News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
President Trump ordered the release of more than 2,800 records related to the John F. Kennedy assassination on Thursday, but bowed to pressure from the CIA, FBI and other agencies to delay disclosing some of the most sensitive documents. Even so, the thousands of pages that were published online by the National Archives ... describe decades of spies and surveillance, informants and assassination plots. In an internal FBI report from May 1964, an informant told the FBI that the Ku Klux Klan said it “had documented proof that President Johnson was formerly a member of the Klan in Texas during the early days of his political career.” The records also reveal a deposition given before the presidential Commission on CIA Activities in 1975 by Richard Helms, who had served as the agency’s director. After a discussion of Vietnam, David Belin, an attorney for the commission, turned to whether the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s killing. “Well, now, the final area of my investigation relates to charges that the CIA was in some way conspiratorially involved with the assassination of President Kennedy. During the time of the Warren Commission, you were Deputy Director of Plans, is that correct?” Belin asked. After Helms replied that he was, Belin then asked: “Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or agent…” Then, suddenly, the document cuts off.
Note: Watch the banned final segment of a History Channel series titled "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and assassinations from reliable major media sources.
Once among the world’s most acclaimed scientists, Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado has become an urban legend. Delgado pioneered ... the brain chip, which manipulates the mind by electrically stimulating neural tissue with implanted electrodes. In 1965, [he] stopped a charging bull in its tracks by sending a radio signal to a device implanted in its brain. He also implanted radio-equipped electrode arrays, which he called “stimoceivers,” in dogs, cats, monkeys, chimpanzees, gibbons, and humans. With the push of a button, he could evoke smiles, snarls, bliss, terror, hunger, garrulousness, lust, and other responses. Delgado also invented implantable “chemotrodes” that could release precise amounts of drugs directly into the brain. In 1952, Delgado co-authored ... the first peer-reviewed paper describing deep brain stimulation of humans. Over the next two decades, he implanted electrodes in some 25 subjects. Most were schizophrenics and epileptics at the now-defunct State Hospital for Mental Diseases in Howard, Rhode Island. The sponsorship of his experiments by the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Aeromedical Research Laboratory (as well as several civilian agencies) raised eyebrows. He invented a halo-like device and a helmet that could deliver electromagnetic pulses to specific neural regions. Testing the gadgets on animals and human volunteers, including himself and his daughter, Delgado discovered that he could induce drowsiness, alertness, and other states.
Note: Read a 1965 New York Times article on Delgado's disturbing research. Imagine how far the military has gone with this microchip technology in the over 50 years since Delgado invented it. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on microchip implants and mind control.
Two former Merck & Co Inc scientists accusing the drugmaker of falsifying tests of its exclusive mumps vaccine said in a court filing on Monday that Merck is refusing to respond to questions about the efficacy of the vaccine. Attorneys at Constantine Cannon, who represent the scientists, asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Lynne Sitarski of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to compel Merck to respond to their discovery request, which asks the company to give the efficacy of the vaccine as a percentage. Instead of answering the question ... Merck has been consistently evasive, using “cut-and-paste” answers saying it cannot run a new clinical trial to determine the current efficacy, and providing only data from 50 years ago. The two scientists, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, filed their whistleblower lawsuit in 2010 claiming Merck, the only company licensed by the Food and Drug Administration to sell a mumps vaccine in the United States, skewed tests of the vaccine by adding animal antibodies to blood samples. As a result, they said, Merck was able to produce test results showing that the vaccine was 95 percent effective, even though more accurate tests would have shown a lower success rate. The plaintiffs said these false results kept competitors from trying to produce their own mumps vaccines, since they were unable to match the effectiveness Merck claimed. The case is United States ex rel Krahling et al v. Merck & Co Inc, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, No. 10-4374.
Note: Why didn't this get reported widely? A search reveals no major media other than Reuters and WSJ covered this. This article in a local paper states the two whistleblowers were threatened by Merck with jail if they went public with this. It also says all students in a Syracuse University mumps outbreak had been properly vaccinated. This excellent article gives a 2019 update and reveals how the vaccines caused injury in a very high percentage of cases. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on vaccines from reliable major media sources.
New York City is an expensive place to live for just about everyone, including prisoners. The city paid $167,731 to feed, house and guard each inmate last year, according to a study the Independent Budget Office released this week. “It is troubling in both human terms and financial terms,” Doug Turetsky, the chief of staff for the budget office, said on Friday. With 12,287 inmates shuffling through city jails last year, he said, “it is a significant cost to the city.” by nearly any measure, New York City spends more than every other state or city. The Vera Institute of Justice released a study in 2012 that found the aggregate cost of prisons in 2010 in the 40 states that participated was $39 billion. The annual average taxpayer cost in these states was $31,286 per inmate. New York State was the most expensive, with an average cost of $60,000 per prison inmate. The cost of incarcerating people in New York City’s jails is nearly three times as much. 83 percent of the expense per prisoner came from wages, benefits for staff and pension costs. Some 76 percent of the inmates in the city were waiting for their cases to be disposed. The wait times have grown even as the number of felonies committed in the city has declined. Since 2002, the time spent waiting for cases to be disposed of has gone to 95 days, from 76 days, [former city correction and probation commissioner Michael] Jacobson said.
Note: This CNN chart shows that most states spend two to three times as much on their prison inmates than they do on students in school. What does that say about our priorities? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing prison system corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota. The state uses electronic voting machines. The experts...concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome. The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting. The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits. Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines.
This week, I was hacking my way through the Florida swampland known as the Office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris and found a couple thousand more names of voters electronically 'disappeared' from the vote rolls. About half of those named are African-Americans. They had the right to vote, but they never made it to the balloting booths. When we left off our Florida story two weeks ago, The Observer discovered that Harris's office had ordered the elimination of 8,000 Florida voters on the grounds that they had committed felonies in other states. None had. Harris bought the bum list from a company called ChoicePoint, a firm whose Atlanta executive suite and boardroom are filled with Republican funders. ChoicePoint, we have learned, picked up the list of faux felons from state officials in ... Texas. In fact, it was a roster of people who, like their Governor, George W, had committed nothing more than misdemeanours. Most of those targeted to have their names 'scrubbed' from the voter roles were African-Americans, Hispanics and poor white folk, likely voters for Vice-President Gore. Add it up. The dead-wrong Texas list, the uncorrected 'corrected' list, plus the out-of-state ex-con list. It's enough to swing a presidential election.
Note: The entire article at the above link is highly recommended. It provides virtual proof of criminal fraud that would have changed the results of the U.S. 2000 presidential election. For lots more on blatant deception in the decisive Florida count in this election, click here.
On April 30, 1966 ... Anton LaVey signed away his soul forever and became leader of ... the Church of Satan. In the church's first year, LaVey conducted a satanic wedding, a satanic funeral on Treasure Island (in cooperation with the U.S. Navy) and a satanic baptism of his young daughter, Zeena. The church was brazenly and publicly devoted to selfish hedonism. In 1968, LaVey opened up his home to a documentary film crew. Satanic rituals were staged for the cameras, with a nude woman serving as the altar. In 1969, LaVey published "The Satanic Bible": "Hate your enemies with a whole heart, and if a man smite you on one cheek, SMASH him on the other." The canon has gone on to sell nearly a million copies. Michael Aquino began corresponding with Anton LaVey while a psychological operative for the U.S. Army. Aquino returned to the States and was soon made a high-ranking priest. His distinctive appearance – he sported a prominent widow's peak and darkly accented eyebrows – was further enhanced by a small 666 tattooed on his scalp. In 1975, Aquino left with many church members and priests ... to form the Temple of Set, a tightly organized religion that revolved around an Egyptian deity on whom the Hebraic Satan supposedly was based. LaVey's church has been besieged for years by bickering former adherents who insist that he was a fraud and that his institution does not worship the Devil properly. "My estrangement from Anton LaVey caused me intense personal pain," Aquino writes. "For six years I had regarded him as a friend, mentor, and ultimately Devil-father."
Note: An openly avowed Satanist while serving as a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army, Michael Aquino coauthored the highly controversial document “Mindwar” in 1980, which would define the strategy and importance of Psychological Operations, aka PSYOPS, for the U.S. Department of Defense. Aquino was investigated in connection with military child abuse scandals, but never brought to court. He defended his beliefs dressed in Satanic wear on this Geraldo show.
The eruption of racist violence in England and Northern Ireland raises urgent questions about the responsibilities of social media companies, and how the police use facial recognition technology. While social media isn't the root of these riots, it has allowed inflammatory content to spread like wildfire and helped rioters coordinate. The great elephant in the room is the wealth, power and arrogance of the big tech emperors. Silicon Valley billionaires are richer than many countries. That mature modern states should allow them unfettered freedom to regulate the content they monetise is a gross abdication of duty, given their vast financial interest in monetising insecurity and division. In recent years, [facial recognition] has been used on our streets without any significant public debate. We wouldn't dream of allowing telephone taps, DNA retention or even stop and search and arrest powers to be so unregulated by the law, yet this is precisely what has happened with facial recognition. Our facial images are gathered en masse via CCTV cameras, the passport database and the internet. At no point were we asked about this. Individual police forces have entered into direct contracts with private companies of their choosing, making opaque arrangements to trade our highly sensitive personal data with private companies that use it to develop proprietary technology. There is no specific law governing how the police, or private companies ... are authorised to use this technology. Experts at Big Brother Watch believe the inaccuracy rate for live facial recognition since the police began using it is around 74%, and there are many cases pending about false positive IDs.
Note: Many US states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects, even though misidentification is a common occurrence. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
The Department of Defense has used taxpayer money to send elite military officers to work for some of the Pentagon's top private contractors. From 1995 to 2021, more than 315 military officers with elite ranks as high as colonel and rear admiral have been placed at top weapons manufacturers such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as other companies with billion-dollar government contracts. The arrangement has also coincided with a dramatic rise in Defense Department spending on private contractors valued in the trillions of dollars. The arrangement, called the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program, sends officers with promising military careers to work for top corporations in the defense, tech, finance, and other industries for one year. These fellows then report on how the Defense Department could incorporate some of these companies' business practices and policies. The program has helped place corporate interests at the very heart of US military strategy. [A] report from Quincy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, is the first detailed examination of the SDEF program. The report casts doubt on the integrity of the fellowship program, calling it a "de facto lobbying tool" for private companies and a "taxpayer-funded revolving door" where more than 40 percent of the fellows have gone on to work for government contractors at some point in their postmilitary careers.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.
The center of the U.S. military-industrial complex has been shifting over the past decade from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to Northern California–a shift that is accelerating with the rise of artificial intelligence-based systems, according to a report published Wednesday. "Although much of the Pentagon's $886 billion budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and private equity firms," [report author Roberto J.] González wrote. "Defense Department officials have ... awarded large multibillion-dollar contracts to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle." González found that the five largest military contracts to major tech firms between 2018 and 2022 "had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined." There's also the danger of a "revolving door" between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon as many senior government officials "are now gravitating towards defense-related VC or private equity firms as executives or advisers after they retire from public service." "Members of the armed services and civilians are in danger of being harmed by inadequately tested–or algorithmically flawed–AI-enabled technologies. By nature, VC firms seek rapid returns on investment by quickly bringing a product to market, and then 'cashing out' by either selling the startup or going public. This means that VC-funded defense tech companies are under pressure to produce prototypes quickly and then move to production before adequate testing has occurred."
Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
According to Wikipedia, the United States has been involved in 107 wars since its founding and 41 of these were fought against the Indigenous peoples of North America. Most of these wars are ignored by schools, textbooks and the media, but the pressure to become involved in additional conflict is ever-present. At times the number of private contractors has been larger than that of enlisted troops. In April 2008, there were 163,900 contractors and 160,000 enlisted troops in Iraq. But when most media reported the number of Americans in the war zone, they reported the number of enlisted troops and not the contractors. This results in a predictable under-estimate of American involvement and additional earnings for contractor providers. Every year, the defense industry donates millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress, creating pressure on the legislative branch to fund specific weapons systems, maintain an extremely high Pentagon budget, and add ever more military spending. In 2022 the weapons/defense industry donated $10.2 million to the 84 members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. And the wars continue. In his book "The United States of War," David Vine reports that, "In the nearly two decades since U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has fought in at least 22 countries." If we are to escape a future of forever wars, all justifications for war should be questioned and debated before the killing starts.
Note: Learn more about war failures and lies in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.
Faith Snapp has never let her blindness get in the way of pursuing her dreams. A 22-year-old Texas native who is legally blind, Snapp was accepted into the Texas Tech University School of Veterinary Medicine. "My entire life, my family has raised horses and goats for as long as I can remember," Snapp shared. "I always loved animals." Snapp and her twin brother were both born prematurely – and with very limited vision. Snapp has had a guide dog since high school, but she has never let her disability come across as a limitation. She was in several clubs in high school and even worked at local animal clinics. While her blindness may have been a challenge at first, she "needed" people to come alongside her and support her dreams. "I just needed to find the people and the accommodations and the places that would be willing to help me," the 22-year-old student [said]. "That was a little bit challenging because I think oftentimes people place limitations on somebody with a disability because they assume that they are limited." Snapp will begin classes in August, and hopes to pursue a career as a mixed-animal veterinarian, working with both large and small animals. It doesn't matter what challenges a person may be facing, Snapp said; people should not give up on their dreams. "No matter who you are or what your circumstances… anything is possible," she said. "I just hope my story can help others realize that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to."
Note: Read more inspiring news articles on incredible people with disabilities.
Our moms and dads used to tell us about their mile-long walk to school. But if we're talking about peda-powered travel to school, this man has set a new standard. Leaving his home in Conakry, Guinea, on a bike, Mamadou Safayou Barry traveled across the whole of West Africa and the Sahara Desert's road network–2,500 miles–and across 5 countries in the mere hopes he'd be accepted into an Egyptian university. Along the way, the husband and father of one crossed Benin, southern Mali, Togo, and Chad, as well as some of the most bandit-filled areas on Earth, including parts of Burkina Faso and Niger. He was detained without cause or charge on three separate occasions, twice in Burkina Faso and once in Togo. It was in Chad, nearly four months after he left home, that he caught an auspicious wind. A local journalist reported on his efforts which led to a local philanthropist getting the man a flight to Cairo. Once there, the prestigious Al-Azhar University offered him a full scholarship, first for Islamic studies, then for engineering. Will Smith heard about Barry's successful voyage, and gave a surprise congratulations to the man. He video-called the Guinean in Cairo to gift him a new bicycle and a laptop for his studies. "When I saw him, I was confused in my head, because I had seen that man before," Barry told the BBC from Cairo. "Then I remember–it's Will Smith! Wow ... I used to watch his films. I was sat on a chair in front of Will Smith!"
Note: Don't miss the deeply inspiring video of Mamadou Safayou Barry's interview with Will Smith about his fascinating journey across Africa. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
How many clinical-trial studies in medical journals are fake or fatally flawed? In October 2020, John Carlisle reported a startling estimate. Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England's National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) – the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies. For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged – either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data. Carlisle called these 'zombie' trials. Even he was surprised by their prevalence. "I anticipated maybe one in ten," he says. The issue is, in part, a subset of the notorious paper-mill problem: over the past decade, journals in many fields have published tens of thousands of suspected fake papers, some of which are thought to have been produced by third-party firms, termed paper mills. "It ... has the potential to amplify a wrong result, suggesting that treatments work when they don't," he says.
Note: Back in 2015, the editor-in-chef of The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, wrote that much of scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Who can we trust? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on science corruption from reliable major media sources.
Biomimicry is grounded in the concept that nature, with its 3.8 billion years of evolution, has already solved many of the problems we grapple with today. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. Rather than designing new technology from scratch, scientists and engineers often look to nature for inspiration. In its approach, biomimicry involves three essential aspects: Emulating natural forms, mimicking natural processes, and imitating ecosystems. Nature operates under specific principles: it runs on sunlight, uses only the energy it needs, fits form to function, recycles everything, rewards cooperation, banks on diversity, demands local expertise, curbs excesses from within, and taps the power of limits. By aligning our technologies and practices with these principles, we can create not only innovative but also sustainable solutions to our challenges. Architects and engineers are designing buildings that mimic termite mounds, which maintain constant temperature despite external fluctuations. This biomimetic approach reduces energy consumption for heating and cooling. The self-cleaning properties of lotus leaves have inspired a whole range of products. The microscopic structure of a lotus leaf repels water and dirt particles. Today, we have self-cleaning paints and fabrics based on this principle. The bumps on the fins of humpback whales, called tubercles, increase their efficiency in water. Applying this concept to the design of wind turbines has led to blades that produce power more efficiently. Corals can heal themselves by producing an organic mineral in response to physical damage. Scientists have mimicked this process to create a type of concrete that can "heal" its own cracks.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing the Earth and technology for good.
In Rambouillet, a small French town around 30 miles (50km) south-west of Paris, a soft blue light emanated from a row of cylindrical tubes. Members of the public ... were invited to bathe in the glow for a few minutes. Soon, the same azure glow will illuminate the nearby, tree-lined Place AndrĂ© ThomĂ© et Jacqueline ThomĂ©-PatenĂ´tre, located just across from the aptly named La Lanterne performance hall, at night. These ethereal experiments are also underway across France. But unlike standard streetlamps, which often emit a harsh glare and need to be hooked up to the electricity grid, these otherworldly lights are powered by living organisms through a process known as bioluminescence. This phenomenon – where chemical reactions inside an organism's body produce light – can be observed in many places in nature. Organisms as diverse as fireflies, fungi and fish have the ability to glow through bioluminescence. The turquoise blue glow bathing the waiting room in Rambouillet ... comes from a marine bacterium gathered off the coast of France called Aliivibrio fischeri. The bacteria are stored inside saltwater-filled tubes, allowing them to circulate in a kind of luminous aquarium. Since the light is generated through internal biochemical processes that are part of the organism's normal metabolism, running it requires almost no energy. "Our goal is to change the way in which cities use light," says Sandra Rey, founder of the French start-up Glowee, which is behind the project in Rambouillet.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 966,575 deaths from COVID-19 on Friday after it corrected the data earlier this week, which reduced the death tallies in all age-groups, including children. The health agency, in a statement to Reuters, said it made adjustments to its COVID Data Tracker's mortality data on March 14 because its algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related. The adjustment resulted in removal of 72,277 deaths previously reported across 26 states, including 416 pediatric deaths, CDC said. The reduction cut the CDC's estimate of deaths in children by 24% to 1,341 as of March 18. Children accounted for about 19% of all COVID-19 cases, but less than 0.26% of cases resulted in death, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which summarizes state-based data. Americans have been polarized over the mitigation measures the CDC recommended for schools during the pandemic from urging schools to be remote, require masks and set up social distancing measures. It now advises that for most of the country, children should be in school and can be without masks.
Note: For lots more on this highly strange news, see this webpage. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
The National Institutes of Health has stunningly admitted to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China's Wuhan lab – despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened. In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, a top NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance – the New York City-based nonprofit that has funneled US funds to the Wuhan lab – for not being transparent about the work it was doing. NIH's principal deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote in the letter that EcoHealth's "limited experiment" tested whether "spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model." Gain-of-function research refers to viruses being taken from animals before they are genetically altered in a lab to make them more transmissible to humans. The admission from the NIH official directly contradicts Fauci's testimony to Congress in May and July, when he denied the US had funded gain-of-function projects in Wuhan. As recently as last month, Fauci was accused of lying about gain-of-function research after documents, obtained by the Intercept, detailed grants given to EcoHealth Alliance for bat coronavirus studies. [A] grant proposal detailed in the trove of documents was for a project titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence," which involved screening thousands of bat samples, as well as people who worked with live animals, for novel coronaviruses.
Note: CNN in this video put tough questions to a top NIH director about lies made by Fauci regarding gain-of-function research. And why did the NIH change this original webpage so that in the changed webpage the entire section on gain-of-function research is deleted and the title changed? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is asking President Biden to pardon a former Air Force intelligence analyst who exposed secrets about drone warfare in Afghanistan. In July, Daniel Hale pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria to violating the Espionage Act and was sentenced in July to 45 months in prison for leaking classified documents to the Intercept. In court, Hale said he felt compelled to speak out about the immorality of the drone program after realizing he had helped kill Afghan civilians, including a small child. "Not a day goes by that I don't question the justification for my actions," he wrote to the judge. "I am grief-stricken and ashamed of myself." One document he leaked showed that during a five-month operation in Afghanistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were not the intended targets. "I take extremely seriously the prohibition on leaking classified information, but I believe there are several aspects of Mr. Hale's case that merit a full pardon," Omar wrote in the letter sent to Biden. "The information, while politically embarrassing to some, has shone a vital light on the legal and moral problems of the drone program and informed the public debate on an issue that has for too many years remained in the shadows." This week, Hale was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, given by a group of whistleblowers from the national security community. Edward Snowden received the same award in 2013.
Note: Hale's leak was the basis for an article series called The Drone Papers. A 2014 analysis found that attempts to kill 41 people with drones resulted in 1,147 deaths. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
The biggest Al Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no Al Qaeda. Instead, the vague, implausible threat by a group of construction workers in Florida to blow up U.S. buildings, including Chicago's Sears Tower, was mostly the making of the FBI, whose undercover operatives sought out the men, promised them money, and coached them over months to implicate themselves in a conspiracy to commit violent acts they never actually intended or had the means to carry out. The "Liberty City Seven" case – known by its connection to the poor, violence-ridden Miami neighborhood where the men involved lived – was the most high-profile FBI investigation of a supposed terrorist cell after the attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. The ordeal of the seven Black men, most of them Haitian American, who were manipulated by two paid FBI informants into pledging allegiance to Al Qaeda is recounted in a new Frontline documentary, "In the Shadow of 9/11," by British director Dan Reed. The case set the stage for hundreds of FBI sting operations in the following years, as the bureau continued to frame individuals who were often poor, credulous, and had dubious ability to independently plan any attacks. Rather than abandoning stings as pointless and harmful ... the FBI doubled down on them, in some cases even providing weapons to the individuals they set up.
Note: Read more about how the FBI uses stings to manufacture terrorism cases. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.