Intelligence Agency Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Intelligence Agency Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on intelligence agency 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.

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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.

The 9/11 Consensus Panel now offers four evidence-based points about the alleged phone calls from the 9/11 flights. The famous "let's roll" drama of the passenger revolt on UA 93 was relayed by passenger Todd Beamer's 13-minute unrecorded seat-back call to GTE telephone supervisor Lisa Jefferson, who reported Beamer as strangely tranquil, declining to speak to his wife. Eerily, Beamer's line remained open for 15 minutes after the crash. Oddly, the Verizon wireless record shows that 19 calls were made from Beamer's cell phone long after the crash of UA 93. Initial media reports and FBI interviews detailed more than a dozen cell phone calls from the planes at high elevation. Yet in 2001, a telephone spokesperson stated that sustained mobile calls were not possible above 10,000 feet. During the 2006 Moussaoui Trial, the FBI (under oath) reduced the number of cell phone calls to two calls made from 5,000 feet, and presented evidence of only one (not two) "unconnected" call from Barbara Olson, lasting "0 seconds." In another twist, two other women reported that Caller-ID showed their husband's cell numbers on their answering machines, which while lasting several minutes, had been made from elevations of 25,000 and 35,000 feet. Although the FBI conducted a massive investigation into the calls, none of the telephone billing, nor any of the cell phone location data stored in standard phone company records has been publicly released.

Note: The 9/11 Consensus Panel, consisting of scientists, pilots, professors, attorneys, and journalists, has developed 32 Points of evidence contradicting specific claims made by the official account of 9/11. For many unanswered questions about 9/11 raised by highly credible former government officials and professors, click here and here. For our 9/11 Information Center filled with reliable, verifiable 9/11 resources, click here.

The FBI did not initially share with Boston police the warnings it had received from Russia about one suspect in last month's marathon bombings, despite the work of four city police representatives on a federal terrorism task force, Boston's police commissioner told Congress on [May 9]. Boston police learned about the Russian security service warnings only later. The congressional hearing was the first in a series to review the government's initial response to the attacks, ask what information authorities received about Tsarnaev and his brother before the bombings and consider whether everything was handled correctly. Some lawmakers questioned whether Boston police could have more thoroughly investigated Tsarnaev after 2011, based on Russia's vague warnings then to the FBI and CIA or the discovery by the Homeland Security Department in 2012 that he was traveling to Russia for six months, and whether Justice Department rules intended to protect civil liberties constrained the FBI's own inquiry. Led by the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Forces operate in many cities as a way to bring federal, state and local officials together to share information. The model has existed for decades but, after 9/11, task forces sprouted up in cities nationwide to ensure that police were not out of the loop on investigations like the one the FBI conducted into Tsarnaev.

Note: For a powerful 11-minute video presenting undeniable evidence that the Boston bombers' uncle was closely linked to both the CIA and terrorist organizations, click here. Many are questioning whether the recent Boston bombing was a false flag operation. Though it is not conclusive, you can find some very reliable evidence that this might be the case at this link and this one. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the deceptions of intelligence agencies, click here.

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency. All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader. “We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.” The C.I.A. ... has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing. Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan. “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.” Now, Mr. Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the C.I.A. to target ... insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of the Obama administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year. But the C.I.A. has continued to pay.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government corruption, click here.

The initial debate over the treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev focused on whether he should be advised of his Miranda rights or whether the "public safety exception" justified delaying it. Now, the Los Angeles Times ... reports something which, if true, would be a much more serious violation of core rights than delaying Miranda warnings - namely, that ... Tsarnaev had repeatedly asked for a lawyer, but the FBI simply ignored those requests, instead allowing the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group to continue to interrogate him alone: "Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Monday, officials said. Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said. A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule." Denying him the right to a lawyer after he repeatedly requests one is ... as fundamental a violation of crucial guaranteed rights as can be imagined. To ignore the repeated requests of someone in police custody for a lawyer, for hours and hours, is just inexcusable and legally baseless. If the LA Times report is true, then it means that the DOJ did not merely fail to advise him of his right to a lawyer but actively blocked him from exercising that right.

Note: The government appears to be setting a precedent in seeing how far they can go with taking away our constitutionally guaranteed rights. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.

Two U.S. officials say Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect [in the Boston Marathon bombings], was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard. Authorities originally said they had exchanged gunfire with Dzhokhar for more than one hour Friday evening before they were able to subdue him. The officials tell The Associated Press that no gun was found in the boat. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said earlier that shots were fired from inside the boat. Investigators also believe the brothers helped finance their plot through drug sales. Sources say Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was unemployed, made money selling marijuana. Police think the brothers killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer for his weapon while they were the subjects of last week's massive manhunt. The brothers only had one real gun and one pellet gun when they were on the run Thursday. Investigators now believe that Officer Sean Collier was killed Thursday because the two bombing suspects wanted to take his gun. Investigators believe because the officer's holster had a locking system, they apparently couldn't get the gun out. Collier was shot in the head execution-style while sitting in his patrol car. In his questioning in the hospital, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said they were self-taught and self-radicalized.

Note: Don't these details released by investigators sound odd? If Dzhokhar was not armed, why did authorities say they exchanged gunfire for an hour? And previous reports claimed Dzhokhar was shot in the throat, so that he could not speak about his version of what happened. High strangeness here. For powerful evidence from a respected researcher that the uncle of the Boston bombers was a top CIA official, click here. This is evidence supporting the theory that the brothers may have been CIA-controlled Manchurian Candidates. For more on this, click here.

Russian authorities contacted the US government with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev not once but "multiple" times, including an alert it sent after he was first investigated by FBI agents in Boston, raising new questions about whether the FBI should have paid more attention to the suspected Boston Marathon bomber. The FBI has previously said it interviewed Tsarnaev in early 2011 after it was initially contacted by the Russians. Following a closed briefing of the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday, Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said he believed that Russia alerted the United States about Tsarnaev in “multiple contacts,” including at least once since October 2011. Warnings raised by Russia have loomed large in the investigation of how Tsarnaev, a Kyrgyzstan national, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, a naturalized US citizen, allegedly prepared for the bombing. US officials have faced tough questions for not tracking the older brother’s travels to the Russian provinces of Dagestan and Chechnya, where he spent more than half of 2012 and may have interacted with militant groups or individuals. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said ... that the FBI told him it was not aware of the older Tsarnaev’s travels because his name had been misspelled on an airliner passenger list. US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano confirmed the misspelling during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee ... but she said Homeland Security nonetheless was aware of his trip.

Note: For powerful evidence from a respected researcher that the uncle of the Boston bombers was a top CIA official, click here.

One of the two ethnic Chechens suspected by U.S. officials of being behind the Boston Marathon bombings had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years, his mother said. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the English-language Russia Today state television station in a phone interview, a recording of which was obtained by Reuters, that she believed her sons were innocent and had been framed. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar was captured after a day-long manhunt. "He (Tamerlan) was controlled by the FBI, like, for three to five years," she said, speaking in English. "They knew what my son was doing, they knew what sites on the Internet he was going to," she said. Tsarnaeva echoed the boys' father, Anzor, who said ... that he believed they had been framed. Tsarnaeva suggested FBI officers had visited her home when she still lived in the United States and told her that Tamerlan "was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. It is really, really a hard thing to hear. And being a mother, what I can say is that I am really sure, I am, like, 100 percent sure, that this is a set-up," she said. U.S. government officials have said the brothers were not under surveillance as possible militants. But the FBI said in a statement on Friday that in 2011 it interviewed Tamerlan at the request of a foreign government, which it did not identify. The FBI statement was the first evidence that the family had come to security officials' attention after they emigrated to the United States from Dagestan about a decade ago.

Note: For a sharp analysis of unanswered questions raised by the official account of the bombings in Boston, click here. For the local NBC station report that bomb-sniffing dogs were present at the finish line of the Boston Marathon before the bombs exploded, watch this video clip. And for a Washington Times article raising more questions on the bombing, including government agents seen at the scene with suspicious backpacks, click here.

The father of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects said he was present at the family house in Cambridge, Mass., when the FBI interviewed his older son in 2011. Anzor Tsarnaev, speaking ... from Makhachkala in Russia's Republic of Dagestan, said Federal Bureau of Investigation agents came to talk to his older son, Tamerlan, as a "person of interest." "Yes, I was there. Of course I was there," Mr. Tsarnaev said. "It was in Cambridge. 410 Norfolk Street, Cambridge." He said U.S. authorities visited the house for what he described as "prevention" activities that involved Tamerlan. "They said: We know what sites you are on, we know where you are calling, we know everything about you. Everything," Mr. Tsarnaev recalled. "They said we are checking and watching—that's what they said." The father of the pair said he wasn't nervous that the FBI showed up at his home. "I knew what he was doing, where he was going. I raised my children right," he said of his sons. He said he is sure Tamerlan and his brother Dzhokhar must have been framed for the Boston bombing. "This is all lies. These are my children. I know my children," Mr. Tsarnaev said. He said his own brother, Ruslan, called his sons "losers" in an American television interview Friday because of a family feud. Asked if it was possible Tamerlan encountered Muslim fundamentalists while in Dagestan, he said there was no way. "There aren't even any of those here anymore," Mr. Tsarnaev said.

Note: Another article in the UK's respected Independent states, "the men's mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said: 'I am 100% sure that this is a set-up.'" Could this have been yet another case of FBI entrapment like this and this? Or could they even have been programmed to do this using mind control using techniques described at this link? And for a Washington Times article raising more questions on the bombing, click here.

New FBI records connecting Saudis who lived in Sarasota before 9/11 to “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks” [have been] released. The FBI records provide new information about an investigation into what occurred prior to 9/11 at the upscale home of Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his family in the gated community of Prestancia. Information in the records contradicts prior FBI statements that no evidence was found connecting the al-Hijjis to 9/11. Agents determined the al-Hijjis “fled” their home on August 27, 2001 — two weeks before the attacks — leaving behind three cars, furniture, clothing, toys, food and other items. “Further investigation of the [name deleted] family revealed many connections between the [name deleted] and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001,” says an April 16, 2002 FBI report. The report lists three of those individuals. Two, including one described as a “family member,” were described as students at the nearby Venice airport flight school where suicide hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained. The third person lived with some flight students, the report says. A counterintelligence officer speaking on condition of anonymity said an FBI examination of gatehouse log books and photos of license tags revealed that vehicles linked to the future hijackers visited al-Hijji’s residence. Much remains unclear. Chunks of the released reports are blanked out for national security and other reasons. Four pages were withheld in their entirety.

Note: For powerful evidence reported in the major media the several of the 9/11 hijackers trained at U.S. military bases, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources questioning the official story of the 9/11 attacks, click here.

A dozen years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an independent, nonpartisan panel’s examination of the interrogation and detention programs carried out in their aftermath by the Bush administration ... provides a valuable, even necessary reckoning. The work of the [11-member task force convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group] is informed by interviews with dozens of former American and foreign officials, as well as with former prisoners. It is the fullest independent effort so far to assess the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report’s authoritative conclusion that “the United States engaged in the practice of torture” is impossible to dismiss. The report found that those methods violated international legal obligations with “no firm or persuasive evidence” that they produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. The task force found that using torture — like waterboarding, slamming prisoners into walls, and chaining them in uncomfortable stress position for hours — had “no justification”. And in engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions, the United States violated its international treaty obligations. As the panel notes, there never was before “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”

Note: For another informative article on this from the Times, click here.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial. Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray. I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone. I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding. The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being ... and I deserve to be treated like one.

Note: Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, has been a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002. For an illuminating analysis of this situation by the Washington Post, click here.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has released a database of diplomatic records by Henry Kissinger, who ran American foreign policy under two presidents. Assange has compiled a database of State Department cables that Kissinger signed during the 1970s. The documents were not classified and had been available in national archives, which is where Wikileaks researchers obtained them. Six years after Wikileaks was founded, Assange and his organisation are under pressure. He worked on the database at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he is now living. Critics deplore what Kissinger has done. They point out that after the US secretly bombed Cambodia in 1970, Kissinger tried to control leaks of information about government activities by setting up wiretaps at the homes of journalists. Critics also say Kissinger encouraged the overthrow of Socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973. Because of his role in the wiretapping of Americans and his comments about Chile, among other things, Kissinger has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the years. Kissinger would "sanitise" official accounts of meetings, says Princeton University's Gary Bass, author of a forthcoming book called The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. "He would tell his note-takers to leave out something, so we don't have a complete record."

Note: It is quite unusual that this article and very few media have reported on a key quote by Kissinger that was released in these files. He says, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." You can see an image of the document with this quote at this link.

For years, senior Obama officials, including the president himself, have been making public claims about their drone program that have just been proven to be categorically false. McClatchy's national security reporter, Jonathan Landay, obtained top-secret intelligence documents showing that "contrary to assurances it has deployed US drones only against known senior leaders of al-Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified 'other' militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area." That article quotes drone expert Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations as saying that "McClatchy's findings indicate that the administration is 'misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.'" In his own must-read article at Foreign Policy about these disclosures, Zenko writes - under the headline: "Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars" - that "it turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan" and that the McClatchy article "plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides - that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al-Qaida who pose an imminent threat of attack on the US homeland - is false." Zenko explains that these now-disproven claims may very well make the drone strikes illegal since assertions about who is being targeted were "essential to the legal foundations on which the strikes are ultimately based."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the lies and crimes committed by the US and UK in their global wars of aggression, click here.

The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade [on April 2], after a more than decade-long campaign. The final vote: 154 in favor, 3 against and 23 abstentions. "This is a victory for the world's people," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. "The Arms Trade Treaty will make it more difficult for deadly weapons to be diverted into the illicit market. ... It will be a powerful new tool in our efforts to prevent grave human rights abuses or violations of international humanitarian law." Never before has there been a treaty regulating the global arms trade, which is estimated to be worth $60 billion. Frank Jannuzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA [said,] "The voices of reason triumphed over skeptics, treaty opponents and dealers in death to establish a revolutionary treaty that constitutes a major step toward keeping assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons out of the hands of despots and warlords who use them to kill and maim civilians, recruit child soldiers and commit other serious abuses." What impact the treaty will actually have remains to be seen. It will take effect 90 days after 50 countries ratify it, and a lot will depend on which ones ratify and which ones don't, and how stringently it is implemented. As for its chances of being ratified by the U.S., the powerful National Rifle Association has vehemently opposed it, and it is likely to face stiff resistance from conservatives in the Senate, where it needs two-thirds to win ratification.

The use of drones by domestic US law enforcement agencies is growing rapidly, both in terms of numbers and types of usage. As a result, civil liberties and privacy groups led by the ACLU ... have been devoting increasing efforts to publicizing their unique dangers and agitating for statutory limits. The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones "could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun." The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. Domestic weaponized drones will be much smaller and cheaper, as well as more agile - but just as lethal [as the large missile-firing drones used by the US military overseas]. The nation's leading manufacturer of small "unmanned aircraft systems" (UAS) ... is AeroVironment, Inc. (AV). AV is now focused on drone products - such as the "Qube" - that are so small that they can be "transported in the trunk of a police vehicle or carried in a backpack." AV's website ... touts a February, 2013 Defense News article describing how much the US Army loves [its] "Switchblade" [drone]. Time Magazine heralded this tiny drone weapon as "one of the best inventions of 2012", gushing: "the Switchblade drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It's a kamikaze: the person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to crash it into a precise target. Its tiny warhead detonates on impact."

Note: This important article also discusses drones used by government agencies such as police for purposes of continuous surveillance. But it misses entirely another major dimension: privately owned and controlled drones, which are becoming dirt cheap and within the reach of virtually anyone. Will the new "DroneWorld" in the making combine the worst features of the Police State with the Wild West?

The CIA's chief technology officer outlined the agency's endless appetite for data in a far-ranging speech. Ira "Gus" Hunt said that the world is increasingly awash in information from text messages, tweets, and videos - and that the agency wants all of it. "The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time," Hunt said. "Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever." Hunt's comments come two days after Federal Computer Week reported that the CIA has committed to a massive, $600 million, 10-year deal with Amazon for cloud computing services. "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information," Hunt said. After that mark is reached, Hunt said, the agency would also like to be able to save and analyze all of the digital breadcrumbs people don't even know they are creating. "You're already a walking sensor platform," he said, noting that mobiles, smartphones and iPads come with cameras, accelerometers, light detectors and geolocation capabilities. "Somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off," he said. Hunt also spoke of mobile apps that will be able to control pacemakers - even involuntarily - and joked about a "dystopian" future. Hunt's speech barely touched on privacy concerns.

Note: The Internet of Things makes mass surveillance even easier. 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.

One of the major governmental abuses denounced by the 1976 final report of the Church Committee was the FBI's domestic counter intelligence programs (COINTELPRO). Under that program, the FBI targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous ... and infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them. What made the program so controversial was that the FBI was attempting to create and encourage crimes rather than find actual criminals - all in order to punish those whose constitutionally protected political activism the US government found threatening. Over the past decade, US Muslims have been routinely targeted with precisely this same tactic of preemptive or anticipatory prosecution. It's all designed to take people engaged in political and religious advocacy which the US government dislikes ... and use paid informants to trick them into saying just enough to turn them into criminals who are then prosecuted and imprisoned for decades. The same pattern repeats itself over and over. The FBI ensnares some random Muslim in a garden-variety criminal investigation involving financial fraud or drugs. Rather than prosecute him, the FBI puts the Muslim criminal suspect on its payroll, sending him into Muslim communities and mosques in order not only to spy on American Muslims, but to befriend them and then actively manipulate them into saying just enough to make their prosecution possible.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on illegal activities of intelligence agencies, click here.

In a blow against government secrecy, a federal judge ruled [on March 15] that the tens of thousands of "national security letters" the FBI sends each year demanding customer records from phone companies, banks and others, are unconstitutional because they forbid recipients from revealing that the letters exist. A gag order that makes it a crime to disclose one has received such a letter "restrains ... speech about government conduct" with little opportunity for judicial review, said U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco. She directed the FBI to stop issuing national security letters that contain gag orders, but put her ruling on hold during an expected government appeal. Attorney Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the suit in May 2011 on behalf of an unnamed telecommunications company, said [that] the gag orders "have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools." The USA Patriot Act, passed in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, authorized the FBI to issue national security letters on its own for information that it considers relevant to an investigation of international terrorism or spying. Virtually all of the letters include a permanent gag order. In 2008, a federal appeals court in New York found the gag orders constitutionally defective. Congress amended the law in 2006 to allow recipients to challenge national security letters on constitutional grounds, but left the government with near-total power over the gag orders, Illston said.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on illegal activities of intelligence agencies, click here.

Last month a three-year-long federal prosecution of Blackwater collapsed. The government’s 15-felony indictment—on such charges as conspiring to hide purchases of automatic rifles and other weapons from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—could have led to years of jail time for Blackwater personnel. In the end, however, the government got only misdemeanor guilty pleas by two former executives, each of whom were sentenced to four months of house arrest, three years’ probation, and a fine of $5,000. Prosecutors dropped charges against three other executives named in the suit and abandoned the felony charges altogether. But the most noteworthy thing about the largely failed prosecution wasn’t the outcome. It was the tens of thousands of pages of documents—some declassified—that the litigation left in its wake. These documents illuminate Blackwater’s defense strategy: to defeat the charges it was facing, Blackwater built a case not only that it worked with the CIA—which was already widely known—but that it was in many ways an extension of the agency itself. [CEO Erik] Prince [said] recently, “Blackwater’s work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked. In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house.”

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the growing privatization of intelligence agency functions, click here.

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document. The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down [targeted persons] by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of "suspicious customer activity," such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The Federal Bureau of Investigation already has full access to the database. However, intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, currently have to make case-by-case requests for information to FinCEN. The Treasury plan would give spy agencies the ability to analyze more raw financial data than they have ever had before. Financial institutions file more than 15 million "suspicious activity reports" every year, according to Treasury. Banks, for instance, are required to report all personal cash transactions exceeding $10,000.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the games intelligence agencies play, click here.

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.