Project Censored

Censored!

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Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored for 13 years, says he’s finished with reform. It’s impossible, he said in a recent interview, to try to get major news media outlets to deliver relevant news stories that serve to strengthen democracy.

"I really think we’re beyond reforming corporate media," said Phillips, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored. "We’re not going to break up these huge conglomerates. We’re just going to make them irrelevant."

Every year since 1976, Project Censored has spotlighted the 25 most significant news stories that were largely ignored or misrepresented by the mainstream press. Now the group is expanding its mission — to promote alternative news sources. But it continues to report the biggest national and international stories that the major media ignored.

The term "censored" doesn’t mean some government agent stood over newsrooms with a rubber stamp and forbid the publication of the news, or even that the information was completely out of the public eye. The stories Project Censored highlights may have run in one or two news outlets, but didn’t get the type of attention they deserved.

The project staff begins by sifting through hundreds of stories nominated by individuals at Sonoma State, where the project is based, as well as 30 affiliated universities all over the country.

Articles are verified, fact-checked, and selected by a team of students, faculty, and evaluators from the wider community, then sent to a panel of national judges to be ranked. The end product is a book, co-edited this year by Phillips and associate director Mickey Huff, that summarizes the top stories, provides in-depth media analysis, and includes resources for readers who are hungry for more substantive reporting.

Project Censored doesn’t just expose gaping holes in the news brought to you by the likes of Fox, CNN, or USA Today — it also shines a light on less prominent but more incisive alternative-media sources serving up in-depth investigations and watchdog reports.

Phillips is stepping down this year as director of Project Censored and turning his attention to a new endeavor called Media Freedom International. The organization will tap academic affiliates from around the world to verify the content put out by independent news outlets as a way to facilitate trust in these lesser-known sources. "The biggest question I got asked for 13 years was, who do you trust?" he explained. "So we’ve really made an effort in the last three years to try to address that question, in a very open way, in a very honest way, and say, these are [the sources] who we can trust."

Benjamin Frymer, a sociology professor at Sonoma State who is stepping into the role of Project Censored director, says he believes the time is ripe for this kind of push. "The actual amount of time people spend reading online is increasing," Frymer pointed out. "It’s not as if people are just cynically rejecting media — they’re reaching out for alternative sources. Project Censored wants to get involved in making those sources visible."

The Project Censored book this year uses the term "truth emergency."

"We call it an emergency because it’s a democratic emergency," Huff asserted. In this media climate, "we’re awash in a sea of information," he said. "But we have a paucity of understanding about what the truth is."

The top 25 Project Censored stories of 2008-09 highlight the same theme that Phillips and Huff say has triggered the downslide of mainstream media: the overwhelming influence of powerful, profit-driven interests. The No. 1 story details the financial sector’s hefty campaign contributions to key members of Congress leading up to the financial crisis, which coincided with a weakening of federal banking regulations. Another story points out that in even in the financial tumult following the economic downturn, special interests spent more money on Washington lobbyists than ever before.

Here’s this year’s list.

1. CONGRESS SELLS OUT TO WALL STREET


The total tab for the Wall Street bailout, including money spent and promised by the U.S. government, works out to an estimated $42,000 for every man, woman, and child, according to American Casino, a documentary about sub prime lending and the financial meltdown. The predatory lending free-for-all, the emergency pumping of taxpayer dollars to prop up mega banks, and the lavish bonuses handed out to Wall Street executives in the aftermath are all issues that have dominated news headlines.

But another twist in the story received scant attention from the mainstream news media: the unsettling combination of lax oversight from national politicians with high-dollar campaign contributions from financial players.

"The worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état," Matt Taibbi wrote in "The Big Takeover," a March 2009 Rolling Stone article. "They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders who used money to control elections, buy influence, and systematically weaken financial regulations."

In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, the financial sector spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions, and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. Since 2001, eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates, and the Republican and Democratic parties.

Wall Street’s spending spree on political contributions coincided with a weakening of federal banking regulations, which in turn created a recipe for the astronomical financial disaster that sent the global economy reeling.

Sources: "Lax Oversight? Maybe $64 Million to DC Pols Explains It," Greg Gordon, Truthout.org and McClatchey Newspapers, October 2, 2008; "Congressmen Hear from TARP Recipients Who Funded Their Campaigns," Lindsay Renick Mayer, Capitol Eye, February 10, 2009; "The Big Takeover," Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, March 2009.

2. DE FACTO SEGREGATION DEEPENING IN PUBLIC EDUCATION


Latinos and African Americans attend more segregated public schools today than they have for four decades, Professor Gary Orfield notes in "Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge," a study conducted by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. Orfield’s report used federal data to highlight deepening segregation in public education by race and poverty.

About 44 percent of students in the nation’s public school system are people of color, and this group will soon make up the majority of the population in the U.S. Yet this racial diversity often isn’t reflected from school to school. Instead, two out of every five African American and Latino youths attend schools Orfield characterizes as "intensely segregated," composed of 90 percent to 100 percent people of color.

For Latinos, the trend reflects growing residential segregation. For African Americans, the study attributes a significant part of the reversal to ending desegregation plans in public schools nationwide. Schools segregated by race and poverty tend to have much higher dropout rates, more teacher turnover, and greater exposure to crime and gangs, placing students at a major disadvantage in society. The most severe segregation is in Western states, including California.

Fifty-five years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, Orfield wrote, "Segregation is fast spreading into large sectors of suburbia, and there is little or no assistance for communities wishing to resist the pressures of resegregation and ghetto creation in order to build successfully integrated schools and neighborhoods."

Source: "Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge," Gary Orfield, The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, January 2009

3. SOMALI PIRATES: THE UNTOLD STORY


Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa were like gold for mainstream news outlets this past year. Stories describing surprise attacks on shipping vessels, daring rescues, and cadres of ragtag bandits extracting multimillion dollar ransoms were all over the airwaves and front pages.

But even as the pirates’ exploits around the Gulf of Aden captured the world’s attention, little ink was devoted to factors that made the Somalis desperate enough to resort to piracy in the first place: the dumping of nuclear waste and rampant over-fishing their coastal waters.

In the early 1990s, when Somalia’s government collapsed, foreign interests began swooping into unguarded coastal waters to trawl for food — and venturing into unprotected Somali territories to cheaply dispose of nuclear waste. Those activities continued with impunity for years. The ramifications of toxic dumping hit full force with the 2005 tsunami, when leaking barrels were washed ashore, sickening hundreds and causing birth defects in newborn infants. Meanwhile, the uncontrolled fishing harvests damaged the economic livelihoods of Somali fishermen and eroded the country’s supply of a primary food source. That’s when the piracy began.

"Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?" asked journalist Johann Hari in a Huffington Post article. "We didn’t act on those crimes — but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about ‘evil.’"

Sources: "Toxic waste behind Somali piracy," Najad Abdullahi, Al Jazeera English, Oct. 11, 2008; "You are being lied to about pirates," Johann Hari, The Huffington Post, Jan. 4, 2009; "The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other," Mohamed Abshir Waldo, WardheerNews, Jan. 8, 2009

4. NORTH CAROLINA’S NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE


The Shearon Harris nuclear plant in North Carolina’s Wake County isn’t just a power-generating station. The Progress Energy plant, located in a backwoods area, bears the distinction of housing the largest radioactive-waste storage pools in the country. Spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants are transported there by rail, then stored beneath circuutf8g cold water to prevent the radioactive waste from heating.

The hidden danger, according to investigative reporter Jeffery St. Clair, is the looming threat of a pool fire. Citing a study by Brookhaven National Laboratory, St. Clair highlighted in Counterpunch the catastrophe that could ensue if a pool were to ignite. A possible 140,000 people could wind up with cancer. Contamination could stretch for thousands of square miles. And damages could reach an estimated $500 billion.

"Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly and catch fire," Robert Alvarez, a former Department of Energy advisor and Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies noted in a study about safety issues surrounding nuclear waste pools. "The fire could well spread to older fuel. The long-term contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than Chernobyl."

Shearon Harris’ track record is pocked with problems requiring temporary shutdowns of the plant and malfunctions of the facility’s emergency-warning system.

When a study was sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission highlighting the safety risks and recommending technological fixes to address the problem, St. Clair noted, a pro-nuclear commissioner successfully persuaded the agency to dismiss the concerns.

Source: "Pools of Fire," Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch, Aug. 9, 2008

5. U.S. FAILS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS AGAINST TOXICS


Two years ago, the European Union enacted a bold new environmental policy requiring close scrutiny and restriction of toxic chemicals used in everyday products. Invisible perils such as lead in lipstick, endocrine disruptors in baby toys, and mercury in electronics can threaten human health. The European legislation aimed to gradually phase out these toxic materials and replace them with safer alternatives.

The story that has gone unreported by mainstream American news media is how this game-changing legislation might affect the U.S., where chemical corporations use lobbying muscle to ensure comparatively lax oversight of toxic substances. As global markets shift to favor safer consumer products, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is lagging in its own scrutiny of insidious chemicals.

As investigative journalist Mark Schapiro pointed out in Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, the EPA’s tendency to behave as if it were beholden to big business could backfire in this case, placing U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage because products manufactured here will be regarded with increasing distrust.

Economics aside, the implications of loose restrictions on toxic products are chilling: just one-third of the 267 chemicals on the EU’s watch list have ever been tested by the EPA, and only two are regulated under federal law. Meanwhile, researchers at UC Berkeley estimate that 42 billion pounds of chemicals enter American commerce daily, and only a fraction have undergone risk assessments. When it comes to meeting the safer, more stringent EU standard, the stakes are high — with consequences including economic impacts as well as public health.

Sources: "European Chemical Clampdown Reaches Across Atlantic," David Biello, Scientific American, Sept. 30, 2008; "How Europe’s New Chemical Rules Affect U.S.," Environmental Defense Fund, Sept. 30, 2008; "U.S. Lags Behind Europe in Reguutf8g Toxicity of Everyday Products," Mark Schapiro, Democracy Now! Feb. 24, 2009

6. AS ECONOMY SHRINKS, D.C. LOBBYING GROWS


In 2008, as the economy tumbled and unemployment soared, Washington lobbyists working for special interests were paid $3.2 billion — more than any other year on record. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, special interests spent a collective $32,523 per legislator, per day, for every day Congress was in session.

One event that triggered the lobbying boom, according to CRP director Sheila Krumholz, was the federal bailout — with the federal government ensuring that the lobbyists got a piece of the pie. Ironically, some of the first in line were the same players who helped precipitate the nation’s sharp economic downturn by engaging in high-risk, speculative lending practices.

"Even though some financial, insurance and real estate interests pulled back last year, they still managed to spend more than $450 million as a sector to lobby policymakers," Krumholz noted. "That can buy a lot of influence, and it’s a fraction of what the financial sector is reaping in return through the government’s bailout program."

The list of highest-ranking spenders on Washington lobbying reads like a roster of some of the most powerful interests nationwide. Topping the list was the health sector, which spent $478.5 million lobbying Congress last year. A close runner-up was the finance, insurance, and real-estate sector, spending $453.5 million. Pharmaceutical companies plunked down $230 million; electric utilities spent $156.7 million; and oil and gas companies paid lobbyists $133.2 million.

Source: "Washington Lobbying Grew to $3.2 Billion Last Year, Despite Economy," Center for Responsive Politics, Open Secrets.org

7. OBAMA’S CONTROVERSIAL DEFENSE APPOINTEES


President Barack Obama’s appointments to the Department of Defense have raised serious questions among critics who’ve studied their track records. Although the news media haven’t paid much attention, the defense appointees bring to the administration controversial histories and conflicts of interest due to close ties to defense contractors.

Obama’s decision to retain Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush, marks the first time in history that a president has opted to keep a defense secretary of an outgoing opposing party in power.

Gates, a former CIA director, has faced criticism for allegedly spinning intelligence reports for political means. In Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, author and former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman described him as "the chief action officer for the Reagan administration’s drive to tailor intelligence reporting to White House political desires." Gates also came under scrutiny for questions surrounding whether he misled Congress during the Iran-contra scandal in the mid-1980s, and was accused of withholding information from intelligence committees when the U.S. provided military aid to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.

Critics are also uneasy about the appointment of Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, who formerly served as a senior vice president at defense giant Raytheon Company and was a registered lobbyist for Raytheon until July 2008. Lynn, who previously served as Pentagon comptroller under the Clinton administration, came under fire during his confirmation hearing for "questionable accounting practices." The Defense Department failed multiple audits under Lynn’s leadership because it was unable to properly account for $3.4 trillion in financial transactions made over the course of several years.

Sources: "The Danger of Keeping Robert Gates," Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, Nov. 13, 2008; "Obama’s Defense Department Appointees- The $3.4 Trillion Question," Andrew Hughes, Global Research, Feb. 13, 2009; "Obama Nominee Admiral Dennis Blair Aided perpetrators of 1999 church Killings in East Timor," Allan Nairn, Democracy Now! Jan. 7, 2009; "Ties to Chevron, Boeing Raise Concern on Possible NSA Pick," Roxana Tiron, The Hill, Nov. 24, 2008


8. BIG BUSINESS CHEATS THE IRS


The Cayman Islands and Bermuda are magnets for Bank of America, Citigroup, American International Group, and 11 other financial giants that were the beneficiaries of the federal government’s 2008 Wall Street bailout. It’s not the balmy weather that inspires some of America’s wealthiest companies to open operations in the Caribbean archipelago: the offshore oases provide safe harbors to stash cash out of the reach of Uncle Sam.

According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office, which was largely ignored by the news media, 83 of the top publicly-held U.S. companies, including some receiving substantial portions of federal bailout dollars, have operations in tax havens that allow them to avoid paying their fair share to the Internal Revenue Service. The report also spotlighted the activities of Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), which has helped wealthy Americans to use tax schemes to cheat the IRS out of billions.

In December 2008, banking giant Goldman Sachs reported its first quarterly loss, and promptly followed up with a statement that its tax rate would drop from 34.1 percent to 1 percent, citing "changes in geographic earnings mix" as the reason. The difference: instead of paying $6 billion in total worldwide taxes as it did in 2007, Goldman Sachs would pay a total of $14 million in 2008. In the same year, it received $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government.

"The problem is larger than Goldman Sachs," U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, told Bloomberg News. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore."

Sources: "Goldman Sachs’s Tax Rate Drops to 1 percent or $14 Million," Christine Harper, Bloomberg News, Dec. 16, 2008; "Gimme Shelter: Tax Evasion and the Obama Administration," Thomas B. Edsall, The Huffington Post, Feb. 23, 2009

9. U.S. CONNECTED TO WHITE PHOSPHOROUS STRIKES IN GAZA


In mid-January, as part of a military campaign, the Israeli Defense Forces fired several shells that hit the headquarters of a United Nations relief agency in Gaza City, destroying provisions for basic aid like food and medicine.

The shells contained white phosphorous (referred to as "Willy Pete" in military slang), a smoke-producing, spontaneously flammable agent designed to obscure battle territory that also can ignite buildings or cause grotesque burns if it touches the skin.

The attack on the relief-agency headquarters is just one example of a civilian structure that researchers discovered had been hit during the January air strikes. In the aftermath of the attacks, Human Rights Watch volunteers found spent white phosphorous shells on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a U.N. school in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch says the IDF’s use of white phosphorous violated international law, which prohibits deliberate, indiscriminate, or disproportionate attacks that result in civilian casualties. After gathering evidence such as spent shells, the organization issued a report condemning the repeated firing of white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza as a war crime. Amnesty International, another human rights organization, followed suit by calling upon the United States to suspend military aid to Israel — but to no avail.

The U.S. was a primary source of funding and weaponry for Israel’s military campaign. Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus.

Sources: "White Phosphorus Use Evidence of War Crimes Report: Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza," Fred Abrahams, Human Rights Watch, March 25, 2009; "Suspend Military Aid to Israel, Amnesty Urges Obama after Detailing U.S. Weapons Used in Gaza," Rory McCarthy, Guardian/U.K., Feb. 23, 2009; "U.S. Weaponry Facilitates Killings in Gaza," Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service, Jan. 8, 2009; "U.S. military resupplying Israel with ammunition through Greece," Saed Bannoura, International Middle East Media Center News, Jan. 8, 2009.

10. ECUADOR SAYS IT WON’T PAY ILLEGITIMATE DEBT


When President Rafael Correa announced that Ecuador would default on its foreign debt last December, he didn’t say it was because the Latin American country was unable to pay. Rather, he framed it as a moral stand: "As president, I couldn’t allow us to keep paying a debt that was obviously immoral and illegitimate," Correa told an international news agency. The news was mainly reported in financial publications, and the stories tended to quote harsh critics who characterized Correa as an extreme leftist with ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

But there’s much more to the story. The announcement came in the wake of an exhaustive audit of Ecuador’s debt, conducted under Correa’s direction by a newly created debt audit commission. The unprecedented audit documented hundreds of allegations of irregularity and illegality in the decades of debt collection from international lenders. Although Ecuador had made payments exceeding the value of the principal since the time it initially took out loans in the 1970s, its foreign debt had nonetheless swelled to levels three times as high due to extraordinarily high interest rates. With a huge percentage of the country’s financial resources devoted to paying the debt, little was left over to combat poverty in Ecuador.

Correa’s move to stand up against foreign lenders did not go unnoticed by other impoverished, debt-ridden nations, and the decision could set a precedent for developing countries struggling to get out from under massive debt obligation to first-world lenders.

Ecuador eventually agreed to a restructuring of its debt at about 35 cents on the dollar. Nonetheless, the move served to expose deficiencies in the World Bank system, which provides little recourse for countries to resolve disputes over potentially illegitimate debt.

Sources: "As Crisis Mounts, Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate and Illegal," Daniel Denvir, Alternet, November 26, 2008; "Invalid Loans to Ecuador: Who Owes Who," Committee for the Integral Audit of Public Credit, Utube, Fall 2008; "Ecuador’s Debt Default," Neil Watkins and Sarah Anders, Foreign Policy in Focus, Dec. 15, 2008

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OTHER STORIES IN THE TOP 25

11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine

12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief

13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War

14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts

15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco

16. US Repression of Haiti Continues

17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan

18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature

19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor

20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates

21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare

22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team

23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud

24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion

25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Read them all at www.projectcensored.org

NYT Censored

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Click here to read the Oct. 5, 2009 Bruce blog, New York Times: Censoring Project Censored.

The Most Censored Story in SF History

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The Most Censored Story in SF History

How the PG&E/ Raker Act scandal has kept cheap clean Hetch Hetchy Public Power out of San Francisco for decades and cost the rate payers billions of dollars.

It’s PG&E that has the blank check. Scroll down for a chronology of the PG&E/Raker Act scandal from 1848-1988, with an added update through 2001.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Ah, yes, you say, as attentive readers of the Guardian since 1969 and the almost famous Bruce blog know, the most censored story in San Francisco history has to be the PG&E/ Raker Act scandal.

It is the biggest ongoing urban scandal in U.S. History. It has cost the city tens of billions of dollars over the decades. It has cost business and residential rate payers hundreds of millions of dollars in extortionate high rates, lousy service, vicious collection practices, and unreliable power. It has corrupted City Hall and local politics for decades and continues to do so to this very day as PG&E presses its multi-million dollar blitz against the Clean Energy act on the November ballot.

And the local media, led by the Hearst – owned San Francisco Chronicle, has censored and marginalized the scandal in every way possible every since the shameful Hearst deal with a PG&E – controlled bank in the late 1920’s.

Hearst was once a major supporter of public Hetch Hetchy power and the federal Raker Act that allowed San Francisco to dam a beautiful valley (Hetch Hetchy in beautiful Yosemite National Park) for the city’s public water and power supply.

Hearst even placed a copy of his pro-Raker Act editorial on the desk of every Congressperson on the day of the critical 1913 vote on the Raker Act. Hearst won the vote, the dam was built, and Hearst continued his strong support of the Hetch Hetchy project up until the late 1920’s PG&E bank deal with it’s historic sell out condition.

The deal was that PG&E gave Hearst much needed capital in return for a multi-billion dollar capitulation: Hearst would reverse his historic pro-public power position to support PG&E’s private power monopoly in San Francisco.

To it’s everlasting shame, Hearst corporate has marched in lock steps everlatter with PG&E and against the city and county of San Francisco and its residents and businesses. It has kept San Francisco in violation of the Raker Act and it’s public power mandates and has thus jeopardized the entire Hetch Hetchy system to the Tear-the-dam-movement.

And Hearst kept the story out of the news in San Francisco until Professor Joe Neilands of UC Berkeley revived the scandal in his famous 1969 story in the Guardian.

Here are a few of the stories that demonstrate that the PG&E/Raker Act Scandal is indeed the most censored story in San Francisco history:

*Chronology of Raker Act Scandal

*The 1969 Neilands story

*The Hearst/PG&E deal

*Project Censored 2008

Project Censored

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media regularly cover terrorism, but rarely discuss how the fear of attacks is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That’s the common thread of many unreported stories last year, according to an analysis by Project Censored.

Since 1976, Sonoma State University has released an annual survey of the top 25 stories the mainstream media failed to report or reported poorly. Culled from worldwide alternative news sources, vetted by students and faculty, and ranked by judges, the stories were not necessarily overtly censored. But their controversial subjects, challenges to the status quo, or general under-the-radar subject matter might have kept them from the front pages. Project Censored recounts them, accompanied by media analysis, in a book of the same name published annually by Seven Stories Press.

"This year, war and civil liberties stood out," Peter Phillips, project director since 1996, said of the top stories. "They’re closely related and part of the War on Terror that has been the dominant theme of Project Censored for seven years, since 9/11."

Whether it’s preventing what one piece of legislation calls "homegrown terrorism" by federally funding the study of radicalism, using vague concerns about security to quietly expand NAFTA, or refusing to count the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war, the threat of terrorism is being used to silence people and expand power.

"The war on terror is a sort of mind terror," said Nancy Snow, one of the project’s 24 judges and an associate professor of public diplomacy at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Snow — who has taught classes on war, media, and propaganda — elaborated: "You can’t declare war on terror. It’s a tactic used by groups to gain publicity and it will remain with us. But it’s unlikely that [the number of terrorist acts] will spike. It spikes in the minds of people."

She pointed out that the number of terrorist attacks has dropped worldwide since 2003. Some use the absence of fresh attacks as evidence that the so-called war on terror is working. But a RAND Corporation study for the Department of Defense released in August said the war on terror hasn’t effectively undermined Al Qaeda. It suggested the phrase be replaced with the less loaded term "counterterrorism."

Both Phillips and Snow agree that comprehensive, contextual reporting is missing from most of the coverage. "That’s one of my criticisms of the media," Snow said. "They spotlight issues and don’t look at the entire landscape."

This year the landscape of Project Censored itself is expanding. After talking with educators who bemoan the ongoing decline of news quality and want to help, Phillips launched the Truth Emergency Project, in which Sonoma State partners with 23 other universities. All will host classes for students to search out untold stories, vet them for accuracy, and submit them for consideration to Project Censored.

"There’s a renaissance of independent media," Phillips said. He thinks bloggers and citizen journalists are filling crucial roles left vacant by staff cutbacks throughout the mainstream media. And, he said, it’s time for universities, educators, and media experts to step in and help. "It’s not just reforming the media, but supporting them in as many ways as they need, like validating stories by fact-checking."

The Truth Emergency Project will also host a news service that aggregates the top 12 independent media sources and posts them on one page. "So you can get an RSS feed from all the major independent news sources we trust," he said. Discerning newshounds can find reporting from the BBC, Democracy Now!, and Inter Press Service (IPS) in one spot. "The whole criteria," he said, "is no corporate media."

Carl Jensen, who started Project Censored in 1976, said the expansion is a new and necessary phase. "It answers the question I was always challenged with: how do you know this is the truth? Having 24 campuses reviewing all the stories and raising questions really provides a good answer. These stories will be vetted more than Sarah Palin."

Phillips said he hopes to expand to 100 schools within the year, and would like the project to bring more attention to the dire need for public support for high quality news reporting. "I think it’s going to require government subsidies and nonprofit organizations doing community media projects," he said. "It’s more than just reforming at the FCC level. It’s building independent media from the ground up."

Phillips likens it to the boom in microbrewed beer and the spread of independently-owned pubs: "If we can have a renaissance in beer-making, following established purity standards, then we can do it with our media, too." But for now, we have Project Censored, whose top 10 underreported stories for 2008 are:

1. HOW MANY IRAQIS HAVE DIED?


Nobody knows exactly how many lives the Iraq War has claimed. But even more astounding is that so few journalists have mentioned the issue or cited the top estimate: 1.2 million.

During August and September 2007, Opinion Research Business, a British polling group, surveyed 2,414 adults in 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces and found that more than 20 percent had experienced at least one war-related death since March 2003. Using common statistical study methods, it determined that as many as 1.2 million people had been killed since the war began.

The US military, claiming it keeps no count, still employs civilian death data as a marker of progress. For example, in a Sept. 10, 2007, report to Congress, Gen. David Petraeus said, "Civilian deaths of all categories, less natural causes, have also declined considerably, by over 45 percent Iraq-wide since the height of the sectarian violence in December."

But whose number was he using? Estimates range wildly and are based on a variety of sources, including hospital, morgue, and media reports, as well as in-person surveys.

In October 2006, the British medical journal Lancet published a Johns Hopkins University study vetted by four independent sources that counted 655,000 dead, based on interviews with 1,849 households. It updated a similar study from 2004 that counted 100,000 dead. The Associated Press called it "controversial."

The AP began its own count in 2005 and by 2006 said that at least 37,547 Iraqis had lost their lives due to war-related violence, but called it a minimum estimate at best and didn’t include insurgent deaths.

Iraq Body Count, a group of US and UK citizens who aggregate numbers from media reports on civilian deaths, puts the figure between 87,000 and 95,000. In January 2008, the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government did door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households and put the number of dead at 151,000.

The 1.2 million figure is out there, too, which is higher than the Rwandan genocide death toll and closing in on the 1.7 million who perished in Cambodia’s killing fields. It raises questions about the real number of deaths from US aerial bombings and house raids, and challenges the common assumption that this is a war in which Iraqis are killing Iraqis.

Justifying the higher number, Michael Schwartz, writing on the blog AfterDowningStreet.org, pointed to a fact reported by the Brookings Institute that US troops have, over the past four years, conducted about 100 house raids a day — a number that has recently increased with assistance from Iraqi soldiers.

Brutality during these house searches has been documented by returning soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and independent journalists (See #9 below). Schwartz suggests the aggressive "element of surprise" tactics employed by soldiers is likely resulting in several thousands of deaths a day that either go unreported or are categorized as insurgent casualties.

The spin is having its intended effect: a February 2007 AP poll showed Americans gave a median estimate of 9,890 Iraqi deaths as a result of the war, a number far below that cited in any credible study.

Sources: "Is the United States killing 10,000 Iraqis every month? Or is it more?" Michael Schwartz, After Downing Street.org, July 6, 2007; "Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian killing fields," Joshua Holland, AlterNet, Sept. 17, 2007; "Iraq conflict has killed a million: survey," Luke Baker, Reuters, Jan. 30, 2008; "Iraq: Not our country to return to," Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, March 3, 2008.

2. NAFTA ON STEROIDS


Coupling the perennial issue of security with Wall Street’s measures of prosperity, the leaders of the three North American nations convened the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The White House–led initiative — launched at a March 23, 2005, meeting of President Bush, Mexico’s then-president Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin — joins beefed-up commerce with coordinated military operations to promote what it calls "borderless unity."

Critics call it "NAFTA on steroids." However, unlike NAFTA, the SPP was formed in secret, without public input.

"The SPP is not a law, or a treaty, or even a signed agreement," Laura Carlsen wrote in a report for the Center for International Policy. "All these would require public debate and participation of Congress, both of which the SPP has scrupulously avoided."

Instead the SPP has a special workgroup: the North American Competitiveness Council. It’s a coalition of private companies that are, according to the SPP Web site, "adding high-level business input [that] will assist governments in enhancing North America’s competitive position and engage the private sector as partners in finding solutions."

The NACC includes the Chevron Corporation, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Merck & Co. Inc., New York Life Insurance Co., Procter & Gamble Co., and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

"Where are the environmental council, the labor council, and the citizen’s council in this process?" Carlsen asked.

A look at NAFTA’s unpopularity among citizens in all three nations is evidence of why its expansion would need to be disguised. "It’s a scheme to create a borderless North American Union under US control without barriers to trade and capital flows for corporate giants, mainly US ones," wrote Steven Lendman in Global Research. "It’s also to insure America gets free and unlimited access to Canadian and Mexican resources, mainly oil, and in the case of Canada, water as well."

Sources: "Deep Integration," Laura Carlsen, Center for International Policy, May 30, 2007; "The Militarization and Annexation of North America," Stephen Lendman, Global Research, July 19, 2007; "The North American Union," Constance Fogal, Global Research, Aug. 2, 2007.

3. INFRAGARD GUARDS ITSELF


The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have effectively deputized 23,000 members of the business community, asking them to tip off the feds in exchange for preferential treatment in the event of a crisis. "The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does — and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials," Matthew Rothschild wrote in the March 2008 issue of The Progressive.

InfraGard was created in 1996 in Cleveland as part of an FBI probe into cyberthreats. Yet after 9/11, membership jumped from 1,700 to more than 23,000, and now includes 350 of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies. Members typically have a stake in one of several crucial infrastructure industries, including agriculture, banking, defense, energy, food, telecommunications, law enforcement, and transportation. The group’s 86 chapters coordinate with 56 FBI field offices nationwide.

While FBI Director Robert Mueller has said he considers this segment of the private sector "the first line of defense," the American Civil Liberties Union issued a grave warning about the potential for abuse. "There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations — some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers — into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI," it cautioned in an August 2004 report.

"The FBI should not be creating a privileged class of Americans who get special treatment," Jay Stanley, public education director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program, told Rothschild.

And they are privileged: a DHS spokesperson told Rothschild that InfraGard members receive special training and readiness exercises. They’re also privy to protected information that is usually shielded from disclosure under the trade secrets provision of the Freedom of Information Act.

The information they have may be of critical importance to the general public, but first it goes to the privileged membership — sometimes before it’s released to elected officials. As Rothschild related in his story, on Nov. 1, 2001, the FBI sent an alert to InfraGard members about a potential threat to bridges in California. Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley, received the information and relayed it to his brother Gray, then governor of California, who released it to the public.

Steve Maviglio, Davis’s press secretary at the time, told Rothschild, "The governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’<0x2009>"

Source: "The FBI deputizes business," Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, Feb. 7, 2008.

4. ILEA: TRAINING GROUND FOR ILLEGAL WARS?


The School of the Americas earned an unsavory reputation in Latin America after many graduates of the Fort Benning, Ga., facility turned into counterinsurgency death squad leaders. So the International Law Enforcement Academy recently installed by the Unites States in El Salvador — which looks, acts, and smells like the SOA — is also drawing scorn.

The school, which opened in June 2005 before the Salvadoran National Assembly approved it, has a satellite operation in Peru and is funded with $3.6 million from the US Treasury and staffed with instructors from the DEA, ICE, and FBI. It’s tasked with training 1,500 police officers, judges, prosecutors, and other law enforcement agents in counterterrorism techniques per year. It’s stated purpose is to make Latin America "safe for foreign investment" by "providing regional security and economic stability and combating crime."

ILEAs aren’t new, but past schools located in Hungary, Thailand, Botswana, and Roswell, N.M., haven’t been terribly controversial. Yet Salvadoran human rights organizers take issue with the fact that, in true SOA fashion, the ILEA releases neither information about its curriculum nor a list of students and graduates. Additionally, the way the school slipped into existence without public oversight has raised ire.

As Wes Enzinna noted in a North American Congress on Latin America report, when the US decided it wanted a training ground in Latin America, El Salvador was not the first choice. In 2002 US officials selected Costa Rica as host — a country that doesn’t even have an army. The local government signed on and the plan made headlines. But when citizens learned about it, they revolted and demanded the government change the agreement. The US bailed for a more discreet second attempt in El Salvador.

"Members of the US Congress were not briefed about the academy, nor was the main opposition party in El Salvador, the Farabundo Martí-National Liberation Front (FMLN)," Enzinna wrote. "But once the news media reported that the two countries had signed an official agreement in September, activists in El Salvador demanded to see the text of the document." Though they tried to garner enough opposition to kill the agreement, the National Assembly narrowly ratified it.

Now, after more than three years in operation, critics point out that Salvadoran police, who account for 25 percent of the graduates, have become more violent. A May 2007 report by Tutela Legal implicated Salvadoran National Police (PNC) officers in eight death squad–style assassinations in 2006.

El Salvador’s ILEA recently received another $2 million in US funding through the congressionally approved Mérida Initiative — but still refuses to adopt a more transparent curriculum and administration, despite partnering with a well-known human rights leader. Enzinna’s FOIA requests for course materials were rejected by the government, so no one knows exactly what the school is teaching, or to whom.

Sources: "Exporting US ‘Criminal Justice’ to Latin America," "Community in Solidarity with the people of El Salvador," Upside Down World, June 14, 2007; "Another SOA?" Wes Enzinna, NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April 2008; "ILEA funding approved by Salvadoran right wing legislators," CISPES, March 15, 2007; "Is George Bush restarting Latin America’s ‘dirty wars?’<0x2009>" Benjamin Dangl, AlterNet, Aug. 31, 2007.

5. SEIZING PROTEST


Protesting war could get you into big trouble, according to a critical read of two executive orders recently signed by President Bush. The first, issued July 17, 2007, and titled, "Blocking property of certain persons who threaten stabilization efforts in Iraq," allows the feds to seize assets from anyone who "directly or indirectly" poses a risk to the US war in Iraq. And, citing the modern technological ease of transferring funds and assets, the order states that no prior notice is necessary before the raid.

On Aug. 1, Bush signed another order, similar but directed toward anyone undermining the "sovereignty of Lebanon or its democratic processes and institutions." In this case, the Secretary of the Treasury can seize the assets of anyone perceived as posing a risk of violence, as well as the assets of their spouses and dependents, and bans them from receiving any humanitarian aid.

Critics say the orders bypass the right to due process and the vague language makes manipulation and abuse possible. Protesting the war could be perceived as undermining or threatening US efforts in Iraq. "This is so sweeping, it’s staggering," said Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration official in the Justice Department who editorialized against it in the Washington Times. "It expands beyond terrorism, beyond seeking to use violence or the threat of violence to cower or intimidate a population."

Sources: "Bush executive order: Criminalizing the antiwar movement," Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 2007; "Bush’s executive order even worse than the one on Iraq," Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, Aug. 2007.

6. RADICALS = TERRORISTS


On Oct. 23, 2007, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed — by a vote of 404-6 — the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act," designed to root out the causes of radicalization in Americans.

With an estimated four-year cost of $22 million, the act establishes a 10-member National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, as well as a university-based Center of Excellence "to examine the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots of domestic terrorism," according to a press release from the bill’s author, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Los Angeles).

During debate on the bill, Harman said, "Free speech, espousing even very radical beliefs, is protected by our Constitution. But violent behavior is not."

Jessica Lee, writing in the Indypendent, a newspaper put out by the New York Independent Media Center, pointed out that in a later press release Harman stated: "the National Commission [will] propose to both Congress and [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff initiatives to intercede before radicalized individuals turn violent."

Which could be when they’re speaking, writing, and organizing in ways that are protected by the First Amendment. This redefines civil disobedience as terrorism, say civil rights experts, and the wording is too vague. For example, the definition of "violent radicalization" is "the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."

"What is an extremist belief system? Who defines this? These are broad definitions that encompass so much…. It is criminalizing thought and ideology," said Alejandro Queral, executive director of the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center in Portland, Ore.

Though the ACLU recommended some changes that were adopted, it continued to criticize the bill. Harman, in a response letter, said free speech is still free and stood by the need to curb ideologically-based violence.

The story didn’t make it onto the CNN ticker, but enough independent sources reported on it that the equivalent Senate Bill 1959 has since stalled. After introducing the bill, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.), later joined forces with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on a report criticizing the Internet as a tool for violent Islamic extremism.

Despite an outcry from civil liberties groups, days after the report was released Lieberman demanded that YouTube remove a number of Islamist propaganda videos. YouTube canned some that broke their rules regarding violence and hate speech, but resisted censoring others. The ensuing battle caught the attention of the New York Times, and on May 25 it editorialized against Lieberman and S 1959.

Sources: "Bringing the war on terrorism home," Jessica Lee, Indypendent, Nov. 16, 2007; "Examining the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act," Lindsay Beyerstein, In These Times, Nov. 2007; "The Violent Radicalization Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007," Matt Renner, Truthout, Nov. 20, 2007

7. SLAVERY’S RUNNER-UP


Every year, about 121,000 people legally enter the United States to work with H-2 visas, a program legislators are touting as part of future immigration reform. But Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) called this guest worker program "the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery."

The Southern Poverty Law Center likened it to "modern day indentured servitude." They interviewed thousands of guest workers and reviewed legal cases for a report released in March 2007, in which authors Mary Bauer and Sarah Reynolds wrote, "Unlike US citizens, guest workers do not enjoy the most fundamental protection of a competitive labor market — the ability to change jobs if they are mistreated. Instead, they are bound to the employers who ‘import’ them. If guest workers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting, or other retaliation."

When visas expire, workers must leave the country, hardly making this the path to permanent citizenship legislators are looking for. The H-2 program mimics the controversial bracero program, established through a joint agreement between Mexico and the United States in 1942 that brought 4.5 million workers over the border during the 22 years it was in effect.

Many legal protections were written into the program, but in most cases they existed only on paper in a language unreadable to employees. In 1964 the program was shuttered amid scores of human rights abuses and complaints that it undermined petitions for higher wages from US workers. Soon after, United Farm Workers organized, which César Chávez said would have been impossible if the bracero program still existed.

Years later, it essentially still does. The H-2A program, which accounted for 32,000 agricultural workers in 2005, has many of the same protections — and many of the same abuses. Even worse is the H-2B program, used by 89,000 non-agricultural workers annually. Created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, none of the safeguards of the H-2A visa are legally required for H-2B workers.

Still, Mexicans are literally lining up for H-2B status, the stark details of which were reported by Felicia Mello in The Nation. Furthermore, thousands of illegal immigrants are employed throughout the country, providing cheap, unprotected labor and further undermining the scant provisions of the laws. Labor contractors who connect immigrants with employers are stuffing their pockets with cash, while the workers return home with very little money.

The Southern Poverty Law Center outlined a list of comprehensive changes needed in the program, concluding, "For too long, our country has benefited from the labor provided by guest workers but has failed to provide a fair system that respects their human rights and upholds the most basic values of our democracy. The time has come for Congress to overhaul our shamefully abusive guest worker system."

Sources: "Close to Slavery," Mary Bauer and Sarah Reynolds, Southern Poverty Law Center, March 2007; "Coming to America," Felicia Mello, The Nation, June 25, 2007; "Trafficking racket," Chidanand Rajghatta, Times of India, March 10, 2008.

8. BUSH CHANGES THE RULES


The Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice has been issuing classified legal opinions about surveillance for years. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) had access to the DOJ opinions on presidential power and had three declassified to show how the judicial branch has, in a bizarre and chilling way, assisted President Bush in circumventing its own power.

According to the three memos:

"There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it";

"The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II," and

"The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations."

Or, as Whitehouse rephrased in a Dec. 7, 2007, Senate speech: "I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them. I get to determine what my own powers are. The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is. I tell the Department of Justice what the law is."

The issue arose within the context of the Protect America Act, which expands government surveillance powers and gives telecom companies legal immunity for helping. Whitehouse called it "a second-rate piece of legislation passed in a stampede in August at the behest of the Bush administration."

He pointed out that the act does not prohibit spying on Americans overseas — with the exception of an executive order that permits surveillance only of Americans whom the Attorney General determines to be "agents of a foreign power."

"In other words, the only thing standing between Americans traveling overseas and government wiretap is an executive order," Whitehouse said in an April 12 speech. "An order this president, under the first legal theory I cited, claims he has no legal obligation to obey."

Whitehouse, a former US Attorney, legal counsel to Rhode Island’s governor, and Rhode Island Attorney General who took office in 2006, went on to point out that Marbury vs. Madison, written by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, established that it is "emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

Sources: "In FISA Speech, Whitehouse sharply criticizes Bush Administration’s assertion of executive power," Sheldon Whitehouse, Dec. 7, 2007; "Down the Rabbit Hole," Marcy Wheeler, The Guardian (UK), Dec. 26, 2007.

9. SOLDIERS SPEAK OUT


Hearing soldiers recount their war experiences is the closest many people come to understanding the real horror, pain, and confusion of combat. One would think that might make compelling copy or powerful footage for a news outlet. But in March, when more than 300 veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan convened for four days of public testimony on the war, they were largely ignored by the media.

Winter Soldier was designed to give soldiers a public forum to air some of the atrocities they witnessed. Originally convened by Vietnam Vets Against the War in January 1971, more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians described their war experiences, including rapes, torture, brutalities, and killing of non-combatants. The testimony was entered into the Congressional Record, filmed, and shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Iraq Veterans Against the War hosted the 2008 reprise of the 1971 hearings. Aaron Glantz, writing in One World, recalled testimony from former Marine Cpl. Jason Washburn, who said, "his commanders encouraged lawless behavior. ‘We were encouraged to bring ‘drop weapons,’ or shovels. In case we accidentally shot a civilian, we could drop the weapon on the body and pretend they were an insurgent.’<0x2009>"

An investigation by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian in The Nation that included interviews with 50 Iraq war veterans also revealed an overwhelming lack of training and resources, and a general disregard for the traditional rules of war.

Though most major news outlets sent staff to cover New York’s Fashion Week, few made it to Silver Spring, Md. for the Winter Soldier hearings. Fortunately, KPFA and Pacifica Radio broadcast the testimonies live and, in an update to the story, said they were "deluged with phone calls, e-mails, and blog posts from service members, veterans, and military families thanking us for breaking a cultural norm of silence about the reality of war." Testimonies can still be heard at www.ivaw.org.

Sources: "Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan eyewitness accounts of the occupation," Iraq Veterans Against the War, March 13-16, 2008; "War comes home," Aaron Glantz, Aimee Allison, and Esther Manilla, Pacifica Radio, March 14-16, 2008; "US Soldiers testify about war crimes," Aaron Glantz, One World, March 19, 2008; "The Other War," Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, The Nation, July 30, 2007.

10. APA HELPS CIA TORTURE


Psychologists have been assisting the CIA and US military with interrogation and torture of Guantánamo detainees — which the American Psychological Association has said is fine, despite objections from many of its 148,000 members.

A 10-member APA task force convened on the divisive issue in July 2005 and found that assistance from psychologists was making the interrogations safe and the group deferred to US standards on torture over international human-rights organizations’ definitions.

The task force was criticized by APA members for deliberating in secret, and later it was revealed that six of the 10 participants had ties to the armed services. Not only that, but as Katherine Eban reported in Vanity Fair, "Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the CIA."

In particular, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, neither of whom are APA members, honed a classified military training program known as SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape] that teaches soldiers how to tough out torture if captured by enemies. "Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on SERE trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror," Eban wrote.

And, as Mark Benjamin noted in a Salon article, employing SERE training — which is designed to replicate torture tactics that don’t abide by Geneva Convention standards — refutes past administration assertions that current CIA torture techniques are safe and legal. "Soldiers undergoing SERE training are subject to forced nudity, stress positions, lengthy isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exhaustion from exercise, and the use of water to create a sensation of suffocation," Benjamin wrote.

Eban’s story outlined how SERE tactics were spun as "science" despite a lack of data and the critique that building rapport works better than blows to the head. Specifically, he said, it’s been misreported that CIA torture techniques got Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah to talk, when it was actually FBI rapport-building. In spite of this, SERE techniques became standards in interrogation manuals that eventually made their way to US officers guarding Abu Ghraib.

Ongoing uproar within the APA resulted in a petition to make an official policy limiting psychologists’ involvement in interrogations. On Sept. 17, a majority of 15,000 voting members approved a resolution stating that psychologists may not work in settings where "persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights."

Sources: "The CIA’s torture teachers," Mark Benjamin, Salon, June 21, 2007; "Rorschach and awe," Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair, July 17, 2007.

OTHER STORIES IN THE TOP 25


11. El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror

12. Bush Profiteers Collect Billions from No Child Left Behind

13. Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq

14. Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste

15. Worldwide Slavery

16. Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights

17. UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights

18. Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers

19. Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction

20. Marijuana Arrests Set New Record

21. NATO Considers "First Strike" Nuclear Option

22. CARE Rejects US Food Aid

23. FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs

24. Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror

25. Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

Read them all at projectcensored.org

———————————————————–

CENSORED IN SAN FRANCISCO

Good stories are going untold everywhere, but Project Censored can’t cover it all. The project focuses on national an international news, but in a place politically, environmentally, and socially charged as the Bay Area, there’s plenty going on that major media sources ignore, underplay, black out, or misreport.

We called local activists, politicians, freelance journalists, and media experts to come up with a list of a few Bay Area censored stories. Post a comment and add your own!

>> The truth about Prop. H: Pacific Gas and Electric Company has been spending millions to tell lies about the Clean Energy Act, Proposition H. But the mainstream press has done nothing to counter that misinformation.

>> The dirty secret of the secrecy law: Vioutf8g San Francisco’s local public records law, the Sunshine Ordinance, carries no penalty, so city agencies do it at will. The failure of the district attorney and Ethics Commission to enforce the law has undermined open-government efforts.

>> The military red herring: The real politics of the JROTC ballot measure have little to do with this particular program. Downtown and the Republican party are using the measure as a wedge issue against progressives

>> The mayor’s war on affordable housing: Mayor Gavin Newsom, who touts his record on homelessness, has actually opposed every major affordable-housing measure proposed by the Board of Supervisors in the last five years. And since Newsom became mayor the city homeless population has increased — but shelter closings have cost the city 400 beds.

>> The hidden cost of attacking immigrants: The San Francisco Chronicle and Mayor Gavin Newsom have been demanding a crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the name of law enforcement – but the move has made immigrants less likely to cooperate with the police and thus is hindering criminal-justice

Tim Russert – an alternative view

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I started cringing early on when the floodtide of eulogies came in for Tim Russert. I cringed because NBC and MSNBC forgot about journalism and went instead for self-reverence to the maximum. And I cringed because so many politicians came forward so quickly to praise him so glowingly and NPC was so happy to run them. And I cringed because all of this once again made the point so dramatically about the incestuous relationship between the press and the political establishment inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C.

I liked Tim Russert, NBC’s Meet the Press anchor and Washington bureau chief. I realized that he had taken a moribund television news program and transformed it with his personality and ability into the premiere Washington television news program. And I liked the fact that he volunteered to cover the presidential primaries and provided some zest and insights.

But there were many things I didn’t like about Russert’s approach to journalism, most notably the fact that the Bush administration loudly claimed it used his Sunday morning show as its favorite to promote its war in Iraq and that Russert never properly challenged them. “In reality, Meet the Press was the venue for some of the White House’s most audacious lies about the Iraq War–most of which went unchallenged by Russert,” according to an excellent critique of Russert by the media organization Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting…

“Recalling such softball questioning, it’s easy to believe the advice that Cheney press aide Cathie Martin says she gave when the Bush administration had to respond to charges that it manipulated pre-Iraq War intelligence: ‘I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was the tactic we often used,’ she said (Salon, l/26/07). ‘It’s our best format.'”

Russert also demonstrated the problem with Beltway access. He had access to the politicians and political establishment for his shows but he refused to use his powers of access for critics of the war and people outside the political establishment.
FAIR pointed out that in Bill Moyers’s documentary “Buying the War” (PBS, 4/25/07), Russert said he wished that dissenting sources would have contacted him: “My concern then was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.” Of course, as FAIR noted, “any journalist could have found such sources–and few critics of the war would have passed up an opportunity to air their views on such a prominent media platform.” Why didn’t he have access to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, the authors of Project Censored stories, or the director of Project Censored, the Nation people, Frank Rich at the New York Times, or other major war critics who, among other things, weren’t lying and happened to be proven right on their positions against the war, the occupation, and the surge?

FAIR quoted Russert as saying that the White House claims “were judgments, and there was no way at that time to say, ‘You’re wrong. How could you possibly say that? You’re lying.’ That’s just not the style of Meet the Press, nor I think the style of good journalism, but we now have a permanent record as to the judgments believed by the Bush administration going into the war and you can look at them three years later and decide whether they were correct or not.'”

Well, as FAIR concludes, “there are journalists who examine the claims made by politicians at the time they make them, and some were doing just that with the assertions Bush Administration officials used to justify the invasion of Iraq (Extra!3-4/06). Had a journalist with the prominence of Tim Russert done so, it’s possible that the debate could have had an entirely different outcome.”

The example I like to use is that the Guardian, and many other alternative newspapers and voices, with no special sources in Washington or Iraq, could figure out that this was the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reasons and opposed it strongly and continuously from the very beginning. Why couldn’t Russert, the White House press corps, and the mainstream media figure this out, the biggest foreign policy blunder in U..S. history?
The coverage of his death gives us a clue. B3


Click here for the FAIR blog, Remembering Russert: What media eulogies remember–and forget.

Click here to read the Orlando Sentinel blog, The Tim Russert coverage: one of the most embarrassing chapters in television journalism.

Pentagon pundits: media facilitate Iraq propaganda

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Every year, the Guardian runs a major front page story from Project Censored at Sonoma State University, listing the 20 major stories that have been “censored” or underreported during the previous year by the mainstream media.

Since 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq with “Shock and Awe,” the project’s stories have criticized the runup to the war, the lies of the Bush administration, the mendacity of the neocons promoting the war, the lousy media coverage, on and on. Neither the project nor most of the stories were published by the mainstream media. And the New York Times, and its sister paper the Santa Rosa Press Democrat near Sonoma State, refused to run the Censored story nor to explain why. (Last year, to its credit, the Press Democrat did a story on Censored.)

Now, the media reform organization Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has raised anew an important point involving a major New York Times story on April 20 that exposed the Pentagon’s program of feeding talking points to military pundits featured on TV newscasts. (Fair pointed out rightly that the military analysts’ ties with military contractors and advocacy groups had been documented as far back as 2003 with a report in the Nation (4/21).

FAIR’s point: “While the Times article focused on the role of the Pentagon, the parties that arguable have most to answer for are the media organizations that relied on these Pentagon analysts and failed to disclose blatant conflicts of interest posed by their ties with defense contractors…Of course, the Pentagon’s propaganda plan would have little effect if not for the enthusiastic participation of the corporate media.”

My question: when will the mainstream media start interviewing such prominent war critics as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others of this caliber? Meanwhile, keep an eye out for our Project Censored package later this year.

Here’s the FAIR article and its call to action to hassle the five major networks:

Freedom of Information: 2007 James Madison Award winners

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Click here for details on the First Amendment Awards Dinner.

Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

DAN NOYES (COFOUNDER, CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM)


If journalists were the subjects of trading cards like baseball players, the Dan Noyes rookie card would be just as impressive as a 2008 career highlights card. Think Reggie Jackson: a long, impressive career, spanning multiple organizations and a propensity to come out swinging big at the end of a hard-fought battle.

Over a career spanning 30 years, Noyes has pursued serious investigations, some lasting as long as a year, into everything from questionable Liberian timber imports to illicit gun trafficking from United States suppliers to the Nuestra family gang. Journalism first interested Noyes during the crucial investigative reporting that sparked Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.

In 1977 Noyes cofounded the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), an independent news organization which produces in-depth stories and documentaries for all major news outlets. In 1979, reporting for the ABC News program 20/20, CIR broke a story on a swindling United Nations charity organization and its connections to international drug trafficking.

More recently, Noyes has done a series of print and broadcast pieces concerning gang violence in California and its effect on the lives of those surrounding the lifestyle. Noyes still holds an executive position at the CIR and continues to contribute to the world of investigative journalism.

Beverly Kees Educator Award

CLIFF MAYOTTE


Cliff Mayotte sees his Advanced Acting Class at Lick-Wilmerding High School as one that merges students’ "consciousness and awareness as young adults with their skills and energies as performance artists."

The subtitle of the course is "Theatre as Civic Dialogue," and the eight students enrolled during the 2007 spring semester used all their abilities to pull off a notable show.

After an introduction to Documentary Theatre — a form he described as "oral history turned into performance" — the group selected a topic that was important to them, giving birth to the "Censorship Project."

The students interviewed their peers, teachers, and administrators to gather perspectives on the ways in which expression and opinion can be muted or altered, both voluntarily and involuntarily. They reached out to organizations such as Project Censored, the First Amendment Project, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. They transcribed interviews and studied subjects in order to capture statements, word patterns, and mannerisms of interviewees, then shaped the themes into a 60-minute performance.

Professional Journalists

WILL DEBOARD


"Being a high school sports guy, I don’t get to do this very often," the Modesto Bee‘s Will DeBoard said of his first major foray into investigative reporting. He had gotten a tip that the California Interscholastic Federation was investigating recruiting violations by the football program at Franklin High School in Stockton, which competed with schools in his area. DeBoard asked the school and CIF about recruiting violations, but the football coach flatly denied the allegations and the CIF wasn’t much more helpful.

So DeBoard decided to make formal requests for public records with the help of business reporter Joanne Sbranti, and after fighting through some initial denials, he obtained hundreds of pages of investigatory documents from CIF showing how the school was recruiting players from American Samoa. "It really was a treasure trove of great stuff. We got two weeks’ worth of stories out of these documents," DeBoard said. "It really showed us that what the school was telling us just wasn’t true."

The documents detailed the recruiting scheme and gave DeBoard tons of leads for follow-up stories, including the address of "a home owned by the coach where there were all these gigantic Samoan linemen living there." DeBoard called the effort an "adrenaline rush" better than that caused by the best game he’s covered and a high point of his journalism career.

THOMAS PEELE


Contra Costa Times investigative reporter Thomas Peele has a long history of battling for public records access on behalf of both reporters and private citizens. Peele, who helps with projects for all the newspapers under the Bay Area News Group-East Bay ownership, helped ensure the recovery of thousands of e-mails from the Oakland mayoral tenure of Jerry Brown when he left office to become the state’s attorney general in 2006. Peele also helped conduct a statewide audit of Public Records Act compliance by law enforcement agencies with the nonprofit Californians Aware, which revealed glaring inconsistencies in how police across the state make information about their activity available to the public. And he’s been a major figure in helping the Chauncey Bailey Project pry out new information about Bailey’s murder last year and it’s connection to Your Black Muslim Bakery. He began his career in 1983 at a small weekly in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and moved from there in 1988 to the Ocean County Observer in New Jersey before joining the CCT in 2000.

ROLAND DE WOLK


KTVU-TV producer Roland De Wolk is leading the investigative team of photographer Tony Hedrick and video editor Ron Acker in a quest to get the names of drivers who regularly use FasTrak lanes but don’t pay anything. But to date, says De Volk, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has been blocking his team’s quest.

De Wolk told the Guardian that his team filed a California Public Records request when the MTC wouldn’t provide information on the amount of money it was losing thanks to drivers who don’t pay tolls when they use FasTrak lanes.

"We asked MTC for specific numbers last summer and got little information. That makes a reporter’s antennae quiver," said De Wolk.

But when he and his team asked for the numbers of people obstructing their plates, the MTC started acting squirrelly, De Wolk said.

"Finally, after six to eight weeks of asking we got an answer: a photo of a car whose plate was blank," fumed De Wolk, whose team continues to push for the names of the 10 most frequent FasTrak violators.

Broadcast News Outlet

KGO-TV


When KGO-TV reporter Dan Noyes and producer Steve Fyffe asked Muni to turn over records of public complaints against its drivers, they were ready for some bureaucratic foot dragging. But they never expected the yearlong grudge match that followed. First, the union representing Muni drivers sued to keep the records sealed. Then Muni’s parent department, the Municipal Transportation Agency, made a backroom deal with the union and released a blizzard of confusing and heavily redacted paperwork that would have made the Pentagon blush.

"It was essentially a big document dump," Fyffe told us. "There was no way to tell one form from another or which driver was which."

Noyes and Fyffe convinced their bosses at KGO-TV to file a lawsuit for full access to the records. The station prevailed, after which Noyes and Fyffe received over 1,200 pages of public complaints about 25 drivers. Recently, the station went back to court after Muni refused to release surveillance tapes of the drivers. As in the previous case, the judge ruled that the public had a right to the materials and forced the transit agency to hand the tapes over.

Fyffe said he sees KGO’s legal successes as small victories in a much larger fight. "I hope in the future that this case will make Muni and other city departments more [responsive] to records requests … these kinds of incremental victories hopefully lead, little by little, to a more open government."

Print News Outlet

SACRAMENTO BEE


The Sacramento Bee operates in a city run by top-tier politicians and their spinmeisters, so the editors and reporters there have placed increasingly high value on using documents to support their stories.

"We’ve always used public records here. Being in a state capital, we’re a little more aware of the necessarily of that," managing editor Joyce Terhaar said. "You just need to be able to tell a story about what’s really happening."

Yet she said that in recent years, the Bee has made a concerted effort to hire public-records experts and to have them share their knowledge with the paper’s staff through regular workshops. And last year, those efforts paid off with a string of big, impactful investigative stories.

Among them was Andy Furillo’s look at how much the state was spending to fight inmate care lawsuits, Andrew McIntosh’s exposé on the lack of oversight for paramedics and emergency medical technicians, and stories by John Hill and Kevin Yamamura on misconduct by the state’s Board of Chiropractic Examiners.

In selecting the Bee, Society of Professional Journalists judges recognized these individual efforts as well as the Bee‘s "institutional support of reporters and their use of public records for numerous stories."

Community Media

THE BERKELEY DAILY PLANET


One of the only ways to uncover corporate wrongdoing is to dig through court records, and it’s the job of the press to report what it discovers, said Becky O’Malley, executive editor for the Berkeley Daily Planet. She was convinced that a prior court order violated the public’s constitutional rights to see court documents, so the small daily newspaper sued and won in a California appeals court last year, making public 15,000 pages of records from a class-action suit filed against Wal-Mart in 2001.

The documents included allegations that the company had denied rest breaks to its workers and deleted hours from paychecks. In the Planet‘s freedom of information suit, the appeals court judges agreed with the paper’s attorneys that the case could set a dangerous precedent where the public would have to prove its right to access court records. "It’s becoming more of a trend for judges to grant permanent seals on court records," said O’Malley. That’s unfortunate, she added, since "the only way the public finds out about bad things going on in society is through court records."

Special Citation Award

CHAUNCEY BAILEY PROJECT


After Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey was murdered last August, a large group of Bay Area media organizations formed a rare coalition to investigate his death and the activities of Your Black Muslim Bakery, a long-time East Bay institution believed by police to be involved in the killing. Since then, the group has produced several stories complete with audio, video, and photo presentations, the most recent of which is a series by retired Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reporter Mary Fricker detailing the sexual assault allegations made by young women once in the custody of Yusuf Bey Sr., founder of the bakery. Fricker received help from independent radio journalist Bob Butler, investigative reporter A.C. Thompson, and MediaNews staff writers Cecily Burt, Thomas Peele and Josh Richman. Other stories have reported allegations of real estate fraud against bakery associates, explored potential coconspirators in Bailey’s death, and examined the bakery’s ties to several prominent politicians. More about the project — the first of its kind since a group of journalists investigated the murder of Don Bolles more than 30 years ago in Arizona — can be found at chaunceybaileyproject.org, or at www.sfbg.com/news/chaunceybailey.

Public Official

MARK LENO


It was a staff member, Kathryn Dresslar, who told Assemblymember Mark Leno how horrible state agencies had become at complying with the California Public Records Act. Dresslar served on the board of Californians Aware, a group that advocates for open government, and she described to her boss how a 1986 audit by the organization had given every one of the 33 agencies in California government a failing grade.

Ryan McKee, then a high-school student and the son of CalAware board president Rich McKee, had visited each agency and asked for a few simple things. He wanted to see each agency’s guidelines for public access, and he requested some basic information, including the salary of the agency director. Agency after agency refused to follow the law.

So Leno introduced legislation that would have mandated that every agency post its access guidelines on the Web — and included stiff fines for agencies that violated the Public Records Act. "It put some teeth into the law," Leno told us. "And I got 120 of 120 members of the state Legislature to vote for it.

That wasn’t enough for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who vetoed the bill, saying it wasn’t needed. The governor insisted that he had already ordered state agencies to fix the problem.

"It was a great eye-opener for me, and showed me the resistance this administration has to allowing public access to state government," Leno said. "Without that access the public is at a great disadvantage."

Library

UC BERKELEY’S BANCROFT LIBRARY LOYALTY OATH PROJECT


It might be hard to believe, but in 1949 the University of California Regents, a bastion of higher education, rode the wave of anticommunist fervor and McCarthyism, forcing all UC employees to take a loyalty oath. The Board of Regents adopted the rule that UC administrators pushed forth: denounce communism and swear loyalty to the state, or face losing your job.

As could be expected, people resisted and 31 faculty, workers, and student employees lost their jobs. They appealed the case to the California Supreme Court and eventually were reinstated in 1952, but the controversy cast a pall over the UC’s reputation and divided campuses. With the help of a grant from UC President Emeritus David Gardner, archivists from UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and other researchers painstakingly compiled 3500 pages of text, many audio statements, and photos from four UC collections.

The online collection, which went live in December 2007, serves as primary source material for students and researchers who want to understand how UC administrators got embroiled in and came to terms with the McCarthy-era tensions that rocked the country.

Legal Counsel

RACHEL MATTEO-BOEHM


Electronic data is the new frontier for public-records law, and Rachel Matteo-Boehm, a lawyer with Holme, Roberts and Owen, last year won a key case preserving the public’s right to access to what some public agencies have tried to claim was proprietary data.

The county of Santa Clara produced a digital map showing property lines, assessors parcels and other key real-estate data, and that became the basis for a geographic information system tool. The GIS would allow users to plot everything from property taxes to street repairs, public investment, political party registration, school test scores and other trends. But Santa Clara wasn’t giving it out to the public: The database cost more than $100,000, which meant only big businesses could use it.

Boehm went to court on behalf of the California First Amendment Coalition to argue that the data was public, and must be made available without high charges. "As information begins to be collected in electronic form, and governments choose to put information in sophisticated electronic formats, you can run into real public-access problems," Boehn told us.

Boehm convinced a Santa Clara Superior Court judge that the data was indeed covered under the California Public Records Act. Now Santa Clara must make the map available to the public — and other counties with similar data, seeing the results of the suit, are following that rule.

The decision was a key one, Boehm said: "One day we’re going to wake up and all there will be is electronic records," she noted. And if governments can apply different rules to those documents, "you can kiss the Public Records Act goodbye."

Whistleblower

DAN COOKE


When Dan Cooke shared details of an alleged sewage spill on Alcatraz Island with the Guardian, the health of the national park — where he’d been working as an historical interpreter for over a decade — was foremost on his mind. But he lost his job after the story was published — apparently for taking a proactive role in noting details of the spill in the island’s log book and speaking candidly to the press about what he’d seen. Wanting nothing more than a return to his job leading educational tours of the island, he filed an administrative claim with the US Department of Labor against the Golden Gate National Park Conservancy and the National Park Service. And he called the Guardian. We reported his firing. The next time Cooke called, it was to happily report he was back on the job.

Citizen

SUPERBOLD (BERKELEYANS ORGANIZED FOR LIBRARY DEFENSE)


SuperBOLD has accomplished something entirely different from what it set out to do. Originally, the small group of devoted Berkeley public library users organized to oppose the installation of RFID tags in books. "In the process of going to library board of trustees meetings, we discovered they were vioutf8g the Brown Act," said Gene Bernardi, who heads SuperBOLD’s steering committee with Jane Welford, Jim Fisher, and Peter Warfield. They found, among other things, that certain documents were only made available to trustees and a lottery system was employed in selecting speakers during public comment. They took their complaints to the Berkeley city attorney and joined up with the First Amendment Project, which threatened a lawsuit. Things have changed, though it’s still not perfect — city council meetings only allow 10 speakers and the library trustees still play the lottery for public comment, but marginal improvements portend better days.

"Now you can speak more than once," said Bernardi. "Now you can speak on consent calendar and agenda items. So there are more opportunities to speak … if the Mayor [Tom Bates] remembers to call public comment."

Electronic Access

CARL MALAMUD, PUBLIC.RESOURCE.ORG


For years, web pioneer Carl Malamud has sought ways to use the Internet to connect average citizens with their government. His new Web site public.resource.org helps that cause by excavating buried public domain information and posting it online. Though still in its early stages, the site already allows users to tap into hard-to-find records from places like the Smithsonian, Congress, and the federal courts system.

Even though most government records are part of the public domain, fishing them out from the bureaucratic depths can be a daunting and expensive task, even for someone like Malamud. During a lecture at UC Berkeley last year, he related his recent difficulties in acquiring a simple database from the Library of Congress. Instead of turning over the materials, officials at the Library cited dubious copyright protections and presented Malamud with a bill for over $85,000 — all for access to supposedly public information.

Thanks to Malamud’s Web site, that database and millions of other documents are now available with the click of a mouse. Ultimately, Malamud hopes public.resource.org will help bring about an age of "Internet governance," in which every last byte of public data winds up online for all to see, free of charge.

THE SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA CHAPTER presents the 23RD ANNUAL JAMES MADISON FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AWARDS DINNER

MARCH 18, 2008
NEW DELHI RESTAURANT
160 ELLIS STREET
SAN FRANCISCO
No-host bar @ 5:30 p.m.
Dinner/Awards @ 6:30 p.m.

TICKETS:
$50 SPJ members & students
$70 General public
For more information, contact David Greene (dgreene@thefirstamendment.org)

>

Will & Willie are back!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

durst_brown_wells.jpg

Will and Willie are back!
“Keeping it Real” with Will Durst and Willie Brown is now in podcast form at WillandWillie.com. Hear it at the link below.

Clear Channel Communications, the media megaconglomerate with l0 lousy radio stations in the Bay Area, made a terrible decision back in September 2006 when it killed the “Keepin’ It Real with Will and Willie” early morning radio show on its 960 a.m. Quake station.

The show, created by the talented radio producer Paul “The Lobster” Wells, featured Comedian Will Durst and former mayor Willie Brown playing themselves and taking on the issues of the day in the spirit and style of the old Herb Caen columns in the old San Francisco Chronicle. They were fun to listen to, brought on guests that nobody else would touch (Peter Phillips from Project Censored, Noam Chomsky, Marie Harrison from the Hunters Point power plant opposition, etc.), sketched out issues the mainstream media ignored, and provided witty conversation and “Bursts of Durst” every week day morning from 7 to l0 p.m.

I was even encouraged to come on the program and blast away at PG&E, its illegal private power utility, and other Guardian issues. Willie promptly suggested on the air that the program stage a debate with PG&E and me. Fine, I said, but they have never agreed to a debate with me since the Guardian started its public power campaign in l969 and I doubted if they ever would. Willie claimed surprise and said he would work on it. Nothing of course happened.

But this was the kind of fun the program encouraged and I, and many others around town, enjoyed going on the show and making points and arguments we could make on no other local show and certainly not in the San Francisco Chronicle and probably not even in Caen’s column (even he was wimpy on PG&E).

Clear Channel just killed the show outright, with no warning, no real explanation, and no real appreciation for what the show had accomplished in a short period of time. And it left the city without a voice or venue on this Progressive station, just as “San Francisco values” became a national phrase and the war and Bush rhetoric heated up, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi ascended to the speakership. Instead, we got all kinds of Quake talent with the sensibility of other places (Al Franken from Minnesota and Stephanie Miller from Los Angeles) and none from San Francisco. (Newsman John Scott does his best, on “The Progressive News Hour” from 4 to 6 p.m., but it isn’t the same.)

The good news is that Will and Willie are back, with producer Paul Wells, in podcast form. Their inaugural episode is the first gathering of Will, Willie, and Paul since the cancellation. They are in good form discussing the San Francisco election and Mayor Newsom running without real progressive opposition and the problem with parking downtown and and and. Their next episode will take on the upcoming Presidential election and other national events.

Cheer them on! Hear them by visiting the following link HERE and going to the Will&Willie podcast. Log in and give them feedback. B3

Project censored — some new suggestions

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One of the bloggers at DailyKos linked to our Project Censored story, and the comments include a lot of other suggestions for stories that the mainstream media ignored. Check it out.

Today’s Ammianoliner: Gen. Betray Us sings “Viva Viagra!”

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General Betray-us sings “Viva Viagra!” If an erection or surge is painful or lasts more than four hours, call Senator Feinstein.”

Please note: See the stories by Peter Byrne on Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest in Iraq featured in Amanda Witherell’s story The Byrne ultimatum, which was a runner up this year on the Project Censored list.

Twice censored…the Santa Rosa Press Democrat runs one censored story but then censors another…

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat today published a story on Project Censored at Sonoma State University, the first time in 3l years that the local daily has taken serious notice of the local project.

But, notes Peter Byrne, a Censored winner for his investigation of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s military contract conflicts, the PD censored out (a) any mention of his winnlng story and (b) any mention of the underlying story of the conflicts that led to Feinstein’s resignation from the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Byrne emailed Bob Norberg, the PD reporter on the story, with the following note: “Congratulations on getting your story on Project Censored printed in today’s Press Democrat. Since Project Censored is based at Sonoma State University, it is a fine local story. But what I fail to understand is why you totally missed reporting on the other local angle to the story, i.e. that the Santa Rosa-based Bohemian’s expose of Senator Dianne Feinstein (written by yours truly) was on the list of 25 most censored stories.

“Is it possible that because we at the Boho regularly critique the PD for being a Chamber of Commerce shill that you (or your editors) censored that interesting, newsy, LOCAL (B3: Byrne caps) factoid from your tale? Warmly, Peter Byrne”

I asked Norberg (or his editors) for comment by email. And I tried to find the story on the PD website but could not. I hope to have the story and PD comment next week. Meanwhile, you can read on our website at SFBG.com the Censored package, with the Byrne stories, and the additional story, “The story behind a censored story that was killed by the Nation.”

And now on to the New York Times to see if it runs the Censored package and the important Feinstein story. Stay alert. B3

Project Censored: The Byrne ultimatum

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amanda@sfbg.com

Sometimes the story behind a story is just as juicy as the story itself. One of Project Censored’s picks for the 2008 list – “Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict” started out as a project funded by the Nation Institute, and was supposed to splash the cover of the Nation magazine prior to the November 2006 election. Instead, it took some interesting peregrinations – involving some charges of partisan political influence — before it was finally printed in the North Bay Bohemian on January 24, 2007.

Petaluma-based freelance journalist Peter Byrne was originally paid $4,500 by the Nation Institute to research connections between lucrative defense contracts granted to Perini and URS companies, in which Richard C. Blum held stock, and the Senate Appropriations Military Construction subcommittee (MILCON) that funds the contracts– and which includes Blum’s wife, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as a ranking member.

Blum’s companies were involved with more than $1.5 billion in defense contracts between 2001 and 2005. Michael R. Klein, Blum’s business partner and Feinstein’s legal advisor, had been informing the senator about specific federal projects in which Perini had an interest, specifically to avoid conflict of interest issues, but Byrne reported Feinstein was not told about potential URS contracts. So, in the case of Perini, Feinstein would be informed and recuse herself from pertinent decisions, but with URS, she’d remain in the dark, and because the detailed project proposals don’t include the names of the companies bidding, the senator wouldn’t know it was URS.

“In theory, Feinstein would not know the identity of any of the companies that stood to contractually benefit from her approval of specific items in the military budget – until Klein told her,” Byrne wrote.

According to Klein, a Senate Select Committee on Ethics ruled, in a confidential decision, that this was all above board.

But Byrne contends, “That these confidential rulings are contradictory is obvious and calls for explanation.”

Furthermore, Byrne’s research concluded that the senator could potentially look at the lists from Klein, compare them to the nameless funding requests and contracts coming before MILCON, and draw substantial conclusions on her own about where the money would end up.

“Klein declined to produce copies of the Perini project lists that he transmitted to Feinstein. And neither he nor Feinstein would furnish copies of the ethics committee rulings, nor examples of the senator recusing herself from acting on legislation that affected Perini or URS. But the Congressional Record shows that as chairperson and ranking member of MILCON, Feinstein was often involved in supervising the legislative details of military construction projects that directly affected Blum’s defense-contracting firms,” Byrne wrote.

A month after Byrne turned the story in to Bob Moser, who was the Nation‘s editor on the story, the piece was killed. In an email to Byrne, Moser wrote, “The main reason is that with Blum’s sale of

Perini and URS stock last year, this became an issue of what Feinstein did rather than an ongoing conflict. Because of that, and also because Feinstein is not facing a strong challenge for re-election, the feeling here, finally, was that the story would not likely have the kind of impact we want from investigative stories.”

Later in the email, Moser writes the story lacks a “smoking gun,” apparently because Byrne lays the case for a perceived conflict of interest and relies on the testimony of non-partisan ethics and government experts for support.

Still, Byrne told us, “I was shocked. The story was really solid, completely fact-checkable, and even though it was complex I think I boiled it down pretty well.”

The Nation‘s publicity director, Ben Wyskida, told us it’s rare for the magazine not to publish a story in which the Institute has invested significant time and money, but in this case the editors decided to pass. “Ultimately they just didn’t feel like he delivered the story that we’d hoped.”

“At the same time, we do think it’s an important story,” he added.

Undaunted, Byrne took it to Salon.com, which initially agreed to buy it, but then killed it as well. When asked why, news editor Mark Schone told us, “We don’t discuss those kinds of editorial decisions. We have a long history of publishing investigative pieces.”

Byrne thinks it was political. “In my opinion it’s because both the Nation and Salon have an editorial allegiance to the Democratic Party.” It was, he said, too sensitive a time to publish a story critical of a Democrat when the party was positioning to take control of the legislative branch.

The Nation vehemently denied the decision to kill had anything to do with that. “It’s absolutely false that we had any political biases that caused us not to run the piece. It was the reporting and the timeliness,” said Wyskida.

Salon would not comment on Byrne’s political theory.

When pushed for specifics on what the story lacked, Wyskida said, “Generally, we felt like it was possible there were pieces of the story we could not verify or stand behind.”

Byrne went on to pitch the story to Slate, the New Republic, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, and – thinking that conservative publications might bite – American Spectator and Weekly Standard. “Most of the editors praised the reporting, but turned down the story,” Byrne writes in an update for Project Censored’s publication. “So I sold the tale to the North Bay Bohemian, which, along with its sister papers in San Jose and Santa Cruz, ran it on the cover – complete with follow-ups. After it appeared, the editors and I received a series of invective-filled emails from war-contractor Klein (who is also an attorney) but, since he could show no errors of fact in the story, he did not get the retraction he apparently wanted.”

Klein, a key figure in the series of stories, is chairman and founding donor of the Washington, DC-based Sunlight Foundation, an organization that promotes more government transparency and grants investigative work undertaken with those goals. The Blum Family Foundation has also given seed money to Sunlight.

The foundation’s Web Site has posted a rebuttal to Byrne’s story, written by senior fellow and veteran investigative journalist, Bill Allison. It includes a spirited exchange between Byrne and Allison on some of the finer points of Byrne’s reporting, and links to the original Congressional hearings that Byrne cites for some of his evidence of Feinstein’s questionable ethics.

Shortly before Byrne’s story was printed in the North Bay Bohemian, Feinstein quit MILCON. Byrne reported this resignation in a March 21, 2007 story, in which he speculates thinks it was because of his questioning her ethics.

Feinstein’s office denies any connection. Press officer Scott Gerber said that at the start of a new Congressional session, “She took the opportunity to become chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee. It’s a better subcommittee for California.” Her office also attempts to blow holes in Byrne’s story with a detailed rebuttal similar to Allison’s – not issued as a press release but provided upon request (and available here in pdf form.)

Despite the rebuttals, which contend that facts have been distorted, Byrne says no evidence exists that merit any retractions.

“Stories get killed all the time for various reasons but what I found interesting is that they paid me almost $5,000,” said Byrne, who expressed admiration for both the Nation and Salon. “The editor worked really hard with me but it was leading up to the elections. I’m not actually accusing them of anything nefarious. They basically told me they weren’t going to print it for political reasons.”

Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, which rated the Byrne story as #23 out of the top 25 stories the mainstream media missed last year, said it played a part in prompting him to conduct a survey of 10 popular “left”-leaning publications. The survey looked at whether or not liberal news outlets touched stories that weren’t reported by the mainstream media and the results were included as a chapter in Project Censored 2008.

EDITORS NOTE: The above story reports that the piece on Dianne Feinstein’s conflicts of interest was slated to
run on the cover of The Nation. Ben Wyskida of the Nation contacted us after publication say that “we just don’t make promises like that; our covers never get decided until all the edits are in.”

Censored!

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>>Project Censored’s 15 missed-story runners up

>>Big local stories that never made mainstream headlines

>>The story behind a censored story that was killed by The Nation

amanda@sfbg.com

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," said Peter Phillips, the 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.

While 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 decrease 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 said.

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 said 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 said. 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."

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. "Every day they’re checking out what we think," he said. "The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy."

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. "I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here," he said.

1. GOOD-BYE, 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 Guantánamo Bay detainees, and most journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, editors at the New York Times wrote, 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?"

Reached by phone, Parry told the Guardian that "this loose phraseology could be interpreted very narrowly or very broadly." He said 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 said.

Though US Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) moved quickly to remedy the situation with the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, that legislation has yet to pass Congress, which some suspect is because too many Democrats don’t want to seem soft on terrorism. Until tested by time, exactly how much the language of the Military Commissions Act may be manipulated will remain to be seen.

Sources: "Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right," Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm, Feb. 12, 2007; "Still No Habeas Rights for You," Robert Parry, Consortium (online journal of investigative reporting), consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html, Feb. 3, 2007; "Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?" Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html, 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. While 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.

The Warner act passed with 90 percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously. Months after its passage, Leahy was the only elected official to have publicly expressed concern about section 1076, warning his peers Sept. 19, 2006, that "we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders." In February, Leahy introduced Senate Bill 513 to repeal section 1076. It’s currently in the Armed Services Committee.

Sources: "Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same Day!" Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site, www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/articles/Fear.html, Jan. 20, 2007; "Bush Moves toward Martial Law," Frank Morales, Uruknet.info (Web site that publishes "information from occupied Iraq"), www.uruknet.info/?p=27769, 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 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, which covers politics, economics, and philosophy. Most US oil imports come from African countries — in particular, Nigeria. According to the 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, "disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil-security strategy."

Though details of the AFRICOM strategy remain secret, Hunt has surveyed past governmental statements and reports by other independent journalists to draw parallels between AFRICOM and CENTCOM, making the case that the United States sees Africa as another "vital interest."

Source: "Understanding AFRICOM," parts 1–3, b real, Moon of Alabama, www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html, 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 US and the EU, 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 EU 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 (global news service), ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008, March 20, 2007; "Signing Away the Future" Emily Jones, Oxfam Web site, www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703, March 2007

5. SHANGHAIED SLAVES CONSTRUCT US 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 like 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. But when they get off the plane, 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 on the job. Lodging is crowded, and food is substandard. One ex-foreman, who’s worked on five other US embassies around the world, said, "I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."

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. First, Kuwaiti managers take their passports, which is a violation of US labor laws. "If you don’t have a passport or an embassy to go to, what do you do to get out of a bad situation?" asked Rory Mayberry, a former medic for one of First Kuwaiti’s subcontractors, who blew the whistle on the squalid living conditions, medical malpractice, and general abuse he witnessed at the site.

The Pentagon has been investigating the slavelike conditions but has not released the names of any vioutf8g 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/article.php?id=14173, 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 2006 to conduct the largest dragnet raids in US history. Armed with fistfuls of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that netted 30,110 criminal arrests.

The Justice Department claimed 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, while 30,110 individuals were arrested, only 586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent either.

Though the US Marshals Service has been quick to tally the offenses, Whitney says 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 asked.

The Marshals Service remains silent about these arrests. Whitney suggests those detainees may have been illegal immigrants and may be bound for border prisons currently being constructed by Halliburton (see last year’s Project Censored).

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, uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1, Feb. 26, 2007; "Operation Falcon," SourceWatch (project of the Center for Media and Democracy), www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON, 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 like Blackwater to provide heavily armed details for US diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the nation is currently 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 on the 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/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232, Jan. 26, 2007

8. KIA: 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. While it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say 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 genetically modified seed maker 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 mealy bugs, which have proven 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, which recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who killed themselves in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately favoring corporations.

Hope comes in the form of a growing cadre of farmers hip to the flawed deals. They’ve organized into local sanghams, 72 of which now exist as small community networks that save and share seeds, skills, and assistance during the good times of harvest and the hard times of crop failure.

Sources: "Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India," Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229, Dec. 13, 2006; "Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India take on Monsanto," Arun Shrivastava, Global Research (Web site of Montreal’s Center for Global Research), www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427, Oct. 9, 2006

9. THE PRIVATIZATION OF 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 like roads and bridges, for a low amount. They work out tax breaks to finance the repairs, raise 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."

The Indiana Toll Road, the Chicago Skyway, Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and many other stretches of the nation’s public pavement have succumbed to these private deals.

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 Lázaro Cárdenas, 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/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html, Feb. 2007; "Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway," Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497, June 12, 2006

10. VULTURE FUNDS: DEVOURING THE DESPERATE


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. US 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/vulture-fund-threat-to-third-world, Feb. 14, 2007

>>More: The story of U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest

Project Censored: The runners up

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11. THE SCAM OF "RECONSTRUCTION" IN AFGHANISTAN


Sources: "Afghanistan, Inc.: A CorpWatch Investigative Report," CorpWatch, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13518, Oct. 6, 2006; "Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan" Ann Jones, Tomdispatch.com, www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=116512, Aug. 27, 2006

12. ANOTHER UN MASSACRE IN HAITI


Source: "UN in Haiti Accused of Second Massacre," HaitiAction.net, www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_21_7/1_21_7.html, Jan. 21, 2007

13. BUSH PUSHES IMMIGRANT ROUNDUPS FOR POLITICAL ENDS


Sources: "Migrants: Globalization’s Junk Mail?" Laura Carlsen, Foreign Policy in Focus, www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4022, Feb. 23, 2007; "Workers, Not Guests," David Bacon, Nation, www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20070219&s=bacon, Feb. 6, 2007

14. IMPUNITY FOR US WAR CRIMINALS


Source: "A Senate Mystery Keeps Torture Alive — and Its Practitioners Free," Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly, public.cq.com/public/20061122_homeland.html, Nov. 22, 2006

15. CHEMICALS DAMAGING DNA


Source: "Some Chemicals are More Harmful Than Anyone Ever Suspected," Peter Montague, Rachel’s Democracy and Health News, no. 876, www.precaution.org/lib/06/ht061012.htm#Some_Chemicals_Are_More_Harmful_Than_Anyone_Ever_Suspected, Oct. 12, 2006

16. NO HARD EVIDENCE CONNECTING OSAMA BIN LADEN TO SEPT. 11


Source: "FBI Says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11," Paul V. Sheridan and Ed Haas, Ithaca Journal, June 29, 2006

17. FACTORIES EXCEED WATER POLLUTION LIMIT


Sources: "Green Fuel’s Dirty Secret," Sasha Lilley, CorpWatch, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646, June 1, 2006; "Factories, Cities across USA Exceed Water Pollution Limits," Sunny Lewis, Environment News Service, www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2006/2006-03-24-05.asp, March 24, 2006

18. MEXICO’S STOLEN ELECTION


Sources: "Mexico’s Partial Vote Recount Confirms Massive and Systematic Election Fraud," Al Giordano, Narco News Bulletin, www.narconews.com/Issue42/article2010.html, Aug. 14, 2006; "Welcome to the Nightmare: Al Qaeda de Mexico?" John Ross, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org/ross09132006.html, Aug. 13, 2006; "Evidence of Election Fraud Grows in México," Chuck Collins and Joshua Holland, AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/story/39763, Aug. 2, 2006

19. BOLIVIA REJECTS IMF AND FTA


Source: "Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?" American Friends Service Committee, Trade Matters, www.afsc.org/trade-matters/trade-agreements/LosingSteam.htm, May 3, 2006

20. ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS ARE NOW TERRORISTS


Source: "Response to Andrew Kohn: The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is Invidiously Detrimental to the Animal Rights Movement (and Unconstitutional as Well)," David Hoch and Odette Wilkens, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, www.vjel.org/editorials/2007S/Hoch.Wilkens.Editorial.htm, March 9, 2007

21. US SEEKS WTO IMPUNITY FOR ILLEGAL AGRIBUSINESS SUBSIDIES


Source: "US Seeks "Get-Out Clause" for Illegal Farm Payments," Oxfam, www.oxfam.org/en/news/pressreleases2006/pr060629_wto_geneva, June 29, 2006

22. NORTH INVADES MEXICO


Source: "Border Invaders: The Perfect Swarm Heads South," Mike Davis, TomDispatch.com, www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=122537, Sept. 19, 2006

23. DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST IN IRAQ


Source: "Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict," Peter Byrne, North Bay Bohemian, www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html, Jan. 24, 2007

24. MEDIA EXAGGERATES THREAT FROM IRAN’S PRESIDENT


Source: " ‘Wiped Off the Map’ — the Rumor of the Century," Arash Norouzi, Global Research, www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070120&articleId=4527, Jan. 20, 2007

25. NATIVE ENERGY FUTURES


Source: "Native Energy Futures," Brian Awehali, LiP, www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featawehali_nativefutures.htm, June 5, 2006

Censored in San Francisco

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Project Censored can’t cover everything — most of the stories the group looks at are national and international in scope. But there are huge local stories in every community that the mainstream media black out, ignore, or underplay. We’ve talked to political activists and media experts around the Bay and come up with a (short) list of Bay Area censored stories. We list them in no particular order.

THE MONOPOLIZATION OF LOCAL DAILY NEWSPAPERS


The deal that gave Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group control of almost every daily newspaper in the Bay Area made the business pages — but the impact on news coverage and the damage caused by the homogenization of local news to communities and the political debate were almost entirely ignored.

COMMUNITY CHOICE AGGREGATION AND PG&E’S ATTACK ON PUBLIC POWER


The importance of Community Choice Aggregation as an alternative to Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s private-power monopoly was badly under-covered — as was PG&E’s looming attack on CCA and public power.

GAVIN NEWSOM’S REAL RECORD


The daily papers love to talk about polls that show the mayor’s popularity (and they love to talk about his personal life), but nobody’s looking at his failure to fulfill many of his original promises.

SHUTTERED PUBLIC HOUSING


Until Mayor Newsom suddenly noticed the problems in local public housing last week, the major news media had overlooked the fact that hundreds of public housing units are shuttered while thousands of people wait for affordable housing.

THE ATTACK OF THE HIGH-RISES


The mainstream media reported with glee on the proposals for giant new towers at the Transbay Terminal, but failed to mention that at least 10 more giant towers are already in the works.

MORE HIGHWAYS, LESS TRANSIT


Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to talk green, but the news media haven’t compared his cuts to public transit with his plans to build more highways.

Censoring the Censored Project: Will the NY Times, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and the mainstream media censor this year’s Project Censored story?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so the 31st annual Project Censored story will run once again as the lead story in the Guardian and in many alternative papers around the country.

The highly regarded Project, researched and disseminated by Peter Phillips and Project Censored at Sonoma State University, makes its case about censored and under-reported stories in a most dramatic way:
the mainstream press, including the nearby Press Democrat/NY Times and the NY Times itself, censors the story.

Not only that, but the Post Democrat and the NYTimes refuse to say why they haven’t ever run a story on the project in 30 years. They even refused to answer my blog questions to the papers after we published last year’s Censored story.

So this year, let us all pull together on this critical mission: spotting who is censoring the Project Censored story? Let me note the impertinent questions for the record:
Will the nearby Press Democrat run this important local and national story? Will its parent New York Times do so?
If not, will they answer my questions when I renew my blogs on the issue? Will other mainstream media censor the story? Who will run it? Let us know at the Guardian.

This is serious stuff. I led my blog of Nov. 20th/2006 with this statement: “On Sept. 10, 2003, while the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat affiliated papers were running Judith Miller stories making the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian published the annual Project Censored list of censored stories.”

Later, after detailing the number one story on the neocon politics that marched us into war, I wrote, “the neocon story and the other censored stories laying out the dark side of the Bush administration and its drumbeat to war got little or no play–or else were presented piecemeal without any attempt to put the information in context.
The number two story was ‘Homeland security threatens civil liberties.’ Number three: ‘U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report.’ Number four: ‘Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists.’ Number seven: ‘Treaty busting by the United States.’ Number eight: ‘U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects.’ Number nine: ‘In Afghanistan poverty, women’s rights, and civil disruption worse than ever.'”

Then I concluded my blog on last year’s censorship of Project Censored by writing, “This year, as Iraq slid into civil war, U.S. war dead rose toward 3,000, and the U.S. public was well ahead of the media in turning against the war, the New York Times should have finally recognized its annual mistake and published the Project Censored story. It didn’t, and never has” ( and neither has the Press Democrat nor hardly any other mainstream media that helped march us into war.)

This year, the theme of the Censored stories is more relevant and timely than ever: the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights in the U.S. Let us see what happens. B3

The Bruce Blog on monopoly media

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Still censored: the story and debate on the impacts of media consolidation in the Bay Area
Posted in Bruce (B3) on April 16, 2007 05:03 PM

Shocked! Shocked! And shocked again!
Posted in Bruce (B3) on April 13, 2007 05:44 PM

Stop the presses! Here come the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration from the nation’s biggest chains (Hearst, Singleton, Gannett, Stephens) Why people get mad at the media (l4)
Posted in Bruce (B3) on April 11, 2007 03:53 PM

Singleton buys another daily paper and further locks up the Bay Area market .Where’s the U.S. Attorney General and the California Attorney General?
Posted in Bruce (B3) on February 5, 2007 05:11 PM

Why people get mad at the media (part 9). the Chronicle and Associated Press blow the big media story and refuse to make corrections
Posted in Bruce (B3) on January 30, 2007 01:48 PM

Eureka! More on how monopoly papers cover monopoly news
Posted in Bruce (B3) on December 20, 2006 04:35 PM

Clint Reilly wins a big one against Hearst and Singleton. Fighting to keep one newspaper towns from becoming a one newspaper region.
Posted in Bruce (B3) on November 28, 2006 03:04 PM

Memo to the city desks of the Chronicle/Hearst and Media News Group/Singleton papers and the Associated Press: the Hearst/Reilly antitrust suit is scheduled for a hearing tomorrow (Wednesday) morning before Federal Judge Susan Illston. Will you cover it?
Posted in Bruce (B3) on November 21, 2006 05:57 PM

SF Chronicle to Outsource All of Its Printing, reports Editor and Publisher Magazine. Will those “competitive” Hearst and Singleton papers cover the monopoly story and its impact on San Francisco and the Bay Area?
Posted in Bruce (B3) on November 17, 2006 12:29 PM

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story. Why? Some impertinent questions for the Press Democrat
Posted in Bruce (B3) on November 13, 2006 01:55 PM

More Impertinent Questions on Hearst shenanigans on the drug pricing scandal (part 5) Why did Hearst censor an AP story on McKesson profits?
Posted in Bruce (B3) on November 2, 2006 02:33 PM

Let us lift a Potrero Hill martini for Thomas Peele of the Contra Costa Times/Singleton papers. He criticized Singleton by name for sealing court records in the Hearst/Singleton antitrust case.
Posted in Bruce (B3) on October 30, 2006 03:37 PM

Dear Jerry Brown: more impertinent questions on the Hearst shenanigans (part 4)
Posted in Bruce (B3) on October 20, 2006 04:55 PM

Impertinent questions on the new Hearst shenanigans (part 2, see previous blog)
Posted in Bruce (B3) on October 18, 2006 03:52 PM

The Guardian turns 40: some things never change
Posted in Bruce (B3) on October 17, 2006 04:01 PM

Judge seals file in MediaNews trial
Posted in Bruce (B3) on September 15, 2006 02:51 PM

Eureka! Finally, Hearst covers the censored story and admits it is partnering with Singleton
Posted in Bruce (B3) on September 14, 2006 01:48 PM

Finally, the Conglomerati do a bit of reporting (actually only a little bit)
Posted in Bruce (B3) on September 8, 2006 04:22 PM

Eureka! Here comes even more Eurekaism! (part 3)
Posted in Bruce (B3) on September 5, 2006 05:35 PM

Eureka! There’s more Eurekaism!
Posted in Bruce (B3) on August 25, 2006 04:39 PM

Where are Hearst and the Chronicle? The conglomerate cometh
Posted in Bruce (B3) on August 11, 2006 05:00 PM

More on the Case of the Uncovered Bay Area Newspaper Monopoly
Posted in Bruce (B3) on August 2, 2006 12:03 PM

The press censors the press
Posted in Bruce (B3) on August 1, 2006 04:53 PM

Stop the presses
Posted in Bruce (B3) on July 31, 2006 05:40 PM

Monopolies are forever
Posted in Bruce (B3) on July 28, 2006 04:24 PM

Still censored: the story and debate on the impacts of media consolidation in the Bay Area

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

For years, the Guardian has been publishing on its front page the “Project Censored” story, a list and story of the most “censored” stories of the past year as compiled by Project Censored, a respected 30-year-old media research project at Sonoma State University. We always include our local version of major stories the local mainstream media miss and note that they always “censor” the big local stories involving their own papers. And of course the mainstream press makes the story even better by “censoring” the Project Censored story every year.

The latest “censored” story, as attentive readers of the Bruce blog know, is
the story of the terrible impact of media consolidation in the Bay Area and the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration that the nation’s biggest chains are using to censor and obfuscate the story.

This morning April l6, on the widely read Romenesko media newsletter on the Poynter Institute website,
an important story was posted that made the censorship point in 96 point Garamond Bold.
It was headlined “The Crisis of Consolidation in Bay Area News Media” and laid out in a telling argument that the Hearst/Singleton consolidation would mean that “coverage of virtually every level of government, education, sports, criminal justice, arts and business would be in the hands of one organization with a single set of principles, perspectives and purposes. This is the situation one expects in a totalitarian regime, not in pluralistic America.”

This is the kind of commentary that ought be a regular feature of every daily paper and major broadcast station in the Bay Area. The Hearst/Singleton deal ought to be a major running story in the local media. How many regional stories will be covered by one reporter? Will there be real Washington and Sacramento bureaus? Will there be a joint line on editorial policy and endorsements? Will the same candidates get the endorsements for president, U.S. Senate, the House, and other state and local political offices? How much will local news suffer? Will one critic cover a show or opening for all the papers? How many sports writers will be covering the Giants, Athletics, and 49ers? Who will cover all those local meetings? How can any of the papers be real local watchdogs? There ought to be informed discourse and debate on such serious impact questions, but there isn’t and there most likely won’t be in the monopolizing press.

Instead, the crisis commentary was written by the former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, Philip J. Trounstine. He wrote the commentary as a consultant to plaintiff Clint Reilly in his antitrust trial in federal court aimed at blocking the monopoly deal. Trounstine was also the former communications director for Gov. Gray Davis and is the founder and director of the Survey and Policy Institute at San Jose State University.

So there you have it: the Hearst and Singleton press that owns all the daily papers from Vallejo to Santa Cruz refuse to do the story on the impact of the deal. Citizen Reilly has to sue to get the story out and bring in Trounstine to do an analysis of the impact. The analysis gets out only by being posted on the Grade the News.com, a media watchdog site, and picked up by Romenesko and the Bruce blog.

Trounstine ends with a crucial point: “The tragedy for the public interest is that instead of reallocating resources to increased local coverage, newspapers across the country and throughout the region are instead using the economic gains made from consolidation for short-term gains in profitability.

“With no meaningful daily competition on significant regional and statewide stories, there is no pressure on news operations to intensify coverage of any issue or event. Just the opposite in fact: consolidation ushers in the decline in the range and depth of information that citizens need to make intelligent civic decisions.”

Now, out of embarrassment or principle, will any Hearst or Singleton or Gannett or Stephens paper anywhere in the U.S. run Trounstine or do a comparable story on the Hearst/Single consolidation and its toxic impact on one of the most liberal and civilized regions in the world.? Let me know. Stay alert. B3

Why people get mad at the media (part l2) The New York Times answers questions about its slow coverage of the Walter Reed scandal but stonewalls on its censorship of Project Censored

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Byron Calame, the public editor of the New York Times, spent an entire column in the Sunday New York Times (March ll) answering an important question:

“Why,” Calame asked in his lead, “were readers of the New York Times left without a word of news coverage of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal for six days after it had been exposed by the Washington Post?
That was the question posed to me in the wake of the Post’s Feb. l8 scoop by readers thirsty for readers thirsty for news of the poor care given those wounded in Iraq.”

As attentive readers of the Bruce blog will recall, I raised an even more important question as to why the Times and its sister paper in Santa Rosa (the Press Democrat) have for 30 years refused to run the Project Censored story from the local Sonoma State University. I have also asked Calame, and Times and PD editors, why they won’t run the Project Censored story, even though its stories before and during the Iraq War laid out much of the key neocon policy behind the war and the anti-war strategies in opposing it. Neither Calame nor any Times nor editor would answer me nor provide an explanation to Carl Jensen, the project’s current founder, nor Peter Phillips, the current director, for their censorship of the Censored Project through the years.

This is highly significant in light of Calame’s Sunday column. “Readers have every right to be angry about the Times’s slowness in telling them about the compelling news in The Post’s two-part series,” he wrote.
((I won’t raise the question here as to why neither the Post nor the Times, nor any of the beltway journalists, didn’t get the stories months earlier at nearby Walter Reed and why they didn’t respond earlier to the accelerating drumbeat of criticism of lousy treatment of returning soldiers from veterans, their families, and veteran’s organizations.)

Calame did find the culprit: “Excessive pride, I believe, is the fundamental problem. The desire to be first with the news still permeates the newsroom at the Times and other newspapers in a way that makes editors and reporters feel defeated when they have to conclude that the information in another publication’s exclusive article is so newsworthy that it has to be pursued.” Good point: but what about newsworthy stories broken by other publications, picked up by Project Censored, stamped “Censored,” and put out as a major package that the Times and other mainstream media then refused to print? Was “excessive pride” at work here for 30 years? Is that much of an excuse on stories as big as Iraq and Bush?

I pointed out in my earlier blog that the Censored stories were particularly timely during the war years.
For example, on Sept. l0, 2003, while the Times and the PD and affiliated papers on its news service, were running the stories of the disgraced Judith Miller that helped Bush make the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian ran the Censored package with a headline that read, “The neocon plan for global domination–and nine other big stories the mainstream press refused to cover in 2002.” I noted that our introduction to the timely censored package made the critical point: “If there’s one influence that has shaped world-wide politics over the past year, it’s the extent to which the Bush administration hs exploited the events of Sept. ll, 200l, too solidify its military and economic control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment. But President George Bush W. Bush hasn’t simply been responding to world events. The agenda the administration has followed fits perfectly with a clearly defined plan that’s been in place for a decade.”

I noted that the neocon story, and the many other such stories that Project Censored put out during the war years and again this year, laying out the drumbeat to war and the dark side of the Bush administration, got no play in the Times nor the PD and very little play in the rest of the mainstream press and its “embedded” and “mission accomplished” journalism that marched us into war and is now keeping us there. Who was right, the Guardian and Project Censored stories or Judith Miller and the Times?

Calame wrote that “readers would benefit if the
Times could swallow a bit of its pride and make use of two readily available approaches to dealing with important news in the scoops of competing competitors.” He said the Times could put the stories of competitors up on its web and they could be encouraged to use “solidly reported wire stories” of significant exclusives in other publications. What about the Censored stories?

Calame concluded, “The reality is that when significant news breaks–even in the form of an exclusive in a competing publication–the Times must be committed to getting on the story. Anything less seriously damages the paper’s value to the readers.”

Another good point: so repeating for emphasis: Why won’t the Times and the PD run the Project Censored stories
that were so often on target when the Times wasn’t? And why won’t the Times and its public editor answer or even acknowledge the question and underlying issues of biased reporting, flawed news judgment, and too much lapdog access to the Bush administration? I’m sending this blog to them and asking once again.

I am waiting for the public editor and Times/PD editors to reply. Is this like waiting for Godot? Stay tuned. B3

Project censored blog:

http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/bruce/2007/02/new_blog_project_censored.html

Byron Calame’s The public editor:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11pubed.html?ex=1331269200&en=7f7f89dff165cf09&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Why people get mad at the media (part ll) Why won’t the New York Times/Santa Rosa Press Democrat run the Project Censored stories when it continues to use anonymous sources to push the Bush line that Iran is providing “lethal support:” to Iraq Shiites?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

As attentive Bruce blog readers recall, I raised the issue in previous blogs why the New York Times and its sister paper in Santa Rosa (the Press Democrat) has for 30 years refused to run the local Project Censored story from the local Sonoma State University.

I pointed out that the issue was particularly timely because on Sept. l0, 2003, while the Times and the PD and affiliated papers were running the disgraced Judith Miller’s stories making the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian published the annual Project Censored list of censored, or underreporterd stories in the mainstream press. I further pointed out that our front page had a caricature of Bush, standing astride the globe holding a U.S. flag with a dollar sign, and a headline that read, “The neocon plan for global domination–and nine other big stories the mainstream press refused to cover in 2002.”

And I noted that our introduction to the timely censored package made the critical point: “If there’s one influence that has shaped world-wide politics over the past year, it’s the extent to which the Bush administration has exploited the events of Sept. ll, 200l, to solidify its military and economic control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment. But President George W. Bush hasn’t simply been responding to world events. The agenda the administration has followed fits perfectly with a clearly defined plan that’s been place for a decade.”

I noted that the neocon story, and the many other such stories that Project Censored put out during the war years and again this year, laying out the dark side of the Bush administration and the drumbeat to war in Iraq, got no play in the Times or the nearby PD and very little play in the rest of the mainstream media that helped Bush march us into war–and now is keeping us there.

Not once, in all of the past three decades, has the Times nor the PD run the Project Censored story nor explained why. And they refused to respond to my repeated questions on this point.

That was the backdrop for the Feb. l0 Times lead story, :”Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says.”
I was astounded when I read the story because it made the most serious and incendiary charges without once naming a source by name. Fair, the media group for fair and accuracy in reporting, said in a Feb. l6 report that
“In the wake of its disastrous pre-war reporting on Iraq, the New York Times implemented new rules governing its use of unnamed sources. Its lead story on Feb. l0, promoting Bush administration charges against Iran, violated those rules.”

Fair said that reporter Michael Gordon cited a “one-sided array of anonymous sources charging the Iranian government with providing a particularly deadly variety of roadside bomb to Shia militias in Iraq: ‘The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.'” Fair goes on, and even quotes Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine, as saying that Gordon “aimed to quiet the skeptics, cited only the following sources: ‘American officials’…’one military official’…military officials’…’American officials’…American military officicials.,'”

FAir also made the critical point about the similarity between current times reporting hyping the Iran threat and the paper’s “credulous” prewar Iran reporting are not coincidental. Gordon, Fair pointed out, was the co-author, along with Miller, of two of six stories singled oiut in the paper’s May 26 2004 apology for faulty Iraq reporting, including the Times story that falsely touted the now-famous “aluminum tubes” as components of an Iraqi nuclar weapons program.

The critical questions: why in the hell, after all that has gone down on Iraq and Times reporting, has the Times violated its own rules on anonymous sources without explanation and without apology?
I have often wondered through the years how Guardian could be right on Vietnam and right on Iraq, without any hotshot sources or intelligence reports, and the New York Times and other mainstream media were so wrong for so long and are still wrong (we can’t pull out now, chaos will occur, Iran is the problem, etc.) Every time I read stories like these, I know why.

For starters, if I were responsible for Times coverage, I would tell my reporters to refuse to attend a “press conference” or “press briefing” mandating anonymity. Instead, I would tell them to stay away and to interview the reporters and principals later and do a full story with full identification and make the critical Project Censored type points. Or do a Fair type critique after the fact. So what if you miss yet another self-immolating Iraq weapons story. If I ran an alternative paper in Washington, D.C., I would cover all those anonymous briefings and press conferences by not going and then reporting on who did go, who wrote what, what it added up to, and then put it in the context of non-embedded and non -mission accomplished reporting. I would concentrate on the stories the Times/PD and other mainstream press censored.

Fair’s concluding point: In his original February l0 report, Gordon wrote, “‘Administration officials said they recognized that intelligence failures related to prewar American claims about Iraq’s weapons arsenal could make critics skeptical about the American claims. While ‘critics’ are surely skeptical, shouldn’t reporters for the New York Times, given their recent record on similar matters, be even more so?”

Further questions: shouldn’t the Times/PD, given its wartime record, publish the Project Censored story and its prescient group of stories that happened to be largely on target year after year? Shouldn’t the Times/PD explain to the Censored director and to the Guardian why it refuses to do so? Repeating: neither the project directors (founder Carl Jensen, current director Peter Phillips) have ever been given a reason and I cannot get one either.

Fair recommends action: contact Times public editor Byron Calame and urge him to look into why the paper’s rules about anonymity are not applied to Michael Gordon–especially considering how Gordon’s pre-Iraq War reporting embarrassed the Times. And: from the Guardian and me: ask Calame, as I have in vain, why the Times/PD won’t run Project Censored and won’t say why?

New York Times: Byron Calame, public editor, public@nytimes.com, phone: (2l2) 556-7652. Good luck, let me know what happens. B3

Bruce B3: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story.

Bruce B3: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: still no answers on why…

Bruce B3: The new media offensive for the Iraq War. Why the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times…

Questions to Byron Calame, public editor of the New York Times? Why won’t the Times and its Santa Rosa Press Democrat cover Project Censored?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Carl Jensen, the founder of Project Censored, Peter Phillips, the current director, and I have been waiting anxiously for weeks now to see if the New York Times/Santa Rosa Press Democrat would answer our questions about why they once again censored and mangled the annual story of Project Censored, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year at Sonoma State University? (See previous blogs.) We heard nothing.

So I am posing the following questions to Byron Calame, public editor of the New York Times, who answers questions about Times coverage and policies in his twice monthly column in the Op ed section of the Week in Review in the Sunday Times.

l. Why in 30 years has the New York Times never covered nor written about Project Censored, a nationally recognized media criticism project locating the 25 most important stories that were overlooked, under-covered, or censored?

2. Why in 30 years has the local New York Times/Santa Rosa Press Democrat either censored or mangled Project Censored, a local journalism/media criticism project done at a local university by local professors and local students?

3. Why did the Press Democrat this year, on the 30th anniversary of the Project, continue its censorious policy by sending a reporter to the celebration, not to do a real story on the project, its stories, and its history, but to do what amounted to a hatchet job on the project via one story, Censored Story No. l8, “Physicist challenges official 9/ll story?”

4. Why won’t the Press Democrat/New York Times answer the questions and complaints from Jensen and Phillips (and the Guardian, as the publisher of the project each year) as to why it censors and/or mangles this major story every year? What is going on here?

5. After the problems with the reporting of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller et al, how do you recommend targets of Press Democrat/New York Times news policy complain effectively and get some fair and balanced news coverage of a major local story?

In my accompanying email note to Calame, I wrote, “The Guardian has been doing this story for years, front page, with our local version of censored stories, and sending it out to the alternative press across the country. It is one of our most widely read and highly respected stories of the year and people look forward to it as a major journalistic and academic gem of distinction. I hope you see this as the terribly important and relevant issue it is, since much of the mainstream press helped Bush march us into a war without end at the very time that Project Censored, and its censored stories, were providing an alternative and more realistic point of view.”

Note the supporting material below, this year’s Guardian story on Project Censored, and the archives of some 750 or so issues or stories over a 30 year period of time. B3

San Francisco Bay Guardian : Home Page
… BY AMANDA WITHERELL Rob Strange Project Censored

Bruce B3: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story.

Bruce B3: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: still no answers on why…

Bruce B3: The new media offensive for the Iraq War. Why the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times…

U.S. MEDIA CENSORSHIP / CONTROL

Clint Reilly wins a big one against Hearst and Singleton. Fighting to keep one newspaper towns from becoming a one newspaper region.

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

On April 26, 2006, the McClatchy newspapers and the Chronicle/Hearst and MediaNews/Singleton publicly announced a complex series of transactions that resulted in Singleton owning three major Bay Area dailies (Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, and the Monterey Herald) that had been previously owned by Knight-Ridder and then McClatchy.

On the same day, April 26, 2006, Hearst and Singleton secretly signed a key centerpiece deal that set up a secret arrangement between Hearst and Singleton that in effect would allow them to join forces, destroy daily competition in the Bay Area, and establish a regional monopoly for the duration.

The key point: the two big publishing chains from New York and Denver lied in effect about the monopolizing features of their deal, and in effect concealed key evidence in the Clint Reilly antitrust case, according to Federal Judge Susan Illston. And then the two chains, who love to holler about freedom of the press and government suppression of documents, moved to keep the documents under seal, including the incriminating letter outlining the monopoly agreement. Their coverage amounts largely to rummy little business stories buried deep in their papers.

Illston neatly skewered the Hearst/Singleton lie that their deal was harmless and would not interfere with vigorous competition between the two companies. Illston quoted the April 26 letter, which she pointed out was not disclosed in the first hearing on a request for a temporary restraining order. (Alioto got the letter in discovery. It is an even bigger bombshell than his charge in the first Reilly trial that Hearst was “horesetrading” favorable coverage for political favors with then Mayor Willie Brown and others to get political help on its moves to create a morning monopoly.)

The letter of agreement was from Hearst Corporation Vice President James Asher to Joseph Lodovic, president of MediaNews. She quoted “in pertiment part” these statements: “The Hearst Corporation and Media News Group agree that they shall negotiate in good faith agreements to offer national advertising and internet advertising sales for their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and to consolidate the San Francisco Bay area distribution networks of such newspapers, all on mutually satisfactory terms and conditions, and in each case subject to any limitations required to ensure compliance with applicable law.

“In addition, Hearst and MediaNews agree that, with respect to the newspapers owned by each of them on the date of this letter, they shall work together in good faith to become affiliated with the networks operated by Career Builder…and Classified Ventures) on the same terms, and each of Hearst and MediaNews further agrees that neither of them shall enter into any agreement, arrangement, or understanding to participate in Career Builder or
Classified Ventures or their respective networks with respect to such newspapers unless the other party is offered the opportunity to participate on identical terms…”

Illston quoted extensively from the “secret” letter, but the Guardian and nobody else can see the letter, oor the supporting documents and depositions, that would further flesh out monopoly deal. That is a terrible position, let me emphasize, for big daily chains to be taking in federal court these days.

Illston said the letter “casts serious doubt on several key findings underlying” her previous order denying a temporary restraining order. She said that she had previously accepted Hearst arguments that “Hearst’s involvement in the transactions was solely that of a passive investor.” But she continued, “Though (Hearst and Singleton) offered no explanation why Hearst was willing to finance an acquisition that would only make competition stronger, the Court did not understand that Hearst expected, or would receive, any quid pro quo. However, the April 26 letter suggests, at the very least, that Hearst’s involvement was specifically tied to an agreement by MediaNews to limit its competition with Hearst in certain ways.”

This “cooperation” between Hearst and Singleton, she said, was “in fact, quid pro quo for Hearst’s assistance to MediaNews in acquiring two of the Bay Area papers.” (The quid pro quo was also a $300 million Hearst investment in Singleton, which I think might evaporate should Illston ultimately nix or water down the deal.) Illston also said the letter indicated that the Chronicle may not continue to be “strong competition” for the other Bay Area papers.

Had the letter been disclosed to the court, she said, it would have “affected the court’s analysis of the McClatchy-MediaNews-Hearst transactions in this case.” Summing up, she stated that “such agreements, the mere existence of the letter, and the cooperation between Hearst and MediaNews they reflect, increase the likelihood that the transactions at issue here were anti-competitive and illegal.”

And so she granted a temporary restraining order in part and temporarily restrained and enjoined Hearst and Singleton from entering into any agreements “of the nature described in the April 26 letter, including agreements to offer national advertising sales for their San Francisco Bay Area newspapers on a joint basis, and consolidation of the Bay Area distribution networks for their papers.” She ordered Hearst and Singleton to show cause at a Dec. 6 hearing why she should not impose a preliminary injunction. Quite an opinion.

As an antitrust attorney told us after reading the opinion, “How the hell does Joe Jr. keep getting the Hearst people to lie under oath, then cough up the documents that prove it? Haven’t they figured out that judges don’t react well to that little character flaw?”

Implicit in all of this is Brugmann’s Law of Journalism: where there is no economic competition, there is no news or editorial competition. Suddenly,for the first time ever by the terms of the proposed deal, daily competition would be eliminated and one of the most liberal and civilized areas of the world would be firmly under the monopoly thumb of conservative billionaires from New York and Denver. The result would give ad rates a monopoly boost, gut and centralize editorial staffs, make editorials and endorsements ever more uniform and conservative, and send all profits out of town on a conveyor belt to headquarters to buy more properties. The carnage is well underway (note our stories and those carried on ChainLinks, the newspaper guild publication)

Illston should disclose the letter and other documents in open court. And the U.S. Justice Department and California Attorney General should awake from their long naps and jump into this case and stop this secretive march to regional monopoly. Meanwhile, thank the Lord for Reilly and Alioto. Keep on rolling. B3, celebrating San Francisco values since l966

P.S. We are running lots of material on this story, including the judge’s order, because it amounts to a “censored” story in the mainstream media. Each year, as the local part of our Project Censored package, we cite the monopolization of the press story. We will follow the current version along in the Guardian and the Bruce blog. Send us your comments and evidence of Eurekas or Censored material. (See previous blogs)

The morning after by G.W. Schulz
While drunk on big newspaper purchases, Dean Singleton promised competitive papers and no layoffs. Now he’s swinging the ax, cutting deals with Hearst, and decimating local news coverage

Judge slams daily-paper chains by Tim Redmond
With a federal court ruling exposing a secret plan by Hearst and Singleton to join forces and end competition, the federal and state Justice Departments should intervene – and all records in the case should now be open

More on Singleton by G.W. Schulz

Read the judge’s decision
Judge Susan Illston’s ruling on Hearst-MediaNews collaboration

Repeating: So why won’t the New York Times cover Project Censored?

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This is an important journalistic and public policy question. The Times claims to be the world’s pre-eminent newspaper, it publishes the International Herald Tribune, has a major news service, and owns a batch of media properties, including the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the daily “of record” for the project, which is housed at nearby Sonoma State University.

Yet, in the project’s 30 year history, the Times has neither published nor written about the Censored Project and its list of serious stories the mainstream media censored or ignored. Peter Philips, the project director, told me that the awards ceremonies were held for a number of years in New York (l996-2000) and that Times reporters would often attend. Phillips remembered one reporter in particular who said, “Keep it up, we post your list in the newsroom every year.”

No representative from the PD ever came to any of the Project’s ceremonies or programs at Sonoma State, except for the reporter Paul Payne who came to a lecture on Nov. 3.
And he came, not to do a real story on Project Censored’s stories of the year or its history, but to do a hatchet job
on Censored Story No. l8, “Physicist challenges official 9/ll story.” (See previous blogs.)
Phillips and the project founder, Carl Jensen, retired and living in Cotati, and the Guardian, which has published the project as a major front page story for years and sent it out to the alternative press nationwide, all complained to the PD and asked for an explanation and an apology. The PD did run an op ed by Phillips but gave no explanation nor apology.

Obviously, the Times and the Post Democrat don’t like the project, but it is after all a local journalism/media criticism project at a local university done by local professors and local students that has gained national acclaim over a 30 year period. Don’t the Times and the PD cover local news any more?
So I put the question to Jensen.

“I am often asked, ” he said, “why hasn’t the New York Times ever written about Project Censored? My response is always the same: ‘You should ask the New York Times why it hasn’t written about Project Censored.’

“After all, Project Censored is the longest running national news media research project in the country. It is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Ih fact, Project Censored may well be the longest running academic research project in the country with the exception of health-oriented longitudinal studies.

“It expanded the definiton of news from the three original categories–religioius censorship, political censorship, and censorship of obscenities–to include the concept of news media self censorship which is now widely accepted. It also institutionalized the term ‘junk food news’ to describe the tabloid-type news thqat appears in the mainstream media. More than a hundred students, faculty, and other volunteers review up to a thousand news stories annually to locate the 25 most important stories that were overlooked, under-covered, or censored.

“Now why wouldn’t the New York Times want to report on that?”

Yes, why? I will query the New York Times public editor Byron Calame and editor Bill Keller, and other editors if necessary, to try to get an answer. Meanwhile, take a look at the link below and the website that has archived 30 years of Project Censored and see what an incredible array of 750 or so issues and stories they represent. Note the stories have synopses, sources, and updates by the authors. And note that the site includes Censored books, pamphlets, and indices from l976 through 2007. The Censored archives and web display were created by Gary Evans, of Sebastopol, who Jensen describes as “an extraordinary fan and honorary archivist of Project Censored.” The site makes clear that Project Censored is truly a unique and outstanding journalistic and academic achievement.

“All the news that fits in print,” proudly trumpets the Times masthead. Surely there’s some news somewhere in this project that would fit in print in the New York
Times. If not, Phillips, Jensen, the Guardian, and lots of other faithful Censored supporters around the world would like to know why. B3, who wonders why the Times runs Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, her stories on fictitious weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and backup editorials justifying the invasion, and still won’t write about Project Censored

http://www.ringnebula.com/index_Censorship.htm

Introducing: the Telling Quote (the TQ):”Ross, you never learned to be a prisoner”

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I have always had a weakness for one-liners and telling quotes, which I call the Telling Quote (the QD).

For example, Tim Redmond gave me a good one just a few minutes ago. He said that in the movie on Elliot Ness of fighitng gangsters in Prohibiition Chicago, Ness was asked what he would do once Prohibiton was over.
“I’d have a drink,” Ness said.

I spotted two quotes I liked in the tomorrow’s Guardian. The first is from the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow and his prescient penguin, who is asked to answer the favorite conservative question to the liberal on the disaster of Iraq: “What’s your solulion?” Responds the penguin: “We take the two hundred million dollars a day we’re currently pouring into Iraq and we funnel it all into an intensive top-secret project to deliver the world’s first working machine…and then we go back to 200l and pay some goddamned attention to everyone who opposed this idotic war of choice from the start. THAT’S MY SOLUTION.”

Memo to the New York Times and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York
Times who have been censoring Project Censored: Take note (see other blogs).

John Ross writes in an op ed column about the jailed Josh Wolf and the murdered Brad Will (see link below) as examples of the “pogrom against independent journalists who refuse to conform to corporate media definitions of what a reporter should be.” He says that in the case of Will, murdered on the barricades in Oazaca, Mexico, by gunmen employed by the provincial governor, “the New York Times and its accomplices–including the New Times version of the Village Voice–intimate that Will was less than a journalist…a troublemaker rather than a young man who reported on trouble.” Ross points out he himself was once a trouble-making jailed journalist, for being the first U.S. citizen to be jailed for refusing induction into the Vietnam War military, and that he formed convict committee against U.S. intervention and wrote about it. When he was finally kicked out of jail, the parole officer who made his life hell for a year walked him to the gate and gave him a goodbye snarl:

“Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”

Ross’s point to the New York Times: the Times’ Judith Miller, with “ll mendacious
front-page New York Times stories on Saddam Hussein’s fictitious weapons of mass destruction (that) helped justify the Bush invasion” was just as much an “activist” as Wolf, Will, and Ross himself. B3

Guilty of independent journalism by John Ross

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