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How can infrastructure be criminal? How does a mine, a gas field, a suburban neighbourhood or a dam become a perpetrator of violence and insecurity? Surviving Society Presents: Material Crimes answers these questions. Each episode investigates a different piece of infrastructure, tracing its global, colonial connections across time and space. The series shows us how the physical sites of everyday life are linked to networks of private and public actors who profit from violence inflicted on spaces and communities on the margins. The series also shines a spotlight on the people-powered movements exposing and challenging the many crimes of infrastructure.

Season Two is out now. New episodes air every Tuesday until 15 October!

︎︎︎ About the Project
︎︎︎ A Guide to Making an Episode

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Night Terror

During a deadly dawn raid by a Kenyan paramilitary squad, an innocent Muslim man, Omar Faraj, was brutally murdered. In this episode Namir Shabibi sets out to find those responsible for this extrajudicial killing. The paramilitary squad is, we discover, part of America’s post-9/11 covert War on Terror infrastructure. Following the death squad from Mombasa’s muslim neighbourhoods to the ‘secret’ Recce military complex miles away in rural Ruiru all the way to the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia, we hear how it was developed, funded, equipped and supported by the United States. Across conversations with former Kenyan parliamentarians, ex-American security forces personnel, academic experts and local activists, including the Chair of ‘Muslims for Human Rights,’ Khelef Khalifa, Shabibi exposes the global War on Terror’s brutal underbelly: a project designed to evade accountability, while terrorising Muslim populations in Kenya and beyond.
Useful Links
Center for Constitutional Rights (USA):
www.ccrjustice.org

Muslims for Human Rights (Kenya):
www.facebook.com/UTETEZI

UNREDACTED (UK):
www.unredacted.uk
Further Reading
William Daugherty. Executive Secrets: Covert Action and the Presidency (Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2004).

Loch K. Johnson. The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2022).

Namir Shabibi. “Revealed: The CIA and MI6’s secret war in Kenya,” Declassified UK, 28 August 2020, https://declassifieduk.org/revealed-the-cia-and-mi6s-secret-war-in-kenya/.

Namir Shabibi & Jack Watling. “Britain’s Covert War in Yemen: A VICE News Investigation,” 7 April 2016, https://www.vice.com/en/article/8x3enb/britains-covert-war-in-yemen-a-vice-news-investigation.
Namir Shabibi is a visiting lecturer and doctoral candidate at Westminster University, researching covert paramilitary action in the “War on Terror.” He also leads the University’s Working Group on Telecoms, Spyware and Surveillance. As an investigative journalist, Namir has published reports for the BBC, the Bureau and VICE, among others, and now regularly contributes to Declassified UK. He previously worked for Reprieve, and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Darfur and Guantánamo Bay.

This episode was co-developed with Claire Lauterbach, whose support with additional research into music, sounds and archival materials were integral to its production. 

Voiceovers: Claire Lauterbach and Chris Alger