Military Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Military Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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The US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States - the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency. Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with "communicating with the enemy", a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death. The documents, some originally classified "Secret/NoForn" - not releasable to non-US nationals - record a probe by the air force's Office of Special Investigations into a cyber systems analyst based in Britain who allegedly expressed support for WikiLeaks and attended pro-Assange demonstrations in London. The suspected offence was "communicating with the enemy, 104-D", an article in the US Uniform Code of Military Justice that prohibits military personnel from "communicating, corresponding or holding intercourse with the enemy". US Vice-President Joe Biden labelled Mr Assange a "high-tech terrorist" in December 2010 and US congressional leaders have called for him to be charged with espionage. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee - both once involved in presidential campaigns - have both urged that Mr Assange be "hunted down". Mr Assange's US attorney, Michael Ratner, said the designation of WikiLeaks as an "enemy" had serious implications for the WikiLeaks publisher if he were to be extradited to the US, including possible military detention.

Note: So revealing top secrets can cause you to be labelled an enemy of the state. Write you political and media representatives to protest this stance. For analysis of this story, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on military corruption, click here.

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed far more people than the United States has acknowledged, have traumatized innocent residents and largely been ineffective, according to a new study released [on September 25]. The study by Stanford Law School and New York University's School of Law calls for a re-evaluation of the practice, saying the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low -- about 2%. In contrast to more conservative U.S. statements, the Stanford/NYU report -- titled "Living Under Drones" -- offers starker figures published by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent organization based at City University in London. Based on interviews with witnesses, victims and experts, the report accuses the CIA of "double-striking" a target, moments after the initial hit, thereby killing first responders. It also highlights harm "beyond death and physical injury," publishing accounts of psychological trauma experienced by people living in Pakistan's tribal northwest region, who it says hear drones hover 24 hours a day. "Before this we were all very happy," the report quotes an anonymous resident as saying. "But after these drones attacks a lot of people are victims and have lost members of their family. A lot of them, they have mental illnesses." People have to live with the fear that a strike could come down on them at any moment of the day or night, leaving behind dead whose "bodies are shattered to pieces," and survivors who must be desperately sped to a hospital.

Note: Visit the Living Under Drones website here. For a Democracy Now! report on the results of this study click here. For more analysis click here and here.

Poor, minority neighborhoods in St. Louis were unwittingly part of Cold War chemical studies. Aerosol was sprayed from blowers installed on rooftops and mounted on vehicles. “The Army claims that they were spraying a quote ‘harmless’ zinc cadmium sulfide,” says Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor, Professor of Sociology. Yet Martino-Taylor points out, cadmium was a known toxin at the time of the spraying in the mid 50’s and mid 60’s. Worse, she says the aerosol was laced with a fluorescent additive – a suspected radiological compound – produced by U.S. Radium, a company linked to the deaths of workers at a watch factory decades before. “The powder was milled to a very, very fine particulate level. This stuff travelled for up to 40 miles. So really all of the city of St. Louis was ultimately inundated by the stuff.” Martino-Taylor says she’s obtained documents from multiple federal agencies showing the government concocted an elaborate story to keep the testing secret. Part of the deception came from false news reports planted by government agencies. “They told local officials and media that they were going to test clouds under which to hide the city in the event of aerial attack. This was against all military guidelines of the day, against all ethical guidelines, against all international codes such as the Nuremberg Code,” she says. The spraying occurred between 1953 and 54 and again from 1963 to 65.

Note: Dr. Martino-Taylor’s comprehensive research on this incident is available here. Read an incredibly well researched timeline with links for verification of the use of humans as guinea pigs in numerous government experiments. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and health.

Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged, a new study by human rights researchers at Stanford University and New York University contends. The report, "Living Under Drones," also concludes that the classified CIA program has ... turned the Pakistani public against U.S. policy in the volatile region. "Real people are suffering real harm" but are largely ignored in government or news media discussions of drone attacks, said James Cavallaro of Stanford, one of the study's authors. Cavallaro said the study was intended to challenge official accounts of the drones as precise instruments of high-tech warfare with few adverse consequences. The study concludes that only about 2% of drone casualties are top militant leaders. The study authors did not estimate overall civilian casualties because of limited data, Cavallaro said. But it cites estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has reported extensively on drone strikes, of 474 to 884 civilian deaths since 2004, including 176 children. In April, Obama's top counter-terrorism advisor, John Brennan, described civilian casualties from drone strikes as "exceedingly rare." The study challenges official versions of three attacks between 2009 and 2011, including a drone strike on March 17, 2011, that killed an estimated 42 people.

Note: Imagine the uproar if another country killed innocent civilians in the US while using drones to kill terrorists in the country. Visit the Living Under Drones website here. For a Democracy Now! report on the results of this study click here. For more analysis click here and here.

At 11:05 on a February night in 1953, a worker employed by the U.S. Army opened a valve on a motorized blower and for five minutes dispersed a mysterious fluffy powder into downtown St. Louis. So began military-sponsored tests in St. Louis that remained secret for four decades and, to this day, raise questions about what the government was up to in the Cold War operation. St. Louis was among several cities where the aerosol testing took place in the 1950s and 1960s with zinc cadmium sulfide, a chemical powder mixed with fluorescent particles so that dispersal patterns could be traced. In 1953 alone, the military conducted 16 tests involving 35 separate releases of zinc cadmium sulfide in St. Louis, many in an area described at the time as "a densely populated slum district." The Army conceded later that the tests were part of a biological weapons program and that St. Louis was chosen because it roughly matched the population and terrain of Russian cities that the United States might attack. Relying heavily on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, [Prof. Lisa] Martino-Taylor identifies connections between participants in the St. Louis testing and scientists who took part in wartime efforts to build the atomic bomb. Noting postwar efforts to test radioactive materials on Americans, she raises suspicions that the St. Louis testing involved not just materials called harmless by the Army but possibly radioactive isotopes. Martino-Taylor found in her research that the aerosol particles were milled so as to be easily absorbed into lungs.

Note: For a follow-up news video on this, click here. Many other examples of secret spraying and other tests using unknowing humans as guinea pigs with links for verification are listed at this link. For reliable evidence of chemtrails endangering public health, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on secret military and intelligence agency experimentation on unwitting civilians, click here.

Rumors are flying in Washington. Were White House staff involved with prostitutes in Colombia? Fox News' Jana Winter reported that a high-ranking Secret Service agent told Fox “we knew very early on that White House staff were involved.” The Pentagon’s report, "AR 15-6 Investigation into Military Misconduct at the 2012 Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia," is very telling. Paragraph B(3) reports that 12 US military members brought prostitutes to their hotel room but paragraph 8, page 2 notes only 11 of the women were verified to be over 18 years old. What happened to the other woman? Was she, in fact, a child and the Pentagon is covering this up as they have covered up the wide-spread use of child porn by senior Pentagon staff, some with top level security clearances, on Pentagon computers? The sub-heading “White House Communications Agency Personal” in the Pentagon’s AR 15-6 report is entirely redacted. Is it possible that the “prostitutes” involved were trafficked children used by White House staff and not Secret Service agents? Has the Secret Service been forced to take the blame and cover up possible child sex abuse by the White House? It is doubtful that DHS’s Inspector General will provide a full report of what really happened in Colombia since President Obama’s administration has gone after whistleblowers and disabled the Inspector General’s as never before seen.

Note: For a suppressed Discovery Channel documentary providing powerful evidence of a child abuse ring that goes to the highest level in government, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on institutional sexual abuse, click here.

Gone are the days of the all-American army hero. These days, the US military is more like a sanctuary for racists, gang members and the chronically unfit. In the relatively halcyon days of the first Gulf war in 1990, the US military blocked the enlistment of felons. It spurned men and women with low IQs or those without a high school diploma. It would either block the enlistment of or kick out neo-Nazis and gang members. It would treat or discharge alcoholics, drug abusers and the mentally ill. No more. Many of the wars' worst atrocities are linked directly to the loosening of enlistment regulations on criminals, racist extremists, and gang members, among others. By 2005, the US had 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq and 19,500 in Afghanistan. But the military wasn't prepared in any way for this kind of extended deployment. The slim forces needed fattening up and what followed constituted a complete re-evaluation of who was qualified to serve. Information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act ... found the number of convicted criminals enlisting in the US military had nearly doubled in two years, from 824 in 2004 to 1,605 in 2006. A total of 4,230 convicted felons were enlisted, including those guilty of rape and murder. On top of this, 43,977 soldiers signed up who had been found guilty of a serious misdemeanour, which includes assault. Another 58,561 had drug-related convictions, but all were handed a gun and sent off to the Middle East. [And] since its inception, the leaders of the white supremacist movement have encouraged their members to enlist. They see it as a way for their followers to receive combat and weapons training, courtesy of the US government.

Note: Extracted from Irregular Army: How The US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, And Criminals To Fight The War On Terror, by Matt Kennard. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on military corruption, click here.

A Navy SEAL's firsthand account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden pulls back the veil on the secret operations conducted almost nightly by elite American forces against terrorist suspects. Former SEAL Matt Bissonnette's account contradicted in key details the account of the raid presented by administration officials in the days after the May 2011 raid in Abbotabad, Pakistan. Bissonnette wrote that the SEALs spotted bin Laden at the top of a darkened hallway and shot him in the head even though they could not tell whether he was armed. Administration officials have described the SEALs shooting bin Laden only after he ducked back into a bedroom because they assumed he might be reaching for a weapon. Bissonnette wrote the book, No Easy Day, under the pseudonym Mark Owen, as one of the men in the room when they killed bin Laden. In [one] scene, a terrified mother clutches her child and a young girl identifies the dead man as Osama bin Laden. The SEAL author says he did "not disclose confidential or sensitive information that would compromise national security in any way."

Note: Isn't it interesting that the SEAL team "spotted bin Laden at the top of a darkened hallway and shot him in the head." If it was a darkened hallway, how did they know it was bin Laden? The articles states "a young girl identifies the dead man as Osama bin Laden." Is that really how they ID'd this guy? And why did they then dump his body into the ocean, so that there could never be definitive proof that the body was indeed bin Laden? So many questions remain. For more evidence bin Laden was not killed by SEALs, click here.

Weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011 to a record high, driven by major sales to Persian Gulf [countries], according to a new study for Congress. Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or nearly 78 percent of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals. The U.S. weapons sales total was an "extraordinary increase" over the $21.4 billion in deals for 2010, the study found, and was the largest single-year sales total in the history of U.S. arms exports. The previous high was in fiscal year 2009, when American weapons sales overseas totaled nearly $31 billion. Increasing tensions with Iran drove a set of Persian Gulf nations -- Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman -- to spend record amounts on weapons. These states do not share a border with Iran, and their purchases focused on warplanes and complex missile defense systems. The agreements with Saudi Arabia included the purchase of 84 advanced F-15 fighters, a variety of ammunition, missiles and logistics support, and upgrades of 70 of the F-15 fighters in the current fleet ... all contributing to a total Saudi weapons deal with the United States of $33.4 billion, according to the study. The United Arab Emirates bought a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, an advanced anti-missile shield that is valued at $3.49 billion, as well as 16 Chinook helicopters for $939 million.

Note: For analyses of this deeply revealing Congressional report on the intense preparations for war on Iran, click here and here. If just 1% of these skyrocketing arms sales were put towards feeding the world, global hunger would vanish in no time.

It was 2007, and [Gwenyth] Todd, then 42, was a top political adviser to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. Previous 5th Fleet commanders had resisted various ploys by Bush administration hawks to threaten the Tehran regime. But in spring 2007, a new commander arrived with an ambitious program to show the Iranians who was boss in the Persian Gulf. Vice Adm. Kevin J. Cosgriff ... was itching to push the Iranians, Todd and other present and former Navy officials say. Cosgriff’s idea, presented in a series of staff meetings, was to sail three “big decks,” as aircraft carriers are known, through the Strait of Hormuz — to put a virtual armada, unannounced, on Iran’s doorstep. No advance notice, even to Saudi Arabia and other gulf allies. Not only that, they said, Cosgriff ordered his staff to keep the State Department in the dark, too. To Todd, it was like something straight out of “Seven Days in May,” the 1964 political thriller about a right-wing U.S. military coup. Todd feared that the Iranians would respond, possibly by launching fast-attack missile boats into the gulf or unleashing Hezbollah on Israel. Then anything could happen: a collision, a jittery exchange of gunfire — bad enough on its own, but also an incident that Washington hawks could seize on to justify an all-out response on Iran. Preposterous? It had happened before, off North Vietnam in 1964. In the Tonkin Gulf incident, a Navy captain claimed a communist attack on his ship. President Lyndon Johnson swiftly ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, touching off a wider war that turned the country upside down and left more than 58,000 U.S. servicemen dead.

Note: Todd eventually was stripped of her career under most unusual circumstances. This entire article is most intriguing and informative about the inner workings of the military. For more on this, click here.

The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Yet ... this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government. Attacking rescuers (and arguably worse, bombing funerals of America's drone victims) is now a tactic routinely used by the US in Pakistan. In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that "the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals." Specifically: "at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims." The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings ... Christof Heyns, said that if "there have been secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping (the injured) after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime." There is no doubt that there have been. The frequency with which the US uses this tactic is reflected by this December 2011 report ... on the drone killing of 16-year-old Tariq Khan and his 12-year-old cousin Waheed, just days after the older boy attended a meeting to protest US drones: "[Witnesses] did not provide pictures of the missile strike scene. Virtually none exist, since drones often target people who show up at the scene."

Note: Drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets and reportedly create more terrorists than they kill. Casualties of war whose identities are unknown are frequently mis-reported to be "militants". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

The shooter behind the deadly massacre at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin [on August 5, 2012] has been identified as 40-year-old Wade Michael Page. Page previously served in the U.S. military, but was no longer on active duty. Page enlisted in the Army in April 1992 and was given a less-than-honorable discharge in October 1998. He was last stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C., serving in the psychological operations unit. Authorities said Page strode into the temple carrying a 9mm handgun and multiple magazines of ammunition and opened fire without saying a word. When the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee ended, six victims ranging in age from 39 to 84 years old lay dead. Three others were critically wounded. The suspect was shot and killed by police. Page joined the military in Milwaukee in 1992 and was a repairman for the Hawk missile system before switching jobs to become one of the Army’s psychological operations specialists assigned to a battalion at Fort Bragg, N.C. As a psyops specialist, Page would have trained to host public meetings between locals and American forces, use leaflet campaigns in a conflict zone or use loudspeakers to communicate with enemy soldiers. He never deployed overseas while serving in that role, Pentagon spokesman George Wright said. The FBI was leading the investigation because the shooting was considered domestic terrorism, or an attack that originated inside the U.S. The agency said it had no reason to believe anyone other than Page was involved. The shooting also came two weeks after a gunman killed 12 people at movie theater in Colorado.

Note: For more on US military and intelligence agency mind control programs and the creation of assassins ("Manchurian Candidates"), click here.

Bolstered by eyewitness accounts and the Internet, the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York 10 years ago spawned a slew of sinister conspiracy theories, most notably the belief that a missile from a U.S. Navy ship was responsible. So prevalent were these theories that the term "Pierre Salinger Syndrome" -- the belief that everything on the Internet is true -- entered the lexicon. Some witness accounts seemed to support the missile theory. It quickly became a hot topic on the young but quickly growing Internet. It might have stayed simply an Internet conspiracy had it not been for Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy's press secretary who had worked as a network news correspondent for a time. Three months after the TWA tragedy, while working as a freelance public relations director, he claimed to have verified the friendly fire cover-up. "It's a document I got about five weeks ago -- came from ... an intelligence agent of France. He had been given this document from an American Secret Service agent based in France," Salinger said at the time. "He had been doing an inquiry and had some contacts with the U.S. Navy." Salinger took to the news airwaves, including CNN, touting his theory. But as baseless as it sounded, Salinger could not be ignored. His accusations gave conspiracy theorists a voice of distinction and credibility.

Note: For powerful evidence from an Emmy-award winning journalist that this investigation was manipulated, click here. To watch the powerful documentary Shadows of Liberty on major media manipulation, including that of TWA flight 800 (minute 14) at this link.

A U.N. investigator has called on the Obama administration to justify its policy of assassinating rather than capturing al Qaeda or Taliban suspects, increasingly with the use of unmanned drone aircraft that also take civilian lives. Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, urged Washington to clarify the basis under international law of the policy, in a report issued overnight to the United Nations Human Rights Council. The U.S. military has conducted drone attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, in addition to conventional raids and air strikes, according to Heyns, a South African jurist serving in the independent post. Citing figures from the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, he said U.S. drone strikes killed at least 957 people in Pakistan in 2010 alone. Thousands have been killed in 300 drone strikes there since 2004, 20 percent of whom are believed to be civilians." Although figures vary widely with regard to drone attack estimates, all studies concur on one important point: there has been a dramatic increase in their use over the past three years," Heyns said. Human rights law requires that every effort be made to arrest a suspect, in line with the "principles of necessity and proportionality on the use of force", the investigator said.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the warcrimes committed by the US military, click here.

Most Americans have gotten used to regular news reports about military and CIA drones attacking terrorist suspects – including US citizens – in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere abroad. But picture thousands of drone aircraft buzzing around the United States. By some government estimates, as many as 30,000 drones could be part of intelligence gathering and law enforcement here in the United States within the next ten years. Operated by agencies down to the local level, this would be in addition to the 110 current and planned drone activity sites run by the military services in 39 states, reported this week by the Federation of American Scientists, a non-government research project. Civil libertarians warn that “unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life,” as the American Civil Liberties Union put it in a report last December. “The technology is quickly becoming cheaper and more powerful, interest in deploying drones among police departments is increasing, and our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values,” reported the ACLU. “In short, all the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life.”

Note: For deeper analysis of the threats posed to American citizens by military and police drones in the skies, click here. For information on a federal recent law compelling the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to fly in US skies, click here. For more information on the use of drones by police in the US, click here. For lots more from reliable sources on surveillance in the US, click here.

Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint. It's war in the shadows, with the U.S. public largely in the dark. The high-tech warfare allows Obama to target what the administration sees as the greatest threats to U.S. security, without the cost and liabilities of sending a swarm of ground troops to capture territory; some of them almost certainly would come home maimed or dead. But it also raises questions about accountability and the implications for international norms regarding the use of force outside of traditional armed conflict. "Congressional oversight of these operations appears to be cursory and insufficient," said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group. "It is Congress' responsibility to declare war under the Constitution, but instead it appears to have adopted a largely passive role while the executive takes the initiative in war fighting," Aftergood said in an interview. That's partly because lawmakers relinquished their authority by passing a law just after the Sept. 11 [attacks]. In this shroud of secrecy, leaks to the news media of classified details about certain covert operations have led to charges that the White House orchestrated the revelations to bolster Obama's national security credentials and thereby improve his re-election chances.

Note: For deeper analysis of the threats posed to American citizens by military and police drones in the skies, click here. For information on a federal recent law compelling the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to fly in US skies, click here. For more information on the use of drones by police in the US, click here. For lots more from reliable sources on surveillance in the US, click here.

The U.S. Air Force's robotic X-37B space plane finally returned to Earth Saturday (June 16), wrapping up a mysterious mission that lasted more than year in orbit. The unmanned X-37B spacecraft, also known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2 (OTV-2), glided back to Earth on autopilot, touching down at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base at 5:48 a.m. PDT. The landing brought to an end the X-37B program's second-ever spaceflight, a mission that lasted more than 15 months with objectives that remain shrouded in secrecy. The X-37B stayed in orbit for 469 days this time, more than doubling the 225 days its sister ship, OTV-1, spent in space last year on the program's maiden flight. Officials at Vandenberg said the spacecraft conducted "on-orbit experiments" during its mission. The space plane was designed to stay aloft for 270 days, but the Air Force kept it flying well beyond that milestone. Exactly what the spacecraft, which is built by Boeing's Phantom Works division, was doing up there for so long is a secret. The details of the X-37B's mission ... are classified, as is its payload. This secrecy has led to some speculation, especially online and abroad, that the X-37B could be a space weapon of some sort — perhaps a sophisticated satellite-killer. Some experts also suspect that the vehicle may be an orbital spy platform.

Note: For lots more on government secrecy from reliable sources, click here.

A new documentary by director Kirby Dick, "The Invisible War," about systemic rape of women in the military and the retaliations and coverups victims face, has won awards in many film festivals, and recently even triggered congressional response. The examples of what happens to women soldiers who are raped in the military are stunning, both in the violence that these often young women face, and in the viciousness they encounter after attacks. The level of sex assault in the military [is] staggering. There is so much of this going on in the US military that women soldiers' advocacy groups have created a new term for it: military sexual trauma or MST. Last year, there were 3,158 cases of sexual assault reported within the military. The Service Women's Action Network notes that rape is always under-reported, and that a military context offers additional hurdles to rape victims: the Department of Defense, they point out, estimates that these numbers are misleading because fewer than 14% of survivors report an assault. The DoD estimates that in 2010 alone, over 19,000 sexual assaults occurred in the military. "Prosecution rates for sexual predators are astoundingly low," they note. In 2011, "officials received 3,192 sexual assault reports. But only 1,518 of those reports led to referrals for possible disciplinary action, and only 191 military members were convicted at courts martial."

Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on the prevalence of rape in the US military and other institutional settings, click here.

New evidence shows that the September 11th activities of former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were falsely reported by official sources. The 20-member 9/11 Consensus Panel analyzed evidence from press reports, FOIA requests, and archived 9/11 Commission file documents to produce eight new studies, released today. The international panel also [determined] that four massive aerial practice exercises traditionally held in October were in full operation on 9/11. The largest, Global Guardian, held annually by NORAD and the U.S. Strategic and Space Commands, had originally been scheduled for October 22-31 but was moved, along with Vigilant Guardian, to early September. Although senior officials claimed no one could have predicted [the use of] hijacked planes as weapons, the military had been practicing similar exercises on 9/11 itself -- and for years before it. Official sources claimed neither Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs of Staff Acting Chairman General Richard Myers (filling in for General Hugh Shelton), nor war-room chief General Montague Winfield were available to take command until well after the Pentagon was struck about 9:37. Yet emerging documents and memoirs show that top leaders were engaged earlier -- and later discussed a shootdown of [United Airlines] Flight 93 before debris was scattered widely around its alleged Shanksville, Pennsylvania crash site. Most intriguing is the mystery of who was running the Pentagon's war-room during the critical early hours.

Note: To examine the evidence presented by the 9/11 Consensus Panel which refutes the questionable accounts of the whereabouts and activities of key political and military leaders provided by The 9/11 Commission Report, as well as the best evidence concerning other claims of the official story of 9/11, click here.

Since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a large and steady rise in the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among our troops. One recent study of ... Americans who served in those countries found that the rates of the disorder jumped to 22 percent in 2008 from just 0.2 percent in 2002. [A] factor that might be playing a role in the increasing rates of the disorder ... has escaped attention: the military’s use of stimulant medications, like Ritalin and Adderall, in our troops. Annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 - more than a fivefold increase. The number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000. The military almost certainly uses the stimulants to help fatigued and sleep-deprived troops stay alert. By causing the direct release of norepinephrine — a close chemical relative of adrenaline — in the brain, stimulants facilitate memory formation. Not surprisingly, emotionally arousing experiences — both positive and negative — also cause a surge of norepinephrine, which helps to create vivid, long-lasting memories. That’s why we tend to remember events that stir our feelings and learn best when we are a little anxious. Since PTSD is basically a pathological form of learning known as fear conditioning, stimulants could plausibly increase the risk of getting the disorder. It is an open question whether the use of stimulants in combat does more good than harm.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in drug companies and in the military.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.