Untitled Document
There are a handful of freedoms that have almost
always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t
exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people
in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in
the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind
bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be
incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a
judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to
see the evidence against you. The president can’t suspend elections, spy
without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell
protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem
individuals “enemy combatants,” or shunt them into special
tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system. Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a
chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil
liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for
the most part the major news media weren’t paying attention. “This year it seemed like civil rights just
rose to the top,” says Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored,
the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers
and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national
and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25
most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially
ignored.
Although the project usually turns up a range of
underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly
into two categories: the increase of privatization and the diminution of
human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.
“I think they indicate a very real concern
about where our democracy is heading,” writer and veteran judge
Michael Parenti says. For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a
list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored,
misreported, or poorly covered. The Oxford American
Dictionary defines censorship as
“the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and
suppressing unacceptable parts,” which, Phillips says, is also a fine
description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to
democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. “We need to broaden our understanding of
censorship,” he says. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored,
Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself:
“The corporate media is
complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing
major news stories like this.”
1. GOODBYE, HABEAS CORPUS The Military Commissions Act, passed in September
2006 as a last gasp of the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into
law by Bush that Oct. 17, made significant changes to the nation’s
judicial system. The law allows the president to designate any person
an “alien unlawful enemy combatant,” shunting that individual
into an alternative court system in which the writ of habeas corpus no longer
applies, the right to a speedy trial is gone, and justice is meted out by a
military tribunal that can admit evidence obtained through coercion and
presented without the accused in the courtroom, all under the guise of
preserving national security. Habeas corpus, a
constitutional right cribbed from the Magna Carta, protects against
arbitrary imprisonment. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist
Papers, called it the greatest defense against “the favorite and most
formidable instruments of tyranny.”
The Military Commissions Act has been seen mostly as a
method for dealing with GuantЗnamo Bay detainees, and most
journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on
Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, the New York
Times reported, in quite definitive language,
“this law does not apply to American citizens.”
Investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. The
right of habeas corpus no longer exists for any of us, he wrote in the online journal Consortium. Deep down in the
lower sections of the act, the language shifts from the very specific
“alien unlawful enemy combatant” to the vague “any person
subject to this chapter.”
“Why does it contain language referring to
‘any person’ and then adding in an adjacent context a reference
to people acting ‘in breach of allegiance or duty to the United
States’?” Parry wrote. “Who has ‘an allegiance or
duty to the United States,’ if not an American citizen?”
Parry says “this loose phraseology could be
interpreted very narrowly or very broadly.” He says he’s
consulted with lawyers who are experienced in drafting federal security
legislation, and they agreed that the “any person” terminology
is troubling. “It could be fixed very simply, but the Bush
administration put through this very vaguely worded law, and now there are
a lot of differences of opinion on how it could be interpreted,”
Parry says. Efforts to repeal the act have been stymied in
Congress. Sources: “Repeal the Military Commissions Act
and Restore the Most American Human Right,” Thom Hartmann, Common
Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org, Feb. 12, 2007; “Still No
Habeas Rights for You,” Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com, Feb. 3, 2007; “Who Is
‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?” Robert Parry, Consortium,
consortiumnews.com, Oct. 19, 2006.
2. MARTIAL LAW:
COMING TO A
TOWN NEAR
YOU
The Military Commissions Act was part of a one-two
punch to civil liberties. Although the first blow to habeas corpus received some
attention, there was almost no media coverage of a private Oval Office
ceremony held the same day the military act was signed at which Bush signed
the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a $532 billion catchall bill for
defense spending.
Tucked away in the deeper recesses of that act,
section 1076 allows the president to declare a public emergency and
dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police
if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. This is essentially a
revival of the Insurrection Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1878,
when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to Northern troops
overstaying their welcome in the reconstructed South. That act wiped out a
potentially tyrannical amount of power by reinforcing the idea that the
federal government should patrol the nation’s borders and let the
states take care of their own territories. The Warner act defines a public emergency as a
“natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health
emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or
possession of the United States” and extends its provisions to any
place where “the president determines that domestic violence has
occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or
possession are incapable of maintaining public order.” On top of
that, federal troops can be dispatched to “suppress, in a state, any
insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or
conspiracy.”
So everything from a West Nile virus outbreak to a
political protest could fall into the president’s personal definition
of mayhem. That’s right — put your picket signs away. Sources: “Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same
Day!” Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site,
www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com, Jan. 20, 2007; “Bush Moves Toward
Martial Law,” Frank Morales, Uruknet.info, Oct. 26, 2006.
3. AFRICOM
President Jimmy Carter was the first to draw a clear line
between America’s foreign policy and its concurrent “vital
interest” in oil. During his 1980 State of the Union address, he
said, “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian
Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the
United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means
necessary, including military force.”
Under what became the Carter Doctrine, an outpost of
the Pentagon, called the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, was
established to ensure the uninterrupted flow of that slick “vital
interest.”
The United States is now constructing a similar
permanent base in Africa, an area traditionally patrolled by more remote
commands in Europe and the Pacific. No details have been released about
exactly what AFRICOM’s operations and responsibilities will be or
where troops will be located, though government spokespeople have vaguely
stated that the mission is to establish order and keep peace for volatile
governments — that just happen to be in oil-rich areas. Though the official objective may be peace, some say
that the real desire is crude. “A new cold war is under way in
Africa, and AFRICOM will be at the dark heart of it,” Bryan Hunt
wrote on the Moon of Alabama blog. Most U.S. oil imports come from African
countries — in particular, Nigeria. Source: “Understanding AFRICOM,” Moon of
Alabama, www.moonofalabama.org, Feb. 21, 2007.
4. SECRET TRADE
AGREEMENTS As disappointing as the World Trade Organization has
been, it has provided something of an open forum in which smaller countries
can work together to demand concessions from larger, developed nations when
brokering multilateral agreements. At least in theory. The 2006 negotiations crumbled
when the United States, the European Union, and Australia refused to heed
India’s and Brazil’s demands for fair farm tariffs. In the wake of that disaster, bilateral agreements
have become the tactic of choice. These one-on-one negotiations, designed
by the U.S. and the E.U., are cut like backroom deals, with the larger
country bullying the smaller into agreements that couldn’t be reached
through the WTO.
Bush administration officials, always quick with a
charming moniker, are calling these free-trade agreements
“competitive liberalization,” and the E.U. considers them
essential to negotiating future multilateral agreements. But critics see them as fast tracks to increased
foreign control of local resources in poor communities. “The overall
effect of these changes in the rules is to progressively undermine economic
governance, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable
multinational firms, robbing developing countries of the tools they need to
develop their economies and gain a favorable foothold in global
markets,” states a report by Oxfam International, the antipoverty
activist group. Sources: “Free Trade Enslaving Poor
Countries” Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service, March 20, 2007;
“Signing Away the Future” Emily Jones, Oxfam Web site,
www.oxfam.org, March 2007.
5. SLAVE LABOR BUILDS EMBASSY IN IRAQ Part of the permanent infrastructure the United
States is erecting in Iraq includes the world’s largest embassy,
built on Green Zone acreage equal to that of Vatican City. The $592 million
job was awarded in 2005 to First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. Though
much of the project’s management is staffed by Americans, most of the
workers are from small or developing countries such as the Philippines,
India, and Pakistan and, according to David Phinney of CorpWatch — a
Bay Area organization that investigates and exposes corporate environmental
crimes, fraud, corruption, and violations of human rights — are
recruited under false pretenses. At the airport, their boarding passes read
“Dubai.” Their passports are stamped “Dubai.” When
they get off the plane, though, they’re in Baghdad.
Once on site, they’re often beaten and paid as
little as $10 to $30 a day, CorpWatch concludes. Injured workers are dosed
with heavy-duty painkillers and sent back to the job. Lodging is crowded,
and food is substandard. These workers have often been banned by their home
countries from working in Baghdad because of unsafe conditions and flagging
support for the war, but once they’re on Iraqi soil protections are
few. The Pentagon has been investigating the slaverylike
conditions but has not released the names of any violating contractors or
announced penalties. In the meantime, billions of dollars in contracts
continue to be awarded to First Kuwaiti and other companies at which little
accountability exists. As Phinney reported, “No journalist has ever
been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site.”
Source: “A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad:
Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy,”
David Phinney, CorpWatch Web site, www.corpwatch.org, Oct. 17, 2006.
6. FALCON’S TALONS Operation FALCON, or Federal and Local Cops Organized
Nationally, is, in many ways, the manifestation of martial law forewarned
by Frank Morales (see story 2). In an unprecedented partnership, more than
960 federal, state, and local police agencies teamed up in 2005 and in 2006
to conduct the largest dragnet raids in U.S. history. Armed with fistfuls
of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that
netted 30,150 criminal arrests. The Justice Department claimed that the agents were
targeting the “worst of the worst” criminals, and Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales said, “Operation FALCON is an excellent
example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice
Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and
traditional violent crime.”
However, as writer Mike Whitney points out on
Uruknet.info, none of the suspects has been charged with anything related
to terrorism. Additionally, although 30,110 individuals were arrested, only
586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent, either. Though the U.S. Marshals Service has been quick to
tally the offenses, Whitney says that the numbers just don’t add up.
For example, FALCON in 2006 captured 462 violent sex-crime suspects, 1,094
registered sex offenders, and 9,037 fugitives. What about the other 7,481 people? “Who are
they, and have they been charged with a crime?” Whitney asks. The Marshals Service remains silent about these
arrests. Whitney suggests that those detainees were illegal immigrants and
that they are bound for border prisons currently being constructed by
Halliburton. As an added bonus of complicity, the Justice
Department supplied local news outlets with stock footage of the raids,
which some TV stations ran accompanied by stories sourced from the
Department of Justice’s news releases without any critical coverage
of who exactly was swept up in the dragnets and where they are now.
Sources: “Operation Falcon and the Looming
Police State,” Mike Whitney, Uruknet.info, Feb. 26, 2007;
“Operation Falcon,” SourceWatch,
Nov. 18, 2006.
7. BLACKWATER
The outsourcing of war has served two purposes for
the Bush administration, which has given powerful corporations and private
companies lucrative contracts supplying goods and services to American
military operations overseas and quietly achieved an escalation of troops
beyond what the public has been told or understands. Without actually
deploying more military forces, the federal government instead contracts
with private security firms such as Blackwater to provide heavily armed
details for U.S. diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where
the nation is engaged in conflicts. Blackwater is one of the more successful and
well-connected of the private companies profiting from the business of war.
Started in 1996 by an ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the North Carolina
company employs 20,000 hired guns, training them on the world’s
largest private military base. “It’s become nothing short of the
Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration’s so-called global war
on terror,” author Jeremy Scahill said the on Jan. 26 broadcast of
the TV and radio news program Democracy Now! Scahill’s Blackwater:
The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published this year by Nation Books. Source: “Our Mercenaries in Iraq,” Jeremy
Scahill, Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org, Jan. 26, 2007.
8. THE NEOLIBERAL INVASION OF INDIA A March 2006 pact under which the United States
agreed to supply nuclear fuel to India for the production of electric power
also included a less-publicized corollary — the Knowledge Initiative
on Agriculture. Although it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian
farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say that the initiative
is destroying India’s local agrarian economy by encouraging the use
of genetically modified seeds, which in turn is creating a new market for
pesticides and driving up the overall cost of producing crops. The deal provides a captive customer base for
Monsanto and a market for cheap goods to supply Wal-Mart, whose plans for
500 stores in the country could wipe out the livelihoods of 14 million small vendors. Monsanto’s hybrid Bt cotton has already edged
out local strains, and India is currently suffering an infestation of
mealybugs, which have proved immune to the pesticides the chemical
companies have made available. Additionally, the sowing of crops has
shifted from the traditional to the trade-friendly. Farmers accustomed to
cultivating mustard, a sacred local crop, are now producing soy, a plant
foreign to India. Though many farmers are seeing the folly of these
deals, it’s often too late. Suicide has become a popular final act of
opposition to what’s occurring in their country. Vandana Shiva, who for 10 years has been studying the
effects of bad trade deals on India, has published a report, titled Seeds of Suicide, that
recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who have killed themselves
in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately
favoring corporations. Sources: “Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the
U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India,” Democracy Now!,
www.democracynow.org, Dec. 13, 2006; “Genetically Modified Seeds:
Women in India take on Monsanto,” Arun Shrivastava, Global Research,
www.globalresearch.ca, Oct. 9, 2006.
9. PRIVATIZING AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ushered
through legislation for the greatest public-works project in human history:
the interstate highway system, 41,000 miles of roads funded almost entirely
by the federal government. Fifty years later, many of those roads are in need of
repair or replacement, but the federal government has not exactly risen to
the challenge. Instead, more than 20 states have set up financial deals
leasing the roads to private companies in exchange for repairs. These
public-private partnerships are being lauded by politicians as the only
credible financial solution to providing the public with improved services.
But opponents of all political stripes are
criticizing the deals as theft of public property. They point out that the
bulk of benefits is actually going to the private side of the equation
— in many cases to foreign companies with considerable experience
building private roads in developing countries. In the United States these
companies are entering into long-term leases of infrastructure, such as
roads and bridges, for low amounts. They work out tax breaks to finance the
repairs, increase tolls to cover the costs, and start realizing profits for
their shareholders in as little as 10 years. As Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones, “the
Federal Highway Administration estimates that it will cost $50 billion a
year above current levels of federal, state, and local highway funding to
rehab existing bridges and roads over the next 16 years. Where to get that
money, without raising taxes? Privatization promises a quick fix —
and a way to outsource difficult decisions, like raising tolls, to entities
that don’t have to worry about getting reelected.”
Cheerleaders for privatization are deeply embedded in
the Bush administration (see story 7), where they’ve been secretly
fostering plans for a North American Free Trade Agreement superhighway, a
10-lane route set to run through the heart of the country and connect the
Mexican and Canadian borders. It’s specifically designed to plug into
the Mexican port of LЗzaro CЗrdenas, taking advantage of cheap
labor by avoiding the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose
members are traditionally tasked with unloading cargo, and the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members transport that cargo
that around the country.
Sources: “The Highwaymen,” Daniel
Schulman with James Ridgeway, Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com, February 2007; “Bush
Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway,” Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events,
www.humanevents.com, June 12, 2006.
10. VULTURE FUNDS Named for a bird that picks offal from a carcass,
this financial scheme couldn’t be more aptly described. Well-endowed
companies swoop in and purchase the debt owed by a Third World country,
then turn around and sue the country for the full amount — plus
interest. In most courts, they win. Recently Donegal International spent $3
million for $40 million worth of debt Zambia owed Romania, then sued for
$55 million. In February an English court ruled that Zambia had to pay $15
million.
Often these countries are on the brink of having
their debt relieved by the lenders in exchange for putting the owed money
toward necessary goods and services for their citizens. But the vultures
effectively initiate another round of deprivation for the impoverished
countries by demanding full payment, and a loophole makes it legal. Investigative reporter Greg Palast broke the story
for the BBC’s Newsnight, saying that “the vultures have already sucked up
about $1 billion in aid meant for the poorest nations, according to the
World Bank in Washington.”
With the exception of the BBC and Democracy Now!, no major news source
has touched the story, though it’s incensed several members of
Britain’s Parliament, as well as the new prime minister, Gordon
Brown. U.S. Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Donald Payne, D-N.J., lobbied
Bush to take action as well, but political will may be elsewhere. Debt
Advisory International, an investment-consulting firm that’s been
involved in several vulture funds that have generated millions in profits,
is run by Paul Singer — the largest fundraiser for the Republican
Party in the state of New York. He’s donated $1.7 million to
Bush’s campaigns. Source: “Vulture Fund Threat to Third
World,” Newsnight, www.gregpalast.com, Feb. 14, 2007.
Amanda Witherell
writes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where this story also appears this week. Contact her at
amanda@sfbg.com.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.
