Justin Elliott and Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica, and Laura Sullivan, NPR. The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster. 29 October 2014. “In 2012, two massive storms pounded the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless, hungry or without power for days and weeks. Americans did what they so often do after disasters. They sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Red Cross, confident their money would ease the suffering left behind by Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. They believed the charity was up to the job. They were wrong. The Red Cross botched key elements of its mission after Sandy and Isaac, leaving behind a trail of unmet needs and acrimony, according to an investigation by ProPublica and NPR. The charity’s shortcomings were detailed in confidential reports and internal emails, as well as accounts from current and former disaster relief specialists. What’s more, Red Cross officials at national headquarters in Washington, D.C. compounded the charity’s inability to provide relief by “diverting assets for public relations purposes,” as one internal report puts it. Distribution of relief supplies, the report said, was “politically driven.” During Isaac, Red Cross supervisors ordered dozens of trucks usually deployed to deliver aid to be driven around nearly empty instead, “just to be seen,” one of the drivers, Jim Dunham, recalls.”
Archives for October 2014
Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General
Eric Lipton, Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General. The New York Times, 28 October 2014. “Attorneys general are now the object of aggressive pursuit by lobbyists and lawyers who use campaign contributions, personal appeals at lavish corporate-sponsored conferences and other means to push them to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements or pressure federal regulators, an investigation by The New York Times has found.”
“Courting Favor: ‘The People’s Lawyers.’ Articles in this series examine the explosion in lobbying of state attorneys general by corporate interests and the millions in campaign donations they now provide.” Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.
The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, Eric Lichtblau, 28 October 2014
The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, Eric Lichtblau, 2014
The shocking story of how America became one of the world’s safest postwar havens for Nazis
Thousands of Nazis — from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich — came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. They had little trouble getting in. With scant scrutiny, many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees,” their pasts easily disguised and their war crimes soon forgotten. But some had help and protection from the U.S. government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.
For the first time, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story not only of the Nazi scientists brought to America, but of the German spies and con men who followed them and lived for decades as ordinary citizens. Only years after their arrival did private sleuths and government prosecutors begin trying to identify the hidden Nazis. But even then, American intelligence agencies secretly worked to protect a number of their prized spies from exposure. Today, a few Nazis still remain on our soil.
Investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, relying on a trove of newly discovered documents and scores of interviews with participants in this little-known chapter of postwar history, tells the shocking and shameful story of how America became a safe haven for Hitler’s men.
Techsploitation, Part One: Modern-day indentured servants: Job brokers steal wages, entrap Indian tech workers in US
Matt Smith, Jennifer Gollan and Adithya Sambamurthy, Techsploitation, Part One: Job brokers steal wages, entrap Indian tech workers in US. The Center for Investigative Reporting, 27 October 2014. “Labor brokers providing Indian high-tech workers to American companies are gaming a professional visa program, creating a shadow world that can turn a worker’s dream of self-betterment into a financial nightmare.” This story was published with The Guardian and NBC Bay Area.
Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, 21 October 2014
Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, 21 October 2014.
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machinations, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.
Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of justice.
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, James Risen, 14 October 2014
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, James Risen, 2014
Louise Richardson, New York Times Book Review: In “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” James Risen holds up a mirror to the United States in the 13 years since 9/11, and what it reveals is not a pretty sight. Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The New York Times, documents the emergence of a “homeland security-industrial complex” more pervasive and more pernicious than the “military-industrial complex” Dwight Eisenhower warned against. With the power and passion of Zola’s “J’Accuse,” he chronicles the abandonment of America’s cherished open society in a never-satiated search for security from an ill-defined threat.
Risen is not the first to comment on the wanton excesses of the war on terror. John Mueller of Ohio State University has repeatedly written about the extraordinary sums expended in America’s overreaction to the threat posed by Al Qaeda. Risen, however, brings home the costs by providing detailed accounts of specific operations and the individuals caught up in the counterterror gold rush. His focus is not on the ravages of war wrought in the countries invaded by the United States and its allies, but on the United States itself. This is a story of war profiteering, personal ambition, bureaucratic turf wars, absence of accountability and, always, secrecy.
James Risen, “Investigation Into Missing Iraqi Cash Ended in Lebanon Bunker.” The New York Times, 12 October 2014. “This article is adapted from “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War” by James Risen.”
The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons
C. J. Chivers, The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons. The New York Times, 14 October 2014. Key Points: “During the Iraq war, at least 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers were exposed to aging chemical weapons abandoned years earlier. These weapons were not part of an active arsenal. They were remnants from Iraq’s arms program in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. Many troops who were exposed received inadequate care. None of the veterans were enrolled in long-term health monitoring. Munitions are unaccounted for in areas of Iraq now under control of ISIS. In response to this investigation, the Pentagon acknowledged that more than 600 troops reported chemical exposure, but it failed to recognize the scope or offer adequate treatment.”
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World, Tom Engelhardt, Foreward by Glenn Greenwald, 7 October 2014
In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn’t fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that “invisible government” has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. In his new book, Tom Engelhardt takes in something new under the sun: what is no longer, as in the 1960s, a national security state, but a global security one building a surveillance structure unparalleled in history and fighting secret wars that have turned the president into an assassin-in-chief. Shadow Government offers a powerful survey of a militarized America with 1 percent elections and a democracy of the wealthy that your grandparents wouldn’t have recognized.
Before the Law: A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life. A rare account of life inside the notorious jail for adolescents on Rikers Island
Jennifer Gonnerman, Before the Law: A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life. The New Yorker, 6 October 2014. “In the early hours of Saturday, May 15, 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, Kalief Browder and a friend were returning home from a party in the Belmont section of the Bronx. They walked along Arthur Avenue, the main street of Little Italy, past bakeries and cafés with their metal shutters pulled down for the night. As they passed East 186th Street, Browder saw a police car driving toward them. More squad cars arrived, and soon Browder and his friend found themselves squinting in the glare of a police spotlight. An officer said that a man had just reported that they had robbed him. ‘I didn’t rob anybody,’ Browder replied. ‘You can check my pockets.'”