Intelligence Agency Corruption News Articles

Excerpts of key news articles on

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.

For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

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.

In 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed "at the highest levels" of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials – eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal – quoted in a 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo News into the CIA campaign against Assange. The plan was to "break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want", recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide "options" about how this could be done. The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said publicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of "a hostile intelligence service". Top intelligence officials intended to decide themselves who is and who is not a journalist, and lobbied the White House to redefine other high-profile journalists as "information brokers", who were to be targeted as if they were agents of a foreign power. In 2013 ... a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers ... failed to find a single person in Iraq and Afghanistan who had died because of the disclosures by WikiLeaks.

Note: CIA interest in assassinating Assange coincided with Wikileaks' publication of leaked CIA hacking tools. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

Louis Armstrong, his wife and a diplomat from the US embassy were out for dinner in a restaurant in what was still Léopoldville, capital of the newly independent Congo. The [musician] was in the middle of a tour of Africa ... organised and sponsored by the State Department. What Armstrong did not know was that his host that night in November 1960 was not the political attaché as described, but the head of the CIA in Congo. "Armstrong was basically a Trojan horse for the CIA," said Susan Williams ... author of White Malice, a new book which exposes the astonishing extent of the CIA's activities across central and west Africa. Armstrong's host, CIA station chief Larry Devlin, and other US intelligence officers posted to Congo used the cover of the musicians's visit to get access to the strategically important and very wealthy province of Katanga, which had recently seceded. There was much of interest to the CIA in Katanga, ranging from senior officials with whom they could not otherwise meet to crucial mining infrastructure, with 1,500 tons of uranium and vast potential to procure more. The CIA in the Congo, led by Devlin, was trying to kill the Congo's first democratically elected prime minister, 35-year-old Patrice Lumumba, fearful that he would lead the country into the Soviet camp. A mile or so from where Armstrong and Devlin had dined, the charismatic Lumumba was being held prisoner ... by soldiers loyal to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the young military chief with a close working relationship with the CIA, who had effectively seized power some weeks earlier. Within two months of Armstrong's tour, Lumumba was murdered in Katanga. Devlin later claimed that the CIA was responsible, telling a US Congressional investigation "that the coup of Mobutu … was arranged and supported, and indeed, managed, by the CIA".

Note: Read how the CIA used modern art and other cultural figures as weapons during the Cold War in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Pentagon is running a 60,000-strong secret army made up of soldiers, civilians and contractors, who travel the world under false identities embedded in consultancies and name-brand companies – without the knowledge of the American people or most of Congress. The top-secret army was created by the Pentagon over the past 10 years as part of a program called "signature reduction," and operates both domestically and internationally using a low-profile force of clandestine warriors who sometimes wear civilian clothes as they carry out their assignments, Newsweek reported. The force is 10 times the size of the covert elements of the CIA, comes with a cost of more than $900 million, and engages about 130 private companies in operations in locales like the Middle East and Africa. About half of the "signature reduction" force is made up of special forces. Military intelligence specialists comprise the second-largest element inside the force. But the ... fastest-growing group in the unit is made up of cyber-warriors who use false personas and "nonattribution" or "misattribution" techniques online to disguise themselves so they can track high-value targets, collect "publicly accessible information" and engage in influence campaigns to manipulate social media. One recently retired senior officer who oversaw one of the programs said no one is fully aware of their extent or the implications they have for military warfare.

Note: Learn more about mission creep in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the intelligence community from reliable major media sources.

John Longan was an agent with the US Border Patrol in the 1940s and '50s. Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Longan ... moved on to work for the CIA. Put simply, Longan taught local intelligence and police agencies how to create death squads to target political activists, deploying tactics that he'd used earlier to capture migrants on the border. He arrived in Guatemala in late 1965 and put into place a paramilitary unit that, early the next year, would execute what he called OperaciĂłn Limpieza, or Operation Cleanup. Within three months, this unit conducted over 80 raids and multiple assassinations, including an action that, over the course of four days, led to the capture, torture, and execution of more than 30 prominent left-wing opposition leaders. The military dumped their bodies into the sea, while the government denied any knowledge of their whereabouts. Longan's OperaciĂłn Limpieza was a decisive step in the unraveling of Guatemala, empowering an intelligence system that over the course of the country's civil war would be responsible for tens of thousands of disappearances, 200,000 deaths, and countless tortures. It was common practice during the Cold War to send former Border Patrol agents to train foreign police through CIA-linked "public safety" programs. Men like Longan helped speed up the pace with which local security forces could target and kill political reformers, thus accelerating political polarization and social misery.

Note: Learn more about CIA crimes in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide. Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power. In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series ... that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate [a] large-scale terrorist war against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA–which meant that Webb's series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans. Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR's Norman Solomon. The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself–as in "CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy." In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times reassured readers that the "CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade." Leading media outlets ... buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links.

Note: Read more about journalist Gary Webb. Learn more about the dark truth behind the US war on drugs. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war on drugs.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump announced he has filed a $100 million lawsuit against multiple government and law enforcement agencies for an alleged conspiracy that led to the 1965 assassination of civil rights activist and religious leader Malcolm X. Crump was joined by one of Malcolm X's daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, in announcing the news on the family's behalf. The suit accuses the U.S. government, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA and the New York Police Department of being involved in the events that led to Malcolm X's assassination and a decadeslong cover-up. It includes claims of excessive use of force against Malcolm X, deliberate creation of danger, failure to protect, denial of access to the courts for Malcolm X's family, conspiracy, fraudulent concealment and wrongful death. Malcolm X was 39 when he was shot 21 times by multiple gunmen who opened fire at him during a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York on Feb. 21, 1965. His wife and children were in the crowd at the time. The suit claims that the government agencies had knowledge of credible threats to Malcolm X's life and didn't act to prevent the assassination. The suit claims the FBI coordinated with undercover informants within the Nation of Islam, from which Malcolm X separated. It accuses the agencies of removing security personnel from the ballroom, encouraging the assassination and failing to intervene, later taking steps to conceal their involvement after the assassination.

Note: Malcolm X was one of four prominent figures killed for speaking truth to power during this era. Read our Substack to learn more about the undeniable evidence that connects these same abuses of power to Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of news articles on assassinations and intelligence agency corruption.

A House committee revealed Friday that the Pentagon, other US agencies and the European Union – in addition to the State Department – have funded a for-profit "fact-checking" firm that allegedly served "as a nontransparent agent of censorship campaigns." House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote a letter to the firm, NewsGuard, demanding more details about the public-private collaboration that led last year to the State Department being sued by conservative outlets that were labeled more "risky" than their liberal counterparts. NewsGuard has briefed committee staff on contracts it had with the Defense Department in 2021, including the Cyber National Mission Force within US Cyber Command; the State Department and its Global Engagement Center; and the EU's Joint Research Centre. The Oversight panel in June opened its investigation into NewsGuard's apparent participation in a government-funded "censorship campaign" to allegedly discredit and even demonetize news outlets by sharing its ratings of their reliability with advertisers. "These wide-ranging connections with various government agencies are taking place as the government is rapidly expanding into the censorship sphere," the chairman wrote. "One search of government grants and contracts from 2016 through 2023 revealed that there were 538 separate grants and 36 different government contracts specifically to address ‘misinformation' and ‘disinformation.'"

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption.

Rapper and activist Chuck D appeared at the White House earlier this summer, announcing that he was joining forces with YouTube and Antony Blinken's State Department to become one of Washington's "global music ambassadors." Throughout the Cold War, the United States ... spent vast sums sending famous artists such as Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald overseas. The CIA deliberately chose to front the campaign with black musicians, helping to soften America's image and promote a (false) message of racial harmony. Despite the official end of the Cold War, the United States has never stopped using music and musicians to foment unrest and spark regime change. The partnership between YouTube and the State Department will see the platform push pro-U.S. music and messaging across the world. This is far from YouTube's only connection to the U.S. national security state. Its parent company, Google, is essentially a creation of the CIA. Both the CIA and the NSA bankrolled the Ph.D. research of Google founder Sergey Brin, and senior CIA officials oversaw the evolution of Google during its pre-launch phase. As late as 2005, the CIA was still a major shareholder in Google. These shares resulted from Google's acquisition of Keyhole, Inc., a CIA-backed surveillance firm whose software eventually became Google Earth – the civilian offshoot of a spying software the U.S. government uses.

Note: Learn more about the CIA's longstanding propaganda network in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

Nearly 25 years ago, a group of suicide bombers attacked the U.S.S. Cole off Aden, Yemen, with the loss of 17 U.S. sailors. A Saudi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, believed to be the mastermind of the attack, was captured in 2002, and was officially charged in 2011 with leading the attack. He has become the longest-running capital murder case at Guantanamo. Al-Nashiri, like so many captives at Guantanamo, was subjected to secret imprisonment by the CIA as well as waterboarding, rectal abuse, and prolonged sleep deprivation. A previous judge at Guantanamo excluded the confessions of al-Nashiri and others because of CIA's torture and abuse. The al-Nashiri case was particularly egregious because his interrogators found him to be compliant, but a senior CIA official ordered the reinstatement of torture and abuse to include waterboarding. The CIA has always maintained that secret memoranda of George W. Bush's Department of Justice permitted the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" to include waterboarding in order to break the will of the captives. The CIA also had the support of psychologists and the American Psychological Association (APA) in conducting the coercive interrogation of terror suspects in Guantanamo and its secret prisons in East Europe and Southeast Asia. Two former military psychologists developed the CIA's sadistic techniques, which were based on Chinese efforts to obtain false confessions from American prisoners in the 1950s.

Note: Read more about how the American Psychological Association supported CIA torture operations. Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

The CIA has for the first time acknowledged that the 1953 coup it backed in Iran that overthrew its prime minister and cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was undemocratic. The CIA in 2013 admitted its role in the coup that brought down Iran's then prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, but until now has not publicly acknowledged that the move was undemocratic. Much of the agency's official history of the coup remains classified, complicating the public's understanding of an event that still resonates, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington. Iran's mission to the United Nations described the 1953 coup as marking "the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran's internal affairs" and dismissed the US acknowledgments. "The US admission never translated into compensatory action or a genuine commitment to refrain from future interference, nor did it change its subversive policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran," the mission said in a statement. Seven decades later, the 1953 coup remains as hotly debated as ever in Iran, where many see a straight line leading from the coup to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ultimately toppled the shah. The coup also prompted the CIA into a series of further actions in other countries, including Guatemala, where US clandestine operations in 1954 installed a military dictator and sparked a 40-year civil war that likely killed approximately 245,000 people.

Note: This admission came in the CIA's official podcast. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

Louis Milione retired from the DEA a second time this summer amid reporting by The Associated Press on potential conflicts caused by his prior consulting for the pharmaceutical industry. Less than three months later, Milione again landed a plum job at Guidepost Solutions, a New York-based firm hired by some of the same companies he had been tasked with regulating when he returned to the DEA in 2021. Milione had spent four years at Guidepost prior to his return, leveraging his extensive experience and contacts from a 21-year DEA career. Milione is the most senior of a slew of DEA officials to have traded their badge and gun for a globe-trotting consulting job. His career stands out for two cycles through the revolving door between government and industry, raising questions about the potential impact on the DEA's mission to police drug companies blamed for tens of thousands of American overdose deaths. Milione's private-sector clientele also included Morris & Dickson Co., the nation's fourth-largest wholesale drug distributor, as it tried to stave off DEA sanctions for disregarding thousands of suspicious, high-volume orders. The DEA allowed the company to continue shipping drugs for nearly four years after a judge recommended its license be revoked for "cavalier disregard" of rules aimed at preventing opioid abuse. It was not until AP began asking questions this spring that the DEA moved to finally strip the Shreveport, Louisiana-based company of its license to distribute highly addictive painkillers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the pharmaceutical industry from reliable major media sources.

A new investigation reveals the extent of the CIA's involvement in the war in Ukraine, where the agency operates clandestinely in what, under a formal declaration of war, would be the domain of the military. The author of the investigation [is] William Arkin, a national security reporter and senior editor at Newsweek, who says that the CIA has "got its hand in a little bit of everything" in Ukraine. "This might come as a surprise to some people, but, as my sources explained it to me, the reality is that Ukraine is not an ally of the United States," [said Arkin]. "We have no treaty obligations towards Ukraine. And the United States is not at war with Russia. So this is a particularly unique battlefield in which the CIA is playing an outsize role, but it is playing an outsize role because the Biden administration has been firm in saying that the U.S. military will not be involved in any direct way in the fighting or on the battlefield or, indeed, inside Ukraine." The CIA is no stranger to Ukraine. Clearly, in the post-World War II period, it was involved in developing right-wing groups within Ukraine that were opposing the Soviet Union, a lot of them former neo-Nazis. "I don't see much movement or much interest even on the part of the U.S. government in Washington ... to find a peaceful resolution" [said Arkin]. "So, really, no one is playing that role. The United Nations is not playing that role. There is no neutral party that really is playing the role of trying to end the conflict between the two parties."

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

The last time a trove of leaked documents exposed U.S. spying operations around the world, the reaction from allied governments was swift and severe. In Berlin, thousands of people protested in the streets, the C.I.A. station chief was expelled, and the German chancellor told the American president that "spying on friends is not acceptable." In Paris, the American ambassador was summoned for a dressing-down. That was a decade ago, after an enormous leak of classified documents detailing American surveillance programs by ... Edward Snowden. The latest leak of classified documents that appeared online this year, the motive behind which remains unknown, has again illustrated the broad reach of U.S. spy agencies, including into the capitals of friendly countries such as Egypt, South Korea, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates. Though the documents mainly focus on the war in Ukraine, they include C.I.A. intelligence briefs describing conversations and plans at senior levels of government in those countries, in several cases attributed to "signals intelligence," or electronic eavesdropping. Unlike in 2013, however, U.S. allies appear to be mostly shrugging off the latest examples of apparent spying. So far, the only evident political fallout from the latest leaks has occurred in South Korea, where one classified U.S. document described a debate among senior national security officials about whether to send artillery shells abroad that might wind up in Ukraine, potentially angering Russia.

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.

The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government's ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance. The documents, revealed in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the FBI, show how closely FBI and Defense officials worked with academic researchers to refine artificial-intelligence techniques that could help in the identification or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent. Many of the records relate to the Janus program, a project funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or IARPA. The improved facial recognition system was ultimately folded into a search tool, called Horus, and made available to the Pentagon's Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which helps provide military technologies to civilian police forces. No federal laws regulate how facial recognition systems can be used. The tool's use in domestic mass surveillance would be a "nightmare scenario," said Nathan Wessler, a deputy director at the ACLU. "It could give the government the ability to pervasively track as many people as they want for as long as they want. There's no good outcome for that in a democratic society."

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.

A war between China and Taiwan will be extremely good for business at America's Frontier Fund ... according to audio from a February 1 event. The remarks occurred at a tech finance symposium hosted at the Manhattan offices of Silicon Valley Bank. "If the China-Taiwan situation happens, some of our investments will 10x, like overnight," [a] person who identified as "Tom" said. "So I don't want to share the name, but the one example I gave was a critical component that ... the total market value is $200 million, but it is a critical component to a $50 billion market cap. That's like a choke point, right. And so if it's only produced in China, for example, and there's a kinetic event in the Pacific, that would 10x overnight, like no question about it. There's a couple of different things like that." AFF is surely not the only venture fund that would see stratospheric returns throughout their portfolio in the case of a destabilizing global crisis, like a "kinetic event in the Pacific" – that is to say, war. Gilman Louie, AFF's co-founder and current CEO, serves as chair of the National Intelligence University, advises Biden through his Intelligence Advisory Board, and was tapped for the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Louie previously ran In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm. In other words, AFF stands to massively profit from a geopolitical crisis while its CEO advises the Biden administration on geopolitical crises. AFF was founded last year with support from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Note: While the detection of a Chinese spy balloon drums up significant fear and outrage over hostile foreign "threats," an incisive article reveals how US surveillance of foreign countries is quite common, including their recent expansion of military bases in Southeast Asia to monitor and surveil China. Furthermore, many independent journalists are questioning the war-fueling narrative that China is a threat to national security. Watch an insightful analysis uncovering the deeper story of what's behind the growing tensions between the US and China.

Under a post-9/11 surveillance program known as "Upstream", the NSA is systematically searching Americans' internet communications as they enter and leave the United States. The agency sifts through these streams of data looking for "identifiers" associated with its many thousands of foreign targets – identifiers like email addresses and phone numbers. The NSA does all of this without warrants, without any individual judicial approval, and without showing that any of the people it is surveilling – including countless Americans – have done anything wrong. This surveillance raises serious constitutional concerns, but no court has ever considered a legal challenge to it because the government has claimed that allowing a suit against Upstream surveillance to go forward would implicate "state secrets". In 2007, for example, an appeals court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Khaled El-Masri claiming that, in a case of mistaken identity, he had been kidnapped and tortured by the CIA. The court acknowledged the public evidence of El-Masri's mistreatment but held that state secrets were too central to the case to allow it to go forward. And in 2010, a different appeals court dismissed a lawsuit filed by five individuals who claimed that one of Boeing's subsidiary companies had flown the planes carrying them to the black sites where they were tortured by the CIA. This use of the state secrets privilege – to dismiss cases – departs from the supreme court's narrow framing of the privilege.

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

Allegations by FBI Special Agent Steve Friend contained in a whistleblower complaint filed late Wednesday with the Department of Justice inspector general reveal a politicized Washington, DC, FBI field office cooking the books to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism, and ­using an "overzealous" January 6 investigation to harass conservative Americans and violate their constitutional rights. Friend, 37, a respected 12-year veteran of the FBI and a SWAT team member, was suspended Monday, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Fla., after complaining to his supervisors about the violations. He was declared absent without leave last month for refusing to participate in SWAT raids that he believed violated FBI policy and were a use of excessive force against Jan. 6 subjects accused of misdemeanor offenses. "I have an oath to uphold the Constitution," he told supervisors when he asserted his conscientious objection to joining an Aug. 24 raid on a J6 subject. "I have a moral objection and want to be considered a conscientious objector." In his whistleblower complaint to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz ... Friend lays out multiple violations of FBI policy involving J6 investigations in which he was involved. He says he was removed from active investigations into child sexual exploitation and human trafficking to work on J6 cases sent from DC. As a result, he believes his child exploitation investigations were harmed.

Note: Read how Facebook is silencing activity related to this whistleblower. Read also Matt Taibbi's reporting on this important case. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Central Intelligence Agency has for years been collecting in bulk, without a warrant, some kind of data that can affect Americans' privacy. At the same time, [the C.I.A.] declared that a report about the same topic, which had prompted the letter, must remain fully classified. That report, called "Deep Dive II," was part of a set of studies by a watchdog board scrutinizing intelligence community operations under Executive Order 12333. In March 2021, the Senate Intelligence Committee received a copy of the report. Two Democrats on the panel, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, urged Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, and William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, to declassify the activity. The senators suggested that its hidden existence cut against Americans' understanding that various pieces of legislation enacted in recent years "limit and, in some cases, prohibit the warrantless collection of Americans' records." In 2015, Congress banned bulk collection of telecommunications metadata under the Patriot Act and limited other types of bulk collection by the F.B.I. under laws governing domestic activities like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Yet "the C.I.A. has secretly conducted its own bulk program" under Executive Order 12333, the senators wrote. "It has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight."

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.

Right up until his death in 2018, Ferik Duka dreamed of seeing his three eldest sons, Shain, Dritan, and Eljvir, freed from prison. In 2009, the three brothers were sentenced to life for their role in an alleged plot to attack the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey. The convictions followed a terrorism sting ... that ran for over a year and involved multiple government informants. The investigation into the "Fort Dix Five," as the case became known, was marred by outrageous law enforcement and legal abuses, documented in a 2015 investigation and documentary by The Intercept. Their case was just one of many in which zealous FBI officials and prosecutors, operating in the heated atmosphere of post-9/11 America, branded individuals who posed no appreciable threat to the country as enemies of the state. Many of them, like the Duka brothers, were given long prison sentences or otherwise had their lives ruined after being convicted on material support for terrorism charges. "There hasn't been any reckoning with the legacy of this era," said Ramzi Kassem, a ... Law professor. Kassem said, "It is alarming when you look across these cases and see an overrepresentation of suspects who were mentally deficient, marginalized, or otherwise vulnerable. Informants proposed so-called terrorism plots, funded them, provided means of execution, coaching, and even coaxed the targets of stings over prolonged periods of time in order to enable prosecutors to paint their conduct as criminally punishable."

Note: Read more about terrorism plots hatched by the FBI. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.

Less than six months into the Biden administration, more than 15 consultants from the firm WestExec Advisors have fanned out across the White House, its foreign policy apparatus, and its law enforcement institutions. Five, some of whom already have jobs with the administration, have been nominated for high-ranking posts, and four others served on the Biden-Harris transition team. Even by Washington standards, it's a remarkable march through the revolving door, especially for a firm that only launched in 2017. The pipeline has produced a dominance of WestExec alums throughout the administration, installed in senior roles as influential as director of national intelligence and secretary of state. WestExec clients, meanwhile, have controversial interests in tech and defense that intersect with the policies their former consultants are now in a position to set and execute. The creeping monopolization of foreign policymaking by a single boutique consulting firm has gone largely unnoticed. The firm describes one of its chief selling points as its "unparalleled geopolitical risk analysis," now confirmed by the saturation of its employees in positions of power. WestExec has also succeeded in getting tech startups into defense contracts. Deputy Director of the CIA David S. Cohen was an early member of WestExec's "core team." But it's impossible to know who his clients were, because an exemption for the spy agencies' officials means that his disclosure is not publicly available.

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

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.