Corruption Free Bharat - The Comptroller and Auditor General's Report

 

Shobhaa De explains all what you wanted to know about #MeToo

Non Disclosure Agreements: a legal weapon used to silence and intimidate

Shannon Bond in The FT

Companies, and individuals, have a range of ways to make sure stories about misconduct do not spread. 

Most financial settlement agreements between accused and accuser include non-disclosure provisions that bar the person receiving the financial settlement from talking about their allegations or even revealing the amount of the settlement, according to lawyers who have represented women in sexual harassment cases. Non-disparagement provisions, which prevent an alleged victim from speaking ill of the person or company they have accused, are also common. 

The penalties for breaking this silence can be steep. “A lot of defendants and the companies they work for are powerful. They can put in draconian liquidated damages provisions in the event there is disclosure,” says one lawyer who has worked on such cases. 

For example, an alleged victim might be forced to pay back not just the full amount of the settlement but also an additional financial penalty and the other party’s legal fees. “There is a lot of fear hanging over your head,” the lawyer says. 

Many of the women who received settlements after accusing Roger Ailes, the former Fox News chief executive and Bill O’Reilly, one of its key presenters, of sexual harassment do not feel free to speak publicly about their experiences because of NDAs. That includes Gretchen Carlson, who received a $20m settlement in a lawsuit she filed against Ailes in 2016 that set off a cascade of allegations about the cable news network’s most powerful figures. 

Ms Carlson has become an advocate for prohibiting forced arbitration clauses and their accompanying NDAs. “We have chosen as a culture to silence the victims either with settlements where you are gagged from ever saying what happened to you or enforced arbitration, which is a part of employment contracts now, and here’s the key — it’s secret,” she told CBS News last week. 

However, NDAs cannot lawfully prevent people from reporting claims to law enforcement and government agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the US, or responding to a subpoena. 

Allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct can also be kept quiet by limiting what employees can say about their workplaces. Employment contracts often include NDAs. Many also require that any complaints, including sexual harassment, be resolved in private arbitration rather than a courtroom. Those arbitration-only clauses — which are being challenged in a Supreme Court case — typically limit what a worker can say about the complaint and the ensuing arbitration. 

“All of these operate to silence survivors of sex harassment and sex assault from coming forward and reporting, and they also help shield serial harassers from accountability,” says Maya Raghu, director of workplace equality at the US National Women’s Law Center. “As we’ve seen in the last few weeks, many survivors feel like ‘I’m the only one who this has happened to’ — so they stay silent.”  

The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq can't be 'countered' indefinitely

The media cover-up has been a weapon in the crimes of western states since the first world war. But a reckoning is coming for those paid to keep the record straight

• 
• • John Pilger
  • The Guardian, Friday 7 February 2014 16.30 GMT

A baby in a Baghdad hospital in July 2003. 'Half a million Iraqi infants died as a result of sanctions, according to Unicef.' Photograph: Joseph Barrak/AFP/Getty Images

The BBC's Today programme is enjoying high ratings, and the Mail and Telegraph are, as usual, attacking the corporation as leftwing. Last month a single edition of the Radio 4 show was edited by the artist and musician PJ Harvey. What happened was illuminating.

Harvey's guests caused panic from the moment she proposed the likes of Mark Curtis, a historian rarely heard on the BBC who chronicles the crimes of the British state; the lawyer Phil Shiner and the Guardian journalist Ian Cobain, who reveal how the British kidnap and torture; the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange; and myself.

There were weeks of absurd negotiation at Broadcasting House about ways of "countering" us and whether or not we could be allowed to speak without interruption from Today's establishment choristers. What this brief insurrection demonstrated was the fear of a reckoning. The crimes of western states like Britain have made accessories of those in the media who suppress or minimise the carnage.

The Faustian pacts that contrived a world war a century ago resonate today across the Middle East and Asia, from Syria to Japan. Then, as now, cover-up was the principal weapon. In 1917 David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, declared: "If people knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know."

On Harvey's Today programme I referred to a poll conducted by ComRes last year that asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion.A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed: a figure so shockingly low it was a profanity.

I compared this with scientific estimates of "up to a million men, women and children [who] had died in the inferno lit by Britain and the US". In fact, academic estimates range from less than half a million to more than a million. John Tirman, the principal research scientist at the MIT Centre for International Studies, has examined all the credible estimates; he told me that an average figure "suggests roughly 700,000". Tirman pointed out that this excluded deaths among the millions of displaced Iraqis, up to 20% of the population.

The day after the Harvey programme, Today "countered" with Toby Dodge of the LSE – a former adviser to General Petraeus, one of the architects of the disasters in both Iraq and Afghanistan – along with Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a former Iraqi "national security adviser" in the occupation regime, and the man who led Saddam Hussein to his lynching.

These BBC-accredited "experts" rubbished, without evidence, the studies and reduced the number of dead by hundreds of thousands. The interviewer, Mishal Husain, offered no challenge to their propaganda. They then "debated" who was responsible. Lloyd George's dictum held; culpability was diverted.

But for how long? There is no question that the epic crime committed in Iraq has burrowed into the public consciousness. Many recall that "shock and awe" was the extension of a murderous blockade imposed for 13 years by Britain and the US and suppressed by much of the mainstream media, including the BBC. Half a million Iraqi infants died as a result of sanctions, according to Unicef. I watched children dying in hospitals, denied basic painkillers.

Ten years later, in New York, I met the senior British official responsible for these "sanctions". He is Carne Ross, once known in the UN as "Mr Iraq". He is now a truth-teller. I read to him a statement he had made to a parliamentary select committee in 2007: "The weight of evidence clearly indicates that sanctions caused massive human suffering among ordinary Iraqis, particularly children. We, the US and UK governments, were the primary engineers and offenders of sanctions and were well aware of the evidence at the time but we largely ignored it and blamed it on the Saddam government … effectively denying the entire population the means to live."

I said to him: "That's a shocking admission."

"Yes, I agree," he replied. "I feel ashamed about it ..." He described how the Foreign Office manipulated a willing media. "We would control access to the foreign secretary as a form of reward to journalists. If they were critical, we would not give them the goodies of trips around the world. We would feed them factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we'd freeze them out."

In the build-up to the 2003 invasion, according to studies by Cardiff University andMedia Tenor, the BBC followed the Blair government's line and lies, and restricted airtime to those opposing the invasion. When Andrew Gilligan famously presented a dissenting report on Today, he and the director general were crushed.

The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news. There will be a reckoning – not just for the Blairs, Straws and Campbells, but for those paid to keep the record straight.

Religion for Atheists