Government Corruption News Articles

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In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership." The letter, signed by Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael, said Tenet should have resigned in protest rather than take part in the administration's buildup to the war. (Read the full letter) Johnson is a former CIA intelligence official and registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000. Cannistraro is former head of the CIA's counterterrorism division. The writers said ... "your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war. CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused." The letter said CIA officers learned later that month Iraq had no contact with Osama bin Laden and that then-President Saddam Hussein considered the al Qaeda leader to be an enemy. Still, Tenet "went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to al Qaeda. "You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States."

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates, according to former department lawyers and public records and documents. Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. The administration ... has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare. Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft ... launched a ''Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative'' in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights. Several of [the eight fired U.S. attorneys] were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians. Virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001 ... has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington ... where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins. In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to one million.

Note: Doublespeak, like the "Ballot Access" initiative, is often used to disguise the fact that the effect of the initiative is the opposite of what the title suggests. Think about the results of the "War on Terror" and "War on Drugs." The amount of terror and drug use has expanded dramatically since these were initiated. Could this be a purposeful maneuver? For more, click here.

[ABC's talk show] "The View," by accident or design, has an almost eerie calibration to the public at large. For example, only one of the four co-hosts ... is a supporter of President Bush. In other words, 25% of the cast has a favorable opinion of Bush, pretty much in line with Bush's approval ratings nationally. Likewise, last year a Scripps Howard poll found that 36% of the U.S. public believes the government was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks. I estimate Rosie [O'Donnell] constitutes 36% of the cast. Why does pop culture matter? Because it reveals ... what is really on our minds. And what's on our minds lately is reasonable doubt. Actor Charlie Sheen [is] onboard to narrate a new version of the online 9/11 conspiracy documentary "Loose Change," with distribution by billionaire Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures. We're not talking about a couple of flaky moonbats in an Oakland basement. Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks. And just about everywhere you look, official narratives are coming unglued: Pat Tillman, for example, or the firing of eight federal prosecutors. The abduction of British sailors in what Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed was indisputably Iraqi territorial waters has proved to be quite disputable. [An] ex-British ambassador claims the map used by the Ministry of Defence to support its case is a fake. I am not a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. At the same time, I'm certain we don't know all there is to know about those events. The data stream has been so thoroughly corrupted. Weapons of mass destruction. Abu Ghraib. The silencing of climate scientists. It's hard for the ministries of Washington to make an appeal to authority when they have been proven so unreliable.

Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.

Dorothy Hansen used to pay her taxes faithfully every year - until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since then, the 87-year-old Sebastopol resident has stopped filing her income tax returns to show her disapproval of the war. "I am very sure that I don't want to have any part in killing people and I certainly don't want a part in any wars that do just that," Hansen said. With the tax-filing deadline just two weeks away, some... are using it as an opportunity to protest the war by withholding their tax dollars to fund it. Known as war tax resisters, they consider it an act of civil disobedience. Some withhold only a symbolic portion of what they owe - $10.40, for example, to represent the 1040 tax form - while others, like Hansen, refuse to pay anything at all. Many will redirect their tax dollars to a charity of their choice. The risks can be costly if a resister is caught. Some resisters have had their wages garnisheed or property seized. Jesse Weller, an IRS spokesman, said the agency does not keep statistics on war tax resisters. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee ... said they have no way of tracking their numbers either. Weller said the IRS goes after promoters of tax resistance more aggressively than those who participate in the movement and warns that anyone who gets caught can face a criminal or civil penalty. Nonetheless, war tax resisters persist. Hansen said she will stand by her beliefs regardless of the consequences.

Note: See the letter WantToKnow.info founder Fred Burks wrote to the IRS on why he is withholding war taxes. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

It is nearly impossible to fathom what self-delusion could have convinced Senator Pete Domenici ... that he had a right to call a federal prosecutor at home and question him about a politically sensitive investigation. That disturbing tale is one of several revealed this week in Congressional hearings called to look into the firing of eight [U.S.] attorneys. The hearings left little doubt that the Bush administration had all eight – an unprecedented number – ousted for political reasons. But it points to even wider abuse; prosecutors suggest that three Republican members of Congress may have tried to pressure the attorneys into doing their political bidding. It already seemed clear that the Bush administration’s purge had trampled on prosecutorial independence. Now Congress and the Justice Department need to investigate possible ethics violations, and perhaps illegality. Two of the fired prosecutors testified that they had been dismissed after resisting what they suspected were importunings to use their offices to help Republicans win elections. A third described what may have been a threat of retaliation if he talked publicly about his firing. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s claim that these prosecutors were fired for poor performance was always difficult to believe. Now it’s impossible.

Note: If the U.S. Attorney General is lying, who can we trust?

The White House approved the firings of seven U.S. attorneys late last year after senior Justice Department officials identified the prosecutors they believed were not doing enough to carry out President Bush's policies ... White House and Justice Department officials said yesterday. The list of prosecutors was assembled last fall, based largely on complaints from members of Congress, law enforcement officials and career Justice Department lawyers, administration officials said. One of the complaints came from Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), who specifically raised concerns with the Justice Department last fall about the performance of then-U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias of New Mexico. Iglesias has alleged that two unnamed New Mexico lawmakers pressured him in October to speed up the indictments of Democrats before the elections. Since the mass firings were carried out three months ago, Justice Department officials have consistently portrayed them as personnel decisions based on the prosecutors' "performance-related" problems. But, yesterday, officials acknowledged that the ousters were based primarily on the administration's unhappiness with the prosecutors' policy decisions and revealed the White House's role in the matter. At least five of the prosecutors, including Iglesias, were presiding over public corruption investigations when they were fired.

Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran. Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me” — only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran. Without any authorization from the public, which spoke so loudly and clearly to you in November’s elections — without any consultation with a Congress ... you seem to be ready to make an open-ended commitment (on America’s behalf) to do whatever you want, in Iran. Our military, Mr. Bush, is already stretched so thin by this bogus adventure in Iraq that even a majority of serving personnel are willing to tell pollsters that they are dissatisfied with your prosecution of the war. You, sir, have become the president who cried wolf. Many of us are as inclined to believe you just shuffled the director of national intelligence over to the State Department because he thought you were wrong about Iran. Many of us are as inclined to believe you just put a pilot in charge of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because he would be truly useful in an air war next door in Iran. Your assurances ... that we trust you have lost all shape and texture. You have lost the military. You have lost the Congress to the Democrats. You have lost many of the Republicans. You are losing the credibility, not just of your presidency, but more importantly of the office itself. And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones.

Note: For powerful information from a highly decorated U.S. General on the real reasons behind war, click here.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy seemed likely to follow his brother, John, into the White House. Then, on June 6, he was assassinated - apparently by a lone gunman. But Shane O'Sullivan says he has evidence implicating three CIA agents in the murder: On June 5 1968, Robert Kennedy wins the California Democratic primary. After midnight, he finishes his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles ... in a crowded pantry when 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan steps down from a tray-stacker with a "sick, villainous smile" on his face and starts firing at Kennedy with an eight-shot revolver. As Kennedy lies dying on the pantry floor, Sirhan is arrested as the lone assassin. He carries the motive in his shirt-pocket (a clipping about Kennedy's plans to sell bombers to Israel). But the autopsy report suggests Sirhan could not have fired the shots that killed Kennedy. And more bullet-holes are found in the pantry than Sirhan's gun can hold, suggesting a second gunman. Three years ago, I started writing a screenplay about the assassination [and was] caught up in a strange tale of second guns and "Manchurian candidates" (as the movie termed brainwashed assassins). As I researched the case, I uncovered new video and photographic evidence suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing. Morales died of a heart attack in 1978, weeks before he was to be called before the HSCA [House Select Committee on Assassinations]. Joannides died in 1990. Campbell may still be out there somewhere, in his early 80s. Given the positive identifications we have gathered on these three, the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department need to explain what they were doing there.

Folker Heinicke always had the feeling that something about his upbringing just wasn’t right. Raised in a German home full of wealth and privilege did not dull his notions that something was missing, but it would be decades before he would learn the full truth: he was the child of a Nazi program to strengthen the German race with Aryan blood. He and other children — known as “Lebensborn Kinder” or “source of life” kids — were the product of parents chosen for their traits to breed Hitler’s idealized blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryan race. The Lebensborn program was the mirror opposite of the Nazi’s other, more hideous racial experiments. While millions of Jews and others deemed “undesirable,” were slaughtered, these children were carefully selected for their Aryan qualities and brought into the world in comfortable surroundings, well away from the Allied bombing raids. Of the estimated 5,000 to 8,000 born into Lebensborn homes in Germany, some were raised by their birth mothers, but many were given over to families of high-ranking SS officers to be raised according to Nazi doctrine.

Note: For more on the Lebensborn project, click here. To understand more about Nazi programs of mind control, click here.

In a case that echoes the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal, two Northern California Republican congressmen used their official positions to try to stop a federal investigation of a wealthy Texas businessman who provided them with political contributions. Reps. John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo joined forces with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by federal banking regulators into the affairs of Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz, documents recently obtained by The Times show. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was seeking $300 million from Hurwitz for his role in the collapse of a Texas savings and loan that cost taxpayers $1.6 billion. The investigation was ultimately dropped. Doolittle and Pombo — both considered protégés of DeLay — used their power as members of the House Resources Committee to subpoena the agency's confidential records on the case, including details of the evidence FDIC investigators had compiled on Hurwitz. Then, in 2001, the two congressmen inserted many of the sensitive documents into the Congressional Record, making them public and accessible to Hurwitz's lawyers, a move that FDIC officials said damaged the government's ability to pursue the banker. The FDIC's chief spokesman characterized what Doolittle and Pombo did as "a seamy abuse of the legislative process."

U.S. military officials in Iraq were fully aware that a Pentagon contractor regularly paid Iraqi newspapers to publish positive stories about the war, and made it clear that none of the stories should be traced to the United States, according to several current and former employees of Lincoln Group, the Washington-based contractor. In contrast to assertions by military officials in Baghdad and Washington, interviews and Lincoln Group documents show that the information campaign waged over the last year was designed to cloak any connection to the U.S. military. "In clandestine parlance, Lincoln Group was a 'cutout' -- a third party -- that would provide the military with plausible deniability," said a former Lincoln Group employee. A number of workers who carried out Lincoln Group's offensive, including a $20-million two-month contract to influence public opinion in Iraq...describe a campaign that was unnecessarily costly, poorly run and largely ineffective at improving America's image in Iraq. Lincoln Group...had little public relations or communications experience when it won its first psychological operations contract last year. Yet it has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the information war, and now has 20 Pentagon contracts.

A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday. The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to identify the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. Weldon declined to identify the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as "2.5 terabytes" as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress, he added.

Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast. One is...Halliburton Co. (Research) subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton. Allbaugh formally registered as a lobbyist for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root in February. Allbaugh is also a friend of Michael Brown, director of FEMA who was removed as head of Katrina disaster relief and sent back to Washington amid allegations he had padded his resume. Halliburton continues to be a source of income for Cheney, who served as its chief executive officer from 1995 until 2000. According to tax filings released in April, Cheney's income included $194,852 in deferred pay from the company.

With Congress poised for a final vote on the energy bill, the Environmental Protection Agency made an 11th-hour decision Tuesday to delay the planned release of an annual report on fuel economy. But a copy of the report, embargoed for publication Wednesday, was sent to The New York Times by a member of the E.P.A. communications staff just minutes before the decision was made to delay it until next week. The contents of the report show that loopholes in American fuel economy regulations have allowed automakers to produce cars and trucks that are significantly less fuel-efficient, on average, than they were in the late 1980's. The average 2004 model car or truck got 20.8 miles per gallon, about 6 percent less than the 22.1 m.p.g. of the average new vehicle sold in the late 1980's, according to the report. Releasing the report this week would have been inopportune for the Bush administration, its critics said, because it would have come on the eve of a final vote in Congress on energy legislation six years in the making. The bill, as it stands, largely ignores auto mileage regulations.

Note: For more, see our New Energy Information Center.

A British lawmaker forcefully denied allegations in a Senate hearing yesterday that he received rights to purchase millions of barrels of Iraqi oil at a discount from Saddam Hussein's government, and he delivered a fiery attack on three decades of U.S. policy toward Iraq. George Galloway, a formidable debater recently ousted from the British Labor Party after attacking Prime Minister Tony Blair for supporting the war in Iraq, used his appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as a forum to challenge the veracity of the Bush administration's case for going to war. He also unleashed a personal attack against panel Chairman Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), calling his investigation the "mother of all smoke screens" designed to "divert attention from the crimes that you supported" by endorsing President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

Important Note: Mr. Galloway's statement was not posted on the website of the Senate Committee tasked with posting these matters. Whereas testimony of all other panel members is provided, for Mr. Galloway, the website states "Mr. Galloway did not submit a written statement." Mr. Galloway did submit a statement, and it has been posted many places on the Internet, and published widely in articles like that above. See the relevant Senate Committee webpage at:
http://hsgac.senate.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=232

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.

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.

One winter night in 1965, eyewitnesses saw a fireball streak over North America, bank, turn and appear to crash in western Pennsylvania. Then swarms of military personnel combed the area and a tarp-covered flatbed truck rumbled out of the woods. Now a former White House chief of staff and an international investigative journalist want to know what the Pentagon knows, calling on it to release classified files about that and other incidents involving unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. Ex-Clinton aide John Podesta...was one of numerous political and media heavyweights on hand in Washington, D.C., to announce a new group to gain access to secret government records about UFOs. The Coalition for Freedom of Information (CFI) is pressing the Air Force for documents involving Project Moon Dust and Operation Blue Fly, clandestine operations reported to have existed decades ago to investigate UFOs and retrieve objects of unknown origins. Backed by the Sci-Fi channel, the CFI hopes to reduce the scientific ridicule factor in this country when the topic is UFOs.

U.S. intelligence officials had several warnings that terrorists might attack the United States on its home soil -- even using airplanes as weapons -- well before the September 11, 2001 attacks, two congressional committees said in a report. In 1998, U.S. intelligence had information that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosives-laden airplane into the World Trade Center, according to a joint inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees. However, the Federal Aviation Administration found the plot "highly unlikely given the state of that foreign country's aviation program," and believed a flight originating outside the United States would be detected before it reached its target inside the country, the report said. "The FBI's New York office took no action on the information," it said. Another alert came just a month before the attacks, the report said, when the CIA sent a message to the FAA warning of a possible hijacking "or an act of sabotage against a commercial airliner." The information was linked to a group of Pakistanis based in South America. That warning did not mention using an airliner as a weapon and, the report said, "there was apparently little, if any, effort by intelligence community analysts to produce any strategic assessments of terrorists using aircraft as weapons."

Note: For many unanswered questions about the official account of 9/11 asked by highly-respected professors and officials, click here and here.

Emergency operations officials in Allegheny County and Pittsburgh hadn't trained for what happened Sept. 11. "Never in our wildest dreams did it ever come to the table that they would be using passenger aircraft as missiles," said Bob Full, chief of emergency operations for Allegheny County. It is clear from 911 tapes that local officials had less than 15 minutes' warning that the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 was in Pittsburgh airspace before the plane crashed at 10:06 a.m. in Somerset County, killing all 44 people aboard. Full learned about the errant plane at 9:53 a.m. That's when he got a call alerting him that the control tower at Pittsburgh International Airport had been evacuated. Thirteen minutes earlier, he had talked to an airport official who had no indication of any threat. Between those two conversations, the Pittsburgh tower had received a call from the Cleveland air traffic control tower, saying a plane was heading toward Pittsburgh and refusing to communicate with controllers. The FAA ordered the Pittsburgh control tower evacuated at 9:49 a.m.

Note: Why on Earth would they have evacuated the control tower from which they could best monitor what was going on with errant Flight 93? Could it be someone didn't want traffic control to see what was really going on? For lots more, click here and here.

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.