RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
April 29 to May 5
Featured Investigation
Even as President Trump has sharply criticized past military policies that led to lengthy foreign entanglements, he has increased America's involvement in two long-troubled places - Somalia and Yemen. In Somalia,Vice Newsreports: The U.S. military is dramatically expanding its operations at a former Soviet air strip in Somalia, constructing more than 800 beds at theBaledoglebase. …The buildup coincides with an aggressive escalation by U.S. forces in their fight against al Qaida-linked al-Shabaab. U.S. Africa Command (known as AFRICOM) now has more than 500 U.S. military personnel in Somalia[up from 50 acknowledged to be on the ground in 2016]. Meanwhile, the New York Timesis reportingthat the U.S. may have crossed a Rubicon in Yemen. Late last year, a team of about a dozen Green Berets arrived on Saudi Arabia's border with Yemen, in a continuing escalation of America's secret wars. With virtually no public discussion or debate, the Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels in Yemen are using to attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities. The Times report appears to contradict official statements claiming U.S. military support of the Saudi-led effort has been limited to logistical support and intelligence sharing.The Times reports: A half-dozen officials — from the United States military, the Trump administration, and European and Arab nations — said the American commandos are training Saudi ground troops to secure their border. They also are working closely with American intelligence analysts in Najran, a city in southern Saudi Arabia that has been repeatedly attacked with rockets, to help locate Houthi missile sites within Yemen. Along the porous border, the Americans are working with surveillance planes that can gather electronic signals to track the Houthi weapons and their launch sites, according to the officials.… The Green Berets have stepped in to deal with an increasingly difficult problem for the Saudi military. Their presence is the latest example ofthe expanding relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia under President Trump and Prince Mohammed. Read Full Articles Here and Here. The Trump Investigations: Top Articles Indignant Judge Questions Mueller's Powers in Manafort Case Fox News
Comey in House Report: Agents Saw No Sign of Flynn Lying Washington Examiner
Trump Called Aware of Stormy Daniels Payment Long Before Denial New York Times
What Mueller Aims to Ask Trump on Obstruction New York Times Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 27 More Accuse Charlie Rose, and CBS Had Warnings
Washington Post
An additional 27 women — 14 CBS News employees and 13 who worked with him elsewhere — say Charlie Rose sexually harassed them. Concerns about Rose's behavior were flagged to managers at the network at least three times, as early as 1986 and as recently as April 2017, when Rose was co-anchor of "CBS This Morning." Rose described as "unfair and inaccurate" the Washington Post story based on interviews with "107 current and former CBS News employees as well as two dozen others who worked with Rose at other television programs." Rubio Leans on Sessions, DeVos Over Broward School Violence
RealClearInvestigations
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is pressing the Trump Justice and Education departments to address a surge in violent juvenile and school-related crime in Broward County, Fla., under Obama-era policies to send lawbreaking youths to counseling instead of jail. Rubio's efforts follow a series of media reports by RealClearInvestigations and other outlets connecting Nikolas Cruz's high school massacre to those policies. Ex-CIA Official: Some Torture Videotapes May Exist
Daily Beast
Some videotapes of CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists, including waterboarding, may still exist despite reports of them having been destroyed in 2005. If so, the tapes could complicate things for GinaHaspel, the CIA official said to have ordered their destruction; she is now President Trump's nominee to run the agency. After Filming Police Violence, They Recount Retaliation
Motherboard
Passersby who captured high-profile videos of the police killings of Eric Garner, Walter Scott,PhilandoCastile, and Alton Sterling claim they have faced stiff retaliation from the police, including false arrests, intimidation, physical violence,doxxingand illegal confiscation of their phones. One among the many who filmed the violent of arrest of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015 said, "Cops used to hang out outside my job, at my kid's school, in front of thehouse; they'd hold their phone cameras up when I'd pass by." The Opioid Crisis Is Turning Into a Cocaine Crisis
BuzzFeed
Deaths from cocaine, after holding steady for many years, increased 52 percent between 2015 and 2016, with the trend continuing in the most recent federal data. The stimulant is now killing approximately 13,000 people a year, on track to rival painkiller pills and heroin. The cause may not be cocaine per se, but another drug it is increasingly cut with, fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has taken over the illicit drug market in just five years, killing tens of thousands of people, including Prince and Tom Petty. To Work in a Morgue, Pretty Much All You Need Is a Pulse
Governing
Coroners are chosen by voters in most states. Many are not pathologists, or even doctors. That often leads to reporting of inaccurate information in cases of murder and suicide. Now, analready inadequate system of death investigation is being strained by the spike in overdose deaths from opioids. In many cases, coroners may lack not only experience, but also the budgets to find out exactly what happened. FBI Redacted 'Superman' Characters Out of Privacy Concerns
Gizmodo
The feds may not be so good atprotecting the identitiesof millions of Americans, but they appear to take Lois Lane's and Clark Kent's privacy seriously -- and of course, as we all know, the latter has a lot to hide. Responding to an investigative journalist's Freedom of Information lawsuit regarding the Church of Scientology, the FBI decided to redact the names of the famous comic-book reporters from the records disclosed. (Evidently the church once drafted a one-act "play" featuring "Superman" characters.) But the episode actually is about as funny as Kryptonite, suggested Emma Best, the MuckRock reporter who sued: It illustrates the FBI's typical lack of due diligence when it comes to processing public records requests. | 
