Tag: secrecy

US Military Officials Involved in Latin America Campaign Required To Sign Non-Disclosure Agreements

US military officials involved in the Trump administration’s military campaign in Latin America have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing US officials.

The report said the request is highly unusual, since US military officials are already required to keep secrets from the public, though it also acknowledged that the Pentagon has previously used NDAs under the leadership of War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The news comes as members of Congress have complained about the Trump administration’s lack of transparency about the campaign, which has involved bombing alleged drug-running boats and a substantial military buildup, and a push toward a regime change war to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

The US War Department has not provided any evidence to back up its claims about what the boats it has been bombing are carrying and hasn’t provided any information about the people it has been killing in strikes that amount to extrajudicial executions at sea.

In an interview on Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has been very critical of the bombing campaign, affirmed that Congress hasn’t received any information about the people the Pentagon has been targeting. “No one said their name. No one said what evidence. No one said whether they’re armed. And we’ve had no evidence presented,” Paul said. “So, at this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings.”

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Pentagon Creates New Legion of PR Toadies

When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment.

The impact of this rule cannot be understated—any reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a deputized public relations lackey.

Many journalists, thankfully, displayed solidarity with each other and the idea of a free press when they resisted the state’s new censorship efforts. “Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon…rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work,” reported the AP (10/15/25).

CNN’s Brian Stelter (10/15/25) reported:

A flyer with the words “journalism is not a crime” appeared Tuesday on the wall outside the “Correspondents’ Corridor” where journalists operate at the Pentagon. It was a silent protest of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new policy that severely restricts press access.

The policy criminalizes routine reporting, according to media lawyers and advocates, so news outlets are refusing to abide by it. Instead, they are giving up their access to the building, while vowing to continue thoroughly covering Hegseth and the military from outside the Pentagon’s five walls.

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Historic New Mexico Town Blocks Cell Tower After Consulting Lawyer Featured in The Defender

Residents of San Cristóbal, New Mexico, a historic valley in Taos County, successfully blocked a 195-foot cell tower from being built in their community after teaming up with a telecommunications attorney featured in The Defender.

San Cristóbal residents contacted attorney Robert Berg on Sept. 19, after reading a Sept. 18 article in The Defender. The article featured Berg’s work representing communities that opposed cell towers or wireless antennas near homes and schools.

Berg agreed to represent the residents in person and praised their teamwork. “It’s a remarkable group of people — and a remarkable valley,” he said.

On Oct. 14, the Taos County Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 to overturn the Planning Commission’s July approval of a special use permit for Skyway Towers, a Tampa-based company that builds cell towers on speculation.

“Our community was united in opposition to this tower because we know that better alternatives exist,” Mandy Sackett, a San Cristóbal resident, told The Defender. “It’s heartening that the county commissioners took our voices seriously.”

The San Cristóbal residents’ victory comes as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — the agency that oversees wireless infrastructure — is proposing new rules that would hand the wireless industry sweeping control over where cell towers are built, according to an Oct. 17 Children’s Health Defense (CHD) action alert.

If adopted, the rules would eliminate public hearings for conditional and special use permits and automatically approve new tower applications after 150 days.

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File on Bizarre Argentine UFO Event Deemed Classified for National Security Reasons

In an eyebrow-raising story out of Argentina, a police report concerning a recent UFO incident involving mesmerized cattle has been deemed classified for national security reasons by government officials. According to a local media outlet, the bizarre event occurred on August 14th in the village of Candioti when police received word that multiple residents had observed a “white light with violet flashes” floating over the community. An officer dispatched to investigate the UFO sighting was soon alerted to a strange commotion unfolding among the animals at a ranch along the way. Arriving at the location, he likely could not believe his eyes at the wondrous scene before him.

To the astonishment of the officer and other witnesses, the ranch’s cows were eerily walking in a circle beneath the mysterious ball of light hovering overhead. Meanwhile, the property’s horses were thrashing around in a manner suggesting that they were deeply disturbed by what was unfolding around them. After a few minutes, the UFO suddenly vanished. Its disappearance seemingly broke the spell cast over the animals as the horses immediately calmed down, and the cows stopped their ritualistic circling. Silence fell over the field, with the witnesses understandably wondering what they had just seen.

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Judge approves class action against California ‘gender secrecy’ amid debate on transgenderism

As debate rages on the frequency of transgender identification in youth, California’s pressure on public schools to hide students’ gender identity at odds with sex from their parents is facing a mortal blow.

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez certified a class and four subclasses Wednesday to challenge The Golden State’s so-called gender secrecy practices, two and a half years after teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West sued Escondido Unified School District to stop muzzling them so they could inform parents about their children’s in-school identities. 

The class covers all individuals who are “participating or will participate in California’s public education system, whether as employees or parents/guardians of students, without having to subject themselves to Parental Exclusion Policies.” 

The subclasses – “appropriate where class members have separate and discrete legal claims” – cover employees who object to the policies or “submit a request for a religious exemption or opt-out to complying” with them, and parents or guardians with children in school who object or seek an exemption or opt-out.

It’s the first such class certification on the subject in the nation, the plaintiffs’ lawyers at the Thomas More Society told Just the News.

The order comes a month before a summary judgment hearing where Benitez could rule, without a trial, against the practices as a violation of parents’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights “to direct their children’s upbringing” and teachers’ free speech and religious freedom rights, the public interest law firm said.

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Secret military files of NATO state dumped at landfill – media

Hundreds of pages of sensitive Polish military documents, including secret papers pertaining to weapons, evacuations, and warehouse blueprints, were found dumped at a landfill, according to an investigation published by the news outlet Onet on Thursday.

The scandal surfaced just over a month after Warsaw pledged to outspend all other NATO states, allocating 4.8% of GDP to its army next year. EU governments have increasingly pushed for military buildups, citing an alleged threat from Russia – claims that Moscow has dismissed.

The Polish military denied the report, instead accusing the outlet of holding unauthorized copies of the documents, and insisting the originals were properly archived or destroyed, Onet wrote.

According to the outlet, an individual handed over the documents after finding them in torn plastic bags at a landfill. While some of the documents were shredded, many were intact and marked “restricted,” it wrote.

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Secret Israeli military bunker located under Tel Aviv tower struck by Iran, analysis shows

The Grayzone has geolocated the underground bunker of an important military command and control center nestled within a densely populated Tel Aviv neighborhood. Known as ‘Site 81,’ the U.S.-built facility houses a hyper-secretive intelligence base.

When Iran struck a series of targets in the heart of north Tel Aviv with ballistic missiles on June 13, Israeli authorities immediately cordoned off the area to prevent journalists from filming the damage. “The building on this compound was just hit,” Trey Yingst of Fox News reported as he arrived that evening at the site of HaKirya, Israel’s Defense Ministry headquarters, and the nearby Azrieli Center. But within seconds, Israeli police officers arrived to aggressively shunt Yingst away from where he was standing, just north of the HaKirya Bridge on the west side of Menachem Begin Road. 

That day, Iranian missiles struck the north tower of the Da Vinci apartment complex roughly 550 meters southwest of Yingst’s location. The Grayzone has determined that the building sits immediately south of the “Canarit” / “Kannarit” Israeli Air Force towers and above an underground military intelligence bunker jointly administered by the US and Israeli militaries. According to an analysis of leaked emails, public documents, and Israeli news reports, the location is host to a highly secretive, electromagnetically shielded intelligence facility known as “Site 81.”

Israel aggressively censors information relating to its urban military and intelligence facilities while simultaneously accusing its adversaries of engaging in ‘human shielding’ – a practice of protecting military targets with civilian populations that is prohibited by international humanitarian law. While the existence of a U.S. Army project to expand Site 81 to a 6,000 square-meter facility was widely reported from government records circa 2013, the specific location remained unknown.

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NASA goes dark hours before first look at interstellar object moving closer to Earth

NASA has gone dark just hours before humans get the closest look at the mysterious object barreling through our solar system. 

The interstellar object dubbed 3I/ATLAS will come within 18 million miles of Mars on October 3, its closest flyby of any planet this year.

Two space probes orbiting the Red Planet, Mars Express and ExoMars, are preparing to take Earth’s best picture and closest scans of the strange visitor, which scientists have widely concluded is an unusual comet from a distant solar system. 

However, when those readings come in, America’s space agency may remain completely silent about what the object really is.

NASA has announced that its official website will not be updated during the government shutdown, which has resulted in thousands of federal employees being sent home without pay.

It’s unclear whether NASA staff will make any announcements regarding the object’s close pass by Mars, similar to the history-making press conference that revealed the discovery of microbial life on Mars in September.

The shutdown couldn’t have come at a worse time, as scientists say Friday’s flyby could answer many questions about the mysterious comet, including whether it’s actually an object of extraterrestrial origin.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has maintained that 3I/ATLAS has too many confounding characteristics to be a simple comet streaking through the solar system.

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Mystery deepens over aide who set herself on fire as congressman cancels events and police withhold records

After one of his staffers died from dousing herself with gasoline and catching fire, a Texas Congressman has canceled all media events – seemingly to avoid questions about her death. 

Regina Santos-Aviles, 35, poured gasoline on herself before she became engulfed in flames at her home on September 13 in Uvalde, Texas – about two hours outside of San Antonio. 

The married mother of one, who was separated from her husband according to the San Antonio Express News, had worked for Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales as regional district director since 2021.

‘The last thing she said is, “I don’t want to die,”‘ Aviles’ mother Nora Gonzales told the Express News. 

She was airlifted to San Antonio, where she died at the hospital the next day.

Investigators have yet to determine her cause of death, with the medical examiner telling Daily Mail Thursday that the autopsy results are still pending.

However, Uvalde police believe she was alone in her backyard when she started to burn, according to the Express News, who reported her death as a self-immolation. 

Days after her death, the media was disinvited to an event where Gonzales would be face-to-face with reporters. 

Gonzales had been scheduled to visit Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio for the opening of a new research facility September 22.

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Veteran Space Operator Alleges Secret Control System Undermines Space Command and is Possibly Connected to UFOs

A veteran U.S. space operator has publicly alleged that a concealed ‘security control system’ within America’s national-security space enterprise is undermining commanders, obstructing routine tracking of objects in orbit, and, in some cases, diverting data away from the very commands responsible for defending the nation.

In a LinkedIn statement on 29 September 2025, Jim Shell alleged that a secret system has supplanted the ‘direction and authority’ of the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command. Shell is a former ‘Chief Scientist’ by duty title at the Space Innovation and Development Center under Air Force Space Command. 

In his statement, Shell states he has high confidence that the system is:

  • Supplanting the authority of Space Force and Space Command
  • Causing unauthorised interference with the Space Domain Awareness (SDA) mission – the global effort to detect, track and characterise satellites, debris, and other orbital objects
  • Demonstrating the potential to interfere with U.S. Northern Command’s ability to protect the homeland
  • Suppressing intelligence about Russian and Chinese on-orbit activities
  • Enforcing unpublished security rules that have led to Guardians – service members with the Space Force – being removed, threatened with court martial, and branded ‘problematic,’ while their commanders were never told the basis for the charges.

He adds that he has medium confidence in two further claims: that funds have been misappropriated, and that the system connects to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) activity – this raises the possibility that anomalous orbital detections are removed from the standard catalogue before they reach operational commanders.

Shell links today’s problems to a 2018 classification policy; however, Liberation Times understands the system’s unpublished rules predate 2018.

The 2018 policy was co-signed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) – which runs America’s spy satellites – and U.S. Strategic Command, which oversaw space operations before the creation of the U.S. Space Force and Space Command in 2019.

When the U.S. Space Command was re-established in 2019, following its inactivation in 2002, it adopted the policy, according to Shell.

Shell argues neither NRO nor U.S. Strategic Command had proper authority to impose such sweeping changes, yet the unpublished rules stemming from that policy continue to be enforced.

Alarmingly, according to Shell, attempts by senior officials to change the policy have repeatedly failed.

He points to an alleged confrontation on 27 May 2021, when the Vice Chief of Space Operations sought to push through changes but was blocked. Based on the date and role, this likely refers to General David Thompson, who held that post at the time.

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