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.

Justified by the Monroe Doctrine – the United States' claim to unchallenged dominance over the Western Hemisphere – the United States has criminalized asylum seekers, militarized the southern border, and intervened directly in Latin America. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis ... is a harrowing indictment of the United States' criminal role in Latin America, a region in which it has sown crisis for over a century with scant regard for the lives of millions. Ronald Reagan ... was keen on avoiding another nation falling into the sphere of influence of Cuba and the Soviet Union. To prevent a drift away from the United States' orbit, he pumped military aid to El Salvador's caudillismo military. The result was carnage and mass displacement. In 1992, three million Salvadoreans were living in Los Angeles, a tenfold growth. [Guatemala's] General Fernando Romeo Lucas GarcĂ­a adopted El Salvador's El Mozote strategy of "cleansing" ... indigenous Mayans. By 1984 around 1.5 million people were internally displaced. Thousands would flee to the United States. Two hundred thousand civilians had been killed; there were 669 massacres; 93 percent of the crimes involved the US-funded and -trained military. The Reagan administration "transformed Honduras from a banana republic where the United Fruit Company picked the country presidents . . . into a virtual US military base." By the 1990s, the states of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were heavily militarized. The armed forces acted with impunity, civil organizations had been hollowed out or were nonexistent, and gross inequality and racism were rampant. The CIA decided that the cocaine and heroin coming through Central America could be trafficked by various local military forces. The Northern Triangle countries [El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras] were used by the CIA to generate illicit earnings that financed the Contras – right-wing militias of Nicaragua – and Iran during its war against Iraq, an episode that came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair.

Note: This article also goes into how Reagan's war on drugs and the crack epidemic in Los Angeles fueled rampant gang violence, creating conditions that formed the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang. Watch our Mindful News Brief videos on how the US government facilitates child trafficking at the border and who's really behind the deadly war on drugs.

Thousands of Americans believe they suffered serious side effects following Covid vaccination. As of April, just over 13,000 vaccine-injury compensation claims have been filed with the federal government. Only 19 percent have been reviewed. Only 47 of those were deemed eligible for compensation, and only 12 have been paid out, at an average of about $3,600. In a recent interview, Dr. Janet Woodcock, a longtime leader of the Food and Drug Administration ... said she believed that some recipients had experienced uncommon but "serious" and "life-changing" reactions beyond those described by federal agencies. "I feel bad for those people," said Dr. Woodcock, who became the F.D.A.'s acting commissioner in January 2021. "I believe their suffering should be acknowledged, that they have real problems, and they should be taken seriously." The government's understaffed compensation fund has paid so little because it officially recognizes few side effects for Covid vaccines. People who said they had been harmed by Covid shots ... described a variety of symptoms following vaccination, some neurological, some autoimmune, some cardiovascular. All said they had been turned away by physicians, told their symptoms were psychosomatic, or labeled anti-vaccine by family and friends – despite the fact that they supported vaccines. The National Institutes of Health is conducting virtually no studies on Covid vaccine safety, several experts noted.

Note: Explore our nuanced, uncensored investigation about this important issue. While mainstream narratives emphasize how rare these injuries are, the numbers speak for themselves. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a voluntary government reporting system that only captures a portion of the actual injuries. Vaccine adverse event numbers are made publicly available, and currently show 1,640,416 COVID vaccine injury reports, 37,647 COVID Vaccine Reported Deaths, and 216,757 COVID Vaccine Reported Hospitalizations.

On Friday, the Biden administration unveiled final Title IX regulations, nearly two years after the administration proposed dramatic changes to how colleges handle sexual assault allegations. According to the final regulations, accused students will lose their right to a guaranteed live hearing with the opportunity to have a representative cross-examine their accuser. This is accompanied by a return to the "single-investigator model," which allows a single administrator to investigate and decide the outcome of a case. Further, under the new rules, most schools will be required to use the "preponderance of the evidence" standard, which directs administrators to find a student responsible if just 51 percent of the evidence points to their guilt. Schools are also no longer required to provide accused students with the full content of the evidence against them. Instead, universities are only bound to provide students with a description of the "relevant evidence," which may be provided "orally" rather than in writing. This is a stunning rollback of due process rights for accused students. Under the new regulations, a student can be found responsible for sexually assaulting a classmate because a single administrator believed there was a 51 percent chance he had committed the assault, and this conclusion can be reached without ever allowing the accused student to know the full evidence against him or providing a hearing during which he could defend himself.

Note: Sexual abuse is real and deeply important to address. Yet where is the due process in entrusting a single administrator working behind closed doors to decide the fate of accused individuals who aren't allowed to know the full evidence against them? Social justice activist adrienne maree brown has called attention to how abuse, harm, and conflict often get conflated, leading to damaging misinterpretations of behavior. Brown articulates: "We absolutely have a culture that affirms rape and abuse of power. But we also have a developing culture of moving to callouts and calling for cancellation very quickly." In a time where cancel culture has led to unprecedented in-house fighting and toxic public discourse, how do we honor context and healthy dialogue before accusing someone of sexual assault?

In the middle of night, students at Utah's Kings Peak high school are wide awake – taking mandatory exams. Their every movement is captured on their computer's webcam and scrutinized by Proctorio, a surveillance company that uses artificial intelligence. Proctorio software conducts "desk scans" in an effort to catch test-takers who turn to "unauthorized resources", "face detection" technology to ensure there isn't anybody else in the room to help and "gaze detection" to spot anybody "looking away from the screen for an extended period of time". Proctorio then provides visual and audio records to Kings Peak teachers with the algorithm calling particular attention to pupils whose behaviors during the test flagged them as possibly engaging in academic dishonesty. Such remote proctoring tools grew exponentially during the pandemic, particularly at US colleges and universities. K-12 schools' use of remote proctoring tools, however, has largely gone under the radar. K-12 schools nationwide – and online-only programs in particular – continue to use tools from digital proctoring companies on students ... as young as kindergarten-aged. Civil rights activists, who contend AI proctoring tools fail to work as intended, harbor biases and run afoul of students' constitutional protections, said the privacy and security concerns are particularly salient for young children and teens, who may not be fully aware of the monitoring or its implications. One 2021 study found that Proctorio failed to detect test-takers who had been instructed to cheat. Researchers concluded the software was "best compared to taking a placebo: it has some positive influence, not because it works but because people believe that it works, or that it might work."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Last week, the nation's largest prison and jail telecom corporation, Securus, effectively defaulted on more than a billion dollars of debt. After decades of preying on incarcerated people and their loved ones with exploitative call rates and other predatory practices that have driven millions of families into debt, Securus is being crushed under the weight of its own. Securus is one of two corporations that dominate roughly 80 percent of the U.S. prison telecom industry. Both companies are owned by private-equity firms: Securus, by Platinum Equity, and ViaPath (previously Global Tel Link), by American Securities. Together, Securus and ViaPath contract with 43 state prison systems and over 800 county jails. Their dominance of the market allows them to routinely charge incarcerated people and their families egregious rates for rudimentary communications services: A 15-minute phone call can run as high as $8.25; a 25-minute video call up to $15; and basic emails as much as $0.50, or more with attachments. The nature of agreements between these telecom providers and correctional agencies often further incentivizes the financial exploitation of the incarcerated, creating profit-sharing kickback schemes that provide prisons and jails with a portion of sales revenue. The ... tactics that brought Securus down–narrative change, policy campaigns, regulatory efforts, and investor activism–offer a roadmap for tackling exploitative corporate profiteers across the prison industry.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Today's managed information landscape makes it more difficult for journalists and our sources to report on ethical lapses, wrongdoing, and crimes. Today, much of the media is less likely to report those things, unless it serves certain political or financial interests. It's been 11 years since CBS News officially announced that I was targeted by unauthorized intrusions into my work computer. Subsequent forensics unearthed government-controlled IP addresses used in the intrusions, and proved that not only did the guilty parties monitor my work in real time, they also accessed my Fast and Furious files, got into the larger CBS system, planted classified documents deep in my operating system, and were able to listen in on conversations by activating Skype audio. I sued after it was clear the Department of Justice would not hold their own accountable. The case is the first we know of in which a journalist spied on by the government received a clerk's default against an agent working for government parties in a surveillance operation. It's a small victory because he was soon reported dead, which means we can't access potential information leading to the larger players. Besides that, I've learned that wrongdoers in the federal government have their own shield laws that protect them from accountability. Our intelligence agencies have been working hand in hand with the telecommunications firms for decades, with billions of dollars in dark contracts and secretive arrangements. They don't need to ask the telecommuncations firms for permission to access journalists' records, or those of Congress or regular citizens.

Note: The above testimony is from award-winning journalist and former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who was hacked by government operatives for pursuing stories that cast the Obama administration in an unfavorable light. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

Police in the U.S. recently combined two existing dystopian technologies in a brand new way to violate civil liberties. A police force in California recently employed the new practice of taking a DNA sample from a crime scene, running this through a service provided by US company Parabon NanoLabs that guesses what the perpetrators face looked like, and plugging this rendered image into face recognition software to build a suspect list. Parabon NanoLabs ... alleges it can create an image of the suspect's face from their DNA. Parabon NanoLabs claim to have built this system by training machine learning models on the DNA data of thousands of volunteers with 3D scans of their faces. The process is yet to be independently audited, and scientists have affirmed that predicting face shapes–particularly from DNA samples–is not possible. But this has not stopped law enforcement officers from seeking to use it, or from running these fabricated images through face recognition software. Simply put: police are using DNA to create a hypothetical and not at all accurate face, then using that face as a clue on which to base investigations into crimes. This ... threatens the rights, freedom, or even the life of whoever is unlucky enough to look a little bit like that artificial face. These technologies, and their reckless use by police forces, are an inherent threat to our individual privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice.

Note: Law enforcement officers in many U.S. states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of important news articles on police corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present. The story, "The Spy War: How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin" ... relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US, and "several European countries." There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian border, one of 12 "secret" bases the US maintains there. Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an "elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them." One of the reasons that I believe the Times article was "authorized" by the intelligence community is because of what isn't in it. There's no mention, for example, that the United Nations has deemed Ukraine to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where money just seems to disappear into foreign accounts and the pockets of Ukrainian government officials. There's no mention that Ukraine has become a "supermarket" for black market weapons and that western weapons meant for the war effort have popped up all over the world. And there is no mention at all that it was the CIA and the State Department that were responsible for the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government in the first place, an action that resulted in Russia's decision to invade eight years later.

Note: John Kiriakou is a whistleblower, former CIA counter-terrorism officer, and former senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In our War Failures and Lies section in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center, we discuss how the CIA has supported Neo-Nazis in Ukraine since at least 2014, the year of the far-right coup that incorporated the Nazi group Azov Battalion into the country's National Guard. Since then, declassified government documents show that Ukraine was systematically developed as a proxy for US war against Russia. In 2016, Congress removed a ban on funding Ukrainian neo-fascist groups, effectively paving the way for American arms and weapons to fall in the hands of Ukraine's Nazi organizations.

In 2018 ... the government was buying up reams of consumer data – information scraped from cellphones, social media profiles, internet ad exchanges and other open sources – and deploying it for often-clandestine purposes like law enforcement and national security in the U.S. and abroad. The places you go, the websites you visit, the opinions you post – all collected and legally sold to federal agencies. The data is used in a wide variety of law enforcement, public safety, military and intelligence missions, depending on which agency is doing the acquiring. We've seen it used for everything from rounding up undocumented immigrants or detecting border tunnels. We've also seen data used for man hunting or identifying specific people in the vicinity of crimes or known criminal activity. And generally speaking, it's often used to identify patterns. It's often used to look for outliers or things that don't belong. So say you have a military facility, you could look for devices that appear suspicious that are lingering near that facility. Did you know that your car tires actually broadcast a wireless signal to the central computer of your car, telling it what the tire pressure is? It's there for perfectly legitimate safety reasons. Governments have ... figured out that the car tire is a proxy for the car. And if you just put little sensors somewhere or you run the right code on devices that you scatter around the world, then you can kind of track people with car tires.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

A US court this week banned three weedkillers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market. The ruling is specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers manufactured by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, which have been blamed for millions of acres of crop damage and harm to endangered species and natural areas across the midwest and south. Discovery documents turned up in the litigation showed the companies knew that their dicamba weedkillers would probably lead to off-target crop damage. This is the second time a federal court has banned these weedkillers since they were introduced for the 2017 growing season. In 2020, the ninth circuit court of appeals issued its own ban, but months later the Trump administration reapproved the weedkilling products. But a federal judge in Arizona ruled on Monday that the EPA made a crucial error in reapproving dicamba, finding the agency did not post it for public notice and comment as required by law. US district judge David Bury wrote ... that it was a "very serious" violation and that if EPA had done a full analysis, it probably would not have made the same decision. Bury wrote that the EPA did not allow many people who are deeply affected by the weedkiller – including specialty farmers, conservation groups and more – to comment. "The evidence has shown that dicamba cannot be used without causing massive and unprecedented harm to farms as well as endangering plants and pollinators," said George Kimbrell [with] the Center for Food Safety, which litigated the case.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas's horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country's indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there's a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one clear winner in this avalanche of violence, suffering, and war: the U.S. military-industrial complex. In December, President Biden signed a record authorization of $886 billion in "national defense" spending for 2024, including funds for the Pentagon proper and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. Add to that tens of billions of dollars more in likely emergency military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and such spending could well top $900 billion for the first time. Annual spending on the costly, dysfunctional F-35 combat aircraft alone is greater than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, Lockheed Martin's contracts with the Pentagon were worth more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and its arms-related revenues continue to rival the government's entire investment in diplomacy. One $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Before investing ever more tax dollars ... the military strategy of the United States in the current global environment should be seriously debated.

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

Scientists at the center of the "lab leak" controversy visited Anthony Fauci's institute at the National Institutes of Health in 2017 to discuss their research – just months before NIH lifted a pause on high-risk virology. Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Shi Zhengli [visited] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers in June 2017, where she gave a presentation about novel coronaviruses. Shi is known internationally as the "Bat Lady" for her work with bats and their coronaviruses. Though ostensibly a civilian lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has conducted research projects "for defensive and biosecurity needs of the military" since at least 2017, according to U.S. intelligence. EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. research organization, partnered closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, subcontracting NIAID funding to Shi's lab, and arranged the meeting. Fauci himself met with [EcoHealth Alliance President Peter] Daszak four months later, in October 2017. By December 2017, NIH had resumed funding for gain-of-function research that generates new viruses in the lab following a three year pause and debate about the possibility that such research could cause a pandemic. A 2021 State Department fact sheet stated that "despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution," it has conducted classified research on behalf of the Chinese military "since at least 2017."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria's President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. Despite these remarkable and costly debacles ... the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades. American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money. To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today's federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA. Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays.

Note: War profiteering is an old game. General Smedley Butler wrote War is a Racket in 1935. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and government corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

During the entirety of the ongoing two-and-a-half-year public health emergency, while he was acting as the president's top COVID-19 advisor, Dr. Fauci made no effort to genuinely investigate COVID-19's origins. On May 11, 2021, Senator Rand Paul finally asked: "Dr. Fauci, do you still support NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?" Dr. Fauci angrily denounced the question: "Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely, and completely incorrect. That the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." Dr. Fauci was then under oath, so his blanket denial was a perjury of striking audacity: [The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases'] decade-long funding of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab had left a public record abundantly and unambiguously documented on PubMed, the official NIH archives of the world's peer-reviewed published research. The authors of myriad gain-of-function studies openly thank NIAID and NIH for funding their research at the Wuhan lab. The ease of finding these incontrovertible proofs of his deception makes Dr. Fauci's lie seem reckless. But the savvy NIAID chief evidently calculated that the issue was now so politicized and the media so committed to fortifying official government orthodoxies that truth was irrelevant. The nation's leading journalistic outlets abetted Dr. Fauci's public deception by shielding him from difficult questions.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our COVID Information Center.

A secretive CIA office has been coordinating the retrieval of crashed UFOs around the world for decades, multiple sources told DailyMail.com. One source said that at least nine apparent 'non-human craft' have been recovered by the US government – some wrecked from a crash, and two completely intact. Three sources briefed on those alleged top secret operations [said] that the Office of Global Access (OGA), a wing of the Central Intelligence Agency's Science and Technology Directorate, has played a central role since 2003 in orchestrating the collection of what could be alien spacecraft. 'There's at least nine vehicles. There were different circumstances for different ones,' one source briefed by UFO program insiders [said]. 'It has to do with the physical condition they're in. If it crashes, there's a lot of damage done. Others, two of them, are completely intact.' The source said the CIA has a 'system in place that can discern UFOs while they're still cloaked,' and that if the 'non-human' craft land, crash or are brought down to earth, special military units are sent to try to salvage the wreckage. Sources said the CIA office then often hands the wreckage or material over to private aerospace contractors for analysis, where it is not subject to rigorous government audits and can be shielded with protections for trade secrets. Multiple sources said that many of the people involved in these programs may not even realize they are dealing with non-human craft.

Note: Read the riveting testimonies of 60 government and military witnesses of UFO phenomenon, which include astronauts, generals, admirals, and other top government and military officials. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent resources provided in our UFO Information Center.

The Justice Department has just posted a new jobs ad – it's looking for eight new attorneys to defend the federal government in vaccine injury cases. Presumably, the hiring spree is in anticipation of a surge of COVID vaccine lawsuits, as people who were forced by government mandates to take the jab, and suffered serious side effects as a result, try to extract compensation from a system that is stacked against them. "The office is currently expanding to address workload created by an increase in cases filed under the Vaccine Act," reads the ad posted by the Torts Branch of the DOJ on the USAJobs website. The recruitment drive comes on the heels of a little-noticed lawsuit filed in Louisiana last month by six vaccine-injured plaintiffs against the federal government. The suit aims to overturn the legal immunity that pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Moderna enjoy on their COVID shots. Meanwhile, almost 13,000 Americans who claim the COVID vaccine caused them or their dead loved ones adverse reactions ... remain in limbo after doing what they were told was "the right thing": heeding government mandates to submit to the jab. The unaccountable, understaffed government tribunal that presides over the so-called Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), for vaccines administered under emergency measures, is a "kangaroo court," says the lawsuit filed by attorney Aaron Siri, partner at New York firm Siri & Glimstad. 

Note: Learn about the legal landmark case in the UK alleging significant injuries and damages from the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of revealing news articles on government corruption and coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources.

Google maintains one of the world's most comprehensive repositories of location information. Drawing from phones' GPS coordinates, plus connections to Wi-Fi networks and cellular towers, it can often estimate a person's whereabouts to within several feet. It gathers this information in part to sell advertising, but police routinely dip into the data to further their investigations. The use of search data is less common, but that, too, has made its way into police stations throughout the country. Traditionally, American law enforcement obtains a warrant to search the home or belongings of a specific person, in keeping with a constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Warrants for Google's location and search data are, in some ways, the inverse of that process, says Michael Price, the litigation director for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' Fourth Amendment Center. Rather than naming a suspect, law enforcement identifies basic parameters–a set of geographic coordinates or search terms–and asks Google to provide hits, essentially generating a list of leads. By their very nature, these Google warrants often return information on people who haven't been suspected of a crime. In 2018 a man in Arizona was wrongly arrested for murder based on Google location data. Google says it received a record 60,472 search warrants in the US last year, more than double the number from 2019. The company provides at least some information in about 80% of cases.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

The United States will continue in a decades long, post-9/11 state of emergency for at least another year. In a Thursday night declaration, President Joe Biden ensured the emergency will extend at least 23 years after coordinated attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Biden penned his signature to a one-year extension of President George W. Bush's Proclamation 7463, retaining broad powers over the organization of the military. The proclamation is officially titled "The National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks." Most emergencies are used to impose economic sanctions. But Proclamation 7463, along with the broad 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, gives the president the power to call up the National Guard, alter the size and shape of the military's top officers and hire or fire commissioned officers – even ordering them out of retirement if necessary. Biden has most recently cited the 2001 authorization to justify drone strikes against al-Shabab militants in Somalia in 2021. The National Emergencies Act, adopted in 1976, requires presidents to renew emergencies each year. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump also extended the 9/11 state of emergency each year of their respective tenures. Trump used it in 2017 to fill a chronic shortage in Air Force pilots. So far, Biden has declared eight new emergencies, continued 34 from his predecessors and ended three.

Note: An article by The Atlantic explores the alarming scope of president's emergency powers, stating that "the moment the president declares a "national emergency"–a decision that is entirely within his discretion–he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The day after the U.S. government began routinely bombing faraway places, the lead editorial in the New York Times expressed some gratification. Nearly four weeks had passed since 9/11 ... and America had finally stepped up its "counterattack against terrorism" by launching airstrikes on al-Qaeda training camps and Taliban military targets in Afghanistan. The Project on Defense Alternatives concluded that American air strikes had killed more than 1,000 [Afghan] civilians during the last three months of 2001. By mid-spring 2002, the Guardian reported, "as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the U.S. intervention." Under the "war on terror" rubric, open-ended warfare was well underway – "as if terror were a state and not a technique," as Joan Didion wrote in 2003. "We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war." Unlike those killed on 9/11, the Iraqi dead were routinely off the American media radar screen, as were the psychological traumas suffered by Iraqis and the decimation of their country's infrastructure. For the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress, the war on terror offered a political license to kill and displace people on a large scale in at least eight countries. The resulting carnage often included civilians. The dead and maimed had no names or faces that reached those who signed the orders and appropriated the funds.

Note: A 2021 report estimated that the War on Terror had "killed up to 929,000 people and cost over $8 trillion." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

A 2022 investigation by the journal The BMJ declared that FDA oversight of clinical trials, including those for Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, was "grossly inadequate," from not conducting enough inspections to failing to alert scientific journals or the public when violations were flagged. But the issues here are not confined to behind the pharmacy counter. Dr. John Abramson, author of the recent book "Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It," traces the roots of issue back decades. "In 1992, when what turned out to be effective HIV drugs were stuck in the bottleneck of the FDA, they didn't have enough staff to get them through quickly enough. Many people were dying, and it was a real crisis," he explains. "The solution was that the Prescription Drug User Fee Agreement was passed. The drug companies started to pay a user fee with that was due upon application for new drug approval. And now roughly 65% of the FDA budget for overseeing human products comes from the drug and device companies. This comes with rigid timelines, and as I see from the outside, some degree of influence and obligation to the drug companies that derives from this agreement." The numbers here vary – Forbes puts that budget figure as high as 75%. Another similar conflict of interest that concerns Abramson is what he calls "the revolving door that goes between FDA and the drug industry."

Note: Read about Brook Jackson, a researcher for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials, who discovered patient safety concerns, data integrity issues, and other significant issues at her site. When she reported it to the FDA, she was fired the same day. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and health 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.