Government Corruption News Articles

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The knees buckle, the brain aches, the stomach turns. And suddenly, nobody feels like protesting anymore. Witnesses describe a minute-long blast of sound emanating from a white Israeli military vehicle. Within seconds, protestors began falling to their knees, unable to maintain their balance. An Israeli military source, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity, confirmed the existence of the Scream. "The intention is to disperse crowds with sound pulses that create nausea and dizziness," the Israel Defence Force spokesperson told the Toronto Star. The IDF is saying little about the science behind the Scream, citing classified information. But the technology is believed to be similar to the LRAD — Long-Range Acoustic Device — used by U.S. forces in Iraq as a means of crowd control. Hillel Pratt, a professor of neurobiology ... likens the effect of such technologies to simulated seasickness. "It doesn't necessarily have to be a loud sound. The combination of low frequencies at high intensities, for example, can create discrepancies in the inputs to the brain," said Pratt. Arik Asherman, a leader of Rabbis For Human Rights, was cautiously optimistic the Scream could make a positive difference. But Asherman said Israeli officials would be wise to use the Scream sparingly. "We need to remind ourselves the problem is not the demonstrations, but what the demonstrations are about," he said. "If this makes it any more difficult for Palestinians to express themselves in a non-violent way, that is problematic. The best way to disperse demonstrations is to deal with the actual issues.

Note: If the above link fails, click here.

Oil and gas ensure that the US backs the Uzbek dictator to the hilt. The bodies of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in Uzbekistan are scarcely cold, and already the White House is looking for ways to dismiss them. The conviction rate in criminal and political trials in Uzbekistan is over 99% - in President Karimov's torture chambers, everyone confesses. Karimov is very much George Bush's man in central Asia. There is not a senior member of the US administration who is not on record saying warm words about Karimov. There is not a single word recorded by any of them calling for free elections in Uzbekistan.

Note: The above article is particularly revealing in that it is written by the UK's former ambassador to Uzbekistan.

"This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record."

It is time...for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably high. Much of the current US nuclear policy has been in place since before I was secretary of defense, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years. On any given day...the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes' deliberation by the president and his advisors. After leaving the Defense Department, I became president of the World Bank. During my 13-year tenure, from 1968 to 1981, I was prohibited...from commenting publicly on issues of US national security. [Afterwards] I decided to go public with some information that I knew would be controversial, but that I felt was needed to inject reality into these increasingly unreal discussions about ... nuclear weapons. To launch weapons against a nuclear-equipped opponent would be suicidal. To do so against a nonnuclear enemy would be militarily unnecessary, morally repugnant, and politically indefensible. The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a very high risk of nuclear catastrophe. There is no way to reduce the risk to acceptable levels, other than to first eliminate the hair-trigger alert policy and later to eliminate or nearly eliminate nuclear weapons.

The government has told a federal appeals court that a suit by an F.B.I. translator who was fired after accusing the bureau of ineptitude should not be allowed to proceed because it would cause "significant damage to the national security and foreign policy of the United States." The case has become a lightning rod for critics who contend that the bureau retaliated against Ms. Edmonds and other whistle-blowers who have sought to expose management problems related to the antiterrorism campaign. The suit was dismissed in July after Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked a rarely used power and declared the case as falling under "state secret" privilege. The Justice Department retroactively classified a 2002 Congressional briefing about the case and some related letters from lawmakers, but this week it decided to permit the information to be released. The inspector general of the department concluded last month that the F.B.I. had failed to aggressively investigate Ms. Edmonds's accusations of espionage and fired her in large part for raising them. In a report that the department sought for months to keep classified, the inspector general issued a sharp rebuke to the bureau over its handling of Ms. Edmonds's accusations.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. This article fails to mention Ms. Edmonds claims that top individuals in government concealed critical information about 9/11 suggesting complicity by compromised politicians. For more, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Leroy Gordon Cooper, one of the nation's first astronauts who once set a space endurance record by traveling more than 3.3 million miles aboard Gemini 5 in 1965, died on Monday. Cooper served on the boards of directors as a technical consultant to a number of companies in the aerospace, electronics and energy fields. He also was the vice president for research and development for Walter E. Disney Enterprises Inc., from 1974-1980. In his post-NASA career, Cooper became known as an outspoken believer in UFOs and charged that the government was covering up its knowledge of extraterrestrial activity. "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth," he told a United Nations panel in 1985. "I feel that we need to have a top-level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the Earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion." He added, "For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us."

Note: The second to last sentence in an AP article on Gordon's death refers to a book he wrote: "Cooper in the book said that as an Air Force pilot in 1951 that he chased UFOs while based in Germany."

An ancient native American treatment for cancer has been shown to have a beneficial effect despite scepticism from the medical establishment. Chaparral, an evergreen desert shrub, has long been used by native Americans to treat cancer, colds, wounds, bronchitis, warts, and ringworm. But experts dismissed its worth, and warned it could be dangerous. Now researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina have shown an extract may shrink some tumours. Chaparral tea was widely used in the US as an alternative anti-cancer agent from the late 1950s to the 1970s. However, the American Cancer Society said there was no proof that it was an effective treatment for cancer - or any other disease. And the US Food and Drug Administration warned against its use after research showed it could damage the liver and the kidneys. However, initial results from the latest study show that an extract of the shrub appears not only to be safe, but to have a positive effect. The researchers tested a refined extract taken from chaparral called M4N. They injected it into the tumours of eight patients with advanced head and neck cancer that had not responded to other forms of treatment. The results were encouraging - patients seemed to tolerate it well, and there was no evidence of the serious liver damage previously associated with chaparral use. The study also produced some evidence that the extract had begun to shrink the tumours.

Note: Some believe that because cancer treatment brings huge profits, viable treatments which are inexpensive are strongly suppressed. For reliable evidence on this, click here and here.

What [Israeli historian Gad] Kroizer had discovered and later footnoted in an academic paper ... was the location of an ultrasecret jail where Israel has held Arabs in total seclusion for years, barred visits by the Red Cross and allegedly tortured inmates. Known as 1391, the facility is used as an interrogation center by a storied unit of Israel's military intelligence, whose members-all Arabic speakers-are trained to wring confessions from the toughest militants. Some of the methods are reminiscent of Abu Ghraib: nudity as a humiliation tactic, compromising photographs, sleep deprivation. In a few cases, at least, interrogators at 1391 appear to have gone beyond Israel's own hair-splitting distinction between torture and what a state commission referred to in 1987 as "moderate physical pressure." But the nightmare for those in 1391 is the isolation and the fear that no one knows where you are. The location of the compound is so hush-hush that a court this year banned a visit by an Israeli legislator. Prisoners describe being hooded everywhere at the facility except in their cells. Hassan Rawajbeh ... a member of the nearly disbanded Palestinian Preventive Security force ... was picked up by soldiers in Nablus 18 months ago. He was hooded, handcuffed and thrown on the floor of a van. When the hood was removed, he was in a tiny, windowless cell. The chamber contained no toilet, only a bucket in the corner, which ... his jailers would empty once every few weeks. A low buzzing droned constantly. For nearly four months, Rawajbeh saw no one but his interrogators, who kept him naked for days at a time and prevented him from going to the bathroom.

Iraq in flames, Washington an object of disgust. What to do? At this pivotal moment, CNN and Fox News are tipped off to a clip of an American citizen being beheaded. The victim is ... Nick Berg.The vile deed is deemed the work of al-Qaeda. The timing of the video was brilliant for the West. Media pundits judged the crime a deeper evil than the systemic torture of innocent Iraqis. But some people sensed a rat. But if it was not al-Qaeda, who? While this video shows a human body having its head chopped off, it does not necessarily portray an act of murder. A month before the discovery of [his] corpse, Berg had been released from custody. But whose custody? Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt ... claimed he was in the custody of Iraqi police. However, the Iraqi police chief [stated] "the Iraqi police never arrested the slain American". Berg's family are certain his jailers were the US military. His father, Michael, had been told so by the FBI. He has produced an email from a US consular official ... confirming that his son was in the hands of the US. In his final moments on screen Berg is wearing an orange jumpsuit of the kind familiar from Guantanamo Bay. His white chair is identical to those in the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures. During the decapitation, starting at the front of the throat, there is little sign of blood. The scream is wildly out of sync, sounds female, and is obviously dubbed. Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons ... agrees with other experts who find it highly probable that Berg had died before his decapitation. There's something fishy about this video. In the end, the question is: who killed Nick Berg, and why?

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For a CNN article raising other serious questions on Berg, click here. For more reliable information on how government can control and manipulate public perception, click here.

Skull and Bones is a shadowy, elite secret society that selects 15 new members each year from the senior class at Yale. It is known both for its celebrity membership - past "taps'' include William F. Buckley Jr., President William Howard Taft, and Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine - and for its bizarre rituals. The rites - said to include a "blood''-drinking initiation and oodles of frank sex talk by the once all-male undergrads (Bones started admitting women in 1992) - are much discussed but little known. This is, after all, a secret society. In her 2002 book, "Secrets of the Tomb,'' Alexandra Robbins speculated that the 2004 presidential election might pit Bonesman George W. Bush (Yale, 1968) against Bonesman John F. Kerry (Yale, 1966.) Good call! This organization [was] once deemed to be so secretive that members had to leave the room if the society's name was ever mentioned in public. Both Bush's father and his grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush, were Bonesmen. [Bonesman John Kerry's] second wife's first husband, the late senator John Heinz, was Bones, as was his father. GWB: "My senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society, so secret I can't say anything more" (from his 1999 campaign biography). JFK [John Kerry]: "There's not much I can say, Tim, because it's a secret" (to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press").

Note: If secret societies produce this many influential leaders, shouldn't the public have a right to know more about them? For lots more, click here.

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was ... a [Republican] congressman. Rumsfeld [was] the head of G. D. Searle & Co.. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. [It] called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession ... in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration [since] September 11, 2001. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role. "One of the awkward questions we faced ... was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." [Cheney's and Rumsfeld's] participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises ... also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades ... even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were ... a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States.

Note: If above link fails, click here. The author, James Mann, is a former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C. Apparently, Cheney and Rumsfeld don't find Congress to be very important.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/11/MN20927.DTL

Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing a push to deregulate the state's electricity markets -- a move embraced by business leaders and some energy analysts but criticized by many Democrats and consumer advocates as a return to the failed policies that sparked California's energy crisis. "Deregulation has already cost the state $50 billion, give or take," said Mike Florio, senior attorney for The Utility Reform Network. "Why on earth anyone would want to do that again is mystifying to us." Florio also said he was suspicious of Schwarzenegger's idea because former Enron Corp. Chairman and CEO Ken Lay met with the actor and others in the spring of 2001, when Lay was pushing deregulation in California. Schwarzenegger has said he doesn't remember details of the meeting.

Note: What was Schwarzenegger doing meeting with the CEO of Enron well over two years before the recall vote which gave him the governorship of California? Could it be big business had plans for him?

Computer users across Europe should encrypt all their e-mails, to avoid being spied on by a UK-US eavesdropping network, say Euro-MPs. The tentacles of the Echelon network stretch so far that the UK's involvement could constitute a breach of human rights, they say. The Euro-MPs have been studying Echelon for almost a year, after allegations that it has been used by the US to commit industrial espionage against European firms. They conclude that Echelon - whose existence is not officially acknowledged - is reading millions of e-mails and faxes sent every day by ordinary people. The US has denied the system even exists, and the UK refuses to give details, except to say that communications interception is a vital tool in the fight against "dangers to society". The Echelon operation is based at Fort Meade in Maryland, America, and at the UK's spy centre, GCHQ in Cheltenham.

Note: For another revealing BBC News report on Echelon, click here.

Anguish over the abduction and death of girls as young as eight at the hands of a convicted sex offender, Marc Dutroux, together with persistent allegations of official cover-ups, has been revived by an announcement that [Jacques Langlois], the chief investigating magistrate in the case, wants to reopen medical evidence of sexual assault on the children. And, in further disclosures ... a book by [Marc Verwilghen], the highly respected chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into the case, claims that his commission's findings were muzzled by political and judicial leaders to prevent details emerging of complicity in the crimes. In August 1996, [the children's] bodies were found buried in Mr Dutroux's back garden in Charleroi. They had disappeared 14 months before, and had apparently starved to death, locked in a cell in Mr Dutroux's basement. The bodies of two teenage girls were also found buried in the garden, with that of Bernard Weinstein, an associate with whom he had fallen out. Two other teenage girls were found alive in the basement cell after the police, who had previously searched the property three times without noticing it, finally broke into the house. Although there is plenty of evidence that Mr Dutroux kidnapped the children ... Mr Langlois now apparently wants to establish whether he [or anyone else] also sexually assaulted them. One of the rescued girls, Sabine Dardenne, 12, who was locked up in the cell for three months, told police of being taken to a 'beautiful white house' by Mr Dutroux and being sexually assaulted.

Note: Explore more excellent research proving a major cover-up of this case. Read a highly revealing essay on several cases of pedophilia rings involving top politicians. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

A hydrogen bomb that went missing for three months in the Mediterranean Sea is back in the hands of the U.S. military after being found the previous day. The bomb had been lost in January when two U.S. military planes, a KC-135 tanker and a B-52 carrying four thermonuclear weapons, collided during midair refueling. Three of the four bombs fell to the ground near Palomares, Spain. While none of them detonated with a nuclear explosion, the high-explosive triggers in two of the bombs went off upon impact and contaminated the area with radioactive material. A fourth bomb plunged into the water off Spain's southeastern coastline. Following the incident, the Spanish government announced it would no longer allow U.S. planes carrying nuclear weapons to fly over its territory. On March 17, the U.S. Navy, using a midget submarine called the Alvin [found] the bomb 2,500 feet underwater, intact and with its parachute still attached.

Note: You can access a Jan. 27, 1966 NY Times article on this incident for a small fee at this link.

Prince Khaled bin Farhan al-Saud sat in one of the few safe locations he frequents in Düsseldorf. He looked surprisingly relaxed for a hunted man. He described his constant fear of being abducted, the precautions he takes when venturing outside, and how German law enforcement officials routinely check on him to make sure he is all right. Recently, bin Farhan ... had incensed the kingdom’s leaders with his calls for human rights reforms. In June 2018 ... the Saudi Embassy in Cairo had contacted [his mother], and had a proposal: The kingdom wanted to mend relations with the prince and was willing to offer him $5.5 million as a goodwill gesture. When he followed up with Saudi officials, he realized the deal had a dangerous catch. They had told him he could collect his payment only if he personally came to a Saudi embassy or consulate. That immediately set off alarm bells. He declined the offer. Two weeks later ... bin Farhan saw a startling news report. Jamal Khashoggi - the Saudi Arabian journalist and Washington Post columnist who had been writing articles critical of his homeland and working clandestinely to undermine some of the government’s social media initiatives - had gone to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up paperwork. Minutes after his arrival ... Khashoggi was tortured and strangled by a Saudi hit squad. Bin Farhan ... realized all too clearly: By refusing to go to a Saudi consulate to pick up his payment, he might have narrowly avoided a similar fate.

Note: Read a highly revealing MSNBC report on this disturbing news. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key 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.