In the dark

We know a lot more now about the dangers and disasters of U.S. empire building in Iraq—the ongoing bloodshed on the ground, expansion of terrorist activities, the huge budget-busting costs of occupation, the stretching and undermining of the military, and the increased sense of fear and insecurity many Americans feel as a result of the invasion.

We also now have a better handle on the immediate and flimsy reasons for the invasion. Bush told us we were going to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened us; he was reconstituting his nuclear-weapons programs (the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Africa); he had huge stocks of chemical and biological weapons that could be launched somehow in a way that threatened the United States. And finally that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda.

As much as 70 percent of the American public believed this, according to some polls. But now it seems clear these were all falsehoods. The lies and deceptions Bush and his minions were feeding to the media are making their way into public discourse and are being covered fairly extensively in the press, in columns by Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd in the New York Times and in wide-ranging reporting at the Washington Post and elsewhere.

But far, far less is known about the planning and the actors that brought us this foreign-policy disaster. What ideas and world views motivated the push to overreach and try to dominate the globe, with Iraq as step No. 1? What secrets, maneuvers, behind-the-scenes policy/power struggles after the attacks of 9/11 led the United States to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11?

The reminder that the media often report the “news” as fed to them by those in power and skip past the real news—the reasons for the behaviors and policies—is good justification for the continued existence of Project Censored, a program that for 27 years has collected under-reported stories from around the country. About 200 students and faculty from Sonoma State University compiled and reviewed the stories for Project Censored. The project described its mission “to stimulate responsible journalists to provide more mass-media coverage of those under-covered issues and to encourage the general public to demand mass-media coverage of those issues or to seek information from other sources.”

Most of the stories on Project Censored’s Top 10 relate to the United States’ war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. On the one hand, this emphasis indicates how the issue dominates the news, but on the other it illustrates how few news consumers really understand how the war happened or why. Taken together, these stories paint a chilling picture of a long-ranging plan to dominate huge sections of the globe militarily and economically and to silence dissent, curb civil liberties and undermine workers’ rights.

Some of the information published as part of the project is pretty shocking, like the fact that the United States removed 8,000 incriminating pages from Iraq’s weapons report to the United Nations, or that Donald Rumsfeld may have a plan to deliberately provoke terrorists, so we can react. Other issues, such as attacks on civil liberties, have been covered in the mainstream press but not in the comprehensive way Project Censored would like to see.

Here are Project Censored’s “Top 10 Censored Stories":

1. Neoconservative plan for global dominance
Project Censored has decided that the incredible lack of public knowledge of the U.S. plan for total global domination, as iterated by the Project for a New American Century, represents the media’s biggest failure over the past year. The PNAC plans advocated the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and other current foreign-policy objectives long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Chillingly, one document published by the PNAC in 2000 actually describes the need for a “new Pearl Harbor” to persuade the American public to accept the acts of war and aggression the administration wants to carry out. “But most people in the country are totally unaware that the PNAC exists,” said Peter Phillips, a professor at Sonoma State and majordomo of The Project Censored Project, “and that failure has aided and abetted this disaster in Iraq.”

According to Project Censored authors: “In the 1970s, the United States and the Middle East were embroiled in a tug-of-war over oil. At the time, the prospect of seizing control of Arab oil fields by force was considered out of line. Still, the idea of Middle East dominance was very attractive to a group of hard-line Washington insiders that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and other operatives. During the Clinton years, they were active in conservative think tanks like the PNAC. When Bush was elected, they came roaring back into power.”

In an update for the Project Censored Web site, Mother Jones writer Robert Dreyfuss noted, “There was very little examination in the media of the role of oil in American policy toward Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and what coverage did exist tended to pooh-pooh or debunk the idea that the war had anything to do with it.”

2. Homeland Security threatens civil liberties
While the media covered the Patriot Act and the so-called Patriot Act II, which was leaked to the press in February 2003, there wasn’t sufficient analysis of some of the truly dangerous and precedent-setting components of both acts. This goes especially for the shocking provision in Patriot II that would allow even U.S. citizens to be treated as enemy combatants and held without counsel, simply on suspicion of connections to terrorism.

“Under section 501, a U.S. citizen engaging in lawful activity can be picked off the streets or from home and taken to a secret military tribunal with no access to or notification of a lawyer, the press or family.” This would be considered justified if the agent “inferred from the conduct” suspicious intention.

Fortunately, Patriot I is under major duress in Congress, as both parties support significant revisions. Yet President Bush, realizing that he and his unpopular Attorney General John Ashcroft are losing popular support, is threatening a veto and has aggressively gone on the offense in favor of the repugnant Patriot II. Let’s see if the media have earned their lesson from Patriot I. Will they probe the new legislation much more thoroughly than the first round, which received inadequate analysis post 9/11?

3. United States illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report
Story three is the shockingly under-reported fact that the Bush administration removed a whopping 8,000 of 11,800 pages from the report the Iraqi government submitted to the U.N. Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The pages included details on how the United States had actually supplied Iraq with chemical and biological weapons and the building blocks for weapons of mass destruction. The pages reportedly implicate not only Reagan and Bush administration officials, but also major corporations including Bechtel, Eastman Kodak and Dupont and the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture.

In comments to Project Censored, Michael Niman, author of one of the articles cited, noted that his article was based on secondary sources, mostly from the international press, since the topic received an almost complete blackout in the U.S. press.

Referring to his first Project Censored nomination in 1989, in which he went into the bush in Costa Rica, Niman said, “With such thorough self-censorship in the U.S. press, reading the international press is now akin to going into the remote bush.”

4. Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists
Moscow Times columnist and CounterPunch contributor Chris Floyd developed this story off a small item in the Los Angeles Times in October 2002 about secret armies the Pentagon has been developing around the world.

“The Pro-active, Preemptive Operations Group (or Pee-Twos) will carry out secret missions designed to ‘stimulate reactions’ among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to ‘counterattack’ by U.S. forces,” Floyd wrote. “The Pee-Twos will thus come in handy whenever the regime hankers to add a little oil-laden real estate or a new military base to the Empire’s burgeoning portfolio. Just find a nest of violent malcontents, stir ’em with a stick, and presto: instant justification for whatever level of intervention-conquest-raping that you might desire.”

Floyd noted that while the story received considerable play in international and alternative media, it has hardly been mentioned in the mainstream U.S. press.

“At first glance, this decided lack of interest might seem a curious reaction, given the American media’s insatiable—and profitable—obsession with terrorism,” he told Project Censored. “But the media’s equally intense abhorrence of moral ambiguity—especially when it involves possible American complicity in mayhem and murder—makes the silence easier to understand.”

5. Effort to make unions disappear
The war on terrorism has also had the convenient side benefit for conservatives of making it easier for employers and the government to suppress organized labor in the name of national security. For example, in October 2002 Bush was able to force striking International Longshore and Warehouse Union members back to work in the San Francisco Bay Area in the name of national safety.

Chicago journalist Lee Sustar noted that labor coverage is usually woefully inadequate in the mainstream media, even though union membership, while shrinking, still makes up a national constituency 13 million strong.

“Twenty years ago, every paper had a beat reporter on labor who knew what was going on,” he said. “Today that’s not the case. Besides a token story on Labor Day or a human-interest story here and there, you don’t see coverage of labor. You only see coverage from the business side.”

Steven Greenhouse, the labor reporter for the New York Times, is one obvious exception to Sustar’s claim.

Ann Marie Cusac, whose story for The Progressive about the decimation of unions was cited, said she thinks the position of organized labor is worse than it has ever been.

She combed National Labor Relations Board files for egregious examples of the lengths to which employers will go to bust unions. And she found a lot. “They had a woman with carpal-tunnel syndrome pulling nails out of boards above her head because they wanted her to go on disability, so she couldn’t organize,” she said. “But she did it, even knowing she might disable herself. The willingness of people to sacrifice, because they know how important it is to unionize, is a sign of hope.”

6. Closing access to information technology
The potential closing of access to digital information is a development that could have a harmful effect on the powerful role online media play in side-stepping media gatekeepers and keeping people better informed.

“The FCC and Congress are currently overturning the public-interest rules that have encouraged the expansion of the Internet up until now,” wrote Arthur Stamoulis, whose story was published in Dollars and Sense.

The Internet currently provides a buffet of independent and international media sources to counter the mostly homogenous offerings of mainstream U.S. media, especially broadcast.

As the shift to broadband gains momentum, cable companies are trying hard to dominate the market and eventually control access.

In 2002, the Federal Communications Commission decided to allow cable networks to avoid common carrier requirements. Now the giant phone companies, which offer the competitive DSL services, want the same freedoms to control access to their lines. In the long run, instead of the thousands of small ISP services to choose from, the switch from dial-up to broadband means that users will have less and less choice over who provides their Internet access.

While the media finally woke up and gave significant coverage to the recent public rebellion against the FCC, which voted to increase media concentration even further, there has been scant coverage to the problem that the Internet as we know it might be lost.

7. Treaty busting by the United States
“The U.S. is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated or gradually subverted,” said Project Censored. These include the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Just as the Bush administration is crowing about the possibility of Saddam Hussein manufacturing nuclear or chemical weapons, it is violating treaties meant to curb these threats, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Commission.

8. United States/British Forces continue use of depleted-uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects
Another subject that victims have tried to get into the mainstream media for over a decade is the United States’ use of depleted uranium in Iraq, in both the recent invasion and in the Gulf War. Depleted uranium was also used in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia.

The writers cited, including some published in the Hustler magazine, noted that cancer rates have skyrocketed in Iraq since the first Gulf War, most likely because of the massive contamination of the soil with DU from the explosive, armor-piercing munitions. U.S. soldiers are also victims of this travesty, suffering Gulf War syndrome and other ailments many feel sure are linked to their exposure to DU.

Reese Erlich, a freelance journalist who reported on the topic for a syndicated radio broadcast and related Web site report, said the federal government has dealt with the issue of DU the way the tobacco industry deals with its liability problems.

“They’ll fog the issue so no one can say for sure what’s happening,” he said. “They’ll commission studies so they can say, ‘There are conflicting reports; we need more information.’ “

He noted that, while the U.S. media is quiet about the issue, it is a hot topic in the international press.

“When you get outside the U.S., the media are much more critical,” he said. “They refer to it as a weapon of mass destruction. This will be a legacy the U.S. has left in Iraq. Long after the electricity is repaired and the oil wells are pumping, children will be getting cancer. The U.S. knew this would happen; it can’t claim ignorance.”

9. In Afghanistan, poverty, women’s rights and civil disruption worse thAn ever
Though his work isn’t cited here, Erlich also reported on continuing poverty, civil disruption and repression of women in Afghanistan. While the country has virtually dropped off the radar screen in the U.S. press and public consciousness, it is suffering its worst decade of poverty ever. Warlords and tribal fiefdoms continue to rule the country, and women are as repressed as ever, contrary to the feel-good images of burqa-stripping that have been broadcast in the media here.

“Reporters by and large don’t go to Afghanistan to report on what they see,” said Erlich, who spent several weeks reporting in the country. “They go to the state department officials, so everything is filtered through these rose-colored glasses, saying things are getting better. But they’re not.”

10. Africa faces new threat of New Colonialism
While Afghanistan is being essentially ignored, African countries are getting plenty of attention from the United States—but not the kind of attention they need. Not many mainstream media stories deal with the formation in June 2002 of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development by a group of leaders from the world’s eight most powerful countries (the G8), who claim to be carrying out an anti-poverty campaign for the continent. But the group doesn’t include the head of a single African nation, and critics charge that the plan is more about opening the continent to international investment and looting its resources than fighting poverty.

“NEPAD is akin to Plan Colombia in its attempt to employ Western development techniques to provide economic opportunities for international investment,” said the Project Censored report.

Kari Lydersen writes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where this story first appeared.