Intelligence Agency Corruption News Articles

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Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Since 9/11, the government has been building a huge anti-terror apparatus. In the first few days, the entire blueprint for what would happen over the next decade was written, all in secret. The public didn't know. The media didn't know. And it would take us years to find out. In secret, the administration had authorized the CIA to use what they called "enhanced interrogation techniques." They can do a lot of things that used to be considered torture. Waterboarding, for example. By any definition, it's torture. The Justice Department called it "enhanced interrogation methods" and it approved seven of them, including waterboarding. It took reporter Dana Priest years to piece together where prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were. They had been hidden in a secret network of CIA prisons known as "black sites." For the first time, the White House had approved the building of an international prison system entirely in secret. The Terrorist Surveillance Program authorized the NSA to intercept certain telephone calls and emails of American citizens without a warrant. The NSA created a global electronic dragnet capable of reaching into America's communication networks, capturing 1.7 billion intercepts every day. The NSA turned to a new force in the covert war, private contractors. You had this boom in the corporate intelligence world, as well, companies like CACI, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics. The NSA spent billions of dollars on more than 480 private companies.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and 9/11 from reliable major media sources.

The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell. That hospital ... would be her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then-16-year-old to undergo treatment for "disobedient" behaviour. Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA's top-secret research into mind control. Now, she is one of two named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. She became an unwitting participant in covert CIA experiments known as MK-Ultra. The Cold War project tested the effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD, electroshock treatments and brainwashing techniques on human beings without their consent. Over 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the US and Canada were involved. At the Allan, McGill University researcher Dr Ewen Cameron drugged patients and made them listen to recordings, sometimes thousands of times. The technique was a form of "psychic driving," says doctoral student Jordan Torbay. "Essentially the minds of patients were manipulated using verbal cues," she says, adding he also looked at the effects of sleep drugs, forced sensory deprivation, and induced coma. Medical records show Ms Ponting was given LSD, as well as drugs like sodium amytal, a barbiturate, desoxyn, a stimulant, as well as nitrous oxide gas, a sedative known as laughing gas.

Note: Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and mind control.

President Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the U.S. government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen. Trump warned that Petro that he "better close up" cocaine production "or the United States will close them up for him, and it won't be done nicely." Is anyone in the Trump White House aware of the long history of U.S. failure in that part of the world? Colombia remains the world's largest cocaine producer despite billions of dollars of U.S. government anti-drug aid to the Colombian government. The Clinton administration made Colombia its top target in its international war on drugs. Clinton drug warriors deluged the Colombian government with U.S. tax dollars to deluge Colombia with toxic spray. The New York Times reported that U.S.-financed planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren, making many of them ill. At the same time that the Clinton administration was sacrificing the health of Colombian children in its quixotic anti-drug crusade ... Laurie Hiett, the wife of Colonel James Hiett, the top U.S. military commander in Colombia, exploited U.S. embassy diplomatic pouches to ship 15 pounds of heroin and cocaine to New York. She pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in narcotic profits. After she was caught and convicted, she received far more lenient treatment than most drug offenders – only five years in prison. Her husband – ridiculed as the "Coke Colonel" in the New York Post – received only six months in prison for laundering drug proceeds and concealing his wife's crimes.

Note: Aerial spraying of pesticides is labeled as a public-health and anti-drug intervention designed to eradicate coca crops. The War on Drugs has been called a trillion dollar failure that targets everyday people while protecting the covert activities of the rich and powerful. See our in-depth investigation into the dark truths behind the War on Drugs.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, numerous men followed sex workers into the apartment at 225 Chestnut Street in San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood. The johns were the unwitting subjects in a CIA experiment focused on how drugs and sex might be used to obtain secrets from foreign adversaries. Part of MKUltra, the agency's broader and highly controversial mind control research program, Operation Midnight Climax began in 1953. The experiments involved luring men into a heavily surveilled bordello, dosing them with LSD, and filming their reactions to probing questions and subliminal messaging. The goal of Midnight Climax was to understand what roles, if any, sex and drugs could play in getting a target to reveal sensitive or classified information. To run the operation, Gottlieb hired George Hunter White, a federal narcotics agent, who got to work renovating the apartment. Microphones disguised as electrical wall outlets were hooked up to tape recorders, and a large two-way mirror allowed CIA agents to monitor, film, and photograph the encounters. Behind the mirror, a makeshift control room featured a portable toilet and a refrigerator full of adult beverages. Sex workers were given $100 for each man they lured to the bordello, and they would then dose their client with LSD-laced cocktails. Eventually these efforts revealed that a man became increasingly talkative if the sex worker asked him to stay awhile–even after the sexual transaction was complete.

Note: Midnight Climax was supervised by George Hunter White, who wrote this in a letter about the program: "Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings put it best: "They do not give a damn about the law or the Constitution or the Congress or the Oversight committees except as something to be subverted and manipulated and lied to. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes." Read our comprehensive investigation connecting Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking network to intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

In an exchange this week on "All-In Podcast," Alex Karp was on the defensive. The Palantir CEO used the appearance to downplay and deny the notion that his company would engage in rights-violating in surveillance work. "We are the single worst technology to use to abuse civil liberties, which is by the way the reason why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to actually buy our product," Karp said. What he didn't mention was the fact that a tranche of classified documents revealed by [whistleblower and former NSA contractor] Edward Snowden and The Intercept in 2017 showed how Palantir software helped the National Security Agency and its allies spy on the entire planet. Palantir software was used in conjunction with a signals intelligence tool codenamed XKEYSCORE, one of the most explosive revelations from the NSA whistleblower's 2013 disclosures. XKEYSCORE provided the NSA and its foreign partners with a means of easily searching through immense troves of data and metadata covertly siphoned across the entire global internet, from emails and Facebook messages to webcam footage and web browsing. A 2008 NSA presentation describes how XKEYSCORE could be used to detect "Someone whose language is out of place for the region they are in," "Someone who is using encryption," or "Someone searching the web for suspicious stuff." In May, the New York Times reported Palantir would play a central role in a White House plan to boost data sharing between federal agencies, "raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power."

Note: Read about Palantir's revolving door with the US government. As former NSA intelligence official and whistleblower William Binney articulated, "The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

A devastating new Defense Department inspector general report finds that ... the Army, the primary Defense Department proponent for battlefield influence and deception, has failed to staff its own psyops units. Recent revelations about the Pentagon's psyops call into question just how effective these programs really are. In 2022, an extensive report by the Washington Post revealed widespread concern inside DOD that psychological operations were being waged both recklessly and ineffectively by the armed services. The report was spurred by research from the Stanford Internet Observatory which detailed over 150 instances of Facebook and Twitter removing accounts linked to U.S. military influence campaigns. The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act gave the Defense Department a green light to engage in offensive psyops campaigns, including clandestine operations that align with the same definition as covert, meaning that the armed forces can carry out influence operations that deny an American connection. After the congressional authorization, an unnamed defense official said, "Combatant commanders got really excited" and were "eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations." Researchers at Stanford ultimately found that despite the dozens of Defense Department obscured accounts spreading misinformation, the effect on foreign populations was far less than information conveyed overtly from self-identified U.S. sources.

Note: Read about the Pentagon's secret army of 60,000 undercover operatives that manipulate public perception. Learn more about the history of military-intelligence influence on the media in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

On the morning of 10 June 2013 ... the journalist Glenn Greenwald and film-maker Laura Poitras published on the Guardian site a video revealing the identity of the NSA whistleblower behind one of the most damning leaks in modern history. It began: "My name is Ed Snowden." William Fitzgerald, then a 27-year-old policy employee at Google, knew he wanted to help. Fitzgerald found himself waiting in the lobby of the Hong Kong W Hotel to meet Greenwald and introduce him to Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Man – the men who became Snowden's legal representatives and hid him in the homes of Tibbo's refugee clients. The Snowden files told a ... sinister story, revealing mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA files suggested that some tech firms, including Google, Facebook and Apple, were aware. Google and other tech firms worked to distance themselves from the NSA's efforts. But over time [Google's] culture appeared to shift, reflecting the changing needs of various governments. Google stopped promoting its transparency report to the media, free expression advocates were replaced by more traditional business-focused executives, and then there was Project Maven – the controversial Department of Defense drone project that Google signed on to build artificial intelligence for. Google isn't alone in vying for government contracts – Microsoft, Amazon, IBM have all since made a play for or struck multimillion-dollar deals to build tools of surveillance for various entities including the Pentagon.

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

Trust Lab was founded by a team of well-credentialed Big Tech alumni who came together in 2021 with a mission: Make online content moderation more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. A year later, the company announced a "strategic partnership" with the CIA's venture capital firm. The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel – which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA – will work on "a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet." Key terms like "harmful" and "safeguard" are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward "pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation." It's difficult to imagine how aligning the startup with the CIA is compatible with [Trust Lab co-founder Tom] Siegel's goal of bringing greater transparency and integrity to internet governance. What would it mean, for instance, to incubate counter-misinformation technology for an agency with a vast history of perpetuating misinformation? Placing the company within the CIA's tech pipeline also raises questions about Trust Lab's view of who or what might be a "harmful" online, a nebulous concept that will no doubt mean something very different to the U.S. intelligence community than it means elsewhere. Trust Lab's murky partnership with In-Q-Tel suggests a step toward greater governmental oversight of online speech.

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

The Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has a vision: "To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again." Founders George Church and Ben Lamm have already racked up an impressive list of high-profile funders and investors, including Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Winklevoss Capital – and, according to the public portfolio its venture capital arm released this month, the CIA. Colossal says it hopes to use advanced genetic sequencing to resurrect two extinct mammals – not just the giant, ice age mammoth, but also a mid-sized marsupial known as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that died out less than a century ago. In-Q-Tel, its new investor, is registered as a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA. On its surface, the group funds technology startups with the potential to safeguard national security. In addition to its long-standing pursuit of intelligence and weapons technologies, the CIA outfit has lately displayed an increased interest in biotechnology and particularly DNA sequencing. "Biotechnology and the broader bioeconomy are critical for humanity to further develop. It is important for all facets of our government to develop them and have an understanding of what is possible," Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm wrote. The embrace of this technology, according to In-Q-Tel's blog post, will help allow U.S. government agencies to read, write, and edit genetic material, and, importantly, to steer global biological phenomena that impact "nation-to-nation competition."

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

The roots of Southeast Asia's billion-dollar drug trade [are] hidden in the picturesque place in northern Thailand, home to only a few hundred people and high up in the hills of the Golden Triangle, which also straddles Myanmar and Laos. This surge in Southeast Asia's narcotics trade was also achieved with at least some input from America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Keen to prevent Mao's Communist message from spreading into Burma, and from there mainland Southeast Asia, the CIA offered support to ... exiled Chinese nationalists, including transportation assistance through Civil Air Transport – the CIA-owned airline that would later become the notorious Air America, which transported U.S. supplies and forces into Vietnam, and the secret war in Laos. Burmese military intelligence reports at the time also noted that the nationalist troops were sporting brand-new American arms in the form of machine guns, bazookas, mortars, and anti-aircraft artillery. A declassified CIA cable from the era said the troops who settled in Mae Salong became the "dominant opium traffickers in the region", and that the move to the hilltop village had proven a "boon" for their activities, by allowing them to develop networks in Thailand. A series of brutal campaigns throughout the 1970s brought the Communist threat in the area to an end, and Mae Salong's residents shifted from producing opium to tea and mushrooms.

Note: Read our Substack investigation into the dark truths behind the US War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs.

Over time, the CIA upper echelon has secretly developed all kinds of policy statements and legal rationales to justify routine, widespread surveillance on U.S. soil of citizens who arent suspected of terrorism or being a spy. Newly declassified documents from 2014 ... reveal the CIA not only intercepted emails of U.S. citizens but they were emails of the most sensitive kind written to Congress and involving whistleblowers reporting alleged wrongdoing within the Intelligence Community. The disclosures, kept secret until now, are two letters of congressional notification from the Intelligence Community inspector general at the time, Charles McCullough. He stated that during routine counterintelligence monitoring of government computer systems, the CIA collected emails between congressional staff and the CIAs head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough added that he was concerned about the CIAs potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent chilling effect. The March 2014 intercepts ... happened amid whats widely referred to as the Obama administrations war on whistleblowers and mass surveillance scandals. The evidence points to bad actors targeting candidate Donald Trump and his associates in part to keep them - and us - from learning about and digging into an even bigger scandal: our Intelligence Community increasingly spying on its own citizens, journalists, members of Congress and political enemies for the better part of two decades.

Note: The above article was written by Emmy award winning investigative journalist and former news anchor for CBS and CNN Sharyl Attkisson. She has been attacked numerous times for investigating too deeply into the lives of certain politicians. Her top-selling book Stonewalled describes her fight for truth against powerful political forces. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

The leader of the far-right Proud Boys group was a "prolific" informer for federal and local law enforcement, reports say. Enrique Tarrio worked undercover for authorities after he was arrested in 2012, according to a 2014 federal court document obtained by Reuters. During a Miami court hearing a federal prosecutor, an FBI agent and Mr Tarrio's lawyer described his work for law enforcement and said that he had helped convict more than a dozen people in drugs, gambling and human smuggling cases. He has become an increasingly high-profile figure as his violent group gained an elevated profile during the Trump administration. The ex-president infamously told the group to "stand back and stand by" when asked to denounce them during a presidential debate last September. They have been involved in a string of high-profile clashes in Washington DC, including the 6 January pro-Trump Capitol riot. [Mr Tarrio] was arrested in Washington DC in January two days before the riot and charged with possession of two high-capacity rifle magazines, and setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner during a December pro-Trump demonstration in the city. Mr Tarrio was ordered to leave the city and has a June court date. During the 2014 court case Reuters says that Mr Tarrio's lawyer and prosecutors asked a judge to reduce his prison sentence after he and two defendants pleaded guilty in a fraud case related to stolen diabetes test kits. The prosecutor told the judge that Mr Tarrio had provided information that resulted in the prosecution of 13 people.

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

The most probable cause of a series of mysterious afflictions that sickened American spies and diplomats abroad in the past several years was radiofrequency energy, a type of radiation that includes microwaves, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has concluded in a report. The conclusion by a committee of 19 experts in medicine and other fields cited "directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy" as "the most plausible mechanism" to explain the illness, which came to be known as Havana syndrome. The report, which was commissioned by the State Department, provides the most definitive explanation yet of the illness that struck scores of government employees, first at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016, and then in China and other countries. Many of the officers suffered from dizziness, fatigue, headaches, and loss of hearing, memory and balance, and some were forced into permanent retirement. C.I.A. officers visiting overseas stations also experienced similar symptoms. The new report reveals strong evidence that the incidents were the result of a malicious attack. It attributes the illnesses to "directed" and "pulsed" – rather than "continuous" – energy, implying that the victims' exposure was targeted and not the result of more common sources of microwave energy. It also said the committee found the immediate symptoms that patients reported ... were more consistent with a directed "attack" of radiofrequency energy.

Note: Many have belittled the possibility of directed energy beam weapons being used to cause harm and alter consciousness. We have been reporting on this for many years. For excellent, reliable information on this disturbing trend, see this essay and these news summaries.

On 12 June 1975, the Washington Post ran a story about an army scientist who had been drugged with LSD by the CIA, reacted badly and jumped out of the window of a New York hotel. This story, with its lurid mix of drugs, death and the CIA, proved irresistible. For the next several days, reporters barraged the CIA with demands to know more. The Olson family called a press conference in the familys back yard. Alice read a statement saying that the family had decided to file a lawsuit against the CIA, perhaps within two weeks, asking several million dollars in damages. Since 1953, we have struggled to understand Frank Olsons death as an inexplicable suicide, she said. The true nature of his death was concealed for 22 years. White House lawyers offered the Olson family $750,000 in exchange for dropping its legal claims. After some hesitation, the family accepted. On 8 August 2002, [Eric Olson] announced that he had reached a new conclusion about what had happened to his father. The death of Frank Olson on 28 November 1953 was a murder, not a suicide, he declared. This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a bad trip. He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program in the early 1950s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.

Note: Read more about the CIA's MK-ULTRA program which Frank Olson was a part of. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mind control from reliable major media sources.

By now, almost everyone knows what Edward Snowden did. He leaked top-secret documents revealing that the National Security Agency was spying on hundreds of millions of people. The key to Snowden’s effectiveness, according to Thomas Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project (GAP), was that he practised “civil disobedience” rather than “lawful” whistleblowing. “None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance ... had any success,” Devine told me. “They came forward ... but the government just said, ‘They’re lying. We’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence.” The NSA whistleblowers were not leftwing peace nuts. They had spent their professional lives inside the US intelligence apparatus – devoted, they thought, to the protection of the homeland and defense of the constitution. They were political conservatives, highly educated, respectful of evidence, careful with words. And they were saying, on the basis of personal experience, that the US government was being run by people who were willing to break the law and bend the state’s awesome powers to their own ends. They were saying that laws and technologies had secretly been put in place that threatened to overturn the democratic governance Americans took for granted and shrink their liberties to a vanishing point.

Note: The article above was is adapted from Mark Hertsgaard’s book, Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing in the Age of Snowden. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

FBI crime laboratory experts gave inaccurate testimony at the trials of defendants in the World Trade Center blast and the 1989 bombing of Avianca Flight 203 in Colombia, and lab scientists and technicians used shoddy analysis and did not follow procedures in scores of other cases, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded. Those findings, coupled with serious problems in the way lab officials conducted themselves in the Oklahoma City bombing and the O.J. Simpson case, are part of a sweeping, 18-month investigation into significant failures at the lab at FBI headquarters in Washington. In addition to conclusions about how lab officials have performed in court, the inspector general also found that the bureau's scientists and technicians did not properly document their test results and poorly prepared lab reports. Overall, in investigating work at the lab's three key sections - the chemistry-toxicology, explosives and materials analysis units - [Inspector General Michael] Bromwich said: "We found significant instances of testimonial errors, substandard analytical work and deficient practices." Investigators also discovered instances where dictation on lab reports was altered and lab supervisors did not properly manage their agents. Bromwich's report does not say when or why the problems began at the lab, but some of the cases studied date back to the 1980s. As early as 1991, top FBI management was alerted to failures at the lab.

Note: Read more about major issues with the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. More recently, the FBI has admitted to problems in its forensics unit leading to decades of flawed testimony in criminal trials. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Justice Department inspector general's office has determined that the FBI crime laboratory working on the Oklahoma City bombing case made "scientifically unsound" conclusions that were "biased in favor of the prosecution," The Los Angeles Times reported. The still-secret draft report ... also concludes that supervisors approved lab reports that they "cannot support" and that FBI lab officials may have erred about the size of the blast, the amount of explosives involved and the type of explosives used in the bombing. The draft report shows that FBI examiners could not identify the triggering device for the truck bomb or how it was detonated. It also indicates that a poorly maintained lab environment could have led to contamination of critical pieces of evidence. The investigation into the crime lab practices began in 1996 following complaints from FBI chemist and whistle-blower Frederic Whitehurst. The draft report's harshest criticism was of David Williams, a supervisory agent in the explosives unit. "We are deeply troubled by Williams' report, which contains several serious flaws," the report said. "These errors are all tilted in favor of the prosecution's theory of the case. We conclude that Williams failed to present an objective, unbiased, competent report." Those flaws reportedly include the basis of his determination that the main charge of the explosion was ammonium nitrate. The inspector general called such a determination "inappropriate," the Times said.

Note: For lots more undeniable evidence the official story of the Oklahoma City bombing is seriously flawed, see this webpage. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.

The United States is the world leader in regime change, toppling 35 foreign heads over the past 120 years, by one reckoning. Overthrowing another country's leader is a routine enough tactic that it has its own acronym among academics: FIRC, or foreign-imposed regime change. According to a tally by Alexander Downes, an associate professor and political scientist at George Washington University ... the United States carried out nearly a third of all of about 120 forced ousters of foreign leaders around the world between 1816 and 2011. About 20 of those 35 U.S.-backed regime changes were in Central and South America or the Caribbean. In some of those countries, the United States removed and replaced leaders again and again, with the concentration of someone kicking a vending machine to get the right candy bar to drop. In 1954 alone, for example, Washington ousted three Guatemalan leaders in succession. Globally, a third of all forced regime changes by all countries led to civil wars in the targeted nation within 10 years. Experts see warning signs for any attempt at regime change in Venezuela, a petrostate where misgovernment by socialist autocrat Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez, coupled with international sanctions, have trashed the economy and created millions of refugees. The Trump administration has accused Maduro of being in league with drug traffickers, although the United States overstates Venezuela's role in drug smuggling.

Note: Learn about the 35 countries where the US has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists.

Epstein's relationship with the Israeli government has long been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theorizing. But the extent of the connections has long been difficult to prove. That is, until October 2024, when the Palestinian group Handala released a tranche of more than 100,000 hacked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country from 1999 to 2001. Barak is known to have been one of Epstein's closest associates. He visited the financier's estates in Florida and New York more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017, years after Epstein had been convicted for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent victims, who died earlier this year, alleged in her posthumous memoir that a figure, described only as "the Prime Minister," but widely believed to be Barak, violently raped her on Epstein's private Caribbean island when she was 18. Epstein helped to facilitate an agreement for Mongolia to purchase Israeli military equipment and surveillance technology from companies with which the men had financial ties. An Israeli spy, Yoni Koren, stayed at Epstein's New York apartment for weeks at a time on three separate occasions between 2013 and 2015. Koren served as an intermediary between the American and Israeli governments, helping Barak organize meetings with top intelligence officials, including former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Epstein's criminal enterprise and intelligence agency corruption.

Despite the public release only a few years ago of evidence showing the Saudi government's direct complicity in the crime of September 11, 2001 – the central, instigating act of terrorism that drove and justified [the] "war on terror" – associating with or even taking money from that same government appears to carry no stigma. After spending more than a decade fighting the shadowy threat of al-Qaida, the U.S. government ... has enthusiastically gone along with the installation of an al-Qaida-linked militant, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as the leader of Syria, whose former president Washington spent years trying to remove from power expressly because of his alleged support for terrorism. The Taliban's link to al-Qaida was once upon a time the rationale for regime change and 20 years of U.S. war in Afghanistan – which, of course, ended with the Taliban coming back into power, which Washington appears to be coming to peace with now. Meanwhile, Trump has also continued and escalated the trend started under the Biden administration of turning the "war on terror" inward. The president is now threatening to deploy the military against what he calls the "enemy from within," as his administration pushes to treat a variety of domestic critics, dissidents, and opposition groups as terrorist threats over their First Amendment-protected activity. Expansive powers claimed by President Bush and then Obama [were] used in new, alarming ways they were never originally intended for, including to intimidate and punish political dissent. What we are witnessing is the war on terror in zombie form: devoid of its original life force and human drive, but more dangerous than ever, as it shuffles mindlessly forward in a search for human flesh to no end.

Note: The number of terrorism-linked fatalities in Africa was very low in 2003. After the US began counterterrorism efforts on the continent, the number of terrorism-related deaths increased by more than 82,000 percent. In our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center, we present undeniable evidence that US geopolitical interests have never been loyal to nations or human rights values it claims to defend – only to the ongoing consolidation of power.

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