Australian special forces killings; Prince Andrew and a Luxembourg bank; Trump election pressure
This week's best document-based investigative journalism.
Video shows Australian SAS soldier shooting and killing unarmed man at close range in Afghanistan
ABC and 4corners citing footage captured on helmet camera.
Four Corners has obtained video which shows a [special forces] operator shooting an unarmed Afghan man three times in the head and chest while he cowers on the ground.
Prince Andrew Helped a Secretive Luxembourg Bank Woo Sketchy Clients
Bloomberg citing emails and internal documents.
For years, Andrew acted as an unofficial door opener for David Rowland and his private bank in Luxembourg … according to a trove of emails, internal documents, and previously unreported regulatory filings.
‘You Have Zero Privacy’ Says an Internal Royal Canadian Mounted Police Presentation
The Tyee citing internal communications.
A 3,000-page batch of internal communications from the RCMP … provides a window into how the force builds its capabilities to spy on internet users and works to hide its methods from the public.
Trump Campaign Officials Started Pressuring Georgia’s Secretary of State Long Before the Election
ProPublica citing an internal email.
Long before Republican senators began publicly denouncing how Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handled the voting there, he withstood pressure from the campaign of Donald Trump to endorse the president for reelection.
In the mercenaries’ own words: Documents detail TigerSwan infiltration of Standing Rock
The Intercept citing company documents, including WhatsApp chats, invoices and operational plans.
The weekend before Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, a secret private security initiative called “Operation Baratheon” was scheduled to begin. A PowerPoint presentation laid out the plan for Joel McCollough, a burly ex-Marine bearing a resemblance to “Game of Thrones” character King Robert Baratheon. He had been posing as an opponent of the Dakota Access pipeline at protests in Iowa but was now assigned to travel to North Dakota to collect intelligence on the growing anti-pipeline movement.
About
The words "according to documents" in a news story signal investigative journalism of the highest caliber.
We want to celebrate reporting based on government or corporate reports, emails, private chat messages or something equally tangible—as opposed to that based on unnamed sources or rumors.
The idea is imperfect, of course, and some excellent reporting will be based on no documents and some terrible reporting will be based on many documents. But ultimately, it's a great rule of thumb.
According to Documents was created by investigative reporters Girish Gupta and Alexandra Ulmer.
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