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Part 1 of a 2 Part Series:
The Top 10 Censored Stories of 2007
By Robert E. Martin
In this age of broadcast sound bites and 'lifestyle' journalism high on gloss but lean on calories and content, each year Project Censored sends researchers out to scour the media looking for news items that never really made the news, publishing the results in an annual book.
A media watchdog group based at
California's Sonoma State University, Project Censored
sets out throughout the course of the year to discern the big stories
that the mainstream news media either ignored, blacked out, spiked, or
under-reported.
Of course, as Project Censored
staffers 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 minimal 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 our work simply
haven't received the kind of attention they warrant."
The stories the researchers identify
involved corporate misdeeds and governmental abuses that have been
underreported if not totally ignored. The challenge, as the researchers
note, is how to get vital information out not only at the margins but
also at the center of our culture.
Each year Project Censored's
findings provide valuable insights into the kinds of issues mainstream
media should be paying closer to attention to.
And The Review is committed to
assisting in bringing issues of this sort to the greater light of public
consciousness.
#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media Sources: Buzzflash.com, July 18, 2005; Title: "Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story". Author: Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. Student Researchers: Lauren Powell, Brett Forest, and Zoe Huffman Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D. Throughout 2005 and 2006, a large underground debate raged regarding the future of the Internet. More recently referred to as "network neutrality," the issue has become a tug of war with cable companies on the one hand and consumers and Internet service providers on the other. Yet despite important legislative proposals and Supreme Court decisions throughout 2005, the issue was almost completely ignored in the headlines until 2006.1 Except for occasional coverage on CNBC's Kudlow & Kramer, mainstream television remains hands-off to this day.
Most coverage of the issue framed it as
an argument over regulation-but the term "regulation" in this case is
somewhat misleading. Groups advocating for "net neutrality" are not
promoting regulation of Internet content. What they want is a legal
mandate forcing cable companies to allow internet service providers
(ISPs) free access to their cable lines (called a "common carriage"
agreement). This was the model used for dial-up Internet, and it is the
way content providers want to keep it. They also want to make sure that
cable companies cannot screen or interrupt Internet content without a
court order.
Those in favor of net neutrality say that
lack of government regulation simply means that cable lines will be
regulated by the cable companies themselves. ISPs will have to pay a
hefty service fee for the right to use cable lines (making internet
services more expensive). Those who could pay more would get better
access; those who could not pay would be left behind. Cable companies
could also decide to filter Internet content at will.
On the other side, cable company
supporters say that a great deal of time and money was spent laying
cable lines and expanding their speed and quality. They claim that
allowing ISPs free access would deny cable companies the ability to
recoup their investments, and maintain that cable providers should be
allowed to charge. Not doing so, they predict, would discourage
competition and innovation within the cable industry.
Though cable companies deny plans to
block content providers without cause, there are a number of examples of
cable-initiated discrimination.
In March 2005, the FCC settled a case
against a North Carolina-based telephone company that was blocking the
ability of its customers to use voice-over-Internet calling services
instead of (the more expensive) phone lines. In August 2005, a Canadian
cable company blocked access to a site that supported the cable union in
a labor dispute. In February 2006, Cox Communications denied customers
access to the Craig's List website. Though Cox claims that it was
simply a security error, it was discovered that Cox ran a classified
service that competes with Craig's List.6
Recent court decisions have extended the
cable company agenda further. On June 27, 2005, The United States
Supreme Court ruled that cable corporations like Comcast and Verizon
were not required to share their lines with rival ISPs (National Cable &
Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services). Cable
companies would not have to offer common carriage agreements for cable
lines the way that telephone companies have for phone lines.
On June 8, the House rejected legislation
(HR 5273) that would have prevented phone and cable companies from
selling preferential treatment on their networks for delivery of video
and other data-heavy applications. It also passed the Communications
Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act (HR 5252), which
supporters said would encourage innovation and the construction of more
high-speed Internet lines. Internet neutrality advocates say it will
allow phone and cable companies to cherry-pick customers in wealthy
neighborhoods while eliminating the current requirement demanded by most
local governments that cable TV companies serve low-income and minority
areas as well.
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran Source: Global Research.ca, August 5, 2005. Title: "Halliburton Secretly Doing Business With Key Member of Iran's Nuclear Team" Author: Jason Leopold. Faculty Evaluator: Catherine Nelson Student Researchers: Kristine Medeiros and Pla Herr According to journalist Jason Leopold, sources at former Cheney company Halliburton allege that, as recently as January of 2005, Halliburton sold key components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil development company. Leopold says his Halliburton sources have intimate knowledge of the business dealings of both Halliburton and Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran's largest private oil companies.
Additionally, throughout 2004 and 2005,
Halliburton worked closely with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the
board of directors of Iran-based Oriental Oil Kish, to develop oil
projects in Iran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran's nuclear
development team. Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in
late July 2005 for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran's nuclear
secrets. Iranian government officials charged Nasseri with accepting as
much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton for this information.
Oriental Oil Kish dealings with
Halliburton first became public knowledge in January 2005 when the
company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars
gas-drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary
of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered to the Cayman Islands.
Following the announcement, Halliburton claimed that the South Pars gas
field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. According to
a BBC report, Halliburton, which took thirty to forty million dollars
from its Iranian operations in 2003, "was winding down its work due to a
poor business environment."
However, Halliburton has a long history
of doing business in Iran, starting as early as 1995, while Vice
President Cheney was chief executive of the company. Leopold quotes a
February 2001 report published in the Wall Street Journal, "Halliburton
Products and Services Ltd., works behind an unmarked door on the ninth
floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the
company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the
Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is "non-American." But like the sign
over the receptionist's head, the brochure bears the company's name and
red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the
world."
In an attempt to curtail Halliburton and other U.S. companies from engaging in business dealings with rogue nations such as Libya, Iran, and Syria, an amendment was approved in the Senate on July 26, 2005. The amendment, sponsored by Senator Susan Collins R-Maine, would penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to legally conduct and avoid U.S. sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
A letter, drafted by trade groups
representing corporate executives, vehemently objected to the amendment,
saying it would lead to further hatred and perhaps incite terrorist
attacks on the U.S. and "greatly strain relations with the United States
primary trading partners." The letter warned that, "Foreign governments
view U.S. efforts to dictate their foreign and commercial policy as
violations of sovereignty often leading them to adopt retaliatory
measures more at odds with U.S. goals."
Collins supports the legislation,
stating, "It prevents U.S. corporations from creating a shell company
somewhere else in order to do business with rogue, terror-sponsoring
nations such as Syria and Iran. The bottom line is that if a U.S.
company is evading sanctions to do business with one of these countries,
they are helping to prop up countries that support terrorism-most often
aimed against America.
Halliburton first started doing business
in Iran as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief
executive of the company and in possible violation of U.S. sanctions.
An executive order signed by former
President Bill Clinton in March 1995 prohibits "new investments (in
Iran) by U.S. persons, including commitment of funds or other assets."
It also bars U.S. companies from performing services "that would benefit
the Iranian oil industry" and provide Iran with the financial means to
engage in terrorist activity.
When Bush and Cheney came into office in
2001, their administration decided it would not punish foreign oil and
gas companies that invest in those countries. The sanctions imposed on
countries like Iran and Libya before Bush became president were blasted
by Cheney, who gave frequent speeches on the need for U.S. companies to
compete with their foreign competitors, despite claims that those
countries may have ties to terrorism.
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger Source: Mother Jones, March /April, 2006; Title: The Fate of the Ocean. Author: Julia Whitty. Faculty Evaluator: Dolly Freidel Student Researcher: Charlene Jones Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now pandemic. Data from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery science, and glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous ways. A vortex of cause and effect wrought by global environmental dilemmas is changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted regional troubles to a global system in alarming distress.
According to oceanographers the oceans
are one, with currents linking the seas and regulating climate. Sea
temperature and chemistry changes, along with contamination and reckless
fishing practices, intertwine to imperil the world's largest communal
life source.
In 2005, researchers from the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory found clear evidence the ocean is quickly warming. They
discovered that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically
in the past forty years as a result of human-induced greenhouse gases.
One manifestation of this warming is the
melting of the Arctic. A shrinking ratio of ice to water has set off a
feedback loop, accelerating the increase in water surfaces that promote
further warming and melting. With polar waters growing fresher and
tropical seas saltier, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation has
quickened, further invigorating the greenhouse effect. The ocean's
currents are reacting to this freshening, causing a critical conveyor
that carries warm upper waters into Europe's northern latitudes to slow
by one third since 1957, bolstering fears of a shut down and cataclysmic
climate change. This accelerating cycle of cause and effect will be
difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Atmospheric litter is also altering sea
chemistry, as thousands of toxic compounds poison marine creatures and
devastate propagation. The ocean has absorbed an estimated 118 billion
metric tons of carbon dioxide since the onset of the Industrial
Revolution, with 20 to 25 tons being added to the atmosphere daily.
Increasing acidity from rising levels of CO2 is changing the ocean's PH
balance. Studies indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by
everything from reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to
dissolve within forty-eight hours of exposure to the acidity expected in
the ocean by 2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and, even
more worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb greenhouse gases,
manufacture oxygen, and are the primary producers of the marine food
web.
Mercury pollution enters the food web via
coal and chemical industry waste, oxidizes in the atmosphere, and
settles to the sea bottom. There it is consumed, delivering mercury to
each subsequent link in the food chain, until predators such as tuna or
whales carry levels of mercury as much as one million times that of the
waters around them. The Gulf of Mexico has the highest mercury levels
ever recorded, with an average of ten tons of mercury coming down the
Mississippi River every year, and another ton added by offshore
drilling.
Meanwhile, since its peak in 2000, the
global wild fish harvest has begun a sharp decline despite progress in
seagoing technologies and intensified fishing. So-called efficiencies
in fishing have stimulated unprecedented decimation of sealife.
Long-lining, in which a single boat sets line across sixty or more miles
of ocean, each baited with up to 10,000 hooks, captures at least 25
percent unwanted catch. With an estimated 2 billion hooks set each
year, as much as 88 billion pounds of life a year is thrown back to the
ocean either dead or dying.
Other sea nurseries are also threatened. Fifteen percent of seagrass beds have disappeared in the last ten years, depriving juvenile fish, manatees, and sea turtles of critical habitats. Kelp beds are also dying at alarming rates. . #4 Hunger & Homelessness Increasing in the US Sources: The New Standard, December 2005; Title: "New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness" Author: Brendan Coyne. OneWorld.net, March, 2006. Title: "US Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire ". Author: Abid Aslam Faculty Evaluator: Myrna Goodman. Student Researcher: Arlene Ward and Brett Forest The number of hungry and homeless people in U.S. cities continued to grow in 2005, despite claims of an improved economy. Increased demand for vital services rose as needs of the most destitute went unmet, according to the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors Report, which has documented increasing need since its 1982 inception.
The study measures instances of emergency
food and housing assistance in twenty-four U.S. cities and utilizes
supplemental information from the U.S. Census and Department of Labor.
More than three-quarters of cities surveyed reported increases in demand
for food and housing, especially among families. Food aid requests
expanded by 12 percent in 2005, while aid center and food bank resources
grew by only 7 percent. Service providers estimated 18 percent of
requests went unattended. Housing followed a similar trend, as a
majority of cities reported an increase in demand for emergency shelter,
often going unmet due to lack of resources.
As urban hunger and homelessness
increases in America, the Bush administration is planning to eliminate a
U.S. survey widely used to improve federal and state programs for
low-income and retired Americans, reports Abid Aslam.
President Bush's proposed budget for
fiscal 2007, which begins October 2006, includes a Commerce Department
plan to eliminate the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program
Participation (SIPP). The proposal marks at least the third White House
attempt in as many years to do away with federal data collection on
politically prickly economic issues.
Founded in 1984, the Census Bureau
survey follows American families for a number of years and monitors
their use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Social
Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child care, and other
health, social service, and education programs.
Some 415 economists and social scientists
signed a letter and sent it to Congress, shortly after the February
release of Bush's federal budget proposal, urging that the survey be
fully funded as it "is the only large-scale survey explicitly designed
to analyze the impact of a wide variety of government programs on the
well being of American families."
Supporters of the survey elimination say
the program costs too much at $40 million per year. They would kill it
in September and eventually replace it with a scaled-down version that
would run to $9.2 million in development costs during the coming fiscal
year. Actual data collection would begin in 2009.
Defenders of the survey counter that the
cost is justified as SIPP "provides a constant stream of in-depth data
that enables government, academic, and independent researchers to
evaluate the effectiveness and improve the efficiency of several hundred
billion dollars in spending on social programs," including homeless
shelters and emergency food aid.
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo Sources: The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005. Title: "The World's Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor talks to Keith Harmon Snow". Earth First! Journal, August 2005. Title: "High-Tech Genocide". Author: Sprocket. Z Magazine, March 1, 2006 Title: "Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo" Authors: Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski Faculty Evaluator: Thom Lough Student Researchers: Deyango Harris and Daniel Turner The world's most neglected emergency, according to the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, is the ongoing tragedy of the Congo, where six to seven million have died since 1996 as a consequence of invasions and wars sponsored by western powers trying to gain control of the region's mineral wealth. At stake is control of natural resources that are sought by U.S. corporations-diamonds, tin, copper, gold, and more significantly, coltan and niobium, two minerals necessary for production of cell phones and other high-tech electronics; and cobalt, an element essential to nuclear, chemical, aerospace, and defense industries.
Columbo-tantalite, i.e. coltan, is found
in three-billion-year-old soils like those in the Rift Valley region of
Africa. The tantalum extracted from the coltan ore is used to make
tantalum capacitors, tiny components that are essential in managing the
flow of current in electronic devices. Eighty percent of the world's
coltan reserves are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Niobium is another high-tech mineral with a similar story.
Sprocket reports that the high-tech boom
of the 1990s caused the price of coltan to skyrocket to nearly $300 per
pound. In 1996 U.S.-sponsored Rwandan and Ugandan forces entered eastern
DRC. By 1998 they seized control and moved into strategic mining areas.
The Rwandan Army was soon making $20 million or more a month from coltan
mining. Though the price of coltan has fallen, Rwanda maintains its
monopoly on coltan and the coltan trade in DRC. Reports of rampant human
rights abuses pour out of this mining region.
Coltan makes its way out of the mines to
trading posts where foreign traders buy the mineral and ship it abroad,
mostly through Rwanda. Firms with the capability turn coltan into the
coveted tantalum powder, and then sell the magic powder to Nokia,
Motorola, Compaq, Sony, and other manufacturers for use in cell phones
and other products.
Keith Harmon Snow emphasizes that any
analysis of the geopolitics in the Congo, and the reasons for why the
Congolese people have suffered a virtually unending war since 1996,
requires an understanding of the organized crime perpetrated through
multinational businesses. Invested corporations, their proxy armies, and
the supra-governmental bodies that support them have instituted the
tragedy of the Congo conflict.
The process is tied to major
multinational corporations at all levels. These include U.S.-based Cabot
Corp. and OM Group; HC Starck of Germany; and Nigncxia of
China-corporations that have been linked by a United Nations Panel of
Experts to the atrocities in DRC. Extortion, rape, massacres, and
bribery are all part of the criminal networks set up and maintained by
huge multinational companies. Yet as mining in the Congo by western
companies proceeds at an unprecedented rate-some $6 million in raw
cobalt alone exiting DRC daily-multinational mining companies rarely get
mentioned in human rights reports.
Sprocket notes that Sam Bodman, CEO of
Cabot during the coltan boom, was appointed in December 2004 to serve as
President Bush's Secretary of Energy. Under Bodman's leadership from
1987 to 2000, Cabot was one of the U.S.'s largest polluters, accounting
for 60,000 tons of airborne toxic emissions annually. Snow adds that
Sony's current Executive Vice President and General Counsel Nicole
Seligman was a former legal adviser for Bill Clinton. Many who held
positions of power in the Clinton administration moved into high
positions with Sony.
The article "Behind the Numbers,"
coauthored by Snow and David Barouski, details a web of U.S. corruption
and conflicts of interest between mining corporations such as Barrick
Gold (see Story #21) and the U.S. government under George H. W. Bush,
Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as U.S. arms dealers such as
Simax; U.S. defense companies such as Lockheed Martin, Halliburton,
Northrop Grumman, GE, Boeing, Raytheon, and Bechtel; "humanitarian"
organizations such as CARE, funded by Lockheed Martin, and International
Rescue Committee, whose Board of Overseers includes Henry Kissinger;
"Conservation" interests that provide the vanguard for western
penetration into Central Africa; and of course, PR firms and news
outlets such as the New York Times.
Sprocket closes his article by noting
that it's not surprising this information isn't included in the
literature and manuals that come with your cell phones, pagers,
computers, or diamond jewelry. Perhaps, he suggests, mobile phones
should be outfitted with stickers that read: "Warning! This device was
created with raw materials from central Africa. These materials are
rare, nonrenewable, were sold to fund a bloody war of occupation, and
have caused the virtual elimination of endangered species. Have a nice
day." People need to realize, he says, that there is a direct link
between the gadgets that make our lives more convenient and
sophisticated-and the reality of the violence, turmoil, and destruction
that plague our world.
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