I blogged last year about Professor Angana Chatterji, of the California Institute of Integral Studies (founded by Hindus for the studies of the mind-body connection), who, with her husband Richard Shapiro, has been an ardent activist against human rights abuses in Kashmir.
Indian nationalists don’t see her actions in so benign a light, and last year, she and her husband were fired from CIIS for misusing her academic post for political activism. There was more.
Apparently, she had been in touch with one Ghulam Nabi Fai, a Kashmiri activist, alleged to be a Pakistani agent, who was arrested in July 2011.
Fai pleaded guilty in December 2011 to two counts of lying to the government and defrauding the IRS.
“”Arrested in July 2011, Dr Fai, director of the Kashmiri American Council, had been accused of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He has been accused of, and later pleaded guilty to, taking money from the Inter-Services Intelligence to run his US-based NGO. In December 2011, Dr Fai had admitted that from 1990 to 2011, he had received money from Pakistani officials including the ISI and the Government of Pakistan through the Kashmiri American Council.
A Department of Justice press release at the time had stated that Dr Fai could face a maximum sentence of five years on the conspiracy count, and three years for tax violation. Dr Fai had also agreed to forfeit his interest in $142,851.32 seized by the government in July 2011.”
Pai ended up with a relatively light sentence of only two years on the conspiracy charge, against a possible five. The Times of India reports:
“Fai was sentenced to 24 months o byf imprisonment followed three years of supervised release against the maximum possible 5 years (for conspiracy) plus three years (for tax violation).”
So, do I understand that if are a foreign agent of a country the US government is bombing, and you are running a lobbying outfit on US soil to influence US foreign policy favorably toward your country, and you are actively engaged in conspiracy directed against the US and its allies, and you lie about it to the government and you launder your illicit payments, you get two years…
On the other hand, if you are an American citizen originally from a country ostensibly allied with the US, a friend of prime-minister and presidents, one of the most highly regarded and competent senior consultants in the world, a man with many philanthropic accomplishments, and you are convicted on flimsy circumstantial grounds of having made some money on insider information at a board meeting of one of the most corrupt outfits that ever graced the planet, then you are liable to face sixty years?
And the man who actually was guilty of insider-trading and was caught on tape doing it is gets off with no jail, because of his exemplary co-operation?
We do not live in a free world. The deomons have won the war with the gods and these are bad times. The kalyug. The demons seem to be ruling. It is very sad what is happening to many good people in the process.