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Revealing News For a Better World

Government Corruption News Articles
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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 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.


Privacy Fears Grow as Cities Increase Surveillance
2013-10-14, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/technology/privacy-fears-as-surveillance-gr...

Federal grants of $7 million, initially intended to help thwart terror attacks at the port in Oakland, Calif., are instead going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data. The new system ... is the latest example of how cities are compiling and processing large amounts of information, known as big data, for routine law enforcement. And the system underscores how technology has enabled the tracking of people in many aspects of life. Like the Oakland effort, other pushes to use new surveillance tools in law enforcement are supported with federal dollars. The New York Police Department, aided by federal financing, has a big data system that links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists. Police in Massachusetts have used federal money to buy automated license plate scanners. And police in Texas have bought a drone with homeland security money. [Critics] of the Oakland initiative, formally known as the Domain Awareness Center, [say] the program, which will create a central repository of surveillance information, will also gather data about the everyday movements and habits of law-abiding residents. Oakland has a contract with the Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, to build its system. That company has earned the bulk of its $12 billion in annual revenue from military contracts.

Note: For more on government privacy invasions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Tax the rich? IMF sparks a mini revolution
2013-10-11, Yahoo!/Agence France Presse
http://news.yahoo.com/tax-rich-imf-sparks-mini-revolution-020128173.html;_ylt...

Tax the rich and better target the multinationals: The IMF has set off shockwaves this week in Washington by suggesting countries fight budget deficits by raising taxes. Guardian of financial orthodoxy, the International Monetary Fund, which is holding its annual meetings with the World Bank this week in the US capital, typically calls for nations in difficulty to slash public spending to reduce their deficits. But in its Fiscal Monitor report, subtitled "Taxing Times", the Fund advanced the idea of taxing the highest-income people and their assets to reinforce the legitimacy of spending cuts and fight against growing income inequalities. "Scope seems to exist in many advanced economies to raise more revenue from the top of the income distribution," the IMF wrote, noting "steep cuts" in top rates since the early 1980s. According to IMF estimates, taxing the rich even at the same rates during the 1980s would reap fiscal revenues equal to 0.25 percent of economic output in the developed countries. "The gain could in some cases, such as that of the United States, be more significant," around 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, said the IMF report, which also singled out deficient taxation of multinational companies. In the US alone, legal loopholes deprive the Treasury of roughly $60 billion in receipts, the global lender said. The IMF managing director, Christine Lagarde, kept up the sales pitch for a more just fiscal policy. "It's clearly something finance ministers are interested in, it's something that is necessary for the right balance of public finances," said Lagarde, a former French finance minister.

Note: Yahoo! was the only major media in the US to pick up this eye-opening news, with the possible exception of a Forbes article which shows how afraid they are of this development. For more on financial corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Pentagon unit held 'phony' ceremonies for MIAs, using planes that can't fly
2013-10-10, NBC News
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/10/20889368-pentagon-unit-hel...

A unit of the U.S. Department of Defense has been holding so-called "arrival ceremonies" for seven years, with an honor guard carrying flag-draped coffins off of a cargo plane as though they held the remains of missing American service men and women returning that day from old battlefields. After NBC News raised questions about the arrival ceremonies, the Pentagon acknowledged Wednesday that no honored dead were in fact arriving, and that the planes used in the ceremonies often couldn't even fly but were towed into position. The ceremonies have been attended by veterans and families of MIAs, led to believe that they were witnessing the return of Americans killed in World War II, Vietnam and Korea. The ceremonies also have been known, at least among some of the military and civilian staff here, as The Big Lie. Photos behind the scenes show that the flag-draped boxes had not just arrived on military planes. The Pentagon insisted that the flag-draped cases do contain human remains recently recovered, just not ones that arrived that day. The Pentagon statement did not explain why the rituals were called "arrival ceremonies" if no one was arriving, or why the public had been told that remains removed that morning from the lab were about to go to the lab to "begin the identification process."

Note: For a revealing book by Robert Kirkconnell, a 27-year USAF veteran who personally witnessed heroin being smuggled in the bodies of dead GIs, click here. For more on military corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Meet the Medical Company Making $1.4 Billion a Year Off Sick Prisoners
2013-10-08, The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176533/meet-medical-company-making-14-billion-y...

The healthcare provider Corizon makes an estimated $1.4 billion off sick prisoners every year. With profits like those, you would think it was actually treating prisoners. But in states that are using Corizon to provide healthcare in their prisons—and right now twenty-nine are—medical neglect and abuse run rampant. Corizon’s attitude toward the debilitating virus Hepatitis C is especially alarming: They just don’t treat it. Last year alone, no fewer than seven sick prisoners died at Metro Corrections, a jail in Louisville, Kentucky, while on Corizon’s watch. The company made headlines when six employees quit their jobs, according to local press, “amid an investigation by the jail that found that the workers ‘may’ have contributed” to two of the deaths. This summer, it was announced that the contract between Corizon and the city would not be renewed. The Nation’s Liliana Segura gives an overview of the massive scope of the crisis of companies profiting off mass incarceration: “With 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States,” she writes, “prisons are big business.”

Note: For a video exposing this craziness, click here. Corizon is just one of the many powerful entities getting rich off mass incarceration. Meet the other Prison Profiteers and take action to fight their abuses at PrisonProfiteers.org. For more on corruption in the government-prison-industrial complex, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Cops Caught Speeding With Some Deadly Consequences
2013-10-02, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/US/2020/cops-caught-speeding-deadly-consequences/story?...

Civilian drivers say they are up in arms over what they see as a double standard: cops ignoring the speed limit, at times with lethal results. Justin Hopson, a former New Jersey state trooper and author of "Breaking the Blue Wall," said police officers ... "[don't] think of it as a hypocrisy. It's more of a mentality of 'Hey, I have a badge and the ability to go fast." And it's a problem that police departments seem reluctant to acknowledge. In June 2009, a Milford, Conn., police cruiser going 94 mph in a 40 mph zone rammed into a passenger car. Ashlie Krakowski and David Servin, 19-year-old sweethearts ... were killed in the crash. The Krakowski and Servin families sued the police to uncover the scale of the problem, demanding to see dashcam video from the previous two years. "We wanted to know: Was there a culture of speeding?" Susan Servin said. "Was this an isolated incident that you could forgive a little more easily?" The families received 500 dashcam clips, including footage of an officer on a call racing at 113 mph in a 45 mph zone. But then the Milford Police Department said that it had accidentally deleted 2,000 other clips. Hopson said it was almost unheard of for cops to call each other out over speeding. Florida State Trooper Donna Watts said she received threatening phone calls and spotted strange police vehicles in front of her home after she pulled over a Miami-Dade police officer flying up Interstate 95 at speeds up to 120 mph. Watts is suing, claiming the harassment prompted her to leave road patrol and even her home.

Note: Watch this ABC video clip and this one to see how crazy this is. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing police corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.


Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media
2013-09-27, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-n...

[Seymour] Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist", ... is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth. Don't even get him started on the ... death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011. Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an "independent" Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. "The Pakistanis put out a report, don't get me going on it. Let's put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It's a bullshit report," he says hinting of revelations to come in his book. The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him. He is certain that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden "changed the whole nature of the debate" about surveillance. "But I don't know if it's going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters 'al-Qaida, al-Qaida' and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic," he says.

Note: For a powerful analysis by scholar David Ray Griffin of the years-long Osama bin Laden psyop, arguing that bin Laden probably died in December 2001, see his book Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?. For more on media cover-ups of important realities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


FBI calls half of populace with 9/11 doubts potential terrorists
2013-09-19, Digital Journal
http://digitaljournal.com/article/358624

A Department of Justice memo [distributed by the FBI] instructs local police, under a program named "Communities Against Terrorism," to consider anyone who harbors "conspiracy theories" about 9/11 to be a potential terrorist. The memo thus adds 9/11-official-story skeptics to a growing list of targets described by federal law enforcement [as] security threats, such as those who express "libertarian philosophies," "Second Amendment-oriented views," interest in "self-sufficiency," "fears of Big Brother or big government," and "Declarations of Constitutional rights and civil liberties." A newly released national poll shows that 48 percent of Americans either have some doubts about the official account of 9/11, or do not believe it at all. The FBI memo entitled "Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities Related to Sleepers" says that people who should be 'considered suspicious' [for] possible involvement in "terrorist activity" include those who hold the "attitude" described as "Conspiracy theories about Westerners." The memo continues: "e.g. (sic) the CIA arranged for 9/11 to legitimize the invasion of foreign lands." "Sleepers" refers to "sleeper cells," in FBI jargon, which are terrorists awaiting orders to be activated into terrorist activity. According to the polling firm YouGov, 38% of Americans have some doubts about the official account of 9/11, 10% do not believe it at all, and 12% are unsure about it. Among well-known doubters of the official 9/11 account are many military officers, law enforcement personnel, firefighters, and pilots.

Note: We don't normally use Digital Journal as a news source, but this article is too important to not include, and no major media source is covering the story. For evidence that search engines are actively blocking 9/11 truth videos, click here. For more on the questions raised about the official explanation of the 9/11 events by highly respected professors and former government and military officials, click here and here.


Report: Capitol Police thwarted from aiding at Navy Yard
2013-09-18, USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/18/navy-yard-capitol-police...

The U.S. Capitol Police have launched an investigation into whether an elite tactical team was abruptly recalled from responding to [the] Navy Yard shooting massacre before D.C. Metropolitan Police officers confronted the shooter. Two Metropolitan Police officers entered the Navy Yard without the Capitol Police team and one was wounded by the gunman, Aaron Alexis. The elite Capitol Police Containment & Emergency Response Team [CERT] is based just a few blocks from the Navy Yard. A law enforcement source told WUSA-TV the unit was less than 30 seconds from the gate and responded as Metropolitan Police pleaded for help. A Capitol Police watch commander "wouldn't let them go in and stop people from being slaughtered," one officer told the Washington TV station. An officer told The Washington Post that the officers' union had filed a complaint. The Capitol Police have launched an investigation into the allegation "We were definitely the closest tactical team in the city," the unidentified officer told the newspaper. "[The team] was at the scene very early on, within a couple of minutes. They were ordered to disengage and turn back. For what reason, we don't know." The CERT, created in 1978, consists of three "cells" — two assault teams of at least six officers each, plus and a counter-sniper unit. Two teams were on duty [at the time of the shooting incident].

Note: How strange that the Capitol Police commander would order the CERT to go back to its base in such a situation! Could there be more than just an error of judgement here?


Lawsuit asks FBI to release Sarasota 9/11 documents
2013-09-10, Sarasota Herald-Tribune (Sarasota FL's leading newspaper)
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20130910/ARTICLE/130919971/-1/news?p=all...

Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks that included three hijacker pilots trained in Venice [FL], the terrorists' alleged interaction with a high-echelon Saudi family that lived in Sarasota remains shrouded in secrecy. But Sunshine law and Freedom of Information Act requests filed by an independent South Florida news organization have chipped away at the FBI's position that information related to the family remain secret. Broward Bulldog editor Dan Christensen and former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham say the documents could shed light on how the locally trained terrorists were managed and supported. Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chair of [the] Congressional body that investigated the attacks, believes the FBI has covered up Saudi support of the terrorists. The former senator wants more disclosure about what happened in Sarasota because he feels it may add to a bigger, largely censored subject: Who financed and supported the 9/11 terror attacks? "The FBI is aggressively resisting the release of any additional documents," he said. "The question is, why are they doing this? What interest does the FBI have in denying the existence of its own documents? Beyond that, they have thrown a blanket of national security over virtually everything, and why are they doing that for an event that occurred, soon to be, 12 years ago?" At the time of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush was visiting a school in Sarasota. Then came the revelation that three of the hijackers learned to fly at Venice Airport.

Note: For lots more reliable information suggesting a major cover-up around the events of 9/11, click here and here.


Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security
2013-09-05, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden. The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments. The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet". Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves. Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software. "Backdoors are fundamentally in conflict with good security," said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Backdoors expose all users of a backdoored system, not just intelligence agency targets, to heightened risk of data compromise."

Note: For an excellent article in the New York Times on this, click here. For a guide from the Guardian on "How to remain secure against NSA surveillance", click here.


Greg Palast: Potential Fed Chair Summers at Heart of Global Economic Crisis
2013-09-03, Truthout
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18555-revealed-potential-fed-chair-summers...

Investigative journalist Greg Palast has obtained a secret memo authored by then deputy Treasury secretary Larry Summers and his protégé Timothy Geithner detailing their plans to roll back financial regulation. In the piece, titled "The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis", [Palast] writes: "The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top U.S. Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears." [Palast:] This is really important right now because Larry Summers is President Obama's top choice to become head of a Federal Reserve Board. He would take Ben Bernanke's place. And what this memo is--they call it the "end game memo". Geithner calls it the "end game". And what's the game being played? The memo asks Summers to get back to the five biggest, most powerful bankers in the United States to act on and determine what our policy should be for world governance of the banking system. Basically, there were secret calls going between Larry Summers and the head of Bank of America, the head of Goldman Sachs, the head of Citibank and Merrill, the five big boys, to find out what should happen to the world financial policing order. And the answer was: smash it. Summers was holding secret meetings with the big bankers to come up with a scheme to eliminate financial regulation across the planet.

Note: Greg Palast is a New York Times-bestselling author and a freelance journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation as well as the British newspaper The Observer. He is one of the few journalists uncovering the deepest layers of secrecy in our world. For a key past report of his on elections corruption, click here.


U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives detailed in ‘black budget’ summary
2013-08-29, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-de...

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget. The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress. The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees. Among the notable revelations in the budget summary: Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community. The CIA and the NSA have begun aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence operations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


NYPD's massive mosque spying operations revealed
2013-08-28, MSN/Associated Press
http://news.msn.com/us/nypds-massive-mosque-spying-operations-revealed

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance. Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen "terrorism enterprise investigations" into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise. The documents show in detail how, in its hunt for terrorists, the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files. As a tactic, opening an enterprise investigation on a mosque is so potentially invasive that while the NYPD conducted at least a dozen, the FBI never did one, according to interviews with federal law enforcement officials. The revelations about the NYPD's massive spying operations are in documents recently obtained by The Associated Press and part of a new book, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit... The book ... is based on hundreds of previously unpublished police files and interviews with current and former NYPD, CIA and FBI officials.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence operations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
2013-08-25, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/health/exploring-salines-secret-costs.html?...

It is one of the most common components of emergency medicine: an intravenous bag of sterile saltwater. Luckily for anyone who has ever needed an IV bag to replenish lost fluids or to receive medication, it is also one of the least expensive. The average manufacturer’s price, according to government data, has fluctuated in recent years from 44 cents to $1. Yet there is nothing either cheap or simple about its ultimate cost, as [revealed by] the commercial path of IV bags from the factory to the veins of more than 100 patients struck by a May 2012 outbreak of food poisoning in upstate New York. Some of the patients’ bills would later include markups of 100 to 200 times the manufacturer’s price, not counting separate charges for “IV administration.” And on other bills, a bundled charge for “IV therapy” was almost 1,000 times the official cost of the solution. At every step from manufacturer to patient, there are confidential deals among the major players, including drug companies, purchasing organizations and distributors, and insurers. These deals so obscure prices and profits that even participants cannot say what the simplest component of care actually costs, let alone what it should cost. And that leaves taxpayers and patients alike with an inflated bottom line and little or no way to challenge it. The real cost of a bag of normal saline, like the true cost of medical supplies from gauze to heart implants, disappears into an opaque realm of byzantine contracts, confidential rebates and fees that would be considered illegal kickbacks in many other industries.

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


FBI director does not deny al-Awlaki may have been government asset
2013-08-23, Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/23/did-us-government-try-to-recruit-r...

Newly declassified documents obtained [by] Judicial Watch, are raising questions over the U.S. government's handling of Anwar al-Awlaki, and whether it [recruited] the radical American cleric as an intelligence source in 2002. Director Robert Mueller did not dismiss the possibility. "I am not personally familiar with any effort to recruit Anwar al-Awlaki as an asset -- that does not mean to say there was not an effort at some level of the Bureau (FBI) or another agency to do so," Mueller said. Fox's ongoing reporting ... shows that in 2002 he was released from custody at JFK international airport -- despite an active warrant for his arrest -- with the okay of FBI Agent Wade Ammerman. Within days of his re-entry, al-Awlaki showed up in Ammerman's counter-terrorism investigation in Virginia into Ali al-Timimi, who is now serving a life sentence on non-terrorism charges. None of the information about al-Awlaki's release from federal custody at JFK, a sudden decision by the Justice Department in October 2002 to rescind an arrest warrant for the cleric, nor the cleric's connection to Ammerman was provided to the defense during Timimi’s 2005 trial. Documents ... show the FBI Director was more deeply involved in the post-9/11 handling of al-Awlaki than previously known. One memo from Mueller to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft on Oct. 3, 2002 -- seven days before the cleric re-entered the U.S. and was detained at JFK -- is marked "Secret" and titled "Anwar Aulaqi: IT-UBL/AL-QAEDA." "Why would al-Awlaki get the attention of the FBI Director? Why would a warrant for his arrest be pulled when he's trying to reenter the country?" asked Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Note: Al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and was a US citizen, died in a U.S. drone attack in Yemen nearly two years ago, the first American targeted for death by the CIA, by its own admission. With the confirmation that he had been an intelligence asset for the US government as early as 2002, his assassination takes on new significance. For more on the murky background of Al-Awlaki, click here and here.


U.S. must protest Britain's press crackdowns
2013-08-20, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/U-S-must-protest-Brita...

It has been an infuriating few days for anyone who values the freedom of the press, as authorities in the United Kingdom resorted to the tactics of tyrants and thugs to squelch reporting that they simply don't like. In acts clearly calibrated for optimal intimidation, they have detained the partner of a journalist, threatened to shut down a reporting operation that has prompted a critical public debate over government spying and forced the destruction of a major publication's hard drives. It's breathtaking in its audacity - and if it comes to light that the U.S. government took any part in organizing, encouraging or supporting these acts, it will warrant immediate congressional investigation. As it is, the accelerating assaults on investigative journalism [indicate the need for] stronger protections for journalists and their sources. Using laws designed to ferret out suspected terrorists to detain a person aiding acts of journalism is a cut-and-dried abuse of government power, an act of intimidation that may well be illegal - and certainly should be. It gives the lie to the naive but oft-repeated notion that if you've done no wrong, you have nothing to fear. Such attacks on investigative journalism here and abroad appear to be escalating. The Justice Department has been caught spying on reporters at the Associated Press, and named a Fox News reporter a "co-conspirator" in a leak inquiry. Judges have threatened reporters at both the New York Times and Fox News with jail time for refusing to disclose their sources.

Note: For more on government attacks on civil liberties, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Why are the JFK files still sealed after 50 years?
2013-08-17, MSN/Associated Press
http://news.msn.com/us/why-are-the-jfk-files-still-sealed-after-50-years

Five decades after President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot and long after official inquiries ended, thousands of pages of investigative documents remain withheld from public view. The contents of these files are partially known — and intriguing — and conspiracy buffs are not the only ones seeking to open them for a closer look. Some serious researchers believe the off-limits files could shed valuable new light on nagging mysteries of the assassination — including what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Nov. 22, 1963. It turns out that several hundred of the still-classified pages concern a deceased CIA agent, George Joannides, whose activities just before the assassination and, fascinatingly, during a government investigation years later, have tantalized researchers for years. "This is not about conspiracy, this is about transparency," said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and author embroiled in a decade-long lawsuit against the CIA, seeking release of the closed documents. "I think the CIA should obey the law. I don't think most people think that's a crazy idea." But so far, the Joannides files and thousands more pages primarily from the CIA remain off-limits at a National Archives center in College Park, Md. Anthony Summers, a British author whose sequel to his JFK book Not In Your Lifetime will be released this year, [said] "By withholding Joannides material, the agency continues to encourage the public to believe they're covering up something more sinister."

Note: For more on the strange secrecy around Joannides and his checkered past, see the New York Times article summarized here. For more on political assassinations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Email service used by Snowden shuts itself down, warns against using US-based companies
2013-08-09, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/09/lavabit-shutdown-snowden...

A Texas-based encrypted email service recently revealed to be used by Edward Snowden - Lavabit - announced yesterday it was shutting itself down in order to avoid complying with what it perceives as unjust secret US court orders to provide government access to its users' content. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations," the company's founder, Ladar Levinson, wrote in a statement to users posted on the front page of its website. He said the US directive forced on his company "a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit." He chose the latter. CNET's Declan McCullagh ... speculates that Lavabit was served "with [a] federal court order to intercept users' passwords" to allow ongoing monitoring of emails; specifically: "the order can also be to install FedGov-created malware." After challenging the order in district court and losing - all in a secret court proceeding, naturally - Lavabit shut itself down to avoid compliance while it appeals to the Fourth Circuit. What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it. Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company.

Note: For more on government and corporate privacy invasions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Is The FDA Being Compromised By Pharma Payments?
2013-08-07, Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2013/08/07/is-the-fda-being-comprom...

In ... the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (JLME), Donald W. Light of the School of Public Health, University of Medicine & Dentistry of NJ, wrote an article entitled “Risky Drugs: Why The FDA Cannot Be Trusted”. The bulk of his essay focuses not on his views about pharma’s competence but rather on his issues with the FDA. While I found a number of his comments troubling, the following stood out. “The ... article in JLME also presents systematic, quantitative evidence that since the industry started making large contributions to the FDA for reviewing its drugs, as it makes large contributions to Congressmen ... drugs approved are significantly more likely to cause serious harm, hospitalizations, and deaths.” This is a pretty damning comment. Basically, Light is saying that pharma paid congressmen to sponsor legislation that results in the FDA being beholden to pharma for funding for its work. Implicit in this is that, as a result of these large “contributions”, the grateful FDA is rapidly approving medicines that are harmful.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about big pharma profiteers and government corruption.


CIA 'running arms smuggling team in Benghazi when consulate was attacked'
2013-08-02, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/10218288...

The CIA has been subjecting operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an attempt to suppress details of a reported US arms smuggling operation in Benghazi that was ongoing when its ambassador was killed by a mob in the city last year, according to reports. Up to 35 CIA operatives were working in the city during the attack last September on the US consulate that resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, according to CNN. The television network said that a CIA team was working in an annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armouries to Syrian rebels. Sources said that more Americans were hurt in the assault ... than had been previously reported. CIA chiefs were actively working to ensure the real nature of its operations in the city did not get out. So only the losses suffered by the State Department in the city had been reported to Congress. Frank Wolf, a US congressman who represents the district that contains CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is one of 150 members of Congress for a new investigation into the failures in Benghazi. "I think it is a form of a cover-up, and I think it's an attempt to push it under the rug," he said. "We should have the people who were on the scene come in, testify under oath, do it publicly, and lay it out. And there really isn't any national security issue involved with regards to that."

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