[Vision2020] Top Ten 2010 Censored Stories: # 1: More 2010 U.S. Soldier Suicides Than Combat Deaths

[Ted Moffett]

The article below is in the most recent edition of the Pacific
Northwest Inlander that is distributed free around Moscow etc.

I found the # 9 censored story, "The government is manipulating the
weather," to be ironically amusing, insofar as the behavior of our
entire society, including government policies as they influence this
behavior, is at this moment geo-engineering the Earth's climate and
weather, increasing the magnitude of flooding, drought, heat waves,
cryosphere ice loss, sea level rise, etc. via massive CO2 emissions
and other human behavior.

We have no rational sane choice at this point in time--the genie is
out of the bottle--but to deliberately geo-engineer the Earth's
climate to lessen catastrophic impacts of anthropogenic global
warming, which the article does address mentioning deliberate
injection of aerosals to reflect solar energy to counter climate
change.  Therefore indeed we need a deliberate government program to
maniplate the weather, in one way or another.  For example,
deliberately planting trees to sequester CO2 is geo-engineering of
climate and weather.

Humanity now has the unavoidable responsibility of a God, to engineer
the Earth's climate.  I recall NASA climate scientist James Hansen's
comment that future major ice ages won't happen, unless humanity goes
extinct, from his book "Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About
the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity:"

"The size of continental-scale ice sheets is mind-boggling. Although
thinner toward the edges, ice over New York towered several times
higher than the Empire State building--thick enough to crush
everything in today's New York City to smithereens. But not to
worry--even though we sometimes hear geoscientists talk as if ice ages
will occur again, it won't happen--unless humans go extinct. Forces
instigating ice ages, as we shall see, are so small and slow that a
single chlorofluorocarbon factory would be more than sufficient to
overcome any natural tendency toward an ice age. Ice sheets will not
descend over North America and Europe as long as we are around to stop
them."
---------------------------
But contrail generated cirrus clouds as secret government military
weather control, even if there is substance to this claim, seems a bit
overblown for a top ten censored story.

http://www.inlander.com/spokane/article-17011-downplayed.html

Project Censored
Downplayed
Ten stories the mainstream media ignored in the past year, according
to Project Censored.
Rebecca Bowe

In an age of blogs, tweets, hacks and piles of beans spilled by
WikiLeaks, the notion of media censorship may seem dated.

But the rundown of stories Project Censored calls attention to this
year serves as a reminder that mainstream media outlets favoring the
superficial over the substantive don’t give us all the information we
need.

Since 1976, Project Censored has endeavored to spotlight important
news articles that didn’t find their way into mainstream headlines.
Originating with a classroom assignment at Sonoma State University,
the perennial project has evolved into a book, a radio show, and the
Project Censored and Media Freedom International websites, which
aggregate underreported independent news stories from around the
globe.

Students and professors engaged in unearthing oft-ignored stories,
part of a nationwide network of affiliates working under the direction
of history professor Mickey Huff, bring a harsh critique to standard
mainstream media fare.

“Corporate media is the information control wing of the global power
structure,” former Project Censored director Peter Phillips writes in
the introduction to Censored 2012: Sourcebook for the Media
Revolution. “The corporate media systematically censors the news
stories that challenge the propaganda of empire.”

In Huff’s words, “We try to highlight the things that are highly
relevant, that seem to be conspicuously absent.”

Huff says the selection process for the top censored stories begins
with nominations of independent articles that readers feel warrant
greater attention than they’ve received. From there, students comb
through LexisNexis or other databases to see whether the stories have
been adequately covered. If not, they fact-check the stories with
professors or other experts in the field.

Once they’ve been “validated” in this way, they’re posted to Project
Censored’s sister site, Media Freedom International. The Top 25
Censored Stories list is the result of a ranked-choice voting process,
in which judges and affiliates select from the entire pool of
validated news articles posted from April to April.
The end product — an annual book featuring a compilation of the
censored stories as well as sociological essays on media censorship
and scathing critiques of “junk food news” churned out by the likes of
Fox News — can be considered a kind of historical almanac, Huff says.

“Journalism is the rough draft of history,” he notes, “and if you have
these mainstream corporate news outlets getting so much of it wrong or
missing it, how does that impact historical construction?”

For the most part, Project Censored’s story list offers a sampling of
smart, investigative journalism produced by the independent press.
They include deep investigative pieces such as “Diet Hard With A
Vengeance,” by David Moberg of In These Times, and a heartrending
portrayal by Chris Hedges of a marine stationed in a mortuary unit in
Iraq.

Yet there are instances when Project Censored seems to wander too far
afield. Their claims of “censorship” seem dubious at times, as with
the charge that the mainstream media has ignored the real unemployment
rate because it hasn’t turned an eye toward the analysis of economist
John Williams, who maintains a website called Shadow Government
Statistics.

Huff and Phillips regularly discuss questions surrounding the Sept.
11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center on their KPFA radio show,
and their emphasis on this particular issue, along with a recent
tendency to give weight to fringe theories concerning things like
suspicious contrails issuing from airplanes, have caused allies of the
organization to defect in the past.

The organization’s definition of censorship has evolved, too, to the
point where the authors cast it as a form of propaganda that is
“intentional by nature ... In essence, this is a conspiracy.”

Nevertheless, the Project Censored team delivers yet another rundown
of surprising, alarming, and thought-provoking stories that are worth
noting — more so, perhaps, because they received so little attention
to begin with. Without further ado, here are the Top 10.

1. More U.S. soldiers committed suicide than died in combat in 2010

Six more, to be exact. That’s the figure reported by Good magazine and
spotlighted by Project Censored in an article highlighting the fact
that 462 American soldiers were killed in combat in 2010, while 468
soldiers, counting enlisted men and women as well as veterans, took
their own lives.

This was the second consecutive year that more soldiers died by their
own hands than in combat — in 2009, the 381 suicides of active-duty
soldiers recorded by the military also exceeded the number of deaths
in battle. The Good report, which references Congressional Quarterly
as a source, was published in January 2011, just weeks after military
authorities announced that a psychological screening program seemed to
be stemming the suicide rate among active-duty soldiers.

“This new data, that American soldiers are now more dangerous to
themselves than the insurgents, flies right in the face of any
suggestion that things are ‘working,’” Good Senior Editor Cord
Jefferson wrote.

Project Censored also spotlighted Chris Hedges’ sobering portrayal of
Jess Goodell, a marine who was stationed in the Mortuary Affairs unit
in Iraq. Goodell published a memoir titled “Death and After in Iraq,”
which is also the name of Hedges’ column.

2. U.S. military’s “friend” fake-out

Anyone suspicious of “sock puppets,” those online commenters
pretending to be someone they’re not, would be unnerved by the U.S.
military’s “online persona management service,” a little-known program
described in the Guardian U.K., Raw Story and Computerworld stories
unearthed and highlighted by Project Censored.

The U.S. Central Command (Centcom) secured a contract with a Los
Angeles-based tech company to develop the program, which enables U.S.
service workers to use fake online personas on social media sites to
influence online chatter. Using up to 10 false identities, they can
counter charged political dialogue with pro-military propaganda.

“These ‘personas’ were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to
make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated
identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious
readers from uncovering the real person behind the account,” according
to a Raw Story account.

A Centcom spokesperson told the Guardian that the program would only
intervene in online conversations in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu or Pashto,
and that it wouldn’t initially target Twitter or Facebook. However,
critics likened this U.S. endeavor to manipulate social media to
China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the Internet.

3. Obama’s hit list

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. military have the
authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad, outside war zones, if strong
evidence exists that they’re involved in terrorist activity, the
Washington Post reported in a front page story in January of 2010.

Despite this prominent press treatment of targeted assassinations
under the Obama administration, Project Censored deems this an
underreported news story, because “a moral, ethical, and legal
analysis of the assassinations seems to be significantly lacking
inside the corporate media.”

The authors instead point us to coverage in Salon, the Inter Press
Service, Common Dreams and several other sources that sharply question
the president’s authority to license extrajudicial executions of
individuals. In December of 2010, Human Rights Watch asked for
clarification of the legal rationale behind this practice after a
judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging the notion.

Columnist Glenn Greenwald blasts the practice in Salon: “Bush merely
imprisoned [Jose Padilla] for years without a trial. If that’s a
vicious, tyrannical assault on the Constitution — and it was — what
should they be saying about the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s
assassination of American citizens without any due process?”

4. Manmade food crisis

David Moberg offers an in-depth breakdown of the global food crisis
for In These Times in an article highlighted by Project Censored,
touching on the environmental context of worsening droughts and
flooding, as well as the economic ramifications of a system in which
free-market speculators stand to profit from volatile food prices.

Beyond crop reductions resulting from irregular weather patterns,
Moberg places the blame for rising food prices and increasing
malnutrition on flawed economic policies. “Hunger is currently a
result of poverty and inequality, not lack of food,” he concludes.

The food price index rose to its highest level since 1990 in February
2011, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations. “Since 2010 began, roughly another 44 million
people have quietly crossed the threshold into malnutrition, joining
925 million already suffering from lack of food,” Moberg writes. “If
prices continue to rise, this food crisis will push the ranks of the
hungry toward a billion people.”

5. Prison companies fund anti-immigrant legislation

When Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer ran for re-election in 2010, her greatest
out-of-state campaign contributions came from high-ranking executives
of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), one of the nation’s
largest prison companies. Brewer gained notoriety among
immigrant-rights advocates after championing Senate Bill 1070, strict
anti-illegal-immigration legislation that drew criticism for
legitimizing racial profiling.

The bill established new crimes and corresponding prison sentences
relating to illegal immigration. CCA profits directly from building
and operating prisons and detention centers.

Bringing it closer to home, CCA previously employed two of Brewer’s
legislative aides as lobbyists.

In a Counterpunch article titled “Wall Street and the Criminalization
of Immigrants” (spotlighted by Project Censored), Peter
Cervantes-Gautschi explores Brewer’s links to CCA and goes deeper
still, offering an historic account of how investors in CCA and prison
giant Geo Group have, for years, actively pushed for legislation that
would result in the widespread incarceration of undocumented
immigrants.

6. Google spies?

A flurry of stories aired in the spring of 2010 when it became
apparent that Google Street View vehicles, in the process of
collecting data for its mapping service, also picked up consumer
“payload” data on Wi-Fi networks, including email messages, website
data, user names and passwords.

The tech giant publicly apologized for what it characterized as a
mistake, saying it had “failed badly.” The Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) admonished Google in a letter but declined to pursue it further.
>From there, Project Censored authors make the leap that the FTC
abandoned its inquiry because, a week earlier, President Obama
attended a Democratic Party fundraiser at the Palo Alto home of Google
executive Marissa Mayer, citing a San Francisco Chronicle article
about the $30,000-per-person affair.

Project Censored authors also point to an article by Eric Sommer
titled “Google’s Deep CIA Connections,” which appeared on Pravda.ru (a
website whose most-read article was “Bermuda Triangle: New Anomalous
Phenomenon Discovered”). Sommer claims that “Google is, in fact, a key
participant in U.S. military and CIA intelligence operations,” basing
his argument on a perplexing set of links between investors in Google
and CIA technologies.

7. Stay positive — at all costs

A military training program that Project Censored has deemed “U.S.
Army and psychology’s largest experiment — ever” was profiled in a
detailed American Psychologist series in early 2011. Comprehensive
Soldier Fitness (CSF) is described as a “holistic approach to warrior
training,” emphasizing positive psychology as a means to counter
mental health problems arising from horrific combat situations.

While the American Psychologist series reads like a puff piece
finessed by the professionals who developed CSF, Project Censored
spotlighted articles in Truthout and The Psychology of Wellbeing that
raised questions about the wisdom of launching a required, untested
psychology program for more than 1 million soldiers — one that
encourages soldiers to think positive even in the face of traumatizing
events.

In an article appearing on OpEdNews.com, authors Roy Eidelson, Marc
Pilisuk, and Stephen Soldz write that the CSF “training” program would
better be described as a research project. They point out that a
hypothesis of the program’s success lies at the very core of CSF, “yet
it is merely a hypothesis — a tentative explanation or prediction that
can only be confirmed through further research.”

8. The myth of clean nuclear power

The terrifying meltdowns of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactors
reignited a worldwide debate about the wisdom of relying on nuclear
energy as an electricity source. While Germany opted to phase out its
nuclear facilities by 2022 in the wake of the tragedy, the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) came under scrutiny after a Union
of Concerned Scientists report analyzed 14 “near misses” at nuclear
power plants in 2010, revealing the shortcomings in NRC inspections.

Project Censored’s critique of mainstream media’s treatment of nuclear
power is that the media is too willing to endorse the idea that
nuclear power is safe so long as proper safety measures are in place,
and that major news publications readily go along with the nuclear
industry’s branding of the power source as “clean” and “carbon-free”
when it’s really not.

Claiming that “the refrain of the corporate media” is that nuclear
power is “perfectly harmless,” the authors spotlight a number of
articles and literature from anti-nuclear nonprofit organizations
explaining the health hazards of radiation, plus Jeff Goodell’s
“America’s Nuclear Nightmare,” an in-depth Rolling Stone article
investigating ties between the NRC and the nuclear industry.

9. The government is manipulating the weather

This one stretches credulity, and it’s probably the best example of
why Project Censored has gained detractors even on the left in recent
years. The authors point us to a Centre for Research on Globalization
article titled, “Atmospheric Geoengineering: Weather Manipulation,
Contrails and Chemtrails,” by Rady Ananda, who begins by informing
readers, “The military-industrial complex stands poised to capitalize
on controlling the world’s weather.”

It describes an “international symposium” held in Belgium in May of
2010, during which “scientists asserted that manipulation of climate
through modification of cirrus clouds is neither a hoax nor a
conspiracy theory,” and is “fully operational.”

That sounds rather serious, but a web video of that symposium easily
located online offers a closer look. One speaker begins by showing
slides of old paintings to demonstrate “what the sky is supposed to
look like,” then offers evidence of a chemtrail cover-up by quoting an
unnamed pilot who tells someone in an online comment that he could
reveal the truth about chemtrails but is bound by contract to shoot
anyone he tells.

Scientific American and other publications have reported that
geoengineering — spreading tiny atmospheric particles to reflect
sunlight as a method to counter climate change — has actually come
under serious consideration in recent years. Yet Project Censored
seems to conflate this with a fringe obsession with supposedly
suspicious airplane contrails.

10. The “real” unemployment rate

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates the “official
unemployment rate” by counting everyone who had no job, was available
for work, and had actively sought work in the last four weeks,
according to the BLS website. But alternative BLS statistics
incorporate so-called “discouraged workers,” unemployed individuals
who’ve given up on the job hunt.

In the first four months of 2011, the national unemployment rate
officially stood at around 9 percent, while a BLS statistic
incorporating discouraged workers and the marginally employed bumped
that figure up to 15.9 percent.

However, Project Censored highlights an article by Greg Hunter,
published on Information Clearinghouse, claiming that the “real”
unemployment rate is actually 22.1 percent, or one out of five U.S.
residents. Hunter’s claim is based on his interview with San
Francisco-based economist John Williams, who maintains a website
called Shadow Government Statistics.

By ignoring the claims of this economist, Project Censored argues, the
mainstream media is engaging in censorship.
As with several claims in this year’s list, that may be stretching
things a bit.

Comments? Write totheeditor at inlander.com. This article first appeared
in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett