Bill Hillar: a Fraud or really a Father? by Voices for Justice in News Sat, November 20, 2010
Bill Hillar who had audiences in tears every time he spoke about his daughter being kidnapped, trafficked, and then killed has now been ousted by students claiming he is a fraud; we sit down with these students to get the lowdown.Brian Hobbs gave interview 11-19-10 to Fox News and CBS, Becky Curtis--second wife.
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"I don't understand. Are you saying that this man lied about being the father of a murdered victim? Are you saying he is exaggerating or distorting what happened to his daughter? Do either one of you want to answer the chat room?
I think at this point it's becoming quite clear that that is the case, I mean, in speaking to other veterans, and myself being a veteran, those of us who deployed, and didn't see the best of things oversees, talking about things that are incredibly inhumane and graphic. It's a very difficult thing to do. I still won't do it, I know there are a lot of others who've been through a whole lot worse, they won't even come close to touching the subject, so for him to be so open about the details and the graphics---that's another thing that was quite unsettling for me. It just doesn't match with the psychology with someone who's been through a disturbing event. You know, it's something you want to put away, put in your pocket, and not deal with it ever again, I mean, it's not something you just open up in random conversation in a coffee shop, which he seemed to be doing a lot of. And including on that note, with the class that I was in, he took us all out to a bar that night, and he continued on with these stories. It was just an inappropriate setting for such heavy, powerful stuff, you know.
27:00 I've been out of college a long time, but, isn't it unethical, or inappropriate for a professor to take out students to drink after class? Or have times changed?
I'm sure that's the case, I can't speak to the specific policies but I'm sure that is the case, but he did do that, and he continued on with these stories, and it was just, just, it was insane to me, I mean, even if I was speaking to a psychiatrist I would be reluctant to talk about this kind of stuff, because, it's just so heavy, and I mean, there he is, in a bar...
That's not a surprise to some of us, because a lot of the stuff that Brian shared, and was telling me, we either heard him say, or we know he's done. We have agencies, we have individuals out here who have worked with him, that after the course of this past week discussing this entire situation, they even said, you know, he has that ability to take you out for coffee or drinks. He's a big person to go out after a presentation and talk to an individual over drinks, and then when Brian brought that up it was like Wow, because, for those of you listening tonight...Brian, you're in California, right? Yes. And then Jay is in California, and we have Jeff. I wish he would have been on the show tonight, but he's a great guy. We spoke with him in depth yesterday, and, he is an individual that is retired from armed forces, and is with the Green Berets, and I find a lot of what he has to say very, very interesting. And it's a shame that individuals like Hillar, if these claims are true, that he has been able to do this. So, drinking, and taking students out, I would think , is not protical these days, but maybe it is, but I know that he likes to take people out and drink afterwards, and talk, and tell his stories, which ultimately, were other people's stories. Is that accurate?
Yeah, I mean, at the same time he was telling these stories, he'd buy you a couple of drinks, and he got some of the students to share some real personal things that they probably wouldn't have shared if they knew what was going on. And so here is, getting people to give a part of themselves that's really deep and personal, and he's manipulating it, and, I mean, it's a horrible thing to come to realize.
30:00 I would like to weigh in on the daughter question too, the question that was raised, you know, is he lying or distorting about his daughter, and, look, the thing is, when you hear these stories, he has conflcting stories, I mean, we have already gone over that, but there's another part of the story that we haven't talked about, and that's that he said that he cannot show a picture, or talk about his daughter because she was never buried with her placenta, which he claimed has to be fulfilled as a religious rite, because she's of the Hwong religion, I guess that's from Laos or Cambodia, and because she was never, because she was killed and never buried with her placenta, he cannot talk about her, or he can never show a picture. And to me, I mean, it just reinforces all the holes in his story, I mean, now you can't even see a picture of her, he never mentions her name, you can never find it on the internet, I mean the whole thing is a sham. I mean, the whole thing with his daughter, it's a complete lie.
Voices for Justice: Human Trafficking, the dark secret of America, by Voices for Justice in Culture, Tue, September 1, 2009,
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"Voices for Justice" airs Wednesday, September 2, 2009 from 3-4p.m.(PT), please help us spread the word! The topic is: Human Trafficking; the dark secret of America. One of our guests include: Bill Hillar, whose daughter was kidnapped and trafficked and unfortunately murdered. Hillar’s story was recently seen in the motion picture “Taken.” Other speakers will include: Transitions Global and Suzanne Stanford, My Internet Safety Coach. Join us at www.blogtalkradio.com/helpingheroes
Murder Victim Imposter Shocker, by Steph Watts, in Current Events, Sun, November 21, 2010,
Did a man -Bill Hillar- who presented himself as a victim rights advocate commit the unthinkable crime?? News broke last week that a self-described retired Colonel of the U.S. Army Special Forces has been investigated for fraudulently representing himself as an expert in the field of Human Trafficking tactical counter-terrorism, explosive ordnance, emergency medicine and psychological warfare.. Brian Hobbs a student at the University of Oregon uncovered the story -that Hillar has been misrepresenting himself and taking money from NON-profit organizations for speaking engagements. Hillar also claim the blockbuster hit Taken was fashioned after his own personal experience. He claimed his daughter was a trafficked victim and that she was brutally murdered after being abducted. There is no record Hillar having a daughter. The Army says they can find NO Record Of Hillar every being in their branch of service. How did he get away with this. We want anwers. Join my panels of experts and the students who broke the story
November 21, 2010, Conclusion of Steph Watt's Show: (with Michelle Bart, host) Bill Hillar, by Voices for Justice, Sun, Survivors speak out regarding allegations about Bill Hillar,
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12:00 As far as I can tell with some of the background stuff that I've done---he does have some financial troubles, and he's been in a lot of debt in his past, and that to me could definitively be a motivation for, um, for wanting to, to, you know, perpetuate this scam, but there's also a psychological aspect to it as well, I believe, there is something to be said about having a captivating audience, and being the center of attention. It goes back to the narcissism evaluation by the psychiatrist who talked to you before, so I think it could be a combination of the two. He's paying off his debts, but he's also getting this spotlight, and he's enjoying it.
Yeah, you know, you actually, he told you a similar story, like he told us, and since we're talking frankly, we know the graphic details of the story. He actually said that when he, ah, when his daughter went out to try and get help, one of the, when she flagged down one of the officers, that particular officer was on the payroll of the traffickers, took her back into a warehouse, is what he said to us in the conference, and then severed her limbs and then stuffed her with bags of chili. I mean, when you, did you, I mean, you said that some of his stories came from books that you know that he's read and that you came across, so, do you think that was a story in a book or do you think that was just part of his vivid imagination?
Well, I certainly hope that it came from a story in a book, because the only other conclusion that I can come to is that, either he does have some kind of very vivid imagination, or maybe he's taken some stories from victims, and he's built these stories up over time, and he's developed this narrative, or, there's also a third, [14:00] more sinister possibility, that maybe he's actually seen this stuff first hand, so there's, it's a slippery slope, but. I mean, it definitely leads in that direction.
Yeah, you know, when you talk about there being a sinister possibility, I've often wondered, was he on the other side?
Yeah, exactly.
Was he so close to the traffickers that he was on the other side? I mean, I don't know. It's almost like it's a drug dealer that wants to, you know, learn more about the drug trade, so they get involved in workshops, and so forth, and learning about, law enforcement, and so forth, like that, do you see what I'm saying?
Yeah, I mean, I'm actually taking a money-laundering course, and our professor told us, you know, that he goes to conferences all the time, and they know that there are some people there who are actively engaging in money laundering, you know, they go into these conferences to learn, you know, how to game the system, so, yeah, that's definitely a possibility.
I wished that Jason was still back with us because that has always been a question of mine, when we are out speaking and we have law enforcement out with us, speaking to us, and I always wondered---what if the traffickers, and pimps and johns and everybody are in the audience, won't they know what is being done to prevent things. But, maybe I'll ask that question next time. I know we have Dawn Schiller on the line now, Dawn
[24:45] He does have a daughter, doesn't he? Isn't that one of the facts? We know that he has an estranged daughter.
HUBBS: Yeah, he has a daughter that he mentions several times. She's a living daughter, bu he hasn't spoken to her in years. And he kept saying that, you know, he wanted to repair the relationship, or get back in touch with her, but it's been very difficult., so, that's the story he tells.
Which I think is very interesting, because that's actually in the film, that part, there was a small part in the film, in the very beginning where he, he and Ethan struggle with his relationship with his daughter. I don't know, I just think that there's so many different comparisons to these stories and these movies, that he's actually lived out, that he's almost lived his own lie, basically.
HUBBS: Well, it's like I say, I don't think the movie was based off of him, I think he based his life off this movie.
Jane Velez Mitchell Discusses Stopping Human Trafficking
By: jamie wetherbe
Tue, 2010-01-05 08:34
Issues host and out TV anchor Jane Velez-Mitchell talks with SheWired about the upcoming human trafficking conference and the war on women:
The Northwest Coalition Against Trafficking (NWCAT) on Jan. 9 in Portland will host their annual conference to educate and protect women and girls from sex trafficking.
The conference — which also serves as a fundraiser to create a trafficking shelter in Portland — will feature breakout sessions, safety demonstrations, child finger printing and keynote speakers with first-hand experience in human trafficking.
Speaker Bill Hillar, a former Special Forces Colonel, lost his 17-year-old daughter when she was kidnapped in 1988 in Asia and forced into the sex industry. Hillar was unable to save his daughter; the recent movie Taken with Liam Neeson, is partially based on his story.
Human trafficking in Coos County
Oct 12, 2010 at 8:33 PM
Human trafficking is a problem throughout the world, but it's even happening right here in Coos County. The most vulnerable victims, women and children, are also the weakest.
By Brie Thiele, KCBY News Published: Oct 12, 2010 at 7:33 PM PST
Human trafficking is a problem throughout the world, but it's even happening right here in Coos County. The most vulnerable victims, women and children, are also the weakest.
So to help educate the public and combat this growing problem, a Stop Human Trafficking event took place at the Mill Casino Hotel on today Tuesday.
People from across the county came together to learn, what we can do as a community to stop, what some people call, this modern day slave trade.
Paula Bechtold, Circuit Judge for Coos County, says people can be trafficked without ever having to leave their home, thanks to the Internet and cell phones.
She says. "trafficking includes the exploitation for commercial sexual purposes of children and girls and women, and in fact, trafficking is going on right here in Coos County."
Bechtold says that because the laws involving human trafficking here in Oregon are less strict than in Washington and California, Oregon may be a hotbed for this kind of criminal activity.
"There is some belief, on the part of law enforcement, that traffickers are perhaps, headquartering here in Oregon and there is obviously some trafficking that goes on along the I-5 corridor," says Bechtold.
The keynote speaker at today's event, Bill Hillar, a retired US Army Colonel from the Special Forces gave a free presentation later that night at the Coos Bay library.
"Stop Human Trafficking" at the Mill Casino Hotel
Oct 12, 2010 at 8:57 PM
We're learning just how big of a problem human trafficking is within the United States, and right here in Oregon, with the US being the number one human trafficking destination in the world.
Multnomah County commissioners declare July as Human Trafficking Awareness Month
Published: Thursday, July 01, 2010, 6:17 PM Updated: Thursday, July 01, 2010, 7:43 PM
By Allan Brettman, The Oregonian
Much has changed in Portland's attitude toward prostitution since a customer held a knife to Jeri Williams' throat in 1989 and demanded money.
Williams, then a prostitute who turned over her earnings to a pimp, fled her attacker early that Sept. 13 morning, but not before she was cut on her arms and neck. That experience helped break the grip of a life bound for destruction.
On Thursday, Williams appeared before the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners. She was one of several speakers who described their experiences in trying to change a local culture that many described as tolerant of selling women and girls, some as young as 12, for sex.
At the conclusion, the commissioners voted to proclaim July as Human Trafficking Awareness Month in the county. More than a dozen speakers talked about the problem.
U.S. Attorney for Oregon Dwight Holton described three convictions in the past year of men who, in separate cases, sold women younger than 18 for sex. The men have been sentenced to prison terms of 10 to 15 years.
"Slavery is alive and well in Oregon, today, right now," Holton said.
"If anyone doubts the seriousness of this issue, the depth of the crisis, or somehow considers prostitution a victimless crime, then you need only spend time in the lives of some of the criminals we have convicted."
Portland Commissioner Dan Saltzman, noting that the City Council on Wednesday declared July as Human Trafficking Awareness Month for the city, said two advocates working with women involved in trafficking will soon begin work at the Gateway Center for Domestic Violence Services.
Joslyn Baker told commissioners about the $500,000 state grant that created the three-year Multnomah County Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children project she coordinates. The aim of the project, which got under way last fall, is to improve victim services by coordinating the response of law enforcement and social service agencies.
Part of that response includes U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden's Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act of 2009, working its way through Congress, which would pay for shelters for victims in six U.S. cities.
Sgt. Jesse Luna of the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office said Thursday marked his first day as "human trafficking sergeant" in the county jail. He will oversee an effort to collect information that might be used against perpetrators of trafficking as well as provide services to victims while they're in jail.
"At that point," said Capt. Linda Yankee of the sheriff's office, who appeared with Luna, "our victims are really in a safe haven. We can help them and make them feel comfortable in helping the investigation process and get them out of this vicious cycle."
Portland police Detective Meghan Burkeen said it was unlikely she would have talked in public about sex trafficking when she began as a vice investigator in 2006.
"And now the awareness of this issue is huge; it's grown so much in the last few years," Burkeen said. "With Portland police, our primary focus is (to) view the young girls and women involved in prostitution as victims. So our goal is to prosecute, arrest and hopefully convict, at the end, the pimp who's forcing these girls to go out and work for them."
Williams, the former prostitute, recalled breaking free of her forced service largely on her own.
Eventually, she found work in nonprofits, and for the past three years has worked as a neighborhood program coordinator for Portland.
In August, she will begin pursuing an undergraduate degree at Warner Pacific College in Portland.
-- Allan Brettman
Stop Human Trafficking Training and Seminar
Oct 11, 2010 at 10:04 AM
Event Details
Date(s) & Time(s)::
October 12, 2010 at 1:00 PM until 4:30 PM
Location: The Mill Casino
Phone: 541-297-4403.
Link: http://www.zontacoosbay.org.
Event Description:
Open to the public, social service workers and law enforcement for a $10 registration fee, the first event features keynote speaker Bill Hillar, an expert on the topic and retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel
Former UO instructor accused of lying about his life
Jan 26, 2011 at 4:59 PM
He claimed to be a war hero with a PhD. He traveled around country giving inspirational talks. Now, former University of Oregon instructor Bill Hillar is behind bars because federal agents say his life story is a lie.
EUGENE, Ore. - Students at the University of Oregon know Bill Hillar as a professional speaker with a harrowing story about his daughter who was kidnapped, sold into sex slavery, then killed.
Hired in 2002, Hillar told students he was the inspiration for the movie "Taken," starring Liam Neeson.
Hillar claimed to have a PhD from the University of Oregon.
He taught summers and weekends through the Substance Abuse Prevention Program on campus.
He told people he was a retired colonel of the U.S. Army Special Forces who served in Asia, the middle east, central and South America.
None of it is true, according to federal prosecutors.
The FBI arrested Hillar on Tuesday in Maryland. He faces numerous charges including mail fraud.
Federal prosecutors are calling it an "elaborate false identity case."
According to court documents, countless clients, including the University of Oregon, were duped into paying him for speeches, lectures and training seminars.
"I think we were fooled by the claims that he made," said UO spokesman Phil Weiler.
Weiler said they became suspicious when a college in California contacted the UO asking about Hillar's academic resume.
That triggered a federal investigation into Hillar's history, landing him behind bars. Weiler doesn't know how much the university paid Hillar over the last nine years, but he said the school wants its money back.
KVAL News asked Weiler if the UO is making any changes in their hiring process as a result of the arrest.
"The university was changing the way that it did those weekend sessions already prior to this issue with Mr. Hillar coming up," Weiler said. "So in the future I don't think we're going to see something like this happen."
Weiler said in the past, the university treated the summer session as separate from the rest of the school year.
That's changing, which he said should make it harder for things like this to happen again.
Voices for Justice: Human Trafficking,... 9/2/09 1:00PM, Host: Voices for Justice
2009 from 3-4p.m.(PT), please help us spread the word! The topic is: Human Trafficking; the dark secret of America. One of our guests include: Bill Hillar, whose daughter was kidnapped and trafficked and unfortunately murdered. Hillar’s story was recently seen in the motion picture “Taken.” Other speakers will include: Transitions Global and Suzanne Stanford, My Internet Safety Coach. Join us at www.blogtalkradio.com/helpingheroes
http://feeds.witf.org/witf-smarttalk-podcast
Radio Smart Talk 03/01/2012
Posted: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 11:42:18 -0500
Play Now
Last year, a Maryland man pleaded guilty to charges related to falsely claiming that he was an Army Green Beret who had reached the rank of colonel. Sixty-six-year-old William Hillar of Millersville was ordered to spend 21 months in prison and pay $170,000 in restitution to the law enforcement, first responders and schools who had hired him to teach counterterrorism and drug and human trafficking interdiction. Hillar was not charged under the Stolen Valor Act but many who have lied and said they had been awarded honors or medals in the military have faced charges. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case where a California man falsely said he was a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. The Court will decide whether that lie rises to the level of a crime or the man was within his freedom of speech rights. On Thursday's Radio Smart Talk, we'll talk about the Stolen Valor Act and what the Court will consider. We would also like to hear your opinion. Does lying about one's military record constitute a crime or is it an example of protected free speech -- even though it may be distasteful?
Hillar arrested on pretenses of fraud
WMAR ABC 2 Baltimore, MD
Jan. 25, 2011. 05:35 PM EST
Fradulent Advocate Bill Hillar Arrested
KOIN CBS 6 • Jan. 26, 2011. 06:11 PM EST
Bill Hillar, a former University of Oregon professor, was arrested by the FBI in Maryland.
Sex Trafficking Specialist Under Investigation
KOIN CBS 6 • Nov. 25, 2010. 12:13 AM EST
Bill Hillar, who taught at the U of O, may have fabricated his personal, professional and military experience.
Bill Hillar For DelNeeds
KOIN CBS 6 • Nov. 22, 2010. 05:36 PM EST
Noted Professor's Past Exposed
KOIN CBS 6 • Nov. 20, 2010. 04:36 PM EST
Reporter Joel Iwanaga
The Monterey Institute says Bill Hillar's credentials don't exist. Now some are questioning much more about the former University Of Oregon's credentials.. and about his claims to fame.
"We did at story on him just last month."
Child Sex Trafficking Exposed In Portland
KOIN CBS 6 • Oct. 12, 2010. 10:48 AM EST
Bill Hillar lost his daughter to a sex trafficking ring and now works to expose such horrific injustices. Hillar and other professionals descr...
A recent speaker at a Human Trafficking Series shared the tragic story of how he lost his daughter to the sex industry in 1988--a problem that is rampant today in Portland.
Bill Hillar's 17-year-old daughter was vacationing in Thailand with friends when she was kidnapped from a train and forced to work as a sex slave.
Since that time, Hillar--a retired special forces colonel who also has a Ph.D in heath education--has worked to enlighten people on the scary realities of human trafficking and even inspired the recent Hollywood film 'Taken,' starring Liam Neeson as a vigilante father.
In the film, Neeson uses his extensive skill-set to save his daughter from the European sex slave market.
Despite Hillar's own extensive experience--he teaches college-level courses and also trains law enforcement groups on trafficking issues--he said he still feels emotions of anger, disappointment, fear and self shame for not being able to protect his teenage daughter, who ultimately was killed.
"There probably isn't a day that goes by that I don't think a lot about it," said Hillar.
Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans (OATH) was a co-sponsor of the City Club of Portland event and spokeswoman Wynne Wakkila said Portland is ranked No. 2 in the country for sexually exploited youth; Las Vegas is No. 1 and Miami is No. 3.
"We have a lot of homeless youth here," said Wakkila. "It's not their fault--they like Portland just like everybody else--but also our laws are more relaxed here.
Hillar's speaking engagement was also sponsored by the offices of several local elected officials, all of whom have identified the prevalence of the problem in Portland.
"Most of the sex slaves in this country are 13, 14 years old, and there's about 250,000 of them--Portland's full of them," said Hillar.
--Joel Iwanaga contributed to this report
January 25, 2011m TBD.com, Bill Hillar arrested on fraud charges by FBI, by Brad Bell, Covering cops and criminals in the Washington region,
Bill Hillar Event
Looks like you may have missed it this time around.
Check back for updates or email the contact below.
Organization: Bend Event Co.
Date: 5/18/2010 update info
Time: 07:00:00 PM - 09:00:00 PM
Event Cost: $5
Venue: Bill Hillar Event in Bend,OR
Contact: Aimee Baillargeon
Phone: (541) 480-8555
Email: Contact Aimee Baillargeon via email
Website: www.bendeventco.com
Event Details:
Central Oregon OATH (Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans) presents Bill Hillar, the heroic father whose true story inspired the blockbuster movie "TAKEN" Tickets being sold at Elite Fitness, Singing Sparrow Flowers, and more...see website for details. www.COOATH.org
Recorded live on May 26, 2010 5:28pm ET EVM TV Interviews Bill Hillar, Win walkkilla
Interview with Bill Hillar, father of the girl whose story was the basis of the movie Taken.
Win Walkkilla is the director of oregonians against the trafficking of humans.
CBS Baltimore, Md. Man Charged With Lying About Credentials
January 25, 2011 6:43 PM
BALTIMORE (WJZ) — A Maryland man has been arrested for a string of lies, including claiming a blockbuster movie was based on his life.
Derek Valcourt has details of the case.
William Hillar, 66, built a career for himself as a consultant and an expert on counterterrorism and human trafficking. In fact, he claimed to be the inspiration for the movie "Taken," starring Liam Neeson.
He said that his own daughter was sold into sex slavery and then killed.
"They cut her body up with machetes and threw it in the South China Sea and it feels like yesterday but that was 1988," Hillar said.
His website identifies him as a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces, saying he served in Asia, the Middle East and Central and South America, but none of it is true, according to federal prosecutors in Baltimore, who filed a criminal complaint for mail fraud against him Tuesday. They describe it as an elaborate false identity case, saying countless clients were duped into paying him for speeches, lectures and training seminars from universities to local and state law enforcement—even the FBI.
Ironically, it was the FBI who arrested Hillar at his rented Millersville home Tuesday morning.
"There was all kinds of craziness going on, all kinds of crazy stories that I thought were a little strange," said neighbor Shirley Tyndall.
Tyndall said Hillar even told her he was a federal air marshal.
"Nobody's supposed to know who the air marshals are, so there was a lot of…every once in a while, I'd go, 'This is a little strange,'" she said.
In court, prosecutors called Hillar a flight risk, but he told the judge if released, he would continue his consulting work and teaching school locally and on the west coast.
He faces up to 20 years in jail for the one mail fraud charge, but it's possible Hillar could face more charges as the FBI continues its investigation.
Bond was set for $50,000. Hillar says he has the money, but he's being held in detention until officials find someone who will ensure he shows up for court appearances.
Questions About Monterey Instructor's Claims
Students' doubts led the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a graduate unit of Middlebury College, to investigate and find discrepancies in the claims of an instructor about his background, the Los Angeles Timesreported. Bill Hillar told students many stories about adventure while serving in the U.S. Army's Special Forces, and students said that he had boasted that the 2008 action movie Taken was based on his life. Students grew to doubt his various claims, causing the institute to look into Hillar's background, finding that he didn't earn the doctorate he claimed to have from the University of Oregon. Monterey was also unable to verify Hillar's military service. Hillar not only has taught part-time at Monterey, but has lectured based on his background at numerous other colleges. Hillar did not respond to requests from the Times for comment, and Monterey officials said he has declined to meet with them to discuss the issues raised about his background.
January 28, 2011, tbd.blog, Bill Hillar case: A resume check, By Sarah Larimer, - 10:26 AM Bill Hillar was taken into custody earlier this week, accused of faking his military and educational background. Authorities say claims that he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon and served with U.S. Army Special Forces were false. But does his resume at least check out?
Not exactly. Some agencies and departments contacted by TBD didn't remember Hillar's name and couldn't find him in their records. That group includes the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which Hillar had listed as a former client on his website.
"We did not get any hits on our State Vendor file and there is no indication that anyone in Georgia Government has dealt with this person as a vendor," wrote Michael Fordham, of the GBI.
Same goes for Idaho Falls Police Department, another agency on Hillar's client list. Lt. Royce Clements says he's been overseeing training at the department for about four years and Hillar's name wasn't "ringing any bells."
"I would remember bringing in somebody like that if I had," Clements says. "I don't think he's ever done any work for us at all."
Hillar was taken into custody by the FBI at his Maryland home on Tuesday. He had claimed to be a former special forces officer who had served in Southeast Asia and the Middle East and an expert in tactical training and psychological warfare.
"I do not recognize the name at all. There's nothing clicking. There's a couple of companies we've dealt with on tactics and stuff, but none of them have been with that person," Clements says.
"We've had some conceal weapons things like that, but all of those have all been through known federal agencies and nationally known companies."
There was at least one agency that remembered Hillar, though. And they remembered him fondly.
"Everybody loves the guy," says Perry Eidum, officer manager for a company that manages the Montana Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. "He puts on a great training. That's all I can say."
January 27, 2011, tbd.blog, Bill Hillar case: Credit for the military fraud arrest should go to website, too,
By Sarah Larimer, - 10:56 AM
Earlier this week, the FBI took into custody a Maryland man who they believe lied about his military and educational background. Part of the credit for the arrest went to California students, former military men themselves, who reported Hillar to the Monterey Institute of International Studies. But part of it also belongs to a social networking website for Green Berets, which discovered problems with Bill Hillar's background last October.
"They didn't do anything. They didn't do anything until we exposed him," says Jeff Hinton, a retired Master Sergeant. "Which really irritates the snot out of us."
A thread entitled "William G. Hillar Special Forces FRAUD" appeared on the website www.professionalsoldiers.com in October.
"Another Special Forces Fraud bagged and tagged," the post reads. "If anyone would like to write some of Bill's clients and inform them of his fraud feel free. I have Bill's "Reserve Coast Guard Radarman" records."
People did write, according to Hinton. Organizations that worked with Hillar were notified by other special forces officers who visit the site, he says. The takedown began last year, when Hinton received a letter asking him to check out Hillar.
That kind of request comes in a lot, Hinton says, and he's outed frauds before. This time, Hillar claimed to be a retired Army special forces officer, a small, elite group of soldiers, who apparently didn't remember his name.
"For him to say he's in special forces and no one knew him,' Hillar says. "That's complete cow manure."
At first, Hinton says he thought Hillar might have been part of a National Guard unit. He checked out his military records and examined his website. Among the tipoffs: the term "tactical counterterrorism," which was a course topic Hillar listed.
"There's no such thing as the term 'tactical counterterrorism,'" Hinton says.
Hillar, was taken into custody at his Millersville, Md., home Tuesday. Authorities say they also believe he faked his educational credentials.
"These guys are using our reputation to scam innocent people," Hinton says. "It really makes us angry."
Bill Hillar - Another Male Fraud
Former UO instructor accused of lying about his life
By Molly Blancett KVAL News Published: Jan 27, 2011 at 9:40 AM PST Last Updated: Jan 27, 2011 at 8:04 PM PST,
EUGENE, Ore. - Students at the University of Oregon know Bill Hillar as a professional speaker with a harrowing story about his daughter who was kidnapped, sold into sex slavery, then killed.
Hired in 2002, Hillar told students he was the inspiration for the movie "Taken," starring Liam Neeson.
Hillar claimed to have a PhD from the University of Oregon.
He taught summers and weekends through the Substance Abuse Prevention Program on campus.
He told people he was a retired colonel of the U.S. Army Special Forces who served in Asia, the middle east, central and South America.
None of it is true, according to federal prosecutors.
The FBI arrested Hillar on Tuesday in Maryland. He faces numerous charges including mail fraud.
Federal prosecutors are calling it an "elaborate false identity case."
According to court documents, countless clients, including the University of Oregon, were duped into paying him for speeches, lectures and training seminars.
"I think we were fooled by the claims that he made," said UO spokesman Phil Weiler.
Weiler said they became suspicious when a college in California contacted the UO asking about Hillar's academic resume.
That triggered a federal investigation into Hillar's history, landing him behind bars. Weiler doesn't know how much the university paid Hillar over the last nine years, but he said the school wants its money back.
KVAL News asked Weiler if the UO is making any changes in their hiring process as a result of the arrest.
"The university was changing the way that it did those weekend sessions already prior to this issue with Mr. Hillar coming up," Weiler said. "So in the future I don't think we're going to see something like this happen."
Weiler said in the past, the university treated the summer session as separate from the rest of the school year.
That's changing, which he said should make it harder for things like this to happen again.
March 30, 2011 , NBC Washington, Con Man Admits to Impersonating Green Beret
By Tim Persinko, Wednesday, Updated 5:15 PM EST,
A man was caught masquerading as a military officer to earn money as a security lecturer. After 12 years of deception, he pled guilty in a Maryland court to wire fraud on Monday.
Wiliam Hillar, of Millersville, Md. sold himself to employers as a seasoned colonel in the Green Berets. Hillar's resume claimed postings in the Middle East and South America, practicing psychological warfare and work with explosive ordnance. Based on that credential, he was able to earn jobs as a lecturer and instructor on counter-terrorism, drug trafficking, and human trafficking, investigators said.
None of that was true.
"William G. Hillar lived a lie and based his teaching career on military experience he did not have, and credentials that he did not earn," U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said. "He was never a colonel, never served in the U.S. Army or the Special Forces, never was deployed to exotic locales and never received training in counter-terrorism and psychological warfare while in the armed forces."
Hillar did have some military experience: he served in the Coast Guard Reserve for eight years, where he achieved the rank of Radarman, Petty Officer Third Class.
Prosecutors said that Hillar was able to earn $171,415 based upon his phony credentials. He offered seminars and consultations under the business name "Bill Hillar Training." He also taught classes at colleges. At the University of Oregon, he gave seminars on human trafficking and international drug trafficking, the Register Guard reported. He was actually given an award from North Carolina's Elon University for his advocacy against human trafficking.
His most recent posting was as an instructor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. His students there helped to expose him, the Monterey Herald reported.
Hillar faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. As part of his plea, he has agreed to repay the $171,415 he made under false-auspices, and will perform 500 hours of community service at the Maryland State Veterans Cemeteries.
Recycle Love Festival
Posted by WarriorSpirit Editor on September 7th, 2010
Story by Steven Bowser
On Aug. 21, Lebanon High School hosted the Recycle Love Festival at Heath Stadium. The event was organized to bring awareness of human sex trafficking to the Lebanon community, as well as to give people an opportunity to aid other connected causes like the orphan crisis and world hunger.
Over six different organizations participated, and hundreds of people attended from all over the Willamette Valley. Speakers Wynne Wikkila, the Executive Director of Oregon Against the Trafficking of Humans (OATH), Dr. Cyndi Romine, the International Field Director of Compassion2One, Jessica Richardson, a former victim of human trafficking, and Dr. Bill Hillar, a retired Special Forces Colonel whose story loosely inspired the movie “Taken,” spoke about the realities of human trafficking and how we can help.
The event also featured live musical performances from Samira Potts, Tyler Fortier and Charis Bourgeois, dance performances from Jeff Warren and the West Albany High School Dance Team and a tent for those who desired to pray or worship.
The event was organized primarily by Fran VandenBos and Caylan Wagar, who shared their inspiration openly. According to VandenBos, they were moved to act after watching the film, "Human Trafficking."
"It inspired me to the point where I thought, 'How can I sit still and let this happen?'" said VandenBos. "I think it is a travesty that this is happening to our children for money and sinful pleasure.”
According to speakers at the event, human sex trafficking is a massively growing industry; only second to illegal drug and gun trafficking, but as stated by Bill Hillar, the gap is closing fast.
"Human trafficking is a perfect crime. With drugs, you can only sell once, but with girls, you can sell over and over and over," said Dr. Hillar.
During the course of the event, the truth about human trafficking was made clear. With over 27 million woman sex slaves and many more men and children slaves worldwide, human trafficking has become a $44 billion a year industry. The age of these slaves can be as low as 4 years old or older, and anybody is vulnerable to being kidnapped and sold within weeks or days.
In the United States, Oregon ranked second in the nation for victims recovered. In fact, according to OATH, Interstate 5 is now being used as a primary trafficking route, where thousands of women and children are secretly transported and sold into slavery, and where they are forced to have sex and are even beaten and tortured.
To the audience, most of the speakers gave the same commission: get educated and spread the word.
"My challenge for you is that we take back this country," said Jessica Richardson, a former victim of human trafficking. "Young people, talk about it and love each other unconditionally."
Dr. Hillar also called the audience to action.
“[Stopping human trafficking] is your responsibility, not anyone else’s,” said Dr. Hillar. "Be a snowflake. Start an avalanche."
As the Recycle Love Festival came to a close, spectators were invited to participate in a worship service with the band and were encouraged to continue to pray concerning human sex trafficking.
After the event, people left with a much different mindset than they had arrived with.
"I didn't know it was so close to home," said attendee Jennifer Bess.
"There are so many organizations in our area that are fighting this, so now I finally get to step up," said Katy Joy, another attendee.
For more information about human trafficking, go to www.oregonoath.org. To report trafficking, please call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) toll free hotline 1-888-3737-888.
[PDF] War on Terror War on Trafficking: A Sex Worker Activist Confronts.
BitchMagazine.org, Trade Secrets,
Article by Emi Koyama, Illustrated by Paul Windle, appeared in issue Underground; published in 2011; filed under Activism.
The tough talk of the new anti-trafficking movement
Underground
Illustration by Paul Windle
In the 2008 film Taken, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA operative whose undercover past is called into action when his daughter is kidnapped while traveling abroad and sold into sexual slavery. Using his counterterrorism skills to torture and murder those who stand between him and his daughter’s captors, he eventually rescues his daughter and comes home a hero, with no consequences exacted for the violence he’s inflicted in the name of his daughter’s safety.
The film was a commercial, if not critical, hit (a sequel is forthcoming in 2012), perhaps because, like many a made-for-TV movie or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode, it served a voyeuristic interest in the world of forced prostitution and sex trafficking involving attractive young, white, middle-class female victims and ethnically Other (Eastern European in this particular case) male perpetrators. Its success also mirrored the real-world events of a presidential administration that justified the use of torture—euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—as a valid means of preventing catastrophic terror attacks, and which dismissed reported cases of extreme prisoner abuses like those at Abu Ghraib as exceptions: safety at any cost, by any means necessary.
The self-purported inspiration for Bryan Mills was retired colonel Bill Hillar of the U.S. Army Special Forces (a.k.a. the Green Berets), who was a popular keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant on the topic of human trafficking. Claiming to have multiple advanced degrees, he gave lectures, trainings, and consultations in which he described his daughter’s abduction into sex slavery to law enforcement officials, private groups, and college audiences. According to Hillar, his daughter was abducted and sold to a brothel while traveling through Southeast Asia with a friend. Using his professional connections as a counterterror specialist, Hillar supposedly, like Neeson’s character, traveled around the globe in search of his daughter. But, as he sadly told audiences, his story did not have the same ending: Despite his efforts, his daughter never came home.
Hillar was widely acclaimed as an American hero who, despite his loss, continued to share his experience and expertise in an effort to end human trafficking. In November 2010, he was scheduled to present the keynote lecture at the annual conference of Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans (OATH), on whose board he served. When, at the last minute, he canceled his appearance due to personal circumstances, OATH instead presented a video recording of one of Hillar’s earlier lectures.
As an audience member at that presentation, I felt unsettled by Hillar’s demeanor in the video. There was something off in his graphic, detailed description of the taking, selling, and murdering of his daughter, and the fact that there was little to no mention of their relationship prior to her abduction. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn, months later, that the “personal circumstances” that precluded Hillar’s appearance at the conference included a pending investigation into his long history of fraud. As it turned out, Hillar never served in the U.S. Army, let alone the Green Berets. He had no academic credentials, nor any expertise in counterterrorism. And his daughter was never kidnapped, trafficked, or murdered.
Yet the simulacrum that is Bill Hillar has become part of the reality of the anti-trafficking movement, in which a language of militarization and vengeance is the basis for a disturbing take on activism in the name of the exploited.
"Human trafficking" is a relatively new term to describe the selling and trading of people. While it had been used in policy contexts in the past (as in the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others), it entered common parlance around 2000 with the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. A quick search on a news database shows that there were only three references to "human trafficking" or "trafficking in humans" before 2000. It was mentioned 9 times in 2000, 41 times in 2001, and broke 100 mentions for the first time in 2005. In 2010, there were more than 500 references.
The proliferation of the term signifies a rhetorical shift on the part of the U.S. government. Simply put, framing forced migration and labor (sexual and otherwise) as the work of international criminal enterprises, comparable to the smuggling of drugs and weapons, elides the reality that it is a social and economic issue arising from poverty, economic disparities, globalization, and unreasonable restrictions on migration. The U.S. government’s approach places the focus squarely on identifiable enemies who are often construed, like the kidnappers in Taken, as evil, sadistic, ethnic Others—ignoring the ways in which capitalist social and economic structures (some of which the U.S. government has actively promoted) make people vulnerable.
As a result, the United States' recent committment to a "War on Trafficking" mimics previous efforts—the epically failed "War on Drugs," the nightmarish "War on Terror"—copying the "Just Say No" urgings of the former and the "Either you're with us or you're against us" rhetoric of the latter and offering an easy, black-and-white worldview that lacks structural analysis into systems of inequality and domination.
Take anti-trafficking newcomer Stop Child Trafficking Now (SCTNow), which is quickly gaining the support of companies like Facebook and Microsoft as well as the blessing of celebrities like Ashton Kutcher. The organization describes its “innovative approach” to addressing the trafficking of minors thus:
Stop Child Trafficking has chosen to fund a bold, new approach, one that addresses the demand side of child sex trafficking by targeting buyers/predators for prosecution and conviction. […] SCTNow has launched a national campaign to raise money for retired military operatives targeting the demand side of trafficking…. These operatives use the skills developed in the War on Terror in this war to bring down predators. Professional law enforcement have vetted this strategy and are eager to work with these operative teams once funding is secured.
Special Operative Teams gather information about child predators both in the U.S. and abroad…. These teams possess skills beyond the average military or law enforcement individual—skills that enable them to achieve their goals in foreign lands independently, without support of U.S. law enforcement resources.
Part of me wishes that this approach could really work. But shouldn’t we be a bit hesitant to trust military operatives who developed their skills in the War on Terror, seeing as how these same “experts” led the United States to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, detained Arab and Muslim Americans without due process, tortured innocent civilians and prisoners of war, conducted surveillance on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States, “renditioned” suspects to countries to outsource torture, and illegally wiretapped our telephone calls?
SCTNow’s description of its “special operations”—which the organization outsources to Global Trident, a private for-profit military intelligence firm with close ties to defense contractor Northrop Grumman, evangelical Christian outlet Middle East Television, and former members of military and domestic intelligence agencies—is troubling. Equally disturbing is the fact that, as a private organization, “the Special Operatives are not bound by the same restrictions that keep U.S. law enforcement from conducting research against sexual offenders.” Thus, the intelligence they gather need not be limited to something that is directly related to trafficking or even prostitution. Operatives are encouraged to record anything and everything that they deem relevant or interesting, which means they can collect information about immigration status or the personal lives of people uninvolved with sex trafficking. Because the organization is a private entity, the usual policies of evidence discovery do not apply, and neither do prohibitions against racial profiling and entrapment. There is no public oversight. So while the organization claims to obey all applicable laws, can we feel truly confident when these same experts violated laws and regulations in their supposed pursuit of “terrorists”?
SCTNow, like many contemporary anti-trafficking organizations such as Shared Hope International and Love146, is part of a Christian fundamentalist movement (an article in the November 2011 issue of Christianity Today even carried the subtitle: “Leading [Portland, Oregon’s] efforts to halt child trafficking is a network of dedicated Christians. Just don’t go advertising it.”). SCTNow was founded by Ron Lewis, the televangelist pastor of North Carolina mega-church King’s Park International Church, and his wife, author Lynette Lewis. Though I have spoken to several members of SCTNow who insist that most of the organization’s money comes from its nationwide “awareness walks,” King’s Park appears to be the organization’s single largest funder. Other prominent funders of anti-trafficking groups include NoVo Foundation, started by one of Warren Buffett’s children, and Hunt Alternatives Fund, founded by heirs to the fortune of Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt.
Given this background, it is not surprising that SCTNow, along with similar anti-trafficking concerns, uses a simplistic language of good and evil in its discussions of trafficking. In this way, its selling of the anti-trafficking movement closely mirrors the selling of the “War on Terror” in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Instead of untangling the resentment against American imperialism built up globally through centuries of exploitation, many Americans rushed to accept the nonsensical explanation, put forth by politicans and pundits, that terrorists "hate us because they hate freedom." We wanted enemies that we could name and locate so that we might destroy them, not lessons in humility and self-reflection. Likewise, today’s mainstream anti-trafficking movement appeals to middle-class Americans with the idea that trafficking happens because there are bad people out there just waiting to take your kids away from schools and malls. Thus, its prevention efforts focus less on the systemic realities of poverty, racism, domestic abuse, and the dire circumstances surrounding runaway and thrownaway youth, and more on installing high-tech security cameras at schools and stationing more security guards at malls. And it measures the success of its activities by the number of criminal convictions it achieves, rather than by the long-term health and well-being of the women and children who are most at risk.
Furthermore, contemporary anti-trafficking efforts like SCTNow and USAID, with its “anti-prostitution pledge,” conflate prostitution and trafficking, even when their efforts are well-meaning. They may rightly reject the Hollywood myth of the glamorous, happy hooker who’s fully in control of her circumstances, but in doing so they substitute an equally simplistic trope that denies resiliency and agency in the choices people make to survive structural inequalities. This, too, appeals to a simplistic idea: Namely, that no one chooses to engage in prostitution unless they are physically or psychologically forced to do so. If we believe that prostitution happens because bad people (often depicted as men of color) force good children (often depicted as white and middle-class) into engaging in it, all we need to worry about is how to keep these bad people out of our schools and communities and let law enforcement handle the rest.
Indeed, there’s a historical precedent for what we’re witnessing today. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the profile of the American citizenry was changing: Racial and sexual anxieties took hold in the United States as emanicipated slaves moved north, white women organized to demand suffrage, and immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia flocked to the country. One result was a “white slavery” panic stoked by xenophobia. In response, an evangelical Christian movement was mobilized to combat the alleged evil. The presence of Asian women in brothels drew particular attention; because Asian women were considered hyper-submissive and therefore incapable of exercising agency, it was assumed that they had been imported for the purpose of sexual slavery. The panic eventually subsided without producing any actual evidence of such slavery, but its rhetoric did produce the nation's first federal law against prostitution and trafficking, the Mann Act, and effected the extension of the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act.
It's not a stretch to say that the United States today is in the midst of similar anxieties about the nation’s racial and ethnic makeup. Anti-immigration sentiment is violently high, and legislations, such as that enacted in Arizona in 2010, are dangerously broad. Fear of terrorism is used to justify discriminatory treatment toward Muslims, Arabs, and many others who don’t fit a status-quo "American" look. Queer and trans people are still marginalized, but are coming closer to equality every day, at least in their legal status, including the right to marry someone of the same gender. And of course, we have a president of the United States whose father was an immigrant from Kenya and whose middle name is Hussein. So it's particularly frustrating to witness the rise of a simplistic, military-minded anti-trafficking movement that refuses to engage with the social, economic, and political nuances of the environment in which it exists. Even more galling is the movement’s failure to acknowledge (and is, in fact, responsible for) undoing the many existing collaborations between public health officials, anti-violence activists, healthcare professionals, homeless advocacy groups, advocates for youth, immigrants, queer and trans people, groups led by people of color organizing within their own communities, sex workers, and other groups that took many years (beginning in the early stages of the 1980s AIDS epidemic) to develop.
Many of the groups in this broad coalition, especially the small grassroots groups led by members of vulnerable communities themselves, have been forced to shut down or scale back due to harsh economic conditions in recent years, while groups led or influenced by religious ideologues and law enforcement officials are expanding their reach as they receive anti-trafficking grants. Groups that have traditionally worked together are split between those that prioritize working with and seeking to empower the people who engage in the sex trade and those that support using state powers to crack down on prostitution. Some feminist foundations that previously supported grassroots groups—the Women’s Funding Network and New York Women’s Foundation among them—seem to have put their dollars on the anti-trafficking bandwagon. Women’s Funding Network, for instance, recently sponsored and promoted a methodologically flawed study claiming that sex trafficking of minors on Internet classified sites in New York, Michigan, and Minnesota had increased by up to 65 percent in just six months.
Groups committed to social and economic justice are being replaced by a movement that promotes religious ideology, action-hero solutions, and flawed research (e.g., the oft-repeated but false claim that the “average age of entry into prostitution” is 12 to 14, or that 100,000 to 300,000 youth are forced into prostitution in the United States). The mainstream anti-trafficking movement negates the history of resistance against violence and self-empowerment within marginalized communities, and seeks to further militarize our schools, our borders, our public spaces, our society. And, as has been pointed out by the likes of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, granting more power to police, courts, prisons, immigration enforcement, and counterterrorism “experts” very often makes women and girls of color, as well as other marginalized people, more, rather than less, vulnerable to violence.
Take, for instance, the November 2010 raid of Club 907 in Los Angeles, a “hostess club” where men pay women to drink nonalcoholic beverages with them and to dance for them, fully clothed. According to the L.A. Times, the raid was intended to investigate allegations including labor code violations and human trafficking, but 81 out of the 88 people arrested were women working as hostesses, many of them undocumented immigrants who had been instructed by club management to obtain fake IDs. The Times further reported that the hostesses were "required to earn $600 a week for the club, which means being selected by men to socialize for at least 20 hours.... Those who don't meet the quota see their wages drop to 16 cents a minute and receive no paycheck at all until they make up the shortfall. If a customer leaves without paying, the dancer is in debt to the club." The police knew in advance that many women working at the club were likely to be undocumented, and that they were likely to be severely exploited by the club owners, in conditions possibly reaching the legal definition of human trafficking. Yet the cops moved in as if the women were the criminals rather than the victims. That they arrested more than 80 women on criminal charges arising from their undocumented status should lead us to question the authorities’ commitment to enforcing labor laws and protecting victims of human trafficking.
The battle feminists and human-rights activists are facing now is not a simple rehash of whether sex work should be legal, or can be empowering, or is itself grounds for victim status. It’s about how to acknowledge the realities of trafficking and work to curb it while not tacitly supporting and furthering the tone set by religious fundamentalists, myopic law enforcement, and sensationalistic media. In September 2010, Third Wave Foundation issued a statement that emphasized a need to recognize "young people engaged in sex work and impacted by the sex trade as critical partners in ensuring health and justice" rather than viewing them as powerless victims in need of unilateral "rescue." With support from INCITE! and Third Wave Foundation, a group of radical women of color, queer people of color, and indigenous people who have engaged in or are currently engaging in the sex trade held a national leadership institute, which led to the recent formation of FUSE (Fed Up and Strategizing for Empowerment). FUSE works to counter the worldview that collapses the complexities and diversity of people’s experiences within the sex trade as well as social and economic factors that shape them into an overly simplistic notion of "modern-day slavery." It opposes Hollywood-style "solutions" that harm the very people—like the hostesses at Club 907—they ostensibly aim to help, and calls for approaches that engage and empower those of us who experience the sex trade. The struggle must be ongoing, because no single policy change—decriminalizing prostitution, for instance—will fundamentally transform the social and economic structures that abet the exploitation of marginalized communities.
Activists like those in FUSE face an uphill battle in an environment dominated by organizations that mask their moralism with a desire to protect the vulnerable, politicians who want to score tough-on-crime approval points, the private security industry that makes money off crisis and panic, the mass media that profit from oversimplification and sensationalism, and celebrities who need a pet cause. Still, regardless of how one thinks about prostitution and pornography, feminists have a common investment in solutions that actually reduce violence.
Feminists have been organizing against trafficking of women, children, and others for the purpose of sexual exploitation long before televangelists, counterterrorism experts, and celebrities got on board. We can lead society once again by refocusing the anti-trafficking movement to center the voices and struggles of people whose stories are not the ones dramatized on the movie screens—and who are all the more vulnerable for their erasure.
Emi Koyama is a multi-issue social-justice activist and writer. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and blogs at eminism.org.
AlterNet
Christians Fundamentalists and Private Military Contractors? The Strange Bedfellows of the Sex Slavery Anti-Trafficking Movement.
By Emi Koyama, Bitch Magazine
Posted on December 15, 2011, Printed on December 18, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153457/chris...icking_movement
In the 2008 film Taken, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA operative whose undercover past is called into action when his daughter is kidnapped while traveling abroad and sold into sexual slavery. Using his counterterrorism skills to torture and murder those who stand between him and his daughter's captors, he eventually rescues his daughter and comes home a hero, with no consequences exacted for the violence he's inflicted in the name of his daughter;s safety.
The film was a commercial, if not critical, hit (a sequel is forthcoming in 2012), perhaps because, like many a made-for-TV movie or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode, it served a voyeuristic interest in the world of forced prostitution and sex trafficking involving attractive young, white, middle-class female victims and ethnically Other (Eastern European in this particular case) male perpetrators. Its success also mirrored the real-world events of a presidential administration that justified the use of torture---euphemistically referred to as enhanced interrogation techniques---as a valid means of preventing catastrophic terror attacks, and which dismissed reported cases of extreme prisoner abuses like those at Abu Ghraib as exceptions: safety at any cost, by any means necessary.
The self-purported inspiration for Bryan Mills was retired colonel Bill Hillar of the U.S. Army Special Forces (a.k.a. the Green Berets), who was a popular keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant on the topic of human trafficking. Claiming to have multiple advanced degrees, he gave lectures, trainings, and consultations in which he described his daughter's abduction into sex slavery to law enforcement officials, private groups, and college audiences. According to Hillar, his daughter was abducted and sold to a brothel while traveling through Southeast Asia with a friend. Using his professional connections as a counterterror specialist, Hillar supposedly, like Neeson's character, traveled around the globe in search of his daughter. But, as he sadly told audiences, his story did not have the same ending: Despite his efforts, his daughter never came home.
Hillar was widely acclaimed as an American hero who, despite his loss, continued to share his experience and expertise in an effort to end human trafficking. In November 2010, he was scheduled to present the keynote lecture at the annual conference of Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans (OATH), on whose board he served. When, at the last minute, he canceled his appearance due to personal circumstances, OATH instead presented a video recording of one of Hillar's earlier lectures.
As an audience member at that presentation, I felt unsettled by Hillar's demeanor in the video. There was something off in his graphic, detailed description of the taking, selling, and murdering of his daughter, and the fact that there was little to no mention of their relationship prior to her abduction. So I wasn't entirely surprised to learn, months later, that the "personal circumstances" that precluded Hillar's appearance at the conference included a pending investigation into his long history of fraud. As it turned out, Hillar never served in the U.S. Army, let alone the Green Berets. He had no academic credentials, nor any expertise in counterterrorism. And his daughter was never kidnapped, trafficked, or murdered.
Yet the simulacrum that is Bill Hillar has become part of the reality of the anti-trafficking movement, in which a language of militarization and vengeance is the basis for a disturbing take on activism in the name of the exploited.
"Human trafficking" is a relatively new term to describe the selling and trading of people. While it had been used in policy contexts in the past (as in the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others), it entered common parlance around 2000 with the passage of theTrafficking Victims Protection Act. A quick search on a news database shows that there were only three references to "human trafficking" or "trafficking in humans" before 2000. It was mentioned 9 times in 2000, 41 times in 2001, and broke 100 mentions for the first time in 2005. In 2010, there were more than 500 references.
The proliferation of the term signifies a rhetorical shift on the part of the U.S. government. Simply put, framing forced migration and labor (sexual and otherwise) as the work of international criminal enterprises, comparable to the smuggling of drugs and weapons, elides the reality that it is a social and economic issue arising from poverty, economic disparities, globalization, and unreasonable restrictions on migration. The U.S. government's approach places the focus squarely on identifiable enemies who are often construed, like the kidnappers in Taken, as evil, sadistic, ethnic Others ignoring the ways in which capitalist social and economic structures (some of which the U.S. government has actively promoted) make people vulnerable.
As a result, the United States recent committment to a "War on Trafficking" mimics previous efforts---the epically failed "War on Drugs," the nightmarish "War on Terror"---copying the "Just Say No" urgings of the former and the "Either you're with us or you're against us" rhetoric of the latter and offering an easy, black-and-white worldview that lacks structural analysis into systems of inequality and domination.
Take anti-trafficking newcomer Stop Child Trafficking Now (SCTNow), which is quickly gaining the support of companies like Facebook and Microsoft as well as the blessing of celebrities like Ashton Kutcher. The organization describes its "innovative approach" to addressing the trafficking of minors thus:
Stop Child Trafficking has chosen to fund a bold, new approach, one that addresses the demand side of child sex trafficking by targeting buyers/predators for prosecution and conviction. [] SCTNow has launched a national campaign to raise money for retired military operatives targeting the demand side of trafficking. These operatives use the skills developed in the War on Terror in this war to bring down predators. Professional law enforcement have vetted this strategy and are eager to work with these operative teams once funding is secured.
Special Operative Teams gather information about child predators both in the U.S. and abroad. "These teams possess skills beyond the average military or law enforcement individual" skills that enable them to achieve their goals in foreign lands independently, without support of U.S. law enforcement resources.
Part of me wishes that this approach could really work. But shouldn't we be a bit hesitant to trust military operatives who developed their skills in the War on Terror, seeing as how these same "experts" led the United States to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, detained Arab and Muslim Americans without due process, tortured innocent civilians and prisoners of war, conducted surveillance on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States, "renditioned" suspects to countries to outsource torture, and illegally wiretapped our telephone calls?
SCTNow's description of its "special operations"---which the organization outsources to Global Trident, a private for-profit military intelligence firm with close ties to defense contractor Northrop Grumman, evangelical Christian outlet Middle East Television, and former members of military and domestic intelligence agencies---is troubling. Equally disturbing is the fact that, as a private organization, "the Special Operatives are not bound by the same restrictions that keep U.S. law enforcement from conducting research against sexual offenders." Thus, the intelligence they gather need not be limited to something that is directly related to trafficking or even prostitution. Operatives are encouraged to record anything and everything that they deem relevant or interesting, which means they can collect information about immigration status or the personal lives of people uninvolved with sex trafficking. Because the organization is a private entity, the usual policies of evidence discovery do not apply, and neither do prohibitions against racial profiling and entrapment. There is no public oversight. So while the organization claims to obey all applicable laws, can we feel truly confident when these same experts violated laws and regulations in their supposed pursuit of "terrorists"?
SCTNow, like many contemporary anti-trafficking organizations such as Shared Hope International and Love146, is part of a Christian fundamentalist movement (an article in the November 2011 issue of Christianity Today even carried the subtitle: "Leading [Portland, Oregon's] efforts to halt child trafficking is a network of dedicated Christians. Just don't go advertising it."). SCTNow was founded by Ron Lewis, the televangelist pastor of North Carolina mega-church King's Park International Church, and his wife, author Lynette Lewis. Though I have spoken to several members of SCTNow who insist that most of the organization's money comes from its nationwide "awareness walks," King's Park appears to be the organization's single largest funder. Other prominent funders of anti-trafficking groups include NoVo Foundation, started by one of Warren Buffett's children, and Hunt Alternatives Fund, founded by heirs to the fortune of Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt.
Given this background, it is not surprising that SCTNow, along with similar anti-trafficking concerns, uses a simplistic language of good and evil in its discussions of trafficking. In this way, its selling of the anti-trafficking movement closely mirrors the selling of the "War on Terror" in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Instead of untangling the resentment against American imperialism built up globally through centuries of exploitation, many Americans rushed to accept the nonsensical explanation, put forth by politicans and pundits, that terrorists "hate us because they hate freedom." We wanted enemies that we could name and locate so that we might destroy them, not lessons in humility and self-reflection. Likewise, today's mainstream anti-trafficking movement appeals to middle-class Americans with the idea that trafficking happens because there are bad people out there just waiting to take your kids away from schools and malls. Thus, its prevention efforts focus less on the systemic realities of poverty, racism, domestic abuse, and the dire circumstances surrounding runaway and thrownaway youth, and more on installing high-tech security cameras at schools and stationing more security guards at malls. And it measures the success of its activities by the number of criminal convictions it achieves, rather than by the long-term health and well-being of the women and children who are most at risk.
Furthermore, contemporary anti-trafficking efforts like SCTNow and USAID, with its "anti-prostitution pledge," conflate prostitution and trafficking, even when their efforts are well-meaning. They may rightly reject the Hollywood myth of the glamorous, happy hooker who's fully in control of her circumstances, but in doing so they substitute an equally simplistic trope that denies resiliency and agency in the choices people make to survive structural inequalities. This, too, appeals to a simplistic idea: Namely, that no one chooses to engage in prostitution unless they are physically or psychologically forced to do so. If we believe that prostitution happens because bad people (often depicted as men of color) force good children (often depicted as white and middle-class) into engaging in it, all we need to worry about is how to keep these bad people out of our schools and communities and let law enforcement handle the rest.
Indeed, there's a historical precedent for what we're witnessing today. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the profile of the American citizenry was changing: Racial and sexual anxieties took hold in the United States as emanicipated slaves moved north, white women organized to demand suffrage, and immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia flocked to the country. One result was a "white slavery" panic stoked by xenophobia. In response, an evangelical Christian movement was mobilized to combat the alleged evil. The presence of Asian women in brothels drew particular attention; because Asian women were considered hyper-submissive and therefore incapable of exercising agency, it was assumed that they had been imported for the purpose of sexual slavery. The panic eventually subsided without producing any actual evidence of such slavery, but its rhetoric did produce the nation's first federal law against prostitution and trafficking, the Mann Act, and effected the extension of the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act.
It's not a stretch to say that the United States today is in the midst of similar anxieties about the nation's racial and ethnic makeup. Anti-immigration sentiment is violently high, and legislations, such as that enacted in Arizona in 2010, are dangerously broad. Fear of terrorism is used to justify discriminatory treatment toward Muslims, Arabs, and many others who don't fit a status-quo "American" look. Queer and trans people are still marginalized, but are coming closer to equality every day, at least in their legal status, including the right to marry someone of the same gender. And of course, we have a president of the United States whose father was an immigrant from Kenya and whose middle name is Hussein. So it's particularly frustrating to witness the rise of a simplistic, military-minded anti-trafficking movement that refuses to engage with the social, economic, and political nuances of the environment in which it exists. Even more galling is the movement's failure to acknowledge (and is, in fact, responsible for) undoing the many existing collaborations between public health officials, anti-violence activists, healthcare professionals, homeless advocacy groups, advocates for youth, immigrants, queer and trans people, groups led by people of color organizing within their own communities, sex workers, and other groups that took many years (beginning in the early stages of the 1980s AIDS epidemic) to develop.
Many of the groups in this broad coalition, especially the small grassroots groups led by members of vulnerable communities themselves, have been forced to shut down or scale back due to harsh economic conditions in recent years, while groups led or influenced by religious ideologues and law enforcement officials are expanding their reach as they receive anti-trafficking grants. Groups that have traditionally worked together are split between those that prioritize working with and seeking to empower the people who engage in the sex trade and those that support using state powers to crack down on prostitution. Some feminist foundations that previously supported grassroots groups---the Women's Funding Network and New York Women's Foundation among them---seem to have put their dollars on the anti-trafficking bandwagon. Women's Funding Network, for instance, recently sponsored and promoted a methodologically flawed study claiming that sex trafficking of minors on Internet classified sites in New York, Michigan, and Minnesota had increased by up to 65 percent in just six months.
Groups committed to social and economic justice are being replaced by a movement that promotes religious ideology, action-hero solutions, and flawed research (e.g., the oft-repeated but false claim that the "average age of entry into prostitution" is 12 to 14, or that 100,000 to 300,000 youth are forced into prostitution in the United States). The mainstream anti-trafficking movement negates the history of resistance against violence and self-empowerment within marginalized communities, and seeks to further militarize our schools, our borders, our public spaces, our society. And, as has been pointed out by the likes of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, granting more power to police, courts, prisons, immigration enforcement, and counterterrorism "experts" very often makes women and girls of color, as well as other marginalized people, more, rather than less, vulnerable to violence.
Take, for instance, the November 2010 raid of Club 907 in Los Angeles, a "hostess club" where men pay women to drink nonalcoholic beverages with them and to dance for them, fully clothed. According to the L.A. Times, the raid was intended to investigate allegations including labor code violations and human trafficking, but 81 out of the 88 people arrested were women working as hostesses, many of them undocumented immigrants who had been instructed by club management to obtain fake IDs. The Times further reported that the hostesses were "required to earn $600 a week for the club, which means being selected by men to socialize for at least 20 hours.... Those who don't meet the quota see their wages drop to 16 cents a minute and receive no paycheck at all until they make up the shortfall. If a customer leaves without paying, the dancer is in debt to the club." The police knew in advance that many women working at the club were likely to be undocumented, and that they were likely to be severely exploited by the club owners, in conditions possibly reaching the legal definition of human trafficking. Yet the cops moved in as if the women were the criminals rather than the victims. That they arrested more than 80 women on criminal charges arising from their undocumented status should lead us to question the authorities' commitment to enforcing labor laws and protecting victims of human trafficking.
The battle feminists and human-rights activists are facing now is not a simple rehash of whether sex work should be legal, or can be empowering, or is itself grounds for victim status. It's about how to acknowledge the realities of trafficking and work to curb it while not tacitly supporting and furthering the tone set by religious fundamentalists, myopic law enforcement, and sensationalistic media. In September 2010, Third Wave Foundation issued a statement that emphasized a need to recognize "young people engaged in sex work and impacted by the sex trade as critical partners in ensuring health and justice" rather than viewing them as powerless victims in need of unilateral "rescue." With support from INCITE! and Third Wave Foundation, a group of radical women of color, queer people of color, and indigenous people who have engaged in or are currently engaging in the sex trade held a national leadership institute, which led to the recent formation of FUSE (Fed Up and Strategizing for Empowerment). FUSE works to counter the worldview that collapses the complexities and diversity of people's experiences within the sex trade as well as social and economic factors that shape them into an overly simplistic notion of "modern-day slavery." It opposes Hollywood-style "solutions" that harm the very people---like the hostesses at Club 907---they ostensibly aim to help, and calls for approaches that engage and empower those of us who experience the sex trade. The struggle must be ongoing, because no single policy change "decriminalizing prostitution, for instance" will fundamentally transform the social and economic structures that abet the exploitation of marginalized communities.
Activists like those in FUSE face an uphill battle in an environment dominated by organizations that mask their moralism with a desire to protect the vulnerable, politicians who want to score tough-on-crime approval points, the private security industry that makes money off crisis and panic, the mass media that profit from oversimplification and sensationalism, and celebrities who need a pet cause. Still, regardless of how one thinks about prostitution and pornography, feminists have a common investment in solutions that actually reduce violence.
Feminists have been organizing against trafficking of women, children, and others for the purpose of sexual exploitation long before televangelists, counterterrorism experts, and celebrities got on board. We can lead society once again by refocusing the anti-trafficking movement to center the voices and struggles of people whose stories are not the ones dramatized on the movie screens---and who are all the more vulnerable for their erasure.
Emi Koyama is a multi-issue social-justice activist and writer. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and blogs at eminism.org.
2011 Bitch Magazine All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153457/
10/02/2011, Phillip Kennedy Johnson.com,
Final Hillar Interview
Today was my final interview with Bill Hillar, the subject of my first non-fiction work, Dreams of Valor. I've been interviewing Bill since March 2011, and hearing his life story from him and those close to him has been a fascinating experience.
For those unfamiliar with his story, Bill was a successful instructor and lecturer on the subject of human trafficking. He has given training courses, lectures and seminars to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Army, the Drug Enforcement Agency, state law enforcement agencies all around the country, and many colleges and Universities. His noteriety grew in part from his career as a Colonel in Army Special Forces, his knowledge of counter-terrorism and his own personal loss: the kidnap and murder of his 17-year-old daughter. The movie Taken was said to have been based in part on his own experiences. He's been taking down brothels and running covert rescue operations overseas for years.
In January, Bill was arrested in his home in Millersville, Maryland on charges of fraud. Although his career as a teacher and lecturer (and impressive client list) is very real, his military record, resume, personal experiences and pretty much everything you just read now appear to be false. He was recently convicted and sentenced to 21 months in prison, which he begins later this month.
The members of America's Armed Forces enjoy an unprecedented time of gratitude for their service and sacrifice. Regardless of politics, it seems that every American loves their military. And why not? We've been embroiled in two difficult wars for ten years, and still hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteer every year. That's pretty impressive, and Americans love a hero. But Bill Hillar now finds himself in an uncomfortable situation. He cashed in on a military record that didn't exist, and a lot of people who admired him (and many who had never heard of him) now see in him the antithesis of a hero.
Before Bill was investigated for fraud, I met him through an anti-human trafficking group called The Samaritan Women. He looked every bit the part, the stories were incredible, and I loved him like everyone else. I was shocked that there wasn't more about him online, and decided to write a book about him. Four months later, I learned that he had invented the whole thing.
Now I had to write a book about him.
To interview a real-life superhero would have been a great privilege. But interviewing the real Bill Hillar has been even better. Bill is a profoundly complex person, with many shortcomings, virtues, flaws, jokes and eccentricities. He's led an amazing life, and writing his biography has been an adventure. Look forDreams of Valor: The Lies and Truth of Bill Hillar sometime next year.
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