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Comment by xbmcuser | Hacker News Reader

This is highlighted in the west depending on where the ruling goverment is with or against the west. Relatives of people abroad and out of reach are targeted. Currently 100s of people in Pakistan are in jail or custody as ransom for their outspoken relatives abroad.

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South Korea and the KCIA is a great example of this, where the KCIA was doing all kinds of wild stuff to maintain a West-approved military dictatorship. And of course the KCIA was created by and modeled after the US CIA.

[1]

> In July 1973 Kim Dae Jung spoke at [the University of Washington], in a classroom with no more than fifteen people present. A month later he was kidnapped in Tokyo by KCIA agents and nearly murdered. Seven years later when he was indicted for "treason," his criticism of the Park government at the University of Washington was included in the indictment, drawn from a tape of his remarks that one of the fifteen people had given to the KCIA.

[2]

> In mid-1973, amidst charges of KCIA harassment of Lee Jai-hyun, a Korean Embassy officer who refused to be reassigned to Korea, I took the initiative to meet with the FBI and called for an investigation of the KCIA in the U.S. After exploratory meetings, such an investigation began, but for reasons I have never quite understood, it did not get off the ground. When it finally petered out several months later, it had produced little more than mere confirmation of the basic information I had submitted initially. I concluded that the FBI, or those higher in authority, had no inclination to follow through on an investigation that could wind up embarrassing an ally.

[1] - Korea's Place in the Sun, p. 372

[2] - The Korean CIA in the USA, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/worldview/article/ab...

was an example of that - South Korea was formerly well known as an example of a US supported autocratic regime, but the fact that your examples are all from the 70s is telling and I do not think this is ongoing in SK

There is a geopolitics angle to this. US has been making noise about upcoming election in Bangladesh being "free and fair". US has even announced some visa policy to promote "democratic elections" in Bangladesh. US has been pursuing a military base in Bangladesh. The current government has been resisting the pressure. According to a report, India has conveyed to US its concerns about what it perceives as US interference in Bangladesh elections.

https://indianexpress.com/article/world/us-announces-banglad...

https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/us-did-not-discuss-taking...

https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/foreign-affairs/3228...

This sounds a lot more like a govt bringing up the US bogeyman like Imran Khan did in Pakistan than the U.S. actually doing anything.

I don’t think you’re properly up to speed on the news:

https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cyph...

Here is a reference. The Intercept brought to light US pressure to remove Imran Khan as democratically elected Prime Minister recently, and the way the ruling class has responded is unnerving.

https://theintercept.com/2023/08/26/pakistan-us-citizens-imp...

I think it has more to do with the fact that we expect better from India and Bangladesh, whereas we all know about how Pakistan functions.

When they introduced extraterritorial jurisdiction for blasphemy for saying anything positive about Ahmadiyyas where was Pakistan populace complaining then? All this stuff was tried out on them first and no one cared because they were “wajib-ul-qatl”. I wasn’t born in Pak and haven’t even been there in a decade and I could have FIR filed against me for saying something on Facebook without setting foot in Pakistan.

Now this routine has been extended to any PTI supporter overseas criticizing what happened to Imran.

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