DeNeen L. Brown, The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, For scores of years, newspapers printed hate, leading to racist terror lynchings and massacres of Black Americans, Monday, 18 October 2021: “For decades, hundreds of white-owned newspapers across the country incited the racist terror lynchings and massacres of thousands of Black Americans. In their headlines, these newspapers often promoted the brutality of white lynch mobs and chronicled the gruesome details of the lynchings. Many white reporters stood on the sidelines of Jim Crow lynchings as Black men, women, teenagers and children were hanged from trees and burned alive. White mobs often posed on courthouse lawns, grinning for photos that ran on front pages of mainstream newspapers. These racist terror lynchings — defined as extrajudicial killings carried out by lawless mobs intending to terrorize Black communities — evoked horror as victims were often castrated, dismembered, tortured and riddled with bullets before being hanged from trees, light poles and bridges. Lynchings took different forms. Some Black people were bombed, as four little girls were in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. Black men were whipped by mobs to silence them. Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, beaten and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. ‘Printing Hate,’ a yearlong investigation by students working with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland, examines the scope, depth and breadth of newspaper coverage of hundreds of those public-spectacle lynchings and massacres.”
For scores of years, newspapers printed hate, leading to racist terror lynchings and massacres of Black Americans
Out of the Darkness: How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings
Noa Yachot, Out of the Darkness: How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings. American Civil Liberties Union, 16 October 2015. From How the ACLU Came to Publish a Powerful Piece of Investigative Journalism, Longreads, 27 October 2015: “‘Out of the Darkness’ is not an easy story to read. It chronicles how two psychologists who had previously devoted their careers to training US troops to resist abusive interrogation tactics teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings.”
Seafood From Slaves: AP Investigation
Robin McDowell, Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza, Seafood From Slaves. Associated Press Investigation, 25 March 2015. “An AP investigation helps free slaves in the 21st century. Over the course of 18 months, Associated Press journalists located men held in cages, tracked ships and stalked refrigerated trucks to expose the abusive practices of the fishing industry in Southeast Asia. The reporters’ dogged effort led to the release of more than 2,000 slaves and traced the seafood they caught to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.”
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. The articles are presented here in their entirety.”
Winner of the 2016 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting.
Winner of the 2015 IRE (Investigative Reporters & Editors) Medal for Investigative Reporting.
Winner of the 2015 George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting.
Winner of the 2015 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism.
Democracy Now!, Is the Seafood You Eat Caught by Slaves? Meet the Pulitzer Winners Who Broke Open a Global Scandal. 18 April 2016.
Joaquin Sapien, Captive Labor and the Reporters Who Exposed an International Scandal. ProPublica, 18 April 2016.
Guantánamo torturer [Richard Zuley] led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession
Spencer Ackerman, Guantánamo torturer led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession. The Guardian, 18 February 2015. “In a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture, a Guardian investigation [reveals] that Richard Zuley, a detective on Chicago’s north side from 1977 to 2007, repeatedly engaged in methods of interrogation resulting in at least one wrongful conviction and subsequent cases more recently thrown into doubt following allegations of abuse.” Part One: Bad lieutenant–American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo. 18 February 2015. “At the notorious wartime prison, Richard Zuley oversaw a shocking military interrogation that has become a permanent stain on his country. Part One of a Guardian investigation reveals he used disturbingly similar tactics to extract confessions from minorities for years–as a police officer in urban America [Chicago].” Part Two: How Chicago police condemned the innocent: a trail of coerced confessions. 19 February 2015. “Before his interrogation tactics got supercharged on detainees in Guantánamo, Richard Zuley extracted confessions from minority Americans in Chicago–at least one leading to a wrongful conviction. Part Two of a Guardian investigation finds a trail of dubious murder cases and a city considering the costs.”
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. Equal Justice Initiative, 10 February 2015. “The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) today [10 February 2015] released Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, which documents EJI’s multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. EJI researchers documented 3959 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 700 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.” Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror: Report Summary. “For a copy of the full-length report, please e-mail EJI at contact_us@eji.org or call 334.269.1803.”
For teens at Rikers Island, solitary confinement pushes mental limits
Trey Bundy and Daffodil J. Altan, For teens at Rikers Island, solitary confinement pushes mental limits. The Center for Investigative Reporting, 4 March 2014. This story was produced in collaboration with Medium. “Because of its imposing size and notoriety, many people think Rikers is a prison, but it’s not. It’s a city jail, where on any given day about 85 percent of inmates await the resolution of their cases, according to the New York City Board of Correction. Most of the teenagers there are locked up because they can’t afford bail. In New York, anyone who is 16 or older is considered an adult under state criminal law. Rikers, one of the largest jails in the world, has an adolescent population that can rival the biggest adult jail systems in the country: between 400 and 800 a day.”
Operation Delirium: a secret Cold War chemical weapons testing program conducted by the US Army during the 1950s and ’60s
Raffi Khatchadourian, Operation Delirium. The New Yorker, 17 December 2012. “Military doctors who helped conduct the [psychochemical] experiments [during the 1950s and ’60s] have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” Companion piece to Operation Delirium: High Anxiety: LSD in the Cold War by Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 16 December 2012. “For decades, the U.S. Army conducted secret clinical experiments with psychochemicals at Edgewood Arsenal. In the nineteen-sixties, Army Intelligence expanded the arsenal’s work on LSD, testing the drug as an enhanced-interrogation [torture] technique in Europe and Asia. This companion piece to “Operation Delirium”…documents the people who were involved and what they did.” Primary Sources : Operation Delirium, The New Yorker, 26 December 2012.
The Guantánamo “Suicides”
Scott Horton, The Guantánamo Suicides. Harper’s, March 2010. “Late on the evening of June 9 [2006]…, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.” See also Scott Horton, Uncovering the Cover Ups: Death Camp in Delta. Harper’s, 4 June 2014. “Mark Denbeaux [professor at Seton Hall Law School] on the NCIS cover-up of three ‘suicides’ at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp.” (This article also has a link for the Seton Hall Law School 2009 report, “Death in Camp Delta.“)
The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means
Mark Danner, The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means. The New York Review of Books, 30 April 2009. “Working through the forty-three pages of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s report [of February 2007], one finds a strikingly detailed account of horrors inflicted on fourteen ‘high-value detainees’ over a period of weeks and months—horrors that Red Cross officials conclude, quite unequivocally, ‘constituted torture.'”