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Project Censored:
The Top 10 Censored Stories of 2007
This year the major theme seems to center around a newly empowered
Executive branch relinquishing away civil liberties in the name of an
amorphous 'War on Terror'. And for the most part, the 'major media'
weren't paying attention.
"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said
Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored.
In this first installment, The Review will examine the
'Top Five' significant news stories that were bumped off the front page
while camera were flashing in the face of Britney.
Yet despite important legislative proposals and Supreme Court decisions
throughout 2005, the issue was almost completely ignored in the
headlines until 2006. And 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.
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.
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 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
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.
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. I 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.
Additionally, in recent years, 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. Iranian authorities
interrogated Nasseri 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.
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."
Moreover mail sent to the company's offices in Tehran and the Cayman
Islands is forwarded directly to its Dallas headquarters.
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).
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.
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.
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.
While at no time in history has science taught more about how the
earth's life-support systems work, the maelstrom of human assault on the
seas continues. If human failure in governance of the world's
largest public domain is not reversed quickly, the ocean will soon and
surely reach a point of no return.
Most of these stories remain out of view, sunk with cement boots in the
backwaters of scientific journals. The media remains unable to
discern good science from bad, and gives equal credence to both, when
they give any at all. The story of our declining ocean world, and
our own future, develops beyond the ken of the public, who forges ahead
without altering behavior or goals, and unimpeded by foresight.
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, 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 included 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.
At stake is control of natural resources that are sought by U.S.
corporations-diamonds, tin, copper, gold, and more significantly, colt
an 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.
There are large fortunes to be made in the manufacturing of high-tech
electronics and in selling convenience and entertainment to American
consumers, but at what cost?
Conflicts in Africa are often shrouded with misinformation, while U.S.
and other western interests are routinely downplayed or omitted by the
corporate media.
Most disturbing is that in the corporate media; the effect of this
conflict on nonhuman life is totally overlooked. Even with a
high-profile endangered species like the Eastern lowland gorilla hanging
in the balance, almost driven to extinction through poaching and habitat
loss by displaced villagers and warring factions, the environmental
angle of the story is rarely considered.
(This is the first part of a two-part series)
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