CIR Featured Projects

In the digital age, half our electricity still comes from coal. Dirty Business: "Clean Coal" and the Battle for Our Energy Future is a documentary that reveals the true social and environmental costs of coal power and tells the stories of innovators who are pointing the way to an alternative energy future.

Mark Schapiro's cover story investigates the fastest growing commodity market on earth: carbon. He reveals the critical challenges of measuring a commodity based on a promise of future greenhouse gas emissions, and the implications for the cap and trade system likely to be voted on soon by Congress. Schapiro recently spoke on Marketplace and will be on NPR's Fresh Air on 1/28.

A multimedia investigation of the untold stories of unsolved civil rights-era murders in the South, presented by CIR, Paperny Films, and WNET. Our reporters are reopening and investigating several cold cases—and producing important evidence that prosecutors have used to build criminal cases against killers and conspirators who have walked free for more than 40 years.

Records show that communities across California had difficulty managing millions in anti-terrorism grants handed out by Congress after Sept. 11. Paperwork went missing and purchasing rules weren't followed. Is the state ready for more in stimulus funds if preparedness cash proved so difficult? This story is part of a collaborative project by California Watch, the Center for Public Integrity and CIR examining the effectiveness of America’s homeland security efforts.

While the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents and hundreds of government attorneys have been hired, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system. As a result, cases often take months if not years to complete. On any given day there are more than 30,000 people in immigration lock-up.

Despite state investigators and other experts saying that a detective’s ties to Your Black Muslim Bakery’s young leader compromised his investigation of journalist Chauncey Bailey's slaying, the Oakland Police Department will not discipline him.

After the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of former Soviet bloc residents migrated abroad, breathing life into one of the oldest criminal enterprises—the trafficking of humans into sexual slavery. Since then, thousands of Eastern European women have been sold into prostitution. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova investigates this rarely documented journey.

A new web-video series from CIR highlighting investigative reporting—as it happens—by journalists around the world. The series features interviews with journalists, who share the stories behind their groundbreaking international investigations into human rights abuses, financial corruption, political malfeasance, environmental destruction and other abuses of power.

Just after the U.S. took Baghdad in 2003, the Green Berets began training young Iraqis with no military experience in the desert of Jordan. The resulting brigade was a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under U.S. command and be unaccountable to the normal political process. Shane Bauer reports for The Nation. Support was provided in part by CIR's Goldensohn Fund.