[Mb-civic] Censored!

[Michael Butler]

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    Censored!
    By Camille T. Taiara
    The San Francisco Bay Guardian

    7-13 September 2005 Issue

    Project Censored presents the 10 biggest stories the mainstream media
ignored over the past year.

    Just four days before the 2004 presidential election, a prestigious
British medical journal published the results of a rigorous study by Dr. Les
Roberts, a widely respected researcher. Roberts concluded that close to
100,000 people had died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Most were
noncombatant civilians. Many were children.

    But that news didn't make the front pages of the major newspapers. It
wasn't on the network news. So most voters knew little or nothing about the
brutal civilian impact of President George W. Bush's war when they went to
the polls.

    That's just one of the big stories the mainstream news media ignored,
blacked out, or underreported over the past year, according to Project
Censored, a media watchdog group based at California's Sonoma State
University.

    Every year project researchers scour the media looking for news that
never really made the news, publishing the results in a book, this year
titled Censored 2006. Of course, as Project Censored staffers painstakingly
explain every year, their "censored" stories aren't literally censored, per
se. Most can be found on the Internet, if you know where to look. And some
have even received some ink in the mainstream press. "Censorship," explains
project director Peter Phillips, "is any interference with the free flow of
information in society." The stories highlighted by Project Censored simply
haven't received the kind of attention they warrant, and therefore haven't
made it into the greater public consciousness.

    "If there were a real democratic press, these are the kind of stories
they would do," says Sut Jhally, professor of communications at the
University of Massachusetts and executive director of the Media Education
Foundation.

    The stories the researchers identify involve corporate misdeeds and
governmental abuses that have been underreported if not altogether ignored,
says Jhally, who helped judge Project Censored's top picks. For the most
part, he adds, "stories that affect the powerful don't get reported by the
corporate media."

    Can a story really be "censored" in the Internet age, when information
from millions of sources whips around the world in a matter of seconds? When
a single obscure journal article can be distributed and discussed on
hundreds of blogs and Web sites? When partisans from all sides dissect the
mainstream media on the Web every day? Absolutely, Jhally says.

    "The Internet is a great place to go if you already know that the
mainstream media is heavily biased" and you actively search out sites on the
outer limits of the Web, he notes. "Otherwise, it's just another place where
they try to sell you stuff. The challenge for a democratic society is how to
get vital information not only at the margins but at the center of our
culture."

    Not every article or source Project Censored has cited over the years is
completely credible; at least one this year is pretty shaky.

    But most of the stories that made the project's top 10 were published by
more reliable sources and included only verifiable information. And Project
Censored's overall findings provide valuable insights into the kinds of
issues the mainstream media should be paying closer attention to.

    1. Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government

    While the Bush administration has expanded its ability to keep tabs on
civilians, it's been working to make sure the public - and even Congress -
can't find out what the government is doing.

    One year ago, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) released an 81-page
analysis of how the administration has administered the country's major open
government laws. His report found that the feds consistently "narrowed the
scope and application" of the Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential
Records Act, and other key public information legislation, while expanding
laws blocking access to certain records - even creating new categories of
"protected" information and exempting entire departments from public
scrutiny.

    When those methods haven't been enough, the Bush administration has
simply refused to release records - even when the requester was a
Congressional subcommittee or the Government Accountability Office, the
study found. A few of the potentially incriminating documents Bush and Co.
have refused to hand over to their colleagues on Capitol Hill include
records of contacts between large energy companies and Vice President Dick
Cheney's energy task force; White House memos pertaining to Saddam
Hussein's, shall we say, "elusive" weapons of mass destruction; and reports
describing torture at Abu Ghraib.

    The report's findings were so dramatic as to indicate "an unprecedented
assault on the laws that make our government open and accountable," Waxman
said at a Sept. 14, 2004, press conference announcing the report's release.

    Given the news media's intrinsic interest in safeguarding open
government laws, one would think it would be plenty motivated to publicize
such findings far and wide. However, most Americans remain oblivious to just
how much more secretive - and autocratic - our leaders in the White House
have become.

    Source: "New Report Details Bush Administration Secrecy" press release,
Karen Lightfoot, Government Reform Minority Office, posted on
www.commondreams.org, Sept. 14, 2004.

    2. Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death Toll

    Decades from now, the civilized world may well look back on the assaults
on Fallujah in April and November 2004 and point to them as examples of the
United States' and Britain's utter disregard for the most basic wartime
rules of engagement.

    Not long after the "coalition" had embarked on its second offensive, UN
High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour called for an investigation
into whether the Americans and their allies had engaged in "the deliberate
targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the
killing of injured persons, and the use of human shields," among other
possible "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions ... considered war
crimes" under federal law.

    More than 83 percent of Fallujah's 300,000 residents fled the city, Mary
Trotochaud and Rick McDowell, staffers with the American Friends Service
Committee, reported in AFSC's Peacework magazine. Men between the ages of 15
and 45 were refused safe passage, and all who remained - about 50,000 - were
treated as enemy combatants, according to the article.

    Numerous sources reported that coalition forces cut off water and
electricity, seized the main hospital, shot at anyone who ventured out into
the open, executed families waving white flags while trying to swim across
the Euphrates or otherwise flee the city, shot at ambulances, raided homes
and killed people who didn't understand English, rolled over injured people
with tanks, and allowed corpses to rot in the streets and be eaten by dogs.

    Medical staff and others reported seeing people, dead and alive, with
melted faces and limbs, injuries consistent with the use of phosphorous
bombs.

    But you wouldn't know any of this unless you'd come across a rare report
by one of an even rarer number of independent journalists - or known which
obscure Web site to log onto for real information.

    Of course, the media blackout extends far beyond Fallujah.

    The US military's refusal to keep an Iraqi death count has been mirrored
by the mainstream media, which systematically dodges the question of how
many Iraqi civilians have been killed.

    Les Roberts, an investigator with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health, conducted a rigorous inquiry into pre- and post-invasion
mortality in Iraq, sneaking into Iraq by lying flat on the bed of an SUV and
training observers on the scene. The results were published in the Lancet, a
prestigious peer-reviewed British medical journal, on Oct. 29, 2004 - just
four days prior to the US presidential elections. Roberts and his team
(including researchers from Columbia University and from al-Mustansiriya
University, in Baghdad) concluded that "the death toll associated with the
invasion and occupation of Iraq is probably about 100,000 people, and may be
much higher."

    The vast majority of those deaths resulted from violence - particularly
aerial bombardments - and more than half of the fatalities were women or
children, they found.

    The State Department had relied heavily on studies by Roberts in the
past. And when Roberts, using similar techniques, calculated in 2000 that
about 1.7 million had died in the Congo as the result of almost two years of
armed conflict, the news media picked up the story, the United Nations more
than doubled its request for aid to the Congo, and the United States pledged
an additional $10 million.

    This time, silence - interrupted only by the occasional critique
dismissing Roberts's report. The major television news shows, Project
Censored found, never mentioned it.

    Sources: "The Invasion of Fallujah: A Study in the Subversion of Truth,"
Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell, Peacework, Dec. 2004-Jan. 2005; "US Media
Applauds Destruction of Fallujah," David Walsh, www.wsws.org (World
Socialist Web site), Nov. 17, 2004; "Fallujah Refugees Tell of Life and
Death in the Kill Zone," Dahr Jamail, New Standard, Dec. 3, 2004; "Mortality
before and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq," Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta,
Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, and Gilbert Burnham, Lancet, Oct. 29,
2004; "The War in Iraq: Civilian Casualties, Political Responsibilities,"
Richard Horton, Lancet, Oct. 29, 2004; "Lost Count," Lila Guterman,
Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 4, 2005; "CNN to Al Jazeera: Why Report
Civilian Deaths?" Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April 15, 2004, and
Asheville Global Report, April 22-28, 2004.

    3. Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage

    Last year Project Censored foretold the potential for electoral
wrongdoing in the 2004 presidential campaign: The "sale of electoral
politics" made number six in the list of 2003-04's most underreported
stories. The mainstream media had largely ignored the evidence that
electronic voting machines were susceptible to tampering, as well as
political alliances between the machines' manufacturers and the Republican
Party.

    Then came Nov. 2, 2004.

    Bush prevailed by 3 million votes - despite exit polls that clearly
projected Kerry winning by a margin of 5 million.

    "Exit polls are highly accurate," Steve Freeman, professor at the
University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational Dynamics, and Temple
University statistician Josh Mitteldorf wrote in In These Times. "They
remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual
voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for."

    The eight-million-vote discrepancy was well beyond the poll's
recognized, less-than-1-percent margin of error. And when Freeman and
Mitteldorf analyzed the data collected by the two companies that conducted
the polls, they found concrete evidence of potential fraud in the official
count.

    "Only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots
did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling
margin of error," they wrote. And "the discrepancy between the exit polls
and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing
states."

    Inconsistencies were so much more marked in African American communities
as to renew calls for racial equity in our voting system. "It is now time to
make counting that vote a right, not just casting it, before Jim Crow rides
again in the next election," wrote Rev. Jesse Jackson and Greg Palast in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

    Sources: "A Corrupt Election," Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf, In
These Times, Feb. 15, 2005; "Jim Crow Returns to the Voting Booth," Greg
Palast and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 26, 2005;
"How a Republican Election Supervisor Manipulated the 2004 Central Ohio
Vote," Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, www.freepress.org, Nov. 23, 2004.

    4. Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In

    It's a well-known dirty trick in the halls of government: If you want to
pass unpopular legislation that you know won't stand up to scrutiny, just
wait until the public isn't looking. That's precisely what the Bush
administration did Dec. 13, 2003, the day American troops captured Saddam
Hussein.

    Bush celebrated the occasion by privately signing into law the
Intelligence Authorization Act - a controversial expansion of the PATRIOT
Act that included items culled from the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act
of 2003," a draft proposal that had been shelved due to public outcry after
being leaked.

    Specifically, the IAA allows the government to obtain an individual's
financial records without a court order. The law also makes it illegal for
institutions to inform anyone that the government has requested those
records, or that information has been shared with the authorities.

    "The law also broadens the definition of 'financial institution' to
include insurance companies, travel and real-estate agencies, stockbrokers,
the US Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, airlines, car dealerships,
and any other business 'whose cash transactions have a high degree of
usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters' " warned Nikki Swartz in
the Information Management Journal. According to Swartz, the definition is
now so broad that it could plausibly be used to access even school
transcripts or medical records.

    "In one fell swoop, this act has decimated our rights to privacy, due
process, and freedom of speech," Anna Samson Miranda wrote in an article for
LiP magazine titled "Grave New World" that documented the ways in which the
government already employs high-tech, private industry, and everyday
citizens as part of a vast web of surveillance.

    Miranda warned, "If we are too busy, distracted, or apathetic to fight
government and corporate surveillance and data collection, we will find
ourselves unable to go anywhere - whether down the street for a cup of
coffee or across the country for a protest - without being watched."

    Sources: "PATRIOT Act's Reach Expanded Despite Part Being Struck Down,"
Nikki Swartz, Information Management Journal, March/April 2004; "Grave New
World," Anna Samson Miranda, LiP, Winter 2004; "Where Big Brother Snoops on
Americans 24/7," Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson, www.capitolhillblue.com,
June 7, 2004.

    5. US Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast Asia

    The American people reacted to the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean
last December with an outpouring of compassion and private donations. Across
the nation, neighbors got together to collect food, clothing, medicine, and
financial contributions. Schoolchildren completed class projects to help the
cause.

    Unfortunately, the US government didn't reflect the same level of
altruism.

    President Bush initially offered an embarrassingly low $15 million in
aid. More important, Project Censored found that the US government exploited
the catastrophe to its own strategic advantage.

    Establishing a stronger military presence in the area could help the
United States keep closer tabs on China - which, thanks to its burgeoning
economic and military muscle, has emerged as one of this country's greatest
potential rivals.

    It could also fortify an important military launching ground and help
consolidate control over potentially lucrative trade routes. The United
States currently operates a base out of Diego Garcia - a former British
mandate in the Chagos Archipelago (about halfway between Africa and
Indonesia), but the lease runs out in 2016. The isle is also "remote and
Washington is desperate for an alternative," veteran Indian journalist Rahul
Bedi wrote.

    "Consequently, in the name of relief, the US revived the Utapao military
base in Thailand it had used during the Vietnam War [and] reactivated its
military cooperation agreements with Thailand and the Visiting Forces
Agreement with the Philippines," Bedi reported.

    Last February the State Department mended broken ties with the
notoriously vicious and corrupt Indonesian military - although human rights
observers charged the military with withholding "food and other relief from
civilians suspected of supporting the secessionist insurgency, the Free Aceh
Movement," Jim Lobe reported for the Inter Press Service.

    Sources: "US Turns Tsunami into Military Strategy," Jane's Foreign
Report, Feb. 15, 2005; "US Has Used Tsunami to Boost Aims in Stricken Area,"
Rahul Bedi, Irish Times, Feb. 8, 2005; "Bush Uses Tsunami Aid to Regain
Foothold in Indonesia," Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service, Jan. 18, 2005.

    6. The Real Oil-for-Food Scam

    Last year, right-wingers in Congress began kicking up a fuss about how
the United Nations had allegedly allowed Saddam Hussein to rake in $10
billion in illegal cash through the Oil for Food program. Headlines screamed
scandal. New York Times columnist William Safire referred to the alleged UN
con game as "the richest rip-off in world history."

    But those who knew how the program had been set up and run - and under
whose watch - were not swayed.

    The initial accusations were based on a General Accounting Office report
released in April 2004 and were later bolstered by a more detailed report
commissioned by the CIA.

    According to the GAO, Hussein smuggled $6 billion worth of oil out of
Iraq - most of it through the Persian Gulf. Yet the UN fleet charged with
intercepting any such smugglers was under direct command of American
officers, and consisted overwhelmingly of US Navy ships. In 2001, for
example, 90 of its vessels belonged to the United States, while Britain
contributed only 4, Joy Gordon wrote in a December 2004 article for Harper's
magazine.

    Most of the oil that left Iraq by land did so through Jordan and Turkey
- with the approval of the United States. The first Bush administration
informally exempted Jordan from the ban on purchasing Iraqi oil - an
arrangement that provided Hussein with $4.4 billion over 10 years, according
to the CIA's own findings. The United States later allowed Iraq to leak
another $710 million worth of oil through Turkey - "all while US planes
enforcing no-fly zones flew overhead," Gordon wrote.

    Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the first six years
of economic sanctions against the country, unearthed yet another scam: The
United States allegedly allowed an oil company run by Russian foreign
minister Yevgeny Primakov's sister to purchase cheap oil from Iraq and
resell it to US companies at market value - purportedly earning Hussein
"hundreds of millions" more.

    "It has been estimated that 80 percent of the oil illegally smuggled out
of Iraq under 'oil for food' ended up in the United States," Ritter wrote in
the UK Independent.

    Sources: "The UN Is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein's Silent Partner," Joy
Gordon, Harper's, December 2004; "The Oil for Food 'Scandal' Is a Cynical
Smokescreen," Scott Ritter, UK Independent, Dec. 12, 2004.

    7. Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood

    Last year was the deadliest year for reporters since the International
Federation of Journalists began keeping tabs in 1984. A total of 129 media
workers lost their lives, and 49 of them - more than a third - were killed
in Iraq.

    In short, nonembedded journalists have now become familiar victims of US
military actions abroad.

    "As far as anyone has yet proved, no commanding officer ever ordered a
subordinate to fire on journalists as such," Weissman wrote in an update for
Censored 2006. But what can be shown is a pattern of tacit complicity, side
by side with a heavy-handed campaign to curb journalists' right to roam
freely.

    The Pentagon has refused to implement basic safeguards to protect
journalists who aren't embedded with coalition forces, despite repeated
requests by Reuters and media advocacy organizations.

    The US military exonerated the army of any wrongdoing in its
now-infamous attack on the Palestine Hotel - which, as the Pentagon knew,
functioned as headquarters for about 100 media workers - when coalition
forces rolled into Baghdad on April 8, 2003.

    To date, US authorities have not disciplined a single officer or soldier
involved in the killing of a journalist, according to Project Censored.

    Meanwhile, the interim government the United States installed in Iraq
raided and closed down al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices almost as soon as it
took power and banned the network from doing any reporting in the country.
In November the interim government ordered news organizations to "stick to
the government line on the US-led offensive in Fallujah or face legal
action," in an official command sent out on interim prime minister Eyad
Allawi's letterhead and quoted in a November report by independent reporter
Dahr Jamail.

    And both American and interim government forces detained numerous
journalists in and around Fallujah that month, holding them for days.

    Sources: "Dead Messengers: How the US Military Threatens Journalists,"
Steve Weissman, www.truthout.org, Feb. 28, 2005; "Media Repression in
'Liberated' Land," Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, Nov. 18, 2004.

    8. Iraqi Farmers Threatened by Bremer's Mandates

    Historians believe it was in the "fertile crescent" of Mesopotamia,
where Iraq now lies, that humans first learned to farm. "It is here, in
around 8500 or 8000 B.C., that mankind first domesticated wheat, here that
agriculture was born," Jeremy Smith wrote in the Ecologist. This entire
time, "Iraqi farmers have been naturally selecting wheat varieties that work
best with their climate ... and cross-pollinated them with others with
different strengths.

    "The US, however, has decided that, despite 10,000 years practice,
Iraqis don't know what wheat works best in their own conditions."

    Smith was referring to Order 81, one of 100 directives penned by L. Paul
Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, and left as a legacy by the
American government when it transferred operations to interim Iraqi
authorities. The regulation sets criteria for the patenting of seeds that
can only be met by multinational companies like Monsanto or Syngenta, and it
grants the patent holder exclusive rights over every aspect of all plant
products yielded by those seeds. Because of naturally occurring
cross-pollination, the new scheme effectively launches a process whereby
Iraqi farmers will soon have to purchase their seeds rather than using seeds
saved from their own crops or bought at the local market.

    Native varieties will be replaced by foreign - and genetically
engineered - seeds, and Iraqi agriculture will become more vulnerable to
disease as biological diversity is lost.

    Texas A&M University, which brags that its agriculture program is a
"world leader" in the use of biotechnology, has already embarked on a $107
million project to "reeducate" Iraqi farmers to grow industrial-sized
harvests, for export, using American seeds. And anyone who's ever paid
attention to how this has worked elsewhere in the global South knows what
comes next: Farmers will lose their lands, and the country will lose its
ability to feed itself, engendering poverty and dependency.

    On TomPaine.com, Greg Palast identified Order 81 as one of several
authored by Bremer that fit nicely into the outlines of a US "Economy Plan,"
a 101-page blueprint for the economic makeover of Iraq, formulated with
ample help from corporate lobbyists. Palast reported that someone inside the
State Department leaked the plan to him a month prior to the invasion.

    Smith put it simply: "The people whose forefathers first mastered the
domestication of wheat will now have to pay for the privilege of growing it
for someone else. And with that the world's oldest farming heritage will
become just another subsidiary link in the vast American supply chain."

    Sources: "Iraq's New Patent Law: A Declaration of War Against Farmers,"
Focus on the Global South and Grain, Grain, October 2004; "Adventure
Capitalism," Greg Palast, www.tompaine.com, Oct. 26, 2004; "US Seeking to
Totally Re-engineer Iraqi Traditional Farming System into a US Style
Corporate Agribusiness," Jeremy Smith, Ecologist, Feb. 4, 2005.

    9. Iran's New Oil Trade System Challenges US Currency

    The Bush administration has been paying a lot more attention to Iran
recently. Part of that interest is clearly Iran's nuclear program - but
there may be more to the story. One bit of news that hasn't received the
public vetting it merits is Iran's declared intent to open an international
oil exchange market, or "bourse."

    Not only would the new entity compete against the New York Mercantile
Exchange and London's International Petroleum Exchange (both owned by
American corporations), but it would also ignite international oil trading
in euros.

    "A shift away from US dollars to euros in the oil market would cause the
demand for petrodollars to drop, perhaps causing the value of the dollar to
plummet," Brian Miller and Celeste Vogler of Project Censored wrote in
Censored 2006.

    "Russia, Venezuela, and some members of OPEC have expressed interest in
moving towards a petroeuro system," he said. And it isn't entirely
implausible that China, which is "the world's second largest holder of US
currency reserves," might eventually follow suit.

    Although China, as a major exporter of goods to the United States, has a
vested interest in helping shore up the American economy and has even linked
its own currency, the yuan, to the dollar, it has also become increasingly
dependent on Iranian oil and gas.

    "Barring a US attack, it appears imminent that Iran's euro-dominated oil
bourse will open in March, 2006," Miller and Vogler continued. "Logically,
the most appropriate US strategy is compromise with the EU and OPEC towards
a dual-currency system for international oil trades."

    But you won't hear any discussion of that alternative on the six o'clock
news.

    Source: "Iran Next US Target," William Clark, www.globalresearch.ca,
Oct. 27, 2004.

    10. Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy

    On Aug. 15 environmental activists created a human blockade by locking
themselves to drilling equipment, obstructing the National Coal Corp.'s
access to a strip mine in the Appalachian mountains 40 miles north of
Knoxville. It was just the latest in a protracted campaign that
environmentalists say has national implications but that's been ignored by
the media outside the immediate area.

    Under contention is a technique wherein entire mountaintops are removed
using explosives to access the coal underneath - a practice that is nothing
short of devastating for the local ecosystem, but which could become much
more widespread.

    As it stands, 93 new coal plants are in the works nationwide, according
to Project Censored's findings. "Areas incredibly rich in biodiversity are
being turned into the biological equivalent of parking lots," wrote John
Conner of the Katúah branch of Earth First! - which has been throwing all
its energies into direct action campaigns to block the project - in Censored
2006. "It is the final solution for 200-million-year-old mountains."

    Source: "See You in the Mountains: Katúah Earth First! Confronts
Mountaintop Removal," John Conner, Earth First!, November-December, 2004.