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Revealing News For a Better World

Intelligence Agency Corruption News Articles
Excerpts of key news articles on


Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on intelligence agency 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.

For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.


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.


On the list: Ten prime ministers, three presidents and a king
2021-07-20, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/20/heads-of-state-pegasus-spyware/

Spies for centuries have trained their sights on those who shape destinies of nations: presidents, prime ministers, kings. And in the 21st century, most of them carry smartphones. Such is the underlying logic for some of the most tantalizing discoveries for an international investigation that in recent months scrutinized a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that included – according to forensic analyses of dozens of iPhones – at least some people targeted by Pegasus spyware licensed to governments worldwide. The list contained the numbers of politicians and government officials by the hundreds. But what of heads of state and governments, arguably the most coveted of targets? Fourteen. Or more specifically: three presidents, 10 prime ministers and a king. Forensic testing that might have revealed infection by NSO's signature spyware, Pegasus, was not possible. Nor was it possible to determine whether any NSO client attempted to deliver Pegasus to the phones of these country leaders – much less whether any succeeded in turning these highly personal devices into pocket spies capable of tracking a national leader's nearly every movement, communication and personal relationship. According to NSO marketing materials and security researchers, Pegasus is designed to collect files, photos, call logs, location records, communications and other private data from smartphones, and can activate cameras and microphones as well for real-time surveillance at key moments.

Note: Read how this Pegasus spyware was used to target activists and journalists in Mexico. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


AP seeks answers from US gov't on tracking of journalists
2021-12-13, ABC News/Associated Press
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/ap-seeks-answers-us-govt-tracking-j...

The Associated Press sought answers Monday from the Department of Homeland Security on its use of sensitive government databases for tracking international terrorists to investigate as many as 20 American journalists, including an acclaimed AP reporter. In a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, AP Executive Editor Julie Pace urged the agency to explain why the name of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Martha Mendoza was run through the databases and identified as a potential confidential informant during the Trump administration, as detailed in a report by Homeland Security's inspector general. The DHS investigation of U.S. journalists, as well as congressional staff and perhaps members of Congress ... represents the latest apparent example of an agency created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks using its vast capabilities to target American citizens. The AP's letter ... called for "assurances that these improper practices and apparent abuse of power will not continue going forward." That would be in line with recent order from Attorney General Merrick Garland prohibiting the seizing of records of journalists in leak investigations. That followed an outcry over revelations that the Justice Department under former President Donald Trump had obtained records belonging to journalists, as well as Democratic members of Congress. During the Obama administration, federal investigators secretly seized phone records for some reporters and editors at the AP.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable major media sources.


What the C.I.A.’s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured
2019-12-04, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-drawings.html

One shows the prisoner nude and strapped to a crude gurney, his entire body clenched as he is waterboarded by an unseen interrogator. Another shows him with his wrists cuffed to bars so high above his head he is forced on to his tiptoes. They are sketches drawn in captivity by the Guantánamo Bay prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah, self-portraits of the torture he was subjected to during the four years he was held in secret prisons by the C.I.A.. In each illustration, Mr. Zubaydah ... portrays the particular techniques as he says they were used on him at a C.I.A. black site in Thailand in August 2002. They demonstrate how, more than a decade after the Obama administration outlawed the program — and then went on to partly declassify a Senate study that found the C.I.A. lied about both its effectiveness and its brutality — the final chapter of the black sites has yet to be written. Mr. Zubaydah, 48, drew them this year at Guantánamo for inclusion in a 61-page report, “How America Tortures,” by his lawyer, Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, and some of Mr. Denbeaux’s students. The report uses firsthand accounts, internal Bush administration memos, prisoners’ memories and the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report to analyze the interrogation program. The program was initially set up for Mr. Zubaydah, who was mistakenly believed to be a top Qaeda lieutenant. He has never been charged with a crime.

Note: For more along these lines, see the "10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture". For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.


The FBI Spends a Lot of Time Spying on Black Americans
2019-10-29, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/29/fbi-surveillance-black-activists/

The FBI has come under intense criticism after a 2017 leak exposed that its counterterrorism division had invented a new, unfounded domestic terrorism category it called “black identity extremism.” A number of civil rights groups have filed public records requests to try to better understand who exactly the FBI is investigating under that designation. The latest batch of FBI documents ... reveals that between 2015 and 2018, the FBI dedicated considerable time and resources to opening a series of “assessments” into the activities of individuals and groups it mostly labeled “black separatist extremists.” This designation was eventually folded into the category of “black identity extremism.” Assessments differ from full-blown investigations - or “predicated investigations,” in the bureau’s lingo - because they do not need to be predicated on a factual basis. As a new report by the civil liberties group Defending Rights & Dissent notes, when choosing targets for an assessment, agents are allowed to use ethnicity, religion, or speech protected by the First Amendment as a factor, “as long as it is not the only one.” As the report notes, “Even though the standards for opening an assessment are extraordinarily low, the FBI is allowed to use extremely intrusive investigative techniques in performing them, including physical surveillance, use of informants, and pretextual interviews.” The bureau has in recent years shifted its target from those espousing “separatist” views to the much larger group of those protesting police violence.

Note: Read more about the FBI's use of "Black Identity Extremism" as a label in its terrorism investigations. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


Learning From Israel’s Political Assassination Program
2018-03-07, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/books/review/ronen-bergman-rise-and-kill-f...

One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the C.I.A. was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again. Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism. We don’t call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are “targeted killings,” most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America’s go-to weapon in the war on terror. There have been many who have objected, claiming that the killings inspire more attacks on the United States, complicate our diplomacy and undermine our moral authority in the world. Yet the targeted killings drone on with no end in sight. Just counting the campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the Bush administration conducted at least 47 targeted killings by drones, while under the Obama administration that number rose to 542. America’s difficult relationship with targeted killing and the dilemmas we may face in the future are beautifully illuminated by the longer story of Israel’s experiences with assassination in its own endless war against terrorism. Israel has always been just a bit farther down this slippery slope than the United States. Americans now have a terrific new introduction to that story with the publication of Ronen Bergman’s “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and assassinations.


Former senior U.S. official John Bolton admits to planning attempted foreign coups
2022-07-13, Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/former-senior-us-official-john-bolton-admits...

John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former White House national security adviser, said on Tuesday that he had helped plan attempted coups in foreign countries. Bolton made the remarks to CNN after the day's congressional hearing into the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The panel's lawmakers ... accused former President Donald Trump of inciting the violence in a last-ditch bid to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. Speaking to CNN anchor Jake Tapper, however, Bolton suggested Trump was not competent enough to pull off a "carefully planned coup d'etat," later adding: "As somebody who has helped plan coups d'etat - not here but you know (in) other places - it takes a lot of work. And that's not what he (Trump) did." Tapper asked Bolton which attempts he was referring to. "I'm not going to get into the specifics," Bolton said, before mentioning Venezuela. "It turned out not to be successful. Not that we had all that much to do with it but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president and they failed," he said. "I feel like there's other stuff you're not telling me (beyond Venezuela)," the CNN anchor said, prompting a reply from Bolton: "I'm sure there is." Many foreign policy experts have over the years criticized Washington's history of interventions in other countries, from its role in the 1953 overthrowing of then Iranian nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and the Vietnam war, to its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan this century.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in intelligence services from reliable major media sources.


Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK's accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp
2021-10-30, Miami Herald
https://www.miamiherald.com/article255356661.html

Almost 40 years after his death following a bar brawl in Key Biscayne, Ricardo Morales, known as "Monkey" – contract CIA worker, anti-Castro militant, counter-intelligence chief for Venezuela, FBI informant and drug dealer – returned to the spotlight Thursday morning when one of his sons made a startling claim on Spanish-language radio: Morales, a sniper instructor in the early 1960s in secret camps where Cuban exiles and others trained to invade Cuba, realized in the hours after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 that the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been one of his sniper trainees. Morales also told his two sons that two days before the assassination, his CIA handler told him and his "clean-up" team to go to Dallas for a mission. But after the tragic events, they were ordered to go back to Miami without learning what the mission was about. The claims ... add to one of the long-held theories about the JFK assassination – that Cuban exiles working for the CIA had been involved. But the claims also point the finger at the CIA, which some observers believe could help explain why President Joe Biden backed off last week on declassifying the remaining documents in the case. Morales Jr. said his father told them he did not know of the plans to assassinate Kennedy. "He knew Kennedy was coming to Dallas, so he imagines something is going to happen, but he doesn't know the plan," he said. "In these kinds of conspiracies ... nobody knows what the other is doing."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the JFK assassination from reliable major media sources.


F.B.I. Secretly Bought Israeli Spyware and Explored Hacking U.S. Phones
2021-01-28, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/world/middleeast/israel-pegasus-spyware.html

It is widely regarded as the world's most potent spyware, capable of reliably cracking the encrypted communications of iPhone and Android smartphones. The software, Pegasus, made by an Israeli company, NSO Group, has been able to track terrorists and drug cartels. It has also been used against human rights activists, journalists and dissidents. Now, an investigation published Friday by The New York Times Magazine has found that Israel, which controls the export of the spyware ... has made Pegasus a key component of its national security strategy, using it to advance its interests around the world. The F.B.I. bought and tested NSO software for years with plans to use it for domestic surveillance until the agency finally decided last year not to deploy the tools. The F.B.I., in a deal never previously reported, bought the spyware in 2019. It also spent two years discussing whether to deploy a newer product, called Phantom, inside the United States. The discussions at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. continued until last summer. But Pegasus equipment is still in a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. And the company also gave the agency a demonstration of Phantom, which could hack American phone numbers. A brochure ... says that Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to "turn your target's smartphone into an intelligence gold mine." In 2018 ... the C.I.A. bought Pegasus to help Djibouti, an American ally, fight terrorism, despite longstanding concerns about human rights abuses there.

Note: Read about how NSO Group spyware was used against journalists and activists by the Mexican government. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations – review
2018-07-22, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/22/rise-kill-first-secret-history-...

In January 2010 Israeli agents converged on a luxury hotel in Dubai: their target was Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an arms supplier for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip. The mission involved 27 operatives of the Mossad secret service who were posing as tourists or tennis players. The hit team and their watchers flew in from different European airports using false passports. Communications were routed via Austria to avoid surveillance. Mabhouh was killed in his room using a paralysing drug and his body left to be discovered by hotel staff the next day. The snag was that the killing exposed the Mossad to global scrutiny – and angered an Arab country with a record of quiet cooperation with Israel. CCTV caught the agents changing disguises and stalking their prey – seen as a legitimate candidate for extrajudicial execution as he had killed an Israeli soldier and, more importantly, was a logistical link with Iran, sworn enemy of the Jewish state. Ronen Bergman’s account of his country’s targeted assassinations contains a wealth of detail about this and other killings. In recent years Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the western world. Bergman’s long view sharpens understanding of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict – and of the limits of force. Bergman’s style tends to the sensational but that does not mask a critical strand that questions the morality and effectiveness of Israel’s approach to dealing with the enemy in its own backyard.

Note: Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman is available here. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and assassinations.


Biometric Surveillance Means Someone Is Always Watching
2014-04-17, Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com/2014/04/25/biometric-surveillance-means-someone-alwa...

From 2008 to 2010, as Edward Snowden has revealed, the National Security Agency (NSA) collaborated with the British Government Communications Headquarters to intercept the webcam footage of over 1.8 million Yahoo users. The agencies were analyzing images they downloaded from webcams and scanning them for known terrorists who might be using the service to communicate, matching faces from the footage to suspects with the help of a new technology called face recognition. In attempting to find faces, the Pentagon's Optic Nerve program recorded webcam sex by its unknowing targets–up to 11 percent of the material the program collected was "undesirable nudity" that employees were warned not to access. And that's just the beginning of what face recognition technology might mean for us in the digital era. The U.S. government is in the process of building the world's largest cache of face recognition data, with the goal of identifying every person in the country. The creation of such a database would mean that anyone could be tracked wherever his or her face appears, whether it's on a city street or in a mall. Today's laws don't protect Americans from having their webcams scanned for facial data. "If cameras connected to databases can do face recognition, it will become impossible to be anonymous in society," [attorney Jennifer] Lynch says. That means every person in the U.S. would be passively tracked at all times.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky'
2011-10-10, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/science/11predict.html?pagewanted=all

More than 60 years ago, in his "Foundation" series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science – psychohistory – that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future. Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet – Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones – to do the same thing. The government is showing interest in the idea. This summer a little-known intelligence agency began seeking ideas from academic social scientists and corporations for ways to automatically scan the Internet in 21 Latin American countries for "big data," according to a research proposal. The three-year experiment ... is being financed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa. The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption and movement of populations. It will use publicly accessible data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries. It is intended to be an entirely automated system, a "data eye in the sky" without human intervention. Some social scientists and advocates of privacy rights are deeply skeptical of the project, saying it evokes queasy memories of Total Information Awareness, a post-9/11 Pentagon program that proposed hunting for potential attackers by identifying patterns in vast collections of public and private data.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Revealed: how UK targeted American civil rights leader in covert campaign
2022-09-13, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/13/revealed-how-uk-targeted-americ...

The British government targeted the American civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael and sought to weaken the Black Power movement with covert disinformation campaigns, recently declassified documents have revealed. The effort was the work of a secret unit known as the Information Research Department, based in London and part of the Foreign Office, which created and distributed literature from fake sources as part of a broader effort to destabilise cold war enemies. The effort against Carmichael, a firebrand orator who travelled to west Africa in part to escape harassment by US law enforcement agencies, aimed to portray the prominent Black Power leader as a foreign interloper in Africa who was contemptuous of the inhabitants of the continent. Based mainly in Guinea from July 1969, the 28-year-old activist had became a vocal advocate of socialist, pan-Africanist ideologies, which worried British officials. The IRD was particularly worried by the movement's potential influence in the Caribbean. In 1969, the IRD also created a new fake group: The Organisation of African Students for African Power. This was supposedly based in East Germany and adopted contemporary radical New Left ideas, "proclaiming a plague on both" the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc. The IRD felt this provided a better platform to "damage opponents" than the dated nationalist approach, while being difficult to trace back to Britain because many similar groups had genuinely sprung up in the late 1960s.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


US Backed Ethnic Cleansing of Serbs, Top Diplomat Secretly Told Croat Leader
2025-08-06, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/06/us-backed-ethnic-cleansing-of-serbs-top-dip...

August 4, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm. Little known outside the former Yugoslavia, the military campaign unleashed a genocidal cataclysm that violently expelled Croatia's entire Serb population. Croat forces rampaged UN-protected areas of the self-declared Serb Republic of Krajina, looting, burning, raping and murdering their way across the province. Up to 350,000 locals fled, many on foot, never to return. Meanwhile, thousands were summarily executed. As these hideous scenes unfolded, UN peacekeepers charged with protecting Krajina watched without intervening. Meanwhile, US officials strenuously denied the horrifying massacres and mass displacement amounted to ethnic cleansing, let alone war crimes. Operation Storm was for all intents and purposes a NATO attack, carried out by soldiers armed and trained by the US and directly coordinated with other Western powers. Despite publicly endorsing a negotiated peace, Washington privately encouraged Zagreb to employ maximum belligerence, even as their ultranationalist Croat proxies plotted to strike with such ferocity that the country's entire Serb population would "to all practical purposes disappear." High-ranking Croat officials privately discussed methods to justify their coming blitzkrieg, including false flag attacks. In preparing for the offensive, Croatian soldiers were trained at Fort Irwin in California and the Pentagon aided in planning the operation.

Note: Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.


MLK Jr. assassination files released after 60 years
2025-07-21, News Nation
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/mlk-jr-assassination-files-released/

The Trump administration Monday released more than 230,000 pages of previously classified documents related to the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced the release, carried out under President Donald Trump's executive order directing full transparency on the assassinations of King, President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The documents ... include FBI investigation details, internal memos tracking case progress and information about James Earl Ray's former cellmate who claimed Ray discussed an assassination plot. The files also contain foreign evidence from Canadian police and CIA records on the international manhunt for Ray. Unlike the JFK assassination files released under federal law, the King documents had never been digitized. Conspiracy theories have circulated about King's death, in part prompted by Ray's claims that his confession had been forced and the revelation of illegal surveillance of King by the FBI and the CIA. The FBI also allegedly attempted to get King to commit suicide. Some in King's family also believe that the government and possibly the Mafia were involved in the assassination and that Ray was set up to take the fall. The United States House Select Committee on Assassinations determined in 1979 that there was a likelihood Ray acted for monetary gain and that there was likely a conspiracy behind the shooting.

Note: Few people know about the buried 1999 King Family civil trial in Memphis, where it took a jury only one hour to determine that the US government was behind the assassination of King. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation that uncovers the dark truths behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on political assassinations.


Data Collection Can Be Effective AND Legal
2025-07-07, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/07/vips-data-collection-can-be-effective-and-l...

Technology already available – and already demonstrated to be effective – makes it possible for law-abiding officials, together with experienced technical people to create a highly efficient system in which both security and privacy can be assured. Advanced technology can pinpoint and thwart corruption in the intelligence, military, and civilian domain. At its core, this requires automated analysis of attributes and transactional relationships among individuals. The large data sets in government files already contain the needed data. On the Intelligence Community side, there are ways to purge databases of irrelevant data and deny government officials the ability to spy on anyone they want. These methodologies protect the privacy of innocent people, while enhancing the ability to discover criminal threats. In order to ensure continuous legal compliance with these changes, it is necessary to establish a central technical group or organization to continuously monitor and validate compliance with the Constitution and U.S. law. Such a group would need to have the highest-level access to all agencies to ensure compliance behind the classification doors. It must be able to go into any agency to inspect its activity at any time. In addition ... it would be best to make government financial and operational transactions open to the public for review. Such an organization would go a long way toward making government truly transparent to the public.

Note: The article cites national security journalist James Risen's book on how the creation of Google was closely tied to NSA and CIA-backed efforts to privatize surveillance infrastructure. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


Is Hollywood inspired by the CIA, or the other way around?
2025-07-06, Los Angeles Times
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-07-06/cia-hollywood-entertainment...

There's a revolving door of talent between the country's premiere intelligence agency and its entertainment industry, with inspiration and influence often working both ways. The agency is targeting professionals at the intersection of arts and technology for recruitment ... and continues to cooperate with entertainment giants to inspire the next generation of creative spies. Creative minds in Hollywood and the entertainment industry have long had a role at the Central Intelligence Agency, devising clever solutions to its most vexing problems, such as perfecting the art of disguise. In the 1950s, a magician from New York named John Mulholland was secretly contracted with the agency to write a manual for Cold War spies on trickery and deception. These days, the officers said, creative skills are more valuable than ever. "You're only limited by your own imagination – don't self-censor your ideas," said Janelle, a CIA public affairs officer. "We're always looking for partners." Some of the CIA's most iconic missions – at least the declassified ones – document the agency's rich history with Hollywood, including Canadian Caper, when CIA operatives disguised themselves as a film crew to rescue six American diplomats in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, an operation moviegoers will recognize as the plot of "Argo." CIA analysts have also been known to leave the agency for opportunities in the entertainment industry, writing books and scripts drawing from their experiences.

Note: Learn more about the CIA's longstanding propaganda network in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. The US Department of Defense has had a hand in more than 800 top Hollywood films. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption.


Blinken Ordered the Hit. Big Tech Carried It Out. African Stream Is Dead
2025-07-05, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/05/blinken-ordered-the-hit-big-tech-carried-it...

On Tuesday, July 1, 2025, African Stream published its final video, a defiant farewell message. With that, the once-thriving pan-African media outlet confirmed it was shutting down for good. Not because it broke the law. Not because it spread disinformation or incited violence. But because it told the wrong story, one that challenged U.S. power in Africa and resonated too deeply with Black audiences around the world. In September, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the call and announced an all-out war against the organization, claiming, without evidence, that it was a Russian front group. Within hours, big social media platforms jumped into action. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all deleted African Stream's accounts, while Twitter demonetized the organization. The company's founder and CEO, Ahmed Kaballo ... told us that, with just one statement, Washington was able to destroy their entire operation, stating: "We are shutting down because the business has become untenable. After we got attacked by Antony Blinken, we really tried to continue, but without a platform on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and being demonetized on X, it just meant the ability to generate income became damn near impossible." Washington both funds thousands of journalists around the planet to produce pro-U.S. propaganda, and, through its close connections to Silicon Valley, has the power to destroy those that do not toe the line.

Note: Learn more about the CIA's longstanding propaganda network in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship.


Top U.S. General in Africa Paints Grim Picture of U.S. Military Failures in Africa
2025-06-08, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2025/06/08/africa-military-failures-michael-langley-...

President George W. Bush created a new command to oversee all military operations in Africa 18 years ago. U.S. Africa Command was meant to help "bring peace and security to the people of Africa." Gen. Michael Langley, the head of AFRICOM, offered a grim assessment of security on the African continent during a recent press conference. The West African Sahel, he said last Friday, was now the "epicenter of terrorism" and the gravest terrorist threats to the U.S. homeland were "unfortunately right here on the African continent." Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted 23 deaths from terrorist violence in 2002 and 2003, the first years of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel and Somalia. By 2010, two years after AFRICOM began operations, fatalities from attacks by militant Islamists had already spiked to 2,674. There were an estimated 18,900 fatalities linked to militant Islamist violence in Africa last year, with 79 percent of those coming from the Sahel and Somalia. This constitutes a jump of more than 82,000 percent since the U.S. launched its post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts on the continent. As violence spiraled in the region over the past decades, at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance were key leaders in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror. At least five leaders of the 2023 coup d'état in [Niger] received American assistance.

Note: Learn more about the US military's shadow wars in Africa. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on terrorism and military corruption.


Torture and Secret C.I.A. Prisons Haunt 9/11 Case in Judge's Ruling
2025-04-29, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/politics/cia-torture-sept-11.html

When a military judge threw out a defendant's confession in the Sept. 11 case this month, he gave two main reasons. The prisoner's statements, the judge ruled, were obtained through the C.I.A.'s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation. But equally troubling to the judge was what happened to the prisoner in the years after his physical torture ended, when the agency held him in isolation and kept questioning him from 2003 to 2006. The defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, is accused of sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attack, which killed 3,000 people. In court, Mr. Baluchi is charged as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the plot. The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, wrote that it was easy to focus on the torture because it was "so absurdly far outside the norms of what is expected of U.S. custody preceding law enforcement questioning." "However," he added, "the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement – all while being continually questioned and conditioned – is just as egregious" as the physical torture. Prosecutors are preparing to appeal. But the 111-page ruling was the latest blow to the government's two-decade-old effort to hold death penalty trials at Guantánamo Bay by sweeping aside a legacy of state-sponsored torture.

Note: Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.


Who's Watching DHS?
2025-03-28, Project on Government Oversight
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/whos-watching-dhs

The Department of Homeland Security is effectively gutting key civil rights offices within the agency, slashing the number of staff at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Each of these offices was created by Congress, but DHS has decided to move ahead anyway, saying they "have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles." Four days later, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student with a valid F-1 visa, was pulled off a sidewalk in Massachusetts and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. The Department of Homeland Security, whose agents surround Ozturk in the video, has a long history of civil and human rights abuses. DHS is home to the largest law enforcement cohort in the United States. Its agents have extraordinary powers to stop, arrest, and detain citizens and noncitizens alike throughout the country. When Congress created DHS in 2002, it ... created the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) to provide oversight to guard against abuses. Every year, CRCL files a report to Congress. In its fiscal year (FY) 2023 report, for example, CRCL reported that it received over 3,000 allegations of misconduct and opened 758 investigations into issues ranging from treatment of travelers at airports to discrimination by DHS law enforcement to sexual abuse in DHS custody to deaths in DHS custody.

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