The relentless right-wing campaign to eliminate all independent and critical voices from the public sphere continues unabated. First, they forced Howard Stern -- no hero of mine but a defender of free speech and a thorn in the side of the hated Bushies nonetheless-- off commercial radio. Then they got CBS anchor Dan Rather to resign (just for practicing semi-hard-hitting journalism). Now, they're hellbent on ousting even the lukewarm liberals at CPB and PBS. Scary stuff.

washingtonpost.com
New Scrutiny of PBS Has Raised Political Antennas

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 22, 2005; Page C01

Liberal commentator Bill Moyers is out on PBS stations. Buster the
animated rabbit is under a cloud of suspicion. And right-wing yakkers
from the Wall Street Journal editorial page have been handed their own
public-television chat show.

Some observers, including people inside the Public Broadcasting
Service, see these recent developments as troubling. PBS, they say, is
being forced to toe a more conservative line in its programming by the
Republican-dominated agency that provides about $30 million in
federal funds to the Alexandria-based service.

Officials at the agency, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, say
they are merely seeking to ensure balance and fairness in the
network's presentation of political news and ideas.

Under its mandate from Congress, which created the agency in 1967,
CPB is required to act as an independent buffer between lawmakers
and public broadcasters, although it can set broad programming
goals. Appointees of President Bush currently control the majority of
seats on CPB's eight-member board. Each board member serves a
six-year term.

Typically one of the quietest bureaucracies in Washington, the
quasi-governmental CPB has been unusually active in recent weeks.
CPB this month appointed a pair of veteran journalists to review public
TV and radio programming for evidence of bias, the first time CPB has
sought such oversight in its 38-year history. PBS officials were
unaware that the corporation intended to review its news and public
affairs programs, such as "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" and
"Frontline," until the appointments were publicly announced.

In negotiations with PBS earlier this year, the corporation also insisted,
for the first time, on tying new funding to an agreement that would
commit the network to strict "objectivity and balance" in each of its
programs -- an idea that PBS's general counsel described in an
internal memo as amounting to "government encroachment on and
supervision of program content, potentially in violation of the First
Amendment."

Late last week, CPB's board declined to renew the contract of its chief
executive, Kathleen Cox, a veteran administrator at the agency. She
was replaced by Ken Ferree, a Republican who had been a top adviser
to Michael Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission. The Ferree appointment followed the dismissals or
departures in recent months of at least three other senior CPB officials,
all of whom had Democratic affiliations.

"We don't want to be alarmist, but I would be less than honest if I said
there wasn't concern here," said one senior executive at PBS, who
insisted on anonymity because CPB provides about 10 percent of its
annual budget. "When you put it all together, a pattern starts to
emerge."

A senior FCC official, who would not speak for attribution because he
must rule on issues affecting public broadcasting, went further, saying
CPB "is engaged in a systematic effort not just to sanitize the truth, but
to impose a right-wing agenda on PBS. It's almost like a right-wing
coup. It appears to be orchestrated."

In an interview yesterday, CPB board chairman Ken Tomlinson called
such comments "paranoia," and said critics of CPB's initiatives should
"grow up."

"We're only seeking balance," said Tomlinson. "I am concerned about
perceptions that not all parts of the political spectrum are reflected on
public broadcasting. [But] there are no hidden agendas."

Asked for specific examples of slanted or unfair programming,
Tomlinson declined to name any. "You've heard the same complaints
of bias that I have in congressional hearings year after year," he said.

In fact, congressional Republicans have been generally critical of
public broadcasting's news and informational programming for years,
saying it favors liberal ideas. These criticisms fueled a movement led
by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to "zero out" CPB's federal
funding a decade ago. Those efforts failed; federal appropriations to
CPB have grown 40 percent since then, to some $386.8 million this
year. About 90 percent of this money is passed directly to public radio
and TV stations, which then pay fees to PBS and National Public Radio
for programming such as "Nova" and "All Things Considered."

However, conservatives recently were exercised that Moyers -- an
outspoken liberal -- was involved in hosting a weekly newsmagazine
called "Now." (Moyers left the show in December, citing personal
reasons.) PBS responded, in part, by trying to recruit Gingrich to host a
weekly program. It wound up developing public affairs shows starring
the Wall Street Journal's conservative pundits and Tucker Carlson, a
columnist for the conservative Weekly Standard and a co-host of CNN's
"Crossfire." (Carlson has since left PBS and CNN for a job at MSNBC.)

In January, PBS came in for more criticism, this time a rebuke from
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings over an episode of a children's
travelogue program in which a rabbit character named Buster paid a
visit to two families headed by lesbians. PBS pulled the episode from
distribution to stations around the country.

Tomlinson would not comment on specific programs. He said CPB's
efforts were aimed at making "incremental changes that meet the
needs of the American people and the aspirations of the American
people."

The corporation's own research indicates broad public satisfaction with
the quality of news programming on PBS and NPR. A series of focus
group sessions and two national surveys conducted by two polling
firms -- the Tarrance Group and Lake Snell Perry & Associates -- found
few perceptions of bias in PBS's or NPR's reporting in 2002 and 2003.
For example, among people who identified themselves as "news and
information consumers," 36 percent said PBS's coverage of the Bush
administration in 2003 was "fair and balanced," and 46 percent offered
no opinion. Eleven percent judged NPR's coverage of the Middle East
to be biased, and this group split almost equally between those who
felt NPR was biased toward Israel and those who felt it was biased
toward the Arab or Palestinian side.

Wayne Godwin, PBS's veteran chief operating officer, said in an
interview yesterday that he wanted to give CPB's new chief executive,
Ferree, some time before he drew conclusions. "They're in such a
significant state of flux at this time that we want to be fair in looking
at
it," he said.

He added, "I don't know that Ken [Tomlinson] is or is not trying to
change our programming. . . . I will say there is reason to remain aware
and vigilant to what is going on. The long run will determine if he wants
changes."

Tomlinson said his goal is to seek increases in federal funding of
public broadcasting in order to strengthen it in an increasingly
competitive media environment. "Public TV, public broadcasting, is in
trouble," he said. "It will wither and die if we continue the way we have.
That's why it's so important for us to rally national support for it. If we
don't have true excellence, we won't be able to gain the support we
need. We have to make sure that these [programming] concerns don't
prevent us from gaining the national consensus we need."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

A distressing example of "target marketing" in action. And the Republicans have the gall to accuse the left of dividing the country along lines of race....


www.slate.com
The Soft Bigotry of Life Expectancy
Different Social Security messages for blacks and Latinos.
By William SaletanPosted Wednesday, March 16, 2005, at 1:08 PM PT



Different strokes for different folks?Why is President Bush's Social Security reform plan heading south inthe polls? Maybe because he's selling different messages to differentaudiences and some audiences are overhearing messages meant forothers. He's telling older people that nothing relevant to them willchange. Meanwhile, he's telling the younger people who are propping upthe system that it's a dead end and he'll help them get out.

This iswhy Republican "town halls" that were supposed to boost the plan inthe polls failed so miserably. The town halls were for the youngerfolks, but the older folks showed up. Oops!It turns out the young and the old aren't the only groups gettingdifferent pitches. Bush is narrowcasting to blacks and Latinos, too.

The message to blacks is that Social Security screws them because theydie younger. By all accounts, that's what Bush told black business andcommunity leaders at a two-hour private meeting on Jan. 25. It's alsothe centerpiece of black community town halls and speeches to blackaudiences by GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, according to the Los AngelesTimes.

At one forum, Bush told a black executive, "African Americanmales die sooner than other males do, which means the system isinherently unfair to a certain group of people." The executive,referring to black male life expectancy, said to Bush, "If you'retelling me that it's 69, and the [retirement] age is going to go to67, you do the math." Bush replied, "Right."Bush was encouraging a misconception.

As Paul Krugman has explained,remaining life expectancy for a 65-year-old black man is 14.6 years,not two. It's true that black male life expectancy at birth is only69, but black-white mortality differences trail off throughout life.(By the late stages, black men outlive white men of the same age.) So,while blacks are likely to spend fewer years taking money out, they'realso likely to spend fewer years paying in.

What's more interesting, however, is another misconception Bush seemsto have floated. On Dec. 21, he met with Kweisi Mfume, the outgoingpresident of the NAACP. According to a Federal Document Clearing Housetranscript, Mfume told reporters afterward that in the meeting Bush"was very strong in his belief that some communities in particular,because of low life expectancy rates, don't get a chance to get outmuch of what they put in all their lives." Black men and women "havedisproportionately lower life expectancies," said Mfume. "And so myassumption is that that group, along with Latinos, may be what thepresident was referring to."

Mfume said he hadn't pressed Bush to clarify the reference to "somecommunities." But the reference did its job. The next day, the Coxnewspaper chain reported that "Mfume said they discussed how toaccount for groups, such as African-Americans and Latinos, that havelower-than-average life expectancy rates and, as a result, don't drawretirement benefits commensurate with what they pay in payroll taxesover the course of their working lives."

There's no record of anyeffort by the White House to correct this account. Indeed, three weekslater, the White House issued a "fact" sheet claiming that "Hispanics,African-Americans, and unmarried elderly women are even more relianton Social Security." The sheet added nothing to suggest that therationales for making this claim about the three groups might differ.A couple of weeks ago, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles-based newspaperLa Opinión, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez reportedly argued thatbecause of their disproportionate reliance on Social Security, Latinosstood to lose disproportionately if Bush's plan were defeated. (Theop-ed can't be found online, and I've asked the Commerce Departmentfor a copy of it but haven't received it, so for now I'm relying on aMarch 4 Los Angeles Times account of it.)

What Gutierrez and the White House seem not to have mentioned is that,contrary to the impression Bush gave Mfume, Latinos can expect tooutlive whites. According to a report issued five years ago by what isnow Gutierrez's department, life expectancy for Americans of "Hispanicorigin" in 1999 was 77.1 years among men and 83.7 years among women.That's a 2.4-year surplus for Latino men over white men and a 3.6-yearsurplus for Latino women over white women.So, here's the situation. In an op-ed written in Spanish and not madeavailable in English on any federal Web site, the administrationargues that Latinos, who live longer than whites do, should supportBush's reform plan because upon retirement they relydisproportionately on Social Security.

Meanwhile, in forums andprivate meetings aimed at blacks, the administration argues thatblacks, who upon retirement rely disproportionately on SocialSecurity, should support Bush's reform plan because they don't live aslong as whites do. Only once has Bush slipped up and alluded to onegroup in the course of making his pitch to the other. And on thatoccasion, at best, he seems to have conveyed?and failed to correctafter its publication?an impression that helped him politically butwas contrary to the truth.

The only other ethnic groups analyzed in the 2000 Commerce Departmentreport on life expectancy?or apparent in any other such governmentreport?are Asian-Americans and American Indians. Asian-Americans werebeating white life expectancy by six years among men and 6.5 yearsamong women. American Indian men were trailing white men by two yearsin life expectancy, but American Indian women were exceeding whitewomen by the same amount.

So, here are two questions for PresidentBush: When you told Mfume that some communities in particular were getting shafted by Social Security due to low life expectancy, which communities were you talking about? And if you're telling the wholetruth to blacks and Latinos, why aren't you telling them the samething?

William Saletan is Slate's chief political correspondent and author ofBearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.Photograph of George Bush by Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI Photo

Stop the Right's Attack on Academic Freedom!
An Open Letter From Concerned Academics

March 2, 2005

URGENT: The University of Colorado Board of Regents will be making
its recommendations about Ward Churchill in the week of March 7.

We call on all those who teach and research at colleges and
universities to raise their voices in opposition to this inquisition.
Sign and act on this open letter. Circulate it widely. Inform the
media.

As an immediate step, we call on our colleagues to pass emergency
resolutions in faculty and professional associations and send them to
the University of Colorado Board of Regents. We offer the following
as a template for such resolutions:

Resolved, that the attempt, escalated by government authority, to
fire Ward Churchill and the trial by media which he is undergoing
amount to a serious assault on dissent, critical inquiry, and
academic freedom, and a heightening of the repressive atmosphere in
American society overall. This attack is intolerable and must stop
now. The precedents already set in this case - that a professor can
be publicly pilloried and threatened with dismissal for what he
writes - must not be allowed to stand. The University of Colorado
Board of Regents must drop any effort to fire Churchill, cease its
spurious investigation into his body of work and repudiate its
actions up to now; and all colleges and universities must reaffirm,
in word and deed, their commitment to defend critical thinking.

The past month has witnessed a chilling turn in American political
and intellectual life. Ward Churchill, a tenured professor and
former chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of
Colorado, has been made the object of an unprecedented nationwide
attack for an essay he wrote three years ago. Two governors,
including the governor of Colorado, have called for his firing. The
national and local media have not only misrepresented his work and
views, but have increasingly vilified and slandered Ward Churchill
himself. Some of Churchill's speaking engagements have been
cancelled. Death threats have been made against him. In response,
the University of Colorado Board of Regents not only "apologized" for
Churchill's remarks - itself an utterly gratuitous and inappropriate
action - but initiated an investigation into his entire body of work
to search for mistakes and supposed evidence of "fraud." During the
week of March 7, the Board of Regents will conclude its 30-day review
of all of Churchill's writings and statements.

One must go back to the "scoundrel time" of the McCarthy years to
find anything even close to this. And now, as an unmistakable sign
of what this portends, just a week ago the University of Colorado at
Boulder announced an investigation into campus records to make sure
that every faculty member has actually signed his or her
state-required loyalty oath!

All this is intolerable and must be reversed--immediately.

To be clear: the issues here have nothing to do with the quality of
Ward Churchill's scholarship or his professional credentials. However
one views his choice of words or specific arguments, he is being put
in the dock solely for his radical critique of U.S. history and
present-day policy in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001.
Apparently, 9/11 is now the third rail of American intellectual life:
to critically probe into its causes and to interrogate the
international role of the United States is treated as heresy; those
inquiring can be denied forums, careers, and even personal safety.
And now Churchill's persecutors have gone further, repeatedly
ridiculing his scholarly argumentation that the United States
committed genocide against the indigenous people of this continent,
and that the FBI systematically attempted to disrupt and destroy the
movements and leaders of the 1960s. Rather than debate or disprove
such theses, Churchill's attackers attempt to render them beyond the
pale of respectable discourse. Through all this, new ground rules
are being established: any criticism or even questioning of the
institutional foundations of the United States, or of the motives and
interests behind its policies, will be treated as essentially
treasonous. Left unopposed, this trajectory will lead to a situation
of uncontested indoctrination enforced by the state.

The Churchill case is not an isolated incident but a concentrated
example of a well-orchestrated campaign launched in the name of
"academic freedom" and "balance" which in fact aims to purge the
universities of more radical thinkers and oppositional thought
generally, and to create a climate of intimidation. While the
right-wing claim that the universities are "left-wing dictatorships"
is specious beyond belief, it is unfortunately true that the campus
remains one of the few surviving refuges of critical thinking and
dissent in this country. This is something to defend and strengthen.

It would be hard to overstate the serious nature of what has already
happened, let alone what it would mean should the Regents fire
Churchill. If this assault on academe succeeds, the consequences for
American society as a whole will be nothing short of disastrous.

The response from the academic world has thus far fallen short of
what is required. Voices have been raised in opposition, but many
have been intimidated. What is needed is an outpouring of faculty
resolutions condemning this witch-hunt. Teach-ins. Protests.

We propose that emergency faculty resolutions be passed and sent to
the University of Colorado Board of Regents (secretary:
millie.cortez@colorado.edu, cc:
EthnicStudies@colorado.edu) and major media outlets. We further
propose that if the Colorado authorities continue their persecution
of Churchill, we mount major nationally coordinated protests on
campuses all over America - and internationally - as soon as
possible, and that we begin to join efforts to reverse this dangerous
direction in American political and intellectual life

The hour is very late; this case is nothing less than a watershed. We
must act, and act now.

Initial Signatories:

Steven P. Best, Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas-El Paso

Henry A. Giroux, Global Television Network Chair Professor in English
and Communications, McMaster University

Ruth Y. Hsu, Associate Professor of English, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Alan Jones, Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs,
Pitzer College

Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of
Religions, University of Chicago

Raymond Lotta, author and lecturer

Henry Silverman, Professor and Chairperson Emeritus, Michigan State University

Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University

Allen W. Wood, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
******************

AMONG NEW SIGNATORIES TO THE OPEN LETTER:
Robert M. Baum, Director of African Studies, Iowa State University

Prasenjit Duara, Chair, Department of History, University of Chicago

Allen F. Roberts, Director, James S. Coleman African Studies Center,
University of California, Los Angeles

******************
E-mail this letter to colleagues, as well as people and institutions
in other walks of life. Please get back to us with your ideas and let
us know what you are doing. Send us copies of resolutions and
statements. Add your name to this Open Letter.

E-mail to: criticalthinking@pitzer.edu

Sleuths of Spin

By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet
Posted on February 22, 2005, Printed on February 22, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21307/

Given the sorry state of the journalism these days, The Center for
Media and Democracy's John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton are setting
about an ambitious – yet necessary – undertaking: reinventing
journalism.

Several right-wing activists/pundits/columnists have already developed
their own roadmap for reinventing journalism. The latest case is that
of Jeff Gannon, whose real name is James D. Guckert. As Gannon, Guckert
reported for a conservative news site called Talon News. Somehow,
Guckert gained access to White House briefings and and was seen tossing
softballs at White House officials. Gannon/Guckert even got called on
by President Bush at a news conference. He ended his question with "How
are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves
from reality?" referring to Sen. Hillary Clinton and Senate Minority
Leader Harry Reid.

Gannon/Guckert had about 13 of his 15 minutes before Media Matters for
America and John Aravosis' Americablog blew the lid off his charade.
Underneath that lid was James D. Guckert on full display – he was outed
as a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net,
Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com.

The administration's payoffs to syndicated newspaper columnists
Armstrong Williams, Mike McManus and Maggie Gallagher may not be nearly
as scrumptious a story as the Gannon/Guckert Affair, but they could be
far more significant. After all, this loose coalition of the shilling
received government money to write about their support for Bush
administration policies. In early January, USA Today revealed that
Williams, a prominent African-American radio and television
personality, had received $240,000 from the Department of Education –
through a contract with the Ketchum public relations firm – for his
support for the president's No Child Left Behind project. Mike McManus
and Maggie Gallagher received their checks from the Department of
Health and Human Services to help promote the president's healthy
marriages initiative.

Sleuths of spin John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have exposed how
corporate shills and government spokespersons manipulate the media and
undermine democracy for more than a decade. Through the Madison,
Wis.-based Center for Media and Democracy, they have produced a number
of groundbreaking books, including Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies,
Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Common Courage Press,
1995), Trust Us, We're Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and
Gambles with Your Future (Tarcher/Penguin, 2001), Weapons of Mass
Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
(Tarcher/Penguin, 2003) and most recently, Banana Republicans: How the
Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State (Tarcher/Penguin,
2004).

Two years ago, the Center launched Disinfopedia, a web site that
Rampton described in a recent e-mail as "an experiment in media
democracy and citizen investigative journalism." Rampton pointed out
that Disinfopedia had "grown into a leading resource on the players who
work behind the scenes to shape public opinion and public policy."
Since its mission has evolved and expanded during the past two years,
the Center recently renamed it SourceWatch. (Disclosure: I have been
cited by SourceWatch.)

Rampton maintains that SourceWatch "is an example of media democracy in
action – an information source that is truly 'of, by and for the
people' who use it. It has become a tool that journalists and activists
use to research and report on key issues such as media concentration
and reform, democratic revitalization, environmental health and
sustainability, the war in Iraq, corporate manipulation of government
agencies, and the power and influence of right-wing special interest
groups and lobbies."

In late February, I conducted an e-mail interview John Stauber. We
covered a number of issues related to the media, starting with the
current payola scandal.

Bill Berkowitz: How do you view the recent scandals involving the Bush
administration giving payoffs to Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher
and Michael McManus in exchange for favorable coverage of their issues?

I'm very happy to see this coming out, but it's really just the tip of
an iceberg. Sheldon Rampton and I wrote our expose of the Public
Relations industry, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, ten years ago. It's
filled with propaganda horror stories. Forty percent or more of what
passes for news and information these days is the result of organized
PR campaigns. It's been wonderful to see these scandals exposed and
others such as the "Karen Ryan reporting" news reports. Karen Ryan runs
a PR firm, and her government funded video news releases (VNRs) are
aired as news by hundreds of TV news directors.

In Toxic Sludge we reported that there were already thousands of
corporate and government VNRs produced and aired each year, and that
number continues to increase. The skillful manipulation of the media by
professional propagandists, often with the consent and approval of
editors and news directors, is rampant and worsening.

Do you think there will be more revelations?

The mainstream media does a horrific job of reporting on itself, and I
think that there will be more revelations only to the extent that
independent journalists are able to document and expose these abuses.
The best PR, like the best propaganda, is invisible. In the more than a
decade that our organization has been reporting on and exposing
propaganda in the media, not one major newspaper to my knowledge has
committed a reporter to this as an investigative beat.

What can reporters do to break through the sound bite/talking points
media culture?

Reporters need to understand the business of propaganda and to view the
public relations industry and the culture of spin as anathema to
journalism and to democracy. Today PR flacks outnumber real working
journalists, and many of the flacks are former reporters who know
exactly how best to manage, cajole and manipulate the media because
they are from the media. J-schools have combined journalism and public
relations and told students that it's all the same, it requires the
same skills, and there is little fundamental difference. This is like
combining accounting and embezzling as a field of study.

Today in the corporate mainstream media reporters are overworked,
underpaid and pressured to avoid topics that offend advertisers.
Reporters need to dedicate themselves to real journalism and find ways
to practice it. Journalism is a sacred trust in a democracy, and if you
don't believe that you should probably go into PR.

Your books have generally focused on the way the American people are
getting hoodwinked by PR companies that set and then explain the agenda
of powerful corporations and politicians. Is there any way to render
them less powerful?

Simply stated, PR firms are corporations that help other corporations
and government agencies to manage public information, perceptions and
policy. Many people think that propaganda doesn't exist in democratic
societies, that it is a problem of dictatorships. Alex Carey, the
Australian academic, and others have pointed out that it is precisely
in democracies where sophisticated, hidden propaganda is most
prevalent, and the news media has become the major disseminator of
propaganda, rather than a force for exposing it.

In our book Weapons of Mass Deception, Sheldon and I explained how
rather than challenge Bush's war and exposing the falsehoods and
failures in Bush's claims, the U.S. news media became a propaganda arm
of the government. It shut out and ridiculed critics of the war, and
enabled it to take place. There are many fundamental reforms that could
be legislated to limit and control the power of corporations to
dominate our news and our politics. But powerful special interests and
governmental ideologues will use the best available techniques of
propaganda to manipulate and manage public perception. It is the
responsibility of journalists, educators and citizen activists to
expose and thwart such manipulation, and it's specifically our mission.

Given such a closed system, why the efforts around building media
democracy?

Twelve years ago when I founded our investigative quarterly PR Watch, I
chose the name Center for Media and Democracy for our non-profit
organization in order to emphasize the idea that without a vigorous,
independent, courageous and muckraking media, democracy cannot survive,
especially in this age of cranked-up propaganda. I've been happy to see
the term "media democracy" come into wide use. With the emergence of
the internet it has taken on new meaning in the age of blogs,
indymedia, wiki web sites like SourceWatch, and all the wonderful
reporting from web sites like AlterNet, Common Dreams, Buzzflash,
WorkingForChange, and those associated with the left[ist] press.

Media democracy seems like a catch-all phrase that is pretty ambiguous.
How would you define it?

Media democracy means that we recognize that one-way, top-down,
corporate mass communications has become much more a foe of democracy
than its friend. Democratic society is impossible without a courageous
and independent news media. The dominant mainstream media, the MSM, is
driven by the corporate bottom line and filled primarily with fluff,
sensationalism, right-wing politics, PR posing as news, and a
commitment to serve corporate advertisers. We need a powerful new
political movement to fundamentally challenge and change the corporate
media environment, and we also need to create new media that takes
advantage of internet technology to better serve democracy. Community
radio stations, non-profit media watchdogs, investigative bloggers, and
alternative news websites are all becoming important producers of
online web-based news and information that is building media democracy.
One project our organization is currently discussing with other groups
committed to media democracy is to develop standards for online
journalism that enable it to fulfill its promise of becoming a vital
media that serves our democracy.

What makes "SourceWatch" unique?

SourceWatch is unique because it is an experiment in collaborative
online investigative reporting. It's a very powerful educational,
organizing, research and networking tool that allows a growing
community of global citizens to collaborate to research and write
investigative news articles.

The open source "wiki" software that powers SourceWatch is in the
public domain, as are the articles that are written. Anyone can go to
SourceWatch and read, write and edit the information there. And every
change made in any article is logged for transparency. Bob Burton, an
investigative journalist, author and activist from Australia, is our
online editor.

We are constantly striving to improve the accuracy, depth and quality
of articles on SourceWatch. It is only two years old [it was originally
launched as Disinfopedia], and we are really just at the beginning of
this experiment. Anyone who first hears about it understandably says,
as I did when my colleague Sheldon Rampton proposed SourceWatch, "what
good is it if anyone with internet access can write or edit or for that
matter vandalize its articles?" But the fact is that the vast majority
of users are dedicated to the concept of investigative online
journalism, and by insisting on journalistic standards of accuracy and
fairness, and relegating opinions to an opinion page, the experiment is
working.

One problem it is solving is that by harnessing the investigative power
of hundreds of citizen journalists, we are finally able to keep track
of the myriad of industry front groups, PR firms, lobbyists and
anti-environmental PR campaigns that exist and are created every day.

SourceWatch has been a great success in its first two years, yet it is
just starting to take off. That said, everyone who reads an article on
the site should understand its limitations; that the article has not
necessarily been vetted by us, that no article is 100 percent accurate,
that anyone can contribute, and that it is a work in progress with no
copyright on its articles. So SourceWatch, like every other bit of the
news media, needs to be read with a critical eye. But with that
qualification I must say that I find most of the information very
accurate and much of it very unique. Wiki websites like SourceWatch are
becoming an important part of the online information environment.

Are you working on another book? What will it be about and when can we
expect it?

Sheldon and I have just begun outlining a new book examining media
corruption, spin and the growing media democracy movement. It would in
some ways be a return to the territory of our first and third books,
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You and Trust Us, We're Experts. We hope to
have it out in hardcover sometime in 2006. We've co-authored two books
in less than two years, timely paperbacks exposing the selling of the
war on Iraq and the political propaganda and strategy of the Republican
right. It seems to be a good time to step back and examine how citizens
might understand and overcome the toxic propaganda emanating from the
right-wing echo chamber.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21307/

McCain waves stick at TV over news coverage

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - Lawmakers' pique over the networks' incredible shrinking news hole is prompting legislation that will both shorten the time broadcasters have between license renewals and require full commission review of 5% of all licenses.

The legislation was introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Tuesday after the release of a report by the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California found evening TV newscasts contained little coverage of local political campaigns last year.

It also would require broadcasters to post on their Internet sites information detailing their commitment to local public-affairs programming, and it calls for the Federal Communications Commission to complete its open proceeding on whether public-interest obligations should apply to broadcasters in the digital era.

According to the survey, 64% of 4,333 broadcasts examined by the center included at least one election story. A typical half-hour contained 3 minutes, 11 seconds of campaign coverage, the report claims.

While 55% of the broadcasts contained a presidential story, just 8% of broadcasts contained a story about a local candidate race for U.S. House, state house seats, city council seats and other local and regional offices. Eight times more coverage went to stories about accidental injuries, the Lear Center said.

"If a local candidate wants to be on TV and can't afford advertising, his only hope is to have a freak accident," McCain said.

The researchers monitored evening-news broadcasts by 44 major network affiliates in markets that account for 23% of all TV viewers: New York; Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Dallas; Seattle; Miami; Denver; Orlando; Tampa, Fla.; Dayton, Ohio; and Des Moines, Iowa.

McCain argued that the dearth of local political coverage on local TV is a result of the increasing consolidation of the media industry.

"Perhaps some media groups have expanded more local news, but most observers see a decrease in local news," he said. "It defies logic that large, centrally owned media groups would expand local news. They would just take the national feed."

Broadcasters disputed the study, claiming that the foundation surveyed only 11 of 210 local TV markets and left out thousands of hours of election coverage in morning news programs, noon news programs, 4 p.m. local news programs, late night programming like "Nightline" and weekend political talk shows.

"The Lear Center review is disappointing on so many levels that it would be a disservice to the academic community to label this legitimate research," the National Association of Broadcasters said.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

Tariq Ali on the Iraqi Elections
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1407404,00.html
Out with the old, in with the new
The Iraqi elections were designed not to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the west.
Tariq Ali
Monday February 7, 2005Guardian

The US, unlike the empires of old Europe, has always preferred to exercise its hegemony indirectly. It has relied on local relays - uniformed despots, corrupt oligarchs, pliant politicians, obedient monarchs - rather than lengthy occupations. It was only when rebellions from below threatened to disrupt this order that the marines were dispatched and wars fought.During the cold war, money was supplied indiscriminately to all anti-communist forces (including the current leadership of al-Qaida); the 21st-century recipients are more carefully targeted. The aim is slowly to replace the traditional elites in the old satrapies with a new breed of neo-liberal politicians who have been trained and educated in the US. This is the primary function of the US money allocated to "democracy promotion". Loyalty can be purchased from politicians, parties and trades unions. And the result, it is hoped, is to create a new layer of janissary politicians who serve Washington.This most recent variant of "democracy promotion" has now been applied in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it will hit Haiti (another occupied country) in November. Create a new elite, give it funds and weaponry to build a new army and let them make the country safe for the corporations.The 2004 Afghan elections, even according to some pro-US commentators, were a farce, and the much vaunted 73% turnout was a fraud. In Iraq, the western media were celebrating a 60% turnout within minutes of the polls closing, despite the fact that Iraq lacks a complete register of voters, let alone a network of computerised polling stations. The official figure, when it comes, is likely to be revised downwards (according to Debka, a pro-US Israeli website, turnout was closer to 40%).The "high" turnout was widely interpreted as a rejection of the Iraqi resistance. But was it? Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's many followers voted to please him, but if he is unable to deliver peace and an end to the occupation, they too might defect.The only force in Iraq the occupiers can rely on are the Kurdish tribes. The Kurdish 36th command battalion fought alongside the US in Falluja, but the tribal chiefs want some form of independence, and some oil. If Turkey, loyal Nato ally and EU aspirant, vetoes any such possibility, then the Kurds too might accept money from elsewhere. The battle for Iraq is far from over. It has merely entered a new stage.Despite strong disagreements on boycotting the elections, the majority of Iraqis will not willingly hand over their oil or their country to the west. Politicians who try to force this through will lose all support and become totally dependent on the foreign armies in their country.The popular resistance will continue. Many in the west find it increasingly difficult to support this resistance. The arguments for and against it are old ones. In 1885, the English socialist William Morris celebrated the defeat of General Gordon by the Mahdi: "Khartoum fallen - into the hands of the people it belongs to". Morris argued that the duty of English internationalists was to support all those being oppressed by the British empire despite disagreements with nationalism or fanaticism.The triumphalist chorus of the western media reflects a single fact: the Iraqi elections were designed not so much to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the west. After Bush's re-election the French and Germans were looking for a bridge back to Washington. Will their citizens accept the propaganda that sees the illegitimate election (the Carter Centre, which monitors elections worldwide, refused to send observers) as justifying the occupation?The occupation involved a military and economic invasion as envisaged by Hayek, the father of neo-liberalism, who pioneered the notion of lightning air strikes against Iran in 1979 and Argentina in 1982. The re-colonisation of Iraq would have greatly pleased him. Politicians masking their true aims with weasel words about "humanity" would have irritated him.What of the media, the propaganda pillar of the new order? In Control Room, a Canadian documentary on al-Jazeera, one of the more disgusting images is that of embedded western journalists whooping with joy at the capture of Baghdad. The coverage of "elections" in Afghanistan and Iraq has been little more than empty spin. This symbiosis of neo-liberal politics and a neo-liberal media helps reinforce the collective memory loss from which the west suffers today.Carl Schmitt, a theorist of the Third Reich, developed the view that politics is encompassed by the essential categories of "friend" and "enemy". After the second world war, Schmitt's writings were adapted to the needs of the US and are now the bedrock of neocon thinking. The message is straightforward: if your country does not serve our needs it is an enemy state. It will be occupied, its leaders removed and pliant satraps placed on the throne.But when troops withdraw, satrapies often crumble. Occupation, rebellion, withdrawal, occupation, self-emancipation is a pattern in world history.At the Nuremberg trials, Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, was charged for providing the justification for Hitler's pre-emptive strike against Norway. Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Jack Straw in a dock of the future? Unlikely, but desirable.

· Tariq Ali's latest book is Bush in Babylon: the Recolonisation of Iraqtariq.ali3@btinternet.com[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

PBS' Future Post-Moyers
By Jeffrey Chester, AlterNet. Posted December 14, 2004.
As PBS lobbies for a billion-dollar trust fund, it's time to challenge the status quo.
It's fitting that as Bill Moyers formally ends his 30-year journey working at PBS, the noncommercial network itself is about to embark on a new effort to determine its own future. This Friday, Moyers signs-off as the host of his "NOW" program, and also leaves PBS. At the same time, public broadcasting's new "Enhanced Funding Initiative" advisory committee is about to hold their first public meeting. Its goal is to "develop ... sustainable ... funding for public service media in the digital era." At issue is whether public broadcasting will finally succeed in securing what has been an endless Holy Grail-like quest since its founding in the 1960s: to secure ongoing and independent funding for noncommercial radio and TV.
For decades, public TV and radio have been buffeted by political forces of Congress, which controls the key federal contributions to its annual budget. It's always been kept on a very short funding leash, which has helped keep both PBS and NPR from engaging in the kind of programming that would significantly challenge the status quo (both of media and of politics). But PBS President Pat Mitchell believes that there is now a serious opportunity to create a permanent trust fund worth billions of dollars. The new funding initiative will recommend how PBS (and presumably NPR and public TV and radio stations) can gain the revenues made possible from the sale of publicly owned airwaves.
Mitchell is correct that the country's congressionally mandated transition to an all-digital broadcast system provides a unique opportunity to explore permanent funding. There are 20 to 30 billions of dollars worth of public spectrum (airwaves) that will return to the government from commercial and public TV stations. Even a small portion of the proceeds could easily generate sustainable annual revenues for noncommercial TV and radio.
But it is unlikely that either PBS or its elite panel of advisors (the panel is chaired by former Netscape CEO James Barksdale and former FCC Chair Reed Hundt) will ask whether PBS actually deserves such a major gift from the American public. Nor will the process likely examine – in a very open and public way – how noncommercial communications should be restructured in the digital era.
For example, before any discussion of raising new revenues, we should be assured that the spirit of the original mission of public broadcasting is fully honored. Where is the commitment to producing serious news and public affairs (both at the station and national level)? How will significant programming slots be controlled by persons of color (at a time when Tavis Smiley, for example, is quitting NPR for its failure to "meaningfully reach out" to a multi-cultural audience)? How much of the schedule will be controlled by independent producers? Will ad-like underwriting vanish from PBS, especially its news and children's programs? How will the governance of public broadcasting change so it becomes more democratic? What new innovative programming ventures will be created that can harness the more than 2,000 digital channels soon to be available to public TV?
Unless there is public pressure on PBS and the Congress to ask such questions, they won't be on the agenda. We should be engaged in the kind of serious review about the future of public service broadcasting (PSB) now underway in the U.K., where a very public and focused process about how to "redefine PSB for the digital age" has already produced significant recommendations. Given the expanded capabilities of digital TV, broadband, and other new media, there is no reason to rely on any one central institution, such as PBS, to provide the public with quality noncommercial programming. One U.K. proposal to create a "Public Service Publisher" that would use independent producers to create and "distribute content on broadband, mobile networks as well as cable [and] satellite" should be embraced here as well. So should its call for a noncommercial system that is "genuinely open, transparent ... and involves the public adequately in decision making."
The new media landscape of TV and online will likely become even more commercialized, as Big Media and Madison Avenue target consumers with pinpoint digital accuracy. It is vital that we create as far-reaching a noncommercial media landscape as we can. To truly do so would be honoring Bill Moyers. In his roles as journalist and storyteller, he has demonstrated how TV can serve democracy as well as the spirit. We can only hope that the country's noncommercial future reflects the rich legacy that Moyers has given us.
For more on this subject, visit:
The Ofcom Review of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) Television
BBC Charter Review
Independent Panel's Report "Emerging Themes"
"PBS CEO Pat Mitchell Charts a Course for Robust Public Service Media in America"
In 2004, PBS Focuses on New Platforms while Delivering on Public Service Mission
Jim Romenesko, "Tavis Smiley Decides against Renewing NPR Contract"
"The Public Broadcasting Service: An Overview"

November 16, 2004
Contact: Dr. Susan Linn (617) 278-4282 slinn@jbcc.harvard.edu
For Immediate Release

PARENTS BEWARE: SPONGEBOB MOVIE RIFE WITH
COMMERCIALISM

Citing the film’s promotions with Burger King, Kellogg’s, and
Keebler, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
(CCFC) is warning parents to beware of the excessive and
harmful levels of commercialism in the new SpongeBob
SquarePants Movie.

“This movie is essentially a ninety minute commercial for junk
food,” said CCFC’s Dr. Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids:
The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. “Parents who take their
children to see the film should expect to be besieged with
requests for products from the movie’s promotional partners.”

Burger King is offering exclusive SpongeBob toys and watches
at its restaurants. Kellogg’s and Keebler have launched several
SpongeBob products to coincide with the movie, including
Kellogg’s SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Cereal, Keebler
SpongeBob SquarePants Movie E.L. Fudge Cookies, Kellogg’s
SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Rice Krispie Treats, and
Kellogg’s SpongeBob SquarePants Pop Tarts.

It has become commonplace for media characters popular with
children to adorn the packages of food products of dubious
nutritional value. Ever since rising to superstardom on
Nickelodeon, SpongeBob SquarePants has been ubiquitous in
grocery stores. In 2002, SpongeBob macaroni and cheese was
Kraft’s top-selling pasta brand. SpongeBob also fronts for
products such as SpongeBob SquarePants cereal, Cheez-Its, and
Wild Bubble-Berry Pop Tarts.

Marketing to children is a factor in childhood obesity. A
number of children’s health organizations – including the
American Academy of Pediatrics – have called for restrictions
on food marketing to children. The Institute of Medicine
recently called for a national conference to develop guidelines
for the advertising of foods and beverages directed at children.

Psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint of the Judge Baker Children’s
Center hopes that parents will factor in the film’s commercial
ties when deciding whether or not to let their children see
SpongeBob on the big screen. “The cost of this movie is more
than the price of a ticket. The nagging that marketers
deliberately and effectively cultivate can be extremely stressful
for families. And for those parents who give in, there are the
potential costs of childhood obesity and its attendant health
problems.”

The Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood (formerly
Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children) is a national
coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy
groups and concerned parents who counter the harmful effects
of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education,
research, and collaboration among organizations and individuals
who care about children. CCFC supports the rights of children
to grow up – and the rights of parents to raise them – without
being undermined by rampant consumerism. For more
information, please visit: www.commercialfreechildhood.org


Josh Golin
Action Coordinator
CCFC: Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
jgolin@jbcc.harvard.edu
(617) 278-4172

Hello Supporters of Low Power FM and Community Radio,
and Greetings from the Prometheus Radio Project!

We're writing this note to let you know about a great opportunity to
expand Low Power FM -- and to encourage you to act on it now, before
time runs out. We need you to file comments at the FCC before -December
1st-, and tell the Commission how much LPFM means to you.

The FCC is collecting comments from organizations and community members,
trying to find out how their local broadcasters are impacting them.
Some organizations, like the Educational Media Foundation, are filing
comments -against- Low Power FM radio! They want their sattelite-fed,
non-local translators to take precedence over our community-run,
volunteer-driven stations.

Tell the FCC that your LPFM stations, and thousands more like it around
the country, are the kind of local media that America needs most. Go to
http://www.prometheusradio.org/localism to file a brief comment today!

Thanks for fighting for real community radio,
The Organizers at Prometheus Radio Project

* * * * *

(to be removed from this list, email hannah@prometheusradio.org. thanks
for reading!)

The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib
By Alfred W. McCoy

From ancient Rome's red-hot irons and lacerating hooks to medieval
Europe's thumbscrews, rack, and wheel, for over 2,000 years anyone
interrogated in a court of law could expect to suffer unspeakable
tortures. For the last 200 years, humanist intellectuals from
Voltaire to members of Amnesty International have led a sustained
campaign against the horrors of state-sponsored cruelty, culminating
in the United Nation's 1985 Convention Against Torture, ratified by
the Clinton administration in 1994.

Then came 9/11. When the Twin Towers collapsed killing thousands,
influential "pro-pain pundits" promptly repudiated those
Enlightenment ideals and began publicly discussing whether torture
might be an appropriate, even necessary weapon in George Bush's war
on terror. The most persuasive among them, Harvard academic Alan M.
Dershowitz, advocated giving courts the right to issue "torture
warrants," ensuring that needed information could be prized from
unwilling Arab subjects with steel needles.

Despite torture's appeal as a "lesser evil," a necessary expedient in
dangerous times, those who favor it ignore its recent, problematic
history in America. They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology
that allows the practice of torture, once begun, to spread
uncontrollably in crisis situations, destroying the legitimacy of the
perpetrator nation. As past perpetrators could have told today's
pundits, torture plumbs the recesses of human consciousness,
unleashing an unfathomable capacity for cruelty as well as seductive
illusions of potency. Even as pundits and professors fantasized about
"limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, following the
President's orders to "kick some ass," was testing and disproving
their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that
spread quickly from use against a few "high target value" Al Qaeda
suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent
Iraqis.

As we learned from France's battle for Algiers in the 1950s,
Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s, and Britain's Northern Ireland
conflict in the 1970s, a nation that harbors torture in defiance of
its democratic principles pays a terrible price. Its officials must
spin an ever more complex web of lies that, in the end, weakens the
bonds of trust that are the sine qua non of any modern society. Most
surprisingly, our own pro-pain pundits seemed, in those heady early
days of the war on terror, unaware of a fifty-year history of torture
by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), nor were they aware that
their enthusiastic proposals gave cover to those in the Bush
Administration intent on reactivating a ruthless apparatus.

Torture's Perverse Pathology

In April 2004, the American public was stunned by televised
photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis
stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering
humiliating abuse while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As the
scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld quickly assured Congress that the abuses were
"perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military," whom New York Times
columnist William Safire soon branded "creeps."

These photos, however, are snapshots not of simple brutality or even
evidence of a breakdown in "military discipline." What they record
are CIA torture techniques that have metastasized like an undetected
cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half
century. A survey of this history shows that the CIA was, in fact,
the lead agency at Abu Ghraib, enlisting Army intelligence to support
its mission. These photographs from Iraq also illustrate standard
interrogation procedures inside the gulag of secret CIA prisons that
have operated globally, on executive authority, since the start of
the President's war on terror.

Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a
deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of
the Cold War. At the UN and other international forums, Washington
has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal
standard for human rights. Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated
ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same
international conventions, a number of which the U.S has ratified. In
battling communism, the United States adopted some of its most
objectionable practices -- subversion abroad, repression at home, and
most significantly torture itself.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA conducted massive, secret research into
coercion and the malleability of human consciousness which, by the
late fifties, was costing a billion dollars a year. Many Americans
have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of
this research -- the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects. While
these CIA drug experiments led nowhere and the testing of electric
shock as a technique led only to lawsuits, research into sensory
deprivation proved fruitful indeed. In fact, this research produced a
new psychological rather than physical method of torture, perhaps
best described as "no-touch" torture.

The Agency's discovery was a counterintuitive breakthrough, the first
real revolution in this cruel science since the seventeenth century
-- and thanks to recent revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo,
we are now all too familiar with these methods, even if many
Americans still have no idea of their history. Upon careful
examination, those photographs of nude bodies expose the CIA's most
basic torture techniques -- stress positions, sensory deprivation,
and sexual humiliation.

For over 2,000 years, from ancient Athens through the Inquisition,
interrogators found that the infliction of physical pain often
produced heightened resistance or unreliable information -- the
strong defied pain while the weak blurted out whatever was necessary
to stop it. By contrast, the CIA's psychological torture paradigm
used two new methods, sensory disorientation and "self-inflicted
pain," both of which were aimed at causing victims to feel
responsible for their own suffering and so to capitulate more readily
to their torturers. A week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke,
General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly
in Guantanamo), offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase
torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the
detainees," the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions
in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep
deprivation in any of our interrogations."

Under field conditions since the start of the Afghan War, Agency and
allied interrogators have often added to their no-touch repertoire
physical methods reminiscent of the Inquisition's trademark tortures
-- strappado, question de l'eau, "crippling stork," and "masks of
mockery." At the CIA's center near Kabul in 2002, for instance,
American interrogators forced prisoners "to stand with their hands
chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled," an effect similar to
the strappado. Instead of the Inquisition's iron-framed "crippling
stork" to contort the victim's body, CIA interrogators made their
victims assume similar "stress positions" without any external
mechanism, aiming again for the psychological effect of self-induced
pain

Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA's "no
touch" torture actually leaves deep, searing psychological scars on
both victims and -- something seldom noted -- their interrogators.
Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many
experts consider more crippling than physical pain. Perpetrators can
suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating acts of
cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. When applied in actual
operations, the CIA's psychological procedures have frequently led to
unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual
perpetrators whose improvisations are often horrific and only
occasionally effective.

Just as interrogators are often seduced by a dark, empowering sense
of dominance over victims, so their superiors, even at the highest
level, can succumb to fantasies of torture as an all-powerful weapon.
Our contemporary view of torture as aberrant and its perpetrators as
abhorrent ignores both its pervasiveness as a Western practice for
two millennia and its perverse appeal. Once torture begins, its
perpetrators, plunging into uncharted recesses of consciousness, are
often swept away by dark reveries, by frenzies of power and potency,
mastery and control -- particularly in times of crisis. "When
feelings of insecurity develop within those holding power," reads one
CIA analysis of the Soviet state applicable to post-9/11 America,
"they become increasingly suspicious and put great pressures on the
secret police to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times police
officials are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy
'confession' and brutality may become widespread."

Enraptured by this illusory power, modern states that sanction
torture usually allow it to spread uncontrollably. By 1967, just four
years after compiling a torture manual for use against a few top
Soviet targets, the CIA was operating forty interrogation centers in
South Vietnam as part of its Phoenix Program that killed over 20,000
Viet Cong suspects. In the centers themselves, countless thousands
were tortured for information that led to these assassinations.
Similarly, just a few months after CIA interrogators first tortured
top Al Qaeda suspects at Kabul in 2002, its agents were involved in
the brutal interrogation of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners. As its most
troubling legacy, the CIA's psychological method, with its
legitimating scientific patina and its avoidance of obvious physical
brutality, has provided a pretext for the preservation of torture as
an acceptable practice within the U.S. intelligence community.

Once adopted, torture offers such a powerful illusion of efficient
information extraction that its perpetrators, high and low, remain
wedded to its use. They regularly refuse to recognize its limited
utility and high political cost. At least twice during the Cold War,
the CIA's torture training contributed to the destabilization of two
key American allies, Iran's Shah and the Philippines' Ferdinand
Marcos. Yet even after their spectacular falls, the Agency remained
blind to the way its torture training was destroying the allies it
was designed to defend.

CIA Torture Research

The CIA's torture experimentation of the 1950s and early 1960s was
codified in 1963 in a succinct, secret instructional booklet on
torture -- the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual,
which would become the basis for a new method of torture disseminated
globally over the next three decades. These techniques were first
spread through the U.S. Agency for International Development's Public
Safety program to train police forces in Asia and Latin America as
the front line of defense against communists and other
revolutionaries. After an angry Congress abolished the Public Safety
program in 1975, the CIA worked through U.S. Army Mobile Training
Teams to instruct military interrogators, mainly in Central America.

At the Cold War's end, Washington resumed its advocacy of universal
principles, denouncing regimes for torture, participating in the
World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna in 1993 and, a year later,
ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture. On the surface, the
United States had resolved the tension between its anti-torture
principles and its torture practices. Yet even when Congress finally
ratified this UN convention it did so with intricately-constructed
reservations that cleverly exempted the CIA's psychological torture
method. While other covert agencies synonymous with Cold War
repression such as Romania's Securitate, East Germany's Stasi, and
the Soviet Union's KGB have disappeared, the CIA survives -- its
archives sealed, its officers decorated, and its Cold War crimes
forgotten. By failing to repudiate the Agency's propagation of
torture, while adopting a UN convention that condemned its practice,
the United States left this contradiction buried like a political
land mine ready to detonate with such phenomenal force in the Abu
Ghraib scandal.

Memory and Forgetting

Today the American public has only a vague understanding of these CIA
excesses and the scale of its massive mind-control project. Yet
almost every adult American carries fragmentary memories of this past
-- of LSD experiments, the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, the
murder of a kidnapped American police adviser in Montevideo who was
teaching CIA techniques to the Uruguayan police, and of course the
Abu Ghraib photographs. But few are able to fit these fragments
together and so grasp the larger picture. There is, in sum, an
ignorance, a studied avoidance of a deeply troubling topic, akin to
that which shrouds this subject in post-authoritarian societies.

With the controversy over Abu Ghraib, incidents that once seemed but
fragments should now be coming together to form a mosaic of a
clandestine agency manipulating its government and deceiving its
citizens to probe the cruel underside of human consciousness, and
then propagating its discoveries throughout the Third World.

Strong democracies have difficulty dealing with torture. In the
months following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the United
States moved quickly through the same stages (as defined by author
John Conroy) that the United Kingdom experienced after revelations of
British army torture in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s -- first,
minimizing the torture with euphemisms such as "interrogation in
depth"; next, justifying it on grounds that it was necessary or
effective; and finally, attempting to bury the issue by blaming "a
few bad apples."

Indeed, since last April, the Bush administration and much of the
media have studiously avoided the word "torture" and instead blamed
our own bad apples, those seven Military Police. In July, the Army's
Inspector General Paul T. Mikolashek delivered his report blaming 94
incidents of "abuse" on "an individual failure to uphold Army
Values." Although the New York Times called his conclusions
"comical," the general's views seem to resonate with an emerging
conservative consensus. "Interrogation is not a Sunday-school class,"
said Republican Senator Trent Lott. "You don't get information that
will save American lives by withholding pancakes." In June, an ABC
News/Washington Post poll found that 35% of Americans felt torture
was acceptable in some circumstances.

In August, Major General George R. Fay released his report on the
role of Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib. Its stunning revelations
about the reasons for this torture were, however, obscured in opaque
military prose. After interviewing 170 personnel and reviewing 9,000
documents, the general intimated that this abuse was the product of
an interrogation policy shaped, in both design and application, by
the CIA.

Significantly, General Fay blamed not the "seven bad apples," but the
Abu Ghraib interrogation procedures themselves. Of the 44 verifiable
incidents of abuse, one-third occurred during actual interrogation.
Moreover, these "routine" interrogation procedures "contributed to an
escalating 'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for
additional and severe abuses to occur."

After finding standard Army interrogation doctrine sound, General Fay
was forced to confront a single, central, uncomfortable question:
what was the source of the aberrant, "non-doctrinal" practices that
led to torture during interrogation at Abu Ghraib? Scattered
throughout his report are the dots, politely unconnected, that lead
from the White House to the Iraqi prison cell block: President Bush
gave his defense secretary broad powers over prisoners in November
2001; Secretary Rumsfeld authorized harsh "Counter-Resistance
Techniques" for Afghanistan and Guantanamo in December 2002; hardened
Military Intelligence units brought these methods to Iraq in July
2003; and General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad authorized these extreme
measures for Abu Ghraib in September 2003.

In its short answer to this uncomfortable question, General Fay's
report, when read closely, traced the source of these harsh
"non-doctrinal methods" at Abu Ghraib to the CIA. He charged that a
flouting of military procedures by CIA interrogators "eroded the
necessity in the minds of soldiers and civilians for them to follow
Army rules." Specifically, the Army "allowed CIA to house 'Ghost
Detainees' who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib,"
thus encouraging violations of "reporting requirements under the
Geneva Conventions." Moreover, the interrogation of CIA detainees
"occurred under different practices and procedures which were absent
any DoD visibility, control, or oversight and created a perception
that OGA [CIA] techniques and practices were suitable and authorized
for DoD operations." With their exemption from military regulations,
CIA interrogators moved about Abu Ghraib with a corrupting "mystique"
and extreme methods that "fascinated" some Army interrogators. In
sum, General Fay seems to say that the CIA has compromised the
integrity and effectiveness of the U.S. military.

Had he gone further, General Fay might have mentioned that the 519th
Military Intelligence, the Army unit that set interrogation
guidelines for Abu Ghraib, had just come from Kabul where it worked
closely with the CIA, learning torture techniques that left at least
one Afghani prisoner dead. Had he gone further still, the general
could have added that the sensory deprivation techniques, stress
positions, and cultural shock of dogs and nudity that we saw in those
photos from Abu Ghraib were plucked from the pages of past CIA
torture manuals.

American Prestige

This is not, of course, the first American debate over torture in
recent memory. From 1970 to 1988, the Congress tried unsuccessfully,
in four major investigations, to expose elements of this CIA torture
paradigm. But on each occasion the public showed little concern, and
the practice, never fully acknowledged, persisted inside the
intelligence community.

Now, in these photographs from Abu Ghraib, ordinary Americans have
seen the reality and the results of interrogation techniques the CIA
has propagated and practiced for nearly half a century. The American
public can join the international community in repudiating a practice
that, more than any other, represents a denial of democracy; or in
its desperate search for security, the United States can continue its
clandestine torture of terror suspects in the hope of gaining good
intelligence without negative publicity.

In the likely event that Washington adopts the latter strategy, it
will be a decision posited on two false assumptions: that torturers
can be controlled and that news of their work can be contained. Once
torture begins, its use seems to spread uncontrollably in a downward
spiral of fear and empowerment. With the proliferation of digital
imaging we can anticipate, in five or ten years, yet more chilling
images and devastating blows to America's international standing.
Next time, however, the American public's moral concern and
Washington's apologies will ring even more hollowly, producing even
greater damage to U.S. prestige.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin, CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, an examination of the CIA's
alliances with drug lords, and Closer Than Brothers, a study of the
impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine
military. He will publish a fuller version of this essay in The New
England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 19, No. 2, 2004).

For Immediate Release
September 3, 2004

Project Censored Announces Release of

Censored 2005, The Top 25 Censored News Stories
Media Democracy in Action

Sonoma State University's student run media research group Project Censored announces the release of its annual publication, Censored 2005, a compilation of the year's 25 most significant news stories that were overlooked or under-reported by the country's major national news media, as well as chapters on the grass roots media democracy, media ownership maps, real news about US involvement in Palestine, Haiti, Iraq, and more.

With introduction by Greg Palast and the political cartoon commentary of Tom Tomorrow throughout, this year's book covers critical issues facing the American public this election year. In Chapter 1's list of top 25 stories focus on politics, economics, foreign policy, food and health, the environment, energy, domestic policy, and the military.

"We define censorship as interference with the free flow of information," states Peter Phillips, Director of the Project, "Corporate media in the United States is interested primarily in entertainment news to feed their bottom-line priorities. Very important news stories that should reach the American public often fall on the cutting room floor to be replaced by sex-scandals and celebrity updates."

The Sonoma State University research group is composed of nearly 200 faculty, students and community experts who review about 1000 story submissions for coverage, content, reliability of sources and national significance. The top 25 stories are submitted to a panel of judges who then rank them in order of importance. Current judges include, Norman Solomon, Michael Parenti, Cynthia McKinney, Howard Zinn, and 20 other national journalists, scholars and writers.

Censored 2005, now available in bookstores nationwide, can also be purchased on the project's website at www.projectcensored.org.

For more information, contact:
Project Censored
Trish Boreta
707-664-2500
censored@sonoma.edu

************************************************************************



Top Most Censored News Stories

#1 Wealth Inequity in 21st Century Threatens Economy and Democracy
Multinational Monitor, May 2003, Vol. 24, No. 5
Title: "The Wealth Divide" (An interview with Edward Wolff)
Author: Robert Weissman
Buzzflash, March 26 and 19, 2004
Title: "A Buzzflash Interview, Parts I and II" (with David Cay Johnston)
Author: Mark Karlin
London Guardian, October 4, 2004
Title: "Every third person will be a slum dweller within 30 years, UN agency warns"
Author: John Vidal
Multinational Monitor, July/August, 2003
Title: "Grotesque Inequality"
Author: Robert Weissman

Wealth inequality increased dramatically in the United States in the late1990s. The top 5% is now capturing an increasingly greater portion of the pie while the bottom 95% is clearly losing ground, resulting in the rapidly vanishing middle class. This trend is the product of legislative policies carefully crafted and lobbied for by corporations and the ultra-wealthy over the past 25 years. America's economic trends have a global footprint, and today, the top 400 income earners in the U.S. make as much in a year as the entire population of the 20 poorest countries in Africa. A series of reports released in 2003 by the UN warn that further increases in the imbalance in wealth throughout the world will have catastrophic effects if left unchecked, such as the collapse of the entire global economy.


#2 Ashcroft vs. the Human Rights Law that Holds Corporations Accountable
One World.Net and Asheville Global Report, May 19, 2003
Title: "Ashcroft goes after 200-year-old Human Rights Law"
Author: Jim Lobe

Attorney General John Ashcroft is seeking to strike down one of the world's oldest human rights laws, the Alien Torts Claim Act (ATCA) which holds government leaders, corporations, and senior military officials liable for human rights abuses taking place in foreign countries. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) vehemently oppose the removal of this law, as it is one of the few legal defenses victims of human rights violations can claim against powerful organizations such as governments or multinational corporations. By attempting to throw out this law, the Bush Administration is effectively opening the door for human rights abuses to continue under the veil of foreign relations diplomacy.

#3 Bush Administration Manipulates Science and Censors Scientists
The Nation, March 8, 2004
Title: "The Junk Science of George W. Bush"
Author: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Censorship News: The National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, Fall 2003, #91
Title: "Censoring Scientific Information"
Author: The National Coalition Against Censorship staff
Environment News Service and OneWorld.Net, February 20, 2004
Title: "Ranking Scientists Warn Bush Science Policy Lacks Integrity"
Author: Sunny Lewis
Office of U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman, August 2003
Title: "Politics and Science in the Bush Administration"
Prepared by: Committee on Government Reform - Minority Staff
(Updated November 13, 2003

In Washington D.C. more than 60 of the nation's top scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, medical experts, and former federal agency directors, issued a statement February 18, 2004 accusing the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific results for political ends. They are calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking. Under the current administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has blacklisted scientists who pose a threat to pro-business ideology, and many unqualified scientists with close industry ties have been appointed to advisory boards.

# 4 High Uranium Levels Found in Troops and Civilians
Uranium Medical Research Center, January 2003
Title: "UMRC's Preliminary Findings from Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom" and "Afghan Field Trip #2 Report: Precision Destruction - Indiscriminate Effects"

Author: Tedd Weyman, UMRC Research Team
Awakened Woman, January 2004
Title: "Scientists Uncover Radioactive Trail in Afghanistan"
Author: Stephanie Hiller
Dissident Voice, March 2004
Title: "There Are No WordsŠ Radiation in Iraq equals 250,000 Nagasaki Bombs"
Author: Bob Nichols
New York Daily News, April 5, 2004
Title: "Poisoned?"
Author: Juan Gonzales
Information Clearing House, March 2004
Title: "International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan At Tokyo, The People Vs. George Bush"
Author: Professor Ms. Niloufer Bhagwat J.

Civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq and occupying troops have been contaminated with astounding levels of radioactive uranium as a result of post-9/11 United States' use of tons of uranium munitions. Four million pounds of radioactive uranium were dropped on Iraq in 2003 alone.
Most American weapons (missiles, smart bombs, bullets, tank shells, cruise missiles, etc.) contain high amounts of uranium that on detonation, release a radioactive dust. Once ingested, these subatomic particles slice through DNA. With a half-life of 4.5 billion years, it is a permanent contaminant distributed throughout the environment.
Scientists from around the world testify to the huge increase in birth deformities and cancers wherever uranium munitions have been used. The effects of the U.S. deployment will be felt in all the neighboring countries in the Middle East and Asia, as well as in our returning troops.

#5 The Wholesale Giveaway of Our Natural Resources
In These Times, November 23, 2003
Title: "Liquidation of the Commons"
Author: Adam Werbach
High Country News, Vol. 35, No. 11, June 9, 2003
Title: "Giant Sequoias Could Get the Ax"
Author: Matt Weiser

The Bush Administration's environmental policies are destroying much of the environmental progress made over the past 30 years. Between the "Clean Skies Initiative," a recent policy that allows power plants to emit more than five times more mercury and twice as much sulfur dioxide, and the "Healthy Forests Initiative," which allows the wholesale liquidation of ancient forests by corporate timber interests under the guise of fire prevention, resource extraction and pollution is occurring at unprecedented rates.

#6 The Sale of Electoral Politics
In These Times, December 2003
Title: "Voting Machines Gone Wild"
Author: Mark Lewellen-Biddle
Independet/UK, October 13, 2003
Title: "All The President's Votes?"
Author: Andrew Gumbel
Democracy Now!, September 4, 2003
Title: "Will Bush Backers Manipulate Votes to Deliver GW Another Election?"
Reporter: Amy Goodman and the staff of Democracy Now!

Conflicts of interest exist between the largest suppliers of electronic voting machines in the United States and key leaders in the Republican Party. While the voting machines themselves present some technical issues, the political affiliations within the voting machine industry pose even more serious questions. The three major companies involved in implementing the new, often faulty, technology at voting stations throughout the country have strong ties to the Bush Administration, Republican leaders, and major defense contractors.
It must be noted that under the Help America Vote Act control over the electoral process has been taken away from local officials and placed in the hands of a very small number of for-profit corporations. In effect we are privatizing America's most public endeavor.

#7 Conservative Organization Drives Judicial Appointments
The American Prospect, Vol. 14, Issue 3, March 1, 2003
Title: " A Hostile Takeover: How the Federalist Society is Capturing the Federal Courts"
Author: Martin Garbus
Title: "Courts vs. Citizents"
Author: Jamin Raskin

In 2001 George W. Bush eliminated the longstanding influence of the American Bar Association (ABA) in the evaluation of the prospective federal judges. ABA's judicial ratings had long kept extremists from the right and left off the bench. In its place, Bush has been using the Federal Society for Law and Public Policy Studies-a national organization whose mission is to advance a conservative agenda by moving the country's legal system to the right.

One of the most important issues in the country is the control of one of the three branches of government, the judiciary. While Presidents and Congress-members get elected every few years, judicial appointments are for life, Our courts deal with nearly every aspect of life; work conditions and wages, schools, civil rights, affirmative action, crime and punishment, abortion and the environment, amongst others.

#8 Secrets of Cheney's Energy Task Force Come to Light
Judicial Watch, July 17, 2003
Title: "Cheney Energy Task Force Documents Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields"
Author: Judicial Watch Staff
Foreign Policy in Focus, January 2004
Title: "Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of the World's Oil"
Author: Michael Klare

Cheney Energy Task Force documents turned over in the summer of 2003 by the Commerce Department as a result of the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Sierra Club and Judicial Watch contain maps of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals. The documents, dated March 2001, also contain plans of occupation and exploitation that predate September 11, confirming suspicions that the Bush Administration energy policy is driving U.S. military strategy.

#9 Widow Brings RICO Case Against U.S. Government for 9/11
Scoop.co.nz, November 2003 and December 2003
Title: "911 Victim's Wife Files RICO Case Against GW Bush"
Author: Philip J. Berg
Title: "Widow's Bush Treason Suit Vanishes"
Author: W. David Kubiak

Ellen Mariani became widowed when her husband Louis Neil Mariani perished in the collision between United Airlines flight 175 and the South Tower of the World Trade Center. In addition to her refusal of the government's million-dollar settlement offer, Mrs. Mariani has filed a 62 page complaint in federal district court charging that President Bush and officials: (1) had adequate foreknowledge of 911, yet failed to warn the country or attempt to prevent it; (2) have since been covering up the truth of that day; (3) have therefore abetted the murder of plaintiff's husband and violated the Constitution and multiple laws of the United States; and (4) are thus being sued under the Civil Racketeering, Influences, and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act for Malfeasant conspiracy, obstruction of justice and wrongful death.

#10 New Nuke Plants: Taxpayers Support, Industry Profits
Nuclear Information and Resourse Service, November 17, 2003
Title: "Nuclear Energy Would Get $7.5 Billion in Tax Subsides, US Taxpayers Would Fund Nuclear Monitor Relapse If Energy Bill Passes"
Authors: Cindy Folkers and Michael Mariotte
WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor, August 2003
Title: "US Senate Passes Pro-Nuclear Energy Bill"
Authors: Cindy Folkers and Michael Mariotte

Senator Peter Domenici (R-NM), along with the Bush Administration, is looking to give the nuclear power industry a huge boost through the new Energy Policy Act. The Domenici-sponsored bill will give nuclear power plants credits costing taxpayers an estimated 7.5 billion dollars, to build six new privately owned, for-profit reactors across the country. Safety standards will be lowered and liability will be passed on to taxpayers. This is in addition to the $4 billion already provided for other nuclear energy programs.

#11 The Media Can Legally Lie
CMW Report, Spring 2003
Title: "Court Ruled That Media Can Legally Lie"
Author: Liane Casten
Organic Consumer Association, March 7, 2004
Title: "Florida Appeals Court Orders Akre-Wilson Must Pay Trial Costs for $24.3 Billion Fox Television; Couple Warns Journalists of Danger to Free Speech, Whistle Blower Protection"
Author: Al Krebs

In 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals ruled that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. It agreed with an argument by Fox Television that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Under the current ruling, it is up to the public to discover whether or not they are being lied to.

#12 The Destabilization of Haiti
KPFA Radio-Flashpoints, April 1, 2004
Title: "Interview with Aristide's lawyer, Brian Concannon"

Reporter: Dennis Bernstein
globalresearch.ca, February 29, 2004
Title: "The destabilization of Haiti"
Author: Michel Chossudovsky
Dollars and Sense, September/October 2003
Title: "Still Up Against the Death Plan in Haiti"
Author: Tom Reeves
KPFA - Democracy Now!, March 17, 2004
Title: "Aristide talks with Democracy Now! About the leaders of the coup and US funding of the opposition in Haiti"
Reporter: Amy Goodman
Associated Press, March 16, 2004
Title: "Aristide Backers Left Out of Coalition"
Author: Ian James

On February 29, 2004, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced into exile by American military. While U.S. officials were eventially forced to acknowledge the kidnapping allegations, they were quick to discredit them and deny responsibility. Meanwhile, the circumstances that led to the current situation in Haiti, as well as the history of U.S. involvement, are being ignored by U.S. officials and the mainstream media.

#13 Schwarzenegger Met with Enron's Ken Lay Before the California Recall
Common Dreams, August 17, 2003
Title: "Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Gray Davis"
Author: Jason Leopold
The London Observer, October 6, 2003
Title: "Arnold Unplugged-It's Hasta la Vista to $9 Billion"
Author: Greg Palast
San Francisco Chronicle and CommonDreams, October 11,2003
Title: "Schwarzenegger Electricity Plan Fuels Fears of Another Debacle"
Author: Zachary Coile
San Francisco Chronicle, May 26, 2001
Title: "Enron's Secret Bid to Save Deregulation: Private Meeting With Prominent Californians"
Authors: Christian Berthelsen, Scott Winokur, Chronicle Staff Writers

In 2002, while the California Governor and his deputy were attempting to re-regulate the energy industry (and get back the $9 billion that was defrauded from California taxpayers by Enron and other energy companies) Arnold Schwarzenegger was being groomed to overthrow Governor Davis in a recall - and cancel plans to re-regulate or to recoup the $9 billion. Back in May of 2001, in the midst of California's energy crisis, Schwarzenegger met with Enron's Ken Lay to discuss "fixing" California's energy crisis.

#14 New Bill Threatens Intellectual Freedom
Yale Daily News, November 6, 2003
Title: "New Bill threatens intellectual freedom in area studies"
Author: Benita Singh
Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 2004
Title: "Speaking in 'Approved' Tongues"
Author: Kimberly Chase

The International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003 threatens academic freedom and classroom curriculum. Under this act, professors whose ideological principles do not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any course curriculum containing criticism of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed anti-American can be barred from the classroom.

#15 US Develops Lethal New Bio-weapon Viruses
The New Scientist, October 29, 2003
Title: "US develops lethal new viruses"
Author: Debora MacKenzie

Scientists funded by the US government have developed a way to make pox viruses incredibly deadly. The stated goal of this research is to fight possible bio-terror attacks. The new virus kills all mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs along with a vaccine that would normally protect the victim from death.

# 16 Law Enforcement Agencies Spy on Innocent Citizens
Agenda, July--August 2003
Title: "Big Brother Gets Bigger--Domestic Spying & the Global Intelligence Working Group"
Author: Michelle J. Kinnucan
Community Alliance, April 2003
Title: "Police Infiltrate Local Groups"
Author: Mark Schlosberg
CovertAction Quarterly, Fall 2003
Title: "Denver Police Keeping Files On Peace Groups"
Author: Loring Wirbel
North Bay Progressive, Volume 2 # 8, October 2003
Title: "Fresno Peace group Infiltrated by Government Agent"
Author: Mike Rhodes
World Socialist Web Site, www.wsws.org, 1/10/04
Title: "Bush Administration Expands Police Spying Powers"
Author: Kate Randall

With little media comment, federal, state and local agencies have begun working as partners in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence information. Under the "Global Intelligence Working Group" (that oversees the new network) police departments receive increased funding for surveillance activity. This has resulted in the recent COINTELPRO-style instances of police infiltration of groups critical of government policies.

#17 U.S. Government Represses Labor Unions in Iraq in Quest for Business Privatization
The Progressive, December 2003
Title: "Saddam's labor laws live on"
Author: David Bacon
Left Turn, March/April 2004, v. 12
Title: "Ambitions of Empire: The Radical Reconstruction of Iraq's Economy"
Author: Antonia Juhasz

According to the Wall Street Journal (alone), the Bush Administration has "sweeping plans to remake Iraq's economy in the US image." The US is calling for the privatization of state-owned industries such as oil and water. But it has chosen not to overturn Sadaam-era edicts that outlaw unions. Every day the economic policies of occupying authorities create more hunger among Iraq's working people, transforming them into a pool of low-wage, semi-employed labor, desperate for jobs at any price.

#18 Media and Government Ignore Dwindling Oil Supplies
New Internationalist, October 31, 2003
Title: "Running on empty; Oil is disappearing fast"
Author: Adam Porter
Guardian Unlimited, December 2, 2003
Title: "Bottom of the Barrel"
Author: George Monbiot

Even industry executives affirm that oil is close to reaching, or may have already reached, its highest levels of production potential. Once the peak is reached, oil prices will start to rise (as they have every year since 2000). As oil decline accelerates, prices will rise even faster, with devastating effects to the US economy. Over the years, U.S. leaders, bowing to oil industry pressure, have not worked to develop viable alternatives (as they have done in Europe).

#19 Global Food Cartel Fast Becoming the World's Supermarket
Left Turn, August/September 2003
Title: "Concentration in the Agri-Food System"
Author: Hilary Mertaugh

Agribusiness and supermarket alliances are transforming the agri-food system into a powerful network of transnational corporations. They now have the power to control the world's food supply at every stage of food production. As fewer corporations control food production, traditional farming is becoming a high-tech form of serfdom. Lack of competition is leading to higher prices, lower choice and quality, and employee abuse.

#20 Extreme Weather Prompts New Warning from UN
UK Independent, July 2003
Title: "Extreme Weather Prompts Unprecedented Global Warming Alert"

In 2003, The UN's World Meteorological Organization reported unprecedented levels of extreme weather and climate occurrences all over the world. The report emphasized an alarming increase in global warming and pointed to the impact of human activity. The significance of this particular report is that the highly respected UN organization is known for its normally conservative predictions and statements.

#21 Forcing a World Market for GMOs
Globalinfo.org, 12/3/03
Title: "Agriculture: Biotech Links to Big Lenders Worry Farm Experts"
Author: Katherine Stapp
Inter Press Service (IPS) News Agency, May 14, 2003
Title: "U.S. WTO Dispute Could Bend Poor Nations to GMOs-Groups"
Author Emad Mekay
CMW Report, Summer 2003
Title: "A Rebuttal to the Tribune"
Author: Liane Casten
SF Weekly, June 2-8, 2004
Title: "Bioscience Warfare"
Author: Alison Pierce

The Bush Administration is trying to force Europe to drop trade barriers against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Meanwhile, the agricultural biotechnology industry is focusing even more intently on developing countries, where regulations governing their use are generally more lax. At the same time, biotech promoters continue to suppress studies that show GMOs may have adverse effects on health and the environment.

#22 Exporting Censorship to Iraq
The American Prospect, Volume 14, Issue 9, October 1, 2003
Title: "Exporting Censorship to Iraq"
Author: Alex Gourevitch
Asheville Global Report, May 12, 2003
Title: "U.S Army Major Refuses Order to Seize Iraq TV Station"
Author: Charlie Thomas

After the fall of Saddam, Paul Bremer told journalists they were now "free to criticize whoever, or whatever, you want." But when negative critiques of U.S. policies appeared in the Iraqi media, Bremer quickly placed controls on its content. And rather than hiring a media outlet to run the Iraqi media (or simply allowing the news groups already there to continue reporting), the Pentagon chose a defense contractor to define the news.

#23 Brazil Opposes US-style FTAA agreements, But Provides Little Comfort for the Poor of South America
Globalinfo.org, November 15, 2003
Title: "Trade: US Moves to Squeeze FTAA Opponents"
Author: Emad Mekay
Left Turn, Mar/Apr, 2004
Title: "Lula's First Year"
Author: Brian Campbell

The Free Trade Area of the America's (FTAA) could become the biggest trading block in history, expanding NAFTA to 34 countries from Canada to the bottom of South America. This deal is unlikely to meet its January 2005 deadline, now that the second largest player in the negotiations, Brazil, is holding back. However, Brazilian President Lula has begun, of his own volition, to institute his own brand of FTAA austerity policies that are sure to drive the poor of the region deeper into poverty.

#24 Reinstating the Draft
Salon, November 3, 2003
Title: "Oiling up the Draft Machine?"
Author: Dave Lindorff
Buzzflash.com, November 11, 2003
Title: "Would a Second Bush Term Mean a Return to Conscription?'
Author: Maureen Farrell
War Times, October-November, 2003
Title: "Military Targets Latino Youth"
Author: Jorge Mariscal

The Selective Service System (SSS), the Bush Administration, and the Pentagon have been quietly moving to fill draft board vacancies nationwide in order to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005. Several million dollars have been added to the 2004 SSS budget. Meanwhile, through an on-going militarization of public school systems, the Pentagon has begun efforts to double the number of Latinos in the U.S. military by 2006.

#25 Wal-Mart Brings Inequity and Low Prices to the World
Multinational Monitor, October 2003
Title: "Welcome to Wal-World"
Author: Andy Rowell

The vision of the international division of Wal-Mart is one where Wal-Mart becomes a global brand, just like McDonald's or Coca- Cola, monopolizing the global retail market. The next five or six years could see about 5,000 to 6,000 Wal-Mart stores outside of the United States. Wal-Mart is Americanizing retailing around the world and exercising an inordinate amount of economic power.