Steve Coll, The Unblinking Stare: The drone war in Pakistan. The New Yorker, 24 November 2014. “At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible…. He has been documenting the drone attacks for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, a Pakistani nonprofit that is seeking redress for civilian casualties…. [H]e has photographed about a hundred…sites in North Waziristan, creating a partial record of the dead, the wounded, and their detritus. Many of the faces before us were young. Behram said he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim’s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant. So he decided to focus on children.”
Archives for November 2014
The Downside of the Boom: North Dakota took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar oil industry with a regulatory system built on trust, warnings and second chances
Deborah Sontag and Robert Gebeloff, The Downside of the Boom. The New York Times, Part 1 of a 3-Part Series, 22 November 2014. “Since 2006, when advances in hydraulic fracturing — fracking — and horizontal drilling began unlocking a trove of sweet crude oil in the Bakken shale formation, North Dakota has shed its identity as an agricultural state in decline to become an oil powerhouse second only to Texas. A small state that believes in small government, it took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar industry with a slender regulatory system built on neighborly trust, verbal warnings and second chances.” Part 2, Deborah Sontag, Where Oil and Politics Mix. 23 November 2014. Part 3, Deborah Sontag and Brent McDonald, In North Dakota, a Tale of Oil, Corruption and Death. 28 December 2014.
A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA. Rolling Stone, 19 November 2014. “From reading headlines today, one might think colleges have suddenly become hotbeds of protest by celebrated anti-rape activists. But like most colleges across America, genteel University of Virginia has no radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy. There are no red-tape-wearing protests like at Harvard, no “sex-positive” clubs promoting the female orgasm like at Yale, no mattress-hauling performance artists like at Columbia, and certainly no SlutWalks. UVA isn’t an edgy or progressive campus by any stretch. The pinnacle of its polite activism is its annual Take Back the Night vigil, which on this campus of 21,000 students attracts an audience of less than 500 souls. But the dearth of attention isn’t because rape doesn’t happen in Charlottesville. It’s because at UVA, rapes are kept quiet, both by students – who brush off sexual assaults as regrettable but inevitable casualties of their cherished party culture – and by an administration that critics say is less concerned with protecting students than it is with protecting its own reputation from scandal. Some UVA women, so sickened by the university’s culture of hidden sexual violence, have taken to calling it ‘UVrApe.'”
Firestone and the Warlord: The untold story of Firestone, Charles Taylor and the tragedy of Liberia
T. Christian Miller and Jonathan Jones, Firestone and the Warlord: The untold story of Firestone, Charles Taylor and the tragedy of Liberia. ProPublica in collaboration with FRONTLINE, 18 November 2014. From FRONTLINE, Firestone and the Warlord: “Firestone wanted Liberia for its rubber. Taylor wanted Firestone to help his rise to power. At a pivotal meeting in Liberia’s jungles in July 1991, the company agreed to do business with the warlord. In the first detailed examination of the relationship between Firestone and Taylor, an investigation by ProPublica and FRONTLINE lays bare the role of a global corporation in a brutal African conflict.” [Read more…]
Whisked Out of Jail, and Back to the N.F.L.
Steve Eder, Whisked Out of Jail, and Back to the N.F.L. Nowhere to Turn: First of Two Articles. The New York Times, 16 November 2014. And N.F.L. Was Family, Until Wives Reported Domestic Abuse. Nowhere to Turn: Second of Two Articles, The New York Times, 17 November 2014. “Even after sheriff’s deputies arrived at her Weston, Fla., home, Kristen Lennon remained in the bathroom, afraid to leave. Minutes earlier, she had fled there for safety as she called 911, telling the operator that her fiancé [Phillip Merling, a 6-foot-5, 305-pound defensive end for the Miami Dolphins] had thrown her on the bed and hit her in the face and head. She was two months pregnant…. Mr. Merling was booked on charges of aggravated domestic battery on a pregnant woman. Almost all inmates are required to leave the jail through the public front door and arrange their own transportation home, but Mr. Merling was granted an unusual privilege: He was escorted out a rear exit by a deputy, evading reporters. The commander, who was off duty and in uniform, drove Mr. Merling in an unmarked car to the Dolphins’ training complex 20 minutes away. After Mr. Merling met with team officials, the commander drove him home to get his belongings — even though a judge had ordered Mr. Merling to “stay away” and avoid any potential contact with Ms. Lennon.”
Death by Deadline: How bad lawyering and an unforgiving law cost condemned men their last appeal
Ken Armstrong, Death by Deadline: How bad lawyering and an unforgiving law cost condemned men their last appeal, Part One. The Marshall Project, 15 November 2014. And Death by Deadline: When lawyers stumble, only their clients fall, Part Two, The Marshall Project, 16 November 2014. Published in partnership with The Washington Post. “[In 1996] President Bill Clinton endorsed a Republican plan to limit death-penalty appeals by setting a one-year deadline for the filing of habeas corpus petitions. Those federal appeals, which typically come after claims in state courts have been exhausted, allow inmates to seek a final review of their convictions on grounds ranging from juror misconduct to the suppression of evidence by prosecutors. Yet an investigation by The Marshall Project has found that in at least 80 capital cases in which lawyers have missed the deadline – sometimes through remarkable incompetence or neglect – it is almost always the prisoner alone who suffers the consequences.
Among the dozens of attorneys who have borne some responsibility for those mistakes, only one has been sanctioned for missing the deadline by a professional disciplinary body, the investigation found. And that attorney was given a simple censure, one of the profession’s lowest forms of punishment. The lack of oversight or accountability has left many of the lawyers who missed the habeas deadlines free to seek appointment by the federal courts to new death-penalty appeals.
The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare, Alayne Fleischmann
Matt Taibbi, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare. Rolling Stone, 6 Novmeber 2014. “Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking. Chase whistle-blower Alayne Fleischmann risked it all.”
Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg
Leslie Wayne, Kelly Carr, Marina Walker Guevara, Mar Cabra and Michael Hudson, Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg. International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. 5 November 2014. “Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and 340 other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny European duchy, leaked documents show.” Winner of the 2014 George Polk Award for Business Reporting.