Military Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Military Corruption News Stories in Major Media

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Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaida two days before Sept. 11 but did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, U.S. and foreign sources told NBC News. The document, a formal National Security Presidential Directive, amounted to a “game plan to remove al-Qaida from the face of the earth,” one of the sources told NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski. In many respects, the directive ... outlined essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. Officials did not believe that Bush had had the opportunity to closely review the document in the two days between its submission and the Sept. 11 attacks. But it had been submitted to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and the officials said Bush knew about it and had been expected to sign it. The couching of the plans as a formal security directive is significant, Miklaszewski reported, because it indicates that the United States intended a full-scale assault on al-Qaida even if the Sept. 11 attacks had not occurred.

Note: Why was this kept secret? Why is it still being kept secret?

The discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir [has] reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country. In Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists. US airstrikes in Pakistan, launched from unmanned drones, are now averaging three a week, triple the number last year. “We're quietly seeing a geographical shift,” an intelligence officer said. The discovery of the dead US soldiers revealed that America’s shadowy war in Pakistan not only involves drones but also small cadres of special operations soldiers. Sources said there were about 200 US military inside the country. “I’m not sure you could just call it training,” one official said. “They are hardly behind the wire if they are on trips to schools in Dir.” The three US soldiers, who have been described variously as special operations forces and civil affairs troops, were killed when their convoy was bombed as it travelled to the re-opening of the school. One official suggested the “trainers” may be used to pick up intelligence on drone targets. If the drones are controversial, the presence of US soldiers on Pakistani soil is far more so.

Note: For more from reliable sources on the covert aspects of the US military aggression worldwide, click here.

The U.S. military plans to more than triple its inventory of high-altitude, armed and unarmed drones capable of 24-hour patrols. The long-range aviation plan delivered to Congress Feb. 2 calls for 800 high-altitude drones, up from 220 currently. “We can’t get enough drones,” General David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, which includes the Afghanistan and Iraq war theaters, said in a speech Jan. 19. Of the military’s 6,819 unmanned aircraft, only the high- altitude “long-endurance” drones can provide ground commanders wide-ranging, round-the-clock surveillance and the opportunity for instant strike. The new planes will include Global Hawks built by Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp. and Predator and Reaper drones. The Air Force uses those three model drones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Northrop also will build its new “broad-area’’ surveillance aircraft for the Navy. The U.S. military currently flies about 39 combat-air patrols for 24 hours each over Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Air Force Lieutenant General David Deptula. The Pentagon has said it would increase the patrols to 50 a day in the next two years and 65 by 2013.

Note: For key reports from media sources on new weapons development by the Pentagon, click here and here.

The British government [has] disclosed once-secret details of the United States' harsh treatment of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee after losing a lengthy legal battle to suppress the information. According to the information, from a judge's summary of a classified CIA report to British authorities, Binyam Mohamed was subjected to "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment during interrogations in Pakistan in 2002, including being shackled and deprived of sleep while interrogators played upon "his fears of being removed from United States custody and 'disappearing.' " Mohamed, 31, was born in Ethiopia and lives in Britain. Arrested in Pakistan in 2002, he says he was tortured by American authorities and others under U.S. instruction there and in Morocco. He says he was beaten with a leather strap, subjected to a mock execution and sliced with a scalpel on his chest and penis. Mohamed says Britain knew about his treatment because information used during his questioning could have come only from British intelligence. He spent seven years in detention, four of them at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Reprieve, a legal organization representing Mohamed in a lawsuit against the British government, said in a statement that the disclosures show that "the U.S. documented their efforts to abuse Mr. Mohamed" and that British authorities "knew he was being abused and did nothing about it."

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the illegal actions undertaken by the US and UK in the prosecution of the fraudulent "war on terror," click here.

An upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations. NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors — Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor — violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.

Note: The Obama administration continues to uphold the illegal policies introduced by the Bush/Cheney regime. For lots more on the realities of the fraudulent "war on terrorism", click here.

Deception [is reliant] on the close control of information, running agents (and double-agents) and creating stories that adversaries will readily believe. In an era of ubiquitous information access, anonymous leaks and public demands for transparency, deception operations are extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, successful strategic deception has in the past provided the United States with significant advantages that translated into operational and tactical success. Successful deception also minimizes U.S. vulnerabilities, while simultaneously setting conditions to surprise adversaries. Thus, strategic deception capabilities and plans must perforce be highly classified. Deception cannot succeed in wartime without developing theory and doctrine in peacetime. In order to mitigate or impart surprise, the United States should develop more robust interagency deception planning and action prior to the need for military operations. To be effective, a permanent standing office with strong professional intelligence and operational expertise needs to be established.

Note: The above excerpts can be found on pages 77 and 78. For a powerful two-page summary of a top general's description of how the American public is deceived into supporting war, click here.

The invasion of Iraq had no "legal basis in international law", the senior government lawyer Sir Michael Wood has told the Chilcot inquiry. Sir Michael ... was the most senior legal adviser at the Foreign Office at the time of the invasion. "I considered that the use of force against Iraq in March 2003 was contrary to international law," he said in a written statement. "In my opinion, that use of force had not been authorised by the (United Nations) Security Council, and had no other basis in international law." Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, rejected advice that the war would be unlawful, the inquiry heard. Sir Michael wrote to Mr Straw on January 24, 2003 to express concerns about comments [Straw] made to then-US vice president Dick Cheney. Mr Straw told Mr Cheney that Britain would "prefer" a second resolution but it would be "OK" if they tried and failed to get one "a la Kosovo". Sir Michael commented that this was "completely wrong from a legal point of view". Sir Michael said this was "probably the first and only occasion" that a minister rejected his legal advice in this way.

Note: For lots more from major media sources on the real reasons behind the invasion of Iraq, click here.

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people. The operations, approved by President Obama, involve several dozen troops from the U.S. military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose main mission is tracking and killing [targeted persons]. Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be. He has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC. The combined efforts have resulted in more than two dozen ground raids and airstrikes. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad. The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list [also] included three U.S. citizens.

Note: For many reports from reliable sources on the growing governmental threats to civil liberties, click here.

In 2025, US aerospace forces can own the weather by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. Weather-modification is a force multiplier with tremendous power that could be exploited across the full spectrum of war-fighting environments. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns complete dominance of global communications and counter-space control, weather-modification offers war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. But, while offensive weather modification efforts would certainly be undertaken by US forces with great caution and trepidation, it is clear that we cannot afford to allow an adversary to obtain an exclusive weather-modification capability.

Note: The above quote is taken from pages 6 and 35, the executive summary and conclusion of the above US Air Force study. For a highly revealing article suggesting elements within government have much more control over the weather than is thought, click here.

Secret wartime experiments were conducted off the New Zealand coast to perfect a bomb that could trigger devastating tidal waves, according to government files declassified in Auckland. The New Zealand Herald, citing the files, said that senior United States defence officials believed the weapon had the potential to be as deadly as the atomic bomb. But the tsunami bomb, as it was known, was never fully tested and the war ended before the project was completed. Its mastermind was Thomas Leech, an Australian professor who as the dean of engineering at Auckland University from 1940 to 1950. He was seconded to the New Zealand Army during the Second World War. He set off a series of underwater explosions that triggered mini tidal waves at Whangaparaoa, just north of Auckland, in 1944 and 1945. Details of the research, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53- year-old documents released by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. What happened to Project Seal once the final report was forwarded to Wellington in the late 1940s is not clear.

Note: For a revealing, well researched article presenting solid evidence that elements within the military have much more control over the weather than is generally believed, click here.

Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare. Sixty years of near-constant war ... and its high-tech industry have long made Israel one of the world's leading innovators of military robotics. "We're trying to get to unmanned vehicles everywhere on the battlefield for each platoon in the field," says Lt. Col. Oren Berebbi, head of the Israel Defense Forces' technology branch. "We can do more and more missions without putting a soldier at risk." Among the recently deployed technologies that set Israel ahead of the curve is the Guardium unmanned ground vehicle, [which] is essentially an armored off-road golf cart with a suite of optical sensors and surveillance gear. In the Gaza conflict in January 2009, Israel unveiled remote-controlled bulldozers. Israel pioneered the use of aerial drones. Within the next year, Israeli engineers expect to deploy the voice-commanded, six-wheeled Rex robot, capable of carrying 550 pounds of gear alongside advancing infantry. The Protector SV [is] an unmanned, heavily armed speedboat that today makes up a growing part of the Israeli naval fleet.

Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on war manipulations and advanced weapons developments often being used against civilians, click here.

Bush administration officials came up with all kinds of ridiculously offensive rationalizations for torturing prisoners. It's not torture if you don't mean it to be. It's not torture if you don't nearly kill the victim. It's not torture if the president says it's not torture. It was deeply distressing to watch the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sink to that standard in April when it dismissed a civil case brought by four former Guantánamo detainees never charged with any offense. The court said former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the senior military officers charged in the complaint could not be held responsible for violating the plaintiffs' rights because at the time of their detention ... it was not "clearly established" that torture was illegal. The Supreme Court could have corrected that outlandish reading of the Constitution, legal precedent, and domestic and international statutes and treaties. Instead, last month, the justices abdicated their legal and moral duty and declined to review the case. The justices surely understood that their failure to accept the case would further undermine the rule of law. In effect, the Supreme Court has granted the government immunity for subjecting people in its custody to terrible mistreatment. It has deprived victims of a remedy and Americans of government accountability, while further damaging the country's standing in the world.

Note: For many reliable reports on the torture used by governments pursuing the "war on terror", click here.

In its attempts to quash weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon has been trying novel ways to track down dangerous materiel. For years, DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] has been trying to train insects and bugs to sniff out toxic substances, providing more sensitive detection, as well as access that conventional sensors might not have. The newest twist on this concept is a plan to link up armies of the cyborg bugs in a peer-to-peer, or insect-to-insect, network that will allow them to communicate with each other and with their human masters. This next approach will implant insects with a chip that reads certain muscle twitches, which correspond to the presence of certain chemicals. The chips will then modify the chirps of insects like cicadas or crickets into an electronic signal that could be transmitted to other chipped insects in the area. Information about detected weaponized chemicals could bounce around this mobile insect network, and then be picked up by humans. The idea of creating a decentralized communication network between free-roaming insects could radically increase the bugs' range of detection.

Note: For a video and more on this, see the New Scientist article at this link.

Just before Christmas, the US President, Barack Obama, signed into law one of his country's biggest aid pledges of the year. It was bound not for Africa or any of the many struggling countries on the World Bank's list. It was a deal for $US2.77 billion ($3 billion) to go to Israel in 2010 and a total of $US30 billion over the next decade. Israel is bound by the agreement to use 75 per cent of the aid to buy military hardware made in the US. For the first time the US is also providing $US500 million to the Palestinian Authority, including $US100 million to train security forces, under the strict proviso that the authority's leadership recognises Israel. For many years Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid, followed by Egypt ($US1.75 billion), which also receives most of its assistance in tied military aid. The Congressional Research Service says that the US spent 17 per cent of its total aid budget - or $US5.1 billion - on military aid in 2008, of which $US4.7 billion was grants to enable governments to receive equipment from the US.

Note: Israel's population is 7.5 million. If you do the math, the US is providing the equivalent of $4,000 in aid to every man, woman and child in Israel over the next decade, with $3,000 of that to buy US military hardware. For lots more on government-facilitated profiteering in the arms industry, click here and here.

American special forces have conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan's tribal areas as part of a secret war in the border region where Washington is pressing to expand its drone assassination programme. A former Nato officer said the incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involved helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani government. "The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn't confirm officially with them," said the source, who had detailed knowledge of the operations. Such operations are a matter of sensitivity in Pakistan. While public opinion has grudgingly tolerated CIA-led drone strikes in the tribal areas, any hint of American "boots on the ground" is greeted with virulent condemnation. After the only publicly acknowledged special forces raid in September 2008, Pakistan's foreign office condemned it as "a grave provocation" while the military threatened retaliatory action. The military source said that was the fourth raid of previous years. The secretive nature of the raids underscores the suspicious nature of the relationship between the two allies as they argue about Washington's latest demands.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the secret realities of the "war on terrorism," click here.

Conspiracy theorists awaiting Wednesday night's premiere of "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" might take interest in a curious comment Ventura made in the Los Angeles Times this weekend. Ventura ... told the paper that MSNBC cancelled his show "Jesse Ventura's America" in 2003 because he did not support the Iraq War. He said the network "in essence" paid him to be silent. "It was awful. I was basically silenced. When I came out of office, I was the hottest commodity out there. I was being groomed for a five day-a-week TV show by them. Then, all of a sudden, weird phone calls started happening: 'Is it true Jesse doesn't support the war in Iraq? My contract said I couldn't do any other cable TV or any news shows, and they honored and paid it for the duration of it. So in essence I had my silence purchased. Why do you think you didn't hear from me for three years? I was under contract. They wouldn't even use me as a consultant!"

President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year. The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House’s promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials, that were publicly outlined in a set of agency documents known as the "family jewels." The White House has given the agencies ... an extension beyond Dec. 31 of an undetermined length - possibly years. It will be the third such extension: Clinton granted one in 2000 and Bush granted one in 2003. The documents, dating from World War II to the early 1980s, cover the gamut of foreign relations, intelligence activities, and military operations. The records in question are held by the Central Intelligence Agency; the National Security Agency; the departments of Justice, State, Defense, and Energy; and other security and intelligence agencies. None of the agencies involved responded to requests for comment. Steven Aftergood, a specialist on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington [said] "If binding deadlines can be extended more or less at will, then any new declassification requirements will be similarly subject to doubt or defiance."

Note: These documents are all more than 25 years old. Why can't the public know what their government is trying to hide from them? For lots more on government secrecy, click here.

An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates ... without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. Former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the [CIA] in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces. Military officials said as recently as this summer that the Afghanistan jail and another like it at the Balad Air Base in Iraq were being used to interrogate high-value detainees. And officials said recently that there were no plans to close the jails. All three former detainees interviewed by The New York Times complained of being held for months after the intensive interrogations were over without being told why. Human rights researchers say they worry that the jail remains in the shadows and largely inaccessible both to the Red Cross and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Note: For many revealing reports from major media sources on the worsening threats to civil liberties, click here.

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus. The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program. "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." Blackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis. Some of these strikes are attributed to [the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes."

Note: Don't miss this key report in it's entirety. Why haven't other major media outlets mentioned the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) drone operations in Pakistan, running parallel to the CIA's?

American soldiers are committing suicide in the greatest numbers since official records began in 1980, with the US Army at a loss to explain the phenomenon since a third of the dead have never been deployed in combat. Suicides in the army alone have passed last year’s record of 140 — 141 in 2009 so far. The upward trend has defied efforts to improve access to appropriate counselling for veterans returning from combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The figure for the first ten months of the year excludes 71 suicides among troops taken off active duty in 2009, and 42 in the US Marine Corps. Roughly a third of this year’s suicides have been by soldiers taking their own lives in war zones, a third by returning soldiers and a third by those based permanently in the US or awaiting deployment overseas. Many military suicides can be traced in part to an inability to process the guilt of having killed in battle.

Note: For lots more from major media sources on the horrific effects of modern war on both combatants and civilians, click here. And for the writings of a top general on why this is happening, click here.

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