Censored News Stories of 2003: A Fisking
1. The neoconservative plan for global dominance
Indeed, the neocons have had the Persian Gulf in their crosshairs for 30 years now. Ever since the oil crisis of 1976 and the Gulf states' nationalization of their petroleum industries in the years that preceded it, the United States began building up forces in the region – primarily in Saudi Arabia – and strengthening relationships with regional dictatorships. The reasons seem simple: the region holds two-thirds of the world's oil.
1. To say that this has been "censored" is just silly. I"ve heard endless yammering about this very topic from all corners of the media.
2. The author implies that we are going to seize and control the Persian Gulf. If so, why have we not done so? Why not do so now? What are we waiting for?
3. Access to oil is of vital strategic importance to almost every nation on earth. Any nation without access to vital resources will ultimately go to war to get what they cannot get peacefully.
2. Homeland security threatens civil liberties
1. Yes, this is a huge huge secret. I've not heard one single lefty raising holy hell (I know, a religious reference, I'll report for re-education in a minute.) about this one. No sir, first I'm hearing of this one.
3. U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report
Bush administration insiders often take extreme measures to protect their own – including those who supplied Saddam Hussein's regime with weapons of mass destruction and training on how to use them.
Even as Bush urged military action against Iraq for the country's failure to divulge details of its alleged chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government covertly removed 8,000 of the 11,800 pages of the weapons declaration the Iraqi government had submitted to the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But the Iraqis released copies of the full report to key media outlets in Europe. It turns out that the missing pages may have contained damning details on 24 U.S.-based corporations, various federal departments and nuclear weapons labs, and several high-ranking members of the Reagan and Bush administrations that, from 1983 until 1990, helped supply Hussein with botulinum toxins, anthrax, gas gangrene bacteria, the makings for nuclear weapons, and associated instruction. Among those implicated: Eastman Kodak, Dupont, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Bechtel, the U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Agriculture, the Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia nuclear weapons labs, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield.
Michael I. Niman, The Humanist and ArtVoice, March/April 2003.
4. Rumsfield's plan to provoke terrorists
Floyd is deeply wrong and detached from reality. This P2 of which he speaks is now the "flypaper" strategy currently in use in Iraq. The idea is to draw the terrorists and their supporters into the theater and have the US troops fight them there rather than in, say, Boise. Bring them out into the open and then kill them. Sounds like a plan to me. Hell, I think we should have fundraisers to buy their plane tickets.
5. The effort to make unions disappear
This is just absurd. To prevent people in jobs that are vital to our national security from being unfireable for things like, gross incompetence they tried to prevent the TSA from unionizing. Further, allowing them to unionize would be granting the Democrats and automatic 30,000 new voters and special interest group that they would have to throw money at for the next 40 years. See also, NEA.
If, however, they were ACTUALLY trying to make unions disappear, I wish they'd get on with it already so I can dance on the grave of the AFL-CIO.
"most progressive unions – having shut down ports up and down the Pacific coast in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal and, later, the anti-WTO protesters in Seattle during the '90s.) "
More likely, it went something like this:
Corrupt Union Mafiosi controlled (I repeat myself) Boss: "Hey, let's *ahem* strike!"
Laborers Who Joined a Union Because They Can't Compete in the Real World: "What for?"
"In sympathy for Mumia Abu Jamal."
"Who?"
"Look, do you want a four day weekend or dontcha?"
"Free Mumia!"
6. Closing access to information technology
Oh my God! Companies being given control over their own products!? What ever shall we do? Yes, we all know about the stifiling of dissent and the camps that Ubergruppenfuher Aschcroft has set up around the nation to silence those against the war. I remember 'blogs before they were shut down. Likewise when libraries were not only free with free internet service and many of them refused to block pron sites as that was "censorship." Not like now with those armed guards checking ID's to make sure that no enemies of the state get in.
7. Treaty busting by the United States
"adopted a policy of preemptive military strikes,"
Good.
"waged an illegal war against Iraq,"
Wrong. Were 17 resolutions just not enough? What part of "grave consequences" and "final opportunity" do you not understand?
"and actually voted to authorize a U.S. military attack on the International Criminal Court in The Hague should the ICC dare try any American for war crimes."
Good ! Let's remember that right wing extremists like Tom Daschle and Hillary Clinton signed that in a 99-0 vote.
"In fact, the United States has now "either blatantly violated or gradually subverted" at least nine multilateral treaties on which it is a signatory, Project Censored found. These include the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Commission, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, and the Rome Statute of the ICC. "
Signing a treaty and ratifiying it are two different things. We never ratified Kyoto or the ICC and with good reason. Both are an attempt to shackle America and bring her to Europe's heel. No thanks.
8. U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects
Crap crap crap. The EU, WHO and every other reputable study has concluded that DU is not harmful unless you ingest or inhale massive amounts of it. For the writer to make such absolutely absurd (and dishonest) claims that "research overwhelmingly suggests" that these ailments are the result of DU is the real story here.
Read some links and then get back to me.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/
http://www.nrpb.org/faq/du/index.htm
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb032603.shtml
Let's see: DU which has been studied extensively by many many independant parties and found to be harmless yet it is the cause? Or, could it possibly be that, oh, I don't know, tons of nerve and bioagents. Maybe, just maybe, those chem and nerve agents Saddam and his ilk were known to lob around that neighborhood might be the cause of these ailments? If you want to talk about how the US govt. kept quiet the use of, and exposure to chem and nerve agents in Gulf War 1, you have my attention. Esp. when 60 minutes asked some DOD spokesmen about troop exposure to chem and nerve agents. He waffled and waffled until he refused to concede that our troops weren't exposed.
[i]Former Sergeant First Class Carol Picou will never be the same after serving in the first Gulf War. On the frontlines with a mobile medical unit, "I noticed that all the bodies that were on the highways and the tanks and all the armament that was damaged was burnt," the veteran nurse told Hustler magazine last spring. "It was actually literally black, and I thought the Iraqi people were black-skinned. It amazed me that they were burnt that bad – that we would have used some type of armament that would actually melt these people into their vehicles." [/i]
A few things: We don't know anything about how these people died. Could be they died from secondary explosions in the vehicles they were travelling in. Could be their skin turned black from putirification which occurs very rapidly in open deserts. DU cannot, in any way, "melt" people. Even it's most ardent critics will concede that.
Final question: Do you really think Hustler is a reliable source for news? You decry Fox but embrace Huslter?
9. In Afghanistan: poverty, women's rights, and civil disruption worse than ever
[i]"Rather than allow the international community to supply sufficient security forces to safeguard Afghan citizens from brutal warlords – and thereby create the foundation necessary for democracy and reconstruction – the United States has instead financed and armed regional warlords in its effort to root out the last remaining al-Qaeda forces. [i/]
Rather than do anything about the horrendous treatment of women at the hands of the Taliban, the International Community (that's the UN) once again vigorously wagged it's impotent finger and warned them with serious consequences should their behavior continue. "They will not recieve any of the latest French films" said French Culture Minister, M. Feckless. Fierce shrugging continues in Belgium
As a result, by October 2002 – a year after the U.S. embarked on its campaign to "liberate" that war-torn Central Asian country – private armies were estimated to be 700,000 strong. (The International Security Assistance Force, in contrast, consists of a scant 5,000 troops – only enough to provide meager protection for Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.)
Let’s try to remember: we have a huge presence in Iraq that is taking up our limited resources. Iraq first, the rest later. Also try to remember the massive strategic importance that Iraq has and Afghanistan does not.
The practice has, in effect, strengthened the nation's endemic system of military feudalism. The heroin trade has skyrocketed. Life expectancy is a mere 46 years – with more than one in four children not making it to their fifth birthday. Only 10 percent of those who survived had access to an education. In many regions the constraints placed on women's basic liberties have reverted to those imposed by the Taliban. Per capita average yearly income was only $280. And the basic infrastructure needed to reintroduce law and order – like a working justice system, banking institutions, a national army – remained a pipe dream.
In short, thanks to American policies, Afghanis are more forsaken than ever. Yet, as far as the mainstream U.S. media are concerned, Afghanis' worst fear has come true: Afghanistan has once again dropped off the corporate media's radar – and, with it, that of the American public.
Are these recent problems? Do you really think that we can waive our magic wand and undo 20 years of destruction from civil wars, Soviet invasion and self-destruction imposed by the Taliban? These people have more food and more access to clean water and immunizations than they’ve ever had before. It’s not perfect but we’re working on it. More than the UN or the EUnichs can say.
Ahmed Rashid, The Nation, 10/14/02; Pranjal Tiwari, Left Turn, February-March 2003; Jan Goodwin, The Nation, 4/29/02; Scott Carrier, with a photo essay by Chien-Min Chung, Mother Jones, July-August 2002.
10. Africa faces new threat of new colonialism
Many Americans are now at least marginally aware of recent neoliberal economic programs such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas and Plan Colombia. But how many have heard of the New Partnership for Africa's Development – a plan being forwarded by the world's most powerful industrialized nations?
NEPAD was launched at the G8 meeting in June 2002 – presumably to help combat poverty in Africa by encouraging outside investment. Curiously enough, the architects of the program didn't bother to consult with representatives of a single African nation while drawing up their plans. Critics fear the program is just another bid by more powerful nations to exploit the continent's last remaining natural resources – at the expense of Africans themselves.
First-world meddling has already wrought havoc on Africa. During the cold war, the United States alone injected $1.5 billion worth of weaponry and training into the continent – now the most war-torn in the world. From 1991 to 1995 the U.S. increased its military contributions to 50 out of Africa's 53 nations. Millions have died from war, displacement, disease, and starvation as a result.
Dumbass, we didn’t “inject” weaponry and training, we SOLD it. Try to get that through your thick skull! Second, the only thing that is going to save Africa from itself is globalization. Unless or until we start putting massive amounts of factories and other manufacturing and mining efforts into Africa they have no hope. To a country they are all corrupt to the core and run by strongmen who line their own pockets with countless dumps of cash from the US, the UN and others. To lay the blame for the destruction and war in Africa at the feet of the US is disgusting.
Meanwhile, structural adjustment programs force-fed to African nations by the IMF, World Bank, and G8 in the name of development have only resulted in the continent's foreign debt rising by a whopping 500 percent over the past 20 years. More of the same isn't likely to help.
We put in those controls to stop the hemmorage of funds heading to private bank accounts! There’s nothing wrong with demanding accountability when you donate money to someone.
Michelle Robidoux, Left Turn, July-August 2002; Asad Ismi, Briarpatch, Vol. 32, No. 1 (excerpted from the CCPA Monitor, October 2002); Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, New Internationalist, January-February 2003. Project Censored awards ceremony and book-release party, with keynote speaker Cynthia McKinney, MC Larry Bensky, and progressive journalists and intellectuals, takes place Oct. 4, 6 p.m., Jewish Cultural Center, 200 San Pedro, San Rafael. $25. (707) 664-3373, www.projectcensored.org. E-mail Camille T. Taiara at camilleTK@sfbg.com.
1. The neoconservative plan for global dominance
Indeed, the neocons have had the Persian Gulf in their crosshairs for 30 years now. Ever since the oil crisis of 1976 and the Gulf states' nationalization of their petroleum industries in the years that preceded it, the United States began building up forces in the region – primarily in Saudi Arabia – and strengthening relationships with regional dictatorships. The reasons seem simple: the region holds two-thirds of the world's oil.
1. To say that this has been "censored" is just silly. I"ve heard endless yammering about this very topic from all corners of the media.
2. The author implies that we are going to seize and control the Persian Gulf. If so, why have we not done so? Why not do so now? What are we waiting for?
3. Access to oil is of vital strategic importance to almost every nation on earth. Any nation without access to vital resources will ultimately go to war to get what they cannot get peacefully.
2. Homeland security threatens civil liberties
1. Yes, this is a huge huge secret. I've not heard one single lefty raising holy hell (I know, a religious reference, I'll report for re-education in a minute.) about this one. No sir, first I'm hearing of this one.
3. U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report
Bush administration insiders often take extreme measures to protect their own – including those who supplied Saddam Hussein's regime with weapons of mass destruction and training on how to use them.
Even as Bush urged military action against Iraq for the country's failure to divulge details of its alleged chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government covertly removed 8,000 of the 11,800 pages of the weapons declaration the Iraqi government had submitted to the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But the Iraqis released copies of the full report to key media outlets in Europe. It turns out that the missing pages may have contained damning details on 24 U.S.-based corporations, various federal departments and nuclear weapons labs, and several high-ranking members of the Reagan and Bush administrations that, from 1983 until 1990, helped supply Hussein with botulinum toxins, anthrax, gas gangrene bacteria, the makings for nuclear weapons, and associated instruction. Among those implicated: Eastman Kodak, Dupont, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Bechtel, the U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Agriculture, the Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia nuclear weapons labs, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield.
Michael I. Niman, The Humanist and ArtVoice, March/April 2003.
4. Rumsfield's plan to provoke terrorists
Floyd is deeply wrong and detached from reality. This P2 of which he speaks is now the "flypaper" strategy currently in use in Iraq. The idea is to draw the terrorists and their supporters into the theater and have the US troops fight them there rather than in, say, Boise. Bring them out into the open and then kill them. Sounds like a plan to me. Hell, I think we should have fundraisers to buy their plane tickets.
5. The effort to make unions disappear
This is just absurd. To prevent people in jobs that are vital to our national security from being unfireable for things like, gross incompetence they tried to prevent the TSA from unionizing. Further, allowing them to unionize would be granting the Democrats and automatic 30,000 new voters and special interest group that they would have to throw money at for the next 40 years. See also, NEA.
If, however, they were ACTUALLY trying to make unions disappear, I wish they'd get on with it already so I can dance on the grave of the AFL-CIO.
"most progressive unions – having shut down ports up and down the Pacific coast in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal and, later, the anti-WTO protesters in Seattle during the '90s.) "
More likely, it went something like this:
Corrupt Union Mafiosi controlled (I repeat myself) Boss: "Hey, let's *ahem* strike!"
Laborers Who Joined a Union Because They Can't Compete in the Real World: "What for?"
"In sympathy for Mumia Abu Jamal."
"Who?"
"Look, do you want a four day weekend or dontcha?"
"Free Mumia!"
6. Closing access to information technology
Oh my God! Companies being given control over their own products!? What ever shall we do? Yes, we all know about the stifiling of dissent and the camps that Ubergruppenfuher Aschcroft has set up around the nation to silence those against the war. I remember 'blogs before they were shut down. Likewise when libraries were not only free with free internet service and many of them refused to block pron sites as that was "censorship." Not like now with those armed guards checking ID's to make sure that no enemies of the state get in.
7. Treaty busting by the United States
"adopted a policy of preemptive military strikes,"
Good.
"waged an illegal war against Iraq,"
Wrong. Were 17 resolutions just not enough? What part of "grave consequences" and "final opportunity" do you not understand?
"and actually voted to authorize a U.S. military attack on the International Criminal Court in The Hague should the ICC dare try any American for war crimes."
Good ! Let's remember that right wing extremists like Tom Daschle and Hillary Clinton signed that in a 99-0 vote.
"In fact, the United States has now "either blatantly violated or gradually subverted" at least nine multilateral treaties on which it is a signatory, Project Censored found. These include the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Commission, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the U.N. Convention on Climate Change, and the Rome Statute of the ICC. "
Signing a treaty and ratifiying it are two different things. We never ratified Kyoto or the ICC and with good reason. Both are an attempt to shackle America and bring her to Europe's heel. No thanks.
8. U.S. and British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects
Crap crap crap. The EU, WHO and every other reputable study has concluded that DU is not harmful unless you ingest or inhale massive amounts of it. For the writer to make such absolutely absurd (and dishonest) claims that "research overwhelmingly suggests" that these ailments are the result of DU is the real story here.
Read some links and then get back to me.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/
http://www.nrpb.org/faq/du/index.htm
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb032603.shtml
Let's see: DU which has been studied extensively by many many independant parties and found to be harmless yet it is the cause? Or, could it possibly be that, oh, I don't know, tons of nerve and bioagents. Maybe, just maybe, those chem and nerve agents Saddam and his ilk were known to lob around that neighborhood might be the cause of these ailments? If you want to talk about how the US govt. kept quiet the use of, and exposure to chem and nerve agents in Gulf War 1, you have my attention. Esp. when 60 minutes asked some DOD spokesmen about troop exposure to chem and nerve agents. He waffled and waffled until he refused to concede that our troops weren't exposed.
[i]Former Sergeant First Class Carol Picou will never be the same after serving in the first Gulf War. On the frontlines with a mobile medical unit, "I noticed that all the bodies that were on the highways and the tanks and all the armament that was damaged was burnt," the veteran nurse told Hustler magazine last spring. "It was actually literally black, and I thought the Iraqi people were black-skinned. It amazed me that they were burnt that bad – that we would have used some type of armament that would actually melt these people into their vehicles." [/i]
A few things: We don't know anything about how these people died. Could be they died from secondary explosions in the vehicles they were travelling in. Could be their skin turned black from putirification which occurs very rapidly in open deserts. DU cannot, in any way, "melt" people. Even it's most ardent critics will concede that.
Final question: Do you really think Hustler is a reliable source for news? You decry Fox but embrace Huslter?
9. In Afghanistan: poverty, women's rights, and civil disruption worse than ever
[i]"Rather than allow the international community to supply sufficient security forces to safeguard Afghan citizens from brutal warlords – and thereby create the foundation necessary for democracy and reconstruction – the United States has instead financed and armed regional warlords in its effort to root out the last remaining al-Qaeda forces. [i/]
Rather than do anything about the horrendous treatment of women at the hands of the Taliban, the International Community (that's the UN) once again vigorously wagged it's impotent finger and warned them with serious consequences should their behavior continue. "They will not recieve any of the latest French films" said French Culture Minister, M. Feckless. Fierce shrugging continues in Belgium
As a result, by October 2002 – a year after the U.S. embarked on its campaign to "liberate" that war-torn Central Asian country – private armies were estimated to be 700,000 strong. (The International Security Assistance Force, in contrast, consists of a scant 5,000 troops – only enough to provide meager protection for Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.)
Let’s try to remember: we have a huge presence in Iraq that is taking up our limited resources. Iraq first, the rest later. Also try to remember the massive strategic importance that Iraq has and Afghanistan does not.
The practice has, in effect, strengthened the nation's endemic system of military feudalism. The heroin trade has skyrocketed. Life expectancy is a mere 46 years – with more than one in four children not making it to their fifth birthday. Only 10 percent of those who survived had access to an education. In many regions the constraints placed on women's basic liberties have reverted to those imposed by the Taliban. Per capita average yearly income was only $280. And the basic infrastructure needed to reintroduce law and order – like a working justice system, banking institutions, a national army – remained a pipe dream.
In short, thanks to American policies, Afghanis are more forsaken than ever. Yet, as far as the mainstream U.S. media are concerned, Afghanis' worst fear has come true: Afghanistan has once again dropped off the corporate media's radar – and, with it, that of the American public.
Are these recent problems? Do you really think that we can waive our magic wand and undo 20 years of destruction from civil wars, Soviet invasion and self-destruction imposed by the Taliban? These people have more food and more access to clean water and immunizations than they’ve ever had before. It’s not perfect but we’re working on it. More than the UN or the EUnichs can say.
Ahmed Rashid, The Nation, 10/14/02; Pranjal Tiwari, Left Turn, February-March 2003; Jan Goodwin, The Nation, 4/29/02; Scott Carrier, with a photo essay by Chien-Min Chung, Mother Jones, July-August 2002.
10. Africa faces new threat of new colonialism
Many Americans are now at least marginally aware of recent neoliberal economic programs such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas and Plan Colombia. But how many have heard of the New Partnership for Africa's Development – a plan being forwarded by the world's most powerful industrialized nations?
NEPAD was launched at the G8 meeting in June 2002 – presumably to help combat poverty in Africa by encouraging outside investment. Curiously enough, the architects of the program didn't bother to consult with representatives of a single African nation while drawing up their plans. Critics fear the program is just another bid by more powerful nations to exploit the continent's last remaining natural resources – at the expense of Africans themselves.
First-world meddling has already wrought havoc on Africa. During the cold war, the United States alone injected $1.5 billion worth of weaponry and training into the continent – now the most war-torn in the world. From 1991 to 1995 the U.S. increased its military contributions to 50 out of Africa's 53 nations. Millions have died from war, displacement, disease, and starvation as a result.
Dumbass, we didn’t “inject” weaponry and training, we SOLD it. Try to get that through your thick skull! Second, the only thing that is going to save Africa from itself is globalization. Unless or until we start putting massive amounts of factories and other manufacturing and mining efforts into Africa they have no hope. To a country they are all corrupt to the core and run by strongmen who line their own pockets with countless dumps of cash from the US, the UN and others. To lay the blame for the destruction and war in Africa at the feet of the US is disgusting.
Meanwhile, structural adjustment programs force-fed to African nations by the IMF, World Bank, and G8 in the name of development have only resulted in the continent's foreign debt rising by a whopping 500 percent over the past 20 years. More of the same isn't likely to help.
We put in those controls to stop the hemmorage of funds heading to private bank accounts! There’s nothing wrong with demanding accountability when you donate money to someone.
Michelle Robidoux, Left Turn, July-August 2002; Asad Ismi, Briarpatch, Vol. 32, No. 1 (excerpted from the CCPA Monitor, October 2002); Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, New Internationalist, January-February 2003. Project Censored awards ceremony and book-release party, with keynote speaker Cynthia McKinney, MC Larry Bensky, and progressive journalists and intellectuals, takes place Oct. 4, 6 p.m., Jewish Cultural Center, 200 San Pedro, San Rafael. $25. (707) 664-3373, www.projectcensored.org
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