The ‘Hillary Effect’ on Ambassadorships to the U.S.

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Mary Jordan writes 'Hillary effect' cited for increase in female ambassadors to U.S. for WaPo (January 11, 2010):

Quotable quotes from the article:

"Even when I say I am ambassador, people assume I am the spouse."

Meera Shankar, Indian Ambassador to the US  

(India's first female ambassador in more than 50 years)

"It's a disadvantage that I am here by myself […] but that means I can work late and not feel guilty."

Houda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo

Ambassador from Bahrain since 2008

"Hillary Clinton is so visible" as secretary of state […] she makes it easier for presidents to pick a woman for Washington."

Amelia Matos Sumbana

Ambassador from Mozambique.

"It's considered normal if a woman goes with her husband but it's not seen as the same if a husband goes."

Angele Niyuhire

Ambassador from Burundi

Jordan writes that Ambassadors' wives have historically played a huge role in entertaining -- a key part of an envoy's job -- so that duty falls to the female ambassadors. "We need a wife, too!" several remarked.

Other tidbits from the article that you might find interesting:  

• “There are 25 female ambassadors posted in Washington -- the highest number ever, according to the State Department.”
  
  

• “Eleven of the 25 female envoys in Washington are from Africa. Four are from Caribbean nations. The others are from Bahrain, the Netherlands, Croatia, Kyrgyzstan, Singapore, Oman, Colombia, India, Liechtenstein and Nauru, an eight-square-mile Pacific island with only 14,000 people.”
  
  

• “Women remain a distinct minority -- there are 182 accredited ambassadors in Washington -- but their rise from a cadre of five in the late 1990s to five times that is opening up what had been an elite's men club for more than a century.”
  
  

• “While male ambassadors are usually accompanied by wives, female ambassadors are often here alone. Of eight interviewed, four are divorced and four said their husbands did not accompany them to Washington because of their own jobs.”
  
  

• “More than half of new recruits for the U.S. Foreign Service and 30 percent of the chiefs of mission are now women, according to the State Department. That is a seismic shift from the days, as late as the 1970s, when women in the Foreign Service had to quit when they married, a rule that did not apply to men.”

Read the whole thing here.

More than half of the new recruits in the Foreign Service are women.  That may not be a great conundrum for the FS now, but before too long it will be. 

What would they do with the husbands?

One More Reason Why Professional EFM Jobs Matter Now

The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) calls population ageing one of the biggest challenges of our century. While working age adults currently make up the largest share of the population in the UNECE region and percentages of dependent children and older adults are relatively small, this situation is changing rapidly. In Europe, there are now 4.4 persons of working age per one person 65 or older. By 2025, there will be 3.1 and by 2050 only 2.1. To help its member States make the appropriate policy responses, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) is launching a series of Policy Briefs on Ageing. Drawn from the latest insights in research, the Briefs highlight strategies for policymakers and offer good practice examples for the variety of policy contexts found in the UNECE region.

One of the policy briefs is on gender equality, work and old age. Excerpted below is the section citing the link between labor force participation and social security.  Although this brief refers to ECE countries, I see some particular relevance to this and trailing spouses and partners in the Foreign Service.

The truth is -- despite progress in the workplace in the United States, trailing spouses particularly women (whether they like it or not), eventually regress into the traditional gender division of labor when posted overseas.  The inability of most Foreign Service spouses (81% of total population is female) and partners to pursue their careers while they are overseas (on their spouses’ government orders) will likely impact their financial and social security in old age. And since the female life expectancy in the United States is now 81.43 and expected grow to 86.62 in 2050, I think of this issue as a possible double whammy future fraught with peril. From the report:

Elderly women outnumber elderly men in all countries of the UNECE region. They are more likely to live in poverty and to be affected by disability and restrictions of mobility. They are more represented among those living in residential care and are at bigger risk of elderly abuse. Many elderly women are widows and at an economic disadvantage due to low incomes. To tailor adequate social policies to respond to an increasingly ageing society, it is important to take into account these gender differences.

Financial and social security of women and men in old age is connected to their current and previous participation in the labour market. Gender differences in socio-economic status are partially rooted in the traditional gender division of labour, where men bear the primary responsibility for breadwinning - that is, for paid work - and women for unpaid housework and family care. This has an impact on men’s and women’s ability to accumulate social security entitlements for their pension age.

Nevertheless, it is desirable that men and women are able to form their family and work lives during their working age period in the way that best suits their personal needs without risking their security in old age. To shape the political framework for gender equality throughout the life course, three strategies are important. The first is to enable and encourage women, and mothers in particular, to participate in the labour market and build careers in the same way as men do. Among others things, this would contribute to their social security entitlement in old age as well as to the current pay-as-you-go pensions system of their countries. Secondly, women who decide to take a career break due to caring responsibilities should nevertheless enjoy social security in old age. A gender-assessed pension system would need to compensate for this. Thirdly, it should be acknowledged that support from family members traditionally plays an important role in the care of older persons and can often be the most desirable form of such care for those involved. Therefore, working-age family members need to have the opportunity of assistance when undertaking such caring tasks.

Frankly, I can imagine a gender-assessed pension systems in some parts of Europe, but not in the United States.  Click here to read the full brief.  To read the other policy briefs, check out UNECE launches Policy Briefs on Ageing.

The New Enhanced Screening Directive: In Numbers

The four countries (Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria) designated as “state sponsors of terrorism” have a collective total population of 141 million people (2007 estimate | WolframAlpha).  The ten “countries of interest” have a collective total population of 468.1 million people (2007 estimate | Wolfram Alpha).

The new directive mandates that “every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening.”



I do not know how many non-citizen travelers actually originate/transit/travel through these 14 countries en route to the United States.  But I was curious at how many nationals from these countries could be impacted by the new directive.  So I went digging for numbers.

Below is the grand total of nonimmigrant visa issuance and admission by nationality on the reported countries covered by the new TSA enhanced screening directive.  The “ISSUED” data come from published statistics of the Bureau of Consular Affairs of the State Department, covering the period October 2007-September 2008.  (See the FY2008 NIV Detail Table on nonimmigrant visa issuances by visa class and by nationality). Issued visas can be as short as 3 months with one entry or can have the maximum validity of 10 years with multiple entry.  Which actually means, you can use it to travel to any US port of entry or border crossing and apply for temporary admission into the country while it is valid.  The validity of the visa is not the length of authorized stay in the United States.  Read more here. 

The “ADMITTED” column below comes from the Department of Homeland Security.  DHS maintains the records of admittance to the United States of foreign visitors by citizenship, country of residence, gender, age, etc.  Even with a visa, the authority to admit an alien into the US is still under DHS.  The length of stay that immigration officers grant foreign visitors can vary, but the normal length of stay authorized as I understand it is usually six months.  Check out its Yearbook of Immigration Statistics here.  You might also want to check out this April 2009 Annual Flow Report from DHS on admission.  The DHS numbers below are extracted from Table 26 (XLS, 54 KB Nonimmigrant Admissions (I-94 Only) by Region and Country of Citizenship: Fiscal Years 1999 to 2008).

COUNTRY	ISSUED DOS FY 2008	ADMITTED DHS FY2008
Cuba	13,108	15,130
Iran	12,635	11,479
Sudan	2,502	2,319
Syria	6,421	7,441
Nigeria	59,748	88,732
Pakistan:	32,666	57,922
Saudi Arabia	36,224	46,853
Lebanon	19,888	28,669
Algeria:	5,947	6,215
Libya	5,375	4,313
Iraq	3,714	3,351
Afghanistan	2,454	2,323
Yemen	1,573	1,616
Somalia	227	24

                         Sources: FY2008 NIV Detail Table (State)

                                        and  Table 26 (DHS)

It is important to note that the number of issuance and number of admission above have no real correlation because an applicant issued a visa in 2008 may have decided to travel/apply for admission at a port of entry in the United States in 2009. Or a visitor who applied for admission for entry in the United States in 2008 may have been issued a visa a year or two previously. To see the trends in the number of admission to the United States, check out DHS’s Table 26, an excel spreadsheet that details total admission by country from FY 2009 FY 1999 – FY 2008.        

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The Christmas Day Airliner Attack and the Intelligence Process

By George Friedman

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR

As is well known, a Nigerian national named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to destroy a passenger aircraft traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit on Dec. 25, 2009. Metal detectors cannot pinpoint the chemical in the device he sought to detonate, PETN. The PETN was strapped to his groin. Since a detonator could have been detected, the attacker chose — or had chosen for him — a syringe filled with acid for use as an improvised alternative means to initiate the detonation. In the event, the device failed to detonate, but it did cause a fire in a highly sensitive area of the attacker’s body. An alert passenger put out the fire. The plane landed safely. It later emerged that the attacker’s father, a prominent banker in Nigeria, had gone to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to warn embassy officials of his concerns that his son might be involved with jihadists.

The incident drove home a number of points. First, while al Qaeda prime — the organization that had planned and executed 9/11 — might be in shambles, other groups in other countries using the al Qaeda brand name and following al Qaeda prime’s ideology remain operational and capable of mounting attacks. Second, like other recent attacks, this attack was relatively feeble: It involved a single aircraft, and the explosive device was not well-conceived. Third, it remained and still remains possible for a terrorist to bring explosives on board an aircraft. Fourth, intelligence available in Nigeria, London and elsewhere had not moved through the system with sufficient speed to block the terrorist from boarding the flight.

An Enduring Threat

From this three things emerge. First, although the capabilities of jihadist terrorists have declined, their organizations remain functional, and there is no guarantee that these organizations won’t increase in sophistication and effectiveness. Second, the militants remain focused on the global air transport system. Third, the defensive mechanisms devised since 2001 remain ineffective to some degree.

The purpose of terrorism in its purest form is to create a sense of insecurity among a public. It succeeds when fear moves a system to the point where it can no longer function. This magnifies the strength of the terrorist by causing the public to see the failure of the system as the result of the power of the terrorist. Terror networks are necessarily sparse. The greater the number of persons involved, the more likely a security breach becomes. Thus, there are necessarily few people in a terror network. An ideal terror network is global, able to strike anywhere and in multiple places at once. The extent of the terror network is unknown, partly because of its security systems and partly because it is so sparse that finding a terrorist is like finding a needle in a haystack. It is the fact that the size and intentions of the terror network are unknown that generates the sense of terror and empowers the terrorist.

The global aspect is also important. That attacks can originate in many places and that attackers can belong to many ethnic groups increases the desired sense of insecurity. All Muslims are not members of al Qaeda, but all members of al Qaeda are Muslims, and any Muslim might be a member of al Qaeda. This logic is beneficial to radical Islamists, who want to increase the sense of confrontation between Islam and the rest of the world. This not only increases the sense of insecurity and vulnerability in the rest of the world, it also increases hostility toward Muslims, strengthening al Qaeda’s argument to Muslims that they are in an unavoidable state of war with the rest of the world. Equally important is the transmission of the idea that if al Qaeda is destroyed in one place, it will spring up elsewhere.

This terror attack made another point, intended or not. U.S. President Barack Obama recently decided to increase forces in Afghanistan. A large part of his reasoning was that Afghanistan was the origin of 9/11, and the Taliban hosted al Qaeda. Therefore, he reasoned the United States should focus its military operations in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, since that was the origin of al Qaeda. But the Christmas Day terror attempt originated in Yemen, a place where the United States has been fighting a covert war with limited military resources. It therefore raises the question of why Obama is focusing on Afghanistan when the threat from al Qaeda spinoffs can originate anywhere.

From the terrorist perspective, the Yemen attack was a low-cost, low-risk operation. If it succeeded in bringing down a U.S. airliner over Detroit, the psychological impact would be massive. If it failed to do so, it would certainly increase a sense of anxiety, cause the U.S. and other governments to institute new and expensive security measures, and potentially force the United States into expensive deployments of forces insufficient to dominate a given country but sufficient to generate an insurgency. If just some of these things happened, the attack would have been well worth the effort.

TSA’s New Security Directive for Enhanced Screening

Here’s a new announcement from TSA:

Today, the Transportation Security Administration issued new security directives to all United States and international air carriers with inbound flights to the U.S. effective January 4, 2010.

The new directive includes long-term, sustainable security measures developed in consultation with law enforcement officials and our domestic and international partners. Because effective aviation security must begin beyond our borders, and as a result of extraordinary cooperation from our global aviation partners, TSA is mandating that every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. The directive also increases the use of enhanced screening technologies and mandates threat-based and random screening for passengers on U.S. bound international flights.

WaPo reports that TSA officials declined to name all the "countries of interest" on Sunday, but confirmed that the directive applies to the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. The department's Web site lists Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria as state sponsors of terrorism. The report also says that “a senior administration official identified the following as terrorism-prone nations or countries of interest to U.S. intelligence agencies: Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen.”

The NYT on its coverage (U.S. Intensifies Air Screening for Fliers From 14 Nations) points out that these new changes will mean that “any citizen of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia will for the first time be patted down automatically before boarding any flight to the United States. Even if that person has lived in a country like Britain for decades, he now will be subject to these extra security checks.”

Nigeria has already criticized its inclusion under the new air passenger screening saying "It is unfair to discriminate against 150 million people because of the behaviour of one person."

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Video of the Week: The Future of the Internet

Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and Chief Evangelist for Google, discusses the past, present, and future of the Internet. Cerf predicts that Asia's cultural influence will grow as the continent's Internet penetration rates reach European levels. He says that, while IPv6 will provide enough Internet addresses to last through his lifetime, the implementation of IPv6 creates difficulties for the Internet in terms of compatibility, security, and broadcasting. Cerf describes the trends and opportunities of the Internet in the 21st century: the transformation of information consumers into information producers; the rise of social networking; the emergence of new economic systems in online games; the development of user-generated advertising content via streaming IPTV; and the transformation of mobile phones into multi-purpose devices that provide geographically indexed information. In Cerf's view, the increasingly lower cost of storing and transporting bits fosters a new economics of digital information and the emergence of new Darwinian business models that challenge existing entities to "adapt or die." As a result, Cerf says the Internet is an unprecedented and unpredictable innovation engine because its infrastructure enables people to invent new applications simply by writing new software on the edge of the network without having to ask for permission.

Video length: 1h 13min 15sec

From: Stanford University’s eCorner

Quickie: Human Trafficking in America

Image by mvcorks via Flickr

For six months Kansas City Star reporters traveled the world, from Guatemalan migrant shelters to the deadly streets of Tijuana, investigating America's war against human trafficking.

They found that America is losing the battle — even in its own backyard. In fact, Kansas City is an emerging hub of human trafficking activity.

Economic opportunity in the U.S. draws human trafficking victims from all over the world. Estimates on the number of victims have varied from 17,500 a year now to 50,000 annually earlier this decade; nobody really knows. International victims are smuggled across borders or can enter legally and fall into slavery. See the Trafficking Primer here (PDF)

This week the Kansas City Star is running a 5-part series on human trafficking in America. Click here to access days four & five (links have not been updated as of this writing):

Day One: A new slaveryBeckoned by the land of the free, immigrants wind up being held against their will for labor, sex and money.

Day Two: Snares of the sex tradeInternational sex trafficking is more complex and problematic than the U.S. law designed to combat it. Meanwhile, domestic victims are getting scant attention.

Day Three: Fraud's welcome matAmerica's intricate, fraud-plagued work visa program is a welcome mat for modern-day slavers.

Day Four: Coming Wednesday - No questions asked Some suspected victims, in violation of U.S. policy, are being deported on government-run airlines based in Kansas City.

Day Five: Coming Thursday - No easy fixesA new approach is needed, and changes are coming.

Click here to read the entire series.

Video of the Week: Cameron Sinclair: The refugees of boom-and-bust

At TEDGlobal U, Cameron Sinclair shows the unreported cost of real estate megaprojects gone bust: thousands of migrant construction laborers left stranded and penniless. To his fellow architects, he says there is only one ethical response.

After training as an architect, Cameron Sinclair (then age 24) joined Kate Stohr to found Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit that helps architects apply their skills to humanitarian efforts. Starting with just $700 and a simple web site in 1999, AFH has grown into an international hub for humanitarian design, offering innovative solutions to housing problems in all corners of the globe. (Video duration: 3:06)

Whether rebuilding earthquake-ravaged Bam in Iran, designing a soccer field doubling as an HIV/AIDS clinic in Africa, housing refugees on the Afghan border, or helping Katrina victims rebuild, Architecture for Humanity works by Sinclair's mantra: "Design like you give a damn." (Sinclair and Stohr cowrote a book by the same name, released in 2006.)A regular contributor to the sustainability blog Worldchanging.com, Sinclair is now working on the Open Architecture Network, born from the wish he made when he accepted the 2006 TED Prize: to build a global, open-source network where architects, governments and NGOs can share and implement design plans to house the world.

"Cameron Sinclair is doing his best to save the world, one emergency shelter and mobile AIDS clinic at a time." Washington Post

Related Links:

• Website: Cameron Sinclair's homepage
• Website: Architecture for Humanity
• Website: Open Architecture Network
• Book: Design Like You Give a Damn
• Website: Worldchanging.com

From ted.com.

Video of the Week: Ian Goldin: Navigating our global future

As globalization and technological advances bring us hurtling towards a new integrated future, Ian Goldin warns that not all people may benefit equally. But, he says, if we can recognize this danger, we might yet realize the possibility of improved life for everyone.

Take a look at Ian Goldin's jam-packed CV and you'll see why he was appointed the first Director of Oxford University's new think tank-cum-research center, the 21st Century School: Goldin battled apartheid in his native South Africa, supported freedom movements in Chile and Nicaragua, worked as an agriculture consultant around the globe in the '80s, served as a development adviser to Nelson Mandela and, as the VP of the World Bank, led collaborations with the UN on global development strategy.

At the 21st Century School, with a diverse brigade of top researchers from the hard and social sciences, he plans to bring fresh thinking to bear on the big, looming issues of the next 100 years: climate change, disruptive technological advancements, aging, bio-ethics, infectious disease, poverty, political conflict.

"End poverty, reverse climate change, eliminate infectious diseases, stop global conflict. It sounds like a Miss World contestant's wish-list. But when Oxford University's latest baby has these aspirations as its stated goals, you have to take them rather more seriously." - John Crace, The Guardian. (Video duration: 7:07)

From ted.com | See interactive transcript of talk here.

Related links:

21^st Century School

Ian Goldin’s Webpage

Video of the Week: Erik Hersman on Texting on a Crisis

At TEDU 2009, Erik Hersman presents the remarkable story of Ushahidi, a GoogleMap mashup that allowed Kenyans to report and track violence via cell phone texts following the 2008 elections, and has evolved to continue saving lives in other countries.

Erik Hersman grew up in Kenya and Sudan and is, as he puts it, "one of those guys who's much more 'at home' in Africa." From his home in the US, he keeps two influential blogs: WhiteAfrican, where he writes about technology on the African continent, and AfriGadget, a group blog that celebrates African ingenuity.

During the Kenyan post-election crisis of 2007-2008, Hersman helped create the website Ushahidi, a place to report incidents of violence via the web and texts. The original Ushahidi tool was written in two days; later that year, it won the NetSquared Mashup Challenge (and a nice check to help further development). Now the Ushahidi team's next project is to build the Ushahidi Engine, a free and open-source tool for crowdsourcing information and seeing communities online. And you can help.

Erik Hersman is an alumnus of the TED Fellows program, having attended TEDGlobal 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania, and TED2009 in Long Beach, California. Find out more about the TED Fellows program.

From TED.com

Video of the Week: PW Singer on Military Robots

And the future of war ...

In this powerful talk, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat. He shows us scenarios straight out of science fiction -- that now may not be so fictitious.

Peter Warren Singer is the director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution -- where his research and analysis offer an eye-opening take on what the 21st century holds for war and foreign policy. His latest book, Wired for War, examines how the US military has been, in the words of a recent US Navy recruiting ad, "working hard to get soldiers off the front lines" and replacing humans with machines for bombing, flying and spying. He asks big questions: What will the rise of war machines mean to traditional notions of the battlefield, like honor? His 2003 book Corporate Warriors was a prescient look at private military forces. It's essential reading for anyone curious about what went on to happen in Iraq involving these quasi-armies.

Singer is a prolific writer and essayist (for Brookings, for newspapers, and for Wired.com’s great Threat Level), and is expert at linking popular culture with hard news on what’s coming next from the military-industrial complex. Recommended: his recent piece for Brookings called "A Look at the Pentagon's Five-Step Plan for Making Iron Man Real."

From TED.com

Video of the Week: Howard Rheingold on Collaboration

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.

As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, "I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net." A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.

His 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to cofound HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we're all creating together.

From ted.com

Video of the Week: Hans Rosling on HIV

New facts and stunning data visuals

Hans Rosling unveils new data visuals that untangle the complex risk factors of one of the world's deadliest (and most misunderstood) diseases: HIV. He argues that preventing transmissions -- not drug treatments -- is the key to ending the epidemic.

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair.

Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofit Gapminder, founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software — which can be loaded with any data — was purchased by Google in March 2007. (Rosling met the Google founders at TED.)

Rosling began his wide-ranging career as a physician, spending many years in rural Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (which he named konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava. He co-founded Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden, wrote a textbook on global health, and as a professor at the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm initiated key international research collaborations. He’s also personally argued with many heads of state, including Fidel Castro.

From TED.com. Hans Rosling was one of the speakers during TED@State but videos of that talk has not been posted online yet.

Related Items:

TED@State on Flickr

TED Blog on TED@State

Quickie: Top 100 Government Contractors

from Washington Technology

The Washington Technology report say that with a new administration, a stimulus package with billions of dollars of new spending and shifting government priorities, the current environment offers no shortage of challenges to fuel changes by the top companies in the market. It notes that several of the top companies also share a growing interest in cybersecurity and health IT, both of which are important priorities for the Obama administration. It probably needs no pointing out but I'll do so anyway -- all top 5 companies in this ranking are in the defense industry.

Click here for coverage of the Top 100.

Click here for Completes List

Top 5 (by Rank)
1) Lockheed Martin ($14,983,515,367)
2) Boeing ($10,838,231,984)
3) Northrup Grumman ($9,947,316,207)
4) General Dynamics ($6,066,178,545)
5) Raytheon ($5,942,575,316)

Diplomatic Bloggers: Official Blogs, Art Thou Here to Stay?

The State Department has DipNote where posts are written, with some exceptions, by the mostly nameless “DipNote Bloggers.” The Brits has the FCO Bloggers: Global Conversations website which collects their official bloggers in one place, complete with full names and titles, including the Foreign Office Secretary David Milliband, who posts regularly. I don’t know of any other large collection of diplomatic bloggers, except these and the un-official ones (diplomats/diplomatic community members blogging in their private capacity).

The former British Ambassador Charles Crawford has written a few posts on diplomatic blogging. He thought in his post here that “the FCO has a goodly bunch, albeit with tone of unrelenting 'corporate' cheeriness, eschewing anything controversial/awkward in policy or philosphical terms.” But his indictment was that “FCO blogs are a friendly but bland product, making no serious contribution to the 'global foreign policy debate'.

I kind of look at both DipNote and the FCO Blogs as toddlers learning to walk; my hope is that they are fast learners and that they will become more agile as they grow older. Well, one can hope, and hoping is still free…

I have started reading the FCO bloggers because they provide a bit more flavor than our folks over at C Street and I like some of them because of the personal tone. One comment about the blogs: FCO bloggers try to keep to policy areas they have responsiblity for. Diverging from this has caused the odd frantic call from London to the offending blogger. What? They do that?

But Why Would a Diplomat Blog?

One of the FCO blogs by Stephen Hale, the Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy, tries to explain where FCO blogging fits in to the UK's foreign policy priorities: More niche blogs, with well defined objectives, linked to specific projects or campaigns. Because the web is about niches, and it's within niches that blogs can have real value. We want our bloggers to reach their particular target audiences (rather than to generate general-interest traffic). Read Stephen Hale’s Why Would a Diplomat Blog?

Ambassador Crawford still is not convinced with its utility, writing: “But how precisely do you begin to define what a 'target audience' is for any given diplomatic blog then target it without being at least a bit sharp and different? It takes months if not years to build up a non-trivial readership - blandness is not the way to do it.” Noah Shachtman over at Danger Room wrote something about this recently in his Info Wars post: “…you need a message that's sharp, and simple. Bland statements-by-committee just don't work. In fact, the more you vet and control your statements, the less effective it is.”

I think that the genie is out of the bottle and can’t be put back in. So here we are; the choices are clear ‘cuz according to the French – “the absent are always wrong.”

Blogs and the other new/social media provide an opportunity to improved engagement among the immediate audience and the larger global audience of these organizations. It is an entirely different world out there; the information superhighway has gotten terribly busier. Although Asia has the largest number of Internet users in the world at 650.4 millions, two other regions register the highest growth of internet usage between 2000-2008. Wanna guess which two?

The Middle East with a growth rate of Internet usage at 1,296.2 %

And Africa with a growth rate of 1,100.0 %.

This should give us some pause.

An Op-ed a Day, Rapid Response or Something Else?

Somebody made a comment that writing a blog is like writing an op-ed a day and worth the exercise. For which Ambassador Crawford responds:

“Blogs offer you the chance to write an op-ed a day. So do newspapers. Yet how many op-ed pieces by serving British diplomats have there ever been? None? The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can't work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government or HQ or both. Just say a diplomat posted a blog entry politely speculating on the wisdom of current Climate Change or Middle East policy. Imagine the scenes in Parliament: "The Secretary of State apparently cannot persuade even his own senior officials of the wisdom of this policy! Why should we take any notice of him?"

True. A unified message is necessary because it has more impact and generates less chaos and migraines. You certainly can’t have different people from the same agency talking from various policy perspectives publicly. I imagine that one or two or more would be dragged into the SFRC hearings to make clarifications or to defend their views. Can’t be done; this won’t work or people would be running around like headless chickens trying to find their heads!

The primary question I supposed is -- what is the function of an official blog? Is it an op-ed generator, a rapid response arm, a community huddle, a shining stake on cyberground, what?. At least the FCO has articulated where its blogging fits in the larger puzzle and has now been evaluated for the third time. DipNote has nothing but this, and if it has been evaluated at all, that report is not in the public sphere.

Part of Ambassador Crawford’s commentary on the FCO blogs is that when things are breaking online or even in the MSM like this one on, "A foul-mouthed anti-Semitic tirade"? or this one, the FCO bloggers and website seems to have little to say about it.


A similar criticism for DipNote, this one saying last year: “When the world is blowing up someplace, why does it take days and days for DipNote to weigh in? Where is Condoleeza Rice? Where is the energy, where is any evidence of a major commitment here to something other than a very, very careful, at times self-flattering operation?”

During the Mumbai siege, two Americans escaped and wrote about their experience with the Embassy (actually the Consulate General) in CNN’s user-generated, iReport.com site, DipNote was nowhere around. I don't think readers would expect DipNote to wade in on the core issues in Mumbai, after all it was an unfolding incident. But it's a blog - you can't expect it to be silent when what is going on is right on its alley!


It could have easily posted contact numbers for the task force (it was available elsewhere) and within a reasonable aftermath, could have invited some un-official bloggers who were assigned in Mumbai and were in the thick of things like Diplodocus who posted a few items: We Are Safe, Thanksgiving., It’s Raining in Bombay, The Earth Spins on Its Axis. And Girl in the the Rain who posted Deep Breath excerpted below:

We have been working 12-hour shifts (and sometimes more), running between phone calls or text messages with American citizens who were trapped in the hotels, meetings with the people “upstairs” who wanted to know what was going on, inquiries from families in the States, media calls (which we promptly passed off), and “field” duty at places like hospitals, outside the hotels, the airport, and even the morgue. Things were changing several times per minute - it was nearly impossible to get an accurate picture of things to report to the higher-ups at any given time, because it would all be different by the time you finished saying it.

There were also, of course, some low points. Like when one of our officers was allowed to enter the Oberoi Hotel - he left the hotel shaken, telling us of a horrific scene inside, with bodies in a restaurant where there were still meals on the tables. And, of course, each time we learned of a confirmed death of one of the people who we’d been looking for, or whose families or friends we had been in touch with.

And We’re okay. with the following:

We did our best to stay on top of the situation, and we did whatever we could to help American citizens who were caught up in the attacks or holed up in hotel rooms, (understandably) scared out of their wits. It is tough work emotionally, and I know I speak for all of my colleagues when I say that we all wholeheartedly wish we could do more for people.

I recognize that DipNote is under new management with some changes recently – but until about last year, it often reads very much like a dry report or a press release, or an extension of the happy-talk magazine. In December somebody posted Vulnerable Minorities: Eradicating Today’s Form of Slavery. The piece was in first person, 11 paragraphs in length. Below is a quick excerpt:

I’ve talked with survivors in Tamil Nadu, an especially poor state in India. Many in bonded labor, some sexually exploited, have rights to freedom under a 32-year-old Indian law. Yet the federal and local political will to rescue them from exploitation does not match the commitment on paper.

I have also met with the champion of Uyghur Muslim rights in China, Rebiya Kadeer, who was jailed for speaking truth to power. She and U.S-funded, but independently operated, Radio Free Asia have reported that Uyghur Muslims have been relocated under force, which makes them human trafficking victims. Conveniently, Kadeer says, many of those trafficked are women of child-bearing age to reduce the Uyghur complexion of Xinjiang.

And I thought as I read this post – okay you’ve met all these people and -- what were your thoughts? If I want to read a report on vulnerable minorities like this I would hunt down a report, or read straight news. It almost seems to me as if this was from a cable, tweaked for blog consumption. This kind of material can trick folks into thinking that they’re engaging the blogosphere and spreading USG’s message in this case, on human trafficking, when the writer is really just talking to himself.

Well, the same could be said about me here …tee-hee

In any case, on these official blogs, the root cause of this “dissatisfaction” might be in the fact that the audience is not only domestic but also global, but that within those segments, people also tend to form “cocoons of conversation online.” That's a lot of niches ...

So -- different strokes for different folks?

Related Post:
Diplomatic Bloggers: Web 2.0 Door Opens

The Baby Trade is Not a Crime?

Map created by Claire Pavlik Purgus
for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Click here for the interactive map

In a new investigative article "The Lie We Love," published in Foreign Policy's November/December 2008 issue, E.J. Graff, associate director and senior researcher at the Schuster Institute writes about how the story of abandoned orphans in developing countries has become largely fiction. The article exposes the myth of a world orphan crisis— where we are told that millions of children are waiting to be rescued from lives of abandonment and abuse. The article reveals that the large amounts of Western money offered for healthy “adoptable” infants and toddlers are inducing the baby trade and trafficking in poor and corrupt countries. Foreign Policy’s website has exclusive rights to the article until January, and you can read it here. After January, it will be available in full at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. A few excerpts below:

[…] Many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of international adoptions each year has nearly doubled, from 22,200 in 1995 to just under 40,000 in 2006. At its peak, in 2004, more than 45,000 children from developing countries were adopted by foreigners. Americans bring home more of these children than any other nationality—more than half the global total in recent years.

You can check out the official stats from the State Department’s newly rolled out adoption website here.

On the Exporters of Children

"One such country has been Guatemala, which in 2006 and 2007 was the No. 2 exporter of children to the United States. Between 1997 and 2006, the number of Guatemalan children adopted by Americans more than quadrupled, to more than 4,500 annually. Incredibly, in 2006, American parents adopted one of every 110 Guatemalan children born. In 2007, nearly 9 out of 10 children adopted were less than a year old; almost half were younger than 6 months old. “Guatemala is a perfect case study of how international adoption has become a demand-driven business,” says Kelley McCreery Bunkers, a former consultant with UNICEF Guatemala. The country’s adoption process was “an industry developed to meet the needs of adoptive families in developed countries, specifically the United States.”

On Mothers Left Behind

"Consider the case of Ana Escobar, a young Guatemalan woman who in March 2007 reported to police that armed men had locked her in a closet in her family’s shoe store and stolen her infant. After a 14-month search, Escobar found her daughter in pre-adoption foster care, just weeks before the girl was to be adopted by a couple from Indiana. DNA testing showed the toddler to be Escobar’s child. In a similar case from 2006, Raquel Par, another Guatemalan woman, reported being drugged while waiting for a bus in Guatemala City, waking to find her year-old baby missing. Three months later, Par learned her daughter had been adopted by an American couple."

On Barter and Trade

"In Vietnam, for instance, a finder’s fee for a single child can easily dwarf a nurse’s $50-a-month salary. Some nurses and doctors coerce birth mothers into giving up their children by offering them a choice: pay outrageously inflated hospital bills or relinquish their newborns. Illiterate new mothers are made to sign documents they can’t read. In August 2008, the U.S. State Department released a warning that birth certificates issued by Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City—which in 2007 had reported 200 births a day, and an average of three abandoned babies per 100 births—were “unreliable.” Most of the hospital’s “abandoned” babies were sent to the city’s Tam Binh orphanage, from which many Westerners have adopted. (Tu Du Hospital is where Angelina Jolie’s Vietnamese-born son was reportedly abandoned one month after his birth; he was at Tam Binh when she adopted him.) According to Linh Song, executive director of Ethica, an American nonprofit devoted to promoting ethical adoption, a provincial hospital’s chief obstetrician told her in 2007 “that he provided 10 ethnic minority infants to [an] orphanage [for adoption] in return for an incubator.”

We have written previously about the Vietnam Adoption here. Graff’s article proposes ways on how to correct the process. One calls for putting a lid on fees:

Per-child fees could be outlawed. Payments could be capped to cover only legitimate costs such as medical care, food, and clothing for the children. And crucially, fees must be kept proportionate with the local economies. “Unless you control the money, you won’t control the corruption,” says Thomas DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, which represents more than 200 international adoption organizations. “If we have the greatest laws and the greatest regulations but are still sending $20,000 anywhere—well, you can bypass any system with enough cash.”

Basic economics at play here; while the demand is there, the market finds a way. So the first step is to help educate prospective adoptive parents. This is a very emotional matter - I understand, but just because we could, does it always mean we should?

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this report is what a USG agent says about the baby trade: “You can get away with buying babies around the world as a United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who investigated Galindo (a former hula dancer who reportedly made millions off Cambodian babies and toddlers through adoption fees). “It’s not a crime.”

Related Posts:
Adoptions in Vietnam – Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

Related Items:

• State Department Adoption Page
  Alerts and Notices
  
  
• Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism
  
  
• “The Diaper Diaspora”
  (Foreign Policy, January/February 2007)
  
  
• Child Laundering: How the Intercountry Adoption System Legitimizes and Incentivizes the Practices of Buying, Trafficking, Kidnapping, and Stealing Children”
  (Berkeley Electronic Press Legal Series, Aug. 29, 2005)
  
  
• “The Baby Trade”
  (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003) by Ethan B. Kapstein