[aldo_14]

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid:86394

Following are Project Censored's Top 10 stories for the past year.

1. The feds and the media muddy the debate over Internet freedom

In its relatively brief life, the Internet has been touted as the greatest example of democracy ever invented by humankind. It's given disillusioned Americans hope that there is a way to get out the truth, even if you don't own airwaves, newspapers or satellite stations. It's forced the mainstream media to talk about issues they previously ignored, such as the Downing Street memo and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.

So, when the Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies aren't required to share their cables with other Internet service providers, it shouldn't have been a surprise that the major media did little in terms of exploring whether this ruling would destroy Internet freedom. As Elliot Cohen reported at buzzflash.com, the issue was misleadingly framed as an argument over regulation, when it's really a case of the Federal Communications Commission and Congress talking about giving cable and telephone companies the freedom to control supply and content--a decision that could have them playing favorites and forcing consumers to pay extra to get information and services that currently are free.

The good news? With the Senate still set to debate the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006, as the network-neutrality bill is called, it's not too late to write congressmembers, alert friends and acquaintances and join grassroots groups to protect Internet freedom and diversity.

Sources: buzzflash.com, July 18. 2005. Title: "Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story." Author: Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

2. Halliburton charged with selling nuclear technology to Iran

Halliburton, the notorious U.S. energy company, sold key nuclear-reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions, journalist Jason Leopold reported on Globalresearch.ca, the Web site of a Canadian research group. He cited sources intimate with the business dealings of Halliburton and Kish.

The story is particularly juicy, because Vice President Dick Cheney, who now claims to want to stop Iran from getting nukes, was president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s, at which time he may have advocated business dealings with Iran, in violation of U.S. law.

Leopold contended that the Halliburton-Kish deals have helped Iran become capable of enriching weapons-grade uranium.

Leopold's filed his report in 2005, when Iran's new hard-line government was rounding up relatives and business associates of former Iranian president and defeated mullah presidential candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani, amid accusations of widespread corruption in Iran's oil industry.

Leopold also reported that in 2004 and 2005, Halliburton had a close business relationship with Cyrus Nasseri, an Oriental Oil Kish official who the Iranian government subsequently accused of receiving up to $1 million from Halliburton for giving them Iran's nuclear secrets.

Source: GlobalResearch.ca, Aug. 5, 2005. Title: "Halliburton Secretly Doing Business With Key Member of Iran's Nuclear Team." Author: Jason Leopold.

3. World oceans in extreme danger

Rising sea levels. A melting Arctic. Governments denying global warming is happening as they rush to map the ocean floor in hopes of claiming rights to oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, zinc and the planet's last pristine fishing grounds. This is the sobering picture author Julia Whitty painted in a beautifully crafted piece that makes the point that "there is only one ocean on Earth ... a Mobiuslike ribbon winding through all the ocean basins, rising and falling, and stirring the waters of the world."

The problem is that if this world ocean, which encompasses 70.78 percent of our planet, is in peril, then we're all screwed. As Whitty reported in Mother Jones magazine, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005 found "the first clear evidence that the world ocean is growing warmer," including the discovery "that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past 40 years as the result of human-induced greenhouse gases." While a Scripps researcher recommended that "the Bush administration convene a Manhattan-style project" to see if mitigations are still possible, the U.S. government has yet to lift a finger toward addressing the problem.

Source: Mother Jones, March/April 2006. Title: The Fate of the Ocean. Author: Julia Whitty.

4. Hunger and homelessness increasing in the United States

As hunger and homelessness rise in the United States, the Bush administration plans to get rid of a source of much of the data that supports this embarrassing reality--a survey that's been used to improve state and federal programs for retired and low-income Americans.

President Bush's proposed budget for fiscal year 2007 includes an effort to eliminate the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation. Founded in 1984, the survey tracks American families' use of Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child care and temporary assistance for needy families.

With legislators and researchers trying to prevent the cut, author Abid Aslam argued that this isn't just an isolated budget matter, but the Bush administration's third attempt in as many years to remove funding from politically embarrassing research. In 2003, it tried to whack the Bureau of Labor Statistics mass-layoff report, and in 2004 and 2005, it attempted to drop the bureau's questions on the hiring and firing of women from its employment data.

Sources: The NewStandard, December 2005. Title: "New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness." Author: Brendan Coyne; oneworld.net, March 2006. Title: "U.S. Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire." Author: Abid Aslam.

5. High-tech genocide in Congo

If you believe the corporate media, then the ongoing genocide in the Congo is all just a case of ugly tribal warfare. But that, according to stories published in Z Magazine and the Earth First! Journal, and heard on radio program The Taylor Report, is a superficial, simplistic explanation that fails to connect the dots between this terrible suffering and the immense fortunes that stand to be made from manufacturing cell phones, laptop computers and other high-tech equipment.

What's really at stake in this bloodbath is control of natural resources such as diamonds, tin and copper, as well as cobalt, which is essential for the nuclear, chemical, aerospace and defense industries--and most importantly for the high-tech industry, coltan and niobum. These disturbing reports concluded that a meaningful analysis of Congolese geopolitics requires a knowledge and understanding of the organized crime perpetuated by multinationals.

Sources: The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005. Title: "The World's Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor Talks to Keith Harmon Snow"; Earth First! Journal, August 2005. Title: "High-Tech Genocide." Author: Sprocket; Z Magazine, March 1, 2006. Title: "Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo." Authors: Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski.

6. Federal whistleblower protection in jeopardy

Though record numbers of federal workers have been sounding the alarm on waste, fraud and abuse since Bush became president, the agency charged with defending government whistleblowers has reportedly been throwing out hundreds of cases--and advancing almost none. Statistics released at the end of 2005 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility led to claims that Special Counsel Scott Bloch, who was appointed by Bush in 2004, is overseeing the systematic elimination of whistleblower rights.

What makes this development particularly troubling is that, thanks to a decline in congressional oversight and hard-hitting investigative journalism, the role of the Office of Special Counsel in advancing governmental transparency is more vital than ever. As a result, employees within the OSC have filed a whistleblower complaint against Bloch himself.

Ironically, Bloch has now decided not to disclose the number of whistleblower complaints in which an employee obtained a favorable outcome, such as re-instatement or reversal of a disciplinary action, making it hard to tell who, if anyone, is being helped by the agency.

Source: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Web site. Titles: "Whistleblowers Get Help from Bush Administration," Dec. 5, 2005; "Long-Delayed Investigation of Special Counsel Finally Begins," Oct. 18, 2005; "Back Door Rollback of Federal Whistleblower Protections," Sept. 22, 2005. Author: Jeff Ruch.

7. U.S. Operatives torture detainees to death in Afghanistan and Iraq

Hooded. Gagged. Strangled. Asphyxiated. Beaten with blunt objects. Subjected to sleep deprivation and hot and cold environmental conditions. These are just some of the forms of torture that detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan have been subjected to, according to an American Civil Liberties Union analysis of autopsy and death reports that were made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

While reports of torture aren't new, the documents are evidence of torture as a policy, begging a whole bunch of uncomfortable questions, such as: Who authorized such techniques? And why have the resulting deaths been covered up?

Of the 44 death reports released under ACLU's FOIA request, 21 were homicides, and eight appeared to have resulted from these abusive torture techniques.

Sources: American Civil Liberties Web site, October 24, 2005. Title: "U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq"; tomdispatch.com, March 5, 2006. Title: "Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy From Guantanamo to Iraq." Author: Dahr Jamail.

8. Pentagon exempt from Freedom of Information Act

In 2005, the Department of Defense pushed for and was granted exemption from Freedom of Information Act requests, a crucial law that allows journalists and watchdogs access to federal documents. The stated reason for this dramatic and dangerous move? The FOIA is a hindrance to protecting national security. The ruling could hamper the efforts of groups like the ACLU, which relied on FOIA to uncover more than 30,000 documents on the U.S. military's torture of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, including the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. (See story No. 7).

With ACLU lawyers predicting that the end result of this ruling is likely to be more abuse, and with Americans becoming increasingly concerned about the federal government's illegal intelligence gathering activities, Congress has imposed a two-year sunset on this FOIA exemption, ending December 2007--which is cold comfort to anyone currently rotting in a U.S. overseas military facility or a CIA secret prison.

Sources: The NewStandard, May 6, 2005. Title: "Pentagon Seeks Greater Immunity from Freedom of Information." Author: Michelle Chen; Newspaper Association of America Web site, posted December 2005. Title: "FOIA Exemption Granted to Federal Agency."

9. World Bank funds Israel-Palestine wall

In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall Israel is building deep into Palestinian territory should be torn down. Instead, construction of this cement barrier, which annexes Israeli settlements and breaks the continuity of Palestinian territory, has accelerated. In the interim, the World Bank has come up with a framework for a Middle Eastern Free Trade Area, which would be financed by the World Bank and built on Palestinian land around the wall to encourage export-oriented economic development. But with Israel ineligible for World Bank loans, the plan seems to translate into Palestinians paying for the modernization of checkpoints around a wall they've always opposed that help lock in and exploit their labor.

Sources: Left Turn Issue No. 18. Title: "Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of World Bank." Author: Jamal Juma'; Al-Jazeera, March 9, 2005. Title: "U.S. Free Trade Agreements Split Arab Opinion." Author: Linda Heard.

10. Expanded air war in Iraq kills more civilians
At the end of 2005, U.S. Central Command Air Force statistics showed an increase in American air missions, a trend that was accompanied by a rise in civilian deaths, thanks to the increased bombing of Iraqi cities. But with U.S. bombings and the killing of innocent civilians acting as a highly effective recruiting tool among Iraqi militants, the U.S. war on Iraq seemed to increasingly be following that of the war on Vietnam. As Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker at the end of 2005, a key component in the federal government's troop-reduction plan was the replacement of departing U.S. troops with U.S. airpower.

Meanwhile, Hersh's sources within the military have expressed fears that if Iraqis are allowed to call in the targets of these aerial strikes, they could abuse that power to settle old scores. With Iraq devolving into a full-blown Sunni-Shiite civil war, and the United States increasingly drawn into the sectarian violence, reporters like Hersh and Dahr Jamail fear that the only way out for the United States is to increase the air power even more as they pull out, causing the cycle of sectarian violence to escalate even further.

[redsniper]

*reads*
*leaves the planet*

[Bob-san]

*reads*
*tries to get elected world leader to fix these damn problems with socialist ideals for equality, but without the all the problems of extremists*

[Sarafan]

*reads*

*immediately starts building an army to conquer the world after the inevitable WWIII (wich will make the 2nd look like a firecracker) and set himself as emperor because only under a united banner can things like these be made right, yes, the first target is the US, if anything there is still alive by that time, its people have nothing to worry from my benevolent rule, only its leaders who will be tortured in the most painfull way first then executed again in the most painfull manner*.

[BlackDove]

Nobody cares.

Complacency killed the world.

A whimper, not a bang.

[TrashMan]

*reads*

*Helps Sarafan to build up a vast army*

[NGTM-1R]

Much as it's likely to end the world that I agree with Blackdove in any way, shape, or form, I have to wonder how much of this was really "censored" and how much just flew under the radar or ended up on the cutting-room floor at random.

[Mars]

If the world wants to end let it... I'm at peace right now.

[vyper]

[Mars]

That's my way of saying: "I DON'T CARE ANYMORE"

No matter what I do the world will find a way of killing itself... I'm out of control and I know it... so why not just live my life like nothing was happening? In the end the result will be the same. The fact that we have 10 apocalyptic scenarios just in this list is bad enough. Throw in North Korea and other such issues, and you have too many potential ends of world to deal with.

[Prophet]

Kim Jong Il isn't going to end the world. You're giving him way too much credit...

[Descenterace]

10 apocalyptic scenarios, but you fail to consider probabilities. Risk is the product of consequence and probability. The world is a big and varied place; the chances of most of the above actually coming to pass are very small.

The problem is not just complacency. The history of a population of six billion has vast inertia, even if those steering it only number in the thousands. Replacing those in power would not solve anything, since the cycle would eventually begin again. It'd buy time, perhaps, but changing leadership by force has unpredictable consequences on the rest of the population and changing it by vote requires a majority (which is how the current guys got into power, at least in democracies).
The other approach is to start at the bottom and aim for a global change in how humans think. With the Internet this is possible, but still requires a group with appreciable historic inertia to exert a lot of effort. Six billion minds need to be changed. Doing that fast enough would require millions to cooperate. Cooperation on that scale is rarely seen outside of wartime, which says a lot about people, really.

[Mefustae]

**** it, let's just destroy 99.95% of humanity and start over. Purge this frail and corrupt race from the face of the planet, taking with it the old hatreds and prejudices. Much like one would cut out cancerous cells, let us extract humanity from this Earth with no mercy, and rebuild society with a strong and just foundation.

...With me as Supreme Overlord, obviously.

[BlackDove]

The history of a population of six billion has vast inertia, even if those steering it only number in the thousands. Replacing those in power would not solve anything, since the cycle would eventually begin again.

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Seems like Tommy knows more being dead than you do being alive.

[aldo_14]

http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/16.html

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

[TrashMan]

God find Aldo 

[Sarafan]

**** it, let's just destroy 99.95% of humanity and start over. Purge this frail and corrupt race from the face of the planet, taking with it the old hatreds and prejudices. Much like one would cut out cancerous cells, let us extract humanity from this Earth with no mercy, and rebuild society with a strong and just foundation.

...With me as Supreme Overlord, obviously.

Oh, no, you dont. I'm already doing that. But if you help me as Trashman did, I'll let you live and have one of the new territories, remember: loyalty is to be rewarded, treason is to be crushed.

[BlackDove]

http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/16.html

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

That's pretty good but it doesn't much relate to the context. And this is fairly inaccurate in the long run, because there have been better and worse governments, with the "low" numbers in heavy fluctuation, even though I agree fundamentally things always do end up that way.

[Kosh]

Much as it's likely to end the world that I agree with Blackdove in any way, shape, or form, I have to wonder how much of this was really "censored" and how much just flew under the radar or ended up on the cutting-room floor at random.

Some of this stuff is pretty inflammatory, a lot of it is embarrassing to the Bush administration. Standning order for the media seems to be "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". I highly doubt, given the nature of the material, that these were accidently removed.

[Nuclear1]

Much as it's likely to end the world that I agree with Blackdove in any way, shape, or form, I have to wonder how much of this was really "censored" and how much just flew under the radar or ended up on the cutting-room floor at random.

Some of this stuff is pretty inflammatory, a lot of it is embarrassing to the Bush administration. Standning order for the media seems to be "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". I highly doubt, given the nature of the material, that these were accidently removed.

Or maybe a lot of it is simply the same-old, same-old?  Halliburton corruption, civilian deaths in Iraq, war in Africa, torture... haven't we all heard plenty of it before?

Whether it's right or not, the media knows when viewers and readers have had enough of a particular topic; chances are that these stories were canned by the editors for that reason.