The Investigative Fund Archives

The Republican War on Voting

Art Levine
(The American Prospect)

During the third and last presidential debate, Senator McCain said that the voter registration group, ACORN, was "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country." But an investigative article from March shows that alleging voter fraud--a favorite Republican tactic for scrubbing the polls--is less likely than a person getting struck with lightning. - Eds.

Using the Department of Justice, friendly governors, and its usual propaganda outlets, the GOP has propagated the myth of voter fraud to purge the rolls of non-Republicans. MORE

Northern Exposure

Sheila Kaplan and Marilyn Berlin Snell
(The New Republic)

Sarah Palin says she will advocate for families of special-needs children once in the White House. But in Alaska, with a birth defect rate that's twice the national average, she has at every turn blocked initiatives that would limit environmental toxins known to cause fetal abnormalities. MORE

The Fence to Nowhere

David Neiwert
(The American Prospect)

The Minutemen promised their supporters a high-tech border barrier. Instead, they got a five-strand barbed-wire fence and a bunch of radical splinter groups. MORE

In Arizona, Illegal Immigrants Face Federal Criminal Charges

David Bacon
(The Nation)

Massive workplace raids are part of a pressure campaign for guest-worker programs. And undocumented workers now face federal criminal charges for what used to count as the administrative equivalent of a parking ticket. MORE

How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits

Joshua Kors
(The Nation)

Joshua Kors has won the prestigious Joseph Galloway Award of 2008 for this two-part series. He will accept the prize at the Military Reporters and Editors conference on November 14 at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C. -Eds.

Wounded soldiers returning from Iraq are increasingly being wrongly diagnosed by the military, which prevents them from collecting benefits. MORE

Behind the Housing Crisis

Kai Wright and Nomi Prins
(Mother Jones and The Nation)

Kai Wright examines the disproportionate impact of the wave of foreclosures on African Americans—what he calls "the strip mining of black wealth"—in his Nation cover story, The Subprime Swindle. WATCH Kai Wright discuss this economic theft. Wall Street insider Nomi Prins focuses on what went wrong in Congress and what it can do to alleviate the crisis in her Mother Jones article Why the Economy Went South and accompanying timeline Where Credit is Due. MORE

The Family

Jeff Sharlet
(Harper)

In this Investigative Fund-supported book, Sharlet takes a penetrating look at the untold story of Christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, a self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. MORE

The Reign of Thuggery

Joshua Hammer
(The New York Review of Books)

Hammer leads us through the world of Zimbabwean politics: from the dictator who won't relinquish power, to the challenger who he had beaten up last year and the South African president who continues to support the failing government. MORE

Another KBR Rape Case

Karen Houppert
(The Nation)

Houppert was interviewed on Democracy Now! along with Dawn Leamon and Jamie Leigh Jones. Leamon also testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. -Eds.

In the wake of Jamie Leigh Jones' highly publicized charges, a woman comes forward with new allegations of a brutal sexual assault and cover-up at a KBR camp in Iraq. MORE

Denial in the Corps

Kathy Dobie
(The Nation)

The American News Project recently released a video featuring Cynthia Fleming, the mother of Lance Cpl. James Jenkins, based on Dobie's article. - Eds.

More and more Iraq War veterans are committing suicide. Abandoned by the Marine Corps, pushed into repeat tours and denied treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, they are turning their guns on themselves. MORE

Great Lakes: Danger Zones?

Sheila Kaplan
(The Center for Public Integrity)

On February 28, the Committee on Energy and Commerce announced that it would launch a full investigation into the suppression of this report. - Eds.

For the past seven months, the nation’s top public health agency has been suppressing an alarming report about elevated infant mortality and cancer rates in the eight Great Lakes states. MORE

FEMA covered up cancer risks to Katrina Victims

Sheila Kaplan
(Salon)

Shortly after this article appeared, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology announced that it would hold a hearing on this matter. - Eds.

Tens of thousands of displaced Katrina victims still live in toxic trailers. And FEMA tried to suppress a doctor's report about the links between the formaldehyde present in their trailers and cancer. MORE

McCain's Secret, Questionable Record

Jeffrey Klein
(The Huffington Post)

The Times used unnamed sources to claim John McCain had been offered an admiralty, but Jeffrey Klein's investigation shreds that theory and points to other signs that McCain's military file contains evidence of a naval career scarred by mishaps. MORE

The coddled “terrorists” of South Florida

Tristam Korten and Kirk Nielsen
(Salon)

Anti-Castro Cuban exiles and their terrorist training camps in South Florida are left to operate in peace by a U.S. government that claims to fight terror abroad but tolerates it at home. MORE

Return of the Swift Boaters

Christopher Hayes
(The Nation)

As conservatives stare into an electoral abyss, the shadowy group that smeared John Kerry in 2004 has reorganized and stands poised to do its dirty work again. MORE

The Hawks' Last Hurrah?

Laura Rozen
(Mother Jones)

Rozen attends a four-day international security conference in the Israeli town of Herzliya, where Washington hawks warn policymakers that they could be on their own on Iran. MORE

The FundamentaList (No. 15)

Sarah Posner
(The American Prospect)

As Mike Huckabee jockeys for the support of the Christian base, Sarah Posner identifies his growing list of supporters on the religious right. MORE

Rigged Trials at Gitmo

Ross Tuttle
(The Nation)

Four days after this article was published, Haynes resigned from the Pentagon. - Eds.

There are to be no acquittals in the Guantánamo prisoners’ trials, says Pentagon general counsel William Haynes. Tuttle gets the inside scoop on bias in the tribunal process from the former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions. MORE

Pity the Man

Sarah Blustain
(The Nation)

The antiabortion movement has found a new face to exploit for political gain. And it's male. MORE

Experts in Terror

Petra Bartosiewicz
(The Nation)

The U.S. government relies heavily on the testimony of self-styled terrorism experts in prosecuting the "war on terror." But how credible are they? MORE

Congo's Crisis, Congo's History

Christian Parenti
(International Herald Tribune)

In eastern Congo, competing militias finance their activities by exporting illegal timber, diamonds and gold-otherwise known as "conflict resources"-to Rwanda and Uganda. UN troops and Congo's army must understand the histories of these militias before tackling them. MORE

Alaska: Big Oil and the Whales

Peter Matthiessen
(The New York Review of Books)

The iconic naturalist exposes disturbing new plans to extract fossil fuels from the pristine Arctic sea floor, and considers the devastating impact that this would have on the wildlife and native people of this spectacular coastline. MORE

Hillary's Mystery Money Men

Russ Baker and Adam Federman
(The Nation)

The men behind the money that made Bush now want to claim the Clinton campaign. Is someone cooking the books at Hillary Inc.? MORE

Rudy's Dirty Money

Ari Berman
(The Nation)

With Giuliani a GOP frontrunner for 2008, now is a good time for a closer look at the Texas energy interests fueling the former New York mayor's presidential campaign. MORE

A Whistleblower's Tale

Glynn Wilson
(The Nation)

Republican lawyer Jill Simpson was the absent star of a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on selective prosecution. MORE

The Fight to Save Congo's Forests

Christian Parenti and Laura Hanna
(The Nation)

A history of colonial neglect and endemic corruption has unleashed a lawless logging binge in the heart of Congo's massive woodlands. MORE

Specialist Town Takes His Case to Washington

Joshua Kors
(The Nation)

On April 9, Spc. Jon Town was featured on the cover of The Nation, in an article that told how he was wounded in Iraq, won a Purple Heart and was then denied all disability and medical benefits. Soon Town became a national figure, the human face of the 22,500 soldiers discharged with personality disorder in the past six years. MORE

PBS Follows Up on IFUND Investigations

Joshua Kors
(The Nation)

The PBS show NOW recently devoted its entire half-hour show to Iraq veterans who've returned home, following up on a story first exposed by Joshua Kors�the scandal of veterans being cheated of their medical benefits�in a two-part series (here and here) underwritten by the Investigative Fund. The show also focused on the soldiers' psychological trauma, an issue covered by IFUND writer Kathy Dobie. MORE

With the Lost Boys in Southern Sudan

David Morse
(TomDispatch.com)

In the American mind, Sudan is essentially Darfur, where a genocidal ethnic-cum-energy war run out of Islamist Khartoum is already underway. Independent journalist David Morse reports on his two-part journey alongside three young refugees returning to the homes they fled in the midst of a bitter civil war in southern Sudan. MORE

The High Price of Beauty

Virginia Sole-Smith
(The Nation)

A scourge of health problems has nail salon workers wondering about the industry's safety standards. MORE

Joshua Kors Wins Polk Award

Joshua Kors
(The Nation)

Joshua Kors won the prestigious 2007 George Polk Award for Magazine Journalism for his two-part series published in The Nation and sponsored by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Read the first article How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits and the second article Specialist Town Takes His Case to Washington. MORE

Medifraud Amok

Art Levine
(The American Prospect)

Heard about the company that resold the drugs that came back in the mail? That's apparently just a normal day in the life of our under-regulated drug industry. MORE

It's easy for soldiers to score heroin in Afghanistan

Shaun McCanna
(Salon)

Just outside a U.S. airfield in Afghanistan sits a series of makeshift shops known as the Bagram Bazaar. For Afghans, it's the place to buy American goods, but it is also known for what it provides American soldiers. It takes less than 10 minutes for a vendor to ask, "You want whiskey?" "No, heroin," I tell him. He ushers me into his store with a smile. MORE

The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness

Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian
(The Nation)

In a special investigation, Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War to expose the brutal effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. The story has made headlines across the world, appearing on the cover of the Independent and the Guardian. MORE

Fencing the Border: Boeing's High-Tech Plan Falters

Joseph Richey
(CorpWatch)

The Department of Homeland Security is trying to seal off the 28-mile stretch of the Sonoran desert that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border, via a multi-billion dollar contract named the Secure Border Initiative Net (SBInet). The goal: to curb the flow of undocumented immigrants, drugs, and potential terrorists by 2013. But things aren't going well. MORE

The Abstinence Gluttons

Michael Reynolds
(The Nation)

How American tax dollars are subsidizing Raymond Ruddy's conservative slush fund. MORE

Coming to America

Felicia Mello
(The Nation )

Every year, American companies legally import an army of low-wage labor under a World War II-era government program called H-2. The program may be unfamiliar to most Americans, but now it has become the template for the expanded guest-worker program hotly debated in Congress. MORE

The Shia Fellas

Robert Dreyfuss
(The American Prospect)

How the Bush Administration and the Neocons got into bed with Iran's agents in Iraq. MORE

Kurdistan's Covert Back Channels

Laura Rozen
(Mother Jones)

How an ex-Mossad chief, a German uberspy, and a gaggle of top-dollar GOP lobbyists helped Kurdistan snag 15 tons of $100 bills. MORE

Who You Gonna Call?

Tara McKelvey
(The American Prospect)

How a pair of seasoned New York Mafia defense lawyers succeeded--while more respectable constitutional lawyers have failed--in defending the rights of American soldiers. MORE

The Subprime Swindle

Kai Wright
(The Nation)

George Mitchell, 76, black and retired, is a typical homeowner in Westwood, Atlanta: having fallen prey to predatory lending practices, he's two steps away from losing his home. Wright tells Mitchell's story and explores how the mortgage industry stole black America's hard-won wealth. MORE

When it Comes to Gay Rights, is Cuba Inching Ahead of USA?

DeWayne Wickham
(USA Today)

Years before George W. Bush proclaimed his support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages in the United States, the ideologically rigid government of Fidel Castro made a big move in the opposite direction. MORE

An American in Cuba

Erin Aubrey Kaplan
(Los Angeles Times)

Nationality trumps race, and color still matters. But everyone struggles together. MORE

Dick Cheney's Dangerous Son-in-Law: Philip Perry and the Politics of Chemical Security

Art Levine
(The Washington Monthly)

How Philip Perry--a top official of the Department of Homeland Security and former chemical industry lobbyist who happens to be married to one of the Vice President's daughters--stymied crucial regulation of safety and security at the nation's chemical plants. MORE