Thread by @TBIJ

Momentous week here as we say goodbye to our longest-running investigative project. Here’s a look back at 10 years of revelations behind ‘Shadow Wars’, and how we exposed the failings and wrongdoing of the world’s most powerful military and security forces
thebureauinvestigates.com/blog/2020-09-0…

When we first started, there was a complete lack of official data on when and where US war on terror air strikes were being carried out, and who was being killed in them. So, it became clear we would have to build our own datasets of strikes and casualties from scratch

And soon, we were the go-to place for information. Our datasets were visited hundreds of thousands of times and we were cited thousands of times in publications by Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, UN special rapporteurs, etc.

The battle for transparency didn’t stop. Pressure from our reporting helped a change in US policy so they finally started publishing (though much lower) numbers of people killed in strikes. In 2017, the US stopped sharing strike figures. But we didn’t.
thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2016-0…

Reporting on numbers wasn’t enough, we also wanted to tell the human stories behind them. Through our ‘Naming the Dead’ project we identified 732 people killed by secretive US drone strikes in Pakistan

v1.thebureauinvestigates.com/namingthedead/…

Together with @nshabibi and @nasir2alsana, we investigated President Trump’s first military operation, a botched raid in Yemen, finding that 9 young children had been killed and reporting the harrowing accounts of survivors

thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-0…

With @nytimes, we proved a US strike on a family home in Afghanistan killed 7 children, their mother and 4 young cousins in the face of repeated denials. Our team built on this, finding more families wiped out in 9 similar strikes.

thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2020-0…

Long before the term OSINT was commonplace, we were doing it, using everything from satellite imagery to Pentagon procurement records. In our most recent recent we investigated 21 strikes with 150 volunteers and @bellingcat

thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2020-0…

We examined other aspects of modern warfare (including the use of contractors, private security and secret detention) and revealed how the private sector was identifying drone targets for the US air force

theguardian.com/us-news/2015/j…

On top of that, our team unearthed the story of a half-billion dollar propaganda contract in Iraq, outsourced to the notorious British PR firm Bell Pottinger

thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2016-1…

Our investigations took us deep inside the hidden world of private security in Iraq and Afghanistan - and what can happen there when things go wrong

thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-0…

And along with @renditionprjct we created the most comprehensive history to date of the CIA’s secret detention programme, revealing who was held where, when

therenditionproject.org.uk/unredacted/the…

To finish, we want to thank those who shared stories and the reporters whose work has had such a powerful impact: @chrisjwoods, @aliceross_, @jackserle, @AbbieFS, @cr0ft0n, @JessicaPurkiss, @PayendaSargand, @RuhullahKhapalw, @MohammadJawad4, @cheesemanab, @nasir2alsana, @nshabibi