Intelligence Agency Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Intelligence Agency Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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A Montreal senior who survived Cold War-era brainwashing experiments picked up a cheque for compensation from the [Canadian] federal government on Tuesday. Janine Huard, 79, accepted an offer to end her class-action lawsuit against the federal government, which jointly funded the experiments with the [U.S.] Central Intelligence Agency. The terms of the settlement are confidential, but Huard says it will allow her to live out her days in peace, with some peace of mind. "I was really so exhausted from fighting for so many years,'' Huard told The Canadian Press in an interview. Huard was a young mother of four suffering from post-partum depression when she checked herself into McGill's renowned Allen Memorial Institute in 1950. On and off for the next 15 years, she was one of hundreds of patients of Dr. Ewan Cameron subjected to experimental treatments that included massive electroshock therapy, experimental pills and LSD. The patients were induced into comas and exposed to repetitive messages for days on end to brainwash them. Cameron pioneered a technique called psychic driving, which he believed could erase harmful memories and rebuild psyches without psychiatric defect. The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited him to experiment with mind control beginning in 1950. Until 1964, Cameron conducted a range of experiments at the McGill institute, often without the knowledge or the permission of his patients. The experiments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge. Huard said the treatment left her unable to care for her children. She suffered memory loss and migraines for many years.

Note: For a powerful summary of MK-ULTRA and other CIA mind-control experiments, click here.

Easily lost, on page 425, in the mass of the CIA's notorious "Family Jewels" files is a short paragraph outlining "potentially embarrassing Agency activities". "Experiments in influencing human behaviour through the administration of mind- or personality-altering drugs to unwitting subjects." Of all the heinous acts committed by the CIA in the name of national security, these experiments, done on the agency's behalf by prominent psychiatrists on innocent victims - including children as young as four - may be the darkest. "We have no answer to the moral issue," former director Richard Helms infamously said when asked about the nature of the projects. The release of the Family Jewels documents revealed the CIA handsomely funded these real-life Dr Strangeloves and engaged pharmaceutical companies to help its experiments. The agency appealed to Big Pharma to pass on any drugs that could not be marketed because of "unfavourable side effects" to be tested on mice and monkeys. Any drugs that passed muster would then be used ... on volunteer US soldiers. The Family Jewels files do not provide further detail into the numerous mind-control programs, such as MKULTRA, covertly propped up by the agency. In 1953, MKULTRA was given 6 per cent of the total CIA budget without any oversight. The nature of the experiments, gathered from government documents and testimony in numerous lawsuits brought against the CIA, is shocking, from testing LSD on children to implanting electrodes in victims' brains to deliberately poisoning people with uranium. "The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952 starting at the tender age of four," wrote Carol Rutz of her experiences.

Note: The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have been posted online by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking here. And for a 10-page summary of Carol Rutz's riveting book on her experiences as a government-created Manchurian candidate, click here.

The C.I.A. monitoring of journalists in 1963, 1971 and 1972, including wiretapping their phones and setting up observation posts across the street from their offices to track their comings and goings and their visitors, was a practice that the White House itself employed during the Nixon administration. The description of Project Mockingbird [details] C.I.A. wiretapping of two Washington reporters (unnamed) from March 12, 1963 to June 15, 1963. As with other questionable or illegal C.I.A. activities that were endorsed by top government officials, this account shows that spying on reporters was approved at the highest levels of the Kennedy administration. According to the transcripts of the tapes that President John F. Kennedy secretly recorded in the Oval Office, shortly after 6 p.m. on August 22,1962, JFK and Director of Central Intelligence John McCone discussed a plan for the CIA to wiretap members of the Washington press corps. The president told McCone to set up a domestic task force to stop the flow of secrets from the government to the newspapers. The order violated the agency’s charter, which specifically prohibits domestic spying. By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow.

Note: This fascinating report discusses only a limited aspect of Operation Mockingbird, which included as well the placing of CIA agents in news organizations in decision-making positions for purposes of propaganda and information control.

Long-secret documents released Tuesday provide new details about how the Central Intelligence Agency illegally spied on Americans decades ago. Known inside the agency as the “family jewels,” the 702 pages of documents released Tuesday catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the C.I.A. The papers provide evidence of paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links between Communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the nation in that period. Yet the long-awaited documents leave out a great deal. Large sections are censored, showing that the C.I.A. still cannot bring itself to expose all the skeletons in its closet. And many activities about overseas operations disclosed years ago by journalists, Congressional investigators and a presidential commission — which led to reforms of the nation’s intelligence agencies — are not detailed in the papers. The 60-year-old agency has been under fire ... by critics [of] the secret prisons and harsh interrogation practices it has adopted since the Sept. 11 attacks. Some intelligence experts suggested ... that the release of the documents was intended to distract from the current controversies. And they and historians expressed disappointment that the documents were so heavily censored. Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive, the research group that filed the Freedom of Information request in 1992 that led to the documents’ becoming public, said he was initially underwhelmed by them because they contained little about the agency’s foreign operations. But Mr. Blanton said what was striking was the scope of the C.I.A’s domestic spying efforts.

Note: The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have been posted online by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking here.

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups ... CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday. The documents ... also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests. In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts. "It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."

William E. Colby faced an uneasy decision in late 1973 when he took over the Central Intelligence Agency: whether to make public the agency’s internal accounting, then being compiled, of its domestic spying, assassination plots and other misdeeds since its founding nearly three decades earlier. Mr. Colby decided to keep the so-called family jewels a secret, and wrote in his memoir in 1978 that he believed the agency’s already sullied reputation ... could not have withstood a public airing of all its dirty laundry. So why, at a time when the agency has again been besieged by criticism, this time for its program of secret detentions and interrogations since the Sept. 11 attacks, would the current director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, decide to declassify the same documents that Mr. Colby chose to keep secret? General Hayden said it was essential for the C.I.A. ... to be as open as possible in order to build public trust and dispel myths surrounding its operations. The more that the agency can tell the public, he said, the less chance that misinformation among the public will “fill the vacuum.” It was this outlook that General Hayden, whose public relations skills are well known in Washington, brought to an earlier job. There, as director of the National Security Agency, he tried to overhaul the N.S.A.’s public image — that of the shadowy, menacing organization portrayed in the movie “Enemy of the State” — by inviting reporters to briefings and authorizing its officials to speak to the author James Bamford for his book on the agency, “Body of Secrets.”

Note: For a brief summary of and links to further information about James Bamford's important book on the NSA, Body of Secrets, click here.

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism. The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002. The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files. Two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have. The results confirmed what ... critics feared, namely that many agents did not ... follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensitive and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the National Security Letter, or NSL. Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to nonnegotiable demands for personal information -- demands that are not reviewed in advance by a judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially eased the rules for issuing NSLs, [leading] to an explosive growth in the use of the letters. More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 seeking 47,000 pieces of information, mostly from telecommunications companies.

A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names. Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror. The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified. A portion of the FBI's unclassified 2008 budget request posted to the Department of Justice Web site, however, refers to "the entire watch list of 509,000 names." A spokesman for the interagency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which maintains the government's list of all suspected terrorists with links to international organizations, said they had 465,000 names covering 350,000 individuals. Many names are different versions of the same identity. In addition to the NCTC list, the FBI keeps a list of U.S. persons who are believed to be domestic terrorists - abortion clinic bombers, for example, or firebombing environmental extremists, who have no known tie to an international terrorist group. Combined, the NCTC and FBI compendia comprise the watch list used by federal security screening personnel on the lookout for terrorists. While the NCTC has made no secret of its terrorist tally, the FBI has consistently declined to tell the public how many names are on its list. "It grows seemingly without control or limitation," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani of the terrorism watch list. Sparapani called the 509,000 figure "stunning. If we have 509,000 names on that list, the watch list is virtually useless," he told ABC News. "You'll be capturing innocent individuals with no connection to crime or terror." U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list.

In April 1971, CIA officer John Seabury Thomson paddled his aluminum canoe across the Potomac on his daily commute from his home in Maryland to CIA headquarters in Langley. When he reached the Virginia shore, he noticed a milky substance clouding the waters around Pulp Run. A fierce environmentalist, Thomson traced the pollution to its source: his employer. The murky white discharge was a chemical mash, the residue of thousands of liquefied secrets that the agency had been quietly disposing of in his beloved river. He single-handedly brought the practice to a halt. Nearly four decades later, though, that trickle of secrets would be a tsunami that would capsize Thomson's small craft. Today the nation's obsession with secrecy is redefining public and private institutions and taking a toll on the lives of ordinary citizens. Excessive secrecy is at the root of multiple scandals -- the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the collapse of Enron, the tragedies traced to Firestone tires and the arthritis drug Vioxx, and more. In this self-proclaimed "Information Age," our country is on the brink of becoming a secretocracy, a place where the right to know is being replaced by the need to know. [There] is a confluence of causes behind it, among them the chill wrought by 9/11, industry deregulation, the long dominance of a single political party, fear of litigation and liability and the threat of the Internet. But perhaps most alarming [is] the public's increasing tolerance of secrecy. Without timely information, citizens are reduced to mere residents, and representative government atrophies into a representational image of democracy as illusory as a hologram.

Note: The author of this superb article is Ted Gup. He is a journalism professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life.

In demanding a congressional investigation into the aborted rescue during the attack of the USS Liberty and subsequent alleged cover-up [the following] conclusions [were] submitted in October 2003 to the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense by the USS Liberty Veterans Association, Inc.: 1. That on June 8, 1967 ... Israel launched a two-hour air and naval attack against USS Liberty ... inflicting 34 dead and 173 wounded American servicemen; 2. That ... unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on USS Liberty's bridge and fired 30mm cannons and rockets into [the] ship; 3. That the torpedo boat attack involved not only the firing of torpedoes, but the machine-gunning of Liberty's firefighters and stretcher-bearers as they struggled to save their ship and crew; the Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty's life rafts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded; 4. That there is compelling evidence that Israel's attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew; evidence of such intent is supported by statements from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Undersecretary of State George Ball, former CIA Director Richard Helms, former NSA Directors Lt. Gen. William Odom, USA (Ret.), Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, USN (Ret.), and Marshal Carter; former NSA deputy directors Oliver Kirby and Maj. Gen. John Morrison, USAF (Ret.); 6. The White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack.

Note: To view the BBC documentary about the USS Liberty attack, "Dead in the Water," click here. For more information about the USS Liberty, click here.

A bipartisan group of senators is pushing legislation that would force the CIA to release an inspector general's report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA has spent more than 20 months weighing requests under the Freedom of Information Act for its internal investigation of the attacks but has yet to release any portion of it. The agency is the only federal office involved in counterterrorism operations that has not made at least a version of its internal 9/11 investigation public. The law requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and two other intelligence committee leaders -- chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and senior Republican Kit Bond of Missouri -- are pushing legislation that would require the agency to declassify the executive summary of the review within one month and submit a report to Congress explaining why any material was withheld. "It's amazing the efforts the administration is going to stonewall this,'' Wyden said. "The American people have a right to know what the Central Intelligence Agency was doing in those critical months before 9/11.'' Completed in June 2005, the inspector general's report examined the personal responsibility of individuals at the CIA before and after the attacks. The CIA has not released any documents to The Associated Press or other organizations that began requesting the information at least 20 months ago. Groups including the National Security Archive have clashed with the agency over its FOIA policies. Last year, the archive gave the CIA its prize for the agency with the worst FOIA record. ''CIA has for three decades been one of the worst FOIA agencies,'' archive Director Thomas Blanton said this week.

Note: For more reliable information on what US intelligence agencies knew about the coming attacks, click here.

New charges have been filed alleging that a former top CIA official pushed a proposed $100 million government contract for his best friend in return for lavish vacations, private jet flights and a lucrative job offer. The indictment [brings] charges ... against Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who resigned from the spy agency a year ago, and ... defense contractor Brent Wilkes. The charges grew from the bribery scandal that landed former U.S. Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in prison. The pair now face 30 wide-ranging counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering [including that] Foggo provided Wilkes with “sensitive, internal information related to ... national security,” including classified information, to help him prepare proposals for providing undercover flights for the CIA under the guise of a civil aviation company and armored vehicles for agency operations. Then, he pushed his CIA colleagues to hire Wilkes’ companies without disclosing their friendship, prosecutors allege. In a June 2005 e-mail to the head of CIA air operations quoted in the indictment, Foggo offered to “use some ’EXDIR grease”’ on Wilkes’ behalf. Foggo was the agency’s executive director at the time. In return, Wilkes offered to hire Foggo after he retired from government service. [An] initial indictment in February charged the pair with 11 counts of the same charges in connection with a $1.7 million water-supply contract Foggo allegedly helped win for one of Wilkes’ companies while he was working as a logistics coordinator at a CIA supply hub overseas. Foggo, the former No. 3 official at the CIA, resigned from the spy agency after his house and office were raided by federal agents.

Note: Until just a few years ago, there was a virtual blackout in the media on any negative coverage of the CIA. The prosecution of the #3 man in the CIA is an external manifestation of huge shake-ups going on behind the scenes. Buzzy Krongard, the previous #3 at the CIA has been linked to the millions of dollars in suspicious stock option trades made just prior to 9/11 that were never claimed, though this received little media coverage.

Former CIA director George J. Tenet bitterly complains in a forthcoming television interview that White House officials set him up as a scapegoat when they revealed that he had assured President Bush the intelligence on Iraq's suspected weapons arsenal was a "slam dunk." Tenet, who was one of the longest-serving CIA directors in U.S. history, resigned abruptly in June 2004 after administration infighting over the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom six months later. Tenet then remained publicly silent about his role in the presentation of prewar intelligence that turned out to be wrong. CBS News's "60 Minutes" released excerpts of its Tenet interview. In the interview, Tenet acknowledged that he used the phrase "slam dunk" during a conversation with Bush and other key advisers in December 2002. But Tenet said the phrase was an offhand remark used to describe the ease with which a public case for war could be made. Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward first wrote about the conversation between Tenet and Bush in his 2004 book "Plan of Attack." Bush told Woodward then that Tenet's "slam dunk" assurance had been "very important" as he weighed decisions about the invasion. In the television interview, Tenet takes special exception with Bush's comments. Tenet initially denied having used the phrase "slam dunk." But, in a 2005 speech at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, he said he regretted using the phrase to describe the case against Iraq. "Those were the two dumbest words I ever said," Tenet said.

Note: The head of the CIA admits he lied about something as vital as the use of a phrase involving gross manipulation of the public in support of war. Who else is lying here?

George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat. [His book] is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war. “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion. Mr. Tenet ... makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war. As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.” Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda. Mr. Tenet has spoken rarely in public, and never so caustically, since stepping down in July 2004.

Note: Was the Iraq war based largely on lies and deception? Now that Hussein is gone and there are no weapons of mass destruction, who is the enemy in Iraq? For the comments of a top U.S. general, click here.

In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership." The letter, signed by Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael, said Tenet should have resigned in protest rather than take part in the administration's buildup to the war. (Read the full letter) Johnson is a former CIA intelligence official and registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000. Cannistraro is former head of the CIA's counterterrorism division. The writers said ... "your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war. CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused." The letter said CIA officers learned later that month Iraq had no contact with Osama bin Laden and that then-President Saddam Hussein considered the al Qaeda leader to be an enemy. Still, Tenet "went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to al Qaeda. "You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States."

Concerned about the growing dependence of the nation’s spy agencies on private contractors, top intelligence officials have spent months determining just how many contractors work at the C.I.A., D.I.A., F.B.I., N.S.A. and the rest of the spook alphabet soup. Now they have an answer. But they cannot reveal it, they say, because America’s enemies might be listening. Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the decision not to reveal the numbers was a sign of dysfunctional policies. “It reveals how confused the government is about what is really sensitive and what is not,” Mr. Aftergood said. “What would Osama bin Laden do with the fraction of intelligence workers who are contractors? Absolutely nothing.” The government’s use of contractors has accelerated greatly during the Bush administration. Nowhere has the increase been more striking than in the spy agencies. The agencies have long fought efforts to make public their budgets and work force numbers. But not all officials have been punctilious about keeping the secrets. At a conference in 2005 ... a deputy director of national intelligence, let slip that the annual spy budget was $44 billion. Last year, John D. Negroponte, then the intelligence director, said in a speech “almost 100,000 patriotic, talented and hard-working Americans” work for the agencies. Why was Mr. Negroponte permitted to reveal that number? “It was an estimate,” said Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for the current intelligence chief.

When the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him. In the CIA, [Howard Hunt] had helped to mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But his first-born son, [Saint] was by his side now. For years, he and Saint had hardly spoken. Then Saint came to him wanting to know if he had any information about JFK’s assassination. His father had sworn in two government investigations that he didn’t. But now, in August 2003, propped up in his sick bed, he began to write down the names of men who participated in a plot to kill the president. He scribbled the initials “LBJ”, standing for Kennedy’s vice-president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ”, connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that has never been solved. Next, his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, another CIA man and a well-known, vicious black-operations specialist. Then his father connected to Morales’s name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll”. So there it was: according to Hunt, LBJ had Kennedy killed. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican mafia assassin Lucien Sarti. A few weeks later, Saint received in the mail a tape recording from his dad. Hunt’s voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, but he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.

Note: Though this article interesting refers to Saint as a "conspiracy nut," if you take the time to read it, you will find it raises many serious questions about the Kennedy assassination. The History Channel has an excellent documentary series showing beyond doubt there was more than one gunman. To order, click here. For the banned final episode of this series, which presents powerful evidence LBJ was directly involved in the JFK assassination, click here

An extraordinary 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and 57 percent believe they are real. Former US Presidents Carter and Reagan claim to have seen a UFO.... In January 1953, [CIA Deputy Director H. Marshall] Chadwell and H. P. Robertson, a noted physicist from the California Institute of Technology, put together a distinguished panel of nonmilitary scientists to study the UFO issue. The panel ... worried that potential enemies contemplating an attack on the United States might exploit the UFO phenomena and use them to disrupt US air defenses. To meet these problems, the panel recommended that the National Security Council debunk UFO reports and institute a policy of public education to reassure the public of the lack of evidence behind UFOs. It suggested using the mass media, advertising, business clubs, schools, and even the Disney corporation to get the message across. Reporting at the height of McCarthyism, the panel also recommended that such private UFO groups as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in Wisconsin be monitored for subversive activities.

Note: Though this compilation largely debunks the UFO phenomenon, it also contains a few revealing facts. Why was the CIA involved in debunking the phenomenon? And why would they start this paper with the statement "at least 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or read something about UFOs," when that number is clearly 100 percent, and is not extraordinary. Of course, everyone has heard of UFOs. Could this document itself be a form of government disinformation meant to further muddy the waters?

Thousands of white-collar criminals across the country are no longer being prosecuted in federal court -- and, in many cases, not at all -- leaving a trail of frustrated victims and potentially billions of dollars in fraud and theft losses. It is the untold story of the Bush administration's massive restructuring of the FBI after the terrorism attacks of 9/11. Five-and-a-half years later, the White House and the Justice Department have failed to replace at least 2,400 agents transferred to counterterrorism squads, leaving far fewer agents on the trail of identity thieves, con artists, hatemongers and other criminals. The hidden cost: a dramatic plunge in FBI investigations and case referrals in many of the crimes that the bureau has traditionally fought, including sophisticated fraud, embezzlement schemes and civil rights violations. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 -- a 34 percent drop. White-collar crime investigations by the bureau have plummeted in recent years. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases -- a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000. Civil rights investigations, which include hate crimes and police abuse, have continued a steady decline since the late 1990s. FBI agents pursued 65 percent fewer cases in 2005 than they did in 2000. Large numbers of FBI agents also were transferred out of violent-crime programs. The gaps created by the Bush administration's war on terrorism are troubling to criminal justice experts, police chiefs -- even many current and former FBI officials and agents.

Note: For an article on how the FBI knowingly allowed innocent people to be sentenced to death, click here.

The depositions of the parents of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold will be kept under seal in the National Archives for 20 years, a federal judge ruled Monday. No one, including violence prevention experts, will be able to see them until they are unsealed, U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock ruled. They will be kept permanently in the National Archives, where they are considered to be of historical value. The depositions of the parents took place in 2003 in connection with a lawsuit filed by the families of five slain Columbine High School students. Brian Rohrbough, the father of slain student Daniel Rohrbough, said he was angered by the ruling. Rohrbough, who watched as attorneys interviewed the parents during the deposition sessions, said there is nothing in them that would cause any harm. Instead, their release could prevent further school shootings, he said. Rohrbough is under court order not to divulge details. "There is no rational reason to lock them up," Rohrbough said. "It's just the idea that it would be OK in 20 years, and can't be OK today."

Note: Why all the secrecy? Could it be to hide evidence showing it could have been stopped?

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing 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.