Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

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

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

More than a decade ago, I walked into the Challenger Memorial Youth Center in Los Angeles County to gather data for a lawsuit related to their "failure to provide an adequate education to detained youth." What our team found was much more horrifying: masses of teachers not showing up or late to work, leaving youth in their cells; children in solitary confinement for weeks; sexual assault by probation officers and detention staff; teacher-run fight clubs during class; and more. These abuses continue even today, as exposed earlier this year by sex tapes recorded in a juvenile detention facility in Seattle and videos of gladiator fights between teens in custody in Los Angeles County. The juvenile justice system was originally designed to be supportive and child-centered, but it became increasingly punitive and harsh through the War on Drugs in the 1980s, which resulted in exponentially higher rates of arrests and imprisonment. As a result, children with externalizing symptoms of trauma – abuse, neglect, domestic violence – have been incarcerated without treatment for their behavioral and mental health symptoms. Youth incarceration is extremely harmful to communities, causing worse adult health and functional limits. If we want a healthy society, we need to address trauma through treatment, not incarceration. Punishment provides immediate, visible results, while empowering youth requires patience, understanding and time.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

New York State's Bedford Hills Correctional facility, Illinois' Pontiac Correctional Center and Albion Correctional Facility in New York State are the three U.S. prisons with the highest reported rates of sexual victimization. These are the findings of a new Department of Justice (DOJ) report about sexual victimization in state and federal prisons, as reported by inmates. The Justice Department carried out a National Inmate Survey in 177 federal prisons. The annual survey is required by the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The survey of 27,541 state and federal inmates found that some 4.1 percent of adult prison inmates reported being sexually victimized in state and federal prisons during the prior 12 months. Furthermore, 2.3 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization by another inmate while 2.2 percent reported sexual victimization by facility staff. Meanwhile, 17 prisons had rates defined as high compared to other facilities. The data pertains to prisons that participated in the survey so the data may not accurately capture those with the highest sexual victimization in America. The prison with the highest proportion of prison inmates reporting sexual victimization was Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a female prison in New York where 18.6 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization. Pontiac Correctional Center, a men's prison in Illinois was second, with 15.9 percent of inmates reporting sexual victimization.

Note: These numbers represent a small number of institutions that voluntarily provided survey data for this study. The actual incidence of sexual violence in correctional facilities may be much higher. To understand how disturbing and common sexual abuse in prison is, read this Human Rights Watch report that documents dozens of first-hand accounts of rape and sexual slavery in prison systems across 34 states. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

Every year millions of people cycle through America's prisons and jails. Many of them never make it home. Using information from a federal government database of more than 21,000 deaths, The Marshall Project is now able to show how people are dying in America's prisons and jails. For incarcerated people under the age of 55, just under half of the deaths we could identify were from largely preventable causes – like suicide or drug overdoses. Older incarcerated people tended to die from natural causes. In more than a third of cases, we simply could not determine a cause of death, because there was not enough information. Our analysis is based on data collected by the Justice Department under the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which Congress passed a quarter-century ago with the intention of creating a record of everyone who dies in law enforcement custody. The data contained information like names, dates and brief descriptions of the circumstances surrounding each person who died in prisons, jails and during the course of arrest between Oct. 1, 2019 and Sept. 30, 2023. The government's data is riddled with errors. Not only did we find hundreds of deaths missing from the dataset, but the majority of the descriptions detailing how each person died didn't meet the government's own minimum quality standards. Almost one-in-10 of the deaths in the dataset were suicides – making it the third most common way people of all ages died.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

The US Bureau of Prisons (BoP) has agreed to pay $115m to more than 100 survivors of a major sexual abuse scandal, a historic settlement of litigation that exposed widespread misconduct of officers at a federal prison. The payout settles 103 claims of sexual abuse and retaliation for reporting misconduct by people who were incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a troubled women's institution located in California. Staff harassment and assault of those in custody at FCI Dublin ... was pervasive and widely documented, and the facility was known internally as the "rape club". Seven former Dublin employees, including the warden who ran the prison and the chaplain, have been criminally convicted of sexual crimes, and more than 20 other employees were placed on leave and under investigation. The bureau announced the permanent closure of Dublin earlier this month, and former residents have been transferred to other federal prisons across the country. The settlement appears to be the largest single payout in BoP history. The agreement is a major victory for advocates fighting misconduct in women's prisons, who have documented how sexual abuse is a systemic problem across the US prison system. Staff have sexually abused incarcerated residents in at least two-thirds of federal women's prisons over the last decade, with some women abused for months and years, a US Senate inquiry found in 2022.

Note: To understand how disturbing and common sexual abuse in prison is, read this Human Rights Watch report that documents dozens of first-hand accounts of rape and sexual slavery in prison systems across 34 states. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

On June 4, 2000, John Millis, a former CIA case officer then serving as the top staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, died of a reported suicide at a seedy Fairfax, Virginia motel after he was found with a gunshot wound to the head. Millis' death occurred the day after he forced the CIA to release a controversial report he had authored on the CIA's alleged links to cocaine smuggling by Nicaraguan drug rings who were connected with criminal groups in Los Angeles. The Fairfax police refused to reveal the contents of an alleged suicide note written by Millis and the Fairfax County Coroner's report. Fairfax city detectives told residents of the motel where Millis died not to talk to anyone about the "suicide," including the media. In 1996 and 1997, [Millis] was staff director of a special Congressional committee that investigated the Clinton administration's approval of arms shipments from Iran to Muslim forces in Bosnia. These Muslims forces included two alleged 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mindhar, and alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with other Al Qaeda operatives. Two months after Millis' death, Insight Magazine, owned by the right-wing Washington Times, claimed that Millis had killed himself because his wife, Linda, discovered that he was involved in a homosexual relationship. The article is believed to have been CIA disinformation that was part of the coverup of Millis' murder.

Note: Journalist Gary Webb also died by apparent suicide after exposing CIA involvement with drug trafficking. Read our in-depth Substack, "How The Deep State Won the War on Drugs: A Complete Timeline," which reveals undeniable evidence that drug trafficking is an essential tool used by the US government and authoritarian regimes around the world to maintain power. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs.

On November 26, soldiers of the Presidential Guard took power in yet another West African country. This time, it was Guinea-Bissau – the tiny country on the Atlantic coast better known to the world as the region's first "narco-state." Since its independence in 1974, the former Portuguese colony has endured nine coups, making it one of West Africa's most fragile states. [The country] acts as a key transit point for the cocaine trade between the northern tier of South America and Europe. The latest coup is the second successful military takeover this year in Africa's rapidly expanding coup belt. According to the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), "Politics and cocaine in Guinea-Bissau have gone hand in hand for decades. Upheavals in one cause ripples in the other." The United States established diplomatic relations with Guinea-Bissau in 1975. Guinea-Bissau's importance as the key transshipment point for cocaine between Colombia and the fast-growing market in Europe grew steadily over the years since. In 2013, Gen. Antonio Indjai, Guinea-Bissau's senior military official at the time, was charged for conspiring to traffic drugs and procure military-grade weapons including surface-to-air missiles for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (the "FARC"). In 2019, one of two large cocaine shipments seized in Guinea-Bissau was linked to ... the Al-Mourabitoun terrorist group, which is affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Note: Many of the recent coups in Africa have been carried out by people affiliated with US intelligence or military interests. Read our Substack investigation into the dark truths behind the US War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs.

On August 10, 2019, Mark Epstein ... saw a breaking news story on CNN that his older brother, Jeffrey, had supposedly committed suicide while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan. When Mark heard news about Jeffrey's death, he boarded a plane and was the one who identified his body. At first, he thought that his brother had committed suicide, as the FBI and other government agencies claimed. "I had no reason to doubt it [the suicide claim]. He was facing a long time in jail," Mark said. When he hired the renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, he expected Baden to confirm that his brother had committed suicide. However, he said that Dr. Baden instead said he couldn't call it a suicide because it "looked too much like a homicide." Fractures found in the autopsy photos under Jeffrey's neck and jaw were inconsistent with a suicide hanging. Baden said: "Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures [as Epstein did]." Dr. Kristin Roman, the New York City pathologist charged with doing the autopsy, came out of the autopsy, like Dr. Baden, saying that Jeffrey's death looked more like a homicide than a suicide. The initial death certificate said, as cause of death, "pending further study." Dr. Baden and Dr. Roman's assessments did not appear in a June 2023 Department of Justice (DOJ) report.

Note: Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Jeffrey Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures. According to CBS News, nearly two years passed before investigators interviewed the two key corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

The United States today has by far the world's largest incarceration rate, with nearly two million people living in prisons and jails. The conditions in those facilities are often substandard, with Amnesty International criticizing the dehumanizing practice of holding prisoners in prolonged solitary confinement. Assistant professor of history [Benjamin] Weber writes of an "unspoken doctrine of prison imperialism" by which U.S. policy makers sought to "govern the globe through the codification and regulation of crime." Weber adds that, "as prison imperialism expanded outwards, it always returned home producing new forms of social control over the growing number of people ensnared in prison in the United States. The forms of policing and record keeping that gave rise to the surveillance state between World War II and the Cold War were pioneered through overseas colonialism, covert operations and military interventions." When the U.S. colonized the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, mass incarceration became a linchpin of counterinsurgency strategy. It was designed to suppress the nationalist rebellion and messianic peasant leaders like Felipe Salvador, a leader of the anti-Spanish resistance. Weber emphasizes that the racial hierarchies and oppressive treatment of captives in colonial wars and inmates in colonial enclaves helped shape the mistreatment of minority groups and left-wing subversives in U.S. jails.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

Most countries around the world limit the time that a prisoner can spend in solitary to 15 days. The United States doesn't. There are scores of prisoners across the U.S. who have been in solitary for years and, in some cases, for decades. It should be clear to everybody–the courts, the states, and the federal Bureau of Prisons–that solitary only worsens already bad situations. It shouldn't be in use. There is a growing body of research that shows that solitary confinement as it is used today can cause a variety of severe psychological problems, including anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, and suicidal thoughts. These problems can be so severe that they can lead to long-term disability or even death. The longer a person is held in solitary, the worse his mental state becomes. The younger a person is when he begins a sentence in solitary, the worse his mental state becomes. And the situation is usually hopeless when a person who is already mentally ill is placed in solitary, whatever his age. It's no wonder that the United Nations has declared the U.S. practice of solitary confinement to be a form of torture. In 2016, Kalief Browder killed himself after spending three years in solitary confinement at Rikers Island jail in New York City. Browder was 16 years old when he was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack. He was never convicted of a crime, but he was held in solitary while he awaited trial.

Note: The above article was written by whistleblower John Kiriakou. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

Bradley Birkenfeld is a former Swiss banker who helped the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoup billions of dollars in tax revenues after exposing the largest tax fraud in U.S. history. Yet it was Birkenfeld who served 40 months at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, while his bosses who orchestrated the fraud and the wealthy investors who cheated the U.S. government never faced any jail time. Birkenfeld's boss, Christian Bovay, conceived the scam that Birkenfeld participated in by which UBS would charge a three percent management fee to its wealthy clients in exchange for helping them to evade paying taxes by placing it securely in one of the bank's secret off-shore accounts. Birkenfeld would make clients more money by investing, often in weapons manufacturers. Then when the clients needed their money, UBS would lend it back at a reasonable interest rate. Birkenfeld wrote in Lucifer's Banker that "UBS was making a fee for holding the guy's cash in the first place, then making another fee for loaning him his own damn money! And guess what? That guy's happy! He's getting his deal done, and he's still doing it with tax-free cash! I couldn't believe it, and you know what? It worked, over and over again." On October 5, 2005, Birkenfeld resigned from UBS and became an internal whistleblower. After a company review of its malpractice turned into a whitewash, Birkenfeld sued UBS.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the court system and in the banking industry.

A military contractor with a lineage going back to the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater will help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down a list of 1.5 million targeted immigrants across the country. ICE inked a deal with Constellis Holdings to provide "skip tracing" services, tasking the company with hunting immigrants down and relaying their locations to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations wing for apprehension. Contractors will receive monetary bounties in exchange for turning over the whereabouts of specified immigrants as quickly as possible, using whatever physical and digital surveillance tools they see fit. Constellis was formed in 2014 through the merger of Academi, previously known as Blackwater, and Triple Canopy, a rival mercenary contractor. The combined companies and their subsidiaries have reaped billions from contracts for guarding foreign military installations, embassies, and domestic properties, along with work for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. spy agencies. In 2007, Blackwater mercenaries massacred 14 civilians in Baghdad; several of its contractors serving prison sentences for the killings were pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020. The government has so far paid Constellis $1.5 million, with the potential for the total to grow to more than $113 million by the contract's end in 2027. Constellis ... secured a $250 million construction contract at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, earlier this year.

Note: Erik Prince's Blackwater got caught systematically defrauding the government. Then Blackwater changed its name to Academi and made over $300 million off the Afghan drug trade. More recently, Prince was recruiting ex spies to infiltrate progressive activist groups. Furthermore, the bounty-based approach mirrors a core tactic of the War on Terror, when US forces offered cash rewards for tips that fueled mass detentions in Afghanistan and beyond. This swept up thousands of people who posed no threat and had no ties to terrorism.

CIA and DEA ... drug operations were intimately tied to the Latin American anticommunist brigades funded by Western capital throughout the Cold War, and the brutal liquidation of the Left these narco-terrorists often carried out. Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is being held in a Brooklyn jail charged with smuggling cocaine into the United States. But even the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that less than 10 percent of cocaine shipments to the U.S come through Venezuela. The vast majority of cocaine shipments originate in Colombia and move through the Pacific route and Mexico. There are no shortages of Latin American leaders and military chiefs who are heavily involved in drug trafficking but who are considered close allies of the United States. One of them, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, was pardoned by Donald Trump last month, after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Trump's national security advisor, comes out of the rightwing Cuban exile community in Miami, one that has for decades engaged in drug trafficking and a dirty war against those it condemns, like Maduro, of being communists. These anti-communist Cubans, including Rubio's inner circle, have [close ties] with the drug trade and [support] Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa, whose family fruit business is accused of trafficking 700 kilos of cocaine. Rubio hailed Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an ‘incredibly willing partner' who ‘has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration.' Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa's family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022.

Note: Read our in-depth Substack, "How The Deep State Won the War on Drugs: A Complete Timeline," which reveals undeniable evidence that drug trafficking is an essential tool used by the US government and authoritarian regimes around the world to maintain power. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

In 1993, 60 Minutes aired a report detailing how the CIA recruited Venezuelan military officer Gen. RamĂłn GuillĂ©n Dávila, enabling the shipment of roughly 22 tons of cocaine into U.S. cities under the guise of an intelligence operation. Once the so-called "Cartel of the Suns" outlived its usefulness to U.S. intelligence, it quietly vanished–only to be revived years later by the U.S. government as a political weapon in its campaign against Venezuela. The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading the long-defunct "Cartel of the Suns." But as journalist Diego Sequera explains, the cartel's origins trace back to the early 1990s, when the CIA allegedly directed one of its top Venezuelan military assets to facilitate the shipment of tons of cocaine into U.S. cities. The "Cartel of the Suns" functions less as a criminal organization than as a political fiction–one born from a U.S. intelligence operation, buried when it became inconvenient, and resurrected decades later to justify coercive measures against a government Washington seeks to remove. What remains consistent is not the evidence, but the utility of the accusation. And in the end, the "Cartel of the Suns" tells us far less about Venezuela than it does about U.S. power: how an intelligence-linked drug operation can be erased from history when it implicates Washington, then revived as propaganda when regime change again becomes the goal. The cartel never needed to exist–only the narrative did.

Note: Read our in-depth Substack investigation and timeline exploring how the deep state won the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

In prisons and jails across the US, people are routinely fed unhealthy, tasteless or inedible meals. Many are left hungry and malnourished, with devastating long-term health consequences. The hidden crisis affecting millions of incarcerated people is the subject of Eating Behind Bars, a new book offering a disturbing account of how correctional institutions punish their residents through the food they provide and withhold. The book by Leslie Soble ... describes roaches and rats in prison kitchens, rotten meat and guard dogs who are fed better meals than incarcerated people. It is a compelling, and at times nauseating, indictment of the criminal justice system. Soble manages the Food in Prison Project at Impact Justice, a national non-profit that advocates for reforms and supports incarcerated people. The prison food crisis [is] a public health crisis, with estimates suggesting each year behind bars reduces life expectancy by two years. It's a labor rights issue, as incarcerated people earn pennies per hour running the kitchens, barely enough to buy canteen snacks to supplement their meager diets. And there are environmental ramifications: US correctional facilities create an estimated 300,000 tons of food waste annually as residents reject unpalatable offerings. A typical prison diet is very high in ultra-processed foods, highly refined carbohydrates, sugar and salt, and very low in fresh fruits and vegetables, quality protein, whole grains.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

Roderick Gadson, an Alabama prison guard, was questioned under oath about an incident in which he and other officers used such devastating force against a prisoner that the man had to be airlifted to hospital to treat his injuries. Gadson was shown a photograph of the man, Steven Davis. He was lying in an ICU bed breathing through a tube, his cadaverous face bruised and covered with blood, his eyes black and sunken. Gadson was asked whether he felt that the amount of force used had been appropriate, given the way Davis looked. He replied: "I don't feel like nothing. I just did my job." On 4 October 2019, Gadson and five other officers were called to respond to a security breach inside Donaldson correctional facility. Davis ... was lying prone and unresistant on the ground. Gadson took the lead. One of the witnesses said the officer hit Davis "with his metal stick in the head, picked him up, throwed him down. He stomped the dude with his size 15 boot. The guy's head bounced like a basketball." David died the following day. The cause of death was officially recorded as homicide caused by "blunt force injuries of head sustained in an assault". Despite evidence of a physical assault by Gadson and the other officers, they were all cleared after an internal investigation. Six months later, Gadson was promoted ... to sergeant. Then, in July 2021, he [was] promoted a second time, 21 months after a prisoner in his care had been beaten to death. Now he holds the exalted status of lieutenant.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

Jeffrey Collins has watched 14 men draw their final breaths. Over 25 years at the Associated Press, the South Carolina-based journalist has repeatedly served as an observer inside the state's execution chamber, watching from feet away as prison officials kill men who were sentenced to capital punishment. South Carolina has recently kept him unusually busy, with seven back-to-back executions in 14 months. The state revived the death penalty last September after a 13-year pause caused by the decision of pharmaceutical makers to stop selling lethal injection drugs to the state. Officials acquired pentobarbital, a sedative, only after legislators passed a law shielding the identities of suppliers. That secrecy surrounding the execution process means the role of observers has never been more vital. Executions aren't filmed, making journalists' accounts the only impartial record of state-sponsored killings, their words often cited by lawyers and courts. "I don't think executions should be publicly broadcast, but I think they need to be videotaped," [said Collins]. "We don't get to see everything. With lethal injections, there could be problems if the needle isn't put in the vein correctly or the drugs are bad, but we don't get any look into either of those things. With firing squads ... the target could get placed poorly. But when the curtain opens, the target has already been placed, so we don't get to witness that either. The secrecy prevents the entire story from being told."

Note: Wrongful convictions and official misconduct have led to at least 93 innocent defendants being sentenced to death. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

Thousands of surveillance reports compiled by undercover police officers who spied on political campaigners were routinely passed to MI5, documents obtained by the spycops inquiry have revealed. Police sent undercover officers on long-term deployments to infiltrate mainly leftwing protest groups and gather enormous quantities of information about their political and personal activities. It can now be revealed that most of those clandestine reports were sent to MI5, helping the Security Service to build up large files on peaceful protesters who were engaged in democratic protests for an array of causes. MI5 still retains these surveillance reports in its files today. Officers have been criticised for spying on thousands of political organisations such as campaigns against racism and nuclear weapons, the Socialist Workers party, justice campaigns and trade unions. Their reports logged personal information about protesters, including their marriages, sexuality, holiday plans and bank accounts, as well as their plans for political action such as demonstrations. Stamped on the surveillance reports are a tell-tale sign – Box 500, a nickname for MI5 ... which confirms that they were sent to the Security Service by the police spies. Working in tandem, senior police officers running the undercover spies and MI5 met regularly to discuss the political groups they wanted to infiltrate. On several occasions, MI5 warned that particular police spies were in danger of being rumbled by activists.

Note: Read more about the spycops scandal and the dozens of activists tricked into having romantic relationships with undercover police. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption.

The retired judge Sir John Mitting has been leading a public inquiry examining the conduct of undercover police officers who spied on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and at least 2010. At least 139 undercover officers in deployments typically lasting four years were sent to infiltrate mainly leftwing and progressive groups. Undercover officers regularly deceived women into long-term sexual relationships. At least four of the undercover officers are known or alleged to have fathered children with women they met during their deployments. So far, between the mid-1970s and 2010 at least 20 police spies are known to have formed sexual relationships with women without disclosing their true identities. Many of these undercover officers were unmasked by the women themselves after long investigations. The undercover officers joined political groups and pretended to be activists. However, their real job was to collect information about the campaigners and their protests and send secret reports back to their bosses. Another issue under the microscope is how activists were allegedly unjustly convicted for offences connected to protests because key evidence gathered by the undercover officers was concealed. Are undercover police still infiltrating political groups? It is difficult to know. Mitting told police he wanted to know if undercover officers were currently been used to spy on political groups. No answer has been given in public so far.

Note: Read more about the spycops scandal and the dozens of activists tricked into having romantic relationships with undercover police. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption.

The idea of a "right to repair" – a requirement that companies facilitate consumers' repairs, maintenance, and modification of products – is extremely popular, even winning broad, bipartisan support in Congress. That could not, however, save it from the military–industrial complex. Lobbyists succeeded in killing part of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have given service members the right to fix their equipment in the field without having to worry about military suppliers' intellectual property. The decision to kill the popular proposal was made public Sunday after a closed-door conference of top congressional officials, including defense committee chairs. For the defense industry ... the proposal threatened a key profit stream. Once companies sell hardware and software to the Pentagon, they can keep making money by forcing the government to hire them for repairs. Defense lobbyists pushed back hard against the proposal when it arose in the military budgeting process. The CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association claimed that the legislation could "cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely." The contractors' argument was that inventors would not sell their products to the Pentagon if they knew they had to hand over their trade secrets as well. As a piece of legislation, the right to repair has likely died until next year's defense budget bill process. The notion could be imposed in the form of internal Pentagon policies.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The Pentagon won't complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The story of the Pentagon's new pistols would be funny if it didn't point to a serious problem at the heart of America's military. The Department of Defense has built a gilded fortress of people and processes that is slow, wasteful and married to the past. Of all the obstacles to fielding the military that America needs, the Pentagon's bureaucracy may be the hardest to overcome. The byzantine system for buying and testing weapons isolates the military from the innovative parts of the American economy. Congress underwrites the dysfunction with appropriations that are designed to deliver wins for its members rather than for America's national security. As the House and Senate work toward the country's first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon's wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense. No one can keep track of where all the money goes. The Defense Department is the only major federal agency never to get a clean bill of health from outside accountants, and has failed its last seven audits in as many years. When the bean counters can follow the money, they often find it has been wasted. The system feeds on itself. Pentagon officials and congressional staff members have long migrated to the arms industry.

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

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