Military Corruption News Stories
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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Dialog, the private network cofounded by Peter Thiel, grades its event attendees on a hidden scale, ranking them by wealth and fame, tracking their relationships, and using algorithms to help decide who they should meet, who they should sit with, and who no longer belongs. Founded in 2006 by Thiel and data broker Auren Hoffman, Dialog is a private club that convenes politicians, investors, entrepreneurs, military leaders, executives, academics, and journalists for invitation-only, off-the-record retreats. According to a Dialog document shared by a past participant, it has “over 1,000 paying members,” and more than 2,500 people have attended its annual retreats. Dialog assigns people grades before they join. Of the 192 dossiers examined by WIRED, 130 are tagged as members. The rest are prospects with files bearing markings like “First Time Dialoger” or “Warm.” Everyone—members and prospective invitees alike—is assigned a grade of A, B, or C. The “C” grade appears reserved for the most famous and influential; only one in seven received it. Most people—141 of 192—received a “B.” The final tier, “A,” appears primarily assigned to older, established members whom the graders consider less notable. The leak also points to a built-in matchmaking system that pairs members for both networking and dating. (Roughly 10 percent of respondents opted into a singles pool.) More than three-quarters already have a list of algorithm-suggested matches.
Note: Is this Dialog Society the Bohemian Grove of Big Tech? Read how Thiel worked with the CIA to influence the origins of Facebook, and how Palantir software helped the NSA spy on the entire planet.
Well, data leaked by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew (who also brought us the justice department’s no-fly list back in 2023) is shedding new light on Dialog, the private social club co-created by the former PayPal boss Peter Thiel and the angel investor Auren Hoffman. The network has been around since 2006, and regularly gathers politicians, entrepreneurs, foreign officials, academics, Silicon Valley founders and even Hollywood folks for invitation-only retreats. there are a few weird things we’ve discovered from this leak. Dialog grades its retreat attenders on a hidden scale, ranking them according to their wealth and fame. Everyone is assigned a grade of A, B or C, with the “C” grade being awarded to the most famous and influential. Lower-grade attenders are charged full-price roughly 70% of the time, while only about a quarter of VIPs have to shell out the bigger bucks. Planned events range from sessions like “Bring Back Nuclear” to others focused on “Disinformation and Deepfakes”, “Contrarian AI Takes”, “Democracy Under Surveillance” and “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness.” The agenda also includes sessions on cult-building (moderated by the founder of the Christian site Pray.com, no less), one on “Navigating WWIII” and a session titled “How’s Your Sex Life?” Dialog has a matchmaking system that pairs members for networking and dating. The data exposed in the leak includes home addresses, phone numbers, emails, dates of birth, and other bio-datas.
Note: Is this Dialog Society the Bohemian Grove of Big Tech? Read how Thiel worked with the CIA to influence the origins of Facebook, and how Palantir software helped the NSA spy on the entire planet.
The 72nd meeting of the Bilderberg group, the elite and secretive policy conference that is the longtime subject of endless conspiracy theories, was held at the weekend in Washington DC. A security cordon went up around the opulent Salamander hotel for the notoriously media-shy summit, which was packed as ever with prime ministers, military leaders, tech billionaires and the heads of giant investment companies. Bilderberg, which since the 1950s has been the intellectual engine room of Nato, took place this year at a time of immense crisis and uncertainty. Away from Trump’s bluster, and for all his rhetoric about abandoning Nato, there were no signs that the Americans are withdrawing from Bilderberg. Far from it – the Americans were there in force. Wall Street titans, including the CEOs of KKR and Lazard, and the heads of huge corporations like Pfizer, met behind closed doors with a delegation of senior politicians close to the president. Big business lobbying in private is Bilderberg’s speciality, and this secretive mix of the private and public sectors fits perfectly with Trump’s brand of crony-capitalism. This year’s conference had a wartime flavour: with the “Future of Warfare” on the agenda, and a participant list including the four-star admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command. From the private sector there was a healthy contingent of military contractors and drone manufacturers.
Note: Is this Dialog Society the Bohemian Grove of Big Tech? Read more about the shadowy history of the Bilderberg secret society.
Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) whistleblower and former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch accused intelligence agencies Tuesday of hiding billions of dollars in secret government spending from Congress. His investigation uncovered what he described as “slush funds” — pools of money allegedly operating outside normal congressional oversight channels — worth billions of dollars annually that were allegedly used to support activities operating outside normal oversight channels, Grusch said speaking at a Capitol Hill event alongside members of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. “This is also a real fraud, waste and abuse issue,” Grusch said. “During my investigation, I found slush funds to the tune of billions of dollars per annum for these activities.” Asked what the government knows about nonhuman intelligence, Grusch claimed the government is aware of “several” different alien species. “It’s a continuum from corporeal bipedal type life to, you know, what I would consider is like sentient plasma life,” Grusch said. “But there are several that this government is aware of.” Federal investigators recently alleged that former CIA official David Rush used a fraudulent “special access program” as part of a scheme involving more than $40 million in gold bars and millions in government funds, drawing renewed attention to how highly restricted government programs can operate with limited outside visibility.
Note: Don't miss our new video UFO Disclosure Explained: New Solutions for Humanity w/ Daniel Sheehan and Amber Yang. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on UFOs. Then explore the comprehensive resources provided in our UFO Information Center.
The Pentagon has announced that they employ specialized energy weapons for defense. The Department of War’s Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael announced this development in an X post. The post ... included a pic of said weaponry firing a laser beam and a soldier holding his head in pain. Dubbed directed energy weapons or DEWs, these advanced instruments of war use focused rays to disable electronic weapons such as drones and incapacitate — or even kill — enemy soldiers. According to the X post, these beams are comprised of “concentrated electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles.” With this announcement, the Department of War seemingly confirmed years of so-called rumors that claimed that the government was developing this science fiction-esque weapon. Perhaps one of the most notable figures sounding the alarm was deceased scientist Amy Eskridge, 34, who was involved in extensive research into anti-gravity technology, UFOs, and extraterrestrial life. The researcher, who allegedly died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2022, had claimed she was hit by a DEW attack in her own home in Huntsville, Alabama not too long before her death. Her theory was seconded by retired British intelligence officer Franc Milburn, whom she had enlisted to investigate harassment she received after she threatened to disclose information about the subjects of her research.
Note: Read more about the mysterious ailments said to be caused by directed energy weapons. Is there a connection to other missing or dead scientists? For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on non-lethal weapons and UFO disclosure.
When Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed one of his goals was the country’s “denazification.” The Kremlin still uses this narrative as a cornerstone of its war propaganda. In their zeal to deconstruct Russian propaganda, Western elites created a propaganda myth of their own: there are no Nazis in Ukraine. This fiction required the whitewashing of Azov, a unit founded in 2014 by the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine under the leadership of Andriy Biletsky. Azov became notorious for extremist ideology, Nazi symbolism, and allegations of war crimes in the Donbas. In 2018, the U.S. Congress banned the group from receiving American weapons, funding, or training. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, that stigma vanished almost overnight. Kyiv repackaged Azov [as] the 3rd Assault Brigade. Western media rebranded and whitewashed it. Questioning this narrative became taboo and labeled as “Russian propaganda.” Neo-Nazi networks are deeply embedded in parts of Ukraine’s military structure. Some Ukrainian military units have incorporated Nazi-linked symbols into their official insignia. The Zelensky government — and President Volodymyr Zelensky himself as commander-in-chief — have made a political bargain with the far right. Since 2022, far-right activists and networks have flooded into the security and defense sector. In conditions of total war and chronic manpower shortages, this alliance ... is becoming entrenched. Ukraine’s Western partners ... tolerate extremists inside Ukraine’s armed forces as long as those extremists continue fighting.
Note: Our Substack, Working Together To End the War On Peace in Ukraine, investigates how US collaboration with extremist nationalist groups and neo-Nazis in Ukraine helped contribute to today's Russia-Ukraine war. We also provide evidence that US and NATO policies, covert intelligence agency operations, media censorship, and corporate profiteering have fueled the conflict while blocking genuine peace efforts. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war and military corruption.
Because defense contracts often prevent the military from repairing its own equipment, critics say weapons companies are price-gouging the Pentagon at every turn. The military’s lack of a “right to repair” doesn't just allow defense contractors to charge thousands of dollars, for fixes that could be done for free or very cheaply. Rather, the Pentagon’s dependence on weapons makers for maintenance undermines military readiness. Namely, contractors’ extensive repair delays and sweeping decisions about whether to service gear routinely leave warfighters without critical equipment and weapons systems — even while deployed. Many DoD contracts now leave repair and maintenance, which can make up as much as 70% of a military program’s lifetime cost, to the vendors. “It's a cash-cow for them,” Ben Freeman, director of the Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy Program, tells RS. “They can charge literally thousands of dollars to replace things that service members could replace for pennies.” Take the RQ-11 Raven drone, for example. After hard landings, it often has trouble starting back up again. But due to contractual restrictions, the military is barred from making repairs and must ship the drone to the contractor at a cost of $26,000, regardless of the issue. When an extensive repair backlog meant service members were temporarily allowed to fix the drone themselves, however, they found they could solve the problem — a broken connector — for free with hot glue.
Note: Read more on how congress has prevented the military from repairing its own equipment. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
Beneath the surface of the Strait of Hormuz and the surrounding Gulf lies a biological sanctuary. The region is home to around 7,000 dugongs and fewer than 100 Arabian humpback whales—a nonmigratory population that cannot leave these waters. Naval mines, residual military activity, and congested shipping lanes mean the strait remains a high-risk environment—not just for vessels but also for the ecosystems beneath them. Underwater explosions and military sonar don’t just scare whales, they can physically blind them, leading to stranding and death. The Arabian humpback whale, unlike its cousins in the Atlantic, does not migrate. For them, the Gulf is not a corridor but home, a permanent habitat. Olivier Adam, a researcher at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, says that the Gulf’s resident cetaceans—better known as marine mammals—have limited options: Either abandon their habitat or remain and endure prolonged exposure to noise. In the case of Arabian humpback whales, relocation is not realistic, as they are one of the only populations that do not migrate between feeding and breeding areas. “These baleen whales have no way to escape,” he says. Whales rely on sound for nearly every essential function: feeding, navigation, reproduction, and social interaction. When that acoustic environment is disrupted, the effects are immediate. In shallow coastal zones, where biodiversity is concentrated, even small disruptions can cascade through the ecosystem.
Note: Read more about the decimation of populations of whales and dolphins over the last decade resulting from the year-round, full-spectrum military practices carried out in the oceans. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war and marine mammals.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who was involved in the raid to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela was arrested on charges that he used classified information to make more than $400,000 by betting on the operation before it happened. In the hours before the U.S. attacked Iran, hundreds of anonymous bets over $1,000 were placed on the U.S. striking Iran by the next day, which the New York Times said suggested that some users might’ve “seen the strike coming.” Prediction markets, such as industry leaders Polymarket and Kalshi, have exploded in popularity. They create or exacerbate an array of problems, but at the Media and Democracy Project, or MAD, we believe they have the potential to severely harm the way news is reported, perceived, and engaged with. Suppose that prediction markets achieve their claims of providing better forecasts than other methods. Casino journalism [would still be] bad for journalism and the public. Most of the “propositions” offered on these markets are based on news reports; reporters provide the raw material on which these bets are made. In effect, traders on prediction markets are betting on the content of news stories. An Israeli journalist recently received death threats over his refusal to rewrite his report on an Iranian missile strike, on which $23 million of prediction market “investments” were riding. As the markets become larger, and their use in news increases, the incentive for market manipulation will also grow.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and Big Tech.
[Veteran journalist Katrina Manson's] new book, “Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare,” is an ... account of the ongoing reconfiguration of the U.S. armed forces for a new technological era. “Project Maven” is structured as an intellectual and professional biography of Drew Cukor, a Marine Corps intelligence officer largely responsible for ... this military transformation. Cukor insists that Maven was never supposed to be a weapon. He frequently defends the project as nothing more than an integrated data platform ... for a world made better and safer by A.I. warfare. In 2018, Google employees staged a massive walkout to protest the company’s work on a primitive iteration of the project. In the aftermath of the Google fiasco, Cukor turns to Palantir (in addition to Microsoft and Amazon) to make Maven a reality. NATO now has its own Maven contract with Palantir, and that prompted ten member nations to pursue one, too. The Maven Smart System has become a global surveillance apparatus—it can keep track of forty-nine thousand airfields all over the world—but its current work is hardly limited to intelligence provision and analysis. A “single click,” [journalist Katrina] Manson reports, “could send coordinates through a tactical data link to a specific weapons platform so that it could fire at the target.” The entire process, from target identification to target destruction, is four clicks. Officials told Manson that Maven was “accelerating operations and ‘enabling lethality’ at combat headquarters around the world.” Maven is only one part of the A.I. tool kit. Manson uncovers evidence of two clandestine killer-robot programs, one aerial and the other aquatic, which are being developed in haste. For the first time, the Pentagon’s proposed budget contained a line item for comprehensively self-directing systems. A machine can shoot, Manson reports, up to “ten times faster than an assassin.”
Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and military corruption.
Palantir (PLTR)’s Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official program of record, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders, a move that locks in long-term use of Palantir’s weapons-targeting technology across the U.S. military. Maven is a command-and-control software platform that analyzes battlefield data and identifies targets. It is already the primary AI operating system for the U.S. military, which has carried out thousands of targeted strikes against Iran over the last three weeks. Designating Maven as a program of record will streamline its adoption across all arms of the military. The memo ordered oversight of Maven be moved from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office within 30 days. Future contracting with Palantir will be handled by the Army, the letter said. Feinberg’s order is a significant win for Palantir, which has landed a growing stream of contracts with the U.S. government, including a deal announced last summer with the U.S. Army worth up to $10 billion. Those awards have helped double the company’s stock price in the past year, lifting its market value to nearly $360 billion. Maven can rapidly analyze huge amounts of data from satellites, drones, radars, sensors and intelligence reports, and use AI to automatically identify potential threats or targets.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and military corruption.
Laser guns are real now. Actual militaries are deploying actual lasers in actual combat. “This is a technology that has been under development for decades,” [said] Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer. “And it’s only really now just really starting to enter the public view.” The Army has outfitted trucks with anti-drone lasers, and the Air Force has added ground-based lasers to its arsenal. Russia, China, and the United Kingdom are all developing—and in some cases already deploying—laser weapons, and last year, Israel became the first country to use a laser in combat to destroy a drone. The very real lasers now being deployed on battlefields around the world have some notable differences from most of their science-fictional forebears. They’re silent, for one thing—no pew pew sound effects—and the beam they produce is invisible. Real lasers have a number of other advantages. $13 a shot is pretty good compared with the Navy’s standard missile interceptors, which cost $2 million apiece. Another advantage of lasers is that they just keep going. Last year, Chinese scientists successfully beamed a precision non-weapon laser all the way to the moon. But infinite range is also a drawback. If a laser missed a drone, Boyd said, the beam could continue for hundreds of miles and hit, say, a commercial airliner. Even if a laser beam did hit its target, Boyd said, its light could still scatter and cause all manner of collateral damage.
Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on warfare technologies.
The Department of Defense has quietly signed a $210 million deal to buy advanced cluster shells from one of Israel’s state-owned arms companies, marking unusually large new commitments to a class of weapons and an Israeli defense establishment both widely condemned for their indiscriminate killing of civilians. The deal, signed in September and not previously reported, is the department’s largest contract to purchase weapons from an Israeli company in available records. The shells are designed to replace decades-old and often defective cluster shells that left live explosives scattered across Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and other nations. The terror of cluster weapons persists long after the guns that fired them have quieted, as civilians return to fields, forests, and settlements laced with bomblets that can explode years later without warning. “The footprint of the injuries of these weapons is so horrifying,” said Alma Taslidžan, advocacy manager for the aid organization Humanity & Inclusion. The Cluster Munition Monitor has documented more than 24,800 cluster munition injuries and deaths since the 1960s, three-quarters from unexploded remnants. In 2024, cluster munitions killed at least 314 civilians, the majority of them in Ukraine. Major military powers — like Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the United States — have never signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans its 112 member states from using or producing those weapons.
Note: American cluster bombs kill countless civilians in countries like Yemen while the world's biggest banks profit from the weapons trade. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war and military corruption.
The truth is out there — and late President George H.W. Bush apparently knew it — telling a federal official that an alien made contact with humans at a secretive New Mexico air base in 1964. Eric Davis, an astrophysicist who was a scientific advisor on the since-disbanded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program ... claimed that Bush confirmed to him in a private conversation details of contact between the military and an alien creature at Holloman Air Force Base in Otero County. Bush told him that three spaceships were seen approaching the base and that an interstellar being emerged from one ship and had a face-to-face encounter with military and CIA officials, Davis said during an interview in “The Age of Disclosure,” a documentary. “One of them landed on the tarmac and a non-human entity deboarded the craft that landed and interacted with uniformed Air Force and civilian CIA personnel,” Davis claimed. “And when [Bush] asked for more details he was told that he did not have a need-to-know,” he relayed. Davis claims in the film that alien bodies were recovered in Russia in 1988, pulled from the wreckage of a large tic-tac shaped UAP, or unidentified anomalous phenomena. Hal Puthoff, a former AATIP member, quantum physicist and longtime disclosure advocate, claimed there were several different types of ETs. “The bodies recovered are not all the same type,” Puthoff said in the documentary, though he declined to detail them.
Note: In the Controlling the UFO Narrative: Government Cover-Ups and Secret Programs section of our UFO Information Center, we present a 2019 leaked memo with Dr. Eric Davis and former Director of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Admiral Thomas R. Wilson. They discuss the existence of deeply classified black budget programs dealing with non-human technology and the different departments and people involved. Our 26-minute video UFO Disclosure: Breakthrough Technology and Awakening Human Consciousness features interviews with leading experts along with well-sourced, verifiable information to help you make sense of this fascinating issue and its immense potential to transform our world.
There is an epidemic of child sex crimes in and around Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Since 2021, and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, dozens of elite soldiers stationed at the military base have been convicted of raping children, distributing child pornography, and other similar offenses. Many of these soldiers served in Afghanistan, where ... the U.S. military aided their local allies in “bacha bazi” (boy play): the practice of kidnapping and keeping boys as sex slaves, large numbers of whom were enslaved on U.S. military compounds. According to investigative journalist Seth Harp, who uncovered a massive narcotics smuggling and distribution network run by elite military operators ... there has been a tenfold increase in such cases since 2021. [Former United States Army Lieutenant Colonel, Special Forces Green Beret, and a former Battalion Commander at Fort Bragg Anthony] Aguilar notes: “When you deploy as a military and you have all of your 90 cubic inch containers that get locked up will all your stuff in it. Those don’t get inspected when they fly back over on a military aircraft and land at Fort Bragg…[They learn] How easy it would be to transport and traffic weapons, drugs, and yes, even humans, back and forth, from country to country. It is all very doable. And it is all very lucrative.” “Military leadership at the highest ranks are aware of what is happening, and they choose to cover it up. The whole time that the U.S. was in Afghanistan, they were working with, protecting, funding, and arming guys who were systematically raping little boys, keeping them in chains on U.S. military bases – chained children on U.S. bases who were raped on a nightly basis!” At Forward Operating Base Shank in Logar Province in 2014, [former Fort Bragg paratrooper Jordan] Terrell recalls seeing a group of young bachas running around the base. One, he noticed, “had something hanging out of his butt.” At first confused by the site, he later realized that what he saw was the child’s prolapsed anus from being repeatedly sodomized.
Note: The State Department belatedly released a report admitting that, for nearly 20 years of occupation, there existed, "a government pattern of sexual slavery on government compounds." US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal that American contractors at DynCorp engaged in drug use and the exploitation of young “dancing boys” in Afghanistan. At the same time, US soldiers were formally ordered not to intervene as Afghan police and militia allies sexually abused children on US bases. Dyncorp was also involved in child sex slavery rings in Bosnia and Colombia, where US military soldiers and international contractors working under DynCorp bought, raped, and trafficked kids as young as 12.
The relatively small Somali community in the U.S., estimated at 260,000, has lately been receiving national attention thanks to a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota. A central theme of Trump’s anti-Somali rancor is that they come from a war-torn country without an effective centralized state, which in Trump’s reasoning speaks to their quality as a people, and therefore, their ability to contribute to American society. It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that Somalia’s state collapse and political instability is as much a result of imperial interventions, including from the U.S., as anything else. Cold War geopolitical machinations partly created the contextual background to the 1977-78 Somalia-Ethiopia war. Somalia’s defeat in this war set the stage for the disintegration of the state in 1991. This threw the country into a prolonged state of conflict, resulting in mass displacement and migration. U.S. drone strikes in Somalia have continued over the past two decades with varying degrees of intensity at different times. Since Trump returned to office, his administration has dramatically increased the drone campaign, while the transparency of the decision-making process and consequences of these strikes have become more opaque. Recent scholarship has noted the link between U.S. militarism in Somalia and the policing and surveillance of Somali immigrants in the U.S. Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric ... conveniently omits the U.S role in fomenting instability.
Note: Read about the terrible consequences of US policy in Somalia. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
“We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it,” a Venezuelan security guard says in a video widely shared on social media and promoted by the White House. His account tells how U.S. special forces in Venezuela captured then-President Maduro using new technology which incapacitated the entire protective team and allowed two dozen U.S. troops to easily defeat hundreds of defenders. Guard: "At one point, they launched something—I don't know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move." In the 90’s and early 2000s, the Pentagon poured resources into the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, now rebranded the Joint Intermedia Force Capabilities Office. Their task was to develop non-lethal, or less-lethal weapons which ... would disable or incapacitate people. The Pentagon worked on a wide variety of concepts, including strobe dazzlers, malodorants and electroshock projectiles. One of the biggest was the millimeter-wave Active Denial System or ‘pain beam’ which could inflict severe pain and drive back rioters from several hundred meters away. A patented device known as Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control (EPIC) ... uses radio waves “to excite and interrupt the normal process of human hearing and equilibrium.”
Note: Acoustic or sonic weapons can vibrate the insides of humans to stun them, nauseate them, or even "liquefy their bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic messes," according to a Pentagon briefing. These devices can also cause excruciating pain, with some able to heat up skin from a distance and others that can beam sound into the skull of a human. Learn more about non-lethal weapons in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.
On November 26, soldiers of the Presidential Guard took power in yet another West African country. This time, it was Guinea-Bissau — the tiny country on the Atlantic coast better known to the world as the region’s first “narco-state.” Since its independence in 1974, the former Portuguese colony has endured nine coups, making it one of West Africa’s most fragile states. [The country] acts as a key transit point for the cocaine trade between the northern tier of South America and Europe. The latest coup is the second successful military takeover this year in Africa’s rapidly expanding coup belt. According to the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), “Politics and cocaine in Guinea-Bissau have gone hand in hand for decades. Upheavals in one cause ripples in the other.” The United States established diplomatic relations with Guinea-Bissau in 1975. Guinea-Bissau’s importance as the key transshipment point for cocaine between Colombia and the fast-growing market in Europe grew steadily over the years since. In 2013, Gen. Antonio Indjai, Guinea-Bissau’s senior military official at the time, was charged for conspiring to traffic drugs and procure military-grade weapons including surface-to-air missiles for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (the “FARC”). In 2019, one of two large cocaine shipments seized in Guinea-Bissau was linked to ... the Al-Mourabitoun terrorist group, which is affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
Note: Many of the recent coups in Africa have been carried out by people affiliated with US intelligence or military interests. Read our Substack investigation into the dark truths behind the US War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs.
The idea of a “right to repair” — a requirement that companies facilitate consumers’ repairs, maintenance, and modification of products — is extremely popular, even winning broad, bipartisan support in Congress. That could not, however, save it from the military–industrial complex. Lobbyists succeeded in killing part of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have given service members the right to fix their equipment in the field without having to worry about military suppliers’ intellectual property. The decision to kill the popular proposal was made public Sunday after a closed-door conference of top congressional officials, including defense committee chairs. For the defense industry ... the proposal threatened a key profit stream. Once companies sell hardware and software to the Pentagon, they can keep making money by forcing the government to hire them for repairs. Defense lobbyists pushed back hard against the proposal when it arose in the military budgeting process. The CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association claimed that the legislation could “cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely.” The contractors’ argument was that inventors would not sell their products to the Pentagon if they knew they had to hand over their trade secrets as well. As a piece of legislation, the right to repair has likely died until next year’s defense budget bill process. The notion could be imposed in the form of internal Pentagon policies.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The story of the Pentagon’s new pistols would be funny if it didn’t point to a serious problem at the heart of America’s military. The Department of Defense has built a gilded fortress of people and processes that is slow, wasteful and married to the past. Of all the obstacles to fielding the military that America needs, the Pentagon’s bureaucracy may be the hardest to overcome. The byzantine system for buying and testing weapons isolates the military from the innovative parts of the American economy. Congress underwrites the dysfunction with appropriations that are designed to deliver wins for its members rather than for America’s national security. As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense. No one can keep track of where all the money goes. The Defense Department is the only major federal agency never to get a clean bill of health from outside accountants, and has failed its last seven audits in as many years. When the bean counters can follow the money, they often find it has been wasted. The system feeds on itself. Pentagon officials and congressional staff members have long migrated to the arms industry.
Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
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