RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
August 2 to August 8

RCI Podcasts & Videos

On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, RCI Editor J. Peder Zane and RCI Senior Reporter James Varney speak with Aaron Shuster about his Tablet article “Entryism Comes to America,” which argues that the U.S. should follow France’s lead and have a serious inquiry into and discussion of what the rise of Islamism means for the nation’s prevailing culture and politics.

On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with Dr. Andrew Bostom about his RealClearInvestigations article which exclusively reported that police have determined that a 2023 shooting outside a Providence mosque that was widely reported as an example of growing “Islamophobia” was not, in fact, a hate crime.

Featured Investigation:

How Predatory Trade Schools Cheat Veterans 

Washington Post

For-profit trade schools that educate military veterans under the GI Bill have bilked the federal government out of more than $300 million, often by charging eye-popping sums for basic classes that last only a few days or weeks, according to a Washington Post investigation.

In New Hampshire, an “organic lawn care institute” taught veterans how to grow grass in a course that took, at most, five days. The school typically billed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) $14,900 per student, more than triple what it charged civilians not covered by the GI Bill. … Another GI Bill trade school based in New Hampshire charged $18,500 in tuition to teach veterans how to make fake rocks out of concrete, federal documents show. … In Texas, a destitute high school dropout opened a “boot camp” that trained novices to become heating and air-conditioning technicians in just six weeks. Tuition and fees ran around $20,000. Within three years, the school had reaped $72 million from the GI Bill to enroll more than 3,500 veterans.

The Post reports that “last year, taxpayers spent more than $11 billion to educate about 666,000 people under the GI Bill. Over the past two decades, Congress has passed laws to make the GI Bill more generous and flexible. Veterans no longer must use their benefits within a few years of leaving the armed forces, and they can transfer benefits to their spouses or children. But lax government oversight has given rise to chicanery and fraud, allowing predatory for-profit trade schools to cheat thousands of veterans out of training intended to help them build new career.

In a separate series of article published last year, the Post reported that “military veterans are swamping the U.S. government with dubious disability claims – including cases of brazen fraud totaling tens of millions of dollars – that are exploiting the country’s sacred commitment to compensate those harmed in the line of duty. … Taxpayers will spend roughly $193 billion this year for the Department of Veterans Affairs to compensate about 6.9 million disabled veterans on the presumption that their ability to work is impaired. Yet The Post found that millions of the claims are for minor or treatable afflictions that rarely hinder employment, such as hair loss, jock itch and toenail fungus.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

• Puppies With Public Funds, RCI
• NYC Transit Trashed Recyclables, RCI
• SNAP For Lottery Winners, RCI
• Burning “Simpsons” Stamps, RCI
• Sheriff’s Horseplay, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

• FBI's Bogus Reasons for Probing Trump as Russian Asset, Substack
• Trump’s Arctic Mining Deal Marks New Era of State Capitalism, BusinessWeek
• Flashback: When Uncle Sam Turns Venture Capitalist, What Could Go Wrong?, RCI
• US Sends More Intel Assets to Cuba, Politico
• Bar Apologizes for Hosting Event for Pro-Israel Democrat, Daily Caller
• US Sends More Intel Assets to Cuba, Politico

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Report: Hamas Coerces Gaza NGOs, Diverts US Aid 

Washington Free Beacon

Hamas officials routinely bullied and intimidated employees of U.S.-funded NGOs operating in Gaza in order to control their operations, according to a confidential probe by American investigators that was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. 

The June investigatory report by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) inspector general's office, an independent law enforcement entity separate from the largely defunct USAID … describes a situation on the ground in Gaza that Hamas and its international allies have vehemently denied for years: Aid operations are subject to strict oversight by Hamas personnel who are often stationed at sensitive humanitarian sites, such as hospitals and aid depots. … [It] reveals that Hamas threatened to sic its fearsome police force on aid workers and even tried to access the NGOs' private employee data as the terror group moved to establish outposts at hospitals and redirect aid to meet its needs. 

This article reports that while several NGOs complied with USAID’s request for information “at least six U.N. agencies failing to provide the USAID inspector general with identical information about staffing and interactions with Hamas.”

How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners 

New York Times

China monitors its 1.4 billion people on an unparalleled scale, with the help of cameras, cellphone signals and national IDs. This article reports that a database stumbled upon by a cybersecurity researcher and journalist based in Amsterdam, offers a rare window into how extensively the Chinese authorities also surveil foreigners in China, displaying entries about people categorized by nationality, with their birth date, sex, marital status, address and occupation, and sometimes their religion. It also included instances when they were captured on camera at traffic intersections, markets, shopping malls or other locations, including a mosque.

It was not clear how, or if, the police have used the database in their work. But its existence illustrates how the Chinese authorities aggregate vast amounts of data from surveillance cameras, medical records, bills, facial-recognition tools and other sources to monitor and analyze the behavior of foreign residents. It had fields for places they frequented, hospital visits and gas payments, as well as flights and trains taken, including seat numbers. For example, it logged the movements of a woman from Mongolia as she went from a residential compound in Zhangjiakou to shopping malls, restaurants and supermarkets. In some instances, the database indicated, she had been tracked using facial recognition.

This article reports that the fact a system with sensitive personal information on hundreds of people was accessible to anyone who could find it on the internet suggests a major lack of privacy protections. Greg Walton, a cybersecurity researcher who has studied similar Chinese systems, said the exposure of this one was not an anomaly. It was a consequence of China’s “surveillance sprawl,” which is fueled by an expanding ecosystem of vendors, contractors and public security agencies, he said.

Rogue Officers Used Camera Network for Stalking 

Washington Post

A sprawling network of artificial-intelligence roadside cameras made by Flock that record passing license plates into a mappable database officers can search has been a boon for law enforcement. But, this article reports, some officers have used the tool to surveil people in their personal lives.

Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent, a Post analysis of police and court records found. In 26 of these cases, police investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes’ new partners or women they wanted to meet. In other cases, police or prosecutors have not specified the alleged surveillance targets. Flock’s system was used in 46 of the cases analyzed by The Post, while the other cases involved competing products. Many of the plate-reader misuse cases were previously covered by local media outlets, and some were first compiled by the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm in Arlington, Virginia.

The article reports that Flock gave police departments wide latitude about whether to activate settings that some police and privacy advocates argue could deter misconduct, and that many departments conducted limited oversight of their officers’ searches. As a result, rogue police were able to monitor their subjects’ movements with precision and secrecy.

Uber’s Strategy for Fighting Sex Suits: ‘What Were You Wearing?’ 

New York Times

This article reports that Uber’s public face doesn’t match it’s courtroom demeanor as it battles thousands of lawsuits from passengers accusing the company of failing to protect them from sexual violence they said they had suffered during rides. Publicly, the ride share company proclaims itself to be devoted to handling sexual violence in a “survivor-centric” and “trauma-informed” way, supporting survivors and treating them with dignity. A Times investigation of the three cases that have gone to trial and a dozen others that have advanced to the stage when the parties start exchanging documents and conducting depositions, however, found that Uber’s attorneys often take a far more aggressive posture toward complainants.

The litigation has revealed a clear pattern: Uber’s lawyers scour women’s private communications, medical records, therapy notes and other sources for sensitive details, including other sexual assaults, childhood abuse and domestic violence. They grill the women about those issues, their sex lives and their behavior on the night of the incident. In one case, Uber petitioned a judge to force a woman to turn over details about sexual abuse she experienced as a child by a family member and family friend. In another, Uber compelled a woman to undergo a psychiatric exam to investigate other sexual assaults she had reported. And in another, a lawyer for Uber asked a woman whether she had been wearing underwear on the night in question and if she had become “extra sexually active” after the Uber incident. At trial, the company has put a spotlight on the women, their choices and their credibility. Uber’s lawyers have argued that the women’s past traumas or use of drugs or alcohol made them unreliable narrators. They have suggested that the women consented to the encounters, or that they never happened. And they have asserted that even if an assault occurred, something else was the true cause of her pain.

This article reports that Uber’s strategy contradicts its own stance as a champion in the fight against sexual violence and reflects the business calculations of a $145 billion publicly traded company facing an avalanche of litigation.

Black Professor's Resignation Puts Cambridge in Spotlight 

Wall Street Journal

For years, this article reports Jason Arday, who in 2023 became the youngest Black professor ever appointed by the University of Cambridge, was feted in the British media for his remarkable back story and account of his achievements. 

Raised in south London in a family of Ghanaian origin, Arday says he was diagnosed with autism as a child, couldn’t speak until he was 11 and overcame illiteracy in his teens before becoming a sociology professor. When at the age of 37 he was appointed as a professor at the University of Cambridge, the prestigious institution said that he would help “address the underrepresentation of people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Today, Arday is at the center of a plagiarism scandal that has cost him his job and raised questions about Cambridge’s decision to hire him in the first place. In recent months, a handful of academics have cast doubt on the originality of Arday’s 2015 doctoral thesis and the veracity of claims about his past feats, including that he raised 5 million pounds, equivalent to around $6.7 million, for charity and once ran 600 miles in six days, completing the challenge with a hairline fracture in his leg.

This article reports that the tale of Arday’s rise and fall has dominated British headlines for weeks and become a lightning rod for debate over whether the professor was the victim of a racially motivated witch hunt or was overpromoted by a university eager to burnish a reputation for diversity. At the time of his appointment there were only 150 Black professors in the U.K. out of a total of around 23,000 people working in such posts.