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squish
Social climber
bc
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I feel the CAI should have been more the target for JK and not the book, perhaps he tried?.
JK gave his $$ to them and he knew people that were on the board of directors, he was probably privy to reasons why those directors quit.
There was large gap of time before JK's media pieces came out. In the meantime, there was alot of money made by GM.
The USA is a nightmare for stupid lawsuit claims and anyone involved should be ashamed with themselves.
I never read the book, but feel for the tragic outcome.
There are many climbing books that are written/co-written where truths are stretched, information not relayed properly or submitted too late for a deadline.
I know a couple of women who worked in publishing and they told me climbers were the worst to work with!.
JK cab stretch things also, while spending time for an article on Fred Beckey and shopping in a grocery store, FB takes a sample of food, then made him out like a moocher, meanwhile FB said JK ate a piece too,
(I have seen FB tip very well and to a male waiter).
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Agreed. I think you mean the Outside profile twenty or so years ago, about the same time I met JK.
I though that the article, though exceptionally well written, was unnecessarily cruel.
But, as a person nearly suckered into the scam, I welcome the daylight shed on GM's profligate ways and grossly inflated claims.
I wish I could remember who and where, but I recently read of somebody with far less fanfare accomplishing far more in building schools in remote areas.
This latest sad turn almost appears to be a confirmation of some peoples worst fears.
That he was a man of honor is so appallingly tragic.
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Rick A
climber
Boulder, Colorado
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Apr 28, 2013 - 11:01pm PT
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Here is Jon Krakauer's devastating update on the Mortenson/CAI story in the Daily Beast.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/08/is-it-time-to-forgive-greg-mortenson.html
Short summary: an audit reveals evidence of corruption and waste of CAI donations by CAI's operatives in Asia, CAI still taking in donations from school children, Three Cups of Tea still selling well, and Mortenson still pulling down a nice salary from money donated to CAI.
Incredible that Mortenson has never had to publicly explain himself. Remember that he claimed that medical problems prevented him from speaking out when the scandal broke and that he would address the 60 Minutes allegations later. We're still waiting two years later.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Apr 29, 2013 - 02:44am PT
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It's clear this tale isn't over. Thankfully so far the lout has been reined in a smidge. Types like this will need a nastier correction though, than that which he's received to date.
And with a lot of the possible malfeasance being in a gray areas of maybe so/maybe not and so terrifically remote geographically---some even in war zones---along with the groundswell of popularity his group generated, getting a real adjustment out of him looks to be awfully challenging.
And the fact GM seems to be willing to ride forward from this point on without substantial clarification or apology, should be enough warning to anyone except school kids with their tiny savings accounts and piggy banks.
Thanks Ricky for keeping the Affaire Mortenson as an important concern for us. And of course Jon. If only Le Greg's whole tale were true, right?
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Apr 29, 2013 - 09:02am PT
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ROTFLMAO!!!! Classic sir, classic.
El Cono Said: "Hi gang!
I scored a 1st draft of Greg Mortensen's apology to everyone:
To the Pakistani Minister of Education: I am sorry to have exposed the ineptitude and ambivalence of your crap department and to have shone a light on the fact that you are both too afraid, too incompetent, and too callous to even visit these parts of your own country, much less bother educating one of the most repressed and abused majority populations of the third world. I am sorry that the world now knows that the Pakistani government doesn't give a flying fuk about it's women and considers them only equal to dogs and other animals of debatable value. I am sorry that your department has secretly tried to subvert both my efforts and the concept of educating girls in remote provinces. I am also sorry that I was unable to properly bribe you into simply leaving us alone.
To John Krakauer: I am sorry to have accepted money from someone without having done a proper google search that would have revealed him to be the self-serving publicity whore that he is. We have learned from this incident and have subsequently refused donations from Aum Shinrikyo, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and Sarah Palin.
To SuperTopo: I am sorry to have revealed to other members your laziness, idiocy, and casual self righteousness in understanding what it means to even attempt to build a school in one of the most hostile cultural and geographic environments in the known solar system. I am sorry that so few of you have ever known the joys of weeks of tear-inducing dysentery, the abject terror when you and your family are approached by veiled teenagers with guns or the butt clenching sounds of gunfire in the night. I am also sorry that you will never experience the joy of relentless fundraising, living out of airport hotels, and having to get on your knees to blow a rich man out of the couple grand he'd otherwise spend on a gold plated toilet seat. I am also sorry that you feel that I am overly compensated in the face of your part-time hair-net jobs.
To the State of Montana: I am sorry I pay property taxes to you.
To the kids who sent me money: I am sorry that I took your money without properly telling you what it would be used for and that I did not explain that sometimes the money I said was used to buy books was sometimes used to bribe a disgusting old man into letting his 12 year old wife go to school 4 hours a week. I am also sorry that I spent some of the money that was to be used for cement or roofing materials was instead spent paying off highwaymen, pikers, armed groups, the guy I used to buy cement wholesale, the guy I used to organize mules to carry boxes of hardware, the guy I used to transport teaching materials, the Pakistani Ministry of Education, and extortionists who'd threaten to expose the fact that I have to waste a lot of your money like this. I am also sorry that i cannot provide receipts for these and other "operating expenses". I'm sorry that I sometimes used a plane to travel directly between fundraising events where I had to kiss the asses of many loathsome people who were mostly looking for a tax write-off. I am truly sorry that you have had to learn, far earlier than you had a right to, the facts that face you in your adult lives; I am deeply sorry for that.
-GM "
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Apr 29, 2013 - 02:24pm PT
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Coz, uh, this was a new and interesting spoof done in the most sarcastic tone possible. V. funny too.
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orle
climber
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Apr 29, 2013 - 02:27pm PT
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Looks pretty real to me
To SuperTopo: I am sorry to have revealed to other members your laziness, idiocy, and casual self righteousness in understanding
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Apr 29, 2013 - 02:38pm PT
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Why not any other sites?
I agree on there needing to be an apology for falsifying climb details.
spoof
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Rick A
climber
Boulder, Colorado
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Excerpt from Krakauer that gives the flavor of his Daily Beast article:
Contrary to the assurances of supporters who insist that both Mortenson and CAI have cleaned up their acts, an audit of the charity’s overseas activities by a Pakistani accounting firm, as well as information provided by other sources in Pakistan and Afghanistan, indicate that CAI’s foreign operations are currently beset by widespread corruption. Thanks to appallingly lax oversight that began while Mortenson was at the helm and continued during Beyersdorfer’s two-year tenure, many hundreds of thousands of dollars—perhaps millions—appear to have been wasted or pilfered by some of the charity’s Afghan and Pakistani staff.
El Cono-
Even though your post is a satire and not really from GM, it sounds like you are a unapologetic supporter of Mortnenson and CAI. Will you keep donating your own money to CAI, so that it can be spent paying Mortenson’s lawyers to the tune of millions in legal fees? Do you care that there is strong evidence that a lot of contributor’s money is wasted by corruption? Any reasonable non profit would have cleared up these sorts of accounting questions long ago. If an organization takes tax payer subsidized donations, it has a responsibility to account for the money and tell the truth about how it is being spent. If contributors' money continues to be wasted, they have a right to know.
If you intended that we take seriously the arguments you seem to put forth in your spoof, they aren’t very persuasive :
To John Krakauer: I am sorry to have accepted money from someone without having done a proper google search that would have revealed him to be the self-serving publicity whore that he is. We have learned from this incident and have subsequently refused donations from Aum Shinrikyo, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and Sarah Palin.
Generating publicity is not Krakauer's motivation at all. He along with a lot of others was impressed by the story Mortenson promoted that GM was a heroic humanitarian worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Because of this fable, Krakauer gave him $75,000 and even endorsed Mortenson. Here is Krakauer's explanation from the article:
Ashamed that I had helped persuade many thousands of people to give their hard-earned money to a charlatan, and had done nothing more to correct my blunder than write a letter to CAI, I launched an exhaustive investigation of the charity to make amends. As my investigation gathered momentum, and I came to understand just how dysfunctional the organization had become, I resolved to do my utmost to inform donors about the gravity of CAI’s predicament and to stay on the case until things were back on track.
On the actions of the Montana attorney general you say:
To the State of Montana: I am sorry I pay property taxes to you.
Mortenson was charged with wrongfully taking and using $1,000,000 from money contributed to CAI. The Montana Attorney General found that this was a probable violation of the law and made him pay it back. The settlement had nothing to do with paying taxes to Montana. There is an unresolved question raised by CAI’s own lawyers regarding whether Mortenson failed to pay federal income taxes on the money that CAI gave him to fly around the country in private jets. Montana doesn’t need an apology, it got $1,000,000 out of Mortenson that he improperly got from CAI. However, the IRS may yet be heard from on the propriety of Mortenson’s actions with respect to federal income tax and if it does, I expect it will demand more than an apology.
To the kids who sent me money: I am sorry that I took your money without properly telling you what it would be used for and that I did not explain that sometimes the money I said was used to buy books was sometimes used to bribe a disgusting old man into letting his 12 year old wife go to school 4 hours a week. I am also sorry that I spent some of the money that was to be used for cement or roofing materials was instead spent paying off highwaymen, pikers, armed groups, the guy I used to buy cement wholesale, the guy I used to organize mules to carry boxes of hardware, the guy I used to transport teaching materials, the Pakistani Ministry of Education, and extortionists who'd threaten to expose the fact that I have to waste a lot of your money like this. I am also sorry that i cannot provide receipts for these and other "operating expenses". I'm sorry that I sometimes used a plane to travel directly between fundraising events where I had to kiss the asses of many loathsome people who were mostly looking for a tax write-off. I am truly sorry that you have had to learn, far earlier than you had a right to, the facts that face you in your adult lives; I am deeply sorry for that.
Pretty hard to follow some of what you are saying here, but you seem to be justifying the waste of contributor’s money overseas. We may disagree on whether the ends (building schools that may or may not be materially helping children in Afganistan) justify the means (using charitable contributions for improper private use, paying off cronies), but the point is that contributors to CAI have a right to know how their money is spent.
Call me self righteous, but personally I wouldn’t want any part of my contributions to a charitable organization going to pay for private jet travel or to buy a house for the executive director’s crony in Afganistan.
Apparently you think it’s a good lesson for the children who contribute to CAI through Pennies for Peace to learn that some of their pennies are not really going to educate Afghan girls, but into the pockets of apparent thieves. Is this really a fact that is an inevitable life lesson? There are plenty of charities that don’t engage in these types of shenanigans and once these children become adults they can simply choose to give to charities that don’t waste their contributor’s money and which account for every penny, even when they operate in third world countries.
To SuperTopo: I am sorry to have revealed to other members your laziness, idiocy, and casual self righteousness in understanding what it means to even attempt to build a school in one of the most hostile cultural and geographic environments in the known solar system. I am sorry that so few of you have ever known the joys of weeks of tear-inducing dysentery, the abject terror when you and your family are approached by veiled teenagers with guns or the butt clenching sounds of gunfire in the night. I am also sorry that you will never experience the joy of relentless fundraising, living out of airport hotels, and having to get on your knees to blow a rich man out of the couple grand he'd otherwise spend on a gold plated toilet seat. I am also sorry that you feel that I am overly compensated in the face of your part-time hair-net jobs.
Krakauer and the State of Montana both state that Mortenson has accomplished some admirable results in his work. That is not the point. The point is that Mortenson’s self serving lies in his books were used to convince people to give to his charity. Mortenson then enriched himself at the expense of that charity, and to date has failed to respond to charges that he engaged in serious wrongdoing.
To me, this establishes that Mortenson can’t be trusted to handle other people’s money, something the Montana AG affirms since they forbade him from having any leadership role in CAI. He was warned for years by his own board of directors that his recklessness with contributor’s money would have consequences. He chose to ignore these warnings and has been disgraced for it. This breach of trust has harmed a lot of people and permanently sullied the reputation of CAI. For all of this, a bona fide apology from Mortenson is long overdue.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Excellent summary Rick and thanks.
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sempervirens
climber
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Rick A,
Well said. A voice of reason is too rare on supertopo. el cono's mediocre attempt at humor turned out to provide opportunity for an objective look at the whole affair. I have questioned Krakauer's motivation for exposing this whole debacle because it must be a bit unsettling to be such a catalyst. I would have had to have an intense internal debate before taking such actions. Krakauer probably did too. But I agree that it had to be done and that GM should apologize - at the very least. I'm not expecting my $200 back.
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rockermike
Trad climber
Berkeley
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If anyone is looking for an alternative donation vehicle, I ran into this a couple of days ago. Sounds pretty legit to me, and closer to home.
http://tinyurl.com/c4omhxg
Jesuit priest working with gang kids in LA's barrio and founder of "Homeboy Industries".
(in the interest of full disclosure: I'm not a Jesuit, nor a Catholic, nor really (some would say) a Christian - but this is inspiring....)
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tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
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I don't know how it is in Afghanistan, but building just one orphanage in Haiti is full-time work for someone to look out for and avoid wasteful spending or getting scammed, or getting tied into bad company, or a million other things that we have spotted and made adjustments out of.
I couldn't imagine doing more than one project at a time. The bigger you get, the more waste there is.
7% of the money Americans donated to Haiti after the earthquake got into their hands when donated through the top 3 large organizations.
100% of what gets donated with our small organization gets into worker's hands.
I think it is wrong - but I can very well see how CAI got too big to run well. The first bits of waste probably happened when nobody looked, then when they realized what had happened, and that nobody said anything, they thought about using the leak to fill their own pocket. Give that a few years and voila! Average, run-of-the-mill non-profit organization. There wouldn't have been much to stop the few leaks at first since the leader apparently was stretching the truth about his climb, etc. from the start. The rest of the group would have picked up on this and allowed lies to grow. Organizational culture always comes from the top.
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SteveW
Trad climber
The state of confusion
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Again, Rick, thanks for some wonderful clarification.
Wish I'd spoken to you before I was suckered out of
some cash that could have gone to someplace really
in need of it.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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El Cono, to my knowledge Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontiere, two of my favorites,
don't save puppies or sell cookies. They are also well known for srupulously
open record keeping and having an extremely low overhead, two attributes
which no impartial observer would attribute to CAI.
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Kathryn
Social climber
Mesa
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@Stitch, Colorado Springs
My poem which you so object to is copyrighted material which you did not contact me for permission to use. The fact you named me in no way gave you permission. You were also ignorant of the reasons why I wrote that poem, as during my coverage my personal email was hacked "spying on school teachers is no way to win a court case", personal emails between myself, attorneys on all sides and the CAI were all harvested, placed in file folders and disseminated all over the U.S. and German (Random House headquarters). To say I was angry is quite obvious. The folders were named "Mortenson" "Discovery" and "Haddon" and I began receiving "love notes" on instant message from "Mohommed" and "Abdul". Obviously some Krakauer supporter or worse, the Plaintiffs were involved in violating my account and I had every right to express my opinion which turned out to be correct.
The motion was made of swiss cheese, there was not one single cited criminal act in the motion which is why they kept requesting permission to amend it. It was dismissed by Judge Samuel Hadden in March of 2012, and Drury persists in an appeal.
And to update my "fan" and "frenemies" where on Supertopo, the man who actually wrote Three Cups of Tea committed suicide last Thanksgiving after being bankrupted and having his reputation ruined because Krakauer got pissed off at Greg Mortenson. Krakauer's insincere condolences to David Relin's widow was insincere as within days his friend and editor Tina Brown runs he article "Is it time to forgive Greg Mortenson yet?"
Gee, after causing the death of one writer, refusing to cooperate with the class action law suit that had one source and one source only Krakauer, he has blood on his hands and all of you who supported him do too.
For those who have on this thread have questioned my academic and professional credentials, I am a graduate of the UND, both in journalism and my Maser's degree is in English, I am an examiner with the British Council here in China and have worked in central Asia for nearly 9 years.
I'm sick of seeing this thread come up when my name is Googled, and for those "dainty" climbers who were offended by my language, please allow me to quote you when someone violates your private email box and sends its contents all over hell and high water.
Krakauer did not kill Mortenson (though he timed it to hopefully have that affect since he was awaiting open heart surgery), Relin is dead, but Mortenson is still in Afghanistan, he did build the schools he said he built, his books still sell world-wide and the CIA is stronger than ever with NO THANKS TO THE KRAK.
Karma will deal with Mr. Krakauer. There is an avalanche with his name on it coming. That's what happens when you piss off the dead.
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Port
Trad climber
San Diego
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 3, 2013 - 11:39am PT
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Relin's death is on Krak???? What a joke. Maybe if a certain person didn't lie and IGNORE opportunities to correct the problem NONE of this would of happened. He chose not to becuase he knew he was guilty. Why do you think he chose not to speak to 60 minutes? Every thing about this was so preventable.
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Jennie
Trad climber
Elk Creek, Idaho
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Jennier Woodlief is perhaps the most professional climbing-reporter/writer today (A Wall of White and A Bolt from the Blue)
Her concern for accuracy, fairness and empathy with characters may start a reverse trend. Get off the Krak and read one of her books...
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sempervirens
climber
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Kathryn, A bit more proofreading would make it easier for me to follow your writing. I couldn't find the poem; would you repost it? You do seem to have some insight on the matter.
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