CENSORED!The 10 big stories the mainstream media refused to cover last yearby Sarah Phelan
November 09, 2006
This fall, two news stories broke the same day, one meaty, one junky. In Detroit, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush administration’s warrantless National Security Agency surveillance program was unconstitutional and must end. Meanwhile, somewhere in Thailand, a weirdo named John Mark Karr claimed he was with 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey when she died in 1996. Predictably, the mainstream media devoted acres of newsprint and hours of airtime to the self-proclaimed beauty-queen killer. During that same time period, hardly a word was written or said in the same outlets about Judge Diggs Taylor’s ruling and the question it raises about why Bush and his power-grabbing administration repeatedly lie to the American public.
The mainstream media’s fascination with unimportant stories isn’t anything new. Professor Carl Jensen, a disenchanted journalist who entered advertising only to become a sociologist, says the media’s preoccupation with "junk food news" inspired him to found a media research project at Sonoma State University about 30 years ago to publicize the top 25 big stories the media had censored, ignored or underreported the previous year.
That was the beginning of Project Censored, the longest-running media censorship project in the nation—and it drew plenty of criticism from editors and publishers. Since 1993, Project Censored has been running not only the stories that didn’t get adequate coverage but also the "junk food news"—the stories that were way overblown and filled precious pages and airtime that could have been used for real news...
Following are Project Censored’s top 10 stories for the past year.
<snip>
2. Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technology to IranHalliburton, the notorious energy company, sold key nuclear reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions, journalist Jason Leopold reported on GlobalResearch.ca, the Web site of a Canadian research group. He cited sources intimate with the business dealings of Halliburton and Kish...
Source: "Halliburton Secretly Doing Business with Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team," Jason Leopold, GlobalResearch.ca, Aug. 5, 2005<snip>
5. High-Tech Genocide in CongoIf you believe the corporate media, then the ongoing genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is all just a case of ugly tribal warfare. But that, according to stories published in Z Magazine and the Earth First! Journal and heard on the Taylor Report, is a superficial, simplistic explanation that fails to connect this terrible suffering with the immense fortunes that stand to be made from manufacturing cell phones, laptop computers and other high-tech equipment.What’s really at stake in this blood bath is control of natural resources such as diamonds, tin and copper, as well as cobalt—which is essential for the nuclear, chemical, aerospace and defense industries—and coltan and niobium, which is most important for the high-tech industries. These disturbing reports concluded that a meaningful analysis of Congolese geopolitics requires a knowledge and understanding of the organized crime perpetuated by multinationals.
Sources: "The World’s Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor talks to Keith Harmon Snow," The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005; "High-Tech Genocide," Sprocket, Earth First! Journal, August 2005; "Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo," Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, Z Magazine, March 1, 2006<snip>
7. U.S. Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and IraqHooded. Gagged. Strangled. Asphyxiated. Beaten with blunt objects. Subjected to sleep deprivation and hot and cold environmental conditions. These are just some of the forms of torture that the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan inflicted on detainees, according to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) analysis of autopsy and death reports that were made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
While reports of torture aren't new, the documents are evidence of the use of torture as a policy, raising a whole bunch of uncomfortable questions, such as: Who authorized such techniques? And why have the resulting deaths been covered up? Of the 44 death reports released under ACLU’s FOIA request, 21 were homicides and eight appear to have been the result of these abusive torture techniques.
Sources: "U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq," American Civil Liberties Union Web site, Oct. 24, 2005; "Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantánamo to Iraq," Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, March 5, 20068. Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information ActIn 2005, the Department of Defense pushed for and was granted exemption from Freedom of Information Act requests, a crucial law that allows journalists and watchdogs access to federal documents. The stated reason for this dramatic and dangerous move? FOIA is a hindrance to protecting national security. The
ruling could hamper the efforts of groups like the ACLU, which relied on FOIA to uncover more than 30,000 documents on the U.S. military’s torture of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, including the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
With ACLU lawyers predicting that this ruling will likely result in more abuse and with Americans becoming increasingly concerned about the federal government’s illegal intelligence-gathering activities, Congress has imposed a two-year sunset on this FOIA exemption, ending in December 2007—which is cold comfort right now to anyone rotting in a U.S. overseas military facility or a secret CIA prison.
Sources: "Pentagon Seeks Greater Immunity from Freedom of Information," Michelle Chen, New Standard, May 6, 2005; "FOIA Exemption Granted to Federal Agency," Newspaper Association of America Web site, posted December 2005<snip>
10. Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More CiviliansAt the end of 2005, U.S. Central Command Air Force statistics showed an
increase in American air missions, a trend that was accompanied by a rise in civilian deaths thanks to increased bombing of Iraqi cities. But with U.S. bombings and the killing of innocent civilians acting as a highly effective recruiting tool among Iraqi militants, the U.S. war on Iraq seemed to increasingly be following the path of the war in Vietnam. As Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker at the end of 2005,
a key component in the federal government’s troop-reduction plan was the replacement of departing U.S. troops with U.S. air power. Meanwhile, Hersh’s sources within the military have expressed fears that if Iraqis are allowed to call in the targets of these aerial strikes, they could abuse that power to settle old scores...
Sources:
"Up in the Air,C Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, December 2005; "An Increasingly Aerial Occupation," Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, December 2005 http://www.shepherd-express.com/1editorialbody.lasso?-response=%2f1editorialbody.lasso&-token.folder=2006-11-09&-token.story=175665.113121&-token.subpub=&-token.feedbackmsgstat=Failure&-token.feedbackmsg=The%20Name%20is%20a%20required%20value.&-token.fbtitle=Outstanding%20article%20-%20if%20only%20we%20had%20media%20for%20the%20people&-token.fbbody=I%20will%20do%20my%20part%20to%20share%20this%20story%20on%20my%20favorite%20progressive%20websites.%20%20And%2c%20I%27ll%20leave%20a%20few%20well-placed%20copies%20laying%20around%20for%20the%20uninformed.%20%20Keep%20up%20the%20good%20work.&-token.fbname=&-token.fbcity=&-token.fbemail=&-nothing&-token.feedbackmsgstat=Success&-token.feedbackmsg=Your%20submission%20has%20been%20received.#feedback
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