Government Corruption News Articles

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Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence. Maria ... had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye. She saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said. The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. "They were like happy ... I thought it was very strange," she said. She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. A statewide bulletin was issued on the van. The plate number was traced to a ... company called Urban Moving. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. Arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. The five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens. The case was transferred ... into the [FBI's] Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases. The FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.

Note: Yet a later Washington Post article states the five were eventually released, even though "when authorities arrested them they had box-cutters in their moving van, the types of weapons used by the terrorist hijackers." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing 9/11 news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our 9/11 Information Center.

Attorney General John Ashcroft was urged in May 2001 by his top security experts not to fly aboard commercial aircraft because of personal threats on his life, not out of fears about terrorist hijackings, the Justice Department said. The department moved quickly to quell suggestions that Ashcroft, who routinely flies aboard a small jet operated by the FBI, took precautions for his own safety in the months before Sept. 11 based on warnings of any threats involving Usama bin Laden or the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Ashcroft declined to discuss the issue while visiting ... with Bulgarian justice officials in his office. Ashcroft walked from the room without comment when a reporter asked about it. An FBI security review after Ashcroft took office recommended that the attorney general eschew flying on commercial planes whenever possible, citing nonspecific threats against Ashcroft's life. Since July 2001, Ashcroft has typically flown aboard an FBI jet or aboard other jets leased by U.S. agencies, although he occasionally has traveled on commercial flights.

Note: For more on this bizarre news, see the CBS report available here. Did Ashcroft have access to information about an impending air disaster that others didn't? For many other major media reports suggesting that rogue elements of government were involved in 9/11, click here.

The Ministry of Defence turned large parts of the country into a giant laboratory to conduct a series of secret germ warfare tests on the public. A government report just released provides for the first time a comprehensive official history of Britain's biological weapons trials between 1940 and 1979. Many of these tests involved releasing potentially dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms over vast swaths of the population without the public being told. While details of some secret trials have emerged in recent years, the 60-page report reveals new information about more than 100 covert experiments. The report reveals that military personnel were briefed to tell any 'inquisitive inquirer' the trials were part of research projects into weather and air pollution. The tests [were] carried out by government scientists at Porton Down. In most cases, the trials did not use biological weapons but alternatives which scientists believed would mimic germ warfare and which the MoD claimed were harmless. But families in certain areas of the country who have children with birth defects are demanding a public inquiry.

Note: Military personnel were ordered to lie to cover-up potentially dangerous experiments on the public. So how can we trust that these people have the public interest as a priority?

In retrospect, and with the benefit of dozens of accounts from the participants, the battle for Tora Bora looks more like a grand charade, a deliberate ploy to cover bin Laden's quiet escape. The US strategy bore little logic for those suffering the brunt of the attacks. "When we round up a pack of stray sheep, we send in shepherds from four sides, not just one," said Malik Osman Khan, a one-eyed tribal chief whose 16-year-old son Wahid Ullah was one of more than 100 Afghan civilians killed in the intense US bombing. "At first, we thought that the US military was trying to frighten the Arabs out, since they were only bombing on one side." Haji Zahir, one of the three Afghan commanders whose ill-prepared fighters led the charge up the southern slopes of Tora Bora, agreed that the US bombing worked against his efforts on the ground. "They started the bombing before they surrounded the area." Bin Laden had left some days previously, and even as the US military's proxy war got under way, the rush of his fighters out of Tora Bora, which had been a trickle and then a stream, now became a mad dash for freedom. The eastern Afghanistan intelligence chief for the country's new government, Pir Baksh Bardiwal, was astounded that the Pentagon planners of the battle for Tora Bora had failed to even consider the most obvious exit routes. He said: "The border with Pakistan was the key, but no one paid any attention to it. Al-Qa'eda escaped right out from under their feet."

Note: For many questions raised about the official account of 9/11 by highly respected individuals, click here and here.

Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro. Bin Laden is reported to have arrived in Dubai on July 4 from Quetta in Pakistan with his own personal doctor, nurse and four bodyguards, to be treated in the urology department. While there he was visited by several members of his family and Saudi personalities, and the CIA. The CIA chief was seen in the lift, on his way to see Bin Laden, and later, it is alleged, boasted to friends about his contact. Intelligence sources say that another CIA agent was also present; and that Bin Laden was also visited by Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence, who had long had links with the Taliban, and Bin Laden. The American hospital in Dubai emphatically denied that Bin Laden was a patient there. Washington last night also denied the story. Bin Laden has often been reported to be in poor health. Some accounts claim that he is suffering from Hepatitis C, and can expect to live for only two more years. According to Le Figaro, last year he ordered a mobile dialysis machine to be delivered to his base at Kandahar in Afghanistan.

Note: For many unanswered questions about the official account of 9/11 asked by highly-respected professors and officials, click here and here.

In the first days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Saudi Arabia supervised the urgent evacuation of 24 members of Osama bin Laden's extended family from the United States, fearing that they might be subjected to violence. Most of Mr. bin Laden's relatives were attending high school and college. They are among the 4,000 Saudi students in the United States. King Fahd, the ailing Saudi ruler, sent an urgent message to his embassy here saying there were "bin Laden children all over America" and ordered, "Take measures to protect the innocents," the ambassador said. The young members of the bin Laden clan were driven or flown under F.B.I. supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then to Washington from where they left the country on a private charter plane when airports reopened three days after the attacks. A majority of the men who hijacked four airliners in the attacks carried Saudi passports. Surprisingly, Osama bin Laden was not a stranger even to a royal family member like Prince Bandar. In the early 1980's, bin Laden came to greet the prince and thank him for helping to build the coalition that fought against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Mr. bin Laden is one of 52 children of a Yemeni-born migrant who made a vast fortune building roads and palaces in Saudi Arabia.

Note: Should the above link fail to function, click here. For a Boston Globe article on this key topic, click here. For more detailed information which both the Times and Globe neglected to report, click here.

Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States and abroad, according to interviews and court testimony. Three days after the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III described reports that several of the hijackers had received flight training in the United States as "news, quite obviously," adding, "If we had understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this." A senior government official yesterday acknowledged law enforcement officials were aware that ... a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended U.S. flight schools. Abdul Hakim Murad ... was arrested in Manila in 1995 and later convicted in New York of plotting to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific, then crash a suicide plane into CIA headquarters. According to law enforcement officials and press reports, the 19 suspected terrorists received flight training from at least 10 U.S. flight schools. At least 44 people sought by the FBI for questioning received some flight instruction.

Note: Why did the upper levels of the FBI "not know" about the suspicious people in US flight schools, when so many lower-level FBI personnel were desperately trying to inform them of these facts? For many other unanswered questions about the official account of 9/11 from highly respected professionals, click here and here.

A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week's attacks. Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin. Mr Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar. The wider objective, according to Mr Naik, would be to topple the Taleban regime and install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place. Mr Naik was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place. He was told that Uzbekistan would also participate in the operation and that 17,000 Russian troops were on standby. Mr Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest. He said that he was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks. And he said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban.

Note: For many questions raised about the official account of 9/11 by highly respected individuals, click here and here.

The disclosure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation withheld documents from Timothy McVeigh's lawyers seems certain to ignite a controversy that will burn for years, perhaps decades. ''If any questions or doubts remain about this case, it would cast a permanent cloud over justice,'' said Attorney General John D. Ashcroft in delaying Mr. McVeigh's execution until at least June 11. But for some people the cloud has been there all along, and always will be. They will never accept the government's assertion that the withholding of the documents was simple human, bureaucratic error. And so the 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City seems likely to join the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as events whose truth -- in the eyes of some Americans -- is forever untold. ''Gee, how did that happen?'' Charles Key, a former member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, said in sarcastic response to the news that the McVeigh defense team had been denied evidence held by the government. Mr. Key, who lives in Oklahoma City, said he has always been convinced that Mr. McVeigh had accomplices beyond Terry Nichols, the other person convicted in the bombing. The government has not pursued the case aggressively, he said, because the full truth would be too damning.

Note: There is an abundance of solid information that the Oklahoma City bombing was manipulated in major ways. For two revealing AP articles on the FBI concealing evidence, click here and here. For news reports that there were undetonated bombs in the building, sharply contradicting the official story click here and here.

For a quarter of a century, [Eric Olson] has believed that the Central Intelligence Agency murdered his father, a United States government scientist. On Nov. 28, 1953, around 2 a.m. [the] night manager at the Statler Hotel ... in New York rushed out the front door ... to find a middle-aged man lying on the sidewalk. The man had fallen from the 10th floor -- apparently after crashing through a closed window. [In late July, 1975] the C.I.A.'s director, William Colby [provided Olson's] family ... declassified documents relating to Frank Olson's death. Olson had not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. He had been a C.I.A. employee working at Fort Detrick. Olson's specialty, it turned out, had been the development of aerosols for the delivery of anthrax. The Colby documents were ... full of unexplained terms like the ''Artichoke'' and ''Bluebird'' projects. These turned out to be the precursors of what became known as MK-ULTRA, a C.I.A. project, beginning in the Korean War, to explore the use of drugs like LSD as truth serums, as well as botulism and anthrax, for use in covert assassination. The documents claimed that during a meeting between the C.I.A. and Fort Detrick scientists ... on Nov. 19,1953, Sidney Gottlieb of the C.I.A. slipped LSD into Olson's glass of Cointreau. Olson, a scientist by training, would have known that he was working for a government that had put Nazi scientists on trial at Nuremberg for immoral experiments on human beings. Now, in the late summer of 1953, [Olson] faced up to the possibility that his own government was doing the same thing. Slipping LSD into Olson's Cointreau was ... designed to get him to talk ... to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him if necessary.

Note: For those interested in this vital, yet disturbing topic, the entire Times article is well worth reading. For further verifiable information on the CIA mind control programs mentioned in this article, click here.

The CIA is acknowledging for the first time the extent of its deep involvement in Chile, where it dealt with coup-plotters, false propagandists and assassins. The agency [released] a declassified report required by the U.S. Congress. Despite the disclosures, the CIA report admits to no abuses or cover-up by CIA agents. But it chronicles clandestine contacts authorized by then-U.S. President Richard Nixon and other top U.S. officials which it said would violate standards now upheld by the agency. Among the disclosures: The CIA had prior knowledge of the plot that overthrew Allende three years later. The CIA supported a kidnapping attempt of Chile's army chief in October 1970, as part of a plot to prevent the congressional confirmation of Allende as president. The kidnapping attempt failed, and Gen. Rene Schneider was shot and killed. The CIA later paid $35,000 to the kidnappers in what it termed "humanitarian" assistance. The CIA made a one-time payment to secret police head Gen. Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, the head of the military regime's feared secret police. He was sentenced in 1993 for killing Chilean socialist leader Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976. Contreras has said the CIA was behind the assassination. The report also describes efforts to influence news media in Chile against Allende and to continue anti-leftist propaganda efforts by successor Pinochet, "including support for news media committed to creating a positive image for the military Junta" now accused of an array of abuses during his 17-year rule, including more than 3,000 killings.

Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency operations news articles from reliable major media sources.

The Central Intelligence Agency's secret history of its covert operation to overthrow Iran's government in 1953 offers an inside look at how the agency stumbled into success, despite a series of mishaps that derailed its original plans. Written in 1954 by one of the coup's chief planners, the history details how United States and British officials plotted the military coup that returned the shah of Iran to power and toppled Iran's elected prime minister, an ardent nationalist. The document shows that: * The C.I.A. and S.I.S., the British intelligence service, handpicked Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and covertly funneled $5 million to General Zahedi's regime two days after the coup prevailed. * Iranians working for the C.I.A. and posing as Communists harassed religious leaders and staged the bombing of one cleric's home in a campaign to turn the country's Islamic religious community against Mossadegh's government.

Note: For the complete text of this major report in single-page format, click here.

A handful of military personnel from the 4th Psychological Operations Group, based at Fort Bragg, NC, have until recently been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. [A] Dutch journalist named Abe de Vries came up with this important story ... and remains properly astounded that no mainstream news medium in the US has evinced any interest in it. De Vries ... originally [came] upon the story [following] a military symposium in Arlington, VA that discussed the use of the press in military operations. De Vries saw a good story, picked up the phone, and finally reached Maj. Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service, who duly confirmed the presence of these Army psy-ops experts at CNN. "Psy-ops personnel, soldiers, and officers," De Vries quoted Collins as telling him, "have been working in CNN's headquarters ... through our program, training with industry. They helped in the production of news." Eason Jordan, who identified himself as CNN's president of news-gathering and international networks, [confirmed] that CNN had hosted a total of five interns from US Army psy-ops. Jordan said the program began ... just before the end of the war against Serbia and only recently terminated. Executives at CNN now describe the Army psy-ops intern tours at CNN as having been insignificant. The commanding officer of the psy-ops group certainly thought them of sufficient significance to mention at that high-level Pentagon powwow in Arlington about propaganda and psychological warfare.

Note: This article strangely has been removed from the Los Angeles Times archives. The link above shows a scanned image of the actual newspaper. The article was first published in the San Jose Mercury News on March 23, 2000, though the article is also strangely not available in their archives. U.S. Congressional testimony in the 1970s revealed that the CIA paid employees of major media networks to influence public opinion. The CIA's Operation Mockingbird revealed blatant efforts by the CIA to manipulate public opinion in the U.S., thus violating its charter.

“Master of Space” – a motto of the United States Space Command, a joint Air Force, Army and Navy command set up by the Pentagon in 1985 – says it all. Our military leaders seek to control outer space, and dominate the earth, by basing weapons in space. Corporate America is deeply involved. “US Space Command–dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment,” says the command’s Vision for 2020, a report whose colorful cover depicts a laser weapon in space zapping targets on the Earth below. The projection of US power by means of deadly technology has other nations understandably upset. This past January ... UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the UN’s annual Conference on Disarmament to “ensure that outer space remains weapons-free.” At the March session of the conference, China’s Ambassador for Disarmament Affairs ... called for an international law forbidding not only nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction in space - as does the 1967 Outer Space Treaty - but “any weapons” in space. In November 138 nations voted in the UN General Assembly to reaffirm the Outer Space Treaty and its provision that space “shall be for peaceful purposes.” Only the United States and Israel abstained. Assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Keith Hall says, “We have [space dominance] and we’re going to keep it.” And money flows for it. Follow the money and you find ... about 75 corporations [involved] in space weapons projects.

Note: For more, see the US Space Command's Vision for 2020 and its Long Range Plan. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

Secret wartime experiments were conducted off the New Zealand coast to perfect a bomb that could trigger devastating tidal waves, according to government files declassified in Auckland. The New Zealand Herald, citing the files, said that senior United States defence officials believed the weapon had the potential to be as deadly as the atomic bomb. But the tsunami bomb, as it was known, was never fully tested and the war ended before the project was completed. Its mastermind was Thomas Leech, an Australian professor who as the dean of engineering at Auckland University from 1940 to 1950. He was seconded to the New Zealand Army during the Second World War. He set off a series of underwater explosions that triggered mini tidal waves at Whangaparaoa, just north of Auckland, in 1944 and 1945. Details of the research, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53- year-old documents released by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. What happened to Project Seal once the final report was forwarded to Wellington in the late 1940s is not clear.

Note: For a revealing, well researched article presenting solid evidence that elements within the military have much more control over the weather than is generally believed, click here.

This was a difficult book for Avner Cohen to write. As an Israeli, he had to break the code of silence that surrounds the discussion of nuclear weapons in his homeland. But he has done a superb job of laying out the political history of Israel's nuclear program from its foundation in 1950 through the acceptance by the United States of Israel as a nuclear-weapon state in 1970. With "Israel and the Bomb," he has written a scholarly treatise that includes over 1,200 footnotes, yet reads like a novel. Israel was the sixth nation in the world - and the first in the Middle East - to acquire nuclear weapons. However, unlike those of the first five, its nuclear program has remained opaque, that is, shrouded in secrecy, officially unacknowledged and insulated from domestic politics. Israel's policy was also shaped by its interaction with France, the United States and Egypt. For its part, the United States realized as early as the Eisenhower Administration that it was not in a position to stop the Israeli program. At the same time, Israel could not openly defy American opposition to the spread of nuclear weapons. Opacity was the solution. Israel also did not wish to provoke the Arab nations into developing their own nuclear weapons or launching a pre-emptive attack on its Dimona reactor. As long as the Israelis kept a low profile, the Arabs, led by Egypt, played down the issue. Israel today remains the only nuclear-opaque state in the world.

Note: Israel refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or allow UN inspectors to inspect its opaque nuclear program. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government secrecy news articles from reliable major media sources.

At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term describing an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow. There are times when the United States, faced with ... moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s ... was one of those times. Bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who ... has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests. Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as ... the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war. MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation. The CIA ... had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director Robert Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities. Given that context, a decision was made to provide America’s potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower. That decision is coming home to roost.

Note: The #2 man (who later became #1) at the CIA acknowledges that the CIA deceived the president in order to forward its own confrontational objectives. How often do you think this might happen? Who's really in charge here? For a highly revealing documentary titled "Secrets of the CIA," click here.

Melvin Goodman was a senior analyst in Soviet affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked for two decades (1966-1986). He currently is professor of international studies at the National War College. [In the CIA], not only do you have political assassinations -- attempts at least -- throughout the Fifties and the Sixties ... but you even have assassination attempts against international leaders: the Mongoose operation in Cuba [and] assassination attempts in Chile, where you were dealing with a country that wasn't even in the vital national interests or concerns of the United States. All of these assassination attempts were done with the authorization of the White House. I think the major problem at the CIA -- and it exists to this day -- is that you have two cultures. You have an intelligence or analytical culture that must remain open. The opposite of that is the clandestine side: it's secret, it's a policy branch of the government. The White House basically uses the operational component of the CIA to do its bidding. It's very useful to have a clandestine corps to carry out military or paramilitary actions very cheaply, without the hand of the United States or a particular president being obvious. In many ways, you're getting worst-case assessments, because quite often the contacts of the CIA are people on the CIA payroll, telling the CIA what these people believe the CIA wants to know -- in return for payment. So the whole tradecraft is somewhat suspicious and somewhat corrupt from the very outset.

Note: Melvin Goodman is one of many senior government officials who question the government's 9/11 story. For his comments on this, click here. For other senior officials with similar sentiments, click here.

In 1823 a 24-year-old Yankee, Warren Delano, sailed to Canton. Within seven years he was a senior partner in Russell & Company. Delano's problem, as with all traders, European and American, was that China had much to sell but declined to buy. The British struck upon an ingenious way to reduce a huge trade deficit. Their merchants bribed Chinese officials to allow entry of chests of opium from British-ruled India, though its importation had long been banned by imperial decree. Nearly every American company followed suit. As addiction became epidemic, and as the Chinese began paying with precious silver for the drug, their Emperor finally in 1839 named an Imperial Commissioner to end the trade. Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu proceeded to Canton, seized vast stocks of opium and dumped the chests in the sea. This ... furnished the spark for the Opium War, initiated by Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, and waged with determination to obtain full compensation for the opium. The Celestial Empire was humbled, forced to open five ports to foreign traders and to permit a British colony at Hong Kong. Warren Delano returned to America rich. He eventually gave his daughter Sara in marriage to ... the father of Franklin Roosevelt. The old China trader was close-mouthed about opium, as were his partners in Russell & Company. It is not clear how much F.D.R. knew about this source of his grandfather's wealth.

Note: So FDR's grandfather struck it rich by dealing opium in China. Note that Samuel Russell, who founded Russell & Company, the most powerful opium trader of the time, was the cousin of William Russell, who founded Yale's Skull and Bones society, which counted among its members Presidents William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. The CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art. Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete. The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash." [This] centrepiece of the CIA campaign ... a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists ... was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines.

Note: Read the entire article at the link above to learn how the CIA secretly funnels money through cooperative millionaires. To this day, the CIA has agents in key press positions to stop stories they don't want or to promote their own pieces widely in the media. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing media corruption news articles and intelligence agency news articles, all from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key 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.