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.

Tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens. The government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. The Truth Movement's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary "Loose Change." It's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing "Loose Change" are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's canon. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt. For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Of course, the ommission report was something of a whitewash — Bush would only be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses, and ... a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda's plotting ... was nowhere mentioned in the report. It's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth.

Note: Though this article belittles the 9/11 movement, there is abundant evidence to support the claim that the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash and the attacks may have been orchestrated. For more, click here.

In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. The juniors in Bill Stroud's class are riveted by a documentary called Loose Change unspooling on a small TV screen at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, in urban Astoria, N.Y. The film uses 9/11 footage and interviews with building engineers and Twin Towers survivors to make an oddly compelling if paranoid case that interior explosions unrelated to the impact of the airplanes brought down the World Trade Center on that fateful day. Afterward, the students--an ethnic mix of New Yorkers with their own 9/11 memories--dive into a discussion about the elusive nature of truth. Raya Harris finds the video more convincing than the official version of the facts. Marisa Reichel objects. "Because of a movie, you are going to change your beliefs?" she demands. "Just because people heard explosions doesn't mean there were explosions." Stroud has posed this question to his class on the blackboard: "If truth is difficult to prove in history, does it follow that all versions are equally acceptable?" Throughout the year, the class will examine news reports, websites, propaganda, history books, blogs, even pop songs. The goal is to teach kids to be discerning consumers of information and to research, formulate and defend their own views, says Stroud, who is founder and principal of [the] school.

Note: To view the highly engaging documentary Loose Change, click here. For more on 9/11, click here.

While the Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence. Page 1, Chapter 1 ... lays out Iraq's importance: "It has the world's second-largest known oil reserves." The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room: that we are fighting, killing and dying in a war for oil. Recommendation No. 63 ... calls on the U.S. to "assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise." This is an echo of calls made [by] the U.S. State Department's Oil and Energy Working Group, meeting between December 2002 and April 2003. Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war." Its preferred method of privatization was a form of oil contract called a production-sharing agreement. These agreements are ... rejected by all the top oil producers in the Middle East because they grant greater control and more profits to the companies than the governments. For any degree of oil privatization to take place ... Iraq has to amend its constitution. Recommendation No. 26 of the Iraq Study Group calls for a review of the constitution to be "pursued on an urgent basis." Petroleum Economist magazine later reported that U.S. oil companies considered passage of the new oil law more important than increased security. Further, the Iraq Study Group would commit U.S. troops to Iraq for several more years to ... provide security for Iraq's oil infrastructure. We can thank the Iraq Study Group for making its case publicly. It is now our turn to decide if we wish to spill more blood for oil.

Note: For more on corporate complicity in fomenting war exposed by a top U.S. general, click here.

By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted. New federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass in Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machines obsolete. Motivated in part by voting problems during the midterm elections last month, the changes are a result of a growing skepticism among local and state election officials, federal legislators and the scientific community about the reliability and security of the paperless touch-screen machines used by about 30 percent of American voters. Various forms of vote-counting software used around the country ... will for the first time be inspected by federal authorities, and the code could be made public. Last year, New Mexico spent $14 million to replace its touch screens. Other states are spending millions more to retrofit the machines to add paper trails. Because some printers malfunctioned last month, election commissioners in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, said last week that they were considering scrapping their new $17 million system of touch-screen machines. Under changes approved by the Election Assistance Commission yesterday, voting machine manufacturers would have to make their crucial software code available to federal inspectors. The code is now checked mainly by private testing laboratories paid by the manufacturers.

Note: How is it possible that the government allowed voting machine companies to keep their software secret even from the government? We may never know how many votes were manipulated. For more, click here.

The Pentagon ... has resisted entreaties from U.S. anti-narcotics officials to play an aggressive role in the faltering campaign to curb the country's opium trade. Military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some requests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized crime syndicates shipping the drug to Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States. Poppy cultivation has exploded, increasing by more than half this year. Afghanistan supplies about 92% of the world's opium. "It is surprising to me that we have allowed things to get to the point that they have," said ... a former top State Department counter-narcotics official. Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade is a law enforcement problem, not a military one. The opium trade is one-third of the country's economy. Several dozen kingpins ... have become more brazen, richer and powerful. [They] openly run huge opium bazaars and labs that turn opium into heroin. [The] head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said ... that the location of major drug operations were "well-known to us and to the authorities." The Pentagon has balked at drug interdiction efforts even when it had the resources, said a former senior U.S. anti-drug official. "There were [drug] convoys where military people looked the other way," the former official said. "DEA would identify a lab to go hit or a storage facility and [the Pentagon] would find a reason to ground the helicopters." A recent congressional report said the DEA asked the Pentagon for airlifts on 26 occasions in 2005, and the requests were denied in all but three cases.

Note: Some observers and insiders believe the reason Afghanistan was attacked is because the Taliban had virtually stopped the opium trade in 2001. For reliable evidence supporting these allegations, click here.

During a 22-year career, Bobby L. Maxwell routinely won accolades and awards as one of the Interior Department’s best auditors in the nation’s oil patch. “Mr. Maxwell’s career has been characterized by exceptional performance and significant contributions,” wrote Gale A. Norton, then the secretary of the interior, in a 2003 citation. Less than two years later, the Interior Department eliminated his job. That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Mr. Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments. Invoking a law that rewards private citizens who expose fraud against the government, Mr. Maxwell has filed a suit [which] contends that the Interior Department ignored audits indicating that Kerr-McGee was cheating. Maxwell says his first serious doubts about the Interior Department originated in 1998, when the agency reluctantly began to investigate accusations of systematic cheating on royalties for oil. Several of the nation’s biggest oil companies eventually settled that investigation by paying nearly $440 million. Mr. Maxwell said, “There have always been people who don’t want to pursue things. But now it’s grown into a major illness.” Broader investigations by Congress and the Interior Department’s own inspector general [are investigating] whether the agency properly collects the money for oil and gas pumped from public land. The Interior Department’s inspector general told a House subcommittee in September that senior officials at the agency had repeatedly glossed over ethical lapses. “Short of crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior,” declared Earl E. Devaney, the inspector general.

Note: If you want to understand how corruption can grow and fester in large government agencies, this entire article is highly educational and revealing.

A hotel security camera video released by the U.S. government showed the explosion that followed the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, but the low-quality recording did not capture an image of the 757 jetliner. The video, recorded by a security camera at the Doubletree Hotel in Arlington, was released to public interest group Judicial Watch and others who filed a lawsuit seeking the tape and other videos from that day. CNN filed a Freedom of Information request for the video in February 2002, after the manager of the hotel disclosed its existence to CNN Senior Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre and said it had been confiscated by the FBI. CNN's FOI request was denied because at the time the tape was considered evidence in the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, who has since been convicted. There was speculation that this video might show the American Airlines 757 jetliner before it crashed, but a close examination by CNN only revealed the subsequent explosion and no image of the jet. The only known record of the plane is on images from the Pentagon security camera, first broadcast by CNN in March of 2002, and officially released in their entirety May of this year.

Note: Scroll down at the link above to find this news clip. To watch this intriguing video footage, click here. How would this video impact the trial of Moussaoui? Why was it confiscated right after 9/11 rather than broadcast widely? The "only known record of the plane" cited in the article is also a highly debatable claim, as it is impossible to tell in this video what actually hit the Pentagon. For deeply revealing information on the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout ... much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government's premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency. NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts. NIST says in its report that the lack of a paper trail for each vote "is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections." The report repeats the contention of the computer security community that "a single programmer could 'rig' a major election." NIST says that voting systems should not rely on a machine's software to provide a record of the votes cast. Some electronic voting system manufacturers have introduced models that include printers to produce a separate record of each vote -- and that can be verified by a voter before leaving the machine -- but such paper trails have had their own problems. Printers have jammed or otherwise failed, causing some election directors to question whether a paper trail is an improvement.

Note: Another federal advisory panel amazingly rejects requiring a paper trail days after the above report is released. To read the CBS News/AP article on this, click here.

No longer a gleam in the Pentagon's eye, ray guns — or radiofrequency (RF) weapons, to be exact — officially have arrived. As troops are increasingly forced to serve as an ad hoc police force, nonlethal weapons have become a priority for the military. The Department of Defense is currently testing the Active Denial System (ADS), which fires pain-inducing beams of 95-GHz radio waves, for deployment on ground vehicles. This surface heating doesn't actually burn the target, but is painful enough to force a retreat. While the military continues to investigate the safety of RF-based weapons, defense contractor Raytheon has released Silent Guardian, a stripped-down version of the ADS, marketed to law enforcement and security providers as well as to the military. Using a joystick and a targeting screen, operators can induce pain from over 250 yards away, as opposed to more than 500 yards with the ADS. Unlike its longer-ranged counterpart, Silent Guardian is available now. As futuristic — and frightening — as the ADS "pain ray" sounds, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding an even more ambitious use of RF energy. Researchers at the University of Nevada are investigating the feasibility of a method that would immobilize targets without causing pain. Rather than heating the subject's skin, this approach would use microwaves at 0.75 to 6 GHz to affect skeletal muscle contractions. This project is still in the beginning stages. The ADS, on the other hand, is already a painful reality.

Note: For lots more concerning information on non-lethal weapons, click here.

The Texas Ethics Commission affirmed this week that state officials could accept unlimited gifts of cash from donors without revealing how much they received. All public officials have to do is report a gift of currency and the source of the money. The legal interpretation shocked campaign finance watchdogs and some Texas officials, who argued that it was tantamount to legalizing bribery. "This creates a loophole big enough to drive an armored car full of cash through," said Craig McDonald, director of the nonprofit group Texans for Public Justice. "It makes a mockery of our ethics laws." Ronnie Earle, the Travis County district attorney leading the corruption prosecution of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, called the interpretation absurd in a letter to the panel. He joked that Texas officials could reveal receiving a gift of a wheelbarrow, "without reporting that the wheelbarrow was filled with cash."

When Mexican president Vicente Fox leaves office this week and Felipe Calderon takes his place, President Bush will be the last of the so-called three amigos. Bush, Fox, and, of course, Canadian prime minister Paul Martin were the originators of the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership, which critics call nothing more than a North American [U]nion. It means open borders, commerce of all [kinds] ... without the approval of either American voters or the U.S. Congress. An effort, the governments say, to harmonize regulation and increase cooperation between three very different countries. A new Canadian prime minister [is] joining the discussions as this North American partnership barrels ahead, with departments and ministries of all three governments working quickly to integrate North America by 2010. Now Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderon, [is] widely expected to keep the progress moving. Critics, though, say there's too little transparency and no congressional oversight. [Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch says] "There's nothing wrong with neighboring governments talking to each other, synchronizing their watches to make sure they're all on the same page in the cases of emergency or on trade issues or even on the flows of goods and people. But if policies are being made that the American people might oppose, or that are contrary to the law ... they're doing something a bit more nefarious." [Fitton] points to SPP documents urging the free flow of goods and people across borders and a wish list from business interests that borders remain open during a flu pandemic. Worse, critics say foreign policy elites are promoting a European-style union, erasing borders between the three countries and eventually moving to a single North American currency called the [Amero].

Note: To view the CNN broadcast of the above, click here. The Canadian TV network CNBC also carried a two-minute report on one of the supposed outcomes of the SPP, the Amero, which is a new common currency being planned for use by Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. To watch this news report, click here.

Japan has again been forced to confront its wartime conduct after a former doctor in the country's imperial navy admitted he had conducted experiments on Filipino prisoners during the second world war. Akira Makino, 84, said in an interview with the Kyodo news agency that he had performed surgery and amputations on dozens of prisoners of war before they were executed in the Philippines. Mr Makino is one of several former Japanese soldiers who decided to reveal the truth about their country's use of human guinea pigs before they die. Unit 731, the imperial Japanese army's notorious germ warfare unit, killed thousands of Chinese civilians and Allied PoWs at its sprawling complex in Harbin, northern China. The victims ... were injected with typhus, cholera and other diseases. They died during the experiments or were executed to prevent them from talking about their experiences. As the end of the war approached, the unit destroyed evidence of their activities. The extent of their activities only came to light following testimony from repentant former doctors, soldiers and nurses. US authorities secretly granted unit officials immunity from prosecution in return for access to years of research into biological weapons. Several former Unit 731 officials went on to enjoy prominent careers in medicine, academia and business. Mr Makino ... said he remained haunted by memories of the experiments. "We should not repeat that misery again," he said. "I want to tell the truth about the war."

Note: Explore a list depicting the rampant use of humans as guinea pigs in government, military, and medical experiments over the last century.

After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation’s voting system, this month’s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts. Tens of thousands of voters, scattered across more than 25 states, encountered serious problems at the polls. The difficulties led to shortages of substitute paper ballots and long lines that caused many voters to leave without casting ballots. Voting experts say it is impossible to say how many votes were not counted that should have been. In Florida alone, the discrepancies ... amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 people gave up trying to vote ... as new online systems for verifying voter registrations crashed repeatedly. In Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000. Election experts say that with electronic voting machines, the potential consequences of misdeeds or errors are of a [great] magnitude. A single software error can affect thousands of votes, especially with machines that keep no paper record. In Ohio, thousands of voters were turned away or forced to file provisional ballots by poll workers puzzled by voter-identification rules. In Pennsylvania, the machines crashed or refused to start, producing many reports of vote-flipping [where] voters press the button for one candidate but a different candidate’s name appears on the screen. In Ohio, even a congressman, Steve Chabot, a Republican, was turned away from his polling place because the address listed on his driver’s license was different than his home address.

In a nation that preaches the virtues of democracy, the United States government has consistently eroded the media's ability to report. U.S. press freedom has been slipping away since Sept. 11, 2001. Many other countries are now ranked freer than the United States. In the most recent survey by Freedom House [the U.S.] tied for 17th place. International free-press advocates Reporters Without Borders ranked us 53rd, tied with Botswana, Croatia and Tonga. Now that we are in a seemingly permanent "war" on terrorism, the government claims wartime powers that result in restricting press freedom. The Bush administration has multiplied exponentially the number of documents it classifies as secret. The office of Vice President Dick Cheney claims to be exempt from reporting even the numbers of records it brands with the "classified" stamp. Within weeks after 9/11, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, allowing him to veto public release not only of his own presidential papers but those of former [presidents]. One of former Attorney General John Ashcroft's first post-Sept. 11 acts was to issue a directive to federal agencies restricting access to government records under the Freedom of Information Act. Cheney [refused] to disclose even the identity of the corporate executives he met with to determine the administration's energy policy. The U.S. Supreme Court held ... that there is no such thing as a First Amendment right of access to government information or facilities. The Bush administration did not advance press freedom by producing ... favorable "news" stories with fake reporters. It is hard to stomach the hypocrisy of claiming to spread democracy abroad while restricting at home the very freedoms that make democracy possible.

The Department of Agriculture declared safe for human consumption yesterday an experimental variety of genetically engineered rice found to have contaminated the U.S. rice supply this summer. The move ... to deregulate the special long-grain rice, LL601, was seen as a legal boon to its creator, Bayer CropScience. The company applied for approval shortly after the widespread contamination was disclosed in August and now faces a class-action lawsuit filed by hundreds of farmers in Arkansas and Missouri. The experimental rice ... escaped from Bayer's test plots after the company dropped the project in 2001. The resulting contamination, once it became public, prompted countries around the world to block rice imports from the United States, sending rice futures plummeting and farmers into fits. In approving the rice, the USDA allowed Bayer to take a regulatory shortcut and skip many of the usual safety tests. Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, said the quick approval shows that the USDA is more concerned about the fortunes of the biotechnology industry than about consumers' health. "USDA is telling agricultural biotechnology companies that it doesn't matter if you're negligent, if you break the rules, if you contaminate the food supply with untested genetically engineered crops, we'll bail you out," Mendelson said in a statement. Officials in Europe, where genetically altered rice is derisively dubbed "Frankenfood," made clear as recently as last week that European countries will not accept any U.S. rice, he said.

Note: For reliable information on the deception and dangers of GM (Genetically Modified) food, click here.

Hoping to prevent Congress from letting the government negotiate lower drug prices for millions of older Americans on Medicare, the pharmaceutical companies have been recruiting Democratic lobbyists [and] lining up allies in the Bush administration and Congress. Many drug company lobbyists concede that the House is likely to pass a bill intended to drive down drug prices, but they are determined to block such legislation in the Senate. If that strategy fails, they are counting on President Bush to veto any bill that passes. With 49 Republicans in the Senate next year, the industry is confident that it can round up the 34 votes normally needed to uphold a veto. They began developing strategy last week at a meeting of the board of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Billy Tauzin, president of that group [and] a former congressman...met with Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who has been trying for six years to allow drug imports from Canada. The industry vehemently opposes such legislation. The 2003 Medicare law prohibits the federal government from negotiating drug prices or establishing a list of preferred drugs. Drug makers have not set a budget for their campaign. They and their trade groups already spend some $100 million a year on lobbying in Washington. Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey [said] “The 2003 Medicare law was essentially written by the drug industry.” Drug companies may be open to some changes in the Medicare drug benefit, but they say they cannot accept any form of price negotiation.

Note: For lots of verifiable information on the power of the drug industry to corrupt Congress, click here.

There were many problems with voting in this election. In at least one Congressional race, the evidence strongly suggests that paperless voting machines failed to count thousands of votes, and that the disappearance of these votes delivered the race to the wrong candidate. [In] Florida’s 13th Congressional District .. according to the official vote count, the Republicans [won] narrowly. The problem is that the official vote count isn’t credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines ... almost 18,000 voters — nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines — supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties. The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota ... interviewed hundreds of voters. About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn’t even find the Congressional race on the screen. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed ... reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race — but that this vote didn’t show up on the ballot summary page. An Orlando Sentinel examination of other votes cast by those who supposedly failed to cast a vote ... shows that they strongly favored Democrats, and Mr. Buchanan won the official count by only 369 votes. For the nation as a whole, the important thing isn’t who gets seated to represent Florida’s 13th District. It’s whether the voting disaster there leads to legislation requiring voter verification and a paper trail. I’ve been shocked at how little national attention the mess in Sarasota has received.

Sibel Edmonds, who formed the 100-plus member National Security whistle-blowers Coalition in 2002, began working as a linguist for the FBI the week after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. Several months into her contract, she discovered "shoddy" translations relevant to 9/11 created by translators who had "failed the proficiency exams." Edmonds says the translator was sent to Guantanamo Bay to translate "the most sensitive terrorist-related information" from interviews of detainees. Edmonds also notified her superiors that a co-worker was responsible for translating wiretaps of a company the latter used to work for. [Edmonds] was fired in March 2002. When Edmonds asked why, she received a letter saying her contract had been "terminated completely for the government's convenience." In its final report, the inspector general concluded that "we believe that many of (Edmonds') allegations were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services." The same month the report was released, Edmonds' lawsuit to contest her firing was dismissed. Legal briefs show the government had invoked the so-called state secrets privilege, arguing that the lawsuit would jeopardize national security. "Instead of protecting and standing up for whistle-blowers, this is just giving the complete green light to retaliate," says Edmonds, who lost her appeal.

Note: This article fails to mention that Edmonds has repeatedly stated in public forums and in the press that she has specific information on the involvement of certain high officials in 9/11. For more on this vital topic, click here.

From 1995 to 2001, Bogdan Dzakovic served as a team leader on the Federal Aviation Administration's Red Team. Set up by Congress to help the FAA ... the elite squad tested airport security systems. In the years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Dzakovic says, the team was able to breach security about 90% of the time, sneaking bombs and submachine guns past airport screeners. Expensive new bomb detection machines consistently failed. The team repeatedly warned the FAA of the potential for security breaches and hijackings but was told to cover up its findings. Eventually, the FAA began notifying airports in advance when the Red Team would be doing its undercover testing. He and other Red Team members approached the Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General, the General Accounting Office and members of Congress about the FAA's alleged misconduct. No one did anything. "Immediately (after 9/11), numerous government officials from FAA as well as other government agencies made defensive statements such as, 'How could we have known this was going to happen?' " Dzakovic testified later before the 9/11 Commission. After filing [a] complaint, Dzakovic was removed from his Red Team leadership position. He now works for the Transportation Security Administration. His primary assignments include tasks such as hole-punching, updating agency phonebooks and "thumb-twiddling." At least he hasn't received a pay cut, he says. He makes about $110,000 a year for what he describes as "entry-level idiot work."

In 2002, decorated FBI Special Agent Mike German was investigating meetings between terrorism suspects. When he discovered other officers had jeopardized the investigation by violating wiretapping regulations, he reported what he found to his supervisors. German says he had ... just received a mass e-mail from FBI Director Robert Mueller, urging other whistle-blowers to come forward. "I was assuming he'd protect me," German says. Instead ... his accusations were ignored, his reputation ruined and his career obliterated. Although the Justice Department's inspector general confirmed German's allegations ... he says he was barred from further undercover work and eventually compelled to resign. The experience is familiar to other government employees who have blown the whistle on matters of national security since 9/11. An increasing number of whistle-blowers allege that rather than being embraced, they're being retaliated against for coming forward. Those who come forward often face harassment, investigation, character assassination and firing. For those who are fired ... there is little recourse. Most national security whistle-blowers are not protected from retaliation by law. That's because the intelligence-gathering agencies are exempted from the 1989 whistle-blower Protection Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled against whistle-blowers in 125 of 127 of the reprisal cases seen by the court since 1994. Many had been star employees at the top of the pay scale and had spent decades in civil service. "I'm one of the last people who survived," says [Coleen] Rowley, the former FBI whistle-blower and Time magazine "Person of the Year." She says widespread, favorable media coverage saved her FBI career.

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.