noted. 07/10/2011

• Alliance for Democracy

  tags: activism alliancefordemocracy pdx

• In Shift, Prosecutors Are Lenient as Companies Break the Law - NYTimes.com

  • As the financial storm brewed in the summer of 2008 and institutions feared for their survival, a bit of good news bubbled through large banks and the law firms that defend them.

     

     

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  • Federal prosecutors officially adopted new guidelines about charging corporations with crimes — a softer approach that, longtime white-collar lawyers and former federal prosecutors say, helps explain the dearth of criminal cases despite a raft of inquiries into the financial crisis.

  • “If you do not punish crimes, there’s really no reason they won’t happen again,” said Mary Ramirez, a professor at Washburn University School of Law and a former assistant United States attorney. “I worry and so do a lot of economists that we have created no disincentives for committing fraud or white-collar crime, in particular in the financial space.”

• Night Raids Curbing Taliban, but Afghans Cite Civilian Toll - NYTimes.com

  • there are still numerous accounts of forced entry and cases of men being shot in their beds next to their wives.

  • Just two weeks earlier American forces had raided the house of a Taliban member at night and killed him and his wife, leaving four small children alone. “We are trying to find relatives to take care of them,” the police chief said.

     “It turns people against the government and the foreign forces,” he said.

  • NATO officials have dismissed many of the allegations from Afghans as Taliban propaganda. They cite cases of Taliban members ordering local elders to call officials and even President Karzai with fictitious reports of civilian casualties.

  • The American and Afghan forces arrived by helicopters at 11 p.m. and stayed for 24 hours, detaining all the men in one house and interrogating and beating a number of them, people in the village said.

     “Before they asked me a question, they started kicking and beating me,” Mr. Younus, the 60-year-old, said, adding that Americans did the beating and interrogation.

     Mr. Younus, a diabetic who walks with a cane, said he was beaten on and off through the night and fainted four times. “Don’t tell us about your sickness, we are going to kill you and your brothers and destroy your houses,” he recalls being told through a translator.

     An adviser minister to President Karzai on tribal affairs, Muhammad Siddique Aziz, who headed the Afghan investigation into the episode, said that none of those killed had been Taliban and that he had had bitter discussions with an American Special Forces general over his findings.

     “We told him that the activities you are doing are not in the interest of you nor of the Karzai government,” he said. “Whoever did this raid, why do they have to kill people? Why did they not just arrest them?”

• Night Raids Curbing Taliban, but Afghans Cite Civilian Toll - NYTimes.com

  • Last year’s influx of coalition forces brought with it the kind of intelligence and surveillance that have enhanced the military’s ability to conduct the night raids, which now average 300 a month, NATO and Afghan officials said. Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands detained in the raids over the past 18 months, they said.
  • complaints from Afghans persist about the raids, which are almost invariably carried out under a veil of secrecy by Special Operations forces, often accompanied by Afghan commandos.

  • Accounts of the raids from the military and Afghan civilians often differ widely. In one example, family members and an Afghan investigator said that two clerics were among eight civilians killed in a raid last November by American Special Operations forces in Mian, a village in a remote district of the southern province of Kandahar.

     Muhammad Younus, 60, said in an interview that he was so badly beaten by American soldiers that he could not walk for 20 days. Villagers carried him out in a wheelbarrow and took him the next morning to see the bodies of his two brothers, the clerics: Maulavi Abdul Kabir, 72, and Maulavi Abdul Rauf, 65.

     They had been burned so badly, they were barely recognizable, and they bore bullet wounds, he said.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.