Frontline : Season 2011

Last year, in the chaos of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, thousands of the country's worst criminals seized the opportunity to stage a mass escape from the National Penitentiary. One year later, the gang leaders are reasserting control in the capital, threatening the country's stability. With unique access to the police units trying to hunt down the gangsters -- and revealing encounters with the gangsters themselves -- FRONTLINE examines the uphill fight to rebuild Haiti in the face of de

FRONTLINE launches its new monthly magazine program with three reports, led by Are We Safer? In this first story, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest investigates the terrorism-industrial complex that grew up in the wake of 9/11. Against a backdrop of recent mail bomb threats from Al Qaeda in Yemen and growing concerns about homegrown terrorists, Priest explores the growing reach of homeland security, fusion centers, battlefield technologies, and data collecting into the

In a follow-up to the hard-hitting investigation of the regional airline industry, Flying Cheap, FRONTLINE sets its sights on another growing trend -- the outsourcing of major airline repair work to foreign-based maintenance operations, from China to El Salvador, and to U.S.-based contractors who keep costs low by using unlicensed mechanics. FRONTLINE correspondent Miles O'Brien investigates reports of undertrained mechanics, foreign workers who can't read the English language repair manuals, in

Every day, nearly 7,000 people die in America. And when these deaths happen suddenly, or under suspicious circumstances, we assume there will be a thorough investigation, just like we see on CSI. But the reality is very different. In over 1,300 counties across America, elected coroners, many with no medical or scientific background, are in charge of death investigations. Nationwide there is a severe shortage of competent forensic pathologists to do autopsies. The rate of autopsies - the gold sta

It was a hot summer morning in St. Louis when John Johnson got the news in his doorway: His daughter was dead. LaVena was 19, a former honor student, and a freshly deployed soldier in Iraq. Devastated, her father asked the Army how she died. The answer that came back stunned him: 'Self-inflicted gunshot wound.' Johnson couldn't believe it; not his little girl. For the past five years, Johnson has waged an all-out war against the Pentagon to disprove the Army's suicide finding.

FRONTLINE dispatches teams to Cairo, going inside the youth movement that helped light the fire on the streets. We follow the "April 6th" group, which two years ago began making a bold use of the Internet for their underground resistance--tactics that led to jail and torture for many of their leaders. Now, starting with the "Day of Rage," we witness those same leaders plot strategy and head into "Liberation Square" to try to bring down President Mubarak. Also in this hour, veteran Middle East co

FRONTLINE continues its new monthly magazine program with the lead story Money and March Madness, an inside look at the multibillion dollar business of the NCAA and its brand of amateur college sports. In this investigation, correspondent Lowell Bergman gains access to Sonny Vaccaro, a former marketing executive at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok who helped bring about the rapid commercialization of college basketball. Vaccaro's success made coaches, administrators, and companies rich. But the players

Also in this newsmagazine hour: An intimate portrait of a man who's sometimes called China's Andy Warhol Ai Weiwei. He's a global art star who's now using his international renown, along with a video camera and a growing underground Twitter following, to push the boundaries of freedom in today's China.

As the fall-out from WikiLeaks continues, an exclusive interview with Private Bradley Manning's father, who speaks out for the first time about his son's upbringing and troubled youth, Manning's time in the Army, and why he still believes his son did not hand over the largest cache ever of classified documents to the whistle-blowing site.

High school football has never had a higher profile, with nationally televised games, corporate sponsorships and minute-by-minute coverage on sports websites. In northwest Arkansas, FRONTLINE examines one ambitious high school team working its way towards national renown. With a superstar quarterback at the helm, tiny Shiloh Christian is striving to join the ranks of the country's best high school teams -- teams whose workout schedules, practices, and styles of play increasingly imitate the pros

Tom Curran and reporter Mark Trahant examine a little-known chapter of the Catholic Church sex abuse story: decades of abuse of Native Americans by priests and church workers in Alaska. The Silence shows how the isolation of the villages and the absolute authority of the church over the Native population created an atmosphere where molestation could go unchecked and unreported. As part of the recent church settlement with the victims, the bishop of Fairbanks returns to all of the villages where

Last year, Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi made an extraordinary reporting trip for FRONTLINE that led to the award-winning film Behind Taliban Lines. This year, once again, Quraishi journeys deep into enemy territory--this time to meet a different band of militants and foreign fighters who say they are loyal to Osama Bin Laden and are readying a new offensive against coalition forces. As the United States faces a major strategic review in Afghanistan, Quraishi's journey sheds light on a q

Since taking over the war effort in Afghanistan, Gen. Petraeus has raised the campaign against the Taliban to a new intensity, nearly doubling the number of air attacks and unleashing Special Forces to kill or capture thousands of militants. In Pakistan, the CIA has killed hundreds of militants with drone attacks. Now as President Obama promises a July deadline for reducing troops, is the strategy working? Through interviews with Gen. Petraeus, his senior commanders, and Taliban foot-soldiers, F

It's the biggest intelligence breach in U.S. history-the leaking of more than half-a-million classified documents on the Wikileaks website in the spring of 2010. Behind it all, stand two very different men: Julian Assange, the Internet activist and hacker who published the documents, and an Army intelligence analyst named Bradley E. Manning, who's currently charged with handing them over. Private Manning allegedly leaked the secret cables -- along with a controversial video -- in the hope of inc

When a child dies under suspicious circumstances, abuse is often suspected. That's what happened in the case of six-month-old Isis Vas, whose death was deemed "a clear-cut and classic" case of child abuse, sending a man named Ernie Lopez to prison for 60 years. But now a Texas judge has moved to overturn Lopez's conviction, and new questions are being asked about the quality of expert testimony in this and many other similar cases. In this joint investigation with ProPublica and NPR, FRONTLINE c

As troops return from Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. government spending on veterans' education will more than double to $9.5 billion this year, and a growing percentage of this money has been ending up in the pockets of for-profit colleges. In a follow-up to FRONTLINE's College, Inc., correspondent Martin Smith investigates how the for-profit schools are aggressively recruiting huge numbers of new veterans with educational promises that many now question whether they can keep.

The bulk of the marijuana consumed in the United States used to come across the border from Mexico, Canada and elsewhere. Now, more than half of it is believed to be home grown in California, where an enormous black market has emerged under the cover of the state's medical marijuana law. With more than a third of all states now experimenting with some form of legalization and decriminalization -- and several California counties attempting to openly regulate pot production -- FRONTLINE and The Ce

New Yorker writer and FRONTLINE correspondent Atul Gawande reports on a doctor in Camden, N.J., who actually seeks out the community's sickest -- and most expensive -- patients. Dr. Jeffrey Brenner and his team are pioneering a practice called "hotspotting," in which medical care is focused on the hardest-to-treat to improve their health and dramatically reduce costs.

After the largest recorded earthquake in Japan set off a nuclear disaster, its people are facing a generation-defining moment as they question their lifestyle and dependency on nuclear power. In The Atomic Artists, FRONTLINE journeys with Marco Werman of PRI's The World as he meets Chim Pom, a provocative group of young artists making headlines as they use art to challenge the status quo and ask Japanese society to rethink their way of life.

In the years after September 11th, FRONTLINE produced more than 45 hours of award-winning films documenting the 9/11 attacks and America's response to them. Now on the 10th anniversary of September 11th, FRONTLINE Producer Michael Kirk -- Bush's War, The Torture Question, and Cheney's Law -- teams up with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dana Priest, to investigate the dramatic changes that have reshaped America in the last decade. The program examines the history of the secret side of America'

An extended conversation with Ali Soufan, an FBI agent who was at the center of the 9/11 investigations

One year after 9/11 how did America grapple with its biggest and most difficult questions?

The men of Third Platoon, Charlie Company: What happened to them in Iraq ... and what happened when they came home.

It became the most controversial building in America, a mostly derelict property in lower Manhattan made infamous overnight as the Ground Zero Mosque. Going beyond frenzied media portraits at the time, FRONTLINE tells the inside stories of Sharif El-Gamal, a real estate developer, and of the victims' relatives and anti-Islam activists who helped turn his project into a continuing battle over faith, values and the meaning of being American. Also in this hour: A rare interview with former FBI spec

Adam Davidson of NPR's "Planet Money" travels to Haiti to meet a man with an unlikely tourism plan to help turn around his country's economy.