http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16784
US Plan for Global Domination Tops Project Censored's Annual List
By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet
September 17, 2003
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 that many Americans feel as a result of the
invasion and its potential for blowback.
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 US. And finally that
Saddam was working with Al Qaeda. According to some polls, as much as 70 percent of the
public believed this. 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 pubic
discourse and are being covered fairly extensively in the press, in columns by Paul
Krugman and Maureen Dowd in the NY 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 worldviews motivated the push to overreach and try to
dominate the globe, with Iraq as step number one? What secrets, maneuvers behind the
scenes policy power struggles after the attacks of 9/11, led the U.S. to invade a country
that had nothing to do with 9/11?
The reminder that the media often reports the 'news" as fed to it by those in power, and
skips past the real news – the reasons for the behaviors and policies – is good reason for
the continued existence of Project Censored, a program in its 27th year that collects
under-reported stories from around the country and compiles a list of the top 10 "censored
stories" as well as 15 runner-ups. About 200 students and faculty from Sonoma State
University compiled and reviewed the stories for Project Censored. The project describes
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 Ten relate to the US's 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, how few news consumers really understand very little about how it
happened and 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 in the course of it. Some of
the information published as part of the project is pretty shocking, like the fact that
the US removed 8,000 incriminating pages from Iraq's weapons report to the UN; or that
Donald Rumsfeld may have a plan to deliberately provoke terrorists so we can react. Other
issues like the attacks on civil liberties have been covered in the mainstream press, but
not in the comprehensive way Project Censored would like to see.
The "Top Ten Censored Stories" followed by the 15 runner-ups:
1. The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance
Sources: The Sunday Herald (9/15/02), Harper's Magazine (10/02), Mother Jones (3/03),
Pilger.com (12/12/02)
Project Censored has decided that the incredible lack of public knowledge of the US plan
for total global domination, represented by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
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 major domo 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 notes
"There was very little examination in the media of the role of oil in American policy
towards 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
Sources: Global Outlook (Winter 2003), Rense.com (2-11-03 & Global Outlook, Volume 4),
Center for Public Integrity (publicintegrity.org) Corporate Media partial coverage:
Atlanta Journal-constitution (5/11/03/), The Tampa Tribune (3/28/03), Baltimore Sun
(2/21/03)
While the media did cover 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 US citizens to be treated as
enemy combatants and held without counsel, simply on suspicion of connections to
terrorism.
"Under section 501 a US 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 are supporting
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 has learned its lesson from Patriot I. Will it probe the new legislation much more
thoroughly than the first round, which received inadequate analysis post 9/11?
3. US Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq UN Report
Source: The Humanist and ArtVoice (March/April 2003), first covered by Amy Goodman on
Democracy Now!
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 UN
Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The pages included details on
how the US 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 US 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 US press. Referring to his
first Project Censored nomination in 1989, in which he went into the bush in Costa Rica,
he said, "With such thorough self-censorship in the US press, reading the international
press is now akin to going into the remote bush."
4. Rumsfeld's Plan to Provoke Terrorists
Source: CounterPunch (11/1/02)
Moscow Times columnist and CounterPunch contributor Chris Floyd developed this story off a
small item in the LA 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 US 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 notes that while the story received considerable play in international and
alternative media, it has hardly been mentioned in the mainstream US 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. The Effort to Make Unions Disappear
Sources: Z Magazine, (11/20/02), War Times (10/11 2002), The Progressive (11/03), The
American Prospect (3/03)
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." said Sustar, Although 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
Source: Dollars and Sense (9/02)
The potential closing of access to digital information is a development that could have a
harmful effect on the powerful role online media plays in side stepping media gate keepers
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,"
writes 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 US 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 (FCC) decided to allow cable networks to
avoid common carrier requirements. Now the giant phone companies, who 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 now it might be lost.
7. Treaty Busting By the United States
Sources: Connections (6/02), The Nation (4/02), Ashville Global Report (6/20-26/02),
Global Outlook (Summer 2002)
"The US is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated
or gradually subverted," says 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. US/British Forces Continue Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Despite Massive Evidence of
Negative Health Effects
Sources: The Sunday Herald (3/30/03), Hustler Magazine (6/03), Children of War (3/03)
The eighth story on the list deals with another subject that victims have tried to get
into the mainstream media for over a decade – the US's use of depleted uranium in Iraq, in
both the recent invasion and in the Gulf War. Depleted uranium (DU) was also used in
Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia.
The writers cited, including the hard-core porn magazine Hustler, note 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. US
soldiers are also victims of this travesty, suffering Gulf War syndrome and other ailments
that 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 that 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 US media is quiet about the issue, it is a hot topic in the
international press. "When you get outside the US, the media is much more critical," he
said. "They refer to it as a weapon of mass destruction. This will be a legacy the US has
left in Iraq. Long after the electricity is repaired and the oil wells are pumping,
children will be getting cancer. The US knew this would happen, it can't claim ignorance."
9. In Afghanistan: Poverty, Women's Rights and Civil Disruption Worse then Ever
Sources: The Nation (10/14/02), Left Turn (3-4/03), The Nation (4/29/02), Mother Jones
(7-8/02) Mainstream Coverage: Toronto Star (3/2/03)
Though his work isn't cited here, Erlich also reported on the topic of the ninth story on
the list, the continuing poverty, civil disruption and repression of women in Afghanistan.
While the country has virtually dropped off the radar screen in the US 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
Source: Left Turn (7-8/02), Briarpatch, Vol. 32, No. 1, Excerpted from The CCPA Monitor,
(10/02), New Internationalist (1-2/03)
While Afghanistan is being essentially ignored, the tenth story on the list shows how
African countries are getting plenty of attention from the US – but not the kind of
attention they need. These stories deal with the formation in June, 2002 of the New
Partnership for Africa's Development, or NEPAD, 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," says Project Censored.
The Project Censored awards ceremony will take place Oct. 4 in San Rafael, Calif. For
tickets or more information, visit the Web site at www.projectcensored.org.
The 15 stories cited as runners-up to the top ten most censored stories of the year are
the following:
#11: U.S. Implicated in Taliban Massacre
#12: Bush Administration Behind Failed Military Coup in Venezuela
#13: Corporate Personhood Challenged
#14: Unwanted Refugees a Global Problem
#15: U.S. Military's War on the Earth
#16: Plan Puebla-Panama and the FTAA
#17: Clear Channel Monopoly Draws Criticism
#18: Charter Forest Proposal Threatens Access to Public Lands
#19: U.S. Dollar vs. the Euro: Another Reason for the Invasion of Iraq
#20: Pentagon Increases Private Military Contracts
#21: Third World Austerity Policies: Coming Soon to a City Near You
#22: Welfare Reform Up For Reauthorization, but Still No Safety Net
#23: Argentina Crisis Sparks Cooperative Growth
#24: Aid to Israel Fuels Repressive Occupation in Palestine
#25: Convicted Corporations Receive Perks Instead of Punishment
Kari Lydersen, a regular contributor to AlterNet, also writes for the Washington Post and
is an instructor for the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in Chicago. She can
be reached at karilyde@aol.com.
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