Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles 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: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Dozens of companies, non-profits and trade organizations including Apple, Google, and Facebook sent a letter [on July 18] pushing the Obama administration and Congress for more disclosures on the government's national security-related requests for user data. Together with LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Twitter and many others, the companies asked for more transparency of secret data gathering in the letter. Tech companies have been scrambling to assert their independence after documents leaked last month by former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden suggested they had given the government direct access to their computers as part of the NSA's secret surveillance program called Prism. The classified nature of the data gathering has barred the participating companies from disclosing even their involvement, let alone the content of the requests. Some companies, including Facebook and Apple, in June struck an agreement with the government to release some information about the number of surveillance requests they receive. But they were limited to disclosing aggregate government requests for data without showing the split between surveillance and criminal requests, and only for a six-month period.

Note: For more on government and corporate privacy invasions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The [UK] Government has issued more than 3,000 export licences for military and intelligence equipment worth a total of Ł12.3bn to countries which are on its own official list for human rights abuses. The existence of one licence to Israel and the Occupied Territories [is] worth Ł7.7bn. The scale and detail of the deals emerged after a forensic investigation by a committee of MPs, who also discovered that strategically controlled items have been sent to Iran, China, Sri Lanka, Russia, Belarus and Zimbabwe – all of which feature prominently on the Foreign Office’s list of states with worrying civil rights records. There are even three existing contracts for Syria, notwithstanding the fact that the UK is sending equipment to rebels fighting the Assad regime and is considering arming them. There are also 57 for Argentina, which is not on the list, but which remains in confrontation with Britain over the Falklands. The Government had stated that it would not issue export licences for goods “which might be used to facilitate internal repression” or “might provoke or prolong regional or internal conflicts”. However, the report by the Committees on Arms Export Controls found there were 62 licences for selling to Iran, ... overwhelmingly cryptographic equipment. This also features heavily in the 271 licences for Russia, along with biotechnology equipment, sniper rifles, laser weapons systems, weapon sights and unmanned air vehicles (drones).

Note: For more on war profiteering, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

A Florida medical examiner’s office said [on July 16] that the FBI has ordered the office not to release its autopsy report of a Chechen man fatally shot by a Boston FBI agent in May. The medical examiner’s office said it completed the autopsy report on Ibragim Todashev, a friend of [a] suspected Boston Marathon bomber, on July 8 and that the report was “ready for release.” The agent shot and killed Todashev on May 22 in his Orlando apartment during an interrogation related to the Boston Marathon bombings. Critics have called for an independent inquiry, questioning the blanket of secrecy surrounding the case. The FBI and the Massachusetts State Police sought out Todashev after the Marathon bombings, but have refused to release details of the shooting. Media reports have provided conflicting accounts: Some said Todashev attacked the agent with a blade during an interrogation, while others said Todashev was unarmed. Another said he lunged at the agent with a metal pole or a broomstick. The agent shot Todashev multiple times, according to family members who released photos of Todashev’s dead body as part of their call for an inquiry into his death. Family members and advocacy groups have questioned the media accounts, pointing out that Todashev had repeatedly cooperated with the FBI. The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the ACLU have called for independent inquiries into the shooting. According to CAIR in Florida, which is conducting its own investigation into Todashev’s slaying, Todashev had spoken to the FBI at least three times at their offices after the Marathon bombings.

Note: What are they hiding here?

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. That came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened? Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming [is] viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The restriction of these broadcasts was [lifted with] the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which passed as part of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. But if anyone needed a reminder of the dangers of domestic propaganda efforts, the past 12 months provided ample reasons. Last year, two USA Today journalists were ensnared in a propaganda campaign after reporting about millions of dollars in back taxes owed by the Pentagon’s top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan. The firm [created] phony websites and Twitter accounts to smear the journalists anonymously.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing media manipulation news articles.

This Reuters article ... purports to summarize an interview I gave to the daily newspaper La Nacion of Argentina. Like everything in the matter of these NSA leaks, this interview is being wildly distorted to attract attention away from the revelations themselves. I made three points in this La Nacion interview, all of which are true: 1) The oft-repeated claim that Snowden's intent is to harm the US is completely negated by the reality that he has all sorts of documents that could quickly and seriously harm the US if disclosed, yet he has published none of those. When he gave us the documents he provided, he repeatedly insisted that we exercise rigorous journalistic judgment in deciding which documents should be published in the public interest and which ones should be concealed on the ground that the harm of publication outweighs the public value. 2) The US government has acted with wild irrationality. The current criticism of Snowden is that he's in Russia. But the reason he's in Russia isn't that he chose to be there. It's because the US blocked him from leaving: first by revoking his passport (with no due process or trial), then by pressuring its allies to deny airspace rights to any plane they thought might be carrying him to asylum (even one carrying the democratically elected president of a sovereign state), then by bullying small countries out of letting him land for re-fueling. 3) I said that [forcing his plane down] would be completely counter-productive given that ... such an attack could easily result in far more disclosures than allowing us as journalists to vet and responsibly report them, as we've [been] doing.

Note: The above article was written by brave journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story. For more on the NSA surveillance scandal, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

In the era of intense government surveillance and secret court orders, a murky multimillion-dollar market has emerged. Paid for by U.S. tax dollars, but with little public scrutiny, surveillance fees charged in secret by technology and phone companies can vary wildly. AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that. Regardless of price, the surveillance business is growing. The U.S. government long has enjoyed access to phone networks and high-speed Internet traffic under the U.S. Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to catch suspected criminals and terrorists. More recently, the FBI has pushed technology companies like Google and Skype to guarantee access to real-time communications on their services. As the number of law enforcement requests for data grew and carriers upgraded their technology, the cost of accommodating government surveillance requests increased. AT&T, for example, said it devotes roughly 100 employees to review each request and hand over data. Likewise, Verizon said its team of 70 employees works around the clock, seven days a week to handle the quarter-million requests it gets each year.

Note: For more on government and corporate attacks on privacy, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Members of a congressional committee [on July 10] accused the FBI of stalling an inquiry into the Boston Marathon bombings, saying the bureau had no grounds for withholding what it knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the attacks. “The information requested by this committee belongs to the American people,’’ said Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee. “It does not belong solely to the FBI.” The frustrations, aired publicly after FBI officials rebuffed an invitation to appear before the committee, stemmed from the FBI’s unwillingness to detail how it handled a security review of Tsarnaev nearly two years before the Marathon bombings. “The FBI continues to refuse this committee’s appropriate requests for information and documents crucial to our investigation into what happened in Boston,” McCaul declared as he opened a committee hearing. Tsarnaev died after a firefight with police in Watertown within hours of being identified as a suspect. Members were particularly frustrated by a July 3 letter to the committee from the FBI. The letter, reviewed by the Globe, said the bureau would not be responding to all the committee’s requests for information. “The fact that the FBI is not sharing information with this committee with jurisdiction over homeland security I think is just totally unacceptable,” said Representative Peter King, a New York Republican.

Note: For more strangeness around the Boston bombing with a key witness being deported, click here. For more on the realities of intelligence agency manipulations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

A professor at an Indiana college says he has found film footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt being pushed in his wheelchair, depicting a secret that was hidden from the public until after his death. Ray Begovich, a journalism professor at Franklin College south of Indianapolis, said ... he found the eight-second clip while conducting unrelated research in the National Archives in College Park, Md. Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921 at age 39 and was unable to walk without leg braces or assistance. During his four terms as president, Roosevelt often used a wheelchair in private, but not for public appearances. News photographers cooperated in concealing Roosevelt's disability, and those who did not found their camera views blocked by Secret Service agents. "This raw film clip may be the first motion picture images of the president in his wheelchair, and it was never meant to be shown to the world," Begovich said. The film shows Roosevelt visiting the U.S.S. Baltimore at Pearl Harbor in July 1944. Roosevelt's disability was virtually a state secret during his presidency, which spanned the Great Depression and most of World War II.

Note: To watch this historic video, click here. Isn't it amazing that Roosevelt was U.S. president for 12 years, yet thanks to collusion of the press, his use of a wheelchair and disability was kept a secret from the public the entire time? Politicians know that public perception makes all the difference, so that perception management and manipulation has become a huge industry. For excellent information and resources along these lines, see this link.

On [July 10] the Washington Post published an article by its long-time reporter Walter Pincus. The article concocted a frenzied and inane conspiracy theory: that it was WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, working in secret with myself [Glenn Greenwald] and Laura Poitras, who masterminded the Snowden leaks ahead of time and directed Snowden's behavior. To peddle this tale, Pincus, in lieu of any evidence, spouted all sorts of accusatory innuendo masquerading as questions ... and invoked classic guilt-by association techniques. See the email I sent Pincus for the conclusive evidence of those factual falsehoods and the other distortions peddled by the Post. Apparently, the Washington Post has decided to weigh in on the ongoing debate over "what is journalism?" with this answer: you fill up articles on topics ... with nothing but idle speculation, rank innuendo, and evidence-free accusations, all under the guise of "just asking questions". You then strongly imply that other journalists who have actually broken a big story are involved in a rampant criminal conspiracy. What was far worse was that Pincus' wild conspiracy theorizing was accomplished only by asserting blatant, easily demonstrated falsehoods. The Post allowed the falsehoods to stand uncorrected all day. More than 8 hours after I first publicized his errors - Pincus emailed me back ... and vowed that a correction would be published. 36 hours after the Post published these falsehoods, 24 hours after I publicized them, and 15 hours after the author of this article acknowledged one of those errors and vowed a correction, the Post article still sits on the internet: uncorrected.

Note: For more on mass media corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Pop quiz: Name a state residential school where children were enrolled in medical experiments over an almost 20-year period, in which they were unknowingly fed a steady diet of radioactive isotopes, subjected to regular blood draws, and placed in solitary confinement if they refused to cooperate. Answer: the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham [Mass.} during the mid 20th century. Unfortunately, as Allen Hornblum, Judith Newman, and Gregory Dober painfully describe in their chilling new book, Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America, Fernald was not the only institution in the country, or even in the state, where children were conscripted into sometimes deadly medical experiments. These were conducted by ambitious physicians and scientists whose belief in what they were trying to accomplish often blinded them to the potentially horrific consequences of their actions. “Against Their Will’’ opens with an overview of the eugenics movement in the United States, which found sympathizers among many luminaries of American medicine in the 19th and early 20th centuries. With its disdain for the disabled, who were considered genetically inferior, the movement paved the way for use of “defective’’ children in research. The book then provides multiple examples of medical experiments perpetrated on developmentally delayed and physically disabled children at multiple institutions across the country over the course of decades, often reading like case studies straight out of the 1947 Nazi doctors’ trial.

Note: For a long list of verifiable incidents where unknowing citizens were used as guinea pigs on a massive scale, click here.

The top U.S. special operations commander, Adm. William McRaven, ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public. The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon's inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. The CIA, noting that the bin Laden mission was overseen by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta before he became defense secretary, said that the SEALs were effectively assigned to work temporarily for the CIA, which has presidential authority to conduct covert operations. The records transfer was part of an effort by McRaven to protect the names of the personnel involved in the raid, according to the inspector general's draft report. But secretly moving the records allowed the Pentagon to tell The Associated Press that it couldn't find any documents inside the Defense Department that AP had requested more than two years ago, and would represent a new strategy for the U.S. government to shield even its most sensitive activities from public scrutiny. "Welcome to the shell game in place of open government," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private research institute at George Washington University. "Guess which shell the records are under. If you guess the right shell, we might show them to you. It's ridiculous."

Note: For a powerful analysis of the strong evidence that Osama bin Laden most likely died in Afghanistan in December 2001, long before he was "killed" by the SEALs raid in Pakistan, read David Ray Griffin's Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? For more on government secrecy, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

CNBC’s BRIAN SULLIVAN: Is there anyone else in the Senate that is a professor? ELIZABETH WARREN: I don't think so. ... We had the big crash in 2008. What does everyone say about it? They say too much concentration in financial services creates too big to fail. It puts us at bigger risk. And what's happened since 2008? The four biggest financial institutions are now 30% bigger than they were in 2008. The central premise behind a 21st century Glass-Steagall is to say if you want to get out there and take risks, go ahead and do it. But ... you can't get access to FDIC insured deposits when you do. That way ... at least one portion of our banking sector stays safe. From 1797 to 1933, the American banking system crashed about every 15 years. In 1933, we put good reforms in place, for which Glass-Steagall was the centerpiece, and from 1933 to the early 1980s, that’s a 50 year period, we didn’t have any of that – none. We kept the system steady and secure. And it was only as we started deregulating, [you hit] the S&L crisis, and what did we do? We deregulated some more. And then you hit long-term capital management at the end of the 90s, and what did we do as a country? This country continued to deregulate more. And then we hit the big crash in 2008. You are not going to defend the proposition that regulation can never work, it did work. SULLIVAN: I didn’t say regulation never worked, Senator. By far and away, and I agree, there were fewer bank failures in that time after Glass-Steagall. ELIZABETH WARREN: “Fewer,” as in, of the big ones, zero.

Note: Sen. Warren is one of the few bright lights in Congress. Watch this interview to see why. To read about later censorship of this interview by NBC, click here.

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans. The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny. The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come. In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures. Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public.

Note: For more on government secrecy, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

South America's leftist leaders rallied to support Bolivian President Evo Morales after his plane was rerouted amid suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board and they demanded an apology from France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The presidents of Argentina, Ecuador, Suriname, Venezuela and Uruguay joined Morales in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba ... to denounce the treatment of Morales, who warned that he would close the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia if necessary. Morales again blamed Washington for pressuring European countries to refuse to allow his plane to fly through their airspace on Tuesday, forcing it to land in Vienna, Austria, in what he called a violation of international law. He had been returning from a summit in Russia during which he had suggested he would be willing to consider a request from Snowden for asylum. Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said Friday that his nation and other European countries were told Snowden was aboard the Bolivian presidential plane. He did not say who supplied the information and declined to say whether he had been in contact with the United States. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said that he and other leaders were offering full support to Morales following the rerouting of the plane, calling it an aggression against the Americas. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro protested alleged attempts by Spanish officials to search the Bolivian presidential plane and accused the CIA of encouraging several European countries to deny the presidential plane their airspace.

Note: The subservience of European governments to the US attempt to apprehend Snowden by forcing Pres. Morales' plane down is logical given the recent revelations that they are also engaging in total surveillance of their own populations. For information on this click here (France), here (the UK), and here (Germany).

Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home. “Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green. “It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his wife owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service. Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images. The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001. It enables the Postal Service to retrace the path of mail at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.

Note: The exposure by whistleblower Edward Snowden of the NSA's massive domestic and global spying operations seems to have triggered a series of other revelations about surveillance of the US population, like this report on the US Postal Service's photographing all mail. Hardly a week goes by without another major revelation, such as a new digital photo-ID database utilized by the FBI and police forces, and the development by US police of a national DNA database on all "potential suspects". Since very few US citizens are terrorists, what is the real purpose behind this total surveillance?

Have you noticed anything missing in the political discourse about the National Security Administration's unprecedented mass surveillance? There's at least been some conversation about the intelligence community's potential criminality and constitutional violations. But there have only been veiled references to how cash undoubtedly tilts the debate against those who challenge the national security state. Those indirect references have come in stories about Booz Allen Hamilton, the security contractor that employed Edward Snowden. CNN/Money notes that 99 percent of the firm's multibillion-dollar annual revenues now come from the federal government. Those revenues are part of a larger and growing economic sector within the military-industrial complex - a sector that, according to author Tim Shorrock, is "a $56 billion-a-year industry." Yet few in the Washington press corps mention that politicians' attacks on surveillance critics may have nothing to do with principle and everything to do with shilling for campaign donors. For a taste of what that kind of institutionalized corruption looks like, peruse the Influence Explorer site to see how much Booz Allen Hamilton and its parent company, the Carlyle Group, spend. As you'll see, from Barack Obama to John McCain, many of the politicians publicly defending the surveillance state have taken huge sums of money from the firms. Simply put, there are corporate forces with a vested financial interest in making sure the debate over security is tilted toward the surveillance state and against critics of that surveillance state.

Note: Tim Shorrock, quoted above, is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

HSBC Holdings Plcs $1.9 billion agreement with the U.S. to resolve charges it enabled Latin American drug cartels to launder billions of dollars was approved by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge John Gleeson in Brooklyn, New York, signed off yesterday on a deferred-prosecution agreement. HSBC was accused of failing to monitor more than $670 billion in wire transfers and more than $9.4 billion in purchases of U.S. currency from HSBC Mexico, allowing for money laundering, prosecutors said. The bank also violated U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba, according to a criminal information filed in the case. The bank, Europes largest, agreed to pay a $1.25 billion forfeiture and $665 million in civil penalties under the settlement, prosecutors announced in December. At a hearing the same month, Gleeson told prosecutors there had been publicized criticism of the agreement, which lets the bank and management avoid further criminal proceedings over the charges. Lack of proper controls allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico and the Norte del Valle cartel in Colombia to move more than $881 million through HSBCs U.S. unit from 2006 to 2010, the government alleged in the case. The bank also cut resources for its anti-money-laundering programs to cut costs and increase profits, the government said in court filings. Under a deferred prosecution agreement, the U.S. allows a target to avoid charges.

Note: HSBC was founded to service the international drug trade, and is considered too big to criminally prosecute. Big bank settlements often amount to "cash for secrecy" deals that are ultimately profitable for banks. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about financial industry corruption.

As Christmas 2011 approached, U.S. Army medic Shawn Aiken was once again locked in desperate battle with a formidable foe: the U.S. Defense Department. Aiken ... was in his second month of physical and psychological reconstruction ... after two tours of combat duty. But the problem that loomed largest that holiday season was [that] Aiken had no money. The Defense Department was withholding big chunks of his pay ... and resisted Aiken's pleas for explanation and redress. The Defense Finance and Accounting Service, or DFAS ... is responsible for accurately paying America's 2.7 million active-duty and Reserve soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. It often fails at that task, a Reuters investigation finds. Aiken's case is hardly isolated. Pay errors in the military are widespread. Precise totals on the extent and cost of these mistakes are impossible to come by, and for the very reason the errors plague the military in the first place: the Defense Department's jury-rigged network of mostly incompatible computer systems for payroll and accounting, many of them decades old, long obsolete, and unable to communicate with each other. The department's authorized 2013 budget, after sequester, totals $565.8 billion - by far the largest chunk of the annual federal budget approved by Congress. Yet the Pentagon is literally unable to account for itself. A law in effect since 1992 requires annual audits of all federal agencies. The Pentagon alone has never complied. It annually reports to Congress that its books are in such disarray that an audit is impossible.

Note: Could it be that the real reason the Pentagon is the only branch of US government that doesn't balance its books is that they don't want us to know where the money is going? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Faced with a $19 billion fine for polluting Ecuador’s rainforest, Chevron Corp. has done a remarkable job of turning the tables on its foes. The lawyers who sued Chevron in Ecuador, winning that eye-popping judgment, have come under non-stop attack from the oil company. Chevron has hauled them into court in New York, accusing them of fraud and extortion. The company has gone after Ecuador’s judicial system as well, claiming judges there conspired with the other side. That aggressive strategy has worked wonders, putting Chevron’s opponents on the defensive and convincing many people that the Ecuador suit is a sham. And you can trace much of that strategy back to a 2008 memo by San Francisco’s master of crisis communications, Sam Singer. In October of 2008, he sent Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson a four-page memo outlining steps the company could take to change public perceptions of the Ecuador lawsuit. Singer recommended going on the offensive. The company should portray Ecuador’s court system as corrupt, with collusion between judges and the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Pointing out the leftward tilt of Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa wouldn’t hurt. And Singer recommended “counter attacks” on the plaintiffs and their legal team, particularly lead lawyer Steven Donziger. Bear in mind that the memo was written more than two years before the Ecuadoran judge presiding over the lawsuit ruled against Chevron, in February of 2011. Some of Singer’s recommendations didn’t fly. For example, he suggested portraying Ecuador as “the next major threat to America.” But the company took much of his advice to heart.

Former FBI supervisor John Morris thought he had left his sordid relationship with James "Whitey" Bulger back in Boston along with the envelopes of money, the cases of expensive wine, the home-cooked meals he had prepared for the accused mob boss. Then the phone rang one night. It was 1995 and Bulger had become a fugitive from justice. It was Bulger on the phone. And he was livid. A Boston newspaper had reported that Bulger was a longtime FBI informant, and Bulger wanted Morris to have the story retracted. "He said if he was going to jail ... I was going with him." Morris testified in the trial of Bulger, 83, who is accused of a string of crimes, including 19 murders. Testimony during the trial has stated Bulger ran a criminal enterprise with the help of corrupt FBI agents [John] Connolly and Morris, and that Bulger was an FBI informant concerning his criminal rivals. Morris' testimony put a spotlight on a staggering amount of corruption in the Boston FBI field office that included cash bribes and tip-offs to wiretaps. Connolly's relationship with Bulger extended into the Massachusetts State House, Morris testified. His friendship with Bulger's brother, then Senate President William Bulger, [could] land him a job as the Boston police commissioner upon his retirement from the bureau. Connolly's behavior did not raise any eyebrows with the Special Agents in Charge of the Boston FBI field office, Morris told the court. In fact it was quite the opposite. FBI bosses sought Connolly's friendship, Morris testified. "He had tremendous access across the board to everything including sports events, political figures," Morris testified.

Note: For more on major corruption within the FBI and other intelligence services, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

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