Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

More than 200 scientists employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they have been directed to alter official findings to lessen protections for plants and animals, a survey released Wednesday says. More than half of the biologists and other researchers who responded to the survey said they knew of cases in which commercial interests, including timber, grazing, development and energy companies, had applied political pressure to reverse scientific conclusions deemed harmful to their business.

Note: If the above link fails, click here.

The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sought by a government working group under a 1998 law that requires full disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals. Some made public last year showed a closer relationship between the United States government and Nazi war criminals than had previously been understood, including the C.I.A.'s recruitment of war criminal suspects or Nazi collaborators. For nearly three years, the C.I.A. has interpreted the 1998 law narrowly and rebuffed requests for additional records. The dispute has not previously been made public. The American government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators, allowing many of them to live in the United States after World War II. Historians who have studied the documents made public so far have said that at least five associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's campaign to exterminate Jews, had worked for the CIA. The records also indicate that the CIA tried to recruit two dozen more war criminals or Nazi collaborators. Among former Nazis who were given refuge in the United States was Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who developed the V-2 rocket in World War II for the Nazis and played a major role in the development of the American space program.

Note: Operation Paperclip involved secretly importing hundreds of Nazi scientists into the U.S. and providing them with aliases and influential work in U.S. government and intelligence services. Some of them were known experts in mind control techniques. For more reliable information, click here.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign." The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’ -- it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs” -- the regional American military commanders-in-chief.

Mr. Arkin, in the online supplement to his book (codenames.org/documents.html ), says the contingency plan, called JCS Conplan 0300-97, calls for "special-mission units in extra-legal missions to combat terrorism in the United States" based on top-secret orders that are managed by the military's Joint Staff. Mr. Arkin provided The New York Times with briefing slides prepared by the Northern Command, detailing the plan and outlining the military's preparations for the inauguration. Three senior Defense Department and Bush administration officials confirmed the existence of the plan and mission, but disputed Mr. Arkin's characterization of the mission as "extra-legal."

They contain Britain's very own X-Files: thousands of classified documents detailing credible observations of unidentified flying objects reported by RAF personnel, British Airways pilots and senior police officers. Now under the Freedom of Information laws, files previously held by the Ministry of Defence's special UFO department, known as SF4, are being released to the public. Among the most credible reports of a possible visit by extraterrestrial life-forms is one made by an RAF pilot and two NCOs. In July 1977 Flt Lt A M Wood reported "bright objects hanging over the sea". The RAF officer said the closest object was "luminous, round and four to five times larger than a Whirlwind helicopter". This account was deemed so sensitive to the national interest that the MoD had delayed its release for an extra three years. Some of the other reports are equally compelling. A British Airways Tri-Star on a return flight from Portugal in July 1976 was involved in an incident [where] the Tri-Star captain reported "four objects - two round brilliant white, two cigar-shaped". The captain was so alarmed by what he and the passengers had seen that he reported the sighting to air traffic controllers at Lisbon and Heathrow. The report says that fighters were immediately scrambled from Lisbon. Shortly afterwards another Tri-Star crew on the same flight path reported a similar unexplained sighting. This time they said there was a "bright object with two contrails". In another incident in the same month two Tri-Star co-pilots and five of their cabin crew reported "passing underneath a bright white circular object". The files also contain reports compiled by police officers of their first-hand experiences of observing UFOs.

Note: If UFOs don't exist, why would the government delay release of the documents three years? As this article is no longer available on the Independent website, to read it in full, click here.

Fifty years ago, Eric Gow had a baffling and unexplained experience. As a 19-year-old sailor, he remembers going to a clandestine military establishment, where he was given something to drink in a sherry glass and experienced vivid hallucinations. Other servicemen also remember tripping: one thought he was seeing tigers jumping out of a wall, while another recalls faces "with eyes running down their cheeks, Salvador Dalí-style". Mr Gow and another serviceman had volunteered to take part in what they thought was research to find a cure for the common cold. Mr Gow felt that the government had never explained what happened to him. But now he has received an official admission for the first time, confirmed last night, that the intelligence agency MI6 tested LSD on servicemen. One of the scientists involved at the time suggested that the experiments were stopped because it was feared that the acid could produce "suicidal tendencies". MI6, known formally as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and responsible for spying operations abroad, carried out the tests in the cold war in an attempt to uncover a "truth drug" which would make prisoners talk against their will in interrogations. In parallel experiments, the CIA infamously tested LSD and other drugs on unwitting human subjects in a 20-year search to uncover mind-manipulation techniques. The trials were widely criticised when they came to light in the 1970s.

Note: For key reports from major media sources on CIA experimentation on unwitting subjects, click here.

Testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2003 about the rebuilding of Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the story of Jumana Michael Hanna, an Iraqi woman...with a tale of her horrific torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime. Hanna's tale - more than two years of imprisonment that included being subjected to electric shocks, repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted - was unusual in that she was willing to name the Iraqi police officials who participated in her torture, "information that is helping us to root out Baathist policemen who routinely tortured and killed prisoners," Wolfowitz said. But Hanna's story, which 10 days before Wolfowitz's testimony had been the subject of a front-page article in the Washington Post, appears to have unraveled. Esquire magazine, in this month's issue, published a lengthy article, by a writer who was hired to help Hanna produce a memoir, saying that her account had all but fallen apart.

The circumstances surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy are being resurrected and re-examined in an attempt to establish the truth of what happened that night in the cramped pantry of a Los Angeles hotel. New evidence has emerged [in] the case of Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of the assassination. Celebrities and journalists are joining the campaign for a federal investigation, which has been sparked in part by a new book, Nemesis, by the British author Peter Evans. Evans, who spent 10 years researching the book, has unearthed evidence to support Sirhan's contention that he was hypnotised into being the "fall guy" for the murder. Evans identifies the hypnotist, who had worked on CIA mind control programmes and who was later found dead in mysterious circumstances. Bullet holes in the walls and ceiling demonstrate conclusively that more than one gunman fired shots at Senator Kennedy. Both Evans and Sirhan's lawyer, Larry Teeter, are convinced that the Palestinian activist was chosen to be a Manchurian Candidate-style assassin. The assassination, they say, was carried out by a professional hitman who fled immediately, leaving Sirhan to take the blame. Teeter ... said: "I know it was done. It was consistent with the US government's programme developed by the CIA and Military Intelligence to enable handlers to get people to commit crimes with no knowledge of what they are doing." Evans goes further and names the hypnotist as a Dr William Joseph Bryan Jnr. He had worked on a CIA mind-control programme called MKULTRA. Dr Bryan was found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room in 1978. He had either shot himself or was murdered. The case remains unsolved.

Note: As this article is no longer available on the Independent website, to read it in full, click here.

More than 50 years after DuPont started producing Teflon ... federal officials are accusing the company of hiding information suggesting that [the chemical] might cause cancer, birth defects and other ailments. Environmental regulators are particularly alarmed because scientists are finding perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, in the blood of people worldwide and it takes years for the chemical to leave the body. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported last week that exposure even to low levels of PFOA could be harmful. With virtually no government oversight, PFOA has been used since the early 1950s. Questions about potential effects on human health and the environment often aren't raised until years after a chemical is introduced to the marketplace. The long and mostly secret history of PFOA began to unravel down the road from DuPont's Teflon plant...where a Parkersburg family began asking questions in the late 1990s about a mysterious wasting disease killing their cattle. Their lawsuit ended with a monetary settlement ... but the legal battle uncovered a trove of industry documents about PFOA. One document detailed how DuPont scientists started warning company executives to avoid human contact with PFOA as early as 1961. Industry tests later determined the chemical accumulates in the body [and] doesn't break down in the environment. Tests on lab animals have found links to illnesses including liver and testicular cancer, reduced weight of newborns and immune-system suppression. The findings concern EPA officials because rats flush the chemical out of their bodies within days, while PFOA stays in human blood for at least four years.

Note: As this article is no longer available on the Chicago Tribune website, to read it in full, click here.

The F.B.I. has failed to aggressively investigate accusations of espionage against a translator at the bureau and fired the translator's co-worker in large part for bringing the accusations, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded. In a long-awaited report that the Justice Department sought for months to keep classified, the inspector general issued a sharp rebuke to the F.B.I. over its handling of claims of espionage and ineptitude made by Sibel Edmonds, a bureau translator who was fired in 2002 after superiors deemed her conduct "disruptive." The report [came] from the office of Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department's inspector general. Mr. Fine's investigation found that many of Ms. Edmonds's accusations "were supported, that the F.B.I. did not take them seriously enough and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the F.B.I.'s decision to terminate her services." Ms. Edmonds's case has become a cause célčbre for critics who accused the bureau of retaliating against her and other whistle-blowers who have sought to expose management problems related to the campaign against terrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union joined her cause earlier this week, asking an appellate court to reinstate a whistle-blower lawsuit she brought against the government. The suit was dismissed last year after Attorney General John Ashcroft, invoking a rarely used power, declared her case to be a matter of "state secret" privilege, and the Justice Department retroactively classified a 2002 Congressional briefing about it.

Note: What this article completely fails to mention is that Ms. Edmonds has claimed repeatedly that she has key information revealing major corruption related to 9/11. For a highly revealing report written by Ms. Edmonds to the 9/11 Commission chairman, click here. Another highly revealing article is available here. The Times link above requires payment. To view the above article free, click here.

The FBI never adequately investigated complaints by a fired contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage inside the bureau's translator program, although evidence and witnesses supported her, the Justice Department's senior oversight official said yesterday. The bureau's response to complaints by former translator Sibel Edmonds was "significantly flawed," Inspector General Glenn Fine said in a report that summarized a lengthy classified investigation into how the FBI handled the case. Fine said Edmonds's contentions "raised substantial questions and were supported by various pieces of evidence." "The report substantiated the most serious of Sibel's allegations and demonstrates that the FBI owes Sibel an apology and compensation for its unlawful firing of her rather than hiding behind its false cloak of national security," said Mark Zaid, her lawyer.

Note: Ms. Edmonds deeply revealing allegations are laid out clearly in an open letter to 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/sibeledmonds.

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley. Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring. The CIA declined to authorize any official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offered an authoritative account of the status of the hunt on the condition of anonymity. The ISG [Iraq Study Group] has interviewed every person it could find connected to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves, according to several people involved in the weapons hunt. Congress allotted hundreds of millions of dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public accounting of the money. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified.

Note: To understand how such major secrecy and deception happens, click here.

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this. "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" ... argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned ... around the world." Why have we heard so much frightening talk about "dirty bombs" when experts say it is panic rather than radioactivity that would kill people? Why did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim on "Meet the Press" in 2001 that Al Qaeda controlled massive high-tech cave complexes in Afghanistan, when British and U.S. military forces later found no such thing? The film ... directly challenges the conventional wisdom by making a powerful case that the Bush administration, led by a tight-knit cabal of Machiavellian neoconservatives, has seized upon the false image of a unified international terrorist threat to replace the expired Soviet empire in order to push a political agenda. "The nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion. Wherever one looks for this Al Qaeda organization, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the 'sleeper cells' in America, the British and Americans are chasing a phantom enemy."

Note: If above link fails, click here. This highly revealing film by one of Britain's most respected documentary makers is available for free viewing on the Internet. For the link and lots more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here. For an excellent review of the film in one of the U.K.'s leading newspapers, click here.

Our correspondent discovers a burial site for 10,000 bodies near a Buddhist temple in Thailand. The bodies of british and other Western tourists are being secretly buried in vast mass graves in an open field close to a busy road. Local Red Cross officials told The Times that they were ordered to prepare a site for 10,000 bodies, far more than the Thai Government says were killed by the tsunami, raising doubts that a true count of victims will ever be known.

”Once you get to a certain height, you are no longer in the range of the cellular network, because cell phone towers aren't built to project their signals that high.”

Washington Post, 12/9/04

“Today's vote by the FCC is intended to address whether technology has improved to the extent that cell phone calls now are possible above 10,000 feet -- they weren't in the past.”

San Francisco Chronicle, 12/15/04

"With television cameramen hovering, Qualcomm chief executive Irwin Jacobs sat in the front row of coach and made one of the first legal cell phone calls from a commercial jetliner. Jacobs pronounced the [brand new] technology behind the airborne phone call a success, although adding that it will be improved over the next couple years. Connections from the plane were generally good, although some calls were dropped."

USA Today/Associated Press, 7/16/04

Note: To find articles showing multiple cell phone use on Sept. 11, 2001, type "9/11" and "cell phone calls" into your favorite search engine, or click here for a Washington Post report on an alleged 30-minute uninterrupted cell phone call from Flight 93. Click here for a CNN report on another call from that flight. Tests have shown it is not possible to have an extended cell phone conversation above 10,000 feet.

Joyce Ann Hafford died without ever holding the son she had tried to save from contracting AIDS by taking an experimental drug regimen administered by government-funded researchers during her pregnancy. But even before her stunned family could grieve, the 33-year-old's death was reverberating among the government's top scientists in Washington. They quickly realized the drugs the HIV-positive woman from Memphis, Tenn., was taking likely caused the liver failure that killed her. Hafford's family members say they were never told NIH had concluded that the experimental drug regimen likely caused her death until the Associated Press gave them copies of NIH's internal case documents this month. They were left to believe Hafford had died from AIDS complications. "They tried to make it sound like she was just sick. They never connected it to the drug," said Rubbie King, Hafford's sister. NIH officials acknowledge that experimental drugs, most likely nevirapine, caused her death. The study during which Hafford died recently led researchers to conclude that nevirapine poses risks when taken over time by certain pregnant women. The family says Hafford seemed unaware of the liver risks. They even kept the bottle of nevirapine showing it had no safety warnings.

Note: If you want to understand just how corrupt and deceitful medical research doctors can be, read the stunning article on this case at this link. This article mentions the little-known fact that "a majority of HIV-positive tests, when retested, come back indeterminate or negative. In many cases, different results emerge from the same blood tested in different labs."

The United States is facing increasing international pressure to place limitations on the use of military sonar ... that has been linked to mass strandings of whales. The European Union Parliament -- the most prominent of four international bodies that have taken up the matter in recent months -- called in October for its member states to develop a moratorium on all types of military sonars, which use powerful sound to locate objects such as submarines. According to studies cited by the EU and the other world bodies, noise can interfere with the survival of the ocean creatures that depend on sound to navigate, find food, locate mates, avoid predators and communicate with one another. At high decibel levels, noise can kill. The U.S. Navy is the biggest user of midfrequency active sonar in the world -- and government officials have been loath to require permits to regulate its use. In more than a dozen instances dating back to the 1960s, however, whales have stranded themselves on the beaches and sometimes died at the time of naval training exercises miles away using midfrequency active sonar. An unprecedented stranding of 16 beaked and minke whales in the Bahamas in 2000 brought worldwide attention to military sonar. A NOAA investigation concluded that a Navy testing maneuver using midfrequency sonar -- by far the most commonly used type of sonar -- was the likely cause. Necropsies found signs of brain hemorrhaging, which is consistent with injury from sound.

Note: To contact your political and media representatives encouraging a ban dangerous sonar use, click here. For more on this important matter, click here.

The US passport is about to go electronic, with a tiny microchip embedded in its cover. The chip is the latest outpost in the battle to outwit tamperers. But it's also one that worries privacy advocates. The RFID (radio frequency identification) chip in each passport will contain the same personal data as now appear on the inside pages - name, date of birth, place of birth, issuing office - and a digitized version of the photo. But the 64K chip will be read remotely. And there's the rub. The scenario, privacy advocates say, could be as simple as you standing in line with your passport as someone walks by innocuously carrying a briefcase. Inside that case, a microchip reader could be skimming data from your passport to be used for identity theft. Or maybe authorities or terrorists want to see who's gathered in a crowd and surreptitiously survey your ID and track you. Why not choose a contact chip, where there would be no possibility of skimming, asks Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "There was another way to go, which was to put an electronic strip in the passport that would require contact." The State Department says it's just following international standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), under the umbrella of the United Nations. The ICAO specified the RFID ... at the behest of the United States. All countries that are part of the US visa-waiver program must use the new passports by Oct. 26, 2005. Mr. Steinhardt ... says the US pushed through the standards against the reservations of the Europeans. "Bush says at the G8 meeting, 'We have to adhere to the global standard,' as though we had nothing to do with it," he says in exasperation.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For more on the risk of RFID chips, click here.

Indonesian specialist Fred Burks ... is making a noisy exit from government service after 18 years of interpreting for top U.S. officials, including President Bush and former president Bill Clinton. Burks resigned last month in protest against what he sees as excessive government secrecy, and since then has been treating anybody who will listen with insider stories about private meetings he attended. Burks interpreted for Bush at an Oval Office meeting with Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri in September 2001, eight days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He says Bush displayed such a detailed grasp of Indonesian issues at the meeting that he came away thinking the president must have been fed information through a hidden earpiece. Burks says he is free to talk about his work as a contract interpreter for senior government officials because he was never required to sign a secrecy agreement. That changed last month when the State Department insisted he agree to a new contract that included a pledge never to disclose "any information" that he learned in the course of his government interpreting work to unauthorized outsiders. He refused. "It was ridiculous," said Burks, who learned Indonesian while teaching in Borneo in 1981 and living with an Indonesian family. "In theory, it meant I couldn't even tell my family where I was traveling if that information had not already been made public." He says he also has never had a security clearance. Burks's fluency in Indonesian and Mandarin Chinese made him a valued asset for the State Department.

Note: If the above link fails to function, click here. Mr. Burks agrees that some level of secrecy is necessary, but that current levels are far beyond tolerable. For brief descriptions of some of the fascinating meetings at which Mr. Burks was present, click here. For lots more on secrecy and an insider's perspective, click here.

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, wrote "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror." Between January 1996 and June 1999 I was in charge of running operations against Al Qaeda from Washington. When it comes to this small slice of the large U.S. national security pie, I speak with firsthand experience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically that during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sound intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden — either by capture or by U.S. military attack. I witnessed and documented, along with dozens of other CIA officers, instances where life-risking intelligence-gathering work of the agency's men and women in the field was wasted. I was never charged with deciding whether to act against Bin Laden. That decision properly belongs solely to senior White House officials. However, as a now-private American citizen, it is my right to question their judgment; I am entitled to know why the protection of Americans — most selfishly, my own children and grandchildren — was not the top priority of the senior officials who refused to act on the opportunities to attack Bin Laden provided by the clandestine service. Each of these officials have publicly argued that the intelligence was not "good enough" to act, but they almost always neglect to say that they were repeatedly advised that the intelligence was not going to get better and that Bin Laden was going to kill thousands of Americans if he was not stopped.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For many other serious questions around the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.