Government Corruption News Articles

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Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of what really happened on 9/11, citizen investigator Aidan Monaghan has filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with federal agencies such as the FBI, SEC, [and] Department of the Navy. Agency after agency has refused to comply with his requests, instead claiming that the information cannot be found, does not exist, [or is "exempt from disclosure."] The FBI has put an exemption on all of their 9/11 information and will release information only if compelled to do so by a lawsuit, of which Monaghan has filed two. The list of FOIAs that Monaghan has filed which have yielded no information is long. He asked the Secret Service for documents that reveal what time former Vice President Dick Cheney entered the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), as well as documents pertaining to the names of persons admitted to PEOC. Reply: no records or documents pertaining to your request. He asked the SEC for a bibliography of the investigation records that were located in the SEC’s offices on floors 11-13 in World Trade Center 7. The reply: did not locate or identify any information responsive to your request. Monaghan asked the Naval Surface Warfare Center for records about the research and development of nano-sized aluminum powders or nano-sized iron oxide powders. Reply: have not found any records responsive to your request. “I’m beginning to wonder if the FOIA is just a lot of theatre for public consumption to provide a perception that yes, government is accessible, it’s transparent,” said Monaghan. “For two years now I’ve tried to pull as much 9/11 info from the federal government as I can, and the most noteworthy thing I’ve found is the absence of information. Material that should be there just isn’t.”

Note: For lots more on government secrecy from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

Pharmaceutical firms need incentives, including lucrative patents, to keep creating drugs and vaccines against emergent threats such as the H1N1 influenza pandemic, the World Health Organization's head said on Tuesday. "Progress in public health depends on innovation. Some of the greatest strides forward for health have followed the development and introduction of new medicines and vaccines," said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said. Chan, who last month declared a full pandemic underway from the H1N1 virus, said that patents can help ensure that companies develop medicines to "stay ahead of the development of drug resistance" in diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. The discovery of isolated H1N1 infections that resist the anti-viral Tamiflu, made by Roche and Gilead, and the global scramble to secure flu vaccines have shown the importance of robust research and development, Chan said. "Innovation is needed to keep pace with the emergence of new diseases, including pandemic influenza caused by the new H1N1 virus," she told a meeting on intellectual property and health, a contentious issue that has divided rich and poor nations.

Note: How much more blatant can it get? The WHO is telling us to pump money into the corrupt pharmaceutical corporations, who make huge profits from fear mongering and health disasters. When profit drives the health industry, which do you think comes first, money or public health? For lots more revealing, reliable information on the fear-mongering around swine flu, click here and here.

Noor Habib's hands shake as he draws a picture of how he says he was abused. He claims that he was taken to a small, darkened cell where his arms were tied to the ceiling and he was made to stand in waist-deep water for six hours at a time. He says he was beaten, threatened with dogs, and deprived of sleep. Habib was an inmate at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, an American military detention centre outside Kabul. Over a period of more than two months, we tracked down 27 former detainees. There were others, but they were afraid to speak or had been warned not to. Many allegations of ill-treatment appear repeatedly in the interviews; physical abuse, the use of stress positions, excessive heat or cold, unbearably loud noise, being forced to remove clothes in front of female soldiers and in four cases, being threatened with death at gunpoint. All the men who spoke to us were interviewed in isolation and they were all asked the same questions. They were held at times between 2002 and 2008 and they were all accused of belonging to or helping al-Qaeda or the Taliban. None of the inmates were charged with any offence or put on trial. The camp has held thousands of people over the last eight years. Most of the inmates are Afghans but some were captured abroad and brought here under a process known as "extraordinary rendition", including at least two Britons. The Obama administration says they are dangerous men and it classifies them as "terrorist suspects" and "enemy combatants" rather than "prisoners of war". It is a legal classification that critics say deliberately denies inmates access to lawyers or the right to appeal or even complain about their treatment.

Note: For more revelations from reliable, verifiable sources of the horrific abuses carried out under US direction at secret prisons worldwide, click here.

A British man spoke publicly for the first time yesterday to accuse MI5 officers of forcing him to confess to masterminding the July 7 bombings. Jamil Rahman claims UK security officers were behind his arrest in 2005 in Bangladesh. He says he was beaten repeatedly by local officials who also threatened to rape him and his wife. Mr Rahman, who is suing the Home Office, said a pair of MI5 officers who attended his torture and interrogation would leave the room while he was beaten. He claims when he told the pair he had been tortured they merely answered: 'They haven't done a very good job on you.' Mr Rahman told the BBC: 'They threatened my family. They go to me, "In the UK, gas leaks happen, if your family house had a gas leak and everyone got burnt, there's no problems, we can do that easily".' He says he eventually made a false confession of involvement in the July 7 bomb plots. The extraordinary allegations will add to pressure on UK ministers to come clean over the way Britain's intelligence agencies have been allowed to gather evidence around the world in the eight years since the September 11 attacks. Jamil Rahman, a former civil servant from south Wales, is a British citizen who moved to Bangladesh in 2005 and married a woman he met there. He returned to the UK last year. He said: 'It was all to do with the British. Jamil Rahman is one of a number of former detainees who accuse the British Government colluded in their torture abroad. His account echoes that of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, who said he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco with MI5's knowledge. The 30-year-old Ethiopian says he was beaten and deprived of sleep to try to make him confess to an Al Qaeda 'dirty bomb' plot, and his treatment is now the subject of an unprecedented police investigation into MI5's conduct.

Note: For lots more on the hidden strategies used to maintain the "war on terror", click here.

David F. Wherley Jr., the head of the Washington National Guard who scrambled jets over the city during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was among those killed in the worst commuter train crash in the city’s history, officials said. Wherley’s wife, Ann, was also among the nine people killed when a train plowed into the rear of a stopped train during rush hour on June 22, Quintin Peterson, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department, said in a telephone interview. Both were 62 and lived in southeast Washington. Wherley was commander of the 113th Fighter Wing at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland during the September 2001 terrorist attacks and sent up aircraft with orders to protect the White House and the Capitol, according to the 9/11 Commission report. He commanded the District of Columbia National Guard from 2003 to 2008, the unit said in a statement. Wherley flew T-38 training jets and F-105 Thunderchief and F-4 Phantom combat jets during a military career that began in 1969, according to the guard’s statement. It said he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Fordham University in New York City in 1969, and a master’s in business administration from the University of Maryland in 1977.

Note: Could there be something more than a mere accident behind the death of the commander of the air defense forces over Washington DC on 9/11? Many questions continue to swirl concerning what was in the air over the city that morning, what was launched by Gen. Wherley and when, and why no interception of an attack aircraft approaching the Pentagon occurred. He knew more than the public does about what really took place in those crucial hours, but he will now not be available for questioning should a real investigation into the 9/11 attacks take place. For lots more on the suspicions that surround the official explanation and calls by highly respected citizens for just such an investigation, click here and here.

In its attempts to quash weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon has been trying novel ways to track down dangerous materiel. For years, DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] has been trying to train insects and bugs to sniff out toxic substances, providing more sensitive detection, as well as access that conventional sensors might not have. The newest twist on this concept is a plan to link up armies of the cyborg bugs in a peer-to-peer, or insect-to-insect, network that will allow them to communicate with each other and with their human masters. This next approach will implant insects with a chip that reads certain muscle twitches, which correspond to the presence of certain chemicals. The chips will then modify the chirps of insects like cicadas or crickets into an electronic signal that could be transmitted to other chipped insects in the area. Information about detected weaponized chemicals could bounce around this mobile insect network, and then be picked up by humans. The idea of creating a decentralized communication network between free-roaming insects could radically increase the bugs' range of detection.

Note: For a video and more on this, see the New Scientist article at this link.

In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly. Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.” His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.” Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique. “I think it was sanitized by the way it was described” in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch. On “World News,” ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself “never carried out any of the waterboarding.” Still, he told ABC that the actions had “disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.” A video of the interview was no longer on ABC's website.

Note: For the transcript of the original ABC interview of John Kiriakou, click here. To watch a video of the interview which ABC News removed from its website, click here.

American authorities reportedly refused an Air France flight from Paris to Mexico entry into US airspace because a left-wing journalist writing a book on the CIA was on board. Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for Le Monde Diplomatique and has written on revolutionary movements in Cuba and Colombia , figured on the US authorities' "no-fly list". A spokesman for Mr Ospina's French publisher, Le Temps des Cerises, said: "Hernando, who was heading to Nicaragua to research a report, thus found out that he is on a 'no-fly list' that bans a number of people from flying to or even over the United States." Some 50,000 people are said to be on the list set up under George W. Bush, the former US president. The publisher accused the Central Intelligence Agency of being behind Mr Ospina's blacklisting, pointing out that the journalist was currently researching a book about the spy agency. "It shows to what degree its paranoia (has reached)," it said. Critics claim that [the list] has been abusively extended to peaceful critics of US policy.

Note: For many disturbing reports from major media sources on the increasing threats to civil liberties under the pretext of the "war on terrorism," click here.

Yesterday was a great day for the people of Appalachia and for all of America. In a bold departure from Bush-era energy policy, the Obama administration suspended a coal company's permit to dump debris from its proposed mountaintop mining operation into a West Virginia valley and stream. In addition, the administration promised to carefully review upward of 200 such permits awaiting approval by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Mountaintop-removal coal mining is the greatest environmental tragedy ever to befall our nation. This radical form of strip mining has already flattened the tops of 500 mountains, buried 2,000 miles of streams, devastated our country's oldest and most diverse temperate forests, and blighted landscapes famous for their history and beauty. Using giant earthmovers and millions of tons of explosives, coal moguls have eviscerated communities, destroyed homes, and uprooted and sickened families with coal and rock dust, and with blasting, flooding and poisoned water, all while providing far fewer jobs than does traditional underground mining. The Corps has been working overtime to oblige impatient coal barons by quickly issuing the pending permits. Each such permit amounts to a death sentence for streams, mountains and communities. Taken together, these pending permits threatened to lay waste to nearly 60,000 acres of mountain landscape, destroy 400 valleys and bury more than 200 miles of streams. The Corps already had issued a dozen permits before the White House stepped in.

A silent $1 trillion "Run on Britain" by foreign investors was revealed yesterday in the latest statistical releases from the Bank of England. The external liabilities of banks operating in the UK – that is monies held in the UK on behalf of foreign investors – fell by $1 trillion (Ł700bn) between the spring and the end of 2008, representing a huge loss of funds and of confidence in the City of London. Some $597.5bn was lost to the banks in the last quarter of last year alone, after a ... massive $682.5bn haemorrhaged in the second quarter of 2008 – a record. About 15 per cent of the monies held by foreigners in the UK were withdrawn over the period. This is by far the largest withdrawal of foreign funds from the UK in recent decades – about 10 times what might flow out during a "normal" quarter. The revelation will fuel fears that the UK's reputation as a safe place to hold funds is being fatally compromised by the acute crisis in the banking system and a general trend to financial protectionism internationally. The slide in sterling – it has shed a quarter of its value since mid-2007 – has been both cause and effect of the run on London, seemingly becoming a self-fulfilling phenomenon. The danger is that the heavy depreciation of the pound could become a rout if confidence completely evaporates. Paranoia that the UK could follow Iceland into effective national insolvency and jibes about "Reykjavik on Thames" will find an unwelcome substantiation in these statistics.

Note: For many deep revelations of the realities of the world financial crisis from reliable sources, click here.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said the fund it uses to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up amid a surge in bank failures, as she responded to an industry outcry against new fees approved by the agency. “Without these assessments, the deposit insurance fund could become insolvent this year,” Bair wrote in a March 2 letter to the industry. “A large number” of bank failures may occur through 2010 because of “rapidly deteriorating economic conditions.” The fund, which lost $33.5 billion in 2008, was drained by 25 bank failures last year. Sixteen banks have failed so far this year, further straining the fund. Smaller banks are outraged over the one-time fee ... Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said yesterday. The agency, which has released the change for 30 days of public comment, could modify the assessment to shift the burden to the large banks “that caused this train wreck,” Fine said. “Community bankers are feeling like they are paying for the incompetence and greed of Wall Street,” he said. Consumers should watch this issue closely, said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director at U.S. PIRG, a Boston- based consumer-watchdog group. “I wouldn’t take their money out of the bank yet,” Mierzwinski said. “If the FDIC is saying that there is this serious problem, then we should all be concerned. I think there is a chance the FDIC is going to have to ask taxpayers for money in the future.”

Note: For lots more on the financial crisis from reliable sources, click here.

Executives at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and hundreds of financial institutions receiving federal aid aren’t likely to be affected by pay restrictions announced yesterday by President Barack Obama. The rules, created in response to growing public anger about the record bonuses the financial industry doled out last year, will apply only to top executives at companies that need “exceptional” assistance in the future. The limits aren’t retroactive, meaning firms that have already taken government money won’t be subject to the restrictions unless they have to come back for more. Pay caps may provide the political cover the administration needs to deliver additional infusions of capital into the financial sector. Obama ... “is not proposing to go back and get that $18.4 billion in bonuses back,” Laura Thatcher, head of law firm Alston & Bird’s executive compensation practice in Atlanta, said of the cash bonuses New York banks paid last year, the sixth-biggest haul in history. “Right now, we have not clamped down” on pay at banks. In addition, some executives may be compensated for the potential reduced salaries with restricted stock grants, which may result in huge paydays after the bank repays the government assistance with interest. “They’re just allowing companies to defer compensation,” said Graef Crystal, a former compensation consultant. The restrictions are “a joke,” he said, because “if the government is paid pack, you can be sure that the stock will have risen hugely.”

Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the realities behind the Wall Street bailout, click here.

In a sweeping critique ... an expert panel of the National Research Council said the federal government was not doing enough to identify potential health and environmental risks from engineered nanomaterials. Nanomaterials are engineered on the scale of a billionth of a meter, perhaps 1/10,000 the width of a human hair. They are turning up in a range of items including consumer products like toothpaste and tennis rackets and industrial products like degreasers or adhesives. But some experts say they may pose health or environmental risks. For example, researchers in Scotland reported this year that carbon nanotubes may pose the same health risks as asbestos. “Industry wants to run with it,” said Andrew D. Maynard, chief science adviser to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, who was the chairman of the panel. But he added, “one of the big barriers at the moment is understanding how to use it safely.” The panel analyzed the risk research strategy of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the program to coordinate federal efforts in nanotechnology research and development. Its report concluded that the initiative’s strategy “does not present a vision, contain a clear set of goals, have a plan of action for how the goals are to be achieved, or describe mechanisms to review and evaluate funded research and assess whether progress has been achieved.” An informal coalition of environmental and business organizations praised the report, saying that for three years they had been urging the federal government to do more to assess potential health and environmental effects of nanomaterials.

Note: For many important articles on health issues from reliable sources, click here.

Thanks to the Sept. 11 interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson of ABC News, the Bush Doctrine has become part of the American vocabulary. Although it has been a fateful doctrine - it was used to justify the attack on Iraq - many Americans reported that they were as clueless about it as Gov. Palin. So what is the Bush Doctrine? According to international law as generally understood since the creation of the United Nations, a pre-emptive attack is legal only if a country has certain knowledge that an attack on it is imminent - too imminent for the matter to be taken to the U.N. Security Council. Pre-emptive war is different from preventive war, in which a country, fearing that another country may become strong enough to threaten it at some time in the future, attacks it to prevent this possibility. Preventive wars are illegal under international law. This distinction, however, creates a terminological problem: Although preventive war is worse than pre-emptive war, to most ears preemption sounds worse. Many people, therefore, speak of pre-emptive war when they mean preventive war. To avoid confusion, we can use the term pre-emptive-preventive war. Neoconservatives, the most powerful of whom is Vice President Dick Cheney, had long disliked the idea that America's use of military power could be constrained by the prohibition against preemptive-preventive war. In 1992, his last year as secretary of defense, Cheney produced a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance that said the United States should use force to "pre-empt" and "preclude threats." After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the neocons were able to turn their wish into U.S. policy.

Note: This article is by WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin. He analyzes the significance of the 9/11 attacks for the acceptance of the Bush Doctrine in more detail in his recent book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, pointing out that the author of the document which first made the doctrine official policy was Philip Zelikow, who then later became executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

Once upon a time, a politician took campaign contributions and favors from a friendly constituent who happened to run a savings and loan association. The contributions were generous: They came to about $200,000 in today's dollars, and on top of that there were several free vacations for the politician and his family, along with private jet trips and other perks. The politician voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of S&Ls, and in 1987, when he learned that his constituent's S&L was the target of a federal investigation, he met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off. That politician was John McCain, and his generous friend was Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. While he was courting McCain and other senators and urging them to oppose tougher regulation of S&Ls, Keating was also investing his depositors' federally insured savings in risky ventures. In 1989, [Lincoln] went belly up -- and more than 20,000 Lincoln customers saw their savings vanish. Keating went to prison, and McCain's Senate career almost ended. Together with the rest of the so-called Keating Five ... McCain was investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee and ultimately reprimanded for "poor judgment." But the savings and loan crisis mushroomed. Eventually, the government spent about $125 billion in taxpayer dollars to bail out hundreds of failed S&Ls. The $125 billion seems like small change compared to the $700-billion price tag for the Bush administration's proposed Wall Street bailout. But the root causes of both crises are the same: a lethal mix of deregulation and greed.

There is apparently no limit to the Bush administration’s desire to invade Americans’ privacy in the name of national security. According to members of Congress, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is preparing to give the F.B.I. broad new authority to investigate Americans — without any clear basis for suspicion that they are committing a crime. Opening the door to sweeping investigations of this kind would be an invitation to the government to spy on people based on their race, religion or political activities. Mr. Mukasey has not revealed the new guidelines. But according to senators whose staff have been given limited briefings, the rules may also authorize the F.B.I. to use an array of problematic investigative techniques. Among these are pretext interviews, in which agents do not honestly represent themselves while questioning a subject’s neighbors and work colleagues. The F.B.I. has a long history of abusing its authority to spy on domestic groups, including civil rights and anti-war activists, and there is a real danger that the new rules would revive those dark days. Clearly, the Bush administration cannot be trusted to get the balance between law enforcement and civil liberties right. It has repeatedly engaged in improper and illegal domestic spying — notably in the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program. The F.B.I. and the White House no doubt want to push the changes through before a new president is elected. There is no reason to rush to adopt rules that have such important civil liberties implications.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey confirmed plans ... to loosen post-Watergate restrictions on the FBI's national security and criminal investigations. Mukasey said he expected criticism of the new rules because "they expressly authorize the FBI to engage in intelligence collection inside the United States." The Justice Department ... is expected to publicly release the final version within several more weeks. Even then, portions are expected to remain classified for national security reasons. Nonetheless, Mukasey provided enough detail Wednesday to alarm civil libertarians. Michael German, a former veteran FBI agent who is now policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said if Mukasey moves ahead with the new rules as he describes them, he'll be weakening restrictions originally put in place after the Watergate scandal to rein in the FBI's domestic Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. "I'm concerned with the way the attorney general frames the problem," German said. "He talks about 'arbitrary or irrelevant differences' between criminal and national security investigations but these were corrections originally designed to prevent the type of overreach the FBI engaged in for years." German said recent events demonstrated that Mukasey needed to strengthen the FBI's guidelines, not "water them down. ... What the attorney general is doing is expanding the bureau's intelligence collection without addressing the mismanagement within the FBI. If you have an agency collecting more with less oversight, it's only going to get worse."

Note: For many disturbing reports on increasing threats to civil liberties from reliable sources, click here.

The United States this year will have spent [at least] $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released [on August 12]. The report, by the Congressional Budget Office ... will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies. The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield. The budget office’s report found that from 2003 to 2007, the government awarded contracts in Iraq worth about $85 billion, and that the administration was now awarding contracts at a rate of $15 billion to $20 billion a year. At that pace, contracting costs will surge past the $100 billion mark before the end of the year. Through 2007, spending on outside contractors accounted for 20 percent of the total costs of the war, the budget office found. The dependence on private companies to support the war effort has led to questions about whether political favoritism has played a role in the awarding of multibillion-dollar contracts.

Note: For many disturbing reports on the realities of the Afghan and Iraq wars from major media sources, click here.

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer’s gripping new account of the war on terror, is really the story of two wars: the far-flung battle against Islamic radicalism, and the bitter, closed-doors domestic struggle over whether the president should have limitless power to wage it. The war on terror, according to Ms. Mayer, ... was a "political battle cloaked in legal strategy, an ideological trench war" waged by a small group of true believers whose expansive views of executive power she traces from the Nixon administration through the Iran-contra scandal to the panicked days after 9/11. Ms. Mayer’s prime movers and main villains are Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel (now chief of staff) David Addington, who after the terrorist attacks moved to establish "a policy of deliberate cruelty that would’ve been unthinkable on Sept. 10." As the leader of the self-styled "war council," a group of lawyers who took the lead in making the rules for the war on terror, Mr. Addington startled many colleagues with the depth of his fervor and the reach of his power. The war council settled on a "pre-emptive criminal model," in which suspects would be used — more or less indefinitely — to gather evidence of future crimes rather than held accountable for previous ones. There would be minimal oversight from Congress. The C.I.A. would take the lead, developing aggressive new interrogation methods that would be described as “enhanced,” “robust,” “special.” What they were not, a series of secret memos issued by John Yoo and others at the Office of Legal Council would attempt to certify, was “torture.”

Note: For lots more on the realities behind the "war on terror", click here.

The former Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt returned to what she called her "other family" in France today as doubt was cast on the apparently daring rescue that won her freedom. While she was still in the air, the Swiss radio station RSR broadcast a report questioning the official version of the operation to free Ms Betancourt and 14 other hostages -- saying that money, not cunning, had clinched their freedom. RSR said that the 15 hostages "were in reality ransomed for a high price, and the whole operation afterwards was a set-up". Citing a source "close to the events, reliable and tested many times in recent years", it said that the United States -- which had three citizens among those freed -- was behind the deal and put the price at $20 million. The Colombian Foreign Ministry furiously denied the allegations, with a spokesman calling them "completely false." He added: "They are lies". General Freddy Padilla, head of the Colombian military, categorically denied they had paid "a single peso" to Farc. The French Foreign Ministry denied any involvement in any deal. The US has not responded to the [allegations].

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.