Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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November 30 marks the International Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare. Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed an estimated 20 million gallons of herbicides over southern Vietnam, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and parts of Cambodia. Nearly two-thirds was Agent Orange, later discovered to be contaminated with 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) – a potent, long-lasting dioxin. TCDD is a known human carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor, linked to cancers, reproductive disorders, and birth defects that can span generations. By the letter of the CWC, Agent Orange is not classified as a "chemical weapon." If you ask a Vietnam veteran suffering from Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, or any of the 19 types of conditions the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) associates with Agent Orange exposure, you'll hear a very different story. To them, it was every bit a weapon designed to destroy life and health. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that over 757,000 veterans – about one in four who served – were receiving benefits linked to Agent Orange. The 2022 PACT Act broadened that circle to veterans who served in other areas where Agent Orange was used. By 2024, more than 84,000 new Vietnam-era veterans were granted compensation, many due to exposure. Fifty years after the Vietnam War ended, the toxic legacy of Agent Orange and other dioxins lingers on.

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

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

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

Military aviation accidents are spiking. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D- Mass.) office reported this week, the rate of severe accidents per 100,000 flight hours, was a staggering 55% higher than it was in 2020. Her office said mishaps cost the military $9.4 billion, killed 90 service members and DoD civilian employees, and destroyed 89 aircraft between 2020 to 2024. The Air Force lost 47 airmen to "preventable mishaps" in 2024 alone. The U.S. continues to utilize aircraft with known safety issues or are otherwise prone to accidents, like the V-22 Osprey, whose gearbox and clutch failures can cause crashes. Dan Grazier, director of the Stimson Center's National Security Reform Program, told RS that the lack of flight crew experience is a problem. "The total number of flight hours U.S. military pilots receive has been abysmal for years. Pilots in all branches simply don't fly often enough to even maintain their flying skills, to say nothing of improving them," he said. This is often because aircraft are not ready to fly. "One of the main reasons behind the lack of flying time, is the simple fact that modern military aircraft are excessively complex machines that don't work as often as the services need them to do," Grazier told RS. He said that popular aircraft, like the F-35, often are not mission capable. "Pentagon officials can ... insist on simpler aircraft with high readiness rates as a key performance parameter."

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

During the Cold War, the first implants showing that we could control animal minds sparked panic. The C.I.A. had its own clandestine experimental mind-control program. People warned of brain warfare. Those fears [are] back, along with a conversation about what it means to have freedom of thought at a time when technology is literally being implanted in our brains. Brain computer interface, or B.C.I. ... are very small devices that go right on the surface of your brain, where they can pick up neural activity. The data is transmitted via Bluetooth to a computer program, which decodes the information. In a sense, they're hooked up to an artificial intelligence. So the neural network inside your mind communicates with a neural network outside. And through that, we are able to reconstruct people's intentions. For people with degenerative diseases, or who are paralyzed, or who otherwise have lost important abilities, these implants have been totally revolutionary. These patients can move their hands, type and in some cases, speak again. Optogenetics, a technique for turning isolated neurons on and off, has been used to implant false memories in mice, raising the possibility that, in the distant future, something similar could be done in humans. Neuroprivacy is the idea that we should have to give consent to anyone who wants access to our innermost selves. But there's a question: Does neuroprivacy apply only to my unspoken thoughts? Or does it apply to the electrical activity in my brain?

Note: Read about the Pentagon's plans to use our brains as warfare, describing how the human body is war's next domain. Learn more about biotech dangers. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and microchip implants.

The White House under Gerald Ford tried to block a landmark Senate report that disclosed the CIA's role in assassination attempts against foreign leaders and ultimately led to a radical overhaul in how the agency was held to account, documents released to mark the 50th anniversary of the report's publication reveal. The documents, dating from 1975, were posted on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, as it sought to highlight the report's significance amid conjecture that Donald Trump may have authorized the agency to assassinate Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, amid a massive US military build-up against the country. Among the documents posted by the National Security Archive is a "secret/sensitive" options paper addressed to Dick Cheney, then chief of staff to Ford, that included a recommendation of outright opposition to publication of the report. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, said highlighting the Church report's historical significance had become more urgent. "Fifty years after the scandal of the revelations of the Church committee report, we've come a long way in the wrong direction, where we have US presidents who now seem to feel they can openly discuss assassination plots against foreign leaders," he said. At least 83 people have been killed in 21 US drone strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific since early September.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on assassinations and intelligence agency corruption.

Fifty years ago today, a special Senate Committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church lifted the veil of secrecy on the clandestine efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target specific foreign leaders for assassination. The Church Committee overcame intense pressure from the Gerald Ford White House to withhold publication of the report, which exposed CIA operations to "neutralize" leaders such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and General Rene Schneider in Chile. "The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots," states the introduction of the 285-page report, officially titled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. "The Committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy." To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee report, the National Security Archive is posting a small selection of documents on efforts by the Ford Administration to keep the report secret. Public outrage forced the CIA and the White House to retreat on the use of assassination as a tool of covert operations. In response to the report, on February 18, 1976, President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which stated: "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on assassinations and intelligence agency corruption.

2025 has given Americans plenty to protest about. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers–including U.S. Border Patrol agents–were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car. Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety's servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock's national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate. Via public records requests, EFF obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. The data shows that agencies logged hundreds of searches related to the 50501 protests in February, the Hands Off protests in April, the No Kings protests in June and October, and other protests in between. Some agencies have adopted policies that prohibit using ALPRs for monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment. Yet many officers probed the nationwide network with terms like "protest" without articulating an actual crime under investigation.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

On July 31, 2019, just eleven days before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell, his connection to the Rothschild banking dynasty became the subject of major public controversy. Anonymous sources informed Bloomberg of a 2015 visit to Epstein's New York mansion by baroness Ariane de Rothschild, the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group, a storied private bank and one of the largest Swiss financial institutions by assets under management. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild's personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal. A second set of documents–the leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak ... sheds light on Epstein's efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. It's not clear whether the Rothschild bank ultimately participated directly in Epstein and Barak's cyberweapons efforts–but in October 2015, de Rothschild negotiated a $25 million contract with Epstein's Southern Trust Company, the same entity Epstein used to fund Barak's intelligence-linked security startup Reporty Homeland Security (now known as Carbyne) earlier that year.

Note: Read more about the vast influence of the Rothschild empire. Israeli cyberweapons have been sold to the FBI and used against journalists and activists. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's crime ring.

The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell. That hospital ... would be her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then-16-year-old to undergo treatment for "disobedient" behaviour. Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA's top-secret research into mind control. Now, she is one of two named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. She became an unwitting participant in covert CIA experiments known as MK-Ultra. The Cold War project tested the effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD, electroshock treatments and brainwashing techniques on human beings without their consent. Over 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the US and Canada were involved. At the Allan, McGill University researcher Dr Ewen Cameron drugged patients and made them listen to recordings, sometimes thousands of times. The technique was a form of "psychic driving," says doctoral student Jordan Torbay. "Essentially the minds of patients were manipulated using verbal cues," she says, adding he also looked at the effects of sleep drugs, forced sensory deprivation, and induced coma. Medical records show Ms Ponting was given LSD, as well as drugs like sodium amytal, a barbiturate, desoxyn, a stimulant, as well as nitrous oxide gas, a sedative known as laughing gas.

Note: Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and mind control.

Epstein's relationship with the Israeli government has long been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theorizing. But the extent of the connections has long been difficult to prove. That is, until October 2024, when the Palestinian group Handala released a tranche of more than 100,000 hacked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country from 1999 to 2001. Barak is known to have been one of Epstein's closest associates. He visited the financier's estates in Florida and New York more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017, years after Epstein had been convicted for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent victims, who died earlier this year, alleged in her posthumous memoir that a figure, described only as "the Prime Minister," but widely believed to be Barak, violently raped her on Epstein's private Caribbean island when she was 18. Epstein helped to facilitate an agreement for Mongolia to purchase Israeli military equipment and surveillance technology from companies with which the men had financial ties. An Israeli spy, Yoni Koren, stayed at Epstein's New York apartment for weeks at a time on three separate occasions between 2013 and 2015. Koren served as an intermediary between the American and Israeli governments, helping Barak organize meetings with top intelligence officials, including former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Epstein's criminal enterprise and intelligence agency corruption.

The CIA experienced "as many failures as successes" in exploring the intelligence applications of LSD and other drugs, according to the October 1975 U.S. Senate testimony of the Agency's former top chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, the man most closely associated with the notorious MKULTRA behavior control research projects. The long-secret transcripts of Gottlieb's testimony to the staff of the United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee") were published today by the National Security Archive, 50 years after the historic intelligence oversight hearings, along with a selection of declassified CIA memos and other records concerning MKULTRA. The Church Committee transcripts are among the highlights of the Digital National Security Archive collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA. Gottlieb was a key bureaucratic player who signed off on hundreds of MKULTRA subprojects and who developed clandestine relationships with universities, prisons, hospitals, private laboratories, and private foundations that made it difficult to trace the programs back to the Agency. The Church Committee faced considerable obstacles in reconstructing the story, especially since Gottlieb and CIA director Richard Helms destroyed most of the original project records in 1973.

Note: According to Gottlieb's testimony, the CIA covertly dosed an unwitting individual with a massive amount of LSD to deliberately induce psychosis, causing him to experience violent paranoia and leading an unsuspecting psychiatrist to declare him mentally ill. This was done explicitly to discredit the man in the eyes of his colleagues–a tactic deemed as operationally useful for destroying a person's credibility without ever touching them. Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Local cops have gotten tens of millions of dollars' worth of discounted military gear under a secretive federal program that is poised to grow under recent executive action. The 1122 program ... presents a danger to people facing off against militarized cops, according to Women for Weapons Trade Transparency. "All of these things combined serve as a threat to free speech, an intimidation tactic to protest," said Lillian Mauldin, the co-founder of the nonprofit group, which produced the report released this week. The federal government's 1033 program ... has long sent surplus gear like mine-resistant vehicles and bayonets to local police. Since 1994, however, the even more obscure 1122 program has allowed local cops to purchase everything from uniforms to riot shields at federal government rates. The program turns the feds into purchasing agents for local police. Local cops have used the program to pick up 16 Lenco BearCats, fearsome-looking armored police vehicles. Those vehicles represented 4.8 percent of the total spending identified in the ... report. Surveillance gear and software represented another 6.4 percent, and weapons or riot gear represented 5 percent. One agency bought a $428,000 Star Safire thermal imaging system, the kind used in military helicopters. The Texas Department of Public Safety's intelligence and counterterrorism unit purchased a $1.5 million surveillance software license. Another agency bought an $89,000 covert camera system.

Note: Read more about the Pentagon's 1033 program. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

Compared to other developed nations, the United States is an extreme outlier in the severity of its criminal legal system. Police in the United States kill civilians at between five and forty times the rate of similarly rich countries, for instance, and the United States imprisons people at about seven times the rate of economically comparable countries. The brunt of this aggressive penal regime is borne of course by poor Americans, particularly poor black Americans. Recently, all of the states in the US have begun to impose fees and charges and costs on offenders and their families: people now have to pay for staying in prison as if they're guests in a hotel. Or if they're on probation instead of being sent to jail, they have to pay for the probation supervision, or they have to pay for a urine test. In one police department in Missouri, offenders who have been tasered have to pay $25 toward the cost of using the taser. In this country, particularly in the neoliberal era, the local state simply doesn't have the capacity or resources to invest in communities and provide housing, schools, jobs, income support, health care services, and so on. What it does have is police and jails, and states have prisons. The politics of the day ... mean that it's always going to be much more likely that the police and the punishment are the first resort, rather than long-term investments in communities, work, families, income support, and jobs.

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

While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth obsesses over the supposed "softening" and "weakening" of American troops, the Pentagon is concealing the scale of a real threat to the lives of his military's active-duty members: a suicide crisis killing hundreds of members of the U.S. Air Force. Data The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act shows that of the 2,278 active-duty Air Force deaths between 2010 and 2023, 926 – about 41 percent – were suicides, overdoses, or preventable deaths from high-risk behavior in a decade when combat deaths were minimal. This is the first published detailed breakdown of Air Force suicide data. In 2022, the National Defense Authorization Act mandated the Defense Department to report suicides by year, career field, and duty status, but neither the department nor the Air Force complied. Congress has done little to enforce thorough reporting. From 2010 to 2023, active-duty maintainers had a suicide rate of 27.4 per 100,000 personnel, nearly twice the 14.2 per 100,000 among U.S. civilians – a 1.93 times higher risk. FOIA records show the most common methods were self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head and hanging. Other methods included sodium nitrite ingestion, helium inhalation, and carbon monoxide poisoning. [The dataset] shows a troubling pattern of preventable deaths that leaders at the senior officer level or above minimized or ignored, often claiming that releasing detailed suicide information would pose a risk to national security. Current and former service members described a fear of bullying, hazing, and professional retaliation for seeking mental health treatment.

Note: Read about the tragic traumas and suicides connected to military drone operators. A recent Pentagon study concluded that US soldiers are nine times more likely to die by suicide than they are in combat. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on mental health and military corruption.

President Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the U.S. government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen. Trump warned that Petro that he "better close up" cocaine production "or the United States will close them up for him, and it won't be done nicely." Is anyone in the Trump White House aware of the long history of U.S. failure in that part of the world? Colombia remains the world's largest cocaine producer despite billions of dollars of U.S. government anti-drug aid to the Colombian government. The Clinton administration made Colombia its top target in its international war on drugs. Clinton drug warriors deluged the Colombian government with U.S. tax dollars to deluge Colombia with toxic spray. The New York Times reported that U.S.-financed planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren, making many of them ill. At the same time that the Clinton administration was sacrificing the health of Colombian children in its quixotic anti-drug crusade ... Laurie Hiett, the wife of Colonel James Hiett, the top U.S. military commander in Colombia, exploited U.S. embassy diplomatic pouches to ship 15 pounds of heroin and cocaine to New York. She pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in narcotic profits. After she was caught and convicted, she received far more lenient treatment than most drug offenders – only five years in prison. Her husband – ridiculed as the "Coke Colonel" in the New York Post – received only six months in prison for laundering drug proceeds and concealing his wife's crimes.

Note: Aerial spraying of pesticides is labeled as a public-health and anti-drug intervention designed to eradicate coca crops. The War on Drugs has been called a trillion dollar failure that targets everyday people while protecting the covert activities of the rich and powerful. See our in-depth investigation into the dark truths behind the War on Drugs.

Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere. "I think now it's quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia's moment. These particular figures have had an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government," [investigative journalist Whitney] Webb explains. It's clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces. If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state – acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is "pre-crime," or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they've committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against each other, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses.

Note: Read about Peter Thiel's involvement in the military origins of Facebook. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, numerous men followed sex workers into the apartment at 225 Chestnut Street in San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood. The johns were the unwitting subjects in a CIA experiment focused on how drugs and sex might be used to obtain secrets from foreign adversaries. Part of MKUltra, the agency's broader and highly controversial mind control research program, Operation Midnight Climax began in 1953. The experiments involved luring men into a heavily surveilled bordello, dosing them with LSD, and filming their reactions to probing questions and subliminal messaging. The goal of Midnight Climax was to understand what roles, if any, sex and drugs could play in getting a target to reveal sensitive or classified information. To run the operation, Gottlieb hired George Hunter White, a federal narcotics agent, who got to work renovating the apartment. Microphones disguised as electrical wall outlets were hooked up to tape recorders, and a large two-way mirror allowed CIA agents to monitor, film, and photograph the encounters. Behind the mirror, a makeshift control room featured a portable toilet and a refrigerator full of adult beverages. Sex workers were given $100 for each man they lured to the bordello, and they would then dose their client with LSD-laced cocktails. Eventually these efforts revealed that a man became increasingly talkative if the sex worker asked him to stay awhile–even after the sexual transaction was complete.

Note: Midnight Climax was supervised by George Hunter White, who wrote this in a letter about the program: "Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings put it best: "They do not give a damn about the law or the Constitution or the Congress or the Oversight committees except as something to be subverted and manipulated and lied to. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes." Read our comprehensive investigation connecting Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking network to intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Covert action refers to secret operations to influence governments, organizations, or persons in support of a foreign policy in a manner that is not attributable to the United States. Donald Trump has gone a step further than all other presidents by ignoring plausible denial; he announced the "secret" authorization to allow the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela against President Nicolas Maduro. This represents the latest attempt to apply pressure on Venezuela. It follows authorization for the U.S. military to target boats that may or may not be carrying drugs. Thus far, five boats have been destroyed and 29 Venezuelans (and some Colombians) have been killed. U.S. covert action, which began under the Eisenhower administration, has been marked by incredible and often predictable failure. The worst failures were in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Congo 1959, and Chile (1973), where leftist leaders were overthrown only to be followed by the accession to power of authoritarians and tyrants such as the Shah, Julio Alpirez, Mobutu, and Pinochet. These authoritarians introduced brutal regimes and repressive military forces, many of whom received military training from the CIA. When U.S. ambassadors in Central America protested this activity, they were ordered to stop reporting on such criminal activity. The CIA also trained and supported abusive internal security organizations throughout Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.

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

President Donald Trump's authorization this week of Central Intelligence Agency operations aimed at toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro prompted warnings from foreign policy experts. The amount of narcotics entering the United States via the country is relatively insignificant. Approximately 90% of US-bound cocaine enters the country via Mexico, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration and other government agencies. Venezuela is also not a significant source of fentanyl, which is the leading cause of overdoses in the US and is also trafficked primarily through Mexico."Using covert or military measures to destabilize or overthrow regimes reminds us of some of the most notorious episodes in American foreign policy, which undermined the human rights and sovereignty of countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean," said [policy advisor Matt] Duss. The US has launched at least 41 interventions that successfully overthrew governments in the hemisphere since 1898. Washington has helped install and prop up brutal dictators and assisted in the subversion of democratic movements, including by training Venezuelan forces in torture and repression at the notorious US Army School of the Americas. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have also died as a result of US economic sanctions on Venezuela, according to research from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "If Venezuela did not possess oil, gas, gold, fertile land, and water, the imperialists wouldn't even look at our country," [Maduro] added.

Note: Read our Substack investigation into the dark truths behind the US War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs.

Some 10,000 American troops are currently supporting the Trump-ordered counternarcotics operations in the Caribbean. At this point the military intervention has killed 27 people, including individuals who are likely not Venezuelan. President Trump's most recent explanation to reporters for this unprecedented Pentagon build-up off Venezuela's coast was surprisingly reminiscent of the failed "war on drugs" which hearkens all the way back to the days of Richard Nixon, when he famously declared it "public enemy number one". There was a time ... where the CIA itself was the biggest narco-trafficker in United States and perhaps the entire Western hemisphere. This was to fund regime change and covert operations in Latin America after a belated Congressional crackdown on taxpayer funding for black ops. In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News [published a] series of articles linking the CIA's "contra" army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles. During the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua's leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. The CIA's drug network, wrote [journalist Gary] Webb, "opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack' capital of the world." Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.

Note: Though President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs by declaring drugs "public enemy No. 1," secretly he admitted in a 1973 Oval Office meeting that marijuana was "not particularly dangerous." The War on Drugs is a trillion dollar failure that has been made worse by every presidential administration since Nixon. Don't miss our in-depth investigation into the dark truths behind the War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the War on Drugs.

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.