not true of his new ideologically driven partners.

“If you look at his past governments, he has really never been forced into real policy decisions by those to the right of him,” Zekheim said. “Now he’s got a problem because these 15 or so seats of those to his right are interested in policy, not just in money.”

Makovsky said Netanyahu appears to be leaving behind a conservatism that was sympathetic to the outlook of its American counterpart.

“His success has been that he’s a stabilizer. He’s risk-averse. He’s focused on the prosperity of the country, with high-tech success. He’s the one to be seen as the tenacious guardian against Iranian nuclear influence,” he said. “And those are things people could relate to. Now, it just seems like he’s just throwing the playbook out the window.”

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Oil Industry Completes Sweep of Congressional Energy Committees

Cathy McMorris Rodgers will take control of the Energy and Commerce Committee after receiving more money from oil and gas PACs than any other House Republican.

PUBLISHED ON DEC 29, 2022
Donald Shaw@donnydonny
Money-in-politics reporter. 
Co-founder of Sludge.
See more
EDITED BY DAVID MOORE

The House Republican who received the most oil and gas PAC money in the last election cycle is set to be the next chair of the House committee that oversees national energy policy. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) is expected to be put in charge of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in January when control of the House flips from the Democrats to the Republicans, after serving as the committee’s ranking member in 2021 and 2022. In addition to energy policy, the Energy and Commerce Committee conducts oversight and crafts bills impacting the oil and gas industry through its wide-ranging jurisdiction over policy areas including “environmental protection,” “clean air and climate change,” “safe drinking water,” and “renewable energy and conservation.”

McMorris Rodgers did not face a competitive Democratic challenger and did not need a large campaign war chest, but the oil and gas industry still donated more to her campaign in 2021-2022 than it ever had before.

McMorris Rodgers’ ascension to chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee means that the two primary congressional committees in charge of energy policy will be controlled by oil industry allies. The Senate Energy Committee is chaired by Sen. Joe Manchin, who was the top recipient of oil and gas industry money of any federal candidate in 2021-2022, despite having not been up for re-election that cycle. Manchin, who took a shotgun to Obama’s climate bill in a 2010 campaign ad, has frequently sided with his fossil fuel industry donors, including killing President Biden’s clean energy program proposal that would have imposed fees on power companies that fail to meet emission reductions targets. Manchin and McMorris Rodgers will control Congress’ energy committees just years before the 2030 deadline that United Nations scientists have identified for the world to halve carbon emissions in order to avoid worse climate-related droughts, flooding, and species extinctions.

According to OpenSecrets, McMorris Rodgers received donations from at least 40 oil and gas industry PACs in the 2021-2022 cycle, totaling more than $240,000. PACs are limited to giving candidates a maximum of $5,000 per election. Some of the oil and gas PACs that donated to McMorris Rodgers’ campaign over the past two years include those affiliated with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, Transcanada USA, Energy Transfer Partners, Cheniere Energy, Halliburton, and HollyFrontier Corp. Several of these companies made additional PAC donations to McMorris Rodgers’ leadership PAC. Combined with donations from employees and lobbyists, the oil and gas industry donated $345,000 to McMorris Rodgers’ campaign and PAC over the past two years, according to OpenSecrets.

At an energy summit hosted by the Association of Washington Businesses days after the November midterms, McMorris Rodgers told attendees that she plans to pursue an “all of the above” energy policy approach, and that U.S. energy strategy needs to include fossil fuel production, according to Northwest Public Broadcasting.

One of the first bills McMorris Rodgers plans to call up before the Energy and Commerce Committee is a package that would authorize construction and operation of the Keystone XL pipeline and strip the president and federal agencies of their authority to restrict oil and gas permitting on federal lands. During the previous session of Congress, McMorris Rodgers was the chief sponsor of a bill with 146 Republican co-sponsors called the American Energy Independence From Russia Act that would achieve these objectives and more. McMorris Rodgers has also said that she plans to pursue legislation along the lines of the Manchin-Bennet energy infrastructure permitting reform proposal that would accelerate the construction of interstate energy projects by limiting environmental review procedures.

In recent interviews, McMorris Rodgers told reporters that with control of Congress divided and Republican legislation unlikely to become law, she plans to launch investigations of Democratic policies under her committee’s jurisdiction. She told the Washington Post in November that she will investigate the climate portions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), warning against “a political agenda that is forcing a green energy transition that jeopardizes our reliability and increases costs.” In August, she called the IRA’s new funding for Department of Energy loan guarantees of clean energy projects “Solyndra on steroids.”

The Energy and Commerce Committee does not just deal with energy policy. It has the broadest jurisdiction of any authorizing committee in Congress, and it conducts oversight and writes bills impacting health care, food, internet, and telecommunications sectors, as well as dealing with all legislation relating to consumer protections or affecting interstate commerce.

For example, the committee has jurisdiction over proposals around lowering prescription drug prices. McMorris Rodgers has been critical of the drug pricing reforms that the Democrats passed into law in the IRA. “There is no pricing floor for the so-called ‘negotiation’ price, meaning health care bureaucrats could force a drug company to accept a figure as low as $1 or face up to a 95 percent excise tax,” she said in August of the bill’s provision allowing Medicare to negotiate price with drug companies. She also echoed drug industry lobbying group PhRMA in arguing that the bill would lead to fewer new medicines being developed. Among the many pharmaceutical company PACs that donated to McMorris Rodgers this cycle are Merck, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, and Abbott Labs.

McMorris Rodgers received more than $3 million from business PACs in the 2022 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, more than any other House candidate. Business PACs are controlled by their corporate sponsors, but they are not funded by corporate dollars due to a prohibition in campaign finance laws. Instead, the money they donate to politicians comes from voluntary contributions made by employees and board members. In addition to pharmaceutical and oil and gas companies, some of the other industries that provided major PAC funding to McMorris Rodgers last cycle were insurance, telecom services, and electric utilities.

Oil companies, fossil fuel industry trade associations, and wealthy donors in the energy industry helped Republicans retake the House with record donations to the super PACs aligned with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate GOP leaders, according to a Sludge analysis of contributions in the lead-up to Election Day.
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‘Special pay’ keeps Pentagon’s cyber experts from jumping ship

By Colin Demarest and Molly Weisner
Dec 28, 3022
The U.S. Department of Defense is increasingly interested in using cyber to influence public opinion, compete with foreign powers and fight future wars, but needs to retain people with the knowledge and skills to do it. (SrA Ryan Lackey/U.S. Air Force photo illustration)


WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is paying tens of millions of dollars each year above set compensation rates to keep sought-after cyber experts onboard and engaged on the digital front lines, according to a federal watchdog.

The services “spent at least $160 million on cyber retention bonuses annually” from fiscal 2017 to 2021, the Government Accountability Office said in a workforce evaluation published this month. Staffing levels across most related career fields that the auditor studied, including in the Army, Air Force and Navy, remained above 80% in the same timeframe.

Special pay is meant to help ensure the military holds on to its top performers, has people in hard-to-fill roles and maintains much-needed expertise amid rivaling opportunities with outside companies or other federal agencies. The services determine how to distribute the incentives, with guidance flowing from the Department of Defense.

The department’s ability to sustain a ready and sufficient cyber cohort is critical to the shielding of its networks and its most sensitive information as well as the execution of digital strikes or influence campaigns on foreign countries or militant groups. Recruitment woes, however, have consumed headlines; the U.S. Army, for example, suffered a shortfall of 15,000 recruits in fiscal 2022. That left the service 20,000 or so troops short of its end-strength number authorized by Congress.

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By Colin Demarest

“To accomplish its national security mission and defend a wide range of critical infrastructure, DoD must recruit, train, and retain a knowledgeable and skilled cyber workforce,” reads the report. “However, DoD faces increasing competition from the private sector looking to recruit top cyber talent to protect systems and data from a barrage of foreign attacks.”

Competition with the private sector — and even within government — for young, highly skilled workers in emerging tech fields is fierce. Big Tech offers nearly uncapped salaries, competitive benefits and workplace flexibility, though recent layoffs are creating a labor pool the government hopes to tap.

To lure in the talent they need, and keep the staff they have, federal workplaces have looked to incentives, monetary and otherwise. In years with staffing gaps, the military services rolled out bonuses and other perks to recruit and retain.

The civilian side of government has taken a similar approach. The White House’s Office of Personnel Management just concluded its annual review of special rate requests for salary adjustments for specific occupations, grades or locations “to alleviate existing or likely significant recruitment or retention difficulties.” Other agencies have deviated from the General Schedule to create job-specific pay systems and invoke special hiring authorities.

Army Cyber Command officials told the GAO that money spent on retention bonuses is offset by the costs of recruitment and training to replace cyber personnel. The replacement cost for a service member in the 17C career field, or cyber operations specialist, who is certified to fill the interactive on-net operator role is about $400,000, while the retention bonus offered to a person with that training is $92,000 spread over six years, the report notes.

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Digital fluency is increasingly important, defense and intelligence officials say, as the U.S. ratchets up competition with China and Russia, top national security threats, according to the National Defense Strategy. Both wield significant cyber weaponry: Chinese-sponsored cyberattacks have breached a Navy contractor’s computers, jeopardizing information related to secret work on an anti-ship missile, and virtual Russian belligerence targeted U.S. elections and lubricated its war machine in Ukraine.

As a result, cyber cliques in the U.S. military are expected to expand in coming years. The Army, specifically, plans to double the size of its active-duty cyber forces by the end of the decade.

“You will continue to see the growth of our cyber branch, as we proliferate cyber-electromagnetic activities, capabilities,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G-6, told reporters in June. “Think cyber and electronic warfare, integrated together, throughout all of our tactical formations.”

The Army requested $16.6 billion in cyber and information technology funding for fiscal 2023. Congressional leaders last week unveiled a $1.7 trillion government spending package, which included $858 billion for defense.

Davis Winkie with Army Times contributed to this article.

About Colin Demarest and Molly Weisner

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

Molly Weisner is a staff reporter for Federal Times where she covers labor, policy and contracting pertaining to the government workforce. She made previous stops at USA Today and McClatchy as a digital producer, and worked at The New York Times as a copy editor. Molly majored in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Inside the call centre scam that lured vulnerable workers to Cambodia and trapped them in the murky world of human trafficking


By South-East Asia correspondent Mazoe Ford and Supattra Vimonsuknopparat in Bangkok
Thousands of vulnerable workers in South-East Asia who lost their jobs during the pandemic have been lured into job scams.
ABC News: Emma Machan

The job advertisements were too enticing to scroll past — marketing and administration roles at a lavish casino in Cambodia, with high salaries and paid accommodation.

For Nokyoong, a 26-year-old Thai single mother of three, and her cousin Neung, 40, it seemed like an incredible opportunity to make money for their family.

As soon as they saw the ads on Facebook they contacted the recruitment agent, speaking multiple times to find out the details before signing up.

But within a day of arriving in Cambodia's casino capital Sihanoukville, their hopes were crushed.

They found themselves locked in a crowded compound, tricked into handing over their phones and passports, and working for a Chinese-run investment scam.

Over several months they tried to leave and raise the alarm. They say they were either tortured, threatened with torture, or forced to watch other people being tortured.

"I was so afraid I wouldn't see my kids again," Nokyoong told the ABC.

"I was afraid that I would be killed over there, I saw how they beat people."

With Nokyoong's three children, all aged under 10, back in Thailand with her aunty and relying on the money they had hoped to send home, the cousins were desperate to get out.

Little did they know, they were among thousands of vulnerable workers across South-East Asia lured by human traffickers into the murky web of online scams.
Inside the call centre scam

As soon as they got to their new workplace, Nokyoong and Neung (whose names the ABC has changed to protect their identities) knew something was amiss.

"When we arrived at a casino in Sihanoukville, Thai and Chinese people took us to a building and the door was locked," Nokyoong said.

"The room was like a cage with iron bars, we couldn't get out, it was like prison."
Thai cousins Nokyoong and Neung were both lured into a labour scam on the promise of lucrative jobs in Cambodia.(ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

They say they were made to work in a call centre, using dating apps on mobile phones to meet people looking for love.

Once they had established online conversations, they were told to pass the people's details on to a "chief" who would continue the chat and trick people into sending money for bogus investments.

Neung told the ABC they were expected to lure up to five unsuspecting investors every day.


"We felt so bad doing that, but we were locked up and force to cheat people," he said.

Nokyoong and Neung, as well as others who were trapped, tried to contact Cambodian police and foreign embassies, but it was difficult to do without being caught.

"A Vietnamese man was caught asking for help from his embassy, and the [scam leaders] told everyone to watch and started hitting him until a bone popped out from his leg," Nokyoong said.

Nokyoong left her three children with a family member while she travelled to Cambodia for what she thought was an administration and marketing position.(ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

After Neung was caught trying to contact Thai authorities, he says he was moved to a different compound and tortured there.

"I was struck with an electric baton and hit on the face," he said.

"I thought I might not survive."

Nokyoong feared for hers and her cousin's life.

"They're bad memories that I'll never forget," she said.
Children as young as 12 being tricked into labour scams

Jaruwat Jinmonca, the co-founder of anti-human trafficking organisation the Immanuel Foundation Thailand, says Nokyoong and Neung's account is terrifyingly common.

He told the ABC that an estimated 3,000 Thai victims have been tricked into working for labour scams in South-East Asia this year, some as young as 12 years old.

"It is a big problem and numbers are increasing … more people have been lured into these scams because of the dire economic situation from COVID," he said.
Jaruwat Jinmonca, the co-founder of anti-human trafficking organisation the Immanuel Foundation Thailand.(ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

Mr Jaruwat says governments in South-East Asia, especially Myanmar and Cambodia, have not been taking the issue seriously.

"They don't see that human trafficking is happening in their countries, and they look at call centre scams as a problem of a few Chinese [people] who rent a building and don't create so much damage," he said.


"When victims are rescued, the traffickers are not charged, they just move to new places."

According to the US State Department's 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia failed to meet the minimum standards for eliminating trafficking, and were designated the lowest rating, tier 3.

Thailand was upgraded to tier 2 status with the report noting the country did "not fully meet the minimum standards … but [was] making significant efforts to do so".

It noted a decrease in prosecutions and convictions compared with the previous year, difficulty identifying victims and gaps in services for victims were issues of concern.

The report credited Thailand with initiating investigations against corrupt officials and sentencing two to jail time, but said more work needed to be done.

"Corruption continues to undermine anti-trafficking efforts," the report said.

"Some government officials are directly complicit in trafficking crimes, including through accepting bribes or loans."

Deputy Secretary-General of the Prime Minister Police General Tamasak Wicharaya, who oversees the government's anti-trafficking response, said the Thai government had laws in place to crack down on corrupt officials in this area.

"We cannot tolerate it. We apply penalties and legal action against them," he told the ABC.

"This year we so far have around 25 individual officials being charged and [over a] seven-year period of time, we have [charged] more than 90."
Escaping their scam prison was far from the end of the ordeal

By early July, six months after they were first lured into the scam, Nokyoong and Neung were finally able to leave.

In a joint Cambodian-Thai Police operation, the Sihanoukville call centres they worked in were raided and shut down and 74 Thai workers were detained.

Nokyoong says they were held in a Cambodian hotel provided by the Thai embassy for around a month while police investigated. They were then taken back over the border by bus.

"Thai police told me they would help me to be categorised as [a] witness and told me not to stress because they would help me," Nokyoong said.

"But when I arrived back in Thailand, they put us in jail for three days and treated us like criminals."

Neung says police explained that they needed to issue arrest warrants in order to get the Thai workers out of Cambodia.

"We felt relieved and did whatever they said," he said.

Neung, like many others trapped in the labour scam, was detained upon his arrival back in Thailand. He now faces fraud charges and is unable to leave the country. (ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

They were given bail and hoped that would be the end of it, but almost a year on, their ordeal is far from over.

Along with 22 others, Nokyoong and Neung are now facing fraud charges in Thailand.

It will be up to the court to decide whether they were victims or criminals posing as victims.

Their trials are not expected to begin until the end of May 2023.
Police see some scam victims as 'part of the gang'

Mr Jaruwat's organisation has rescued 374 Thai victims of human trafficking in South-East Asia this year, and continues to help those caught up in labour scams to defend themselves in court.

"We worked with police, we told them they were victims, we showed them evidence, but police did not listen. They charged them," he said.

"The police have their targets … they set the goal as getting rid of the call centres, but they have not tried to understand the victims' situations."

General Tamasak said Thai authorities must conduct a thorough investigation including a comprehensive victim screening process.


"Many [people] are innocent, having been trafficked [while] seeking economic opportunities such as working in an entertainment complex, but some turn out to be part of the gang," he said.

"Some receive criminal proceeds and benefit from quite a large [amount] of money and they are no longer victims.

"This is a very awkward situation and very complex but we have to be unbiased."
Police General Tamasak Wicharaya says officers must thoroughly investigate all victims to ascertain whether they have profited from the scams.(ABC News: Mazoe Ford)

Nokyoong and Neung confirmed they were paid by the traffickers for around half the time they were trapped in the scam — the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a month.

They are hoping this fact will not cloud their criminal cases.
If it sounds too good to be true — it's probably a scam

Thailand is stepping up its efforts to help victims and try to track down the transnational criminal networks that target them.

In the new year it will open a centre of excellence in Bangkok to counter human trafficking — a facility General Tamasak said he hoped would become the "authority" on the issue in the region.

Australia will provide technical support to help Thailand design the centre and get it up and running, and assist with developing a new national curriculum for counter-trafficking, with a focus on gender-sensitive, victim-centred approaches.

With fraud charges hanging over their heads, Nokyoong and Neung are still haunted by the scam that snared them.

"Now we are charged with a crime and can't apply for jobs, we can't do anything," Nokyoong said.

The cousins fear the "big fish" will never be caught, but they hope that by speaking out other people will learn from their experience.

"I want to warn people, don't just look at a post telling you 'good job, good money', it's not like that, it's a slave job," Neung said.

Nokyoong warned people to think carefully before jumping on irresistible offers.

"There are so many scammers out there and I don't want anyone to go through what we have," she said.
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