Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog. As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to have picked up on some unrelated background chatter to devise its fantastical fairy tale ending. "The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'" police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney's 2009 musical comedy. "That's when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports." The department had begun testing an AI-powered software called Draft One to automatically generate police reports from body camera footage. The goal was to reduce the amount of paperwork – but considering that immense mistakes are falling through the cracks, results clearly vary. Draft One was first announced by police tech company Axon – the same firm behind the Taser, a popular electroshock weapon – last year. The software makes use of OpenAI's GPT large language models to generate entire police reports from body camera audio. Experts quickly warned that hallucinations could fall through the cracks in these important documents. Critics also argue that the tool could be used to introduce deniability and make officers less accountable in case mistakes were to fall through the cracks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even as US beef prices have continued to surge, American cattle ranchers have come under increased financial pressure–and a new report from More Perfect Union claims that this is due in part to industry consolidation in the meat-packing industry. Bill Bullard, the CEO of the trade association R-CALF USA, explained to More Perfect Union that cattle ranchers are essentially at the bottom of the pyramid in the beef-producing process, while the top is occupied by "four meat packers controlling 80% of the market." "It's there that the meat packers are able to exert their market power in order to leverage down the price that the cattle feeder receives for the animals," Bullard said. To illustrate the impact this has had on farmers, Bullard pointed out that cattle producers in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef, whereas four decades later they were receiving just 37 cents for every dollar. "That allocation has flipped on its head because the marketplace is fundamentally broken," Bullard [said]. Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, recently highlighted the role played by the four big meatpacking companies–Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS–in hurting US ranchers. Dan Osborn, an independent US Senate candidate running in Nebraska, has made the dangers of corporate consolidation a central theme of his campaign. "If you're a farmer, your inputs, your seed, your chemicals, you have to buy from monopolies," he said.

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

On November 18, Donald Trump suffered a major political defeat when the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by a nearly unanimous vote: 427–1. But the final version specified that the Department of Justice must make public "all unclassified" documents on Epstein. The word unclassified potentially gives Trump and the CIA wide latitude to hold back Epstein-related materials that they claim are too sensitive to release. People have linked Epstein to the spy world for years. In 2019, Vicky Ward, writing in The Daily Beast, reported that Trump's then–labor secretary, Alex Acosta–who, as a federal prosecutor, had cut a notorious sweetheart plea deal with Epstein before his trial in 2008–had made some startling comments about Epstein when he was being vetted for his role in the first Trump administration. As Ward noted, Acosta claimed that he had "cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had ‘been told' to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to leave it alone,' he told his interviewers in the Trump transition [team]." Just as much of the policing of the American empire is now done by private military companies (notably Constellis, formerly known as Academi and Blackwater), billionaires like Epstein have their own private foreign policy. Whatever work Epstein did with the CIA or the Mossad would have been as a peer rather than an employee.

Note: Our latest 7-min video with Joe Martino of Collective Evolution explores compelling evidence that Epstein was heavily involved in both CIA and Mossad operations. Even after his conviction as a sex offender, Epstein was meeting with top officials at the CIA and the White House. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

By leveraging the dual-use nature of many of their products, where defense technologies can be integrated into the commercial sector and vice versa, Pentagon contractors like Palantir, Skydio, and General Atomics have gained ground at home for surveillance technologies – especially drones – proliferating war-tested military tech within the domestic sphere. Palantir's Gotham platform was initially promoted as intelligence software for defense and counter-terrorism purposes. Now adopted among U.S. law enforcement, hundreds of police departments can use Gotham to analyze data on civilians' whereabouts. Palantir has gone on to sell similar software to other government agencies, obtaining a $30 million ICE contract this spring to help the agency track undocumented immigrants. L3Harris Stingrays, or cell site simulators, are sophisticated phone trackers originally designed for military use. Police departments subsequently adopted these systems to track and collect information on crime suspects. Defense contractors are similarly leveraging their battle-tested drones to capitalize on a booming domestic market. The broader public safety drone market is expected to nearly triple within the next 10 years. The DRONE Act, meanwhile, included in the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, would let police purchase and operate the systems with federal grants, thus flooding drone procurement processes with more federal funds.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and police corruption.

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

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

Politicians push government IDs. In a TSA announcement, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem sternly warns, "You will need a REAL ID to travel by air or visit federal buildings." European politicians go much further. They're pushing government-mandated digital IDs that tie your identity to nearly everything you do. The second richest man in the world, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, says, "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything." That's a good thing? "That is a recipe for disaster and totalitarianism," says privacy specialist Naomi Brockwell. "Privacy is not about hiding. It's about an individual's right to decide for themselves who gets access to their data. A digital ID will strip individuals of that choice." "I already have a government-issued ID," says Tokarev. "Why is a digital one worse?" "It connects everything," says Brockwell. "Your financial decisions, social media posts, your likes, things that you're watching, places you're going. You won't be able to voice things anonymously online anymore. Everything you say will be tied back to who you are." Even without a digital ID, Canada froze the bank accounts of truckers who protested COVID-19 vaccine mandates. With a digital ID, politicians could do that much more easily. "It makes you super easy to target," says Brockwell, "easy to silence if suddenly you become 'problematic.' Whoever controls that data has a lot of power. We're simply handing it to them."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

On November 4, Abigail Spanberger, a CIA case officer in the Middle East from 2006 to 2014, was elected as Virginia's 75th governor. Spanberger's CIA background raises concern that she will appoint people who will advance the CIA's interests and ... enable greater CIA penetration of higher education. The latter is already a big problem, with the CIA planting professors, setting up journals and carrying out recruitment on many campuses, and even running covert operations through them. She also voted for massive military aid appropriations to Ukraine; pushed to have Russia designated as a state sponsor of terrorism; supported the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites; supported sanctions against Russia, Syria, Venezuela and other countries that took a devastating humanitarian toll; and expressed vocal support for Israel as it was carrying out genocide in Gaza and bombed Syria, Iran and Lebanon. While the CIA may not have directly assisted her campaign, which would be illegal, her election can still be considered a violation of constitutional principles mandating a separation of powers given her presumed loyalty to an Executive Branch agency–the CIA. John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower who lives in Virginia, stated that "Spanberger's election as governor of Virginia is a real positive for the CIA, in that the CIA has countless facilities across the state and will be assured of continued cooperation with the Governor's Office. With that said, every Virginia governor, of both parties, has kowtowed to the CIA over the years, so don't expect any changes."

Note: As governor-elect, Spanberger appointed senior transition and security officials drawn from the national security apparatus and major Wall Street investment firms. Read the full article to learn more. Learn more about the dark history of the CIA in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

An FBI investigation into an alleged terror plot in Southern California bears the familiar hallmarks of the bureau's long-running use of informants and undercover agents to advance plots that might not otherwise have materialized. The limited details available suggest an investigation that leaned heavily on a paid informant and at least one undercover FBI agent [who] were involved in nearly every stage of the case, including discussions of operational security and transporting members of the group to the site in the Mojave Desert where federal agents ultimately made the arrests. It is still unclear how the FBI first identified the group or how long the informant had been embedded before the bomb plot emerged – a period defense attorneys say is central to any serious examination of entrapment, whereby defendants are coerced into crimes they would not otherwise commit, a frequent criticism of stings involving paid informants and undercover agents. Despite comments from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Patel, and others characterizing the Turtle Island Liberation Front as a coherent group ... there's little evidence that any group by that name exists beyond a small digital footprint and a handful of attempts at organizing community events, including a self-defense workshop and a punk rock benefit show. A previous sting operation [involved] the so-called Newburgh Four, in which an aggressive and prolific FBI informant steered four poor Black men into a scheme to bomb synagogues and attack an Air Force base. Years later, a federal judge granted the men compassionate release, describing the case as an "FBI-orchestrated conspiracy."

Note: The FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of harming anyone. Read more about terrorism plots hatched by the US government, including cases in which alleged terrorists were acting on behalf of the CIA. This process not only pads arrest and prosecution statistics but also helps justify big budgets by misrepresenting the threat of terrorism.

On Thursday, lawmakers in the House approved a "pilot program" in the pending Pentagon budget bill that could eventually open the door to sending billions to big contractors, while providing what critics say would be little benefit to the military. The provision, which appeared in the budget bill after a closed-door session overseen by top lawmakers, would allow contractors to claim reimbursement for the interest they pay on debt they take on to build weapons and other gadgets for the armed services. One big defense contractor alone, Lockheed Martin, reported having more than $17.8 billion in outstanding interest payments last year, said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the nonprofit Stimson Center. "The fact that we are even exploring this question is a little crazy in terms of financial risk for the government," Gledhill said. Gledhill said even some Capitol Hill staffers were "scandalized" to see the provision in the final bill, which will likely be approved by the Senate. The switch to covering financing costs seems to be in line with a larger push this year to shake up the defense industry. The Pentagon itself was dubious in a 2023 study conducted by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. The Pentagon found that policy change might even supercharge the phenomenon of big defense contractors using taxpayer dollars for stock buybacks instead of research and development.

Note: Read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption.

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

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

The American weapons maker Anduril ... is partnering with EDGE Group, a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the activities typically associated with democratic societies. In the UAE, free expression and association are outlawed, and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process. A 2024 assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-backed think tank, gave the UAE a score of 18 out of 100. The EDGE–Anduril Production Alliance, as it will be known, will focus on autonomous weapons systems, including the production of Anduril's "Omen" drone. The UAE has agreed to purchase the first 50 Omen drones built through the partnership. EDGE Chair Faisal Al Bannai explained in a 2019 interview that EDGE was working to develop weapons systems tailored to defeating low-tech "militia-style" militant groups. Nathaniel Raymonds, who leads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health ... argued that "not since Operation Cyclone," the CIA effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen, "has there been a covert action by any nation state to arm a paramilitary proxy group at this scale and sophistication and try to write it off as just a series of happy coincidences."

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

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

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

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

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

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.