Military Corruption News Articles

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Here’s what passes for funny in a room packed full of weapons-industry executives and lobbyists: When Vice Adm. Joseph Rixey — the man in charge of the Pentagon agency that administers foreign arms sales — said “I know you don’t go after human rights violators for potential customers.” The line produced chuckles in the room. Rixey was the guest of honor at a reception Wednesday hosted by the Senate Aerospace Caucus, a group of more than a dozen senators who “work to ensure a strong, secure, and competitive American aerospace sector.” The event ... was cohosted by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), the lobbying group for weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Rixey is the director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), the Pentagon agency charged with overseeing the Pentagon’s relations with the militaries of U.S. allies. Over the past year, the DSCA has approved upwards of $47 billion in such contracts, for weapons transfers to countries like Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. In his own remarks, Rixey lauded the relationship between the DSCA and industry. “We at DSCA are thankful that we have the support of our counterparts within the United States government and with defense industries,” he said. Rixey was joined by caucus co-chairs Sens. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., who praised the industry for its role in overseas weapons sales on both foreign policy and economic grounds.

Note: The Pentagon is the only segment of US government that doesn't balance its books, and Pentagon auditors are heavily pressured to look the other way on blatant corruption. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

By the time I started working at the Defense Department in the early years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon's 17.5 miles of corridors had sprouted dozens of shops and restaurants catering to the building's 23,000 employees. And, over time, the U.S. military has itself come to offer a similar one-stop shopping experience to the nation's top policymakers. As retired Army Lt. Gen. Dave Barno once put it to me, the relentlessly expanding U.S. military has become "a Super Walmart with everything under one roof" - and two successive presidential administrations have been eager consumers. The military's transformation into the world's biggest one-stop shopping outfit is ... at once the product and the driver of seismic changes in how we think about war, with consequent challenges both to our laws and to the military itself. We've gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of "war," thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks. But viewing more and more threats as "war" brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion - and its reduced protections for basic rights. Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.

Note: As the Tribune has strangely removed this article, here's an alternate link. Another cutting article shows that according to the latest report on public relations spending from the Government Accountability Office, the US government PR apparatus has spent over $1 billion annually — $626 million of which the Pentagon allots to employ a massive propaganda army. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

It was Soviet intervention, not the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that caused Japan to surrender. Most Americans cling to the myth that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 [forced] Japan's surrender without a U.S. invasion. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. As the National Museum of the U.S. Navy makes clear, the atomic bombs ... "made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria ... changed their minds." As shocking as this may be to Americans today, it was well known to military leaders at the time. In fact, seven of America's eight five-star officers in 1945 said that the bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible or both. Following the defeat at Saipan in July 1944, many Japanese leaders realized the war could not be won militarily. Telegrams going back and forth between Japanese officials in Tokyo and Moscow made it clear that the Japanese were seeking an honorable way to end what they had started. The U.S. had been firebombing and wiping out Japanese cities since early March. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama. Japanese leaders accepted that the U.S. could and would wipe out Japan's cities. It didn't make a big difference whether this was one plane and one bomb or hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs. The atomic bombs contributed next to nothing to U.S. victory, but they did slaughter hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Note: Read a detailed description of how the New York Times suppressed and skewed the facts about the effects of the atomic bomb in order to forward the war-profiteering agenda. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about government corruption and the manipulation of public opinion.

The scariest part of Emily Vorland’s relatively uneventful 2009 deployment to Iraq was that the enemy wore Army green. When a higher-ranking male officer sexually harassed her, her commander told Vorland to file a formal complaint. So she did. The investigation ... concluded she had “acted inappropriately,” engaged in consensual sex and was lying about it. A lesbian, she was concerned that her best defense was one that would end her military career. The Army [discharged her] for “unacceptable conduct.” Even as the military scrambles under congressional pressure to prevent future cases of sexual abuse, past victims are suffering for having stood up for themselves. Thousands of victims have been pushed out of the service with less-than-honorable discharges, which can leave them with no or reduced benefits, poor job prospects and a lifetime of stigma. Worse, when they try to rectify their situation, as Vorland did, fewer than 10% of them succeed, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch estimates. “Military personnel who report a sexual assault frequently find that their military career is the biggest casualty,” the group says in a new report. 163 veterans [were] ousted from the military between 1966 and 2015 after complaining about sexual abuse, ranging from harassment to rape. “Our interviews suggest that all too often superior officers choose to expeditiously discharge sexual-assault victims rather than support their recovery and help them keep their position,” the study says.

Note: A 2015 Associated Press article states that: "the true scope of sex-related violence in the military communities is vastly underreported." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Sexual violence in war “is as destructive as any bomb or bullet”, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said a couple of years ago. As he was uttering these words, the UN’s own peacekeepers were themselves carrying out the most appalling abuse. In 2014, when Mr Ban was speaking out on behalf of the victims, three girls in the Central African Republic have alleged they were tied up and forced to have sex with a dog by a French military commander. There were no fewer than 99 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by the “blue helmets” – as UN military personnel are nicknamed – last year, and there have been 25 new claims this year. This isn’t the first time such claims have surfaced about the conduct of UN peacekeepers. There was an alleged paedophile ring in the Democratic Republic of Congo, UN police officers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and trafficking young women from Eastern Europe, and Pakistani peacekeepers were found guilty of sexual abuse in Haiti. There’s a track record going back decades. In January, an independent review into the abuses accused the UN of failing to respond to allegations of child abuse against the peacekeepers. The UN’s response? Last month, the Security Council passed its first ever resolution to tackle sexual abuse by its peacekeepers. Military or police units would be repatriated “where there is credible evidence of widespread or systemic sexual exploitation and abuse”. Is that really the best the UN can do?

Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team titled "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this sad subject in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Two senior intelligence analysts at U.S. Central Command say the military has forced them out of their jobs because of their skeptical reporting on U.S.-backed rebel groups in Syria. It’s the first known instance of possible reprisals against CENTCOM personnel after analysts accused their bosses of manipulating intelligence reports about the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in order to paint a rosier picture of progress in the war. One of the analysts alleging reprisals is the top analyst in charge of Syria issues at CENTCOM. He and a colleague doubted rebels’ capabilities and their commitment to U.S. objectives in the region. [Their] views put them at odds with military brass, who last year had predicted that a so-called moderate opposition would make up a 15,000-man ground force to take on ISIS. An initial $500 million program to train and arm those fighters failed spectacularly. And until the very end, Pentagon leaders claimed the operation was more or less on track. The Pentagon inspector general and a congressional task force are investigating allegations of doctored intelligence reports about ISIS. More than 50 CENTCOM analysts have said that senior officials gave more scrutiny and pushback on reports that suggested U.S. efforts to destroy ISIS weren’t progressing. The Defense Department inspector general is also looking into ... "whether there was any falsification, distortion, delay, suppression, or improper modification of intelligence information.”

Note: Explore powerful evidence that ISIS is aided and was possibly even created by covert US support. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

The United States spent more than $7 billion in the past 14 years to fight the runaway poppy production that has made Afghan opium the world’s biggest brand. Tens of billions more went to governance programs to stem corruption and train a credible police force. But ... more than ever, Afghan government officials have become directly involved in the opium trade. Some of the most important regional police and security commanders, including allies of American military and intelligence officials, are closely identified with the opium trade. Farmers said they paid [government officials] about $40 for each acre of poppies under cultivation. In 2015, that meant nearly $3 million in payments from the district of Garmsir alone. Garmsir is just one of several districts in ... the heart of poppy country. By the most basic metric, the international effort to curb poppy production in Afghanistan has failed. More opium was cultivated in 2014, the last year of the NATO combat mission, than in any other year since the United Nations began keeping records in 2002. Government complicity in the opium trade is not new. Taxation on a districtwide level in the main opium-growing centers, however, has been less common. Most who spoke about it did so on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. Farmers in Nad Ali said tax collection depended on ... one’s relationship with the local police commander. In some cases, the teams sent by the government to eradicate crops collected the funds. In others, it was the local or national police.

Note: For solid evidence that rogue elements of the US government are making big profits from opium sales, read the riveting stories of two award-winning journalists. For more, read how US counternarcotics efforts have contributed to the Afghan opium boom.

The Overseas Contingency Operations budget ... was known from 2001 to 2009 as “the supplemental” and is now considered a de facto slush fund. It began as the war budget President George W. Bush needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan without having to go back to Congress every time the Defense Department needed to modify its main half-trillion-dollar budget. The Pentagon does not have to release details publicly on how specifically this money will be spent. As a result, [the OCO] has ballooned into an ambiguous part of the budget to which government financiers increasingly turn to pay for other, at times unrelated, costs. This year the proposed budget ... grew by $200 million despite thousands fewer combat troops in Afghanistan and, technically, none in Iraq. Janine Davidson, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to become undersecretary of the Navy, wrote last year about the perils of letting this budget remain unchecked. Adams believes the increased reliance on this budget “fractures budget discipline” for the Defense Department and demonstrates that normal budget process “is completely broken.” It leaves the Defense Department all the money it needs for operations and paying its bills, and then some. “When you’ve done that, you’ve basically said to all the people who run the Pentagon, ‘You’re awash with money. Priority-setting is no longer necessary.’”

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

Billions of dollars spent by the U.S. government in Afghanistan over the past decade has failed to make the country safer or substantially improve its economic prospects, according to a new report. The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction [SIGAR] says its investigations led to the imprisonment of two U.S. Army sergeants who were found guilty of accepting illegal bribes. SIGAR’s report also points out that between October and December 2015, “Afghanistan proved even more dangerous than it was a year ago” and that the Taliban now controls more territory, around 30 percent, than at any time since 2001. The U.S. has spent $113.1 billion funding Afghanistan’s reconstruction since 2002, including $8.4 billion for counter-narcotics efforts. Despite that enormous sum ... Afghanistan has the equivalent of 400,000 football fields of opium under cultivation. SIGAR’s quarterly report follows a series of damning discoveries about Department of Defense spending in Afghanistan. In December, SIGAR released a report that said the DOD spent $150 million on private homes ... for between five and 10 U.S. government employees. Afghanistan is also perceived as one of the most corrupt countries in the world: Transparency International ranks Afghanistan as 166th out of 168 countries.

Note: The same thing could be said about Iraq. The US has spent several trillion dollars pursuing a policy of endless war since 9/11. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

America's only top-secret airline may be hiring again. Janet Airlines, which flies from from Las Vegas to a number of government sites, is reportedly looking for a pilot for its Boeing 737 aircraft. Janet - an acronym which some claim stands for "Just Another Non-Existent Terminal" - is a shuttle service that is operated by defense contractor AECOM and the U.S. Air Force, making daily flights from a private, unmarked (and heavily guarded) terminal at McCarran International Airport to military bases including the restricted Tonopah Test Range, aircraft manufacturing site Plant 42 and a site at Groom Lake, Nevada which ... is more commonly known as Area 51. The Tactical Air Network discovered a job posting on AECOM's website for a First Officer, and the contractor is currently accepting applications from candidates with a ... Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) in order to qualify for Top Secret security clearance. Janet's fleet currently includes white 737-600 aircraft, which are remarkable for how completely unremarkable they are, with no logos and no markings other than a red stripe and a registration number. The Janet jets are the narrow visible bandwidth of a much broader spectrum of 'black world' places and projects. At its core, Janet Airlines is the heart of an entire clandestine defense ecosystem that is spread across the deserts of the American southwest, pumping talent and brain power to some of the most advanced technologies mankind has ever developed.

Note: For more on this secret airline, see this webpage. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing secrecy news articles from reliable major media sources.

The Navy is poised to promote the admiral in charge of its elite SEAL teams and other commando units even though Pentagon investigators determined that he illegally retaliated against staff members who he mistakenly suspected were whistleblowers. Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was investigated five times by the Defense Department’s inspector general after subordinates complained that he had wrongly fired, demoted or punished them during a vengeful but fruitless hunt for the person who had anonymously reported him for a minor travel-policy infraction. After conducting separate, years-long investigations that involved more than 100 witnesses and 300,000 pages of e-mails, the inspector general upheld complaints from three of the five staff members. In each of those cases, it recommended that the Navy take action against Losey for violating whistleblower-protection laws, the documents show. The Navy, however, dismissed the findings this month and decided not to discipline Losey. He now leads the Naval Special Warfare Command. The previously undisclosed investigations into one of the Navy’s top SEALs underscore the weakness of the military’s whistleblower-protection law and how rarely violators are punished. Of the 1,196 whistleblower­cases closed by the Defense Department during the 12 months ending March 31, only 3 percent were upheld by investigators. The complaints against Losey also illustrate the Pentagon’s long-standing reluctance to discipline top brass for wrongdoing and how the military typically conceals misconduct investigations from public view.

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

This year, US Special Operations forces have already deployed to 135 nations, according to Ken McGraw, a spokesman for Special Operations Command (SOCOM). That’s roughly 70 percent of the countries on the planet. Every day, in fact, America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations, practicing night raids or sometimes conducting them for real, engaging in sniper training or sometimes actually gunning down enemies from afar. As part of a global engagement strategy of endless hush-hush operations conducted on every continent but Antarctica, they have now eclipsed the number and range of special ops missions undertaken at the height of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the waning days of the Bush administration, Special Operations forces (SOF) were reportedly deployed in only about 60 nations around the world. By 2010, according to the Washington Post, that number had swelled to 75. [It reached] a new record of 135 this summer. This 80 percent increase over the last five years is indicative of SOCOM’s exponential expansion which first shifted into high gear following the 9/11 attacks. SOCOM will not name the 135 countries in which America’s most elite forces were deployed this year, let alone disclose the nature of those operations. These forces carry out operations almost entirely unknown to the American taxpayers who fund them, operations conducted far from the scrutiny of the media or meaningful outside oversight of any kind.

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

The world’s largest defense contractor has agreed to pay $4.7 million to settle charges that it illegally used government money. Top executives for Lockheed Martin — who were being paid by the federal government to run Sandia National Laboratories — ran a fierce campaign to lobby [government] officials for a seven-year extension of their contract, [and] urged them to close the bidding to competition. To clinch the contract extension, Sandia labs officials hired high-priced consultants — including Heather A. Wilson, the former New Mexico congresswoman, who allegedly was paid $226,000. Wilson was not just on Lockheed’s payroll. From 2009 through 2011, she had consulting jobs for Lockheed and three other contractors managing the Energy Department’s national lab, charging taxpayers a total of $450,000. But the contractors could not document her work, said [Energy Department Inspector General Gregory] Friedman, whose staff found that the justification for the billing did “not meet even minimum standards” for federal payments.” Wilson ... left Congress in 2009. Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, called the deal a “slap on the wrist for the world’s biggest defense contractor to pay,” [and] wrote on the NuclearWatch blog Lockheed “engaged in deep and systemic corruption, including paying Congresswoman Heather Wilson $10,000 a month starting the day after she left office for so-called consulting services that had no written work requirements.”

Note: Lockheed Martin runs a breathtakingly big part of the United States. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the corporate world.

U.S. special operations forces in Iraq developed an untraceable explosive device they nicknamed the Xbox to kill Iraqi Shiite militiamen smuggling roadside bombs from Iran to attack American troops, according to a new book. Starting in about 2007, Army Delta Force commandos in a special task force in the war to oust Saddam Hussein used the bombs against Iranian collaborators whose improvised explosive devices were powerful enough to destroy the most heavily armored U.S. vehicles, Sean Naylor wrote in “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command.” The Xbox bomb “was designed to look and behave exactly like one made by Iraqi insurgents” with a hodgepodge of Russian, Chinese and Pakistani-made parts, wrote Naylor, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy. The intent was that if the device were sent to the FBI for analysis, even its experts “would mistakenly trace the bomb back” to a particular terrorist bomb maker. Using the bomb ... the command “found a way around the political restrictions by killing its enemies without leaving any U.S. fingerprints,” according to the book.

Note: The "war on terror" is designed to be endless. The above shows how blurry the line between terrorism and military deception has become.

In 1945, as a first-year student at Kyushu Imperial University’s medical school in southern Japan, [Toshio] Tono became an unwilling witness to atrocities. Just weeks after he began his studies, a US B-29 Superfortress crashed in northern Kyushu island. The [surviving] airmen were rounded up by police and placed in military custody. The prisoners were led to believe they were going to receive treatment for their injuries. But over the following three weeks, they were to be subjected to a depraved form of pathology at the medical school – procedures to which Tono is the only surviving witness. According to testimony ... at the Allied War Crimes Tribunals, they injected one anaesthetised prisoner with seawater. Other airmen had parts of their organs removed, with one deprived of an entire lung. In another experiment, doctors drilled through the skull of a live prisoner. “The experiments had absolutely no medical merit,” [Tono] said. “They were being used to inflict as cruel a death as possible on the prisoners. Of the 30 Kyushu University doctors and military staff who stood trial in 1948, 23 were convicted of vivisection and the wrongful removal of body parts. But they were never punished. President Truman issued an executive order that led to freedom for imprisoned war criminals. By the end of 1958, all Japanese war criminals had been released and began reinventing themselves, some as mainstream politicians, under their new, US-authored constitution.

Note: The German Nazis conducted similarly horrifying experiments on humans, as described in this Harper's Magazine article. Many of the Nazi scientists involved were secretly brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip. And according to this disturbing essay of a survivor, Nazi torturers were brought to the US to train CIA to train operatives in how to create multiple personality super spies through torture, drugs, and hypnosis.

The Defense Department earlier this summer released a comprehensive manual outlining its interpretation of the law of war. The 1,176-page document, the first of its kind, includes guidelines on the treatment of journalists covering armed conflicts that would make their work more dangerous, cumbersome and subject to censorship. Journalists, the manual says, are generally regarded as civilians, but may in some instances be deemed unprivileged belligerents, a legal term that applies to fighters that are afforded fewer protections than the declared combatants in a war. The manual warns that Reporting on military operations can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying. It says that governments may need to censor journalists work or take other security measures so that journalists do not reveal sensitive information to the enemy. Allowing this document to stand as guidance for commanders, government lawyers and officials of other nations would do severe damage to press freedoms. Authoritarian leaders around the world could point to it to show that their despotic treatment of journalists including Americans is broadly in line with the standards set by the United States government. The documents broad assertion that journalists work may need to be censored lest it reveal sensitive information to the enemy ... seems to contravene American constitutional and case law, and offers other countries that routinely censor the press a handy reference point.

Note: Read a critical analysis of the Pentagons new manual from the Committee to Protect Journalists. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in the intelligence community and the manipulation of public perception.

Retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, a top intelligence official in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says in a forthcoming interview ... that the drone war is creating more terrorists than it is killing. He also asserts that the U.S. invasion of Iraq helped create the Islamic State. Flynn, who in 2014 was forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of the Obama administrations Middle East strategy. The former three star general ... describes the present approach of drone warfare as a failed strategy. What we have is this continued investment in conflict, the retired general says. The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just fuels the conflict. In 2010, [Flynn] published a controversial report on intelligence operations in Afghanistan, stating in part that the military could not answer fundamental questions about the country and its people despite nearly a decade of engagement there. Earlier this year, Flynn commended the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture saying that torture had eroded American values and that in time, the U.S. will look back on it, and it wont be a pretty picture.

Note: Drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets. 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 news articles about military corruption.

As a young U.S. Army soldier during World War II, Rollins Edwards knew better than to refuse an assignment. When officers led him and a dozen others into a wooden gas chamber and locked the door, he didn't complain. None of them did. Then, a mixture of mustard gas and a similar agent called lewisite was piped inside. "It felt like you were on fire," recalls Edwards, now 93 years old. "Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out." Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program – formally declassified in 1993 – to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American. While the Pentagon admitted decades ago that it used American troops as test subjects in experiments with mustard gas, until now, officials have never spoken about the tests that grouped subjects by race. All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret. [Subjects] received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. They were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time. In 1991, federal officials for the first time admitted that the military conducted mustard gas experiments on enlisted men during World War II. However the race-based experiments remained largely a secret until ... 2008. Despite months of federal records requests, NPR still hasn't been given access to hundreds of pages of documents related to the experiments, which could provide confirmation of the motivations behind them.

Note: Explore an excellent timeline of horrifying secret government experiments on unsuspecting subjects. And read an NPR article on how they located a number of subjects of these experiments.

The Obama administration is again allowing the CIA to use drone strikes to secretly kill people that the spy agency does not know the identities of in multiple countries - despite repeated statements to the contrary. Apparently the drone operators didn't even know at the time who they were aiming at - only that they thought the target was possibly a terrorist hideout. It's what's known as a "signature" strike. Signature strikes has led to scores of civilians being killed over the past decade, including two completely innocent hostages ... one of whom was a US citizen ... less than two months ago. It's a way of killing that's been roundly condemned by human rights organizations and that some members of Congress have tried to outlaw. Here's how the New York Times described it: "The joke was that when the CIA sees "three guys doing jumping jacks," the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers – but they might also be farmers." It has become increasingly clear that the "rules" are virtually meaningless. As is typical with the US government's extrajudicial killing policy, there was no public debate about any of the changes to the supposed rules, or even announcement that they ever changed - only an unofficial leak to a journalist after the latest killing. Beyond the enormous human rights consequences related to such a dangerous policy, these types of strikes backfire on the United States, sowing hatred in the populations of bombed countries and breeding sympathy for al-Qaida where there was none before.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on terrorism from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our War Information Center.

Roughly 600 officers, known as missileers ... are responsible for launching America's 450 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. [They] have agreed to render whole cities [into] "smokin' holes." [In their training] the first requirement is signing a document committing to end the world if so ordered by the president. After a few months of key launch exercises ... "you become utterly desensitized to tending nuclear weapons," one former missileer says. Three years of sleepless nights following checklists out on the American tundra feels like a prison term. That might explain why a disproportionate number of nuclear commanders and missileers have recently been charged with criminal acts. ICBM bases [have] unusually high rates of criminality, domestic violence and security lapses. Court-martial rates ... are more than twice as high as in the overall Air Force. In October 2013, Michael Carey, a two-star general overseeing the entire nuclear command, was ousted for "misconduct" on an official trip to Moscow. A few months later [two officers] were caught sending phone messages to 11 other officers about "specific, illegal drug use that included synthetic drugs, Ecstasy, and amphetamines." Over the years, safeguards have failed so spectacularly that even an atheist might suspect divine intervention. A hydrogen bomb fell out of a plane in 1958 and leveled a South Carolina home without detonating. Another bomb accidentally parachuted towards Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961, but failed to activate.

Note: Read about a wild incident where a UFO shut down many ICBMs seemingly as a message to humanity not to play with these toys. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our War Information Center.

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.