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Military Corruption Media Articles

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on military corruption 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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Gitmo Is Killing Me
2013-04-15, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/hunger-striking-at-guantanamo-bay.html

Ive been detained at Guantnamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial. Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray. I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I cant describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldnt. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone. I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding. The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being ... and I deserve to be treated like one.

Note: Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, has been a prisoner at Guantnamo Bay since 2002. For an illuminating analysis of this situation by the Washington Post, click here.


Three key lessons from the Obama administration's drone lies
2013-04-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/three-lessons-obama-drone...

For years, senior Obama officials, including the president himself, have been making public claims about their drone program that have just been proven to be categorically false. McClatchy's national security reporter, Jonathan Landay, obtained top-secret intelligence documents showing that "contrary to assurances it has deployed US drones only against known senior leaders of al-Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified 'other' militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area." That article quotes drone expert Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations as saying that "McClatchy's findings indicate that the administration is 'misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.'" In his own must-read article at Foreign Policy about these disclosures, Zenko writes - under the headline: "Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars" - that "it turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan" and that the McClatchy article "plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides - that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al-Qaida who pose an imminent threat of attack on the US homeland - is false." Zenko explains that these now-disproven claims may very well make the drone strikes illegal since assertions about who is being targeted were "essential to the legal foundations on which the strikes are ultimately based."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the lies and crimes committed by the US and UK in their global wars of aggression, click here.


UN Adopts Treaty to Regulate Global Arms Trade
2013-04-03, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/adopts-treaty-regulate-global-arms-trade-1...

The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade [on April 2], after a more than decade-long campaign. The final vote: 154 in favor, 3 against and 23 abstentions. "This is a victory for the world's people," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. "The Arms Trade Treaty will make it more difficult for deadly weapons to be diverted into the illicit market. ... It will be a powerful new tool in our efforts to prevent grave human rights abuses or violations of international humanitarian law." Never before has there been a treaty regulating the global arms trade, which is estimated to be worth $60 billion. Frank Jannuzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA [said,] "The voices of reason triumphed over skeptics, treaty opponents and dealers in death to establish a revolutionary treaty that constitutes a major step toward keeping assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons out of the hands of despots and warlords who use them to kill and maim civilians, recruit child soldiers and commit other serious abuses." What impact the treaty will actually have remains to be seen. It will take effect 90 days after 50 countries ratify it, and a lot will depend on which ones ratify and which ones don't, and how stringently it is implemented. As for its chances of being ratified by the U.S., the powerful National Rifle Association has vehemently opposed it, and it is likely to face stiff resistance from conservatives in the Senate, where it needs two-thirds to win ratification.


Top Pentagon thinker bemoans civilian subjugation to the military.
2013-03-26, Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/local/blogs/war-and-peace/2013/03/26/top-pentagon-...

Blistering charges of misplaced power and a morally bankrupt culture in the nations military-industrial complex are rarely leveled by one of the defense establishments own. But that is exactly what ... Gregory D. Foster, a former Army officer and West Point graduate who now teaches national security studies at the National Defense University in Washington [did] when he went after the top brass, political leaders, and defense company executives [at a recent defense budget conference]. He accused them of allowing the nearly sacrosanct principle of civilian control of the militaryan early building block of American democracyto be turned on its head. How? By virtually never questioning the key assumptions of military planning and allowing a largely unchecked, destructive and highly militarized foreign policy to pose as a properly subordinated military industrial complex. [Foster said] This is what I call civilian subjugation to the military. We face it in this administration, we faced it in the Clinton administration...we faced it in the Bush administration. It all makes for a national security establishment, in Fosters view, that perpetuates an approach to the world that is overly confrontational, lacks critical thinking about long term objectives, and even undercuts the strategic aims of democracy. For example, he said the accepted orthodoxy of never-ending global threats and the necessity to confront them militarily makes it nearly impossible to fashion a national security strategy that puts real security, crisis prevention, and the preservation of civil society ahead of institutional bias and private profit.

Note: For a penetrating analysis by a great general of the real purposes served by continuous war, click here.


UN: Pakistan 'does not sanction' US drone strikes
2013-03-15, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21803391

The head of a UN team investigating US drone strikes in Pakistan has said that Islamabad does not consent to them and sees them as a territorial violation. American officials say privately that co-operation with Pakistan has not ended altogether - despite a cooling of relations - and key Pakistani military officers and civilian politicians continue to support the strikes. It is estimated that between 2004 and 2013, CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed up to 3,460 people. About 890 of them were civilians and the vast majority of strikes were carried out under the President Barack Obama's administration. "The position of the government of Pakistan is quite clear," Mr Emmerson said on Friday. "It does not consent to the use of drones by the United States on its territory and it considers this to be a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and territorial integrity." The drone campaign "involves the use of force on the territory of another state without its consent", he said. Furthermore Pakistan believes that drone strikes are radicalising a new generation of militants, he said, when it was capable of fighting Islamist extremists in the country by itself. The UN special rapporteur said that as a matter of international law, drone strikes were only lawful if they took place at the express request of the country concerned.

Note: Why are these drone strikes allowed to continue when Pakistan clear opposes them and when there is not doubt many civilians are killed? For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government corruption, click here.


Federal court rejects CIA's denial of drone strikes as 'fiction'
2013-03-15, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-court-cia-drone-20130315,0,1257923...

A federal appeals court said [on March 15] that it will no longer accept the fiction from the Obama administrations lawyers that the CIA has no interest in or documents that describe drone strikes. It is neither logical nor plausible for the CIA to maintain that it would reveal anything not already in the public domain to say the Agency at least has an intelligence interest in such strikes, said Chief Judge Merrick Garland. The defendant is, after all, the Central Intelligence Agency. The decision gave a partial victory to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that seeks documents on the governments still-secret policy on drone strikes. The three judges ... rejected the administrations position that it could simply refuse to confirm or deny that it had any such documents. A federal judge had rejected the ACLUs suit entirely, but the three-judge appeals court revived the suit. The agencys non-response does not pass the straight face test, Garland concluded. He cited public statements from President Obama, new CIA Director John Brennan and former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that discussed the use of drone strikes abroad. In this case, the CIA has asked the courts ... to give their imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible, Garland wrote in ACLU vs. CIA. ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer called the decision a victory. It requires the government to retire the absurd claim that the CIAs interest in targeted killing is a secret, he said. It also means that the CIA will have to explain what records it is withholding and on what grounds it is withholding them."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the lies required to sustain the illegal US/UK wars of aggression in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, click here.


How the US public was defrauded by the hidden cost of the Iraq war
2013-03-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/11/us-public-defrauded-hidde...

When the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration estimated that it would cost $50-60bn to overthrow Saddam Hussein and establish a functioning government. This estimate was catastrophically wrong: the war in Iraq has cost $823.2bn between 2003 and 2011. Some estimates suggest that it may eventually cost as much as $3.7tn when ... the long-term costs of caring for the wounded and the families of those killed [are factored in]. The most striking fact about the cost of the war in Iraq has been the extent to which it has been kept "off the books" of the government's ledgers and hidden from the American people. This was done by design. The most obvious way in which the true cost of this war was kept hidden was with the use of supplemental appropriations to fund the occupation. By one estimate, 70% of the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2008 were funded with supplemental or emergency appropriations approved outside the Pentagon's annual budget. With the Iraq war treated as an "off the books" expense, the Pentagon was allowed to keep spending on high-end military equipment and cutting-edge technology. The Bush administration masked the cost of the war with deficit spending to ensure that the American people would not face up to its costs while President Bush was in office. [It] encouraged the American people to keep spending and "enjoy life", while the government paid for the occupation of Iraq on a credit card they hoped never to have to repay.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on government corruption, click here.


Fukushima And The Navy: Sailors Sue Japan Nuclear Plant Owner, Saying Disaster Made Them Sick
2013-03-11, Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/fukushima-navy-health-problems_n_285...

Within weeks of setting off a geiger counter and scrubbing three layers of skin off his hands and arms, former Navy quartermaster Maurice Enis recalled being pressured to sign away U.S. government liability for any future health problems. Enis and about 5,000 fellow sailors aboard the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier had finally left Japan, after 80-some days aiding victims of the March 11, 2011, Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, and were about to take a long-awaited port call in Thailand. But first, they were told they needed to fill out some paperwork. "They had us [to] sign off that we were medically fine, had no sickness, and that we couldn't sue the U.S. government," Enis [says], recalling widespread anger among the sailors who ... felt they had little choice. [On] the [second] anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, Enis joined a lawsuit with more than 100 other service members who participated in the rescue mission and who have since developed medical issues they contend are related to radioactive fallout from the disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Rather than targeting the U.S. government, the federal lawsuit names plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. the defendant. TEPCO, as the company is known, provided false information to U.S. officials about the extent of spreading radiation from its stricken reactors, according to Roger Witherspoon on his blog Energy Matters.

Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing nuclear power news articles from reliable major media sources.


Above the law
2013-03-11, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/katrina-vanden-heuvel-above-the-law/20...

The government of the United States, wrote Chief Justice John Marshall in his famous decision in Marbury v. Madison, has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men. This principle grounded in the Constitution, enforced by an independent judiciary is central to the American creed. Citizens have rights, and fundamental to these is due process of the law. Yet last week Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking for the administration with an alarmingly casual nonchalance, traduced the whole notion of a nation of laws. First, the attorney general responded to Sen. Rand Pauls inquiry as to whether the president claimed the power to authorize a lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil and without trial. Holder wrote that, speaking hypothetically, it is possible to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which that power might become necessary and appropriate. In response to the growing furor, Holder sent Paul another letter, stating clearly that the president has no authority to use a weaponized drone against an American in the United States who is not engaged in combat. But that, of course, only underscores the issue. The country is waging a war on terrorism that admits no boundary and no end. Now Holder is saying that the president has the authority to kill Americans in the United States if they are engaged in combat. No hearing, no review, no due process of law.

Note: For a disturbing report on the massive expansion of drones over US skies, click here.


Three Democratic myths used to demean the Paul filibuster
2013-03-10, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/10/paul-filibuster-drones-pr...

Commencing immediately upon the 9/11 attack, the US government ... has spent 12 straight years inventing and implementing new theories of government power in the name of Terrorism. Every year since 9/11 has ushered in increased authorities of exactly the type Americans are inculcated to believe only exist in those other, non-free societies: ubiquitous surveillance, impenetrable secrecy, and the power to imprison and even kill without charges or due process. The Obama administration has already exercised the power to target even its own citizens for execution far from any battlefield. [This] has prompted almost no institutional resistance from the structures designed to check executive abuses: courts, the media, and Congress. Last week's 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan's confirmation as CIA director by GOP Sen. Rand Paul was one of the first ... Congressional efforts to dramatize and oppose just how radical these Terrorism-justified powers have become. For the first time since the 9/11 attack, even lowly cable news shows were forced ... to extensively discuss the government's extremist theories of power. All of this put Democrats ... in a very uncomfortable position. The politician who took such a unique stand in defense of these principles was not merely a Republican but a leading member of its dreaded Tea Party wing. Some Democrats, to their credit, publicly supported Paul. But most Democratic Senators ran away as fast as possible from having anything to do with the debate. Paul was doing nothing more than voicing concerns that have long been voiced by leading civil liberties groups such as the ACLU. But almost without exception, progressives who defend Obama's Terrorism policies steadfastly ignore the fact that they are embracing policies that are vehemently denounced by the ACLU.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the loss of civil liberties in the US, click here.


U.S. Air Force stops reporting data on Afghan drone strikes
2013-03-10, NBC News/Reuters
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/51122184/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia

With debate intensifying in the United States over the use of drone aircraft, the U.S. military said ... that it had removed data about air strikes carried out by unmanned planes in Afghanistan from its monthly air power summaries. U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has increasingly used drones to target against ... militants overseas. The debate was intensified by Obama's decision to nominate his chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, an architect of the drone campaign, as the new director of the CIA. Brennan was sworn into office on [March 8] following a protracted confirmation battle that saw Senator Rand Paul attempt to block a vote on the nomination with a technical maneuver called a filibuster, in which he tried to prevent a vote by talking continuously. Paul held the Senate floor for more than 12 hours while talking mainly about drones, expressing concern that Obama's administration might use the aircraft to target U.S. citizens on home soil.

Note: For a disturbing report on the massive expansion of drones over US skies, click here.


Rand Paul filibusters vote on CIA director nominee John Brennan over drones
2013-03-06, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57572883/rand-paul-filibusters-vote-on-ci...

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is filibustering the nomination of John Brennan to be director of the CIA, delivering a protracted speech on the Senate floor in protest of the Obama administration's controversial drone program, of which Brennan has been a key architect. Paul, speaking during the debate surrounding Brennan's nomination on the Senate floor, said he would "speak until I can no longer speak" in order to get his point across. "I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court," he said. Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder clarified to Paul in a letter that the U.S. drone policy does authorize the use of military force on against Americans on U.S. soil in cases of "extraordinary circumstance." Paul, a longstanding opponent of the administration's controversial targeted killing policy, expressed his outrage in a statement following his receipt of the letter and continued that tirade on the floor today. "That Americans could be killed in a cafe in San Francisco or in a restaurant in Houston or at their home in bowling green, Kentucky, is an abomination," Paul said. "I object to people becoming so fearful they gradually give up their rights."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the loss of civil liberties in the US, click here.


Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres
2013-03-06, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war. Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency. After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the Special Police Commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from ... Shia groups such as the Badr brigades. A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding. Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld. The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary ["James Steele: America's Mystery Man in Iraq"], implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on war crimes committed by the US and UK in their post-9/11 wars of aggression, click here.


President Could, In Theory, Order Drone Strike Inside U.S., Holder Says
2013-03-05, NPR
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/05/173572444/president-could-in-t...

Attorney General Eric Holder has said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul that the president could in an "entirely hypothetical" situation authorize the military to use lethal force within U.S. territory. The letter to Paul came in response to three inquiries the Kentucky Republican sent to John Brennan, President Obama's nominee for CIA director. Paul's letters asked if it was legal for the U.S. government to use lethal force, including in the form of drone strikes, on Americans inside the country. Here's Holder's response, in part: "As members of this Administration have previously indicated, the U.S. government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no President will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the President could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the loss of civil liberties in the US, click here.


The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking
2013-03-03, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-s...

Researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitlers reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945. The documented camps include not only killing centers but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named care centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel. Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear. The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions. The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on crimes committed in wars of aggression, click here.


I did it to make the world a better place: Manning
2013-03-01, Sydney Morning Herald/New York Times
http://www.smh.com.au/world/i-did-it-to-make-the-world-a-better-place-manning...

Bradley Manning has confessed in open court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, saying he wanted the information to become public "to make the world a better place". Appearing before a military judge for more than an hour on [Feb. 28], Private Manning read a statement recounting how he joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain documents should become known to the American public to prompt a wider debate about the Iraq War, and ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks. Before reading the statement, he pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the leak, which included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, logs of military incident reports, assessment files of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and 250,000 diplomatic cables. The guilty pleas exposed him to up to 20 years in prison. But the case against the slightly built, bespectacled 25-year-old who has become a folk hero among antiwar and whistleblower advocacy groups is not over. In a riveting personal history, Private Manning portrayed himself as thinking carefully about the categories of information he was divulging, excluding the sort that would harm the United States. He said he was initially concerned about diplomatic cables in particular, but after doing research learned that the most sensitive ones were not placed into the database to which he had access, and he concluded that those might prove "embarrassing" but would not cause harm.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on crimes committed in wars of aggression, click here.


Bradley Manning: the face of heroism
2013-02-28, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/28/bradley-manning-heroism-p...

If Bradley Manning did what he is accused of doing, then he is a consummate hero, and deserves a medal and our collective gratitude, not decades in prison. At his court-martial proceeding [today] in Fort Meade, Manning ... pleaded guilty to having been the source of the most significant leaks to WikiLeaks. He also pleaded not guilty to 12 of the 22 counts, including the most serious - the capital offense of "aiding and abetting the enemy", which could send him to prison for life - on the ground that nothing he did was intended to nor did it result in harm to US national security. The US government will now almost certainly proceed with its attempt to prosecute him on those remaining counts. Spencer Ackerman was there and reported: "Manning's motivation in leaking, he said, was to 'spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and foreign policy in general', he said, and 'cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.' Manning is absolutely right when he said today that the documents he leaked "are some of the most significant documents of our time". They revealed a multitude of previously secret crimes and acts of deceit and corruption by the world's most powerful factions. Journalists and even some government officials have repeatedly concluded that any actual national security harm from his leaks is minimal if it exists at all. To this day, the documents Manning just admitted having leaked play a prominent role in the ability of journalists around the world to inform their readers about vital events.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on crimes committed in wars of aggression, click here.


How the Bush administration sold the war and we bought it
2013-02-27, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/27/bush-administration-sold-...

It has been 10 long years since "Shock and Awe" the opening bombardment of Baghdad lit up the skies above the Tigris. Have we learned the lessons of that disastrous period? And what were those lessons? For nearly a year prior to the invasion, President Bush and his administration peppered the airwaves with serious accusations against Saddam Hussein. The intelligence supporting the claims was either not believed, or was highly disputed, by the experts. As a covert CIA operations officer working frantically in the months before the war to find and verify hard intelligence about Iraq's presumed WMD program, Valerie [Plame] was keenly interested in watching Secretary of State Colin Powell address the United Nations on 6 February 2003. As [she] watched the speech unfold on TV from CIA headquarters that morning, she experienced what can only be described as "cognitive dissonance". It became clear, as Powell laid out the case for war ... that his robust claims about the state of Iraqi WMD simply did not match the intelligence which she had worked on daily for months. Powell's claim from a discredited defector code-named "Curveball" on Iraq's biological weapons capability was particularly alarming. Valerie knew that "Curveball" had been deemed a "fabricator" by the agency, meaning that none of his intelligence could be believed. The implications suddenly become obvious: we were watching a kabuki play and the outcome was predetermined. The Bush administration was determined to go to war, however bad the intelligence, and not even Secretary of State Powell was going to stand in the way.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on crimes committed in wars of aggression, click here.


At the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a Steady Drip of Toxic Trouble
2013-02-24, The Daily Beast/Newsweek
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/24/at-the-hanford-nuclear-reser...

This month, the Department of Energy announced that a tank at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is leaking up to 300 gallons of radioactive waste a year. Nuclear sludge left over from Cold War plutonium production is drip-drip-dripping into American soil, infiltrating the groundwater, slowly making its way into our rivers. The leak is just another in a long line of mild disasters at Americas most contaminated nuclear-waste site, a radioactive drop in the already-polluted Columbia River. Hanford is the worst kind of mess: the kind that humanity is capable of making, but not capable of cleaning up. It was the home of the worlds first full-scale plutonium reactor and the epicenter of American nuclear production during the Cold War. Now the 586-square-mile campus is the subject of the largest environmental cleanup operation the United States government has ever undertaken. There are other sites in America with long nuclear historiesplaces like Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Yucca Mountain. But none have become sprawling disasters with quite as much panache as Hanford. The human and environmental consequences of Hanford have spread beyond those borders, across Washington and Oregon. A decade ago a rash of radioactive tumbleweeds blew across the nearby plains. In the early 1960s, an irradiated whale was killed off the Oregon coast, having apparently been contaminated by nuclear waste flowing down the Columbia River.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on environmental and health devastation caused by the nuclear weapons and energy industry, click here.


Obama officials refuse to say if assassination power extends to US soil
2013-02-22, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/22/obama-brennan-paul-assass...

The Justice Department "white paper" purporting to authorize Obama's power to extrajudicially execute US citizens was leaked three weeks ago. Since then, the administration - including the president himself and his nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan - has been repeatedly asked whether this authority extends to US soil, i.e., whether the president has the right to execute US citizens on US soil without charges. In each instance, they have refused to answer. Brennan has been asked the question several times as part of his confirmation process. Each time, he simply pretends that the question has not been asked, opting instead to address a completely different issue. It's really worth pausing to remind ourselves of how truly radical and just plainly unbelievable this all is. What's more extraordinary: that the US Senate is repeatedly asking the Obama White House whether the president has the power to secretly order US citizens on US soil executed without charges or due process, or whether the president and his administration refuse to answer? That this is the "controversy" surrounding the confirmation of the CIA director - and it's a very muted controversy at that - shows just how extreme the degradation of US political culture is.

Note: For a revealing 27-minute documentary on drones which operate in swarms and pose serious ethical questions in both peace and war, click here.


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