We know more now about the dangers and disasters of empire building in Iraq
— the ongoing bloodshed on the ground, expansion of terrorist activities, the
huge budget-busting costs of occupation, the stretching and undermining of the
military, and the increased insecurity that many Americans feel as a result
of the invasion.
We also now have a better handle on the immediate and flimsy reasons for the invasion. President George W. Bush said we were going to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened us. Bush said the Iraqi dictator was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programs and had huge stocks of chemical and biological weapons that could be launched somehow in a way that threatened the United States Bush said that Saddam was working with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist organization.
According to some polls, as much as 70 percent of the public initially believed the president. Their trust, it turns out, was misplaced. Allegations about the state of Iraq’s weapons program remain unproven; no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been discovered. Bush recently reiterated there was no Iraqi involvement in the 9-11 attacks – and, contrary to earlier U.S. assertions, there is no evidence of ties between the deposed Iraqi regime and al-Qaida. Early assurances about the limited cost and duration of the Iraqi campaign have disappeared.
By now, even some in the mainstream media are raising questions about the Bush administration’s candor. The lies and deceptions that were parroted by much of the media earlier this year are now getting coverage, ranging from columns by Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd in the New York Times to wide-ranging reports in the Washington Post.
Far, far less is known about the planning and the actors that brought us this foreign policy disaster. What ideas motivated the Bush administration’s push to overreach and try to dominate the globe, with Iraq as step No. 1? What secret maneuvers and behind-the-scenes policy power struggles after the September 11, 2001 attacks led us to invade a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C.?
Back in the mid-1970s, a professor at Sonoma State University, a liberal-arts college near San Francisco, decided that the nation’s dominant media companies did a fairly good job of reporting news from official and powerful sources, but they failed miserably in explaining why decisions were made. With the help of students and a prominent group of national media experts — ranging from former ABC news anchor Hugh Downs to linguist Noam Chomsky — Professor Carl Jensen launched Project Censored, a group that annually identifies the top ten “censored” stories, as well as fifteen runner-ups. The stories, it turns out, aren’t actually censored: They’ve all been published, usually by small-circulation media outlets and, occasionally, even by foreign or mainstream U.S. newspapers. But Jensen’s point was that unless important stories received broad mass-media coverage, they were effectively buried.
Now in its 27th year, Project Censored has taken licks for its predictable anti-corporate bent, occasional holes in its research and the fact that every now and then, it finds “censored” stories in mainstream media organizations. SF Weekly, a San Francisco-based alternative weekly, last year asserted that a database search found that most of the stories on the 2002 Project Censored list already appeared, in some form, in the New York Times. “To label any of the subjects ‘censored’ is either flat-out deception or an admission of astonishing ignorance,” SF Weekly columnists Peter Byrne and Matt Palmquist wrote. At the same time, the columnists conceded,”some of the stories on the list may deserve wide and more thorough coverage.”
This year, most of the stories on Project Censored’s Top Ten relate to the U.S. war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. On the one hand, this emphasis indicates how the issue dominates the news, but on the other, how little news consumers really understand about how the war happened and why. Taken together, these stories paint a chilling picture of a long-ranging plan to dominate huge sections of the globe militarily and economically, and to silence dissent, curb civil liberties and undermine workers’ rights. Some of the information is shocking, including the U.S. government’s decision to remove 8,000 or more pages from Iraq’s weapons report to the United Nations. Other stories, such as attacks on civil liberties, have received mainstream press coverage, but not in the comprehensive way Project Censored says is needed.
Here, according to Project Censored, at the “Top Ten Censored Stories”
of 2002-2003:
1. The neoconservative plan for global dominance. Project Censored
has decided that the lack of public knowledge of the U.S. plan for total global
domination, represented by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) represents
the media’s biggest failure over the past year. The PNAC plans advocated the
attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and other current foreign policy objectives,
long before the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Chillingly, one document published by the PNAC in 2000 actually describes the need for a “new Pearl Harbor” to persuade the American public to accept the acts of war and aggression the administration wants to carry out. “But most people in the country are totally unaware that the PNAC exists,” says Peter Phillips, a Sonoma State professor and the current head of The Project Censored Project. “That failure,” Phillips adds, “has aided and abetted this disaster in Iraq.”
According to Project Censored authors: “In the 1970s, the United States and the Middle East were embroiled in a tug-of-war over oil. At the time, the prospect of seizing control of Arab oil fields by force was considered out of line. Still, the idea of Middle East dominance was very attractive to a group of hard-line Washington insiders that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and other operatives. During the Clinton years they were active in conservative think tanks like the PNAC. When Bush was elected they came roaring back into power.
In an update for the Project Censored Web site, Mother Jones writer
Robert Dreyfuss notes, “There was very little examination in the media of the
role of oil in American policy towards Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and what coverage
did exist tended to pooh-pooh or debunk the idea that the war had anything to
do with it.”
Sources: The Sunday Herald (Sept. 15, 2002), Harper’s (October
2002), Mother Jones (March 2003), Pilger.com (Dec. 12, 2002)
2. Homeland security threatens civil liberties. While the media did
cover the Patriot Act, and the so-called Patriot Act II, which was leaked to
the press in February 2003, there wasn’t sufficient analysis of some of the
truly dangerous and precedent-setting components of both acts. This goes especially
for the shocking provision in Patriot II that would allow even U.S. citizens
to be treated as enemy combatants and held without counsel, simply on suspicion
of connections to terrorism.
The Patriot Act, which was enacted with little media analysis after 9-11, now is under major duress in Congress as both parties are supporting significant revisions. Yet, President Bush, realizing that he and his unpopular Attorney General John Ashcroft are losing popular support, is threatening a veto, and has aggressively gone on the offense in favor of the Patriot II.
Sources: Global Outlook (Winter 2003), Rense.com (Feb. 11, 2003 &
Global Outlook, Volume 4) and the Center for Public Integrity (publicintegrity.org).
Also: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 11, 2003), The Tampa Tribune
(March 28, 2002), Baltimore Sun (Feb. 21, 2003)
3. U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq UN report. Story three is
the shockingly under-reported fact that the Bush administration removed a whopping
8,000 of 11,800 pages from the report the Iraqi government submitted to the
UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The pages included
details on how the U.S. had actually supplied Iraq with chemical and biological
weapons and the building blocks for weapons of mass destruction. The pages reportedly
implicate not only Reagan and Bush administration officials but also major corporations
including Bechtel, Eastman Kodak and Dupont and the U.S. departments of Energy
and Agriculture.
In comments to Project Censored, Michael Niman, author of one of the articles cited, notes that his article was based on secondary sources, mostly from the international press, since the topic received an almost complete blackout in the U.S. press. Referring to his first Project Censored nomination in 1989, in which he went into the bush in Costa Rica, he said, “With such thorough self-censorship in the U.S. press, reading the international press is now akin to going into the remote bush.”
Sources: The Humanist and ArtVoice (March/April 2003), first covered by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
4. Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists. Moscow Times columnist
and CounterPunch contributor Chris Floyd developed this story off a small
item in the Los Angeles Times in October 2002 about secret armies the
Pentagon has been developing around the world. “The Pro-active, Preemptive Operations
Group (or “Pee-Twos”) will carry out secret missions designed to ‘stimulate
reactions’ among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts
which would then expose them to ‘counterattack’ by U.S. forces,” Floyd wrote.
“The Pee-Twos will thus come in handy whenever the Regime hankers to add a little
oil-laden real estate or a new military base to the Empire’s burgeoning portfolio.
Just find a nest of violent malcontents, stir ’em with a stick, and presto:
instant justification for whatever level of intervention-conquest-raping that
you might desire.”
Floyd notes that while the story received considerable play in international and alternative media, it has hardly been mentioned in the mainstream U.S. press.
“At first glance, this decided lack of interest might seem a curious reaction, given the American media’s insatiable — and profitable — obsession with terrorism,” he told Project Censored. “But the media’s equally intense abhorrence of moral ambiguity — especially when it involves possible American complicity in mayhem and murder — makes the silence easier to understand.”
Source: CounterPunch (Nov. 1, 2002)
5. The effort to make unions disappear. The war on terrorism has also
had the convenient side benefit for conservatives of making it easier for employers
and the government to suppress organized labor in the name of national security.
For example, in October 2002, President Bush was able to force striking International
Longshore and Warehouse Union members back to work in the San Francisco Bay
Area in the name of national safety. Chicago journalist Lee Sustar notes that
labor coverage is usually woefully inadequate in the mainstream media, even
though union membership, while shrinking, still makes up a national constituency
13 million strong. “Twenty years ago every paper had a beat reporter on labor
who knew what was going on,” he says. “Today that’s not the case. Besides a
token story on Labor Day or a human-interest story here and there, you don’t
see coverage of labor. You only see coverage from the business side,” Sustar
adds.
Ann Marie Cusac, whose story for The Progressive about the decimation of unions was cited, says she believes the position of organized labor is worse than it has ever been. She combed National Labor Relations Board files for egregious examples of the lengths to which employers will go to bust unions. And she found a lot. “They had a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome pulling nails out of boards above her head, because they wanted her to go on disability so she couldn’t organize,” she says. “But she did it, even knowing she might disable herself. The willingness of people to sacrifice, because they know how important it is to unionize, is a sign of hope.”
Sources: Z Magazine, (Nov. 20, 2002),War Times (Oct. 11, 2002), The Progressive (November 2003), The American Prospect (March 2003)
6. Closing access to information technology. The potential closing
of access to digital information is a development that could have a harmful
effect on the powerful role online media plays in side stepping media gate keepers
and keeping people better informed. “The FCC and Congress are currently overturning
the public-interest rules that have encouraged the expansion of the Internet
up until now,” writes Arthur Stamoulis, whose story was published in Dollars
and Sense.
The Internet currently provides a buffet of independent and international media sources to counter or amplify the mostly homogenous offerings of mainstream U.S. media, especially broadcast. As the shift to broadband gains momentum, cable companies are trying hard to dominate the market, and eventually control access.
In 2002 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to allow cable networks to avoid common carrier requirements. Now the giant phone companies, who offer the competitive DSL services, want the same freedoms to control access to their lines. In the long run, instead of the thousands of small ISP services to choose from, the switch from dial-up to broadband means that users will have less and less choice over who provides their Internet access. While the media finally woke up and gave significant coverage to the recent public rebellion against the FCC, which voted to increase media concentration even further, there has been scant coverage to the problem that the Internet as we now it might be lost.
Source: Dollars and Sense (September 2002)
7. Treaty busting by the United States. “The U.S. is a signatory to
nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated or gradually
subverted,” says Project Censored. These include the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty, the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines and the Kyoto Protocol on global
warming. Just as the Bush administration is crowing about the possibility of
Saddam Hussein manufacturing nuclear or chemical weapons, it is violating treaties
meant to curb these threats, including the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
and the Chemical Weapons Commission.
Sources: Connections (June 2002), The Nation (April 2002), Ashville Global Report (June 20-26, 2002), Global Outlook (Summer 2002)
8. U.S./British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite
massive evidence of negative health effects. The eighth story on the list
deals with another subject that victims have tried to get into the mainstream
media for over a decade — the U.S.’s use of depleted uranium in Iraq, in both
the recent invasion and in the Gulf War. Depleted uranium (DU) was also used
in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia.
The writers cited, including the porn magazine Hustler, note that cancer rates have skyrocketed in Iraq since the first Gulf War, most likely because of the massive contamination of the soil with DU from the explosive, armor-piercing munitions. U.S. soldiers are also possible victims of this travesty, suffering Gulf War syndrome and other ailments that many feel sure are linked to their exposure to DU.
Reese Erlich, a freelance journalist who reported on the topic for a syndicated radio broadcast and related Web site report, says that the federal government has dealt with the issue of DU the way the tobacco industry deals with its liability problems. “They’ll fog the issue so no one can say for sure what’s happening,” he says. “They’ll commission studies so they can say, ‘There are conflicting reports,’ ‘We need more information.'”
He notes that while the U.S. media is quiet about the issue, it is a hot topic in the international press. “When you get outside the U.S., the media is much more critical,” he says. “They refer to it as a weapon of mass destruction. This will be a legacy the U.S. has left in Iraq. Long after the electricity is repaired and the oil wells are pumping, children will be getting cancer. The U.S. knew this would happen, it can’t claim ignorance.”
Sources: The Sunday Herald (March 30, 2003), Hustler (June 2003)
Children of War (March 2003)
9. In Afghanistan: Poverty, women’s rights and civil disruption worse than
ever. Though his work isn’t cited here, Erlich also reported on the topic
of the ninth story on the list, the continuing poverty, civil disruption and
repression of women in Afghanistan. While the country has virtually dropped
off the radar screen in the U.S. press and public consciousness, it is suffering
its worst decade of poverty ever. Warlords and tribal fiefdoms continue to rule
the country, and women are as repressed as ever, contrary to the feel-good images
of burqa-stripping that have been broadcast in the media here.
“Reporters by and large don’t go to Afghanistan to report on what they see,” says Erlich, who spent several weeks reporting in the country. “They go to the State Department officials, so everything is filtered through these rose-colored glasses, saying things are getting better. But they’re not.”
Sources: The Nation (Oct. 14, 2002), Left Turn (March-April 2003), The Nation (April 29, 2002), Mother Jones (July-August 2002), Toronto Star (March 2, 2003)
10. Africa faces new threat of new colonialism. While Afghanistan is being
essentially ignored, the tenth story on the list shows how African countries
are getting plenty of attention from the U.S. — but not the kind of attention
they need. These stories deal with the formation in June 2002 of the New Partnership
for Africa’s Development, or NEPAD, by a group of leaders from the world’s eight
most powerful countries (the G8) who claim to be carrying out an anti-poverty
campaign for the continent. But the group doesn’t include the head of a single
African nation, and critics charge that the plan is more about opening the continent
to international investment and looting its resources than fighting poverty.
“NEPAD is akin to Plan Colombia in its attempt to employ Western development
techniques to provide economic opportunities for international investment,”
says Project Censored.
Sources: Left Turn (July-August 2002), Briarpatch, Vol. 32,
No. 1, Excerpted from The CCPA Monitor, (October 2002), New Internationalist
(January-February 2003)
For more information about Project Censored, including the list of fifteen
runners-up, visit the Web site www.projectcensored.org
This story was distributed by AlterNet. Kari Lydersen, a regular contributor
to AlterNet, also writes for the Washington Post and is an instructor
for the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in Chicago. She can be
reached atkarilyde@aol.com
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2003.
