The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program

Jane Mayer, The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation programThe New Yorker, 13 August 2007. After 11 September 2001 a secret C.I.A. program was started “in which terrorist suspects…were detained in ‘black sites’–secret prisons outside the United States–and subjected to unusually harsh treatment.” [Read more…]

Outsourcing Torture: The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program

Jane Mayer, Outsourcing Torture: The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program. The New Yorker, 14 February 2005. “On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.”

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Chicago Tribune Watchdog Investigation: Cops and Confessions. Chicago police substitute interrogation for thorough investigation

Ken Armstrong, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley, Tribune Watchdog Investigation: Cops and Confessions. Chicago Tribune, 16 December 2001. 6-Part Series, December 2001-January 2002.  Part 1: Coercive and illegal tactics torpedo scores of Cook County murder cases. “Substituting interrogation for thorough investigation, police in Chicago and Cook County have repeatedly closed murder cases with dubious confessions that imprison the innocent while killers go free.” Part 2: Veteran detective’s murder cases unravel. “Some statements cop has extracted stand out for way they fall through.” Part 3: Officers ignore laws set up to guard kids. “Detectives grill minors without juvenile officers or parents present.” Part 4: When jail is no alibi in murders. “Just as [Daniel Taylor] was going to be formally charged with two counts of murder [to which he had previously confessed], Taylor protested to detectives that he could not have committed the crimes because he had been in police custody when they occurred.” Part 5: DNA voids murder confession. By Kirsten Scharnberg and Steve Mills. “In the first case of a videotaped murder confession unraveling in Cook County, a man who was recorded saying he stabbed his mother was freed on Friday after DNA tests linked another man to the crime.” Part 6: Cops urged to tape their interrogations. By Steve Mills and Michael Higgins. “Chicago videotapes only confessions.”

Winner of the 2001 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.

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Torn From the Land: Black Americans’ Farmland Taken Through Cheating, Intimidation, Even Murder

Todd Lewan and Dolores Barclay, Torn From the Land: Black Americans’ Farmland Taken Through Cheating, Intimidation, even Murder. The Associated Press, 2 December 2001. A three-part series. “In an 18-month investigation, The Associated Press documented a pattern in which black Americans were cheated out of their land or driven from it through intimidation, violence and even murder. In some cases, government officials approved the land takings; in others, they took part in them. The earliest occurred before the Civil War; others are being litigated today.”

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Justice Derailed: Capital Punishment in Illinois

Ken Armstrong and Steve Mills, Justice Derailed. Chicago Tribune, 14 November 1999. 5-Part Series in November 1999. Part 1: Death Row justice derailed. “Capital punishment in Illinois is a system so riddled with faulty evidence, unscrupulous trial tactics and legal incompetence that justice has been forsaken, a Tribune investigation has found.” Part 2: Inept defenses cloud verdict. “Since Illinois reinstated capital punishment in 1977, 26 Death Row inmates…have received a new trial or sentencing because their attorneys’ incompetence rendered the verdict or sentence unfair, court records show.” Part 3: The jailhouse informant. “Even prosecutors acknowledge that jailhouse informants are among the least reliable of witnesses. Yet in Illinois, at least 46 inmates have been sent to Death Row in cases where prosecutors used a jailhouse informant, according to a Tribune investigation that examined the 285 death-penalty cases since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977.” Part 4: A tortured path to Death Row. ” For police and prosecutors, few pieces of evidence close a case better than a confession. After all, juries place a remarkable degree of faith in confessions; few people can imagine suspects would admit guilt if they were innocent. But, in Illinois, confessions have proved faulty.” Part 5: Convicted by a hair. “[O]ver the last decade or so, hair-comparison evidence has been exposed as notoriously untrustworthy.”

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Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Cocaine Explosion in the US

Gary Webb, Dark Alliance. San Jose Mercury News (online at Narco News), 18, 19 and 20 August 1996 and 16 September 1996. Part One, 18 August 1996: “America’s ‘crack’ plague has roots in Nicaragua war. Colombia-SanFrancisco Bay Area drug pipeline helped finance CIA-backed Contras. Backers of CIA-led Nicaraguan rebels brought cocaine to poor L.A. neighborhoods in early ’80s to help finance war–and a plague was born.” Part Two, 19 August 1996: “How a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a driven ghetto teen-ager created the cocaine pipeline, and how crack was ‘born’ in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974. [In the] shadowy origins of ‘crack’ epidemic, [the] role of CIA-linked agents [was] a well-protected secret until now [August 1996]. Part Three, 20 August 1996: [The] war on drugs has [an] unequal impact on black Americans. [The] Contra case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.A. dealer faces life.”

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The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jeffrey Wigand takes on Big Tobacco

Marie Brenner, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Vanity Fair, May 1996. “Angrily, painfully, Jeffrey Wigand emerged from the sealed world of Big Tobacco to confront the nation’s third-largest cigarette company, Brown & Williamson. Hailed as a hero by anti-smoking forces and vilified by the tobacco industry, Wigand is [1996] at the center of an epic multi-billion-dollar struggle that reaches from Capitol Hill to the hallowed journalistic halls of CBS’s 60 Minutes.

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Town Without Pity: Police torture in Chicago: The courts know about it, the media know about it, and chances are you know about it. So why aren’t we doing anything about it?

John Conroy, Town Without Pity: Police torture in Chicago. Chicago Reader, 11 January 1996. “Police torture [in Chicago]: The courts know about it, the media know about it, and chances are you know about it. So why aren’t we doing anything about it?”

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House of Screams: Torture by Electroshock: Could it happen in a Chicago police station? Did it happen at Area 2?

John Conroy, House of Screams: Torture by Electroshock. Chicago Reader. 25 January 1990. “Torture by Electroshock: Could it happen in a Chicago police station? Did it happen at Area 2?… What if a parade of men arrested by detectives at Area 2 over the course of a decade…claimed that they had been interrogated by electrical means, or had plastic bags put over their heads, or had their fingers put in bolt cutters, or were threatened with being thrown off a roof? What if there was no connection at all between the alleged victims, no evidence of any collusion among them, and yet they kept pointing to the same police station and the same group of officers?” [Read more…]

Pinto Madness: the Ford Pinto’s fire-prone gas tank

Mark Dowie, Pinto Madness. Mother Jones, 1 September 1977. “For seven years the Ford Motor Company sold cars in which it knew hundreds of people would needlessly burn to death.”

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