Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

When I joined the CIA in January 1990, I did it to serve my country. My whole world, like the worlds of all Americans, changed dramatically and permanently on September 11, 2001. Within months of the attacks, I found myself heading to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. Almost immediately, my team began capturing al-Qaeda fighters at safehouses all around Pakistan. Just a month after the September 11 attacks, the CIA leadership gathered its army of lawyers and black ops people and came up with a plan to legalize torture. This was despite the fact that torture has long been patently illegal in the United States. But it didn't matter. In the end, I was the only person associated with the CIA's torture program who was prosecuted and imprisoned. I never tortured anybody. But I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, for telling ABC News and the New York Times that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been approved by the president himself. I served 23 months in a federal prison. Former CIA Director George Tenet, former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jose Rodriguez, former CIA Executive Director John Brennan, and CIA [contractors] James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen ... weakened our democracy by pretending that the Constitution and the rule of law didn't exist.

Note: This article was written by CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. For more along these lines, see the "10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture". For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

As war in Ukraine continues, controversial defense contractors and adjacent companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Clearview AI are taking advantage to develop and level-up controversial AI-driven weapons systems and surveillance technologies. These organizations' common link? The support of the controversial, yet ever-more powerful Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel-backed groups' involvement in war serves to develop not only problematic and unpredictable weapons technologies and systems, but also apparently to advance and further interconnect a larger surveillance apparatus formed by Thiel and his elite allies' collective efforts across the public and private sectors, which arguably amount to the entrenchment of a growing technocratic panopticon aimed at capturing public and private life. What's more, Thiel's funding efforts signal interest in developing expansive surveillance technologies, especially in the name of combatting "pre-crime" through "predictive policing" style surveillance. As an example, Thiel's provided significant funds to Israeli intelligence-linked startup Carbyne911 (as did Jeffrey Epstein), which develops call-handling and call-identification capacities for emergency services, and has ... a predictive-policing component. Thiel also assisted in the development and subsequent privatized spinoffs of the US Government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Total Information Awareness project.

Note: Peter Thiel was also recently reported to be an FBI informant. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Journalist Stephen Kinzer has spent several years investigating the CIA's mind control program, which was known as MKUltra. LSD was just one of the mind-altering drugs that were used in the program to see if and how they could be weaponized to control human behavior. Many of the unwitting subjects of these experiments were subjected to what amounts to psychological torture. The CIA basically set up phony philanthropic foundations which then funded university and college research, and it's through those research experiments that people like Ginsberg and Kesey and Robert Hunter got introduced to LSD. And the university researchers had no idea that their research was actually being funded by the CIA. Stanford University was running a program in which they asked for volunteers to come in and try this new substance. Allen Ginsberg was one of the volunteers; so was Robert Hunter. A similar set of experiments was going on at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. That's where Ken Kesey took LSD for the first time. He was so excited about it he took a job in the hospital and began stealing the LSD to give it to his friends. That became the basis for "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." So all of these original strands that came together in the '60s to produce this great countercultural revolt based around LSD can be traced back through these bogus foundations to the CIA and, ultimately, the director of MKUltra, Sidney Gottlieb.

Note: Read more about the MKUltra program. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and mind control from reliable major media sources.

For Palestinians in Gaza, Israel's eyes are never very far away. Surveillance drones buzz constantly from the skies. The highly-secured border is awash with security cameras and soldiers on guard. But Israel's eyes appeared to have been closed in the lead-up to an unprecedented onslaught by the militant Hamas group, which broke down Israeli border barriers and sent hundreds of militants into Israel to carry out a brazen attack that has killed hundreds. Israel withdrew troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. But even after Hamas overran Gaza in 2007, Israel appeared to maintain its edge, using technological and human intelligence. It claimed to know the precise locations of Hamas leadership and appeared to prove it through the assassinations of militant leaders in surgical strikes, sometimes while they slept in their bedrooms. Israel has known where to strike underground tunnels used by Hamas to ferry around fighters and arms. Despite those abilities, Hamas was able to keep its plan under wraps. The ferocious attack, which likely took months of planning and meticulous training and involved coordination among multiple militant groups, appeared to have gone under Israel's intelligence radar. An Egyptian intelligence official said Egypt, which often serves as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, had spoken repeatedly with the Israelis about "something big," without elaborating. He said Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza.

Note: According to Efrat Fenigson, a former Israeli soldier who served on the Gaza border, "A cat moving alongside the fence is triggering all forces." How could Israeli intelligence not have known that this attack was coming? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and war from reliable major media sources.

The Food and Drug Administration is now regularly approving new drugs after just one or two clinical trials – a significant departure from the more rigorous vetting process the agency was previously known for, newly published research reveals. Furthermore, the authors say, there's now less information available to the public about the results of all trials. Of the 37 drugs approved by the FDA last year, 24 (about 65%) were approved based on just one study, according to a paper published in JAMA Network Open. Only four of those 37 drugs, or about 11%, reported three or more studies before approval. Another piece of new research, published in Health Affairs Scholar, found that of the 46 new drugs approved in 2017, 19 of them (41%) were approved based on a single study – though the drugmakers conducted an average of 2.2 studies per drug, including 165 studies for the popular weight-loss drug Ozempic. The ease with which novel drugs are approved is in part the result of the 21st Century Cures Act, passed in 2016 to speed the approval of new medicines so patients could gain access to life-saving treatments. As part of that law, the FDA relaxed some standards to allow treatments for priority health conditions such as cancer to be approved with fewer supporting studies, and with less emphasis on randomized clinical trials. But in the years following the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, the FDA has faced a firestorm of criticism over the approval process for some new drugs.

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

In December 2010 under the Obama administration, Congress enacted the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. This legislation provided for more fruits and vegetables in school meal programs, a focus on whole grains and a lot fewer starchy vegetables and trans-fat laden foods. In response, some food companies rejiggered ingredients just enough to add "whole grain" to their packaging. Things went downhill from there. Congress caved to lobbying in 2014, allowing schools to serve high-salt french fries and pizza sold by these companies. Again, big food lobbied hard and legislators pulled back on restrictions for sodium levels, flavored milks and amounts of refined grains. We in the United States seem to believe that ... education is unconnected to food and how we eat. Instead, our kids are at the mercy of the companies and brands inundating them: Tyson, General Mills, Kraft, Heinz and many others. Before the pandemic began, the overwhelming majority of US schools offered branded foods during or around mealtimes, and that this is worth $20bn in ... profits for the food industry. Pantries and food banks get in bed with corporate food companies because they don't want to lose access to large quantities of foods and beverages that fill people up. That these products are unhealthy is a secondary or tertiary concern. Food banks and pantries are not always meeting the nutritional profiles of the people they serve, particularly people who are struggling with diabetes, obesity and decades of poor eating.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption 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.

Public schools ... are the focus of a new report on surveillance and kids by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "Over the last two decades, a segment of the educational technology (EdTech) sector that markets student surveillance products to schools – the EdTech Surveillance industry – has grown into a $3.1 billion a year economic juggernaut," begins Digital Dystopia The Danger in Buying What the EdTech Surveillance Industry is Selling. "The EdTech Surveillance industry accomplished that feat by playing on school districts' fears of school shootings, student self-harm and suicides, and bullying – marketing them as common, ever-present threats." As the authors detail, among the technologies are surveillance cameras. These are often linked to software for facial recognition, access control, behavior analysis, and weapon detection. That is, cameras scan student faces and then algorithms identify them, allow or deny them entry based on that ID, decide if their activities are threatening, and determine if objects they carry may be dangerous or forbidden. "False hits, such as mistaking a broomstick, three-ring binder, or a Google Chromebook laptop for a gun or other type of weapon, could result in an armed police response to a school," cautions the report. Students are aware that they're being observed. Of students aged 14–18 surveyed by the ACLU ... thirty-two percent say, "I always feel like I'm being watched."

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.

On April 27, 2021, then-director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky stated, "we have not seen any reports" of post-vaccination myocarditis, but this was a false statement. When Walensky claimed to have "not seen any reports," there were dozens of reports in the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). "The CDC," notes [journalist Zachary] Stieber, "was warned by Israel on Feb. 28, 2021, about a ‘large number' of myocarditis cases after Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination. Internally, the warning was designated as ‘high' importance and set off a review of US data." The Israeli Ministry of Health requested a joint meeting with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the CDC to respond to this trend. "The Israeli National Focal Point is noticing a large number of reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people, following the administration of the Pfizer vaccines," the email stated. Even when more information about myocarditis became public, [Walensky's] agency continued to downplay the risks. Stieber also found that the CDC's V-Safe self-reporting system did not include a category for myocarditis reports. To this day, the CDC has not released complete, updated data on myocarditis. The agency's cover-up of adverse cardiac events has had profound consequences and represents a major breach of trust and abuse of authority. Due to the higher risks of myocarditis after Moderna, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, and France suspended the use of the Moderna vaccine for people under 30 two years ago.

Note: When current and former FDA advisers and academics asked the FDA to improve COVID vaccine labeling given the significant risk of severe vaccine injuries, the agency denied almost every single request. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources.

The FBI has amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles – equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population – according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept. The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. "The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security," the appeal for an increase says. "When we're talking about rapid expansion like this, it's getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database," Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, [said]. "I think the civil liberties implications here are significant." The rapid growth of the FBI's sample load is in large part thanks to a Trump-era rule change that mandated the collection of DNA from migrants who were arrested or detained by immigration authorities. Until recently, the U.S. DNA database surpassed even that of authoritarian China, which launched an ambitious DNA collection program in 2017. That year, the BBC reported, the U.S. had about 4 percent of its population's DNA, while China had about 3 percent. While DNA has played an important role in prosecuting crimes, less than 3 percent of the profiles have assisted in cases, the Bureau's data reveals. By comparison, fingerprints collected by the FBI from current and former federal employees linked them to crimes at a rate of 12 percent each year.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy 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.

From Virginia to Florida, law enforcement all over the US are increasingly using tools called reverse search warrants – including geofence location warrants and keyword search warrants – to come up with a list of suspects who may have committed particular crimes. While the former is used by law enforcement to get tech companies to identify all the devices that were near a certain place at a certain time, the latter is used to get information on everyone who's searched for a particular keyword or phrase. It's a practice public defenders, privacy advocates and many lawmakers have criticised, arguing it violates fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches. Unlike reverse search warrants, other warrants and subpoenas target a specific person that law enforcement has established there is probable cause to believe has committed a specific crime. But geofence warrants are sweeping in nature and are often used to compile a suspect list to further investigate. Google broke out how many geofence warrants it received for the first time in 2021. The company revealed it received nearly 21,000 geofence warrants between 2018 and 2020. The tech giant did not specify how many of those requests it complied with but did share that in the second half of 2020, it responded to 82% of all government requests for data in the US with some level of information. Apple has taken steps to publish its own numbers. In the first half of 2022 the company fielded a total of 13 geofence warrants and complied with none.

Note: The legal world is struggling to keep up with the rise of tech firms building ever more sophisticated means of surveilling people and their devices. 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.

Fort Ord was one of 800 U.S. military bases, large and small, that were shuttered between 1988 and 2005. The cities of Seaside and Marina, Calif., where Fort Ord had been critical to the local economy, were left with a ghost town of clapboard barracks and decrepit, World War II-era concrete structures that neither of the cities could afford to tear down. Also left behind were poisonous stockpiles of unexploded ordnance, lead fragments, industrial solvents and explosives residue, a toxic legacy that in some areas of the base remains largely where the Army left it. Across the country, communities were promised that closed bases would be restored, cleaned up and turned over for civilian use. But the cleanup has proceeded at a snail's pace at many of the facilities, where future remediation work could extend until 2084 and local governments are struggling with the cost of making the land suitable for development. At more than 1,000 sites within the closed bases, the land is so badly contaminated that no one will ever be allowed to live on it. Sites that were supposed to be clean were later found full of asbestos, radioactivity and other health threats. Military base cleanups are often full of surprises, but Hunters Point is in a league of its own. Two former supervisors at an environmental firm, Tetra Tech EC, which the Navy hired to help clean up the base, were convicted in 2018 of fraudulently submitting clean dirt to a laboratory in place of the contaminated dirt at the shipyard.

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

In March of 2021 a nonprofit group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released a report about online misinformation. Founded [by] Imran Ahmed, the CCDH ... provides the White House with a powerful weapon to use against critics including RFK Jr. and [Elon] Musk, while also pressuring platforms like Facebook and Twitter to enforce the administration's policies. One rumor that came up ... is that [Ahmed] works for British intelligence. "There's nothing surprising about this," said Mike Benz, a former State Department official who now runs the Foundation for Freedom Online, a free-speech watchdog. "This is not the first rodeo of British and U.S. intelligence services creating a cutout for the purpose of influencing the online news economy, to rig public debate in favor of political speech that supports agency agendas." CCDH's ... chairman is Simon Clark, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a D.C. think tank aligned with the corporate arm of the Democratic Party. One might conclude that CCDH functions as an arm of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, to be deployed against the perceived enemies of corporate Democrats, whether they come from the left or the right. Clark was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab. "The Atlantic Council, in the past several years, has had seven CIA directors on its board of directors or board of advisers," said Benz. "And it's one of the premier architects of online censorship."

Note: Read an excellent piece on what gave rise to the modern censorship regime. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

On 7 October 2022, the United States government implemented export controls in an effort to hinder the development of China's semiconductor industry. The next day, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said: "... By politicising tech and trade issues and using them as a tool and weapon, the US cannot hold back China's development but will only hurt and isolate itself when its action backfires." Under the Trump and Biden administrations, the US has placed hundreds of Chinese companies on trade and investment blacklists. These restrictions have banned any company in the world that uses US products – effectively every chip designer and manufacturer – from doing business with Chinese tech firms. The US has also pressured governments and firms around the world to impose similar restrictions. Washington fears that China's technological development will lead, through trade and investment, to the dispersal of advanced technologies more broadly throughout the world, namely, to states in the Global South that the US sees as a threat. This would be a significant blow to the US's power over these countries. The scale of the developments in digital technology is staggering. Earlier conflicts took place over energy and food, but now this conflict has heated up ... the resources of our digital world. This technology can be used to solve so many of our dilemmas, and yet, here we are, at the precipice of greater conflict to benefit the few over the needs of the many.

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

A federal court of appeals ruled earlier this month that the White House, surgeon general, CDC and FBI "likely violated the First Amendment" by exerting a pressure campaign on social media companies to censor COVID-19 skeptics – including Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics and health research policy at Stanford University, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in the fall of 2020 with professors from Harvard and Oxford. The epidemiologists advocated for "focused protection" – safeguarding the most vulnerable Americans while cautiously allowing others to function as normally as possible – rather than broad pandemic lockdowns. "We were just acting as scientists, but almost immediately we were censored," said Bhattacharya. "Google de-boosted us. Our Facebook page was removed. It was just a crazy time. "The kinds of things that the federal government was telling social media companies to censor included us – along with millions of other posts from countless other people who were criticizing government COVID policy," he added. A New Orleans-based three-judge panel found that the federal government "likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content" by vaguely threatening adverse regulatory consequences if social media companies did not suppress certain viewpoints on the pandemic.

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

What if I told you one in 50 people who took a new medication had a "medically attended adverse event" and the manufacturer refused to disclose what exactly the complication was – would you take it? And what if the theoretical benefit was only transient, lasting about three months, after which your susceptibility goes back to baseline? And what if we told you the Food and Drug Administration cleared it without any human-outcomes data. That's what we know about the new COVID vaccine the Biden administration is firmly recommending. COVID vaccines are very different from flu vaccines. COVID vaccines have higher complication rates, including severe and life-threatening cardiac reactions. Flu shots have a 50-plus-year safety record whereas COVID vaccines have been associated with a serious adverse event rate of one in 5,000 doses, according to a German study by the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut. Another study, published last year in the medical journal Vaccine, estimated the rate of serious adverse events to be as high as one in 556 COVID vaccine recipients. And for young people, the incidence of myocarditis is six to 28 times higher after the vaccine than after infection, even for females, according to a 2022 JAMA Cardiology study. That's one of the reasons a study that we and several national colleagues published last year found that college booster mandates appear to have resulted in a net public health harm.

Note: The above was written by Marty Makary, MD, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Anecdotals is a powerful documentary that follows the lives of many people who stepped up to get vaccinated for themselves or the greater good, yet whose lives changed drastically as a result. Instead of having their stories of vaccine injuries heard and seen, they were discredited and abandoned by the medical system and our media systems.

Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) [is] Europe's biggest arms fair, which takes place every two years in the Excel convention centre in east London. It is a sprawling supermarket of modern warfare, where the world's armies come to buy the latest AI-guided missiles and tanks, inspect giant warships moored in the Royal Docks, and queue to take a turn sitting in the cockpits of fighter jets. Joystick manufacturers jostle with makers of invisibility cloaks, while purveyors of VR simulators compete with those of radar jammers, next to endless ranks of machine guns. Sleek submarines sparkle on spotlit plinths while flocks of missile-carrying drones dangle from the ceiling like menacing mobiles. "This year feels much busier than usual," one bomb salesman tells me, standing by a gleaming rack of cone-shaped warheads, polished like trophies in a glass cabinet. "It seems war is back in a big way. People are looking to stock up." Whereas attendees of this great murderous bazaar may once have felt sheepish, they now proudly march through the entrance gates with their heads held high. Recent events in Ukraine have sharpened minds and opened wallets in relation to government spending on defence. Total global military expenditure reached an all-time high of $2.2tn (Ł1.8tn) in 2022. Outside the exhibition halls, reality hits. "Please be aware," a polite protester tells visitors, "that many of the countries you are doing business with are on the UK government's human rights priority list."

Note: As one defense executive flat-out told Reuters during the event, "war is good for business." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war and military corruption from reliable major media sources.

In response to a spate of coups by U.S.-trained military personnel in West Africa and the greater Sahel, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., has authored an amendment to the 2024 defense spending bill to collect information on trainees who overthrow their governments. It would require the Pentagon for the first time to inform Congress about U.S.-mentored mutineers. "The Department of Defense, up until this point, has not kept data regarding the people they train who participate in coups to overthrow democratically elected – or any – governments," said Gaetz. The Intercept has found that at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror. At least five leaders of the Niger coup in late July received American training. They, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors. The Intercept identified more than 70 other African military personnel involved in coups since 2001 who might have received U.S. training or assistance, but when provided with names, State Department spokespeople either failed to respond or replied, "We do not have the ability to provide records for these historical cases." Gaetz's proposed legislation ... would require the defense secretary to submit a report listing "the number of partner countries whose military forces have participated in security cooperation training or equipping programs or received security assistance training."

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

Col. Elias Melgar Urbina, a top-ranking Honduran military official and U.S. partner in joint drug war operations, has been tied to a Honduran drug trafficker, according to a U.S. Justice Department filing, and a private security company accused of assassinating land rights activists, according to eyewitness testimony and documents obtained by The Intercept. During the trial of Geovanny Fuentes RamĂ­rez in federal district court in Manhattan, U.S. prosecutors suggested the possibility that Melgar himself had links to the drug trade. Fuentes was convicted in March 2021 of conspiring with high-ranking Honduran politicians and military officials to traffic tons of cocaine into the United States. One of Fuentes's "military contacts," according to prosecutors, was Melgar. For decades, the U.S. has supported Honduran governments whose security forces have violently repressed protest, protected select figures in the drug trade, and executed perceived criminals with so-called extermination squads. Since 2009, when a military coup greenlit by the State Department ousted former President Manuel Zelaya, the husband of current president Castro, the U.S. has supported sweeping security initiatives to militarize Honduran forces in the name of the war on drugs – even as they engaged in widespread human rights abuses. "The armed forces have been the key for turning Honduras into a narco-state," [Pro-Honduras Network head Cristián] Sánchez told The Intercept.

Note: The US government has a long history of involvement in drug trafficking. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.