EAW & Rebecca Bowe / SF Bay Guardian – 2010-09-19 20:24:07
http://www.sfbg.com/2010/09/14/censored-brave-new-world
We are pleased to announce that
Environmentalists Against War
has covered six of the Top Ten
Censored Stories for 2009-2010
2. Environmental Enemy No. 1: US Department of Defense
Communities Seek Accountability for Military Pollution
March 28, 2009… More than 80 US communities and organizations are calling for federal legislation to require the Pentagon and the Department of Energy to protect human health and the environment. The DOD is responsible for more than 31,000 cleanup sites on more than 4,600 active and former defense properties. About one in 10 Americans live within 10 miles of a military site listed as a national priority for hazardous waste cleanup.
The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism
May 11, 2009… “When we declare war on a foreign nation, we now also declare war on the Earth, on the soil and plants and animals, the water and wind and people, in the most far-reaching and deeply infecting ways. A bomb dropped on Iraq explodes around the world.”
Militarism and the Environment
May 20, 2003… Militarism and the Environment: What’s the connection? In an era of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, war has become an extremely destructive enterprise.
How Fuel-efficient Is the Pentagon?
The military is critically dependent on oil for all of its operations. Oil supplies 79 percent of the Defense Department’s energy needs but the Pentagon is far from fuel-efficient. This 1991 article found the DOD’s ships, tanks and jets to be leading consumers of the Earth’s oil resources.
3. ICE’s Secret Detention Facilities
Halliburton Gets $385 Million to Build US Concentration Camps
Plans for detention facilities or camps have a long history. Halliburton subsidiary KBR has received a $385 million contract to build detention facilities for “an emergency influx of immigrants” — another step down the road toward martial law.
Preparing for Civil Unrest in America
Mar 22, 2009… The financial meltdown has unleashed a social crisis across the US. One solution to social unrest is to confine angry citizens in detention camps. What we are dealing with are FEMA internment camps and the ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program.
5. Blackwater in Pakistan
Criminal Organization Conspires to Win Pentagon Contracts
September 6, 2010… The US security company Xe (formerly known as Blackwater), infamous for killing unarmed civilians in Iraq, has created an array of 30 bogus subsidiaries to win millions of dollars in government deals from the US Army and the CIA.
Pakistan Anger Rises as CIA Hires Mercenaries
Aug 21, 2009… From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones that have killed scores of civilians on the ground in Pakistan.
Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret CIA Raids
Dec 11, 2009 … Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the CIA’s most sensitive activities including clandestine raids, the transporting of detainees, and the CIA’s Predator drone program in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan
Nov 24, 2009… A covert military operation being run almost entirely by Blackwater, includes planning targeted assassinations, “snatch and grabs” and other sensitive actions inside and outside Pakistan.
[And more….]
7. The African Land Grab
How Food and Water are Driving a 21st-century African Land Grab.
Rich countries faced by a global food shortage have bought up large tracts of African farmland. Foreign companies are swarming the continent, seizing lands the local residents have used for centuries.
Africa: The Second Scramble for Africa Starts
Apr 20, 2009 … Sub-Saharan African countries have become the target of a new form of investment that is strongly reminiscent of colonialism. Foreign investors are buying the continent’s farmland, often dealing with warlords who claim property rights, as in Sudan.
8. Massacre in Peruvian Amazon
Peru: Blood Flows in the Amazon
Jun 12, 2009 … The Obama regime has predictably not issued a single word of concern or protest in the face of one of the worst massacres of Indigenous Peruvians.
9. Human Rights Abuses Continue in Palestine
Gaza as Seen through the Eyes of YouTube
International Human Rights Activists have repeatedly witnessed Palestinian farmers being shot at by Israeli forces as they attempt to work on agricultural projects on ancestral lands.
New York Times Spins UN Report on Gaza Suffering
Aug 22, 2010… The Times reports Israel’s claim that its incursions in the Gaza Strip are matters of self-defense against Palestinian aggression. The UN, however, notes that much of the “aggression” is in response to Israel’s destruction of Palestinian land and property. The loss of potential agricultural income in Gaza is estimated at over $50 million annually.
Israel Rejects Gaza War Allegations
Sept 16, 2009… Israel has rejected a UN report accusing it of committing human rights violations during its three-week war against Hamas in Gaza that killed more than 1,400 Gazan civilians, including 300 children.
10. US Funds and Supports Taliban
Afghan Security Contractors Undermine the US Counterinsurgency Strategy
Sept 15, 2010… At least some of the $2 billion the US military pays Afghan and American trucking companies to move their supplies and materials throughout the country might be going to the very Taliban forces they’re trying to defeat.
Project Censored:
The Top 10 Stories the Major Media Didn’t Report in 2009
Rebecca Bowe / SF Bay Guardian
…[T]oday’s highly fragmented media world has opened the floodgates to endless news and propaganda of every possible variety, leaving citizens awash in more information than they can possibly process.
The shared American narrative and agenda disappeared as the Internet boomed and newspapers shrank. While major media outlets have been consolidated into the hands of fewer corporations and the once stable media industry has been in flux, the general public has splintered into factions that seem to reside in disparate realities.
Extremism and the promotion of narrow corporate interests have gained footholds. Even on national television networks, personalities such as Glenn Beck are gaining traction by painting President Barack Obama as a dangerous radical, a Big Brother figure, or worse. Once-accepted imperatives like addressing global warming are undermined by seemingly legitimate news stories.
Yet the public is playing a bigger role than ever. Blogs abound, and nearly anyone can spark a public outcry by capturing egregious behavior on film with his or her cell phone. Thanks to a team of hackers who know a thing or two about encryption technology, WikiLeaks has emerged as a wild card of the new media landscape by cutting loose thousands of classified government documents and airing military footage never intended for a mass audience.
It’s a brave new world of media consumption, but Project Censored’s mission hasn’t really changed. More than ever, people need help sifting through this cacophony to figure out what they truly need to know.
For 35 years, the project has distributed its Censored list nationwide to shed light on the top stories not brought to you by the mainstream press.
These days, stories are submitted, researched by students, filtered through LexisNexis to determine which outlets have covered them, and then voted on by a team of judges. An international network of 30 colleges and universities contributes to the project, and volunteers from around the world submit stories for consideration. At the end of each project cycle, the work is released in a compendium.
Past judges have included luminaries such as Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn, to whom Censored 2011 (Seven Stories Press, 2010) is dedicated. Even journalist Walter Cronkite publicly stated, “Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism.”
The preface to Censored 2011 offers a harsh critique of mainstream news. “In America, unsubstantiated opinions, rumors, and gossip surrounding important issues masquerade as real news,” it states. “We live in a propaganda culture where factual information is routinely censored by degree.”
To be sure, public relations outfits and staged press events routinely influence the content of the daily news, and media watchdog groups often spotlight the fiction or egregious bias that finds its way onto the airwaves. Yet in a culture where truth is so often mangled and information so scattered — and the state of politics and the economy so frightening — both sides of the political spectrum have moved toward the fringes.
THE TOP 10 CENSORED STORIES OF 2009-2010
1. Buh-bye US Dollar as the Global Reserve Currency?
Since the financial meltdown of 2008 sent a jarring ripple effect throughout the global economy, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been talking up the idea of an international market that doesn’t use the US dollar as a global reserve currency. The dollar now holds the status of the predominant anchor currency held in foreign exchange reserves, securing the US’s strategic economic position.
In July 2009 at the Group of Eight Summit in Italy, Medvedev underscored his call for a newly conceived “united future world currency” when he pulled a sample coin from his pocket and showed it off to heads of state, the Bloomberg news service reported. At a conference in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in June 2009, world leaders from Brazil, India, and China listened as Medvedev made his case for a new global currency system anchored on something other than the dollar, according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor.
Additionally, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) suggested in a report that the present system of using the dollar as the world’s reserve currency should be subject to a wholesale reconsideration, according to an article in the Telegraph, a British newspaper.
Michael Hudson, an author and professor of economics at the University of Missouri, links discussions about an alternative global reserve currency with US military spending.
Referencing Medvedev’s calls for a “multipolar world order,” Hudson offers this translation: “What this means in plain English is, we have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks, and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth.”
2. Environmental Enemy No. 1: US Department of Defense
The US military burns through 320,000 barrels of oil a day, Sara Flounders of the International Action Center reports, but that tally doesn’t factor in fuel consumed by contractors or the energy and resources used to produce bombs, grenades, missiles, or other weapons employed by the Department of Defense.
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products — yet it has a blanket exemption in commitments made by the US to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Despite its status as top polluter, the Department of Defense received little attention in December of 2009 during talks at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
Meanwhile, human health is threatened by the long-term environmental impacts of military operations throughout the globe. Depleted uranium contamination from the Iraq conflict has been linked to widespread health problems, Jalal Ghazi reports for New America Media. The Chamoru people of Guam, meanwhile, experience an alarmingly high rate of cancer, which is suspected to be linked to a nearby 1950s US nuclear weapons testing site that left a legacy of radioactive contamination.
“The greatest single assault on the environment comes from one agency: the Armed Forces of the United States,” author Barry Sanders writes in The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism.
3. Internet Privacy and Personal Access at Risk
Project Censored cites 13 sources, including articles published in Wired and Mother Jones, for this story, and a Google search for the phrase “Internet kill switch” yields 539,000 results generated by more recent reporting.
The Cybersecurity Act was proposed in June 2009, giving the president the power to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and do whatever is necessary to diffuse a cyber attack. The Senate Homeland Security Committee approved a comprehensive cybersecurity bill this past June, which has drawn sharp criticism for including a provision that would allow the president to shut down networks in the event of an emergency.
Reporting in Wired, Noah Schachtman broke the story that the CIA was investing in Visible Technologies, a software firm that can collect, rank, and analyze millions of posts on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media sites.
Wired also reported that the Obama administration had followed the lead of George W. Bush by urging a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a spy case weighing whether a US president can bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
4. ICE’s Secret Detention Centers
The federal office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces that reveal no information about their ICE tenants. Reporting in The Nation, Jaqueline Stevens describes ICE’s jail network and the agency’s penchant for secrecy when it comes to withholding public information about the facilities.
“The absence of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret jails,” Stevens writes. “Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the fact, a situation ripe for errors … as well as cover-ups.” As a result, detainees can literally be “lost” by attorneys or family members for days or weeks at a time after being transferred.
5. Blackwater in Pakistan
The notorious private military contractor Blackwater has changed its name to Xe Services, but it hasn’t escaped scrutiny. According to a story that ran in The Nation in December 2009, the contractor is at the center of a covert program in Pakistan run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Karachi.
Xe is involved in planning targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, and helps direct a US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus who spoke with the Nation.
The Pentagon has disputed the claim, stating: “There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan.” More recently, The New York Times reported that Xe had created a web of more than 30 shell companies to win defense contracts, and specifically mentioned that the company employees had loaded bombs and missiles onto predator drones in Pakistan.
6. Cause of Death: Lack of Health Care
As the health care debate raged on and Americans heard over and over again about supposed “death panels,” “Obamacare,” and the government’s infringement on personal freedom, at least one important study was largely drowned out. Research led by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center revealed that lack of health insurance may have figured into 17,000 childhood deaths among hospitalized children in the United States in the span of less than two decades.
The results of a study published in the Journal of Public Health compared more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005, and found that uninsured children in the study were 60 percent more likely to die in the hospital than those with insurance.
“Can we say with absolute certainty that 17,000 children would have been saved if they had health insurance? Of course not,” notes a co-investigator. “From a scientific perspective, we are confident in our finding that thousands of children likely died because they lacked insurance or because of factors directly related to a lack of insurance.”
7. The African Land Grab
A “land grab,” according to this Project Censored story, is the purchase of vast tracts of land by wealthier nations from mostly poor, developing countries in order to produce crops for export.
Throughout the African continent, an estimated 50 million hectares of land either have been acquired or are in the process of being negotiated for purchase over the last several years, with international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, and commodity traders leading the rush for cheap, undeveloped, arable land.
Ethiopia has approved at least 815 foreign-financed agriculture projects since 2007, but the food produced there will be exported rather than used to feed the 13 million people in need of food aid in that country. “Rich countries are eyeing Africa not just for a healthy return on capital, but also as an insurance policy,” notes researcher Devlin Kuyek. “Food shortages and riots in 28 countries in 2008, declining water supplies, climate change, and huge population growth together have made land attractive. Africa has the most land and, compared with other continents, is cheap.”
8. Massacre in Peruvian Amazon over Free Trade Agreement
While the story highlighted by Project Censored is titled, “Massacre in the Amazon,” a later installment by Laura Carlsen, the translator, appeared in the Huffington Post titled “Victory in the Amazon.”
The story centers on a movement standing its ground even with tragic loss of life as the consequence: On June 5, 2009, 50 or more Peruvian Amazon Indians were massacred after a 57-day protest against the implementation of decrees under the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States.
Decrees that would have opened vast swaths of indigenous land in the Peruvian Amazon to private investment by gas, mining, and oil companies prompted Amazon peoples to block highways and gas and oil pipelines. But the conflict escalated when armed Peruvian government agents attacked the protesters with rifles and, according to eye witnesses, burned bodies and threw them into a river.
According to Carlsen’s account, Peru’s Congress voted 82 to 12 in the aftermath to repeal two of the decrees that the indigenous groups had been standing against.
Daysi Zapata, a representative of the association of indigenous groups, celebrated the triumph: “Today is a historic day. We are thankful because the will of the indigenous peoples has been taken into account, and we just hope that in the future, the governments attend and listen to the people, that they don’t legislate behind our backs.”
9. Human Rights Abuses Continue in Palestine
While there is a great deal of news coverage about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Project Censored highlights human rights abuses as a little-discussed aspect.
After a 15-month study conducted by an international team of scholars, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa concluded that Israel is, from the perspective of international law, an occupying power in Palestinian territories and that it has become a colonial enterprise that implements a system of apartheid.
An Amnesty International report charges that Israel is denying Palestinians the right to access adequate water by maintaining total control over the shared water resources and pursuing discriminatory policies. And articles that appeared in Electronic Intifada detailed how Israel had begun barring movement between Israel and the West Bank for those holding a foreign passport, including humanitarian aid workers and thousands of Palestinian residents.
Project Censored’s introduction touches on the topic: “Rare mainstream media glimpses of Israel’s apartheid system, like the CBS 60 Minutes segment ‘Is Peace Out of Reach?’ in January 2009, air and then fade away after drawing vitriolic, selectively focused criticism.”
10. US Funds and Supports the Taliban
While this story appeared on the front pages of The New York Times and Washington Post, Project Censored claims they omitted some key facts. The Nation broke the story, and at the time Project Censored was researching it, there was nary a mention in the mainstream media of how American tax dollars wind up in the hands of the Taliban.
In some cases, money goes to Afghan companies run by former Taliban members like President Hamid Karzai’s cousin, Ahmad Rate Popal, who was charged in the 1980s with conspiring to import heroin into the United States. US military contractors in Afghanistan also pay suspected insurgents to protect supply routes. “It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting,” according to The Nation story, written by Aram Roston.
The Nation article also highlighted a link omitted by the other publications: NCL holdings, a licensed security company in Afghanistan, is run by the son of the Afghan defense minister and has an influential former CIA officer, Milton Bearden, on its advisory board. NCL secured a highly lucrative trucking contract — despite having no apparent trucking experience.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
