Terrorism News Stories

Excerpts of Key Terrorism News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on terrorism from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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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.

The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone. The former JSOC drone operator ... states that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed as a result. Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that its operations kill terrorists with the utmost precision. Within the NSA ... a motto quickly caught on at Geo Cell: ‘We Track ’Em, You Whack ’Em.’” In December 2009, utilizing the NSA’s metadata collection programs, the Obama administration dramatically escalated U.S. drone and cruise missile strikes in Yemen. The first strike in the country known to be authorized by Obama targeted an alleged Al Qaeda camp in the southern village of al-Majala. The strike, which included the use of cluster bombs, resulted in the deaths of 14 women and 21 children.

Note: For an in-depth interview on this important topic, click here. Would anyone in a developed country tolerate their citizens being killed by the drones of a foreign government? Note also that The Intercept is the new media source being funded by Pierre Omidyar and featuring Glenn Greenwald and other top reporters known for the their independence.

A series of revelations about the rocket believed to have delivered poison sarin gas to a Damascus suburb last summer are challenging American intelligence assumptions about that attack and suggest that the case U.S. officials initially made for retaliatory military action was flawed. A team of security and arms experts, meeting this week in Washington to discuss the matter, has concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered sarin in the largest attack that night was too short for the device to have been fired from the Syrian government positions where the Obama administration insists they originated. The authors of a report released Wednesday said that their study of the rocket’s design, its likely payload and its possible trajectories show that it would have been impossible for the rocket to have been fired from inside areas controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. In the report, titled “Possible Implications of Faulty U.S. Technical Intelligence,” Richard Lloyd, a former United Nations weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argue that the question about the rocket’s range indicates a major weakness in the case for military action initially pressed by Obama administration officials. Postol said that a basic analysis of the weapon ... would have shown that it wasn’t capable of flying the 6 miles from the center of the Syrian government-controlled part of Damascus to the point of impact in the suburbs, or even the 3.6 miles from the edges of government-controlled ground.

Note: For more on government lies designed to start wars, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

A small organic farm in Arlington, Texas, was the target of a massive police action ... that included aerial surveillance, a SWAT raid and a 10-hour search. Members of the local police raiding party had a search warrant for marijuana plants, which they failed to find at the Garden of Eden farm. Farm owners and residents who live on the property [said] that the real reason for the law enforcement exercise appears to have been code enforcement. Local authorities had cited the Garden of Eden in recent weeks for code violations, including "grass that was too tall, bushes growing too close to the street, a couch and piano in the yard, chopped wood that was not properly stacked, a piece of siding that was missing from the side of the house, and generally unclean premises." The raid on the Garden of Eden farm appears to be the latest example of police departments using SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics to enforce less serious crimes. In recent years, SWAT teams have been called out to perform regulatory alcohol inspections at a bar in Manassas Park, Va.; to raid bars for suspected underage drinking in New Haven, Conn.; to perform license inspections at barbershops in Orlando, Fla.; and to raid a gay bar in Atlanta where police suspected customers and employees were having public sex. A federal investigation later found that Atlanta police had made up the allegations of public sex. Other raids have been conducted on food co-ops and Amish farms suspected of selling unpasteurized milk products. The federal government has for years been conducting raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in states that have legalized them.

Note: The author of this report, Radley Balko, is a senior writer and investigative reporter for The Huffington Post. He is also the author of the new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. For an ABC News report on this disturbing raid, click here.

In early 2003, two senior CIA officers arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to pick up a pair of large cardboard boxes. Inside were bundles of cash totaling $15 million that had been flown from Germany via diplomatic pouch. The Americans and Poles then sealed an agreement that over the previous weeks had allowed the CIA the use of a secret prison — a remote villa in the Polish lake district — to interrogate al-Qaeda suspects. The Polish intelligence service received the money, and the CIA had a solid location for its newest covert operation, according to former agency officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the interrogation program, including previously unreported details about the creation of the CIA’s “black sites,” or secret prisons. The CIA prison in Poland was arguably the most important of all the black sites created by the agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It was the first of a trio in Europe that housed the initial wave of accused Sept. 11 conspirators, and it was where Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of the attacks, was waterboarded 183 times after his capture. In December, the European Court of Human Rights heard arguments that Poland violated international law and participated in torture by accommodating its American ally. “In the face of Polish and United States efforts to draw a veil over these abuses, the European Court of Human Rights now has an opportunity to break this conspiracy of silence and uphold the rule of law,” said Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

After a tumultuous year at the war-on-terror detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. military's motto is "Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent," operations are cloaked in secrecy. The prison approaches the start of its 13th year next week with a new reclusive regime that no longer discloses what was once routinely released information. The daily tally of hunger striking detainees — the protest that engulfed more than 100 prisoners at its peak this summer — stopped in December. Guards and other prison camp troops are under orders to withhold their names when talking to reporters. On the witness stand in the war court recently, a lawyer in the uniform of an Air Force officer gave sworn testimony under a curious, unexplained fake name — "Major Krueger." Guantanamo is remote, and what is happening there in this new era has mostly gone unnoticed. The government controls access to everything pertaining to Guantanamo. Journalists have to get the military's permission to go there, navigate censorship of their pictures, wait 40 seconds to hear what happens in court and then wait weeks to see court filings. The current crackdown on information can range from the mildly curious to the outright comedic. At times it seems to signify a gratuitous use of power by troops on rotation with sudden power to [wield] a censor's scissors. At times, it suggests a government bureaucracy whose default is knee-jerk secrecy.

Note: For more on government secrecy, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

[Many questions] have dogged the [CIA] for years. This secret body [is] known to have overthrown governments and installed others, raised armies, staged an invasion of Cuba, spied and counterspied, established airlines, radio stations and schools. Was it in fact damaging, while it sought to advance, the national interest? Former President Truman, whose administration established the CIA in 1947, said In 1963 that by then he saw "something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic positions." President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his administration that he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." In the 19 years that the CIA has been in existence, 150 resolutions for tighter congressional control have been introduced - and put aside. Few persons in or out of the American Government know much about its work, its organization, its supervision or its relationship to the other arms of the executive branch. In 1960, CIA agents in Laos, disguised as "military advisers," stuffed ballot boxes and engineered local uprisings to help a hand-picked strongman ... set up a "pro-American" government. It was the CIA that built up Ngo Dinh Diem as the pro-American head of South Vietnam after the French ... had found him in a monastery cell in Belgium and brought him back to Saigon as Premier. The revelation that CIA agents served among Michigan State University scholars in South Vietnam from 1955 to 1959 has contributed to the fear [of infiltration of universities].

Note: For a longer, even more revealing summary of this very lengthy article, click here. To see a full copy of this article, click here. For more on the secret and illegal activities of major intelligence agencies, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I'd start with: "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?" Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand. What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if ... we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle. I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying barely covers it. When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering. UAV troops are victim to not only the haunting memories of this work that they carry with them, but also the guilt of always being a little unsure of how accurate their confirmations of weapons or identification of hostile individuals were. The UAVs in the Middle East are used as a weapon, not as protection, and as long as our public remains ignorant to this, this serious threat to the sanctity of human life – at home and abroad – will continue.

Note: For more on war crimes committed by the US and UK in the illegal "global war on terror", see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

On December 4th it [was exactly] 44 years since a select unit of 14 Chicago Police officers, on special assignment to Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, executed a pre-dawn raid on a west side apartment that left Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark dead, several other young Panthers wounded, and the seven raid survivors arrested on bogus attempted murder charges. The physical evidence soon exposed the claims of a "shootout" that were made by Hanrahan and his men to be blatant lies, and that the murderous reality was that the police fired nearly 100 shots while the Panthers fired but one. But those lies were only the first layer of a massive cover-up that was dismantled and exposed over the next eight years -- a cover-up designed to suppress the central role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its COINTELPRO program in the assassination. The first documentation [of the operation and its cover-up] surfaced in March of 1971 when the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a small FBI office in Media Pennsylvania and expropriated over 1000 FBI documents. These documents exposed the FBI's super-secret and profoundly illegal COINTELPRO program and its focus in the 1960s on the black liberation movement and its leaders. Citing the assassinated Malcolm X as an example, Hoover directed all of the Bureau's Offices to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize" African American organizations and leaders.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency activity, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev heard voices inside his head and had an alter-ego, a report published in The Boston Globe claimed yesterday. Donald Larking, 67, who attended the same Boston mosque as the suspected bomber, said Tsarnaev believed the voices were part of a “majestic mind control”, which was “a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist." Larking also told the Globe that Tsarnaev was “torn” between himself and an alter-ego. “You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things,” he said; “Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him.” According to the report, the voices “came to [Tsarnaev] at unexpected times, an internal rambling that he alone could hear. Alarmed, he confided to his mother that the voice 'felt like two people inside of me. “As he got older, the voice became more authoritative, its bidding more insistent. Tamerlan confided in a close friend that the voice had begun to issue orders and to require him to perform certain acts, though he never told his friend specifically what those acts were.” Tamerlan, 26, and his younger brother Dzhokhar, 20, are alleged to have planted the two pressure cooker bombs that killed three and injured more than 260 at the Boston Marathon in April. While Tamerlan was later killed in a shootout with police, his brother was captured and now potentially faces the death penalty under charges of terrorism.

Note: Many have long suspected that most mass murderers are mind control victims subject to top secret mind control programs, like those revealed in declassified government documents on this webpage. For the full investigative report in the Boston Globe, click here. For lots more verifiable information on these mind control programs, click here.

After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors. But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. It was kept secret and remains so today. President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. The pages are completely blank. Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally. The Saudis deny any role in 9/11. The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States. Is the federal government protecting the Saudis? Case agents [say] they were repeatedly called off pursuing 9/11 leads back to the Saudi Embassy, which had curious sway over White House and FBI responses to the attacks. Just days after Bush met with the Saudi ambassador in the White House, the FBI evacuated from the United States dozens of Saudi officials, as well as Osama bin Laden family members. [Ambassador Bandar ibn-Saud] made the request for escorts directly to FBI headquarters on Sept. 13, 2001 — just hours after he met with the president.

Note: For verifiable evidence the bin Ladens were evacuated shortly after 9/11, click here. Why are most media not reporting this important story? A search showed only one other major media outlet in the US (Boston Globe at this link) that covered this news. The appearance of this article in the most popular tabloid in New York is being interpreted by some observers as a sea change in public attitudes to the tragedy of 9/11. Of course the most important question is whether there was US government involvement in the attacks. For abundant evidence implying this, see the deeply revealing reports available at our 9/11 Information Center.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the C.I.A. for an internal study done by the agency that lawmakers believe is broadly critical of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program but was withheld from congressional oversight committees. The committee’s request comes in the midst of a yearlong battle with the C.I.A. over the release of the panel’s own exhaustive report about the program, one of the most controversial policies of the post-Sept. 11 era. The Senate report, totaling more than 6,000 pages, was completed last December but has yet to be declassified. According to people who have read the study, it is unsparing in its criticism of the now-defunct interrogation program and presents a chronicle of C.I.A. officials’ repeatedly misleading the White House, Congress and the public about the value of brutal methods that, in the end, produced little valuable intelligence. Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, disclosed the existence of the internal C.I.A. report during an Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. He said he believed it was begun several years ago and “is consistent with the Intelligence’s Committee’s report” although it “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.” “If this is true,” Mr. Udall said ... “this raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.”

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency operations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh accused the Obama administration ... of having “cherry-picked intelligence” regarding the Aug. 21 chemical attack in Syria that served as evidence for an argument in favor of striking President Bashar Assad's government. Though President Barack Obama eventually decided not to strike Syria, the administration made a public case for war by saying that Assad’s regime was responsible for a poison gas attack in the outskirts of Damascus. The U.N. later concluded the attack had involved the nerve agent sarin. In his piece -- titled "Whose Sarin?" -- Hersh reported that al-Nusra, a jihadi group fighting in Syria’s long-running civil war, had also "mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity.” Therefore, he wrote, “Obama did not tell the whole story” when stating with certainty that Assad had to be responsible, crossing a so-called "red line" that would trigger U.S. retaliation. Hersh is a freelancer, but he's best known these days for his work in The New Yorker, where he helped break the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. In an email, Hersh wrote that “there was little interest” for the story at The New Yorker. Hersh then took the story to The Washington Post. Hersh wrote that he was told by email that Executive Editor Marty Baron decided “that the sourcing in the article did not meet the Post's standards.” Hersh [then] sent the Syria story to editors at the London Review of Books, LRB Senior Editor Christian Lorentzen [said]. Lorentzen said the piece was not only edited, but thoroughly fact checked by a former New Yorker fact checker who had worked with Hersh in the past.

Note: For more on government lies to provide pretexts for war, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

[Since] Sept. 11, 2001, victims’ loved ones, injured survivors, and members of the media have all tried without much success to discover the true nature of the relationship between the 19 hijackers – 15 of them Saudi nationals – and the Saudi Arabian government. Many news organizations reported that some of the terrorists were linked to the Saudi royals and that they even may have received financial support from them as well as from several mysterious, moneyed Saudi men living in San Diego. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any connection. But earlier this year, Reps. Walter B. Jones, R-N.C., and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., were given access to the 28 redacted pages of the [Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001] issued in late 2002, which have been thought to hold some answers about the Saudi connection to the attack. Last week, Jones and Lynch introduced a resolution that urges President Obama to declassify the 28 pages, which were originally classified by President George W. Bush. It has never been fully explained why the pages were blacked out, but President Bush stated in 2003 that releasing the pages would violate national security. Some of the information has leaked out over the years ... that the 28 pages in fact clearly portray that the Saudi government had at the very least an indirect role in supporting the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attack. In addition, these classified pages clarify somewhat the links between the hijackers and at least one Saudi government worker living in San Diego.

Note: For more on the government cover-up of the truth behind 9/11, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

[In] Miram Shah, the frontier Pakistani town that has become a virtual test laboratory for drone warfare, ... residents paint a portrait of extended terror and strain within a tribal society caught between vicious militants and the American drones hunting them. Their claims of distress are now being backed by a new Amnesty International investigation that found, among other points, that at least 19 civilians in the surrounding area of North Waziristan had been killed in just two of the drone attacks since January 2012 — a time when the Obama administration has held that strikes have been increasingly accurate and free of mistakes. Miram Shah ... has become a fearful and paranoid town, dealt at least 13 drone strikes since 2008 — more than any other urban settlement in the world. Even when the missiles do not strike, buzzing drones hover day and night, scanning the alleys and markets with roving high-resolution cameras. The strikes in the area mostly occur in densely populated neighborhoods. The drones have hit a bakery, a disused girls’ school and a money changers’ market, residents say. The constant presence of circling drones — and accompanying tension over when, or whom, they will strike — is a crushing psychological burden for many residents. Sales of sleeping tablets, antidepressants and medicine to treat anxiety have soared, said Hajji Gulab Jan Dawar, a pharmacist in the town bazaar. Women were particularly troubled, he said, but men also experienced problems. State services have virtually collapsed. At the local hospital, corrupt officials are reselling supplies of medicine and fuel in the town market, doctors said.

Note: For more on the illegal killing worldwide of innocent men, women, and children by missile strikes from US drones, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The federal government’s main terrorist watch list has grown to at least 700,000 people, with little scrutiny over how the determinations are made or the impact on those marked with the terrorist label. The government refuses to confirm or deny whether someone is on the list, officially called the Terrorist Screening Database, or divulge the criteria used to make the decisions. Even less is known about the secondary watch lists that are derived from the main one, including the no-fly list (used to prevent people from boarding aircraft), the selectee and expanded selectee lists (used to flag travelers for extra screening at airport checkpoints), the TECS database (used to vet people entering or leaving the United States), the Consular Lookout and Support System (used to screen visa applications) and the known or suspected terrorists list (used by law enforcement in routine police encounters). For people who have landed on these lists, the terrorist designation has been difficult to challenge legally. The Terrorist Screening Center, which administers the main terrorist watch list, declined to discuss its procedures, or to release current data about the number of people on various watch lists, and how many of them are American citizens.

Note: For more on government threats to civil liberties, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Europe’s human rights court shone a rare public light [December 3] on the secret network of European prisons that the CIA used to interrogate terrorism suspects, reviving questions about the “extraordinary renditions” that angered many on this continent. At [the] hearing, attorneys for two terrorism suspects currently held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, accused Poland of human rights abuses. The lawyers say the suspects fell victim to the CIA’s rendition program, in which terrorism suspects were kidnapped and transferred to third countries; they allege that the two were tortured in a remote Polish prison. All the prisons were closed by May 2006. Interrogations at sea have replaced CIA “black sites” as the U.S. government’s preferred method for holding terrorism suspects and questioning them without access to lawyers. One of the cases heard [concerns] 48-year-old Saudi national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who faces U.S. terrorism charges for allegedly orchestrating the al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in 2000, a bombing in the Yemeni port of Aden that killed 17 sailors. The second case involves 42-year-old Abu Zubaida, a Palestinian also held in Guantanamo who has never been charged with a crime. Both men say they were brought in December 2002 to Poland, where they were detained and subjected to harsh questioning at a Polish military installation in Stare Kiejkuty, a village in the country’s remote northeast. There they were subject to mock executions, waterboarding and other tortures, including being told their families would be arrested and sexually abused, said Amrit Singh, a lawyer representing Nashiri.

Note: For more on war crimes by the US and UK in the "global war on terror", see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

In the early years after Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA turned some Guantanamo Bay prisoners into double agents, sending them home to help the United States kill terrorists, current and former U.S. officials said. The CIA promised the prisoners freedom, safety for their families and millions of dollars from the agencys secret accounts. It was a gamble. Officials knew there was a chance that some prisoners might quickly spurn their deal and kill Americans. Nearly a dozen current and former U.S. officials described aspects of the program to the Associated Press. Dozens of prisoners were evaluated, but only a handful, from a variety of countries, were turned into spies who signed agreements to work for the CIA. Prisoners agreed to cooperate for a variety of reasons, officials said. Some received assurances that the United States would resettle their families. Another agreed to cooperate after the agency insinuated that it would harm his children, a former official said, a threat similar to those interrogators made to self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. All were promised money. Exactly how much each received remains unclear. But altogether, the government paid millions for their services, officials said. The money came from a secret CIA account, code-named Pledge, that is used to pay informants, officials said. Officials said the program ended in 2006 as the flow of detainees to Guantanamo Bay slowed to a trickle. The last prisoner arrived there in 2008.

Note: There is no doubt that the CIA used mind control techniques to control and likely program some of the prisoners. To read verifiable documentation on the U.S. governments secret mind control programs, click here. For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Pope Francis's crusade against corruption has made him a target for Italy's all-powerful mafia clans, a leading anti-mob prosecutor has warned. Nicola Gratteri, who has battled Calabria's shadowy 'Ndrangheta mafia, said [that] Francis's attempt to bring transparency to the Vatican was making the white collar mobsters who do business with corrupt prelates "nervous and agitated". He told the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano: "Pope Francis is dismantling centres of economic power in the Vatican. If the bosses could trip him up they wouldn't hesitate. I don't know if organised criminals are in a position to do something, but they are certainly thinking about it. They could be dangerous." Francis, who has called for "a poor church", has backed reform at the Vatican's bank, which has been suspected for years of being a channel for the laundering of mob profits. This week police impounded a luxury hotel on Rome's Janiculum hill – formerly a monastery – which the 'Ndrangheta allegedly purchased from a religious order. "The mafia that invests, that launders money, that therefore has the real power, is the mafia which has got rich for years from its connivance with the church," said Gratteri. "Priests continuously visit the houses of bosses for coffee, which gives the bosses strength and popular legitimacy," he said. A bishop in Locri in Calabria had excommunicated mobsters after they damaged fruit trees owned by the church, he said. "But before that episode, the bosses had killed thousands of people" without being sanctioned, he added.

Note: For more on secret societies, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Twelve years ago, on 13 November 2001, President George W Bush signed an order authorizing the detention of suspected al-Qaida members and supporters, and the creation of military commissions. A total of seven detainees out of the 779 men ever held at Guantánamo have been convicted and sentenced. Five of the seven are no longer at Guantánamo creating a paradox: you have to lose to win. Those lucky enough to get charged and convicted of a war crime have good odds of getting out of Guantánamo, but those who are never charged could spend the rest of their lives in prison. Since nearly all of the men held at Guantánamo have been there since long before 2006 and most were at best low-level flunkies, the government's inability to charge them with providing material support for terrorism means they likely will never face a military commission for a trial that might have enabled them to find a way out of Guantánamo. In September 2006, 14 high-value detainees held in CIA black sites were transferred to military custody at Guantánamo. Only one has been tried and convicted. The law that has evolved from Guantánamo has been a black eye for the country: from the Supreme Court ruling that President Bush's military commissions were illegal to the Washington DC circuit ruling [that] all of the men convicted in military commissions were charged with an offense that was not a legitimate war crime. America's enemies and allies alike, in their criticism of US war on terrorism practices, cite Guantánamo as an example of failed leadership.

Note: For more on military corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Doctors and psychologists working for the US military violated the ethical codes of their profession under instruction from the defence department and the CIA to become involved in the torture and degrading treatment of suspected terrorists, an investigation has concluded. The report of the Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centres concludes that after 9/11, health professionals working with the military and intelligence services "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees". The report lays blame primarily on the defence department (DoD) and the CIA, which required their healthcare staff to put aside any scruples in the interests of intelligence gathering and security practices that caused severe harm to detainees, from waterboarding to sleep deprivation and force-feeding. The two-year review by the 19-member taskforce, Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, supported by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations, says that the DoD termed those involved in interrogation "safety officers" rather than doctors. Doctors and nurses were required to participate in the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike, against the rules of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association. Doctors and psychologists working for the DoD were required to breach patient confidentiality and share what they knew of the prisoner's physical and psychological condition with interrogators, and were used as interrogators themselves.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency operations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available 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.