Project Censored's

TOP 10 CENSORED STORIES OF THE YEAR

Part 2 in a 2 Part Series

 
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 U.N. 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 U.N. fleet charged with intercepting any such smugglers was under direct command of American officers, and consisted overwhelmingly of U.S. 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 U.S. planes enforcing no-fly zones flew overhead," Gordon wrote.

Scott Ritter, a U.N. 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 U.S. 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 U.K. 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. 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," 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 U.S., 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 U.S. 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 "re-educate" 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 U.S. "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.


8.  Universal Mental Screening Program Usurps Parental Rights
        In April of 2002, President Bush appointed a 22 member commission called the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in order to "identify policies that could be implemented by Federal, State and local governments to maximize the utility of existing resources, improve coordination of treatments and services, and promote successful community integration for adults with a serious mental illness and children with a serious emotional disturbance."
    

Members of this commission include physicians in the mental health field and at least one (Robert N. Postlethwait) former employee of pharmaceutical giant Ely Lilly and Co.
   

In July of 2003 the commission published the results of their study. They found that mental health disorders often go undiagnosed and recommended to the President that there should be more comprehensive screening for mental illnesses for people of all ages, including pre-school age children. In accordance with their findings, the commission recommended that schools were in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adult employees of our nation's schools.
      

The commission also recommended linking the screenings with treatment and support. Basically they developed an algorithm that recommends specific drugs, which should be used to treat specific diseases. Funding for  TMAP was provided by a Robert Wood-Johnson Grant as well as several major drug companies.
       

Critics of mental health screening and TMAP claim that it is a payoff to Pharmaceutical companies. Many cite Allen Jones, a former employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General. He was fired when he revealed that many key officials who have influence over the medication plan in his state received monetary perks and benefits from pharmaceutical companies, which benefited from their drugs being in the medication algorithm.
 

In November of 2004, Congress appropriated $20 million to implement the findings of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.
       

One way drug companies, in collusion with doctors, increase their market share is to expand the definition of diseases. When diagnostic criteria were liberalized for attention deficit disorder in 1991, the number of children diagnosed jumped by about 60 percent.
 

Now, more than one in every 100 toddlers and preschoolers in the United States are on powerful psychiatric drugs, such as Ritalin and Prozac, according to a study published in the February issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
 

As bad as this is for those put on drugs and labeled "mentally ill," the far bigger concern is the creation of a disease for every drug, a situation made possible by the hand-in-glove relationship between industry and the government.

Sources: Asheville Global Report (British Medical Journal),No. 284, June 24-30, 2004 Title: "Bush Plans To Screen Whole U.S. Population For Mental Illness" Author: Jeanne Lenzer

9. Corporations Win Big on Tort Reform, Justice Suffers
        On February 18, 2005, President Bush signed into law the most sweeping federal tort reform measure in more than a decade. The Class Action Fairness Act puts into effect a tort reform that will take away people's access to the courts, undermining the constitutional right to trial by jury.
       

These reforms weaken consumer and worker protections, denying due process of law in civil cases to all but the wealthiest in our society.
      

The act will move many civil lawsuits from state to federal courts in an attempt to end so-called "forum shopping" by trial lawyers seeking districts most hospitable to multi-party suits against companies.
  

What has been lost in all the partisan rhetoric is the fact that class action suits are most often lawsuits brought by people who have been hurt by HMO abuses, civil rights violations, or workplace injuries and violations. These are the suits that allow for compensation when large numbers of people are hurt by companies in the pursuit of profit.
    

Although, at times, individual injuries may be relatively small, they represent a pattern of behavior on the part of the defendant. While legal recourse may not be available on an individual level, by joining together at the state level, people have been able to affect responsible change in the conduct of corporations.
       

Federal courts are not expert in these cases, are already overburdened, and are much smaller than state courts. Critics claim that the real intention of this law is to make sure these cases get buried quickly and are ultimately dismissed.
 

Attached to this bill is a mass tort section that will severely restrict large class action suits against pharmaceutical companies and paves the way for medical malpractice reform, effectively immunizing abusive or negligent corporations from liability.
  

The reform sets a cap of $250,000 per lawsuit while shielding drug companies from responsibility for punitive damages and lawsuits where the drug had been approved by the FDA.
 

One woman who was taking the FDA approved drug Vioxx, for example, had a stroke and continued taking the drug because she wasn't warned of its major side effect-stroke. She went on to have a second stroke. The new reform would limit her settlement to $250,000 for a lifetime of disabilities.
    

Under this new legislation corporations will not be held accountable for their faulty products and will only be punished with a slap on the wrist in terms of financial payment. 

SOURCES: Dollars and Sense, Issue #252, March/April 2004 Title: "Supremes Limit Punitive Damages" Author: Jamie Court Democracy now! Feb 4, 2005 Title: "Tort reform: The Big Payoff for Corporations, Curbing the Lawsuits that Hold Them Accountable" Author: Amy Goodman et al (Juan Gonzalez interview with Joanne Doroshow)

10.  Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem & 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, Tenn.
 

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 Kat�ah 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: Kat�ah Earth First! Confronts Mountaintop Removal," John Conner, Earth First!, November-December 2004.