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struggle4progress

(118,043 posts)
Mon Jun 20, 2016, 09:56 PM Jun 2016

Trump Campaign Manager’s Firm Turned Blind Eye to Burma Rapes

BETSY WOODRUFF
06.20.16 1:00 AM ET

... his newest big hire is a K Street veteran whose old firm once enthusiastically defended a military junta that used rape as a weapon of war—and tried to malign the reputations of the human rights’ groups that worked to protect women and girls from the military rapists.

Jim Murphy, who became Trump’s new national political director earlier this month, was a managing partner at JLM Consulting when Trump hired him. Previously, he was a managing partner at the DCI Group lobbying firm from June 2002 until June 2012. For his last four years there, according to his LinkedIn page, he was also president. The firm is famous for making fake “smokers’ rights groups” to defend Big Tobacco, and for creating an astroturf campaign in favor of Social Security privatization (a campaign that belly-flopped).

In 2002, when Jim Murphy was a managing partner there, the DCI Group worked for a the Burmese military government. As part of that work, it issued press releases saying the country’s military wasn’t responsible for systematically raping ethnic minority women.

... Reports from activists on the ground and from the U.S. State Department indicate that the military was, in fact, using rape as a weapon of war when DCI represented it—and still does so to this day. One former U.S. official who worked in Burma while DCI contracted with the country’s government said the firm’s statements on the issue were “propaganda” and “baloney”—all in defense of a military regime that human rights activists held responsible for the systematic rape, torture, and murder of countless ethnic minority women ...


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/20/trump-campaign-manager-s-firm-turned-blind-eye-to-burma-rapes.html

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Trump Campaign Manager’s Firm Turned Blind Eye to Burma Rapes (Original Post) struggle4progress Jun 2016 OP
sickening, but not in the least surprising. niyad Jun 2016 #1
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