Government Corruption News Articles

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Medicare's drug benefit has given a shot in the arm to pharmaceutical companies and insurers, whose revenue is climbing thanks to government subsidies for prescription medicine. What's happened so far: Drugmakers including GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer reported higher-than-expected sales and profit in the second quarter, with some of the momentum coming from Medicare. Meanwhile, membership rolls of big insurers, including UnitedHealth Group and Humana, are mushrooming as Medicare beneficiaries sign up for drug plans. Drug companies -- which successfully thwarted price-control attempts -- are reaping the rewards of more seniors and disabled people getting access to their medications. British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline's second-quarter net income grew 14 percent over the same quarter last year due in part to strong Medicare drug sales. Merck & Co., Schering Plough, Wyeth, Roche and Pfizer ... all exceeded analysts' expectations, reflecting sales boosts from the program. In the first three months of the benefit, brand-name drug prices rose 4 percent, according to a report from the AARP. WellPoint Inc., the nation's largest insurer, reported second-quarter profit gains of 34 percent. UnitedHealth ... posted quarterly profit gains of 26 percent. Humana reported earlier this week its second-quarter profit increased 9.9 percent and revenue jumped 52 percent over the same quarter last year, due in large part to a surge in Medicare membership. The insurer expects annual revenue to grow by 50 percent.

Note: This article fails to mention who pays for all these profits -- our tax dollars. To understand the degree of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, read a two-page summary by one of the most respected MDs in the U.S. at http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup

Despite a month-old pledge, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has yet to reopen four of its biggest no-bid contracts for Hurricane Katrina work and won’t do so until the contracts are virtually complete. A promise to hire more minority-owned firms also is largely unfulfilled. The no-bid contracts for temporary housing, worth up to $100 million each, were given to Shaw Group Inc., Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Inc. and Fluor Corp. right after Katrina struck. Bechtel CEO Riley Bechtel served on Bush’s Export Council from 2003-2004, and the Shaw Group’s lobbyist, Joe Allbaugh, is a former FEMA director and friend of Bush. Charges of favoritism helped prompt last month’s pledge by FEMA acting director R. David Paulison, but now officials with the Homeland Security Department, which oversees FEMA, say the contracts won’t be awarded again until February. FEMA promised to boost the number of contracts given to minority-owned businesses but in the last month the percentage has increased only slightly, from 1.5 percent to 1.8 percent. That’s still well below the 5 percent of federal contracts normally set aside for minority-owned firms.

Government secrecy has reached a historic high by several measures, with federal departments classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like "sensitive security information." A record 15.6 million documents were classified last year, nearly double the number in 2001. Meanwhile, the declassification process, which made millions of historical documents available annually in the 1990's, has slowed to a relative crawl, from a high of 204 million pages in 1997 to just 28 million pages last year. Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the Sept. 11 commission and a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said the failure to prevent the 2001 attacks was rooted not in leaks of sensitive information but in the barriers to sharing information between agencies and with the public.

After listening to former translator Sibel Edmonds complain about her treatment at the hands of the Justice Department and the FBI, Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said their staffs would debrief Edmonds and confront Justice Department officials with the information. Edmonds commented on the issue while testifying at a House Government Reform subcommittee hearing on the government's designation of information as classified. She told lawmakers the people she accused were still working at the FBI. The Justice Department's inspector general said last month that the FBI never adequately investigated Edmonds' complaints, even though evidence and witnesses supported her. Edmonds filed a lawsuit seeking to keep her job, but last summer a judge threw out her case after Attorney General John Ashcroft said her claims might harm national security by exposing government secrets.

Note: 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.

Gary McKinnon has lost his appeal against extradition to the US on hacking charges. To hear the US government tell it, Gary McKinnon is a dangerous man, and should be extradited back to America to stand trial. One US prosecutor has accused him of committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time". But Mr McKinnon has said his motives were harmless and innocent. He was, he says, simply looking for information on UFOs. If found guilty, Mr McKinnon could face decades in US jail, and fines of close to $2m. Mr McKinnon said that ... he never acted with malicious intent. But he did admit that he hacked into dozens of US government computer systems. In fact, he calmly detailed just how easy it was to access extremely sensitive information. But for some, his method of hacking is not nearly so interesting as his reason for doing it. Mr McKinnon told the BBC that he is convinced that the United States government is withholding critical information about Unidentified Flying Objects. His supporters say that instead of prosecuting him, the US government should thank him for pointing out massive computer security lapses. As for his quest to find evidence of a UFO cover-up, Mr McKinnon has said that he found some circumstantial evidence online ... including what he said are photos with what he speculated were alien spacecraft airbrushed out of the picture.

Note: For inspiring, reliable information on the UFO cover-up, see our two-page summary available here.

There's an explosion planned at [a] test site in the Central Valley, and residents fear it could launch radioactive material into their air. Now there's a fight to stop those planned tests at Site 300, just outside of Tracy near the Lawrence Livermore Lab. The Lawrence Livermore Lab has been setting off 60 to 80 blasts a year; most have been small, but next year two larger 300-pound explosions are planned using depleted uranium. For Tracy shoe shop owner Bob Sarvey, that means the potential of a radioactive release. Sarvey showed CBS13 the risk assessment from the local government and says someone must be worried to have added a cancer risk footnote, and that's before any review of potential radioactivity.

Note: For an ABC report on the dangers of depleted uranium, click here. For a CBC (One of Canada's top TV stations) report which goes much deeper, click here. Why are they exploding this dangerous, radioactive material into the air just outside of the San Francisco area?

John Reid, the home secretary, is planning a new official secrets law to punish intelligence officers who blow the whistle on government policy by leaking secret information. He wants longer jail sentences and the removal of a key legal defence of 'necessity' for whistleblowers. The crackdown is aimed at preventing cases such as that of Katharine Gun, a former translator at GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre, who leaked a memo showing that in the months before the Iraq war in 2003 the Americans wanted GCHQ's help in bugging the homes and offices of UN security council members. The government dropped its case against her after she threatened to use the necessity defence that she broke the law to prevent a greater 'crime' in the form of an invasion of Iraq. Ministers are also concerned at the growing number of leaks of sensitive documents by dissident officials, including those relating to the MI5 investigation into the July 7 bombings. It will be the first change to the official secrets legislation since 1989 when the government removed the right of whistleblowers to claim a defence of public interest.

U.S. spending in Iraq and Afghanistan helped push up global 2005 military expenditure by 3.5 percent to $1.12 trillion. The USA is responsible for 48 percent of the world total, distantly followed by the UK, France, Japan and China with 4 to 5 percent each. U.S. spending was behind about 80 percent of the gain in 2005.

Note: If you crunch the numbers you find that the U.S. spends literally ten times as much as the next highest spending country on military expenditures. Is it any wonder the U.S. is seen as a warring nation?

JOURNALISTS. Our attorney general is coming for us. On Sunday, Alberto Gonzales told ABC's "This Week" that he would consider prosecuting reporters who get their hands on classified information and break news about President Bush's terrorist surveillance program. "There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility. We have an obligation to enforce those laws." Asked...if The New York Times should be prosecuted for its initial story on government surveillance without warrants, Gonzales said, "We are engaged now in an investigation about what would be the appropriate course of action." This is the same administration that...has already set the presidential record in claiming the authority to circumvent the law in more than 750 cases. Gonzales...issued the infamous "torture memo" that advised President Bush to throw the Geneva Convention into the trash can for detainees in the war on terror. Gonzales...helped the administration block and drag its feet on the release of presidential papers from Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Gonzales helped to withhold or delay highly classified documents from the president's own 9/11 Commission and from...the energy task force of Vice President Dick Cheney. The actions of Gonzales show how little the Bush administration promotes the rights of the press. With every pronouncement, freedom is disappearing, in incremental steps.

Who could have imagined that, in the post-9/11 world, the United States government would approve a deal giving control over six major American ports to a country with ties to terrorism? But this is exactly what the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has done. Since 1999, the ports of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other cities have been operated by a British concern, P & O Ports, which has now been bought by Dubai Ports World, a company controlled by the government of the United Arab Emirates. While the United Arab Emirates is deemed by the Bush administration to be an ally in the war on terrorism...two of the 9/11 hijackers were citizens of the emirates, and some of the money for the attacks came from there. It was one of only three countries in the world that recognized the Taliban regime. And Dubai was an important transshipment point for the smuggling network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who supplied Libya, Iran and North Korea with equipment for making nuclear weapons. Most terrorism experts agree that the likeliest way for a weapon of mass destruction to be smuggled into our country would be through a port. After all, some 95 percent of all goods from abroad arrive in the United States by sea, and yet only about 6 percent of incoming cargo containers are inspected for security threats.

If the nightmare of an avian flu pandemic emerges from the dark chapters of doomsday scenarios, it will fall to the Department of the Homeland Security, not the medical establishment, to manage the crisis, according to federal documents and interviews with government officials. Under the National Response Plan, which also plans for actions in case of pandemics, DHS assumes top authority when an “incident of national significance” is declared. The first such “incident of national significance” was declared in August after Hurricane Katrina hit; however, federal coordination among agencies and state and local governments broke down on so many levels that even President Bush was forced to acknowledge that the plan was flawed. Federal officials have been role playing different flu outbreak scenarios for the past several months. Last year’s plan called for closing of schools, restricting travel and...lock-down quarantine measures. Those extreme measures jumped into the spotlight...when President Bush suggested that federal military troops -- not just the National Guard -- may have to be called in to enforce a quarantine.

Note: Isn't it interesting how the government seems to be predicting that the avian flu, which has killed less than 100 people worldwide, is going to mutate and cause massive deaths? How do they know this? Could this be another way of pushing us into fear and giving up our civil liberties?

The emergency phone calls made by people trapped inside the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, need not be released to the public, a New York court ruled Thursday. The families sought release of the 9-1-1 calls possessed by the Fire Department of New York, along with department dispatcher calls and interviews with firefighters who participated in the September 11 rescue effort. The FDNY had resisted the disclosures, citing privacy concerns. The FDNY also sought to block the release of six unidentified tapes and transcripts selected by federal prosecutors as evidence in the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person facing trial in the United States for the September 11 attacks.

Director Michael Moore says the U.S. health care system is driven by greed in his new documentary "SiCKO," and asks of Americans in general, "Where is our soul?" He also said he could go to jail for taking a group of volunteers suffering ill health after helping in the September 11, 2001 rescue efforts on an unauthorized trip to Cuba, where they received exemplary treatment at virtually no cost. In "SiCKO" he turns his attention to health, asking why 50 million Americans, 9 million of them children, live without [coverage], while those that are insured are often driven to poverty by spiraling costs or wrongly refused treatment at all. But the movie, which has taken Cannes by storm, goes further by portraying a country where the government is more interested in personal profit and protecting big business than caring for its citizens, many of whom cannot afford health insurance. "I'm trying to explore bigger ideas and bigger issues, and in this case the bigger issue in this film is who are we as a people?" Moore told reporters after a press screening. "Why do we behave the way we behave? What has become of us? Where is our soul?" One section of the film explains how a U.S. man severed the tip of two fingers in an accident and was told he would have to pay $12,000 to re-attach the end of his ring finger, and $60,000 to re-attach that of his index finger. "Being a hopeless romantic, Rick chose his ring finger," Moore quipped in a typically sardonic voiceover. It also follows a woman whose young daughter falls seriously ill but who said she was refused admission to a general hospital and instructed to go to a private one instead. By the time she got to the second hospital, it was too late to save the girl.

The U.S. Army, in a search for "nonlethal incapacitating agents," tested cannabis-based drugs on GI volunteers throughout the 1960s according to Dr. James Ketchum, the psychiatrist who led the classified research program at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Ketchum retired as a colonel in 1976. He has written a memoir, "Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten," in which he describes experiments conducted at Edgewood and defends the Army's ethical standards. In a talk to the Society of Cannabis Clinicians in Los Angeles last month, Ketchum recounted to 20 doctors the Army's experiments with cannabinoid drugs. Only a small fraction of Ketchum's work at Edgewood involved THC derivatives. Ketchum says he was motivated to write his memoir because the media has conflated the ethical, scientific drug studies conducted by the Army on knowing volunteers with the kinky, unsafe drug studies conducted by the CIA on unwitting civilians. "None, to my knowledge, returned home with a significant injury or illness attributable to chemical exposure," Ketchum says. "Nevertheless, years later, a few former volunteers did claim that the testing had caused them to suffer from some malady." Those claims came from subjects exposed to agents other than EA 2233, he says.

Note: Though the Army may have been somewhat more ethical than the CIA, why has the media had so little coverage of these unethical programs to develop mind control capabilities. For more information on secret mind control programs based on 18,000 pages of declassified government documents, click here.

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has doggedly made the case to Washington that he is the finger in the dike holding back a wave of Islamic extremism. Having successfully argued his own indispensability, General Musharraf has reaped billions of dollars in economic aid and arms sales — while encountering little challenge from Washington over his backsliding from steps toward democratic rule. Military aid to Pakistan grew from under $10 million in the three years prior to 9/11 to more than $4 billion in the three years after. But now it is political protest, fueled by Musharraf's steps to consolidate and extend his power, that is washing over Pakistan. That is presenting the U.S. with a classic dilemma of the war on terrorism: Does a key leader's security value outweigh his authoritarian practices? Earlier this month, Musharraf suspended the country's Supreme Court chief justice. Ever since, Pakistan's middle classes — one of the chief beneficiaries of the military leader's eight-year rule — have taken to the streets. Also fueling the uproar are suspicions that Musharraf is paving the way to another term as both president and chief military leader. Musharraf cited "abuse of power" when he suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry on March 9. Chaudhry had also expressed his view that it was not legal under the constitution for Musharraf to seek another presidential term while remaining the Army chief. The Bush administration has ... has expressed concern over some clashes that have turned violent but has reiterated support for Musharraf as a valuable ally in the war on terror.

Note: Once again security triumphs over democracy as the U.S. pours billions of tax dollars into this dictatorship which has been known to harbor terrorists.

The 110th Congress opened with the passage of sweeping new rules intended to curb the influence of lobbyists by prohibiting them from treating lawmakers to meals, trips, stadium box seats or the discounted use of private jets. But it didn't take long for lawmakers to find ways to keep having fun while lobbyists pick up the tab. In just the last two months, lawmakers invited lobbyists to help pay for a catalog of outings: lavish birthday parties in a lawmaker's honor ($1,000 a lobbyist), martinis and margaritas at Washington restaurants (at least $1,000), a California wine-tasting tour (all donors welcome), hunting and fishing trips (typically $5,000), weekend golf tournaments ($2,500 and up), a Presidents Day weekend at Disney World ($5,000), parties in South Beach in Miami ($5,000), concerts by the Who or Bob Seger ($2,500 for two seats), and Broadway shows such as "Mary Poppins" and "The Drowsy Chaperone" (also $2,500 for two). The lobbyists and their employers typically end up paying for the events, but within the new rules. Instead of picking up the tab directly, lobbyists pay a political fundraising committee created by an individual politician and, in turn, the committee pays the lawmaker's way. Lobbyists say that the rules might even increase the volume of contributions flowing from K Street, where many lobbying firms have their offices, to Congress. Members of Congress are becoming more and more creative in finding ways to engage lobbyists to help pay for their campaigns.

Last month, Bud Cummins, the U.S. attorney (federal prosecutor) for the Eastern District of Arkansas, received a call on his cellphone while hiking in the woods with his son. He was informed that he had just been replaced by J. Timothy Griffin, a Republican political operative who has spent the last few years working as an opposition researcher for Karl Rove. Mr. Cummins’s case isn’t unique. Since the middle of last month, the Bush administration has pushed out at least four U.S. attorneys, and possibly as many as seven, without explanation. The list includes Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for San Diego, who successfully prosecuted Duke Cunningham, a Republican congressman, on major corruption charges. The top F.B.I. official in San Diego told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Ms. Lam’s dismissal would undermine multiple continuing investigations. In Senate testimony yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused to say how many other attorneys have been asked to resign, calling it a “personnel matter.” Such a wholesale firing of prosecutors midway through an administration isn’t normal. U.S. attorneys, The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, “typically are appointed at the beginning of a new president’s term, and serve throughout that term.” Why, then, are prosecutors that the Bush administration itself appointed suddenly being pushed out? For the first time the administration is really worried about where corruption investigations might lead. The purge of U.S. attorneys looks like a pre-emptive strike against the gathering forces of justice.

U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan, who announced his resignation Tuesday after 4 1/2 years as the top federal prosecutor in coastal Northern California, actually was fired by the Bush administration, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday. [She] made her assertion at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing while questioning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about federal prosecutors who have been recently removed by President Bush. Two federal prosecutors in California have been "asked to resign ... from major jurisdictions, with major cases ongoing, with substantially good records as prosecutors," Feinstein said. She said four more have been asked to resign in other states. U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president to four-year terms. Being "asked to resign" amounts to being fired. "I am very concerned, because technically under the Patriot Act, you can appoint someone without confirmation for the remainder of the president's term," Feinstein said. Feinstein introduced legislation last week to repeal a provision of the USA Patriot Act that allows Bush to choose replacement prosecutors to serve until his term expires, without Senate confirmation. Her legislation would restore a previous law that limited an interim U.S. attorney chosen by the president to 120 days in office. Gonzales defended the Patriot Act's expansion of presidential appointment power. The Justice Department has not denied that Bush had sought the departure of Lam, who led the corruption prosecution of Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31 ... some 700 million pages of secret documents became unsecret. No longer were they classified. This would seem a victory for freedom of information. Executive Order 12958 in 1995 ... mandated that 25-year-old documents be automatically declassified unless exempted for national security or other reasons. But it is not so simple. There is a dirty little secret about these secrets: They remain secreted away. It could be years before these public documents can be viewed by the public. Fifty archivists can process 40 million pages in a year, but now they are facing 400 million. Not only are archivists overwhelmed by the number of documents that have arrived at the facility; they also face the strange mumbo jumbo of competing declassification instructions from various agencies. "The United States has the most open government in the world," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, "but it also has the most secretive government in the world, if you measure it by the production of new secrets." Among the 400 million pages of documents awaiting their release are road maps to American history in the 1950s and 1960s. But frankly, no one really knows what's there -- except the officials who originally classified them. Old secrets also can provide context for new crises. For example, U.S. dealings with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s are still coming to light. "It's our history, and in many cases, it's our present," Aftergood says.

A dozen Army and Marine recruiters who visited high schools were among the personnel caught in a major FBI cocaine investigation, and some were allowed to keep working while under suspicion. The recruiters, who worked in the Tucson area, were targets of a federal sting called Operation Lively Green, which ran from 2001 to 2004 and was revealed last year. So far, 69 members of the military, prison guards, law enforcement employees and other public employees have been convicted of accepting bribes to help smuggle cocaine. The FBI allowed many recruiters to stay on the job even though they were targeted by the investigation. Some were still recruiting three years after they were photographed running drugs in uniform. Most of the recruiters pleaded guilty and will be sentenced in March. Some honorably retired from the military.

Note: For a description of serious government involvement in major drug trafficking by a former top DEA agent, click here. Immediately following is a similar story by a Pulitzer-winning journalist.

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.