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.

The Obama Administration has taken the unprecedented step of authorising the killing of a US citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The decision is extraordinary not only because Mr al-Awlaki is believed to be the first American whose killing has been approved by a US President, but also because the Obama Administration chose to make the move public. The Los Angeles Times reported in January that Mr al-Awlaki’s name had been placed on a top-secret list of targeted killings. In the past 24 hours, however, a handful of intelligence and counter-terrorism officials have briefed Reuters and The New York Times on the decision. The authorisation ... and the decision to make it public is a high-risk strategy. Tina Foster, of the US-based International Justice Network, told The Times: “It is shocking that our Government would go to these extremes, even depriving someone of their life without a legal process.” The policy of targeted killings is controversial. President Ford issued an order in 1976 banning political assassinations. Yet Congress approved the use of force against al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks.

Note: Obama is the first president to publicly order the assassination an American citizen. Neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney asserted such a power on the part of the president.

In nearly nine years of warfare in Afghanistan, U.S. Special Forces have done their fighting in the shadows, governed by rules largely of their own making. Now, these elite and secretive troops, their actions long shielded from public scrutiny, are the focus of a high-profile investigation that could shed unprecedented light on their methods and tactics. American and Afghan officials are probing a possible attempted coverup in the deaths of five Afghan civilians in February in a raid carried out by U.S. Special Forces accompanied by Afghan troops. Three of those killed were women and among the charges is that the bodies were tampered with by coalition forces to conceal the cause of death. Special Forces are inextricably linked to one of the most contentious issues between the Afghan government and Western forces: civilian deaths and injuries. Special Forces account for a disproportionate share of civilian casualties caused by Western troops ... though there are no precise figures because so many of their missions are deemed secret. In mountain villages and desert hamlets, the Special Forces inspire dread among Afghans, who tend to speak of them in whispers. Their strikes are usually swift and violent, most often taking place in the dead of night.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on US military atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq, click here.

Imagine being charged with a crime, but an imaginary friend takes the rap for you. That is essentially what happened when Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, was caught illegally marketing Bextra, a painkiller that was taken off the market in 2005 because of safety concerns. It's a story about the power major pharmaceutical companies have even when they break the laws intended to protect patients. The story begins in 2001, when Bextra was about to hit the market. The drug was part of a revolutionary class of painkillers known as Cox-2 inhibitors that were supposed to be safer than generic drugs, but at 20 times the price of ibuprofen. Pfizer and its marketing partner, Pharmacia, planned to sell Bextra as a treatment for acute pain, the kind you have after surgery. But in November 2001, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Bextra was not safe for patients at high risk of heart attacks and strokes. The FDA approved Bextra only for arthritis and menstrual cramps. It rejected the drug in higher doses for acute, surgical pain. Promoting drugs for unapproved uses can put patients at risk by circumventing the FDA's judgment over which products are safe and effective. For that reason, "off-label" promotion is against the law. Internal company documents show that Pfizer and Pharmacia (which Pfizer later bought) used a multimillion-dollar medical education budget to pay hundreds of doctors as speakers and consultants to tout Bextra.

Note: For lots more from major media sources on corporate corruption, click here.

The Democratic administration of Barack Obama, who denounced his predecessor, George W. Bush, as the most secretive in history, is now denying more Freedom of Information Act requests than the Republican did. Transparency and openness were so important to the new president that on his first full day in office, he dispatched a much-publicized memo saying: "All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA." One of the exemptions allowed to deny Freedom of Information requests has been used by the Obama administration 70,779 times in its first year; the same exemption was used 47,395 times in Bush's final budget year. An Associated Press examination of 17 major agencies' handling of FOIA requests found denials 466,872 times, an increase of nearly 50% from the 2008 fiscal year under Bush.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government secrecy, click here.

Oil consumption has fallen, demand from U.S. motorists for gasoline is flat at best and refiners that turn crude into fuel are operating well below capacity. Yet oil prices keep marching toward $90 a barrel, pushing gasoline toward $3 a gallon in many markets, and prompting American drivers to ask, "What gives?" Blame it on the same folks who brought you $140 oil and $4 gasoline in 2008: Wall Street speculators. Experts attribute much of the recent rise in prices to flows of speculative money into oil markets. Rising oil and gasoline prices are deja vu all over again for Michael Masters. The hedge fund manager has crusaded for legislation that would prevent so much speculative money in the oil markets. Wall Street is "gaming" the price of oil, he warns. "If you're a bank, and you know there is going to be a large amount of investor inflows into the commodities market, you are going to position yourself ahead of them. You want to be a seller at a higher price," explained Masters, noting that large Wall Street banks invest for themselves in these markets even as they also broker the oil investments of others. What's abundantly clear, he and others argue, is that an oil contract's price today has little to do with the supply of and demand for oil.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the hidden realities and destructive impacts of Wall Street speculation, click here.

Despite months of dire warnings and millions in taxpayer dollars, less than half of the 229 million doses of H1N1 vaccine the government bought to fight the pandemic have been administered -- leaving an estimated 71.5 million doses that must be discarded if they are not used before they expire. Between 81 million and 91 million doses of swine flu vaccine were injected into peoples' arms or squirted up their noses through the end of February, according to federal officials, leaving about 138 million doses unused. An estimated 60 million of those will be donated to poor countries or saved for possible future use. But doses already in vials and syringes will be thrown away if not used before their expiration dates pass. The prospect of millions of doses of the once-precious vaccine being discarded is the latest twist in the $1.6 billion program -- the most ambitious immunization campaign in U.S. history. The government-led effort produced a vaccine in record time, but unexpected production problems delayed delivery of the bulk of supplies until after the second wave of infections had peaked.

Note: Yet the pharmaceutical companies get to keep the huge profits from the vaccines, paid for by the taxpayers. For key reports from major media sources on the government and pharmaceutical corporation corruption involving bird and swine flu vaccines, click here.

For almost two years, molecular biologist Bénédicte Trouiller doused the drinking water of scores of lab mice with nano-titanium dioxide, the most common nanomaterial used in consumer products today. Halfway through, Trouiller became alarmed: Consuming the nano-titanium dioxide was damaging or destroying the animals' DNA and chromosomes. The biological havoc continued as she repeated the studies again and again. It was a significant finding: The degrees of DNA damage and genetic instability that [she] documented can be "linked to all the big killers of man, namely cancer, heart disease, neurological disease and aging," says Professor Robert Schiestl, a genetic toxicologist who ran the lab at UCLA's School of Public Health where Trouiller did her research. Nano-titanium dioxide is so pervasive that the Environmental Working Group says it has calculated that close to 10,000 over-the-counter products use it in one form or another. Other public health specialists put the number even higher. It's "in everything from medicine capsules and nutritional supplements, to food icing and additives, to skin creams, oils and toothpaste," Schiestl says.

Note: For a treasure trove of key reports on health issues, click here.

A federal judge ruled [on March 31] that the National Security Agency�s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration�s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush. In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been �subjected to unlawful surveillance,� the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages. The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department�s claim � first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama � that the charity�s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets. The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to �unfettered executive-branch discretion� that had �obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.�

Note: For illumination of the dark world of state secrecy, click here.

Urgent warnings by government experts about the risks of routinely using powerful CT scans to screen patients for colon cancer were brushed aside by the Food and Drug Administration, according to agency documents and interviews with agency scientists. Such scans can deliver the radiation equivalent of 400 chest X-rays. An estimated 70 million CT scans are performed in the United States every year, up from three million in the early 1980s. As many as 14,000 people may die every year of radiation-induced cancers as a result, researchers estimate. The use of CT scans to screen healthy patients for cancer is particularly controversial. The internal dispute [at the FDA] has grown so heated that a group of agency scientists who are concerned about the risks of CT scans say they will testify ... that F.D.A. managers ignored or suppressed their concerns, and that the resulting delay in making these concerns public may have led hundreds of patients to be endangered needlessly. Scores of internal agency documents made available to The New York Times show that agency managers sought to approve an application by General Electric to allow the use of CT scans for colon cancer screenings over the repeated objections of agency scientists, who wanted the application rejected.

Note: For lots more on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.

A former Food and Drug Administration scientist said [on March 30 that] his job was eliminated after he raised concerns about the risks of radiation exposure from high-grade medical scanning. Dr. Julian Nicholas said at a public hearing that he and other FDA staffers "were pressured to change their scientific opinion," after they opposed the approval of a CT scanner for routine colon cancer screening. Nicholas said that he objected to exposing otherwise healthy patients to the cancer risks of radiation. After FDA officials pushed ahead with plans to clear the device, Nicholas, now a physician at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego, said he and eight other staffers raised their concerns with the division's top director Dr. Jeffrey Shuren last September. "Scientific and regulatory review process for medical devices was being distorted by managers who were not following the laws," Nicholas said. A month later Nicholas' position was terminated, he said.

Note: For lots more on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.

In a significant victory for news media, a federal appeals court said the Federal Reserve must disclose records on emergency lending programs to banks bailed out by the government in the financial crisis. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals on [March 19] ordered the Fed to release details of programs it adopted starting in late 2007 to shore up the financial system and forestall a complete meltdown of global financial markets. Bloomberg ... and News Corp's Fox News Network sought details of the central bank's actions under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The Fed argued against disclosure, citing an exemption that it said lets federal agencies keep secret various trade secrets and commercial or financial information. Writing for a unanimous three-judge appeals court panel, Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs said, however, that to give the Fed power to deny disclosure because it thinks it best to do so "would undermine the basic policy that disclosure, not secrecy, is the dominant objective." Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said the rulings will help shed light on the Fed, which he called "the least transparent institution" in government.

Note: Isn't it crazy that the Fed would try to keep secret what it did with nearly $1 trillion of US taxpayer money?

A U.N. report says Afghanistan, the world's biggest producer of opium, is also a "major producer of cannabis" and "the world's biggest producer of hashish." The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime issued its Afghanistan Cannabis Survey on [March 31], documenting large-scale cannabis cultivation in half of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. "While other countries have even larger cannabis cultivation, the astonishing yield of the Afghan cannabis crop -- 145 kilograms per hectare of hashish, the resin produced from cannabis, as compared to around 40 kilograms per hectare in Morocco -- makes Afghanistan the world's biggest producer of hashish, estimated at between 1,500 and 3,500 tons a year," said Antonio Maria Costa, UNODC's executive director. The report says money "is one of the main reasons" for large-scale cannabis cultivation. "The gross income per hectare of cannabis (US $3,900) is higher than from opium (US$ 3,600)."

Note: What almost no media reports point out is that in 2000, the year before the US invasion, the Taliban had virtually eradicated opium and hashish. Is it a coincidence that under US control Afghanistan has since regained its status as top producer of these drugs? For powerful evidence suggesting rogue elements of government profit greatly from the drug trade, click here.

As head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC], Brooksley Born became alarmed by the lack of oversight of the secretive, multitrillion-dollar over-the-counter derivatives market. Her attempts to regulate derivatives ran into fierce resistance from then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation. PBS: Let's start with September 2008 as we all sat there and watched the economy melting down. Born: It was like my worst nightmare coming true. I had had enormous concerns about the over-the-counter derivatives [OTC] market ... for a number of years. The market was totally opaque. Nobody really knew what was going on. And then it became obvious as Lehman Brothers failed, as AIG suddenly appeared to be on the brink of tremendous defaults and turned out [to have been a major derivatives] dealer. PBS: How did it happen? Born: It happened because there was no oversight of a very, very big, dynamic, growing market. I would never say derivatives should be banned or forbidden. The problem is that they can be extremely misused. Traditionally, government has had to protect the public interest by overseeing the marketplace and keeping the extreme behavior under some check. All other financial markets have some kind of government oversight protecting the public interest. [But] not this one. The over-the-counter derivatives dealers business ... was something like 40 percent of the profits of many of these big banks as recently as a couple of years ago. PBS: We're the losers. Who were the winners? Born: Our largest banks. It was short-term benefit for a few major institutions at the expense of all the people who have lost their jobs, who have lost their retirement savings, who have lost their homes.

Note: Don't miss this entire, astonishing interview with Born, who practiced derivatives law for 20 years before being appointed head of the CFTC. She lays bare the level of deceit, greed, and corruption by both bankers and some of the politicians who protect them.

American psychiatrists need to break away from a "culture of influence" created by their financial dealings with the drug industry, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health said in a leading medical journal. Dr. Thomas Insel stops short of calling researchers corrupt or asking them to stop taking money from drug companies. But he highlights a "bias in prescribing practices" that favors brand names drugs over cheaper generics and non-drug treatments. And he says the situation must change with new standards for transparency and full disclosure of psychiatry's collaborations with industry. "We can show the rest of medicine how to clean up our act," Insel told The Associated Press. Current National Institutes of Health rules on financial disclosure are confusing, Insel said. They allow researchers seeking federal funds to make their own judgments about what constitutes a significant financial interest, which they must report to their academic or research institutions. The rules also exempt disclosures of anything below $10,000 annually or 5 percent equity interest in a company.

Note: For a top-notch overview of medical corruption, click here.

The U.S. government has had to make many ... embarrassing admissions to victims of crime and grieving family members: Just so you know, the person who just stabbed you or murdered your relative was an agent of the state. The Mounties insist that a provision in the Witness Protection Program Act forces them to hide problem cases. However, other witness protection programs - including the provincial one in Quebec and the U.S. federal program - are quite public about their mistakes. About 1,000 people - 700 RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) witnesses, and about 300 from other police services - have been admitted to the program and disappeared into new communities with new identities. It is a criminal offence to knowingly reveal, directly or indirectly, anything about their new identities. Because of this Canadians have been barred from seeing the dark side to protecting known criminals. For instance, one family somewhere in Canada has no idea their loved one was killed by protected witness, a man who some lawyers have argued didn't deserve a new identity or the more than $100,000 he was paid.

Note: For those who really want to know a deep, dark side of politics which incriminates Stockwell Day, the former Canadian Minister of Public Safety and current Minister of International trade and many others, see the compelling evidence provided at www.transfixed.net. For the most revealing webpage there, click here.

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

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

Germany is fighting to keep sealed the Adolf Eichmann files detailing the years the Holocaust chief logistical organiser spent on the run before he was captured by Mossad agents. Those hoping to have a 50-year secrecy order overturned believe the government is embarrassed by details within that may prove German and Vatican officials colluded in his escape and freedom. For the current papacy under the German pope, Benedict XVI, the 4,500 page Eichmann dossier could be the ’smoking gun’ that would shoot down his plans to canonize Pope Pius XII (1939-58), aka ‘Hitler’s Pope.’ The role of Pope Pius XII during World War II, his relationship with Nazism and his efforts (or lack of them) to save Jews from the gas chambers are hotly disputed. Even within the Jewish community there are strong opinions on both sides of the debate. In fact history’s most savage mass murderers – Adolf Eichmann, Dr Josef Mengele, better known as Auschwitz’s ‘Angel of Death’, Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp – escaped justice down the ‘ratline’ that ran straight through the Vatican state in Rome. Senior members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy – marinaded in virulent Judeophobia and obsessed by Bolshevism – organised the escape of thousands of the most debauched, cruel monsters to a peaceful, prosperous retirement in Catholic South America.

Note: As mentioned by the initiator of the lawsuit to open the documents in this Associated Press story, "I think it's impossible that in Germany we are hiding documents about a convicted Nazi mass murderer today." Evidence suggests that these Nazis were purposely allowed to escape with the involvement of the Vatican, the CIA, and other groups. Josef Mengele is purported to have gone on to train the CIA in powerful mind control techniques he perfected using concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs. For more on this, click here.

Four men accused of trying to bomb synagogues and shoot down planes in New York last spring did little more than go along with a fake plot proposed, directed and funded by the federal government, defense lawyers claim in asking the court to dismiss the case. A federal informant chose the targets, offered payment, provided maps and bought the only real weapon involved, a handgun, the attorneys said in a dismissal motion filed this week in federal court. They alleged the defendants were not inclined toward any crime until the informant began recruiting them. The dismissal motion identified the government's agent as Shaheed Hussain, a "professional informant" for the FBI. The defense alleged that Hussain tried to incite the defendants by blaming Jews for the world's evil and telling them that attacks against non-Muslims were endorsed by Islam. Nevertheless, they said, he failed to motivate the defendants to any action on their own. Hussain suggested the targets, paid for the defendants' groceries, bought a gun, provided the fake bombs and missile, assembled the explosive devices and acted as chauffeur, the defense said. "The alleged crimes were almost entirely the product of Hussain's labors and the enterprise would have immediately collapsed if Hussain's guiding hand had been removed," the defense motion said.

Note: For lots more evidence of fake terror plots used to maintain the "war on terror", click here.

To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret. The Pentagon assessed the danger WikiLeaks.org posed to the Army in a report marked “unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions.” It concluded that “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army” — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information. WikiLeaks, true to its mission to publish materials that expose secrets of all kinds, published the 2008 Pentagon report about itself on [March 15]. WikiLeaks ... has rankled governments and companies around the world with its publication of materials intended to be kept secret. The Army’s interest in WikiLeaks appears to have been spurred by ... its publication and analysis of classified and unclassified Army documents containing information about military equipment, units, operations and “nearly the entire order of battle” for American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in April 2007. WikiLeaks also published an ... unclassified copy of the “standard operating procedures” at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. WikiLeaks said the document revealed methods by which the military prevented prisoners from meeting with the International Red Cross and the use of “extreme psychological stress” as a means of torture.

Note: For many reports from reliable sources on government secrecy, click here.

On Nov. 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a ... 42-year-old government scientist, plunged to his death from room 1018A in New York's Statler Hotel. [Twenty-two] years later, the Rockefeller Commission report was released, detailing a litany of domestic abuses committed by the CIA. The ugly truth emerged: Olson's death was the result of his having been surreptitiously dosed with LSD days earlier by his colleagues. The belated 1975 [admission] ... generated more interest into a series of wildly implausible "mind control" experiments on an unsuspecting populace over three decades. Much of this plot unfolded here, in New York, according to H.P. Albarelli Jr., author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments. Albarelli spent more than a decade sifting through more than 100,000 pages of government documents and his most startling chestnut might be his claim that the intelligence community conducted aerosol tests of LSD inside the New York City subway system. "The experiment was pretty shocking — shocking that the CIA and the Army would release LSD like that, among innocent unwitting folks," Albarelli told The Post. An Olson colleague, Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, confirmed to Albarelli that the LSD subway test did, in fact, occur in November 1950, albeit on a smaller scale than first planned. Little, however, is known about the test — what line, how many people and what happened.

Note: For lots more reliable information on CIA mind control experiments, click here and here.

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.