Intelligence Agency Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Intelligence Agency Corruption News Stories 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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Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., will lead a new task force focused on the declassification of federal secrets – including records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other documents in the public interest. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., appointed Luna to chair the "Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets." Comer and Luna sent letters to the State Department, Department of Energy and the CIA for documents relating to the origins of COVID-19; the National Security Agency and CIA for records relating to JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations; the Department of Defense and the CIA for 9/11 files; and to the Justice Department for documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein. The creation of the task force comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling the director of national intelligence ... to present a plan for the full and complete release of all JFK assassination records within 15 days. He also ordered that officials immediately review the records relating to RFK and MLK assassinations and present a plan for their full and complete release within 45 days. "We have spent years seeking information on the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, Reverend King, and other government secrets without success," Luna told Fox News Digital. "It is time to give Americans the answers they deserve."

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigations covering the dark truths behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Drugs were the elephant in the room during the failed U.S. war in Afghanistan. Because opium was such a large part of the poor and war-torn country's economy, the fighting between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan republic often looked more like a turf war between rival narco gangs, with the U.S. military protecting some opium fields and bombing others. Afghan farmers were happy to take USAID's help while continuing to grow opium. For example, opium cultivation increased by 119 percent in the Kandahar Food Zone between 2013 and 2015, after USAID helped expand the irrigation systems there. A USAID-funded charity in Kenya allegedly covered up rampant sex abuse of children, and USAID funded a second charity in the Central African Republic a month after a major sex abuse scandal broke. The Children of God Relief Institute, which ran an orphanage for Kenyan children affected by AIDS and similar projects, received high praise from the U.S. government. From 2013 onward, USAID gave the institute $29.3 million. In 2021, a whistleblower told USAID that the charity was harboring a dark secret. USAID's inspector general soon determined that Children of God Relief Institute officials "knew or should have known of multiple incidents" of child sex abuse "but failed to take effective remedial measures to address the abuse." In some cases, the victims were forced to apologize for provoking their own abuse, The Washington Post reports.

Note: Watch our latest video on government waste, where we take a thoughtful look at the current political landscape and explore powerful solutions that have the potential to tackle wasteful spending and restore financial freedom. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there. But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory. There is no new intelligence behind the agency's shift, officials said. John Ratcliffe, the new director of the C.I.A., has long favored the lab leak hypothesis. He has said it is a critical piece of intelligence that needs to be understood and that it has consequences for U.S.-Chinese relations. The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency "on the sidelines" of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Even in the absence of hard intelligence, the lab leak hypothesis has been gaining ground inside spy agencies. But some analysts question the wisdom of shifting a position in absence of new information. Five agencies, including the National Intelligence Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed that natural exposure most likely caused the epidemic. But they said that they had only low-confidence in their assessment. Until now, two agencies, the F.B.I. and Department of Energy, thought a lab leak was more likely. But their theories are different.

Note: For years, the lab leak hypothesis was labeled as "racist," " thoroughly debunked," and "something out of a comic book." If intelligence agencies are just now admitting the lab leak is ‘more likely,' does that mean they were ignoring or covering up evidence–or just waiting for the political winds to shift? Watch our Mindful News Brief on the strong evidence that bioweapons research created COVID-19.

A former CIA operative has revealed the agency pursues people with a certain mental disorder as it makes them the best agents. John Kiriakou, who had a 14-year career as a CIA officer, said ... 'A CIA psychiatrist told me one time that the CIA looks to hire people with sociopathic tendencies–not sociopaths because sociopaths have no consciences,' said Kiriakou, speaking to The Real News Network. A 'sociopath' is someone who lacks empathy, disregards the feelings of others and may manipulate or harm people without remorse, often for their own personal gain. 'Sociopaths are impossible to control,' said Kiriakou. 'They slip through the cracks because they have no conscience and they pass the polygraph very easily because they don't feel guilty. The CIA has admitted that spies have pathological personality features that help them with their espionage efforts, such as a sense of entitlement or a desire for power and control. While employed by the CIA, Kiriakou was involved in critical counterterrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He was involved in the capture of terrorist Abu Zubaydah. However, he refused to be trained in so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques.' Kiriakou has claimed that he never authorized or engaged in these techniques. After leaving the CIA, he appeared on ABC News where he said the CIA waterboarded detainees and labeled the action as torture. The interview led to Kiriakou being arrested in 2012 and charged with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for allegedly illegally disclosing the identity of a covert officer. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Note: Learn more about the rise of the CIA and the dark realities of modern American torture practices in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

In a landmark verdict cheered by human rights defenders around the world, a federal jury in Virginia found a U.S. military contractor liable for the torture of three prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s. The jury ordered CACI Premier Technology to pay each of the three Iraqi plaintiffs $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages, for a total of $42 million. It is the first time that a civilian contractor has been found legally responsible for abusing Abu Ghraib detainees. The lawsuit against CACI–filed in 2008 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of Suhail Al Shimari, Asa'ad Al Zuba'e, and Salah Al-Ejaili–alleged that company officials conspired with U.S. military personnel in subjecting the plaintiffs to torture and other crimes. Dozens of Abu Ghraib detainees died in U.S. custody, some of them as a result of being tortured to death. Abu Ghraib prisoners endured torture ranging from rape and being attacked with dogs to being forced to eat pork and renounce Islam. A separate U.S. Army report concluded that most Abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent, with the Red Cross estimating that between 70-90% of inmates there were wrongfully detained. These include women who were held as bargaining chips to induce suspected militants to surrender. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the prison's commanding officer, was demoted. No other high-ranking military officer faced accountability for the abuse.

Note: Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.

On Friday, March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a Manhattan federal court. Extradited to the United States shortly after completing his second presidential term in 2022, the 55-year-old Hernández is up against a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in jail. US Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Hernández of having run Honduras as a "narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity". Hernández was until very recently a good chum of successive US administrations, which appointed him a vital ally in the so-called "war on drugs" and flung money at Honduras accordingly. The messianically right-wing leader came to power five years after the 2009 US-facilitated coup d'Ă©tat against Manuel Zelaya. The fabricated pretext for the coup ... was that Zelaya was scheming to remain president of Honduras in violation of the constitutional one-term limit. Later this limit was quickly dispensed with in order to enable the continued reign of Hernández. Post-election protests triggered a characteristically lethal response from Honduran security forces, which didn't stop the US from continuing to fund those very same forces. The CIA's narco-operations have spanned the globe from Pakistan to Laos to Venezuela, while many an international narco-politician has – like Hernández – found at least fleeting favour with the US government.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

In 2016, Flaviu Georgescu was found guilty and sentenced of attempting to traffic weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, an insurgent group on the U.S. terror list. But when he was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents, he told the officials he was working for the CIA. The majority of defendants in post-9/11 terrorist cases had no actual ties to terrorism or to terrorist organizations. Many were caught in FBI stings, where informants posed as terrorists often crossing the line into encouraging and even facilitating crimes that would otherwise not have occurred. As the war on terror has waned, the DOJ has shifted its focus, with its agencies – including the DEA – now targeting people for similar sting operations on allegations of involvement in so-called "narcoterrorism." The FBI ... would identify someone who was espousing views that might be sympathetic to those organizations, or even an attack, and they would encourage that person to get involved. Some of the targets of investigations were very financially desperate. The FBI, through the informant, would dangle the opportunity to make money. In those cases, the vast majority of people have no connections to real terrorist groups, they have no access to weapons. And the FBI provides everything. A bomb, grenades, automatic rifles ... guns that would be very difficult to obtain, even by sophisticated criminals. When the defendant goes about to use the weapon, they're arrested, and they're charged, and announced to the public as a terrorist who was about to get involved in this very deadly plot were it not foiled by the FBI. The Intercept [documents] these cases through Trial and Terror. We've seen hundreds of these cases involving sting operations since 9/11. What this has done ... in the post-9/11 era, was really exaggerate the threat of terrorism from within Muslim communities in the United States. And, on the news, it really made the public think that the threat of terrorism within the United States from these communities was much, much greater than it really was.

Note: The FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of harming anyone. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers", a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead "they try to manage the drug trade". "It's like pest control companies," Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, [said]. "If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job." Under the Merida Initiative, the US Congress has approved more than $1.4bn in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges. "It's true, they want to control it," a mid-level official with ... Mexico's equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA's policing of the drug trade. Jesús Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution. "Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of [Jesus Zambada's] father, Ismael Zambada and ‘Chapo' Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs into the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels," Zambada's lawyers wrote as part of his defence. "Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel."

Note:The US helped arm and finance the Sinaloa cartel for decades, which was barely covered in the American media. For more, read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs.

The United States prepared a rebel force to join the offensive that overthrew the regime of Bashar al-Assad, fighters have claimed. British and American-trained fighters in the Revolutionary Commando Army (RCA), a group aligned against Islamic State, were told "this is your moment" in a briefing by US Special Forces before Assad was ousted. The RCA revealed it had been told to scale-up its forces and "be ready" for an attack that could lead to the end of the Assad regime. Having worked with the RCA to dismantle the Islamic State's Syrian caliphate, the US still pays its fighters a salary to prevent the terror group's resurgence. Syria's 13-year civil war ... threw up a bewildering array of militias and alliances, most of them backed by foreign powers. It would therefore be only one of many ironies if the US has been in an effective alliance with a group like HTS, which was al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria until it broke away in 2017. It is equally ironic that rebel factions supported by the US are co-operating with those backed by Turkey in places like Palmyra, while fighting against each other elsewhere in the country. While Turkey opposed the US-supported Kurds in Syria, it was in full agreement about the threat posed by Isis. In recent days, the US has carried out dozens of air strikes on Isis positions even as its Kurdish allies have come under sustained attack from Syrian factions supported by Turkey.

Note: Watch former CIA director John Brennan suggest that the Syrian rebels we previously supported now pose more of a threat to Syrians and American interests. As recently as 2016, Syrian militias armed by the Pentagon were fighting with Syrian militias armed by the CIA. Learn more about war failures and lies in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Even before 9/11, as the US hunted for terrorists, the CIA launched "extraordinary rendition"–an ingenious scheme to interrogate "high-value" suspects outside the country and thus avoid US laws on torture. The first suspects were taken to Egypt as early as in the mid-1990s and the program continued until 2007. How many did the CIA render? A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report noted that exact numbers can't be known. But according to a ... Washington Post article, "thousands were arrested and held with US assistance in countries known for brutal treatment of prisoners." In 2004, former CIA agent Robert Baer [said] that "conceptually, the practice is a rendition to torture. If you wanted a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear, Egypt." Survivors [of Syria's Sednaya military prison] tell horrific tales: they were sodomized with swords, suspended in shackles from cages, beaten with iron rods, kept naked in freezing cells the size of coffins, forced to kill cellmates and starved. Some say their genitals were subject to electric shocks. Besides Syria, the CIA dispatched suspects to Egypt, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, Poland, Thailand and Romania. The Senate report stated that "the CIA provided millions of dollars in cash payments to foreign government officials to host secret CIA detention sites."

Note: Most of the Senate Torture Report remains classified. Read the "10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture." Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer claimed in an interview released Monday the agency has tried to downplay "anomalous health incidents" endured by government officials. The whistleblower, going by the pseudonym "Alice," told former CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge she was attacked by an "energy weapon" in 2021, prior to her medically retiring from the agency. She said that while serving in Africa, she heard a "weird noise" in her home one night before then experiencing what felt like "the reverb from a speaker." "I think that there are probably multiple weapons, I think there are weapons that can be fit in backpacks, ones that can be fit in the trunks of cars, ones that can be planted at a position with line of sight to people from across the street," she said. Alice told Herridge she experienced an "anomalous health incident (AHI)", alleging she has since suffered vertigo, cognitive difficulties and ear and head pressure. AHIs, not officially recognized by the medical community, were first reported by federal employees serving overseas in 2016. Alice claimed the CIA has continually "gaslight[ed]" her and other former officers, seeking to make them "question" their AHIs. She told Herridge she watches the agency continue to "deny people's humanity and their injuries." Herridge reported that multiple sources told her CIA Director William Burns privately said in 2021 he believed Russia was behind some of the attacks.

Note: Learn more about non-lethal weapons 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.

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.

The connection between the CIA and the Finders cult ... would constitute not simply an outlandish and perhaps criminal group purported to be abusing and trafficking children, but one sanctioned by the most powerful government on earth. U.S. Customs documents penned by Special Agent Ramon Martinez [reports that] the CIA stepped in to cover up the criminal activity of the Finders in the initial 1987 investigation. This would link the CIA with evidence of organized child trafficking, child abuse and allegations of ritual abuse and mind control. Martinez reportedly learned of this development from Sgt. Stitcher, the MPD detective who wrote reports indicative of CIA involvement with the Finders. Stitcher passed away from septic shock prior to the 1993 DOJ inquiry into allegations of a CIA coverup of the original investigation. Martinez wrote of his attempts to review evidence collected at Finders properties in Washington, D.C. during the initial 1987 investigation: "[I] attempted to access the evidence collected for a period of approximately two months. I was unsuccessful ... and was informed by Sergeant Stitcher (now deceased) that the Finders was a CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) front gone bad, and that the evidence was unavailable." The leader of the Finders cult was Marion G. Pettie, a former Air Force master sergeant who admitted that his son worked for CIA-front Air America. Former Nebraska State Senator John Decamp, author of "The Franklin Coverup," claimed that the Finders were associated with the CIA and that they were abusing children by means of indoctrination. "I was getting information anonymously," [he said]. "I found out later that it came from CIA people who were concerned. There is enough documentation to show that children, at a fairly tender age, were being used for sexual purposes, to compromise people, and for the "mind control" nonsense."

Note: Read more about the Finders. The CIA's Air America was also involved in illegal drug smuggling operations. In fact, the CIA's inspector general implicated the company in cocaine trafficking. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and mind control.

In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them "double, triple and quadruple" doses of LSD for 77 straight days. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing that they were part of the CIA's highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds – a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick. Detrick, still thriving today as the army's principal base for biological research ... was for years the literal nerve center of the CIA's hidden chemical and mind-control empire. [CIA chemist Sidney] Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electro-shock or sensory deprivation. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky. In Europe and East Asia, Gottlieb's victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. "The conclusion from all these activities," [Gottlieb] admitted, "was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way." Gottlieb was the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century – unless there was someone else who conducted brutal experiments across three continents and had a license to kill issued by the U.S. government.

Note: Read more about the troubling experiments of Sidney Gottlieb. Much remains unknown about the 150+ subprograms sponsored by MUKUltra. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and mind control.

The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu's arrival to office as Prime Minister. In [Netanyahu's] 1996 book Fighting Terrorism, Israel would not fight the terrorists; it would fight the states that support the terrorists. More accurately, it would get the US to do Israel's fighting for it. This was confirmed to General Wesley Clark after 9/11. He was told ... that "we're going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years–we're going to start with Iraq, and then we're going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran." Since 2011, the Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria's oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian people into misery. The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when Barack Obama covertly tasked the CIA with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in Operation Timber Sycamore. That effort finally came to "fruition" this week, after more than 300,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011. The U.S. has by now led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation during 2010's), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia's invasion in 2006). A prospective U.S. war with Iran, ardently sought by Israel, is still pending. Strange as it might seem, the CIA has repeatedly backed Islamist Jihadists to fight these wars, and jihadists have just toppled the Syrian regime. The CIA, after all, helped to create al-Qaeda in the first place by training, arming, and financing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan from the late 1970s onward.

Note: Remember when Syrian militias armed by the Pentagon fought with Syrian militias armed by the CIA? Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on 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.

Even for those familiar with parts of the stories about women who were deceived into intimate relationships with undercover police officers, the evidence that has emerged in recent weeks has been shocking. The litany of destructive behaviour either carried out by, or caused by, officers deployed to spy on campaigners, who were mostly active in leftwing causes, is being laid bare as never before: self-harm, heroin use, unprotected sex leading to emergency contraception, coercive control and the sudden abandonment of female partners and children. On Tuesday, Belinda Harvey told the public inquiry how she was manipulated by Bob Lambert, who tricked at least three other women into relationships as well. Next week, Mr Lambert will face questions about who authorised the tactic of targeting and seducing young, female activists – and why he employed it so many times. Last month, another undercover officer testified that Mr Lambert had "bragged" about fathering a child. In their jointly authored book, Deep Deception, five women described how they found out that they had been systematically lied to by former partners – in some cases after decades of confusion and self-doubt. Mr Lambert stands out not only for the number of secret relationships he initiated and his alleged involvement in an arson plot, but also because his five-year deployment as a police spy in the 1980s was treated as a triumph. He was given a commendation and went on to run covert operations.

Note: Read more about the dozens of activists tricked into having romantic relationships with undercover police. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption.

The existence of a squad of police officers sent deep undercover in political groups was so top secret that many of the UK's most senior officers were completely oblivious until they began reading reports in the Guardian 10 years ago. When Lisa Jones ... and her friends established that [her boyfriend Mark] Kennedy was a police officer who had been spying on climate change activists, the story [collapsed] a major trial ... quashing the convictions of environmental activists who had been prosecuted for conspiring to shut down one of the UK's biggest power stations. The police spies initially belonged to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which was created to control the restive protests of the late 1960s, including those opposed to the war in Vietnam, but continued to monitor protest groups for a further four decades. Their deployments typically lasted four to five years, with officers living alongside political campaigners, forming deep bonds of friendship, or romantic liaisons, with their targets. At least three of the police spies fathered children with women they met while undercover. Over more than four decades, at least 139 police officers were given fake identities to closely monitor the inner workings of more than 1,000 political groups. These police spies were tasked with gathering intelligence that could be used to disrupt and monitor political groups. Their targets included the black power movement, the anti-apartheid campaign, leftwing groups, and anarchists. Many ... were instructed by their superiors to adopt the identities of dead children to lend credibility to their aliases – with some, in a macabre ritual, even visiting the graves of the deceased children whose identities they were using. One of the most notorious police spies, Bob Lambert, who adopted the identity of a seven–year-old boy who had died of a congenital heart defect in 1959.

Note: Read more about the dozens of activists tricked into having romantic relationships with undercover police. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption.

Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) was more than a leader – he was a force, a relentless advocate who confronted an entrenched culture of injustice with courage and strength. Malcolm X set the stage for me and many others who were called to continue the fight against injustice. His fight was cut short by a horrific assassination carried out in front of his wife and children, followed by a cover-up that his family believes involved some of the most highly regarded agencies in our country at the time. On Nov. 15, I joined some of our nation's foremost attorneys in filing a lawsuit on behalf of the Shabazz family, seeking to uncover the truth surrounding Malcolm's assassination on Feb. 21, 1965, in New York City. Through this lawsuit, we plan to prove in court the accusation that government agencies, including the FBI, the CIA and the New York Police Department, actively facilitated and then covered up Malcolm X's assassination through several coordinated actions. We believe the FBI and the NYPD engaged in a cover-up after the assassination, concealing key documents, manipulating witness testimony and wrongfully prosecuting innocent men to divert attention from their own roles in his death. Our case is being brought forward in the wake of a public apology from former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who, in November 2021, acknowledged that ... two of three men who'd been convicted of murdering Malcolm X, hadn't committed the crime.

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

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