Marvin Bush Employee's mysterious death - connections to 9/11?

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Marvin Bush: mysterious death - connections to 9/11?
Thu Oct 16 04:30:04 2003
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Marvin Bush Employee's mysterious death - connections to 9/11?
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/101003_bush_death.html

A bizarre story, which appeared only in Washington Post so far.
Wayne Madsen thinks, there might be more behind it.
Did Bertha Champagne know more about Stratasec?



October 10 , 2003, 1200 PDT, (FTW) --

By Wayne Madsen

WASHINGTON, At around 9 PM on September 29, Fairfax County, Virginia police responded to a 911 call describing an accident. However, they soon discovered they were not dealing with a routine emergency but the mysterious death of an employee of the 47-year old brother of President George W. Bush, venture capitalist Marvin Bush.

Sixty-two year old Bertha Champagne, described as a long time "baby sitter" for Marvin and Margaret Bush's two children, son Walker, 13, and daughter Marshall, 17, was found crushed to death by her own vehicle in a driveway in front of the Bush family home in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County. Champagne reportedly lived at the Bush family home.
( Read More... | 4129 bytes in body )
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/101003_bush_death.html


Champagne had left the residence to retrieve something from her car, which police say had somehow been left in gear. According to the police report, the car rolled forward and pinned the woman between it and a small building next to the driveway (possibly a checkpoint built by the Secret Service when Marvin's father, George H. W. Bush, was president).

The car crossed Edgehill Drive, a small street in front of the Bush compound. The vehicle then crossed a busy two-lane street, Fort Hunt Road, finally coming to rest in a wooded area across the street that adjoins the prestigious Belle Haven Country Club. No explanations have been offered as to why the vehicle did not move until Champagne was in a position to be crushed.

Champagne was pronounced dead on arrival at Inova Mount Vernon Hospital. Courtney Young, a spokesperson for the Fairfax County police was surprised when asked about the circumstances surrounding Champagne's death. She indicated the media was primarily focused on another Fairfax County story, the kidnapping and holdup of the wife of New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg on October 7. More mystifying is the fact that the Washington Post waited almost an entire week to publish the story about the baby sitter's death.

The incident occurred on September 29, but the Post did not report it until October 5 and buried it on page 3 of the Metro section. Nevertheless, the Washington Post was the only media outlet to cover the story at all. Young said police still did not know the exact cause of Champagne's death.

Young said the police had posted the incident on its web site in a press release, although the report makes no mention of Marvin Bush. It reads: A 62-year-old Alexandria area woman died after being pinned between a rolling car and a building. The crash happened on Monday, around 9 pm, near the intersection of Fort Hunt Road and Edgehill Drive. Bertha Champagne had gone outside to get something from a car in a driveway.

The car, which was left in gear, began to roll forward. Champagne was pinned between the car and a small building next to the driveway. The car continued to roll down the driveway, crossed Fort Hunt Road, and came to rest in a wooded area. Champagne was taken to Inova Mount Vernon Hospital where she was pronounced dead.

The press release is dated September 30 at 1330 (1:30 PM), some sixteen and a half hours after the incident occurred. The police were well aware of Marvin Bush's controversial role in serving on corporate boards for companies associated with the 911 terrorist attacks, however, they emphasized that Champagne's death was merely a quirky accident and no foul play was involved.

...According to two articles in the Progressive Populist written by Margie Burns, from 1993 to 2000, Bush served on the board of Securacom (since renamed Stratesec). The chairman of the board of Stratesec is Wirt D. Walker III, a cousin of Marvin and George W. Bush. Securacom had contracts to provide security for Dulles International Airport (the airport from which American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, originated) and the World Trade Center in New York.

Securacom's backers include a number of Kuwaitis through a company called KuwAm Corp (Kuwaiti-American Corp.). Stratesec also has Saudi investors.

Walker also serves as a managing director of KuwAm, which maintains offices within the Watergate complex along with Riggs Bank, on whose board Bush's uncle, Jonathan Bush, sits. Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Bandar, used a Riggs account to funnel money to Omar al Bayoumi and Osama Basnan, two Saudi students in California associated with two of the 911 hijackers.

More at FTW

Please check out also Marvin Bush at 911review.org
http://www.911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Bush,Marvin.shtml
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Bush Family Babysitter Killed in Fairfax
Sunday, October 5, 2003; Page C03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46190-2003Oct5.html

A babysitter for the family of Marvin Bush was found dead Monday night outside the family's Fairfax County home, and police said that she had been crushed when her car rolled into her, pinning her between the vehicle and an outbuilding on the property.

Fairfax County police said Bertha Champagne, 62, had worked for several years for Marvin Bush, President Bush's brother, and lived at the family home on Fort Hunt Road in the Alexandria section of Fairfax.

Officer Courtney Young, a police spokeswoman, said Champagne had gone outside the house about 9 p.m. Monday, reportedly to retrieve something from her car.

The vehicle had been in gear, police said, and appeared to have rolled in her direction when Champagne was in front of it.

After pinning Champagne, Young said, the car continued rolling toward Fort Hunt Road, near the intersection of Edgehill Drive.

Champagne was taken to an area hospital and declared dead that evening. Young said she did not know the cause of death.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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Marvin Bush
911dossier notes 25.1.2003:
http://anderson.ath.cx:8000/911/hj05.html

For those who do not accept the Official Story on the collapse of the Twin Towers, this article is a minor smoking gun. It explains their biggest problem: if the Towers were brought down with explosives how could anyone get them in. Step in Marvin Bush whose company installed the security system...

Vol. 9, No. 2021 - The American Reporter - January 20, 2003
SECRECY SURROUNDS A BUSH BROTHER'S ROLE IN 9/11 SECURITY

by Margie Burns

Washington, D.C. WASHINGTON, Jan 19, 2003 -- A company that provided security at New York City's World Trade Center, Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and to United Airlines between 1995 and 2001, was backed by a private Kuwaiti-American investment firm with ties to a brother of President Bush and the Bush family, according to records obtained by the American Reporter.

Two planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001 were United Airlines planes, and another took off from Dulles International Airport; two, of course, slammed into the World Trade Center. But the Bush Administration has never disclosed the ties of a presidential brother and the Bush family with the firm that intersected the weapons and targets on a day of national tragedy.

Marvin P. Bush, a younger brother of George W. Bush, was a principal in the company from 1993 to 2000, when most of the work on the big projects was done. But White House responses to 9/11 have not publicly disclosed the company's part in providing security to any of the named facilities, and many of the public records revealing the relationships are not public.

Nonetheless, public records reveal that the firm, formerly named Securacom, listed Bush on its board of directors and as a significant shareholder. The firm, now named Stratesec, Inc., is located in Sterling, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., and emphasizes federal clients. Bush is no longer on the board.

Marvin Bush has not responded to repeated telephoned and emailed requests for comment on this story.

The American Stock Exchange delisted Stratesec's stock in October 2002. Securacom also had a contract to provide security at Los Alamos National Laboratories, notorious for its security breaches and physical and intellectual property thefts.

According to its present CEO, Barry McDaniel, the company had an ongoing contract to handle security at the World Trade Center "up to the day the buildings fell down." Yet instead of being investigated, the company and companies involved with it have benefited from legislation pushed by the Bush White House and rubber-stamped by Congressional Republicans. Stratesec, its backer KuwAm, and their corporate officers stand to benefit from limitations on liability and national-security protections from investigation provided in bills since 9/11.
FULL REPORT:
http://anderson.ath.cx:8000/911/hj05.html

ALL OF A SUDDEN THE PRESIDENT BUSH TAKES A 9-DAY OUT OF THE
COUNTRY TRIP..... WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE????

SECRECY SURROUNDS A BUSH BROTHER'S ROLE IN 9/11 — Margie Burns, Thu Oct 16 05:01

BUSH CRIME FAMILY TREE

Bush Family Fortunes (2003)

George Walker, GW's great-grandfather, set up the takeover of the Hamburg-America Line, a cover for I.G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. In Germany, I.G. Farben was most famous for putting the gas in gas chambers; it was the producer of Zyklon B and other gasses used on victims of the Holocaust. The Bush family was not unaware of the nature of their investment partners. They hired Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, to hide the funds they were making from Nazi investments and the funds they were sending to Nazi Germany, rather than divest. It was only in 1942, when the government seized Union Banking Company assets under the Trading With The Enemy Act, that George Walker and Prescott Bush stopped pumping money into Hitler's regime. (1)

Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather. According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush. (2) On the 20th of October, the government commenced action against the company under the trading with the enemy act. (3) After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal. (4) In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past.(5)

George Herbert Walker Bush, the presidents father. Bush, as director of the CIA, had funneled enormous amounts of cash to drug runners including Manuel Noriega and helped in the destabilization of Argentina. Bush utilized his own connections to help fund drug runners from Laos to Panama. Most shocking was the so-called "cocaine coup" in Bolivia in June 1980, masterminded by fugitive Nazi Klaus Barbie, "The Butcher Of Lyons." Barbie, who had been previously secreted in Latin America by the CIA, began working closely with the Argentines and used drug money to finance a neo-Nazi cabal, one that succeeded in overthrowing the government. The troops swept through the capital wearing Nazi armbands, according to former DEA agent Mike Levine. George H.W. Bush later facilitated the Iran-contra affair, employing many of the same methods: secretly selling Central American cocaine in America and weapons to Iran while using the profits to fund the contras and to overthrow democratically elected socialists in Central America.(6) as the head of the CIA and later as Vice President, toppled democratically elected regimes in South and Central America and began propping up a dictator by the name of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Although forbidden by congress to do so, he continued to sell chemical and biological weapons to Saddam even after he used them on villages of innocent civilians. A decade later The United States had to go to war against him and the Bush family again, made millions from it.
Jonathan J. Bush, the Presidents uncle. Jonathan Bush's "Pioneer Profile" in "George W. Bush's $100,000 Club" cites him as the "head" of the Riggs Investment Management Co.; "Bush’s uncle Jonathan ... founded its subsidiary, J. Bush & Co., of which he is chair. He also is an ex-chair of the New York Republican State Finance Committee. Bush credits the investors sent his way by this banker uncle as a key to his 'success' in the Texas oil industry in the early ‘80s." (17)
Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering. Jonathan Bush, who is a major fundraiser for his nephew, was appointed in 2000 to run Riggs Investment Management Co. His association with Riggs began when he headed J. Bush & Co., a New Haven, Conn., company he created in 1970 and built to offer advice on money management. (18)
According to the 5/14/04 New York Times, Federal regulators fined the Riggs National Corporation, the parent company of Riggs Bank, $25 million yesterday for "failing to report suspicious activity, the largest penalty ever assessed against a domestic bank in connection with money laundering. The fine stems from Riggs's failure over at least the last two years to actively monitor suspect financial transfers through Saudi Arabian accounts held by the bank." The 5/14/04 Wall Street Journal reported that of particular concern, Riggs failed to monitor "tens of millions of dollars in cash withdrawals from accounts related to the Saudi Arabian embassy," including "suspicious incidents involving dozens of sequentially numbered cashier's checks and international drafts written by Saudi officials, including Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan." According to the 4/18/04 Washington Post, Saudi Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, "may have used a Riggs account to donate money to a charity that then gave some of it to the Sept. 11 terrorists."(...)According to the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice, Jonathan Bush is the President and CEO of Riggs Investment Management - a major arm of Riggs Bank. He is also the uncle of President George W. Bush. The President "credits the investors sent his way by this banker uncle as a key to his 'success' in the Texas oil industry in the early '80s." According to Public Citizen, the uncle Jonathan was a Bush Pioneer, having raised more than $100,000 for his nephew in 2000.(19)

Neil Bush, the president's brother. Central player of the 1980'ssavings and loan scandal, he ran a savings and loan into the ground while shoveling millions of its taxpayer-backed dollars into the pockets of two deadbeat partners. Neil served as a director of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan in Denver, Colorado, from 1985 until 1988. During that time, the now-dead thrift made over $200 million in loans to Neil's two partners in JNB Exploration, Neil's abysmally unsuccessful oil company. Federal regulators determined that, while Silverado was pumping loans to Neil's two associates, Neil was completely dependent on the two men for his income. The failure of Silverado -- its closure delayed until after the 1988 election -- cost taxpayers about $1 billion. After Silverado failed, Neil started a new oil company, Apex Energy. This time, his money came from a $2.35 million loan through a Small Business Administration program. When news of this reached the press in March 1991, the SBA discovered that the companies through which the loan was approved were technically insolvent, and it gave them up to thirty months to "self-liquidate." This meant that Apex would have to repay its SBA-guaranteed loans. Neil took this as his cue to move on, and he left Apex -- and its debts -- for others to worry about. (7) update: Neil Bush made $171,370 in one day. The fact that he was a former consultant to the company whose stock he dumped is just a coincidence
Marvin Bush, the president's brother was on the board of directors of a company providing electronic security for the World Trade Center, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines, according to public records. The company was backed by an investment firm, the Kuwait-American Corp., also linked for years to the Bush family. The security company, formerly named Securacom and now named Stratesec, is in Sterling, Va.. Its CEO, Barry McDaniel, said the company had a ``completion contract" to handle some of the security at the World Trade Center ``up to the day the buildings fell down." The suite in which Marvin Bush was annually re-elected, according to public records, is located in the Watergate in space leased to the Saudi government. The company now holds shareholder meetings in space leased by the Kuwaiti government there.(8) (9) more

Jeb Bush, the president's brother. After graduating from The University of Texas, Jeb Bush served a short apprenticeship at the Venezuelan branch of Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas before settling in Miami, in 1980, to work on his father's unsuccessful primary bid against Ronald Reagan. Shortly after arriving in Miami, Jeb was hired by Cuban-American developer Armando Codina to work at his Miami development company as an agent leasing office space. A couple of years later, Jeb and Codina became business partners, and in 1985 they purchased an office building in a deal partly financed by a savings and loan that later failed.The $4.56 million loan, from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida, was granted in such a way that neither Codina's nor Bush's name appeared on the loan papers as the borrowers. A third man, J. Edward Houston, borrowed the $4.56 million from Broward and then re-lent it to the Bush partnership. When federal regulators closed Broward Savings in 1988, they found the loan, which had been secured by the Bush partnership, in default. As Jeb's father was finishing his second term as vice-president and running for the presidency, federal regulators had two options: to get Jeb Bush and his partner to repay the loan, or to foreclose on their office building. But regulators came up with a third solution. After reappraising the building, regulators decided it wasn't worth as much as was owed for it. The regulators reduced the amount owed by Bush and his partner from $4.56 million to just $500,000. The pair paid that amount and were allowed to keep their office building. Taxpayers picked up the tab for the unpaid $4 million. (10)
He also rigged an election that you may have heard about. Thousands of eligible voters were disallowed the right to vote in predominantly democratic regions. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service.Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. (11)

George W. Bush, second appointed president of the United States.
• 1979-83: Fifty Bush family investors and friends, led by uncle Jonathan, a New York Republican Party official and an investment manager, fork over $4.7 million to set up young Bush in a company called Arbusto. It's a flop, and in 1982 gets a new name: Bush Exploration.
• 1984: Spectrum 7 Corporation, an Ohio oil exploration outfit owned by Dubya's Yalie pal William DeWitt Jr., buys out Bush Exploration, setting up young Bush as CEO at $75,000 a year and giving him 1.1 million shares of the firm's stock. Another flop. The company's fortunes soon sink, with $400,000 in losses and a debt of $3 million.
• 1986: In the nick of time, Bush and partners merge the failing Spectrum with Harken Oil, a Dallas exploration company, with a $2 million stock purchase. Bush puts up about $500,000 and gets a $120,000 annual consulting fee along with $131,250 in stock options. Harken is a small outfit, looking for oil opportunities within the U.S. Then out of the blue comes Harvard Management Corporation, an investment adviser for Harvard University's endowment portfolio. It pumps millions into the venture.
• 1990: Although Harken has no international expertise, it gets the attention of the Bahrain National Oil Company, which unexpectedly appears on the scene and bypasses big oil's Amoco and Chevron to sign a production agreement with the little Texas concern. The contract grants Harken exclusive rights to what seems to be a promising offshore area squeezed between two productive tracts owned by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Wall Street Journal speculates Bahrain was trying to cozy up to Daddy Bush, who was plotting an assault on Iraq after Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait.
Bass Enterprises Production Company finances the Bahrain drilling with $25 million, and Harvard Management raises its investment. A couple of members of the Fort Worth Bass family have places on Team 100, an elite business group contributing to the Republican National Committee.
In June, Harken drills two dry holes in Bahrain. The future looks bleak. Dubya dumps two-thirds of his Harken holdings (212,140 shares), for $848,560. He uses some of this money to buy into the Texas Rangers baseball club. This is a lot of stock to dump on the market all at once, and brokers say it was purchased by an unnamed institutional investor.
That August, Harken posts a loss of $23 million.
• January 1991: Daddy Bush attacks Iraq.
• February 1991: Dubya, as the official in charge at Harken, reports his big stock sale to the SEC—eight months late.
• April 1991: The SEC begins an investigation into Harken dealings. Chairman Richard Breeden, who had been appointed by the senior Bush and served him as an economic policy adviser, hails from Baker & Botts, a big Texas oil law firm where he was a partner. Inside the SEC, James Doty, general counsel and the official in charge of any litigation that might come out of the Harken investigation, is another alumnus of Baker & Botts. And as a private attorney, before joining the government, Doty represented the younger Bush in matters related to Dubya's ownership of the Rangers.
• 1993: The SEC ends its Harken investigation following perfunctory interviews.
The good people of Baker & Botts continued looking out for Shrub. Since 1993, Breeden, Doty, and other lawyers there have given him $182,050 for his various political campaigns, making the firm one of his biggest supporters.(12)
Upon appointment as president, Bush appoints 6 Iran-contra defendants to his staff, (13) fills the upper levels of the White house and pentagon with senior members of the PNAC (14) including his speech writer, chief advisor, secretary of defense, and vice president. Uses the terrorist attacks of 9-11 (16) to illegally invade and occupy Iraq under the false pretense of imminent threat (15) and reaps billions for Cheney's Halliburton, Rumsfeld's Bechtel, and his own family's Carlyle group.
newsweek article on Bush/Nazi connection
“Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951” - Federal Documents
Karl Rove's grandfather was Karl Heinz Roverer, the Gauleiter of Oldenburg. Roverer was Reich-Statthalter---Nazi State Party Chairman---for his region. He was also a partner and senior engineer in the Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo A. G. engineering firm, which built the Birkenau death camp,
Still, that's ancient history. Surely bush wouldn't be repeating the actions of fascist dictators. Or would he?
(1) http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id195/pg1/
(2) http://www.clamormagazine.org/features/issue14.3_feature.html
(3) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3713.htm
(4) http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=39&contentid=997
(5) http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=39&contentid=963&page=2
(6) http://www.oldamericancentury.org/bushcontra.htm
(7) http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1992/09/bushboys.html
(8) http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0204-06.htm
(9) http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Marvin_Bush
(10) http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/BushFV.html#p2
(11) http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1
(12) http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0228/ridgeway.php
(13) http://www.blythe.org/nytransfer-subs/Central_America/Iran-Contra_Felons_Get_Good_Jobs_from_Bush
(14) http://www.oldamericancentury.org/pnac.htm
(15) http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/sperry/stories/storyReader$526
(16) http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/
(17) http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Jonathan_Bush
(18) http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28396-2004May14?language=printer
(19) http://www.davidsirota.com/2004/05/bushs-uncle-is-executive-at-bank-fined.html



Bush 'planted fake news stories on American TV'

Andrew Buncombe / London Independent | May 29 2006

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies' products.

Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.

The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.

"We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them," said Diana Farsetta, one of the group's researchers. "I would say it's pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these get played and how frequently these pre-packaged segments are put on the air."

Ms Farsetta said the public relations companies commissioned to produce these segments by corporations had become increasingly sophisticated in their techniques in order to get the VNRs broadcast. "They have got very good at mimicking what a real, independently produced television report would look like," she said.

The FCC has declined to comment on the investigation but investigators from the commission's enforcement unit recently approached Ms Farsetta for a copy of her group's report.

The range of VNR is wide. Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying "Thank you Bush. Thank you USA" in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items.
Many of the corporate reports, produced by drugs manufacturers such as Pfizer, focus on health issues and promote the manufacturer's product. One example cited by the report was a Hallowe'en segment produced by the confectionery giant Mars, which featured Snickers, M&Ms and other company brands. While the original VNR disclosed that it was produced by Mars, such information was removed when it was broadcast by the television channel - in this case a Fox-owned station in St Louis, Missouri.

Bloomberg news service said that other companies that sponsored the promotions included General Motors, the world's largest car maker, and Intel, the biggest maker of semi-conductors. All of the companies said they included full disclosure of their involvement in the VNRs. "We in no way attempt to hide that we are providing the video," said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel. "In fact, we bend over backward to make this disclosure."

The FCC was urged to act by a lobbying campaign organised by Free Press, another non-profit group that focuses on media policy. Spokesman Craig Aaron said more than 25,000 people had written to the FCC about the VNRs. "Essentially it's corporate advertising or propaganda masquerading as news," he said. "The public obviously expects their news reports are going to be based on real reporting and real information. If they are watching an advertisement for a company or a government policy, they need to be told."

The controversy over the use of VNRs by television stations first erupted last spring. At the time the FCC issued a public notice warning broadcasters that they were obliged to inform viewers if items were sponsored. The maximum fine for each violation is $32,500 (£17,500).