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.

Individual Californians are shouldering an increasing percentage of the state's general fund, while the share of revenue from corporate income taxes has declined, according to a new analysis by a think tank in Sacramento. "Over time, the burden of paying for public services has, in a fairly dramatic way, shifted from businesses to individuals,'' said Jean Ross, director of the nonprofit California Budget Project in Sacramento. Ross went back more than 40 years to track how much the state derived from its three main revenue sources: personal income tax, sales tax and corporate income tax. Over time, income taxes paid by individuals have risen to fill half of the state's coffers, while corporate income taxes have fallen to about 10 percent of the take. Dan Bucks, executive director of the Multistate Tax Commission, said the decline in corporate taxes as a share of state coffers is occurring in all 47 states that levy some form of business or corporate tax. "Our data indicate that ... corporate income taxes were 9.7 percent of state revenues in 1980 and 4.9 percent in 2002,'' he said. Personal income taxes -- levied in more than 40 states -- have also risen nationwide "in a virtually straight line,'' he said. Corporations have gotten better at sheltering income from both federal and state taxes. For instance, the General Accounting Office, watchdog agency of Congress, recently reported that more than 60 percent of U.S. corporations paid no federal taxes from 1996 through 2000.

A high-ranking military analyst has accused the Federal Government of systematically putting foreign policy objectives ahead of intelligence, seriously undermining the work of its own spies. A saga that has wracked the military for six years has culminated in General Peter Cosgrove's senior intelligence analyst during the East Timor conflict, Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins, writing to the Prime Minster demanding a Royal Commission into the spy services. The letter says there has been a litany of intelligence failures. "I strongly urge you, Prime Minister, to appoint an impartial and wide-ranging Royal Commission into intelligence," the letter says. "To do otherwise would merely cultivate an artificial scab over the putrefaction beneath". A navy lawyer, Captain Martin Toohey, conducted a review of Colonel Collins's grievances and found his intelligence on Timor was blocked at high levels in the DIO. Captain Toohey said the DIO reported what "the government wants to hear" on East Timor. He found it vindictively and unfairly placed Colonel Collins's name on an Australian Federal Police search warrant looking for leaked intelligence documents, effectively ending his career as an intelligence officer. The Herald can reveal the DIO shut down an intelligence-sharing network at the height of the East Timor operation and ordered, in early 2000, that no more intelligence be gathered from West Timor, where atrocities against East Timorese refugees occurred.

Skull and Bones is a shadowy, elite secret society that selects 15 new members each year from the senior class at Yale. It is known both for its celebrity membership - past "taps'' include William F. Buckley Jr., President William Howard Taft, and Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine - and for its bizarre rituals. The rites - said to include a "blood''-drinking initiation and oodles of frank sex talk by the once all-male undergrads (Bones started admitting women in 1992) - are much discussed but little known. This is, after all, a secret society. In her 2002 book, "Secrets of the Tomb,'' Alexandra Robbins speculated that the 2004 presidential election might pit Bonesman George W. Bush (Yale, 1968) against Bonesman John F. Kerry (Yale, 1966.) Good call! This organization [was] once deemed to be so secretive that members had to leave the room if the society's name was ever mentioned in public. Both Bush's father and his grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush, were Bonesmen. [Bonesman John Kerry's] second wife's first husband, the late senator John Heinz, was Bones, as was his father. GWB: "My senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society, so secret I can't say anything more" (from his 1999 campaign biography). JFK [John Kerry]: "There's not much I can say, Tim, because it's a secret" (to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press").

Note: If secret societies produce this many influential leaders, shouldn't the public have a right to know more about them? For lots more, click here.

President Bush said Sunday that an intelligence memo he read shortly before September 11, 2001, contained no "actionable intelligence" that would have helped him to try to prevent the 9/11 attacks. "The (August 6, 2001 memo) was no indication of a terrorist threat," Bush said. But a member of the independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks said ... the memo -- the president's daily briefing, or PDB -- should have alerted Bush to the strong possibility of such an attack. Richard Ben-Veniste [said] the memo and other reports and incidents made up a "substantial body of information" about Osama bin Laden's possible plans. The briefing was headlined, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US." "The CIA was reminding the president -- with the headline ... 'don't just look overseas for the possibility of this spectacular event that everyone was predicting,' " Ben-Veniste told reporters. Ben-Veniste also took issue with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the committee ... that the White House had no inkling al Qaeda would use planes as missiles. He said he would "be surprised if Dr. Rice didn't know" about a no-fly zone in place over Genoa, Italy, for the spring 2001 G8 meeting, spurred by fears terrorists could crash planes "into the buildings where the leaders were meeting."

Note: To see the daily presidential briefing which shows beyond any doubt that Bush was not telling the truth on this, click here. For excerpts from many major media articles suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.

LEHMAN. Were you told that there were numerous young Arab males in flight training? RICE. I was not. LEHMAN. Were you told that the red team in F.A.A. for 10 years had reported ... that the U.S. airport security system never got higher than 20 percent effective. RICE. To the best of my recollection I was not told that. LEHMAN. Were you aware that I.N.S. had quietly internally halved its internal security enforcement budget? RICE. I was not made aware of that. LEHMAN. Were you aware that it was the U.S. government established policy not to question or oppose the sanctuary policies [which] prohibited the local police from cooperating at all with federal immigration authorities? RICE. I do not believe I was aware of that. LEHMAN. Were you aware of a program that was well established that allowed Saudi citizens to get visas without interviews? RICE. I learned of that after 9/11. LEHMAN. Were you aware of the extensive activities [of] the Saudi government in supporting over 300 radical teaching schools and mosques around the country, including right here in the United States? Were you aware at the time of the fact that Saudi Arabia ... had in their custody the C.F.O. [Chief Financial Officer] and the closest confidante of Al Qaeda, of Osama bin Laden, and that they refused direct access to the United States? RICE. I don't remember anything of that kind. LEHMAN. Were you aware that they would not cooperate and give us access to the perpetrators of the Cobar Towers attack? RICE. I was very involved in issues concerning Cobar Towers. LEHMAN. Were you aware that it was the policy of the Justice Department ... to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning? RICE. No.

Note: Don't miss the full revealing transcript at the link above. Most of the quotes above are towards the bottom of the webpage. Why didn't we hear lots more about these astounding facts put forward by one of the 9/11 commissioners, yet hardly mentioned in the final report? For lots more, click here.

A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. She said the claim [made by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie". Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege". Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed "secure" room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI's Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qa'ida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps. She said said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack.

Note: Watch the amazing, well documented documentary "Kill the Messenger" on courageous 9/11 whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, the most gagged citizen in U.S. history, who exposes the 9/11 Commission Report as irreparably flawed. For more along these lines, read concise summaries of deeply revealing 9/11 investigation news from reliable major media sources.

Oops. That's the word that comes to mind when reading Michael Carroll's thoroughly nerve-wracking book, "Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory" ... about the federal germ facility on Plum Island. The island [is] home to some of the deadliest microbes festering on the planet. According to Carroll's book, the island -- and laboratory -- are also home to slipshod construction, poor safeguards, and lax security. "Lab 257" claims errors at the facility caused Lyme disease outbreaks and health problems for the local population -- claims disputed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which ran the facility until recently. Carroll [said] that the point of the book was to expose the potential hazards of a poorly run institution; he has nothing against better-run, more secure institutions. "You have to know how things interact, germs, bacteria, etc. You [just] don't need to create millions of them to know how to create them and make them more virulent. Like other government scientific facilities, it's had an aura of mystery: Plum Island earns a mention in "The Silence of the Lambs," and thriller writer Nelson DeMille set a novel there. Much of Carroll's research was done through interviews with nearby residents, as well as documents and reports. While the government was "cooperative at the outset," Carroll said ... he was later denied access to the facility. Carroll isn't the first to offer criticism. In 2002, after a power outage on the island, New York's WABC-TV did a story on whether containment procedures worked; several employees questioned the lab's safety. In 2003, the General Accounting Office listed security problems on the island, partially prompted by a whistleblower, Jim McCoy, who protested the management of a private concern.

Note: At the northernmost tip of Long Island, Plum island sits directly across from the town of Lyme, Conn., famous as the epicenter of the Lyme disease outbreak. For a powerful, multiple award-winning film showing shocking ignorance and even political corruption on the part of the medical community about the Lyme disease epidemic spreading across the US and even around the world, click here. It shows evidence that Lyme may be even the cause of many cases of ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's disease.

More than 240 [Russians died in the autumn of 1999] in a wave of bombings that destroyed three blocks of flats, two in Moscow and one in the town of Volgodonsk. The Russian authorities were swift to lay the blame at the door of Chechen separatists. But no supporting evidence has emerged. Two men from the Caucasus were convicted of involvement after a closed trial this year, but it was widely denounced as a charade. Instead a growing body of proof has surfaced that links the bombings ... to the FSB - the revamped KGB. Independent investigators, including several MPs, who have sought to look into the case have been intimidated, arrested or beaten. Analysts and investigators claim that President Vladimir Putin, who was FSB chief until August of that year and subsequently prime minister, must know the truth. Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: "He would know not just what happened but who the suspects were. The truth will not damage him because it won't be told until after he is gone." The 1999 bombings proved to be Mr Putin's political making. He positioned himself as a strongman who would crush the Chechen rebels and restore order to the ailing country. Riding a wave of nationalist fervour, in eight months he went from being a virtual political unknown to winning the presidency by an easy margin.

Note: For an excellent overview of false-flag operations, click here.

Pres. Bush and John Kerry were both members of the secret organization. ‘Skull and Bones' dates to 1832. It was in fact a reaction to a secret society, the Masons. Founder William Huntington Russell thought of his little enclave as sort of anti-Masons and as a home for the wealthy and the powerful ... who would do anything for another Bonesman. Each year, 15 young undergraduate seniors are tapped for membership. Members of ‘Skull and Bones' gather on High Street in the Yale campus at the tomb. New members, the neophytes, are expected to do things like lie in coffins, wrestle in mud, kiss a skull, and confess their sexual histories in front of the group to bond themselves together. Once you‘re in, you‘re in: ‘Skull and Bones' is for life. There are a lot of [famous] Bonesmen ... Henry Luce, who created "TIME" magazine; Harold Stanley, founder of Morgan Stanley; William F. Buckley; Averell Harriman, long-time governor of New York. And then there are the presidents: William Howard Taft, whose father, Alphonso, had helped found the group; George Herbert Walker Bush, whose father, Prescott, was a Bonesman and a senator; the current President Bush. [And there's] John Kerry, Bonesman class of ‘66. His wife Teresa Kerry‘s first husband, John Heinz ... was ‘Skull and Bones.' Both Bush and Kerry refused to answer ‘Meet the Press' host Tim Russert when asked about the organization. Alexandra Robbins, author of "Secrets of the Tombs" [said] "The sole purpose of Skull and Bones is to get members into positions of power and then to have those members hire other members to prominent positions, which is something that President Bush has done."

Note: For a highly revealing, four-minute CNN News clip on Skull and Bones, click here. Many have claimed that secret societies have not had much influence on world politics. This article and video raises many serious questions about this. For those interested in exploring reliable information covering the big picture of how and why these secret societies are using government-sponsored mind control programs to achieve their agenda, click here. And for other revealing media news articles on powerful secret societies, click here.

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was ... a [Republican] congressman. Rumsfeld [was] the head of G. D. Searle & Co.. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. [It] called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession ... in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration [since] September 11, 2001. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role. "One of the awkward questions we faced ... was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." [Cheney's and Rumsfeld's] participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises ... also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades ... even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were ... a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States.

Note: If above link fails, click here. The author, James Mann, is a former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C. Apparently, Cheney and Rumsfeld don't find Congress to be very important.

Charlie Matulka, who lost to Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska [in 2002], does not trust the results in his election. Most of the votes were cast on paper ballots that were scanned into computerized vote-counting machines, which happen to have been manufactured by a company Mr. Hagel used to run. Mr. Matulka, suspicious of Senator Hagel's ties to the voting machine company, demanded a hand recount of the paper ballots. Nebraska law did not allow it, he was informed. In his primary race in 1996, Mr. Hagel, who had lived in Virginia for 20 years, beat the state attorney general by nearly two to one. In the general election, he defeated the governor, who had been elected two years earlier in a landslide. In 2002, against Mr. Matulka, he won more than 80 percent of the vote. What gets conspiracy theorists excited is not just Mr. Hagel's prodigious wins, but his job before jumping into the 1996 race: heading American Information Systems, the manufacturer of the machines that count 85 percent of Nebraska's votes. Rob Behler ... who helped prepare Georgia's machines for the 2002 election, says secret computer codes were installed late in the process. Votes ''could have been manipulated,'' he says, and the election thrown. Among the growing ranks of electronic-voting skeptics ... Mr. Hagel's wins in 1996 and 2002 have taken on mythic status. The problem is, there is no way to prove the right man was elected. A healthy democracy must avoid even the appearance of corruption. [The] Nebraska elections fail this test.

Note: For more clear evidence Hagel was directly involved in voting machine manipulation which lead to an illegal victory for him, click here and here.

A report on the Columbine High School massacre ... could answer questions about what police knew before the shootings that left 13 victims and two gunmen dead. The families of the victims of the April 20, 1999 massacre were the first to see, in private, [a] mountain of evidence. Some of the evidence is expected to show that Harris and Klebold were on police radar nearly two years before the attack. Brian Rohrbough, whose son, Danny, died at Columbine, said he was hopeful that he would get the answers he and other family members have been seeking. Rohrbough [has] been one of the most vocal critics of the sheriff department's failure to follow up on tips about Harris in the 18 months before Columbine. "I have a hard time sleeping at night because I cannot share with you what I know," he said hours before the report was to be released. Rohrbough and some other relatives of victims have seen a deposition given by Wayne Harris, father of Eric Harris. A federal magistrate has ordered the deposition, which is already sealed, destroyed. Rohrbough also is pressing for release of an investigation by the school district, which the district insists it must withhold because teachers questioned during the probe haven't given their permission. Rohrbough is convinced school staff saw a video the teen killers made that gave a hint of their plans. "We were lied to about a number of things and it seems like that things were hidden from us and we never understood why," said Scott. "And I honestly think the answers are not in the things we looked at yesterday. I think they're in sealed reports and possibly things that have been destroyed," he said.

Note: Why is the government destroying key evidence in this crucial case? Could it be that the government is somehow implicated? To explore this disturbing possibility, click here.

Eight months have passed since the Department of Homeland Security took over the management of Plum Island from the Agriculture Department. Last week, Homeland Security officials offered a rare glimpse into this veiled and mysterious island. The timing of the tour for a dozen journalists coincided with the publication of a new book, ''Lab 257,'' by Michael Christopher Carroll, who argues that the Plum Island laboratories have an appalling safety record and can be linked to outbreaks of Lyme disease and West Nile virus. There have long been questions about the safety of Plum Island's operations, but they became more prevalent after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Mr. Carroll, a lawyer from Bellmore, writes that in 2002 American forces in Afghanistan found a file on the Plum Island laboratory in the home of a nuclear physicist identified by American officials as an associate of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Carroll, who calls the lab a ticking biological time bomb, describes low employee morale and a decline in security after a private company took over support functions in 1991. A report from the General Accounting Office released in October also criticized security at the center, saying that officials did not control access to dangerous pathogens that could be adapted for germ warfare. The report also cited door alarms and sensors that did not work ... and insufficient background checks. Plum Island and Homeland Security officials said there have been no direct terrorist threats against the lab, which studies foot-and-mouth disease and swine fever, among other diseases.

Note: At the northernmost tip of Long Island, Plum island sits directly across from the town of Lyme, Conn., famous as the epicenter of the Lyme disease outbreak. For a powerful, multiple award-winning film showing shocking ignorance and even political corruption on the part of the medical community about the Lyme disease epidemic spreading across the US and even around the world, click here. It shows evidence that Lyme may be even the cause of many cases of ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's disease.

The former chief internal watchdog at the FBI has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 6-year-old girl and has admitted he had a history of molesting other children before he joined the bureau for what became a two-decade career. John H. Conditt Jr., 53, who retired in 2001, was sentenced last week ... to 12 years in prison after he admitted he molested the daughter of two FBI agents after he retired. He acknowledged molesting at least two other girls before he began his law enforcement career, his lawyer said. Conditt headed the internal affairs unit, which investigates agent wrongdoing, for the Office of Professional Responsibility at FBI headquarters in Washington from 1999 until June 2001, the FBI said. FBI officials said yesterday they had no information suggesting Conditt had any problems during his career and he was never the subject of an investigation. Assistant District Attorney Mitch Poe of Tarrant County, who prosecuted the case, said he wanted a longer prison sentence and was skeptical of Conditt's claim that his molestation of children subsided during his FBI career.

Note: For powerful evidence in a Discovery Channel documentary that many top politicians are involved in sophisticated child sex abuse rings, click here.

The United States has become a major importer of sex slaves. Between 18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked annually into the United States. How many of these are victims of sex traffickers? Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, America's largest anti-slavery organization, says ... at least 10,000 a year. John Miller, the State Department's director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, conceded: "That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge." Bales estimates that there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time. Sex-trafficking victims widely believe that if they talk, they or someone they love will be killed. And their fear is not unfounded. The trafficking rings reach back into the girls' hometowns, and local law enforcement is often complicit in the sex trade. In a series of excruciating conversations, Andrea explained to me how the trafficking ring that kept her worked. Girls were shuttled in open cars between the Plainfield, N.J., stash house and other locations in northern New Jersey. Andrea named trading hubs at highway rest stops in Deming, N.M.; Kingman, Ariz.; Boulder City, Nev.; and Glendale, Calif. The operating assumption among American police departments is that women who sell their bodies do so by choice, and undocumented foreign women who sell their bodies are not only prostitutes (that is, voluntary sex workers) but also trespassers on U.S. soil.

Note: The vast majority of child sex slaves in the US are American kids. International sex trafficking is a $99 billion industry. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team titled "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this sad subject.

Between 1999 and 2001, unbeknownst to the others, each [of four scientists] made a simple but dramatic discovery that challenged the catechism of the same powerful industry -- biotechnology -- that by then had become the handmaiden of industrial agriculture and the darling of venture capitalists. When he was the principal scientific officer of the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, Hungarian citizen Arpad Pusztai fed transgenically modified [GMO] potatoes to rodents in one of the few experiments that have ever tested the safety of genetically modified food. Almost immediately, the rats displayed tissue and immunological damage. After he reported his findings, which eventually underwent peer review and were published in the United Kingdom's leading medical journal, Lancet, Pusztai's home was burglarized and his research files taken. Soon thereafter, he was fired from his job at Rowett, and he has since suffered an orchestrated international campaign of discreditation. [Read full article for the other three distrubing stories of scientific suppression] These four men were not attacked because of flawed or imperfect experiments but because the findings of their work have a potential economic effect. The sad part is that the academies and other allegedly independent institutions that once defended scientific freedom and protected employees like Hayes, Chapela, Losey and Pusztai are abandoning them to the wolves of commerce, the brands of which are being engraved over the entrances to a disturbing number of university labs.

Note: Big money is clearly stifling good science and keeping the public in the dark about genetic modifications in the food we eat. To educate yourself on this most important topic, click here.

The Justice Department is investigating allegations that officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials – despite protests by the Drug Enforcement Administration. That is a huge amount of cocaine. But it was hardly a first for the CIA. The agency has never been above using individuals or organizations with known links to drug trafficking if it thought they could help it further its national security mission. In Costa Rica, when the war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government was at its peak and cocaine was beginning to pour into the United States, the DEA attaché wanted to place cameras at clandestine airstrips from which he suspected drugs were being flown to the United States. The CIA resident gave him a list of airstrips on which he was not to place cameras. They were the strips into which the CIA was flying arms for the contras. Some were also strips from which the DEA agent suspected drugs were being flown to the United States. Shortly after the kidnapping and brutal murder of the DEA's Enrique Camarena in Mexico, Francis Mullen, the DEA administrator, was taken by the CIA station chief in Mexico City to Mexico's director of federal security, a man who, the station chief confided, was a CIA asset. The gentleman ... denied any knowledge of the affair. He was lying. A DEA investigation revealed that he had been connected ... to the murder. CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to the Korean War.

Note: The above was written by Larry Collins, author of the book, "Black Eagles," which deals with the CIA, cocaine traffic and Central America in the mid-'80s. Read the account of Mike Levine, a 25-year veteran of the DEA who personally witnessed large-scale drug smuggling by the government. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

The FBI used murderers as informants in Boston for three decades, even allowing innocent men to be sentenced to death to protect the secret operation, a government report has found. The FBI's policy "must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement" and had "disastrous consequences", the report by the House Committee on Government Reform said. More than 20 people were murdered by FBI informants in Boston from 1965, often with the help of FBI agents, it said. But no FBI agent or official has ever been disciplined. The FBI's policy of using murderers grew out of a belated effort by a former director, J. Edgar Hoover, to go after the Mafia, which Hoover had earlier denied even existed. In the early 1960s, the bureau began recruiting underworld informers in its new campaign. The report focuses heavily on one episode, the 1965 murder of Edward Deegan, a small-time hoodlum who was killed by Jimmy Flemmi and Joseph Barboza, who had just been recruited by an FBI agent in Boston. The FBI knew the two men were the killers because it had been using an unauthorised wire tap and had heard Flemmi ask the Mafia boss, Raymond Patriarca, for permission to kill Deegan. A few days later, Deegan was shot dead. Four men who had nothing to do with the killing were tried and convicted, with two sentenced to death and two to life in prison. Two of the men died in prison and two had their sentences commuted and were freed after serving 30 years behind bars. Hoover was kept fully informed about this murder and the wrongful convictions, the report said.

The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reached an agreement with the White House yesterday to gain restricted access to years of classified presidential briefings. A four-person subcommittee that will have varying degrees of access to the documents known as Presidential Daily Briefs from the Bush and Clinton administrations. But the accord includes numerous restrictions limiting what parts of briefings can be seen and what parts can later be shared with the rest of the bipartisan panel. The limitations prompted angry condemnations yesterday from two Democratic commissioners -- former Georgia senator Max Cleland and former Indiana representative Timothy Roemer -- who have argued that the commission should be more aggressive in seeking sensitive materials from the Bush administration. Cleland called the agreement "unconscionable" and said it "was deliberately compromised by the president of the United States" in order to limit the panel's work. "If this decision stands, I as a member of the commission cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access," he said. "This investigation is now compromised. This is `The Gong Show'; this isn't protection of national security."

Note: Cleland later resigned from the commission. For the questions of other highly-respected former government officials who are disatisfied with the truthfulness of the 9/11 Commission Report, click here.

In mid-August 2003, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold, wrote a letter inviting 100 wealthy friends to a fund-raiser at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. He wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers," an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race. Through Diebold Election Systems, Mr. O'Dell's company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines.

Note: This Nov. 2003 article became pay for view only shortly after the 2004 elections. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on various aspects of the elections cover-up, see our Elections Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation.

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.