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Sure, some has splattered on the attorneys but apparently the banksters remain out of bounds....
Judges Berate Bank Lawyers in Foreclosures
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
With judges looking ever more critically at home foreclosures, they are reaching beyond the bankers to heap some of their most scorching criticism on the lawyers.
In numerous opinions, judges have accused lawyers of processing shoddy or even fabricated paperwork in foreclosure actions when representing the banks.
Judge Arthur M. Schack of New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn has taken aim at an upstate lawyer, Steven J. Baum, referring to one filing as “incredible, outrageous, ludicrous and disingenuous.”
But New York judges are also trying to take the lead in fixing the mortgage mess by leaning on the lawyers. In November, a judge ordered Mr. Baum’s firm to pay nearly $20,000 in fines and costs related to papers that he said contained numerous “falsities.” The judge, Scott Fairgrieve of Nassau County District Court, wrote that “swearing to false statements reflects poorly on the profession as a whole.”
More broadly, the courts in New York State, along with Florida, have begun requiring that lawyers in foreclosure cases vouch for the accuracy of the documents they present, which prompted a protest from the New York bar. The requirement, which is being considered by courts in other states, could open lawyers to disciplinary actions that could harm or even end careers.
Stephen Gillers, an expert in legal ethics at New York University, agreed with Judge Fairgrieve that the involvement of lawyers in questionable transactions could damage the overall reputation of the legal profession, “which does not fare well in public opinion” throughout history.
“When the consequence of a lawyer plying his trade is the loss of someone’s home, and it turns out there are documents being given to the courts that have no basis in reality, the profession gets a very big black eye,” Professor Gillers said.
The issue of vouching for documents will undoubtedly meet resistance by lawyers elsewhere as it has in New York.
Anne Reynolds Copps, the chairwoman of the real property law section of the New York State bar, said, “We had a lot of concerns, because it seemed to paint attorneys as being the problem.” Lawyers feared they would be responsible for a bank’s mistakes. “They are relying on a client, or the client’s employees, to provide the information on which they are basing the documents,” she said.
The role of lawyers is under scrutiny in the 23 states where foreclosures must be reviewed by a court. The situation has become especially heated for high-volume firms whose practices mirror the so-called robo-signing of some financial institutions; in these cases, documents were signed without sufficient examination or proper notarization.
In the most publicized example, David J. Stern, a lawyer whose Florida firm has been part of an estimated 20 percent of the foreclosure actions in the state, has been accused of filing sloppy and even fraudulent mortgage paperwork. Major institutions have dropped the firm, which has been the subject of several lawsuits, and 1,200 of the 1,400 people once at the firm are out of work.
The Florida attorney general’s office is conducting a civil investigation of Mr. Stern’s firm and two others.
“There’s been no determination” in a court that Mr. Stern or his employees “did wrong things, said Jeffrey Tew, Mr. Stern’s lawyer, adding that the impact was nevertheless devastating.
“There are groups in society that everybody likes to hate,” Mr. Tew added. “Now foreclosure lawyers are on the list.”
Such concerns have, in recent months, brought a sharp focus on activities in New York State, and in particular on the practice of Mr. Baum, a lawyer in Amherst, outside Buffalo. Judges have cited his firm for what they call slipshod work that, in some cases, was followed by the dismissal of foreclosure actions.
One case involved Sunny D. Eng, a former manager of computer systems on Wall Street. He and his wife, who has cancer, stopped paying the mortgage on their Holtsville, N.Y., home after Mr. Eng’s Internet services business foundered. The mortgage was originally held by the HTFC Corporation, but the foreclosure notice came from Wells Fargo, a bank that the Engs had no relationship with. They hired an experienced foreclosure defense lawyer on Long Island, Craig Robins. The court ultimately ruled in favor of Mr. Eng.
“You want to call it God, you can call it God,” Mr. Eng said. “You want to call it luck, you can call it luck. We just followed the system, and thank God the system worked.”
Through a spokesman, Mr. Baum said, “The foreclosure process in New York State is extremely complex and subject to extensive judicial review. We believe this review respects the due process of anyone who challenges a foreclosure. Consumer activists and attorneys representing homeowners have their own agenda in this process, including degrading the legal work we conduct on behalf of our clients by using terms like ’foreclosure mill,’ which I find personally and professionally insulting.”
He added, “What is important now is that all parties attempt to work together to resolve issues amicably. The barrage of accusations and litigation does little to help the underlying problems.”
Cases across the nation like Mr. Eng’s have led New York’s judicial system to take a hard look at the 80,000 pending foreclosures in the state and demand that the paperwork be sound, said the state’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman. “Knowing what we know, our only option — at least from my perspective — is to turn to the lawyers who are officers of the court and say, ’You’d better go to your clients and find out if these cases are real,’ ” he said.
The court devised a two-page affirmation to be signed by lawyers in foreclosure actions saying they had reviewed the documents and had “confirmed the factual accuracy” of any allegations with the clients.
Ann Pfau, deputy chief administrative judge for New York State, who has worked directly with the state bar to carry out the plan, said, “We need to know that this is a court process that has some integrity.”
Judge Pfau said, “If you can’t get good information, you shouldn’t be filing the cases in the first place.”
To address some lawyer concerns, the judiciary issued a modified version of the affirmation in November but said that the alterations were minor. In the end, the lawyers are vouching for their filing, Judge Pfau said. “They are absolutely still on the hook.”
While lawyers are being implicated as part of the problem, they should also be part of the solution, said Stephen P. Younger, the president of the New York State Bar Association, which has not taken an overall position on the foreclosure matter. Foreclosure defense lawyers, he noted, have led court proceedings to throw out flawed cases.
“The real problem is that there are thousands and thousands of people who are unrepresented by lawyers,” Mr. Younger said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/bu...ef=todayspaper
The nationalist convictions of Pakistani lawyers is well established. With the US policy of destabilizing Pakistan into a failed state, anything goes ....
Pakistan Faces a Divide of Age on Muslim Law
By CARLOTTA GALL
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Cheering crowds have gathered in recent days to support the assassin who riddled the governor of Punjab with 26 bullets and to praise his attack — carried out in the name of the Prophet Muhammad — as an act of heroism. To the surprise of many, chief among them have been Pakistan’s young lawyers, once seen as a force for democracy.
Their energetic campaign on behalf of the killer has caught the government flat-footed and dismayed friends and supporters of the slain politician, Salman Taseer, an outspoken proponent of liberalism who had challenged the nation’s strict blasphemy laws. It has also confused many in the broader public and observers abroad, who expected to see a firm state prosecution of the assassin.
Instead, before his court appearances, the lawyers showered rose petals over the confessed killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, a member of an elite police group who had been assigned to guard the governor, but who instead turned his gun on him. They have now enthusiastically taken up his defense.
It may seem a stark turnabout for a group that just a few years ago looked like the vanguard of a democracy movement. They waged months of protests in 2007 and 2008 to challenge Pakistan’s military dictator after he unlawfully removed the chief justice.
But the lawyers’ stance is perhaps just the most glaring expression of what has become a deep generational divide tearing at the fabric of Pakistani society, and of the broad influence of religious conservatism — and even militancy — that now exists among the educated middle class.
They are often described as the Zia generation: Pakistanis who have come of age since the 1980s, when the military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, began to promote Islam in public education and to use it as a political tool to unify this young and insecure nation.
Today, the forces he set loose have gained such strength that they threaten to overwhelm voices for tolerance in Pakistan’s feeble civilian government. They certainly present a nagging challenge for the United States.
Washington has poured billions of dollars into the Pakistani military to combat terrorism, but has long neglected a civilian effort to counter the inexorable pull of conservative Islam. By now the conservatives have entered nearly every part of Pakistani society, even the rank-and-file security forces, as the assassination showed. The military, in fact, has been conspicuously silent about the killing.
“Over time, Pakistani society has drifted toward religious extremism,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and defense analyst from Lahore. “This religious sentiment has seeped deep into government circles and into the army and police at lower levels.”
“The lower level are listening to the religious people,” he said.
Indeed, the Pakistan of today, and the brand of Islam much of the nation has embraced, is barely recognizable even to many educated Pakistanis older than the Zia generation. Among them is Athar Minallah, 49, a former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the lawyers’ protest campaign against Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007 and 2008.
Mr. Minallah studied law at Islamic University in Islamabad from 1983 to 1986, and the first lesson any student learned in his day was that the preservation of life was a pillar of Islamic law, he said.
But under General Zia in the 1980s, the government began supporting Islamic warriors to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Indian control of Kashmir, and the syllabus was changed to encourage jihad. The mind-set of students and graduates changed along with it, Mr. Minallah said.
That change is now no more apparent than among the 1,000 lawyers from the capital, Islamabad, and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi, who have given their signed support for the defense of Mr. Qadri, who has been charged with murder and terrorism.
Their leader is Rao Abdur Raheem, 30, who formed a “lawyers’ forum,” called the Movement to Protect the Dignity of the Prophet, in December. The aim of the group, he said, was to counter Mr. Taseer’s campaign to amend the nation’s strict blasphemy laws, which promise death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
In interviews, Mr. Raheem and six of his colleagues insisted they were not members of any political or religious party, and were acting independently and interested only in ensuring the rule of law.
All graduates of different Pakistani universities, they insisted they were liberal, not religious conservatives. Only one had religious training. They said they had all taken part in the lawyers’ protest campaign in 2007 and 2008, and that they were proud that the movement helped reinstate the chief justice.
Yet they forcefully defended Mr. Qadri, saying he had acted on his own, out of strong religious feeling, and they denied that he had told his fellow guards of his plans in advance. He was innocent until proved guilty, they said. They have already succeeded in preventing the government from changing the court venue.
In their deep religious conviction, and in their energy and commitment to the cause of the blasphemy laws, they are miles apart from the older generation of lawyers and law enforcement officials above them.
“I felt this is a different society,” said one former law enforcement official when he saw the lawyers celebrating Mr. Qadri. “There is a disconnect in society.”
The former security official, who has worked in fighting militancy and who requested anonymity because of his work, said that within just four hours of the killing, 2,500 people had posted messages supporting Mr. Qadri on Facebook pages.
Mass rallies championing him and the blasphemy laws have continued since then.
This conservatism is fueled by an element of class divide, between the more secular and wealthy upper classes and the more religious middle and lower classes, said Najam Sethi, a former editor of The Daily Times, a liberal daily newspaper published by Mr. Taseer. As Pakistan’s middle class has grown, so has the conservative population.
Besides his campaign against the blasphemy laws, it was Mr. Taseer’s wealth and secular lifestyle that made him a target for the religious parties, Mr. Sethi said.
“Salman had an easygoing, witty, irreverent, high-life style,” he said, “so the anger of class inequality mixed with religious passion gives a heady, dangerous brew.”
Government officials, analysts and members of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the secular-leaning party to which Mr. Taseer belonged, blame the religious parties and clerics who delivered speeches and fatwas against Mr. Taseer for inciting the attack. On Monday, Mr. Qadri, who confessed to the killing, provided a court with testimony saying he was inspired by two clerics, Qari Hanif and Ishtiaq Shah.
The police say they are now seeking the clerics for questioning, but with the growing strength of the conservative movement on the streets, religious leaders — even those who incite violence and terrorism — are nearly untouchable to the authorities and are almost never prosecuted.
The blasphemy law has been condemned by human rights groups here, who say it has been used to persecute religious minorities, like Christians, and on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI called on Pakistan to undo the law. But the law has become an opportunity for religious parties looking to whip up public sentiment, Mr. Sethi said.
A dark presence in the background is the military establishment, which has sponsored the religious parties for decades, using them as tools to influence politics and as militant proxies abroad. The military also has a heavy influence on much of Pakistan’s brash media, which fanned the flames of the blasphemy issue with sensationalist coverage.
“Democracy has brought us a media that is extremely right-wing, conservative,” Mr. Sethi, 62, said. “Most are in their 30s and are a product of the Zia years, of the textbooks and schools set by the Zia years, which are not the sort of things that we were taught.”
“The silence of the armed forces is ominous,” Mr. Sethi added.
Indeed, whether on the military or civilian side, the government has failed to act forcefully on the case at every stage, the former security official said. Whether through fear or lack of policy, it has done little to challenge the ideology behind the attack or the spreading radicalism in Pakistani society.
“The entire state effort has been on the capture and kill approach: how many terrorists can you arrest and how many can you kill,” the former security official said. “Nothing has been done about the breeding ground of extremism.
“Unless the government does something serious and sustained,” the official warned, “we are on a very dangerous trajectory.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/wo...ef=todayspaper
Judges Berate Bank Lawyers in Foreclosures
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
With judges looking ever more critically at home foreclosures, they are reaching beyond the bankers to heap some of their most scorching criticism on the lawyers.
In numerous opinions, judges have accused lawyers of processing shoddy or even fabricated paperwork in foreclosure actions when representing the banks.
Judge Arthur M. Schack of New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn has taken aim at an upstate lawyer, Steven J. Baum, referring to one filing as “incredible, outrageous, ludicrous and disingenuous.”
But New York judges are also trying to take the lead in fixing the mortgage mess by leaning on the lawyers. In November, a judge ordered Mr. Baum’s firm to pay nearly $20,000 in fines and costs related to papers that he said contained numerous “falsities.” The judge, Scott Fairgrieve of Nassau County District Court, wrote that “swearing to false statements reflects poorly on the profession as a whole.”
More broadly, the courts in New York State, along with Florida, have begun requiring that lawyers in foreclosure cases vouch for the accuracy of the documents they present, which prompted a protest from the New York bar. The requirement, which is being considered by courts in other states, could open lawyers to disciplinary actions that could harm or even end careers.
Stephen Gillers, an expert in legal ethics at New York University, agreed with Judge Fairgrieve that the involvement of lawyers in questionable transactions could damage the overall reputation of the legal profession, “which does not fare well in public opinion” throughout history.
“When the consequence of a lawyer plying his trade is the loss of someone’s home, and it turns out there are documents being given to the courts that have no basis in reality, the profession gets a very big black eye,” Professor Gillers said.
The issue of vouching for documents will undoubtedly meet resistance by lawyers elsewhere as it has in New York.
Anne Reynolds Copps, the chairwoman of the real property law section of the New York State bar, said, “We had a lot of concerns, because it seemed to paint attorneys as being the problem.” Lawyers feared they would be responsible for a bank’s mistakes. “They are relying on a client, or the client’s employees, to provide the information on which they are basing the documents,” she said.
The role of lawyers is under scrutiny in the 23 states where foreclosures must be reviewed by a court. The situation has become especially heated for high-volume firms whose practices mirror the so-called robo-signing of some financial institutions; in these cases, documents were signed without sufficient examination or proper notarization.
In the most publicized example, David J. Stern, a lawyer whose Florida firm has been part of an estimated 20 percent of the foreclosure actions in the state, has been accused of filing sloppy and even fraudulent mortgage paperwork. Major institutions have dropped the firm, which has been the subject of several lawsuits, and 1,200 of the 1,400 people once at the firm are out of work.
The Florida attorney general’s office is conducting a civil investigation of Mr. Stern’s firm and two others.
“There’s been no determination” in a court that Mr. Stern or his employees “did wrong things, said Jeffrey Tew, Mr. Stern’s lawyer, adding that the impact was nevertheless devastating.
“There are groups in society that everybody likes to hate,” Mr. Tew added. “Now foreclosure lawyers are on the list.”
Such concerns have, in recent months, brought a sharp focus on activities in New York State, and in particular on the practice of Mr. Baum, a lawyer in Amherst, outside Buffalo. Judges have cited his firm for what they call slipshod work that, in some cases, was followed by the dismissal of foreclosure actions.
One case involved Sunny D. Eng, a former manager of computer systems on Wall Street. He and his wife, who has cancer, stopped paying the mortgage on their Holtsville, N.Y., home after Mr. Eng’s Internet services business foundered. The mortgage was originally held by the HTFC Corporation, but the foreclosure notice came from Wells Fargo, a bank that the Engs had no relationship with. They hired an experienced foreclosure defense lawyer on Long Island, Craig Robins. The court ultimately ruled in favor of Mr. Eng.
“You want to call it God, you can call it God,” Mr. Eng said. “You want to call it luck, you can call it luck. We just followed the system, and thank God the system worked.”
Through a spokesman, Mr. Baum said, “The foreclosure process in New York State is extremely complex and subject to extensive judicial review. We believe this review respects the due process of anyone who challenges a foreclosure. Consumer activists and attorneys representing homeowners have their own agenda in this process, including degrading the legal work we conduct on behalf of our clients by using terms like ’foreclosure mill,’ which I find personally and professionally insulting.”
He added, “What is important now is that all parties attempt to work together to resolve issues amicably. The barrage of accusations and litigation does little to help the underlying problems.”
Cases across the nation like Mr. Eng’s have led New York’s judicial system to take a hard look at the 80,000 pending foreclosures in the state and demand that the paperwork be sound, said the state’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman. “Knowing what we know, our only option — at least from my perspective — is to turn to the lawyers who are officers of the court and say, ’You’d better go to your clients and find out if these cases are real,’ ” he said.
The court devised a two-page affirmation to be signed by lawyers in foreclosure actions saying they had reviewed the documents and had “confirmed the factual accuracy” of any allegations with the clients.
Ann Pfau, deputy chief administrative judge for New York State, who has worked directly with the state bar to carry out the plan, said, “We need to know that this is a court process that has some integrity.”
Judge Pfau said, “If you can’t get good information, you shouldn’t be filing the cases in the first place.”
To address some lawyer concerns, the judiciary issued a modified version of the affirmation in November but said that the alterations were minor. In the end, the lawyers are vouching for their filing, Judge Pfau said. “They are absolutely still on the hook.”
While lawyers are being implicated as part of the problem, they should also be part of the solution, said Stephen P. Younger, the president of the New York State Bar Association, which has not taken an overall position on the foreclosure matter. Foreclosure defense lawyers, he noted, have led court proceedings to throw out flawed cases.
“The real problem is that there are thousands and thousands of people who are unrepresented by lawyers,” Mr. Younger said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/bu...ef=todayspaper
The nationalist convictions of Pakistani lawyers is well established. With the US policy of destabilizing Pakistan into a failed state, anything goes ....
Pakistan Faces a Divide of Age on Muslim Law
By CARLOTTA GALL
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Cheering crowds have gathered in recent days to support the assassin who riddled the governor of Punjab with 26 bullets and to praise his attack — carried out in the name of the Prophet Muhammad — as an act of heroism. To the surprise of many, chief among them have been Pakistan’s young lawyers, once seen as a force for democracy.
Their energetic campaign on behalf of the killer has caught the government flat-footed and dismayed friends and supporters of the slain politician, Salman Taseer, an outspoken proponent of liberalism who had challenged the nation’s strict blasphemy laws. It has also confused many in the broader public and observers abroad, who expected to see a firm state prosecution of the assassin.
Instead, before his court appearances, the lawyers showered rose petals over the confessed killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, a member of an elite police group who had been assigned to guard the governor, but who instead turned his gun on him. They have now enthusiastically taken up his defense.
It may seem a stark turnabout for a group that just a few years ago looked like the vanguard of a democracy movement. They waged months of protests in 2007 and 2008 to challenge Pakistan’s military dictator after he unlawfully removed the chief justice.
But the lawyers’ stance is perhaps just the most glaring expression of what has become a deep generational divide tearing at the fabric of Pakistani society, and of the broad influence of religious conservatism — and even militancy — that now exists among the educated middle class.
They are often described as the Zia generation: Pakistanis who have come of age since the 1980s, when the military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, began to promote Islam in public education and to use it as a political tool to unify this young and insecure nation.
Today, the forces he set loose have gained such strength that they threaten to overwhelm voices for tolerance in Pakistan’s feeble civilian government. They certainly present a nagging challenge for the United States.
Washington has poured billions of dollars into the Pakistani military to combat terrorism, but has long neglected a civilian effort to counter the inexorable pull of conservative Islam. By now the conservatives have entered nearly every part of Pakistani society, even the rank-and-file security forces, as the assassination showed. The military, in fact, has been conspicuously silent about the killing.
“Over time, Pakistani society has drifted toward religious extremism,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and defense analyst from Lahore. “This religious sentiment has seeped deep into government circles and into the army and police at lower levels.”
“The lower level are listening to the religious people,” he said.
Indeed, the Pakistan of today, and the brand of Islam much of the nation has embraced, is barely recognizable even to many educated Pakistanis older than the Zia generation. Among them is Athar Minallah, 49, a former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the lawyers’ protest campaign against Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007 and 2008.
Mr. Minallah studied law at Islamic University in Islamabad from 1983 to 1986, and the first lesson any student learned in his day was that the preservation of life was a pillar of Islamic law, he said.
But under General Zia in the 1980s, the government began supporting Islamic warriors to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Indian control of Kashmir, and the syllabus was changed to encourage jihad. The mind-set of students and graduates changed along with it, Mr. Minallah said.
That change is now no more apparent than among the 1,000 lawyers from the capital, Islamabad, and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi, who have given their signed support for the defense of Mr. Qadri, who has been charged with murder and terrorism.
Their leader is Rao Abdur Raheem, 30, who formed a “lawyers’ forum,” called the Movement to Protect the Dignity of the Prophet, in December. The aim of the group, he said, was to counter Mr. Taseer’s campaign to amend the nation’s strict blasphemy laws, which promise death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
In interviews, Mr. Raheem and six of his colleagues insisted they were not members of any political or religious party, and were acting independently and interested only in ensuring the rule of law.
All graduates of different Pakistani universities, they insisted they were liberal, not religious conservatives. Only one had religious training. They said they had all taken part in the lawyers’ protest campaign in 2007 and 2008, and that they were proud that the movement helped reinstate the chief justice.
Yet they forcefully defended Mr. Qadri, saying he had acted on his own, out of strong religious feeling, and they denied that he had told his fellow guards of his plans in advance. He was innocent until proved guilty, they said. They have already succeeded in preventing the government from changing the court venue.
In their deep religious conviction, and in their energy and commitment to the cause of the blasphemy laws, they are miles apart from the older generation of lawyers and law enforcement officials above them.
“I felt this is a different society,” said one former law enforcement official when he saw the lawyers celebrating Mr. Qadri. “There is a disconnect in society.”
The former security official, who has worked in fighting militancy and who requested anonymity because of his work, said that within just four hours of the killing, 2,500 people had posted messages supporting Mr. Qadri on Facebook pages.
Mass rallies championing him and the blasphemy laws have continued since then.
This conservatism is fueled by an element of class divide, between the more secular and wealthy upper classes and the more religious middle and lower classes, said Najam Sethi, a former editor of The Daily Times, a liberal daily newspaper published by Mr. Taseer. As Pakistan’s middle class has grown, so has the conservative population.
Besides his campaign against the blasphemy laws, it was Mr. Taseer’s wealth and secular lifestyle that made him a target for the religious parties, Mr. Sethi said.
“Salman had an easygoing, witty, irreverent, high-life style,” he said, “so the anger of class inequality mixed with religious passion gives a heady, dangerous brew.”
Government officials, analysts and members of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the secular-leaning party to which Mr. Taseer belonged, blame the religious parties and clerics who delivered speeches and fatwas against Mr. Taseer for inciting the attack. On Monday, Mr. Qadri, who confessed to the killing, provided a court with testimony saying he was inspired by two clerics, Qari Hanif and Ishtiaq Shah.
The police say they are now seeking the clerics for questioning, but with the growing strength of the conservative movement on the streets, religious leaders — even those who incite violence and terrorism — are nearly untouchable to the authorities and are almost never prosecuted.
The blasphemy law has been condemned by human rights groups here, who say it has been used to persecute religious minorities, like Christians, and on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI called on Pakistan to undo the law. But the law has become an opportunity for religious parties looking to whip up public sentiment, Mr. Sethi said.
A dark presence in the background is the military establishment, which has sponsored the religious parties for decades, using them as tools to influence politics and as militant proxies abroad. The military also has a heavy influence on much of Pakistan’s brash media, which fanned the flames of the blasphemy issue with sensationalist coverage.
“Democracy has brought us a media that is extremely right-wing, conservative,” Mr. Sethi, 62, said. “Most are in their 30s and are a product of the Zia years, of the textbooks and schools set by the Zia years, which are not the sort of things that we were taught.”
“The silence of the armed forces is ominous,” Mr. Sethi added.
Indeed, whether on the military or civilian side, the government has failed to act forcefully on the case at every stage, the former security official said. Whether through fear or lack of policy, it has done little to challenge the ideology behind the attack or the spreading radicalism in Pakistani society.
“The entire state effort has been on the capture and kill approach: how many terrorists can you arrest and how many can you kill,” the former security official said. “Nothing has been done about the breeding ground of extremism.
“Unless the government does something serious and sustained,” the official warned, “we are on a very dangerous trajectory.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/wo...ef=todayspaper
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