Government Corruption News StoriesExcerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media
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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.
Three things can be expected from Bush's speech, according to a new study by three Columbia University researchers: The media will repeat the president's remarks. Public fear of terrorism will increase. And the president's poll numbers will rise. Those have been the effects of presidential pronouncements on terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to political scientists. "These are interesting findings, and confirm what many of us had suspected," said Mark Juergensmeyer, director of Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. "This public panic benefits the terrorists whose work is made easier by an overactive government response that magnifies their efforts. In an odd way this puts the government and the terrorists in league with one another," he said. "The main loser, alas, is the terrified public." [The study's author said terrorists] "want to intimidate, they want to spread fear and anxiety." Larry Beutler, director of the National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism in Palo Alto, who reviewed the Columbia team's research [commented] "There are findings suggesting that the administration's use of the alert system increased inordinately before the election and each time it did, Bush's numbers went up about 5 percent." The research is also a "damning indictment of the media's bloodlust," said Matthew T. Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington.
President Bush on Wednesday acknowledged previously secret CIA prisons around the world. The announcement from Bush was the first time the administration had acknowledged the existence of CIA prisons, which have been a source of friction between Washington and some allies in Europe. European Union lawmakers said the CIA was conducting clandestine flights in Europe to take terror suspects to countries where they could face torture.
Nearly 70 percent of the rescue and cleanup workers who toiled in the dust and fumes at ground zero have had trouble breathing, and many will probably be sick for the rest of their lives, doctors said Tuesday in releasing results of the biggest Sept. 11 health study yet. The Mount Sinai Medical Center study is conclusive proof of a link between recovery work at the World Trade Center ruins and long-term respiratory problems, doctors aid.
With its dollar hoard rising at $17 billion a month and about to pass the $1 trillion mark, Beijing is finding out that it is possible to have too much money. Beijing's growing dollar hoard represents the most dangerous imbalance in today's global economy. The United States is both importing heavily from China and borrowing heavily from the country to finance those purchases, pushing the dollar down and putting the two economic superpowers on a collision course.
Already the world's largest producer of opium, Afghanistan's 2006 output has soared a staggering 59 percent, according to a survey by the U.N.'s drug control program. So this year, the country that the United States invaded five years ago to stabilize will produce 16,000 tons of opium. Drugs now make up more than half of gross domestic product. Top government officials are tied to the drug trade. Corruption runs rampant. Addiction rates in Afghanistan and neighboring Central Asia, Iran and Pakistan are skyrocketing.
Note: How is it possible that the opium production continues to skyrocket in Afghanistan, when it was decimated the year before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan? For a possible answer, click here.
The Transportation Department's inspector general urged the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday to consider disciplinary action against two executives who failed to correct false information provided to the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The acting inspector general, Todd J. Zinser, whose office acts as the department's internal watchdog, found in a new report that the F.A.A. executives...learned after the fact that false information was given to the commission in May 2003 about the F.A.A.'s contacts with the Air Force on the morning of Sept. 11. The inspector general's report, prepared in response to complaints from the independent Sept. 11 commission, found that the three F.A.A. executives failed to act on an "obligation" to correct the false information provided to the commission, which found widespread confusion within the aviation agency and the military on the morning of the attacks. The F.A.A., part of the Transportation Department, declined to identify the three executives, whose names and titles were not revealed in the inspector general's report. Nor did the agency say whether it would consider disciplinary action. Richard Ben Veniste, a commission member, said in an interview on Friday that he was troubled that it had taken the inspector general two years to complete his investigation -- more time than it took the 9/11 commission to complete all of its work -- and that he released the report "on the Friday afternoon before the Labor Day weekend."
Faced with an angry minority of people who believe the Sept. 11 attacks were part of a shadowy and sprawling plot run by Americans, separate reports were published this week by the State Department and a federal science agency insisting that the catastrophes were caused by hijackers who used commercial airliners as weapons. The official narrative of the attacks has been attacked as little more than a cover story by an assortment of radio hosts, academics, amateur filmmakers and others. As a motive, they suggest that the Bush administration wanted to use the attacks to justify military action in the Middle East. A nationwide poll taken earlier this summer...found that more than a third of those surveyed said the federal government either took part in the attacks or allowed them to happen. And 16 percent said the destruction of the trade center was aided by explosives hidden in the buildings. Details are available at http://newspolls.org. The State Department report...is titled, "The Top Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theories" and says, "Numerous unfounded conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks continue to circulate, especially on the Internet." Produced by an arm of the State Department known as a "counter-misinformation team," the report is dated Aug. 28...at http://usinfo.state.gov/media/misinformation.html. Among those now propelling the argument that explosives took down the trade center is Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, coeditor with Mr. Ryan of www.journalof911studies.com, which published his paper, "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Completely Collapse on 9-11-2001?"
[On] the Web site porkbusters.org is a quote attributed to former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott: "I'll just say this about the so-called porkbusters. I'm getting damn tired of hearing from them." Sens. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) are probably damn tired of hearing from them too. The porkbusters led a pack of bloggers who outed the two senators for bottling up a bill meant to help the public track how its tax dollars are spent. The measure would create a searchable online database of federal grants and contracts. An unnamed senator...was blocking that bill from coming to the floor. Under an arcane Senate rule, any member who has concerns about a bill can block it--anonymously. When the porkbusters learned about the so-called "secret hold," they issued a call for bloggers to contact their own senators and demand to know: Are you the anonymous blocker? Readers at TPMmuckraker.com and GOPprogress.com joined in, and within days they had denials from 97 senators. That's when Stevens decided to "fess up." The bloggers still weren't satisfied. By Thursday, Byrd was the only senator who continued to duck the question. Noting that Byrd's "penchant for pork would probably win him the Pork Crown if he weren't saddled with minority status," TPMmuckraker pressed for an answer. By midafternoon, Byrd had admitted he placed a hold on the bill--and said he has now released it. When they were caught, Stevens and Byrd offered lots of blather about why they were preventing taxpayers from finding out how their money is spent. It's a good day for taxpayers and the bloggers who got to the truth. And a bad day for secrecy in the U.S. Senate.
It was early December 2002. [Carlotta] Gall, the Afghanistan correspondent for The New York Times, had just seen a press release from the U.S. military announcing the death of a prisoner at its Bagram Air Base. Soon thereafter the military issued a second release about another detainee death at Bagram. Gall: “I just wanted to know more. And I came up against a blank wall." The body of one of the detainees had been returned, a young taxi driver known as Dilawar. Gall met with Dilawar’s family, and his brother handed Gall a death certificate...that the military had issued. “It said, ‘homicide.’ The press release announcing Dilawar’s death stated...heart attack, a conclusion repeated by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. But the death certificate, the authenticity of which the military later confirmed to Gall, stated that Dilawar — who was just twenty-two years old — died as a result of “blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.” Gall filed a story. It sat for a month. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run.” Gall’s story...had been at the center of an editorial fight. Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor: “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.” The story ran on page fourteen under the headline "U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody." The Times also reported that officers who had overseen the Bagram prison at the time were promoted; another, who had lied to investigators, was transferred to help oversee interrogations at Abu Ghraib and awarded a Bronze Star.
Note: Why does it take a university journal to ask the hard questions? Again and again, news that should be front-page headlines is buried on insignificant pages or not reported at all. This key article from one of the most respected schools of journalism in the world tells it all about the unreported and underreported violent abuse of prisoners condoned by elements of the U.S. military. Don't miss reading this most powerful story in its entirety.
The New York Times' Web site is blocking British readers from a news article detailing the investigation into the recent airline terror plot. "We had clear legal advice that publication in the U.K. might run afoul of their law," Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said Tuesday. "It's a country that doesn't have the First Amendment, but it does have the free press. We felt we should respect their country's law." Visitors who click on a link to the article, published Monday, instead got a notice explaining that British law "prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial." The blocked article reveals evidence authorities have in the alleged plot to use liquid explosives to down U.S. airliners over the Atlantic. The Times also blocked U.K. access to an audio summary of the top Times stories, which included the article in question. British readers could find excerpts posted on Web journals and other unblocked sites. In fact, the Daily Mail of London published an article on the case, attributing details to the Times. The Times also is keeping the article out of printed editions published in the U.K. or mailed to U.K. subscribers.
Note: To see the blocked article, click here. The more likely reason for blocking the article is that it makes clear that the threat was significantly exaggerated by authorities and that experts on the case were unsure "whether any of the suspects was technically capable of assembling and detonating liquid explosives." Clearly, there are those who want to keep us in fear in order to gain ever greater control.
A Russian investigator has said grenades fired by surrounding Russian forces could have triggered the Beslan school bloodbath in September 2004. Yuri Savelyev's conclusions contradict the official view that bombs planted by the hostage-takers in the school gym went off just before the gun battle. Mr Savelyev is a member of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating the siege, in which 331 people died. Mr Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, said that during the investigation, he "discovered that the consequences of those blasts could not at all be explained by the explosions of the home-made devices installed by the rebels". The head of the commission, Stanislav Kesayev, said he had confidence in Mr Savelyev's conclusions. "He had more resources than our commission. He relied on his own knowledge as a weapons specialist and mathematician," Mr Kesayev told the radio. For weeks after the siege Russian officials had denied the use of flamethrowers.
Note: The Russian school bombing is very likely one of many examples of a false-flag operation -- a terrorist act staged secretly by a government and blamed on another group or government in order to achieve a certain agenda. To understand more about that agenda, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/brighterfuture. To see Terrorstorm, an excellent, free documentary on false flag operations, click here.
Two scholars who created a controversy earlier this year when they wrote that the pro-Israel lobby exerted too much influence over U.S. foreign policy said Monday that the recent Israel-Hezbollah war was yet another example of a dangerous tendency. John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political science professor, and Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, said the U.S. government's unstinting support for Israel in the war again placed the agenda of what they call the Israel lobby ahead of U.S. strategic interests. The result, they said, was that the U.S. position in the Middle East, already strained because of the Iraq war, had worsened with consequences that were bad for America and Israel. "Iran and Syria are more likely to continue arming and supporting Hezbollah," Mearsheimer said. They blamed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a leading pro-Israel lobby, for a failed attempt to slightly amend language in a pro-Israel House resolution to call on the warring parties to protect innocent civilians and infrastructure. "One would think that such language would be unobjectionable if not welcome," Mearsheimer said. "But AIPAC, which was the main driving force behind this resolution to begin with, objected and John Boehner, the House majority leader, kept the proposed language out. The resolution still passed 410-8."
Rice farmers in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and California have sued Bayer CropScience, alleging its genetically modified rice has contaminated the crop. The farmers alleged that the unit of Germany's Bayer AG
Note: Why did no major media report this important story in the U.S.? Only the Christian Science Monitor mentioned it. The media rarely reports anything negative about genetically modified food. To learn about the dangers of GMOs in the food you eat: http://www.WantToKnow.info/deception10pg
In an ironic twist, legislation that would open up the murky world of government contracting to public scrutiny has been derailed by a secret parliamentary maneuver. An unidentified senator placed a "secret hold" on legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., that would create a searchable database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans and financial assistance, worth $2.5 trillion last year. The database would bring transparency to federal spending and be as simple to use as conducting a Google search. The measure had been unanimously passed in a voice vote last month by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It was on the fast track for floor action before Congress recessed Aug. 4 when someone put a hold on the measure. Now the bill is in political limbo. Under Senate rules, unless the senator who placed the hold decides to lift it, the bill will not be brought up for a vote. "It really is outrageous to do this in the dead of night as Congress is recessing," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a budget watchdog group based in Washington. "The public has a right to know how the government spends money." Porkbusters.org...posted photographs of all senatorial suspects underneath a bold-faced headline asking, "Who is the Secret Holder?" There is no conceivable, rational explanation for killing this legislation unless they have something to hide.
The results are in for the White House's latest effort to exploit terrorism for political gain: the era of Americans' fearing fear itself is over. By crying wolf about terrorism way too often, usually when a distraction is needed from bad news in Iraq, [President Bush] and his administration have long since become comedy fodder. June's scenario was particularly choice: as Baghdad imploded, Alberto Gonzales breathlessly unmasked a Miami terror cell plotting a "full ground war" and the destruction of the Sears Tower, even though the alleged cell had no concrete plans, no contacts with terrorist networks and no equipment, including boots. Dick Cheney...will always be the man who told us that Iraqis would greet our troops as liberators and that the insurgency was in its last throes in May 2005. The administration's constant refrain that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terror is not only false but has now also backfired politically: only 9 percent in the CBS poll felt that our involvement in Iraq was helping decrease terrorism. As its fifth anniversary arrives, 9/11 itself has been dwarfed by the mayhem in Iraq, where more civilians are now killed per month than died in the attack on America. This country remains a country of the center, and opposition to the war in Iraq is now the center and...even the center right. It's hard to ignore the tragic reality that...botched American policy has strengthened Iran and Hezbollah and undermined Israel, and that our Department of Homeland Security is as ill-equipped now to prevent explosives (liquid or otherwise) in cargo as it was on 9/11.
What was already expected to be a controversial documentary that charges that Osama bin Laden's top spy infiltrated three different branches of U.S. national security has gotten even hotter. Veteran investigative reporter Peter Lance call[ed] the TV documentary based on his book a whitewash. The documentary, Triple Cross, is scheduled to air on the National Geographic Channel Aug. 28, with Lance's book of the same name set for publication a few weeks later. But their accounts of the way bin Laden's master spy Ali A. Mohamed outwitted the CIA, the FBI and the U.S. Army may be overshadowed by the acrimonious war of words. National Geographic's producers at one point held back transcripts of interviews they were supposed to share with Lance, and still won't let him see the final documentary unless he signs what they call a "non-disparagment agreement." Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to...detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant at the same time he was smuggling bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, writing most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa. Finally arrested in 1998, Mohamed cut a deal with the Justice Department. His whereabouts remain shrouded in official secrecy. Lance, an Emmy winner who spent nine years as a producer-reporter at ABC, was one of the first journalists on the trail of the Mohamed story. "The FBI allowed the chief spy for al Qaeda to...plan the bombings of the embassies in Africa right under their noses.''
Red-faced because the best pictures of its glory days are missing, NASA said Tuesday it was launching an official search for more than 13,000 original tapes of the historic Apollo moon missions. Everything from all 11 missions from launch to splashdown is on the videos. What's missing are the never-before-broadcast clear original videos not the grainy converted pictures the world watched on television more than three decades ago. The tapes aren't lost, insists the NASA official put in charge of the search. But he doesn't know where they are. The original video, taken directly from the moon and beamed to deep space network observatories in Australia, has never been seen by the general public or even NASA officials. There are 15 reels (three boxes) for just Apollo 11's stay on the moon. "It's the whole history of the entire mission, of everything that went on."
Note: Does this seem strange? If you are ready for something even stranger, see the documentary "Dark Side of the Moon" available free at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3288261061829859642. Though some claim this is a "mockumentary" on Stanley Kubrick's involvement with the moon landings, consider the large amount of money that went into making this very professional, sophisticated film. Could it be sophisticated disinformation put out purposely to lead investigators astray? The documentary certainly would explain the missing tapes above. Two Fox News clips raise more questions. Click here and here.
Ten years ago today, one of the most controversial news articles of the 1990s quietly appeared on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. Titled "Dark Alliance"...the three-part series by reporter Gary Webb linked the CIA and Nicaragua's Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic that ripped through South Los Angeles in the 1980s. Most of the nation's elite newspapers at first ignored the story. A public uproar, especially among urban African Americans, forced them to respond. What followed was one of the most bizarre, unseemly and ultimately tragic scandals in the annals of American journalism. Top news organizations closed ranks to debunk claims Webb never made, ridicule assertions that turned out to be true and ignore corroborating evidence when it came to light. The whole shameful cycle was repeated when Webb committed suicide in December 2004. At first, the Mercury News defended the series, but after nine months, Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos wrote a half-apologetic letter to readers that defended "Dark Alliance" while acknowledging obvious mistakes. Webb privately (and accurately) predicted the mea culpa would universally be misperceived as a total retraction, and he publicly accused the paper of cowardice. He resigned a few months later. Meanwhile, spurred on by Webb's story, the CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade. History will tell if Webb receives the credit he's due for prodding the CIA to acknowledge its shameful collaboration with drug dealers.
Note: Many thanks to the Los Angeles Times for the courage to report this story. For more on this incredibly revealing, yet very tragic case which reveals corruption in both the government and media at the highest levels: http://www.WantToKnow.info/mediacover-up#webb
A special report in The New Yorker says the Bush administration was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks against Hizbullah in Lebanon, and US officials hoped that by helping Israel destroy or disarm the militant Islamic group, it would make it easier for the US to launch a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The report, written by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who also helped break the story about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and in the 70s broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, alleges Israeli officials travelled to Washington to talk to US officials, in particular Vice President Dick Cheney, about the plan. A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House "has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a pre-emptive blow against Hezbollah." CBS News reports that Israeli officials "fiercely denied" that it had sought a "greenlight" from Washington, and that it had no advance plan to attack Hizbullah. Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. They really want to go after Iran." Last month the San Francisco Chronicle reported that "Israel's military response...was unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago". The report said that a senior Israeli army officer had been briefing diplomats, journalists and think-tanks for more than a year about the plan. It quoted Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at [Israel's] Bar-Ilan University, who said: "Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared."
The term we employ is the 'Nexus of Politics and Terror.' It does not imply that there is no terror. But it also does not deny that there is politics, and it refuses to assume that counterterror measures in this country are not being influenced by politics. [Here are] remarks made on May 10, 2005 by [former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge] discussing the old color-coded terror threat warning system. 'Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it. And we said, "For that?" In the light of those remarks...it is imperative that we examine each of the coincidences of timing since 2002, including the one last week, in which excoriating comments by leading Republicans about leading Democrats just happened to precede arrests in a vast purported terror plot, arrests that we now know were carried out on a time line requested not by the British, nor necessitated by the evidence, but requested by this government. We introduce these coincidences to you exactly as we did when we first compiled this top 10 list after the revelation that the announced threats New York's subway system, last October, had been wildly overblown. [See either of the two links above for the 10 highly suspicious coincidences, or view the broadcast at the links below.]
Note: To view this highly revealing broadcast, see http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm or click 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.