War News Stories

Excerpts of Key War News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on war 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.

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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.

A Russian investigator has said grenades fired by surrounding Russian forces could have triggered the Beslan school bloodbath in September 2004. Yuri Savelyev's conclusions contradict the official view that bombs planted by the hostage-takers in the school gym went off just before the gun battle. Mr Savelyev is a member of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating the siege, in which 331 people died. Mr Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, said that during the investigation, he "discovered that the consequences of those blasts could not at all be explained by the explosions of the home-made devices installed by the rebels". The head of the commission, Stanislav Kesayev, said he had confidence in Mr Savelyev's conclusions. "He had more resources than our commission. He relied on his own knowledge as a weapons specialist and mathematician," Mr Kesayev told the radio. For weeks after the siege Russian officials had denied the use of flamethrowers.

Note: The Russian school bombing is very likely one of many examples of a false-flag operation -- a terrorist act staged secretly by a government and blamed on another group or government in order to achieve a certain agenda. To understand more about that agenda, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/brighterfuture. To see Terrorstorm, an excellent, free documentary on false flag operations, click here.

A special report in The New Yorker says the Bush administration was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks against Hizbullah in Lebanon, and US officials hoped that by helping Israel destroy or disarm the militant Islamic group, it would make it easier for the US to launch a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The report, written by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who also helped break the story about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and in the 70s broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, alleges Israeli officials travelled to Washington to talk to US officials, in particular Vice President Dick Cheney, about the plan. A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House "has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a pre-emptive blow against Hezbollah." CBS News reports that Israeli officials "fiercely denied" that it had sought a "greenlight" from Washington, and that it had no advance plan to attack Hizbullah. Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. They really want to go after Iran." Last month the San Francisco Chronicle reported that "Israel's military response...was unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago". The report said that a senior Israeli army officer had been briefing diplomats, journalists and think-tanks for more than a year about the plan. It quoted Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at [Israel's] Bar-Ilan University, who said: "Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared."

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., [Herbert Reed] ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and another. They began to talk. [They] all have depleted uranium in their urine. The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks. The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations. Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium. Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. Depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War Syndrome, from which no treatment has emerged. About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer [this] baffling array of symptoms. Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor. It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange...was linked to [major disease and] sufferings. It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.

Note: Why isn't the media reporting more on this health disaster? For lots more on how veterans suffer from corporate and governmental denial and manipulations, see what a highly decorated U.S. General has to say on the suffering of soldiers at http://www.WantToKnow.info/warcoverup. For an amazingly revealing documentary with interviews from top sources on the depleted uranium cover-up, click here.

The Bush administration drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policy makers from possible criminal charges for authorizing any humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal. At issue are interrogations carried out by the CIA and the degree to which harsh tactics such as water-boarding were authorized by administration officials. When interrogators engage in waterboarding, prisoners are strapped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning. One section of the draft would outlaw torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, but it does not contain prohibitions from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions against "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Another section would apply the legislation retroactively. The initiative is "not just protection of political appointees, but also CIA personnel who led interrogations." Interrogation practices "follow from policies that were formed at the highest levels of the administration."

Kill anything that moves. Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying. Back home in California, Henry published an account of the slaughter. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and fabricators. No one was ever prosecuted. Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth. The files are part of a once-secret archive ... that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known. The Times...obtained copies of about 3,000 pages -- about a third of the total -- before government officials removed them from the public shelves, saying they contained personal information that was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators. Many war crimes did not make it into the archive. The archive ... includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass. The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese. Hundreds of soldiers ... described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses ... were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam. Ultimately, 57 [soldiers] were court-martialed and just ... fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator. He served seven months of a 20-year term. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.

Four U.S. soldiers accused of murdering suspected insurgents during a raid in Iraq said they were under orders to "kill all military age males," according to sworn statements obtained by The Associated Press. "The ROE (rule of engagement) was to kill all military age males on Objective Murray," Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard told investigators, referring to the target by its code name. That target, an island on a canal in the northern Salhuddin province, was believed to be an al-Qaeda training camp. The soldiers said officers in their chain of command gave them the order and explained that special forces had tried before to target the island and had come under fire from insurgents. Girouard, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, and Spc. Juston R. Graber are charged with murder and other offenses in the shooting deaths of three of the men during the May 9 raid. Girouard, Hunsaker and Clagett are also charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly threatening to kill another soldier if he told authorities what happened.

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday. The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration. Israel's request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike. The new American arms shipment to Israel has not been announced publicly, and the officials who described the administration's decision to rush the munitions to Israel would discuss it only after being promised anonymity. Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel.

The House, displaying a foreign affairs solidarity lacking on issues like Iraq, voted overwhelmingly Thursday to support Israel in its confrontation with Hezbollah guerrillas. The resolution, which was passed on a 410-8 vote, also condemns enemies of the Jewish state. House Republican leader John Boehner cited Israel's "unique relationship" with the United States as a reason for his colleagues to swiftly go on record supporting Israel in the latest flare-up of violence in the Mideast. Yet as Republican and Democratic leaders rally behind the measure in rare bipartisan fashion, a handful of lawmakers have quietly expressed reservations that the resolution was too much the result of a powerful lobbying force and attempts to court Jewish voters.

Note: It's interesting to note that very few major media picked up this revealing story.

Journalists regularly hold back information for national security reasons; I recently withheld information at the request of the intelligence community. The one thing worse than a press that is "out of control" is one that is under control. Anybody who has lived in a Communist country knows that. Just consider what would happen if the news media as a whole were as docile to the administration as Fox News or The Wall Street Journal editorial page. When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage...misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. The real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it. Historically, we in the press have done more damage to our nation by withholding secret information than by publishing it. One example was this newspaper's withholding details of the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. President Kennedy himself suggested that the U.S. would have been better served if The Times had published the full story and derailed the invasion. Then there were the C.I.A. abuses that journalists kept mum about until they spilled over and prompted the Church Committee investigation in the 1970's. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the press...was too credulous about claims that Iraq possessed large amounts of W.M.D. In each of these cases...we failed in our watchdog role, and we failed our country. So be very wary of Mr. Bush's effort to tame the press. Watchdogs can be mean, dumb and obnoxious, but it would be even more dangerous to trade them in for lap dogs.

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.

Alongside the submarines, ships and airplanes participating in large-scale military exercises in the Pacific this month, a team of sea lions and dolphins are expected to patrol the sea. These marine animals will be flown in from San Diego for simulated mine recovery and mine detection during the biennial RIMPAC war games. Six bottle-nosed dolphins would find the mines, while four California sea lions would help recover them. High-tech gadgets deployed by the military can't match the natural skills of the dolphins and sea lions. Sea lions have "incredibly good underwater hearing" and can dive to 1,000 feet to attach a recovery line to a simulated mine, he said. Dolphins use their sonar to find the mines. Marine mammals have been used by the Navy since the early 1960s. The animals save the Navy an estimated $1 million a year. The $15 million Marine Mammal Program has 75 dolphins and 30 sea lions at its San Diego facility. Opponents of the program say the military should not train animals for use in warfare.

Amid daily revelations about prewar intelligence and a growing scandal surrounding the indictment of the vice president's chief of staff and presidential adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and Richard Bruce Cheney, the most powerful vice president in the nation's history. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies," Cheney told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government would have to operate on the "dark side." In The Dark Side, airing June 20, 2006, at 9 P.M. on PBS...FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the chief architect of the war on terror and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control of the "dark side." Drawing on more than 40 interviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war. After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies, and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet.

Covering Guantanamo means wrangling with...logistics so nonsensical that they turn two hours of reporting into an 18-hour day...with hostile escorts who seem to think you're in league with Al Qaeda...a Pentagon power play that muzzles already reluctant sources and an unceremonious expulsion to Miami on a military plane, safety-belted onto whatever seat is available. In this case, that seat was the toilet. I ended up on that plane, on that seat, because...the only three newspaper reporters who managed to surmount Pentagon obstacles to covering the first deaths at Guantanamo were ordered off the base. When unexpected news breaks, like the suicides, the Pentagon's knee-jerk reflex to thwart coverage reminds me of how Communist officials used to organize Cold War-era propaganda trips for Moscow correspondents but then pull the plug when embarrassing realities intruded. What little we learn often comes to light by accident. During my first visit in January 2005...I asked...if the facility had ever been at or near capacity. "Only during the mass-hanging incident," the Navy doctor replied, provoking audible gasps and horrified expressions among the public affairs minders...none of whom were particularly pleased with the disclosure that 23 prisoners had attempted simultaneously to hang themselves with torn bed sheets in late 2003. Under ground rules we must agree to if we want access to the base, journalists may not have any contact with detainees, who are removed from sight at all but one camp during media tours.

A January poll [found] that 64% of Iraqis believe that crime and violent attacks will decrease if the U.S. leaves Iraq within six months. If that's true, then what are we doing there? It was questions very much like [this]...that led, eventually, to the publication of the first of the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, 35 years ago this week. Nearly two years earlier...I first started copying the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents from my office safe at Rand...an act that I fully expected would send me to prison for life. It became increasingly clear that the whole chain of command, civilian and military, was participating in a coverup. It's a system that lies reflexively, at every level from sergeant to commander in chief, about murder. And I had...7,000 pages of documentary evidence to prove it. The papers documented in stunning detail a pattern of lies and deceptions by four presidents and their administrations over 23 years to conceal their war plans. It became clear to me that the justifications that had been given for our involvement were false. I thought to myself: I don't want to be part of this lying machine anymore. Today, there must be, at the very least, hundreds of civilian and military officials...who have in their safes and computers comparable documentation of intense internal debates -- the Pentagon Papers of Iraq, Iran or the ongoing war on U.S. liberties. Some of those officials, I hope, will choose to accept the personal risks of revealing the truth -- earlier than I did -- before more lives are lost or a new war is launched.

Note: If you have time to read only one full article on war deception, I can't recommend this one highly enough. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine, Pentagon official, and State Department officer in Vietnam, more than any single person exposed the huge deception involved in the Vietnam War. The story of his experience is astonishingly similar to what is happening today.

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?

Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded in Iraq in 2004, said on Thursday he felt no sense of relief at the killing of the al Qaeda leader in Iraq and blamed President Bush for his son's death. The United States said its aircraft killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insurgent leader who masterminded the death of hundreds in suicide bombings and was blamed for the videotaped beheading of Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor, and other captives. "I don't think that Zarqawi is himself responsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq," Berg said in a combative television interview with the U.S. Fox News network. Berg said Bush was to blame for the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. "Yeah, like George Bush didn't OK the torture and death and rape of people in the Abu Ghraib prison for which my son was killed in retaliation?" Zarqawi's organization took responsibility for the execution of Nick Berg in May 2004. The video was published with a caption saying: "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slaughtering an American." When an Islamist Web site showed the video of a man severing Berg's head, the CIA said Zarqawi was probably the one wielding the knife. The father said he was not convinced. "I have been lied to by my own government," he told Reuters on Thursday.

Note: There are many very strange circumstances surrounding the beheading of Nick Berg. For a report from Australia's leading newspaper on this, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/nickberg

The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to C.I.A. documents that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informers after World War II. The United States government...had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The documents show the C.I.A. "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "forced us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis. As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers and having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the C.I.A. to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hitler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet K.G.B. Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has persuaded the government to declassify more than 8 million pages of documents. But the group ran into resistance starting in 2002 from the C.I.A., which sought to withhold operational files from the 1940's and 50's.

Note: For more on clandestine government use of Nazi scientists in developing top-secret mind control programs with links for verification, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg

The planned detonation of 700 tons of conventional explosives in the Nevada desert next month was postponed indefinitely Friday because of fears over the possible spread of radiation. The detonation site for the blast, known as "Divine Strake," is at the Nevada Test Site, which is 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The plan was to detonate 1.4 million pounds of fuel oil and fertilizer -- 280 times the amount used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The prospect has drawn critics, who say the explosion could kick radiation-laced soil into the air, and conspiracists, who say the blast is a front for testing new nuclear weapons.

Note: Many thanks to all of you who emailed expressing concern about Divine Strake and were part of the movement to have this test stopped. Together, we make a difference!

The Defense Department's accounting practices are in such disarray that defense officials can't track how much equipment the military owns, where it all is or exactly how they spend defense dollars every year. The report by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities called the Pentagon's financial-management practices an embarrassment. "Today, if the Defense Department were a private business it would be involved in a major scandal," said Kwai Chan, a former top official with the Government Accountability Office and the report's author. The nonpartisan group, made up of more than 600 current and retired business executives from U.S. companies, thinks that federal spending priorities are undermining national security. A report this year from the White House's Office of Management and Budget found that 20 out of 23 defense programs that auditors looked at...didn't use strong financial-management practices. In reports to Congress in recent years, the GAO found $100 million that could be collected annually from defense contractors who underpaid federal taxes. The federal government had collected less than 1 percent of that. $1.2 billion in Army supplies shipped to Iraq [also] couldn't be accounted for. As a result, military units ended up short on "tires, tank tracks, helicopter spare parts, radio batteries and other basic items." The Defense Department's Office of the Inspector General has pronounced the department "un-auditable."

Note: The article failed to mention Rumsfeld's own admission "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," as reported on CBS. The CBS article goes on to state that "[the Pentagon's] own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends." See this highly underreported article at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN. The US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient. The command force in Iraq...and the overseeing US general, had claimed "not to have ... received any weapons from Bosnia." A Nato official.. told Amnesty: "There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands." The Moldovan air firm which flew the cargo out of a US air base at Tuzla, north-east Bosnia, was flying without a licence. The firm, Aerocom, [was] named in a 2003 UN investigation of the diamonds-for-guns trade in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Some of the firms used in the Pentagon sponsored deals were also engaged in illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia and to Saddam Hussein four years ago. The Pentagon commissioned the US security firms Taos and CACI - which is known for its involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison controversy in Iraq - to orchestrate the arms purchases and shipments.

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.