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The news that never made the news.
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 the war when they went to the polls.
That's just one of the big stories the mainstream news media ignored, blacked out or under-reported 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 quite made the news and publish the results in a book, this year titled
Censored 2006
.
Each year, SFR publishes a version of this report for our readers; this year's version comes originally from The San Francisco Bay Guardian.
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Project Censored's "censored" stories aren't literally
censored
. Most can be found on the Internet if you know where to look. Some have received ink in the mainstream press. "Censorship," Project Director Peter Phillips says, "is any interference with the free flow of information in society." The stories Project Censored highlights, therefore, simply haven't received the 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," Sut Jhally, professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts and executive director of the Media Education Foundation, says.
The stories the researchers identify involve corporate misdeeds and governmental abuses that have been under-reported 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."
And while "The Internet is a great place to go if you already know that the mainstream media is heavily biased," Jhally says, "the challenge for a democratic society is how to get vital information not only at the margins but at the center of our culture."
1. OPEN GOVERNMENT-NOT
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One year ago, US Rep. Henry A Waxman, D-Calif., released an 81-page analysis of the Bush administration's handling of major open government laws. His report found 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 that block 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. Some of the documents the administration refused to release included records of contacts between large energy companies and Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force; White House memos pertaining to Saddam Hussein's "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.
Despite the news media's intrinsic interest in safeguarding open government laws, there was little reportage of Waxman's findings and most Americans remain oblivious to just how much more secretive the White House has 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. 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 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.
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 for the Congo, and the US pledged an additional $10 million.
This time, silence-interrupted only by the occasional critique dismissing Roberts's report. The major television news shows, according to Project Censored, 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. ELECTION DISTORTION REDUX
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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 under-reported 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 8 million vote discrepancy was well beyond the poll's recognized, less-than-1-percent margin of error. 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. "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. SHHH: BIG BROTHER'S HERE
On Dec. 13, 2003, American troops captured Saddam Hussein. President 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 it was leaked.
Specifically, the IAA allows the government to obtain individual 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 the 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 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," wrote Anna Samson Miranda 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 wrote: "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."
One of the stories cited by Project Censored for this topic makes some questionable allegations. Titled, "Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7," it was written by Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson and published on
, a Virginia Web site that's been around since 1994.
The piece claims the Pentagon is defying Congress and covertly operating the notorious Total Information Awareness program (which Congress explicitly killed), and also that the feds now monitor "virtually every financial transaction of every American,"
in real time
(that is, as it's happening). The article's authors also maintain the Pentagon uses the information to launch investigations of "persons of interest" and as a basis for adding names to the Transportation Security Administration's "no fly" lists.
The principal sources for the story seem to be an anonymous "security consultant who worked on the project" and an "Allen Banks"-someone identified simply as a "security expert," without any detail as to who he is or how he would be privy to such information.
Thompson, the site's publisher, defended the accuracy of the story, saying that he'd spoken with "over 30 sources"-police, banks, credit card agencies-and that he reached his conclusions based on those sources as well as on the fact that there were "too many coincidences." (None of that is explained in the story.)
"To some extent," he added, "it was a conclusion by me, looking at the links." Banks and other private industries had been instructed to e-mail data to the feds under TIA and continued sending data to the same places after TIA was killed because they never received orders to stop, Thompson said. His caveat: "If I had to go into court and prove this, there's no way I could prove it."
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. THE TSUANAMI-FROM TRAGEDY TO MILITARY
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, medicines and financial contributions. Schoolchildren completed class projects to help the cause.
The US government, Project Censored found, 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 also could 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," wrote veteran Indian journalist Rahul Bedi.
"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 co-operation 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 four, Joy Gordon wrote in a December 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. DEAD MESSENGERS
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," wrote Weissman 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.
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. SEED GREED
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 BC, that mankind first domesticated wheat, here that agriculture was born," wrote Jeremy Smith 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, already has embarked on a $107 million project to "re-educate" Iraqi farmers to grow industrial-sized harvests, for export, using American seeds. And anyone who has 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
, 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, 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. FILLER UP
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."
Source:
"Iran Next US Target," William Clark, www.globalresearch.ca, Oct. 27, 2004.
10. THE DRILL IS GONE
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 "Mountaintop Removal," or MTR, a technique wherein entire mountaintops are removed using explosives to access the coal underneath, a practice devastating for the local ecosystem, but which also could become much more widespread.
The coal industry has coined many less menacing names for mountaintop removal, such as "cross range mining," "surface mining" and others. But regardless of the euphemism, MTR remains among the most pernicious forms of mining ever conceived. Blasting mountain tops with dynamite is cheaper than hiring miners who belong to a union. More than 40,000 jobs have been lost to MTR in West Virginia alone.
As it stands, 93 new coal plants are in the works nationwide, according to Project Censored. Four federal agencies that review applications for coal mines have entered an agreement that would give state governments an option that could speed up the process. The Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife Service and Office of Surface Mining said the agreement was intended to streamline the procedures companies go through when applying for permits to start surface coal mines, including those that remove entire mountaintops to unearth coal. Environmental groups are beginning to challenge these policies in federal district court.
Source:
"See You in the Mountains: Katúah Earth First! Confronts Mountaintop Removal," John Conner, Earth First!, November-December, 2004.
More information on censored stories, including all 25 stories in
Censored 2006
, can be found at:
.
Those stories were: 11.
Universal Mental Screening Program Usurps Parental Rights
12.
Military in Iraq Contracts Human Rights Violators
13.
Rich Countries Fail to Live up to Global Pledges
14.
Corporations Win Big on Tort Reform, Justice Suffers
15.
Conservative Plan to Override Academic Freedom in the Classroom
16.
US Plans for Hemispheric Integration Include Canada
17.
US Uses South American Military Bases to Expand Control of the Region
18.
Little Known Stock Fraud Could Weaken US Economy
19.
Child Wards of the State Used in AIDS Experiments
20.
American Indians Sue for Resources; Compensation Provided to Others
21.
New Immigration Plan Favors Business Over People
22.
Nanotechnology Offers Exciting Possibilities But Health Effects Need Scrutiny
23.
Plight of Palestinian Child Detainees Highlights Global Problem
24.
Ethiopian Indigenous Victims of Corporate and Government Resource Aspirations
25.
Homeland Security Was Designed to Fail
