Censored 2012 (14 page)

In May 2011, the
New York Times
did report that previous claims that Arizona’s private prison system save the state money are misleading or even false: “Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons—even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates.”
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According to one estimate cited, inmates held in private prisons cost the state as much as $1600 more per year. Moreover, five of Arizona’s eight private prisons do not accept the state’s most costly prisoners, those with “limited physical capacity and stamina,” severe physical illness, or chronic conditions.

The global atmosphere, including the air that we breathe, exemplifies what many people envision when they champion protection of the commons—i.e., forms of wealth that belong to all of us and must therefore be protected and managed for the good of all. Rising global temperatures, increasing population, and degradation of water supplies have created broad support for the growing field of weather modification. One such program is atmospheric geo-engineering, or cloud seeding, which involves using airplane contrails to seed cirrus clouds. Advocates claim that geo-engineering could be employed to
counteract global warming, while critics raise concern about public health effects and potential military applications.

Coverage in the corporate media has been almost nonexistent: the
New York Times
, for instance, ran a 2007 opinion piece advocating geo-engineering as “an insurance policy, a backup plan for climate change.”
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More recently,
Newsweek
offered a skeptical account of geo-engineering’s potential to block sunlight and thus counteract global warming, while WTEN, an ABC affiliate based in Albany, New York, broadcast a report on activists who believe that geo-engineering may actually be a covert military operation.
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Rady Ananda reported on an international symposium hosted in Belgium during May 2010, where scientists gathered to “force public debate” on geo-engineering. At the conference, Dr. Coen Vermeeren of the Delft University of Technology stated that “weather manipulation through contrail formation … is in place and fully operational.” The Case Orange Report concluded that “manipulation of climate through modification of Cirrus clouds is neither a hoax nor a conspiracy theory” and warned that the United States aims to “control the weather by the year 2025, both for civil and military purposes.” Reviewing the history of efforts at weather modification dating back to 1915, Ananda wrote, “The only conspiracy surrounding geo-engineering is that most governments and industry refuse to publicly admit what anyone with eyes can see.”

The European Union Times
reported on China’s extensive cloud seeding projects and the US government’s covert weather modification experiments over the past half century. One of the latest US programs is HAARP, the High Frequency Active Aural Research Program. This technology, the
European Union Times
reported, could potentially trigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and earthquakes. The scientific idea behind HAARP is to “excite” a specific area of the ionosphere and observe the physical processes in that excited area with intention of modifying ecological conditions.
The Times
report described HAARP as having the potential to be used as “a weapon of mass destruction on a global scale.”

After the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s northeast coast, MSNBC reported that “the atmosphere above the epicenter … underwent unusual changes in the days leading up to the disaster,” according to preliminary data being examined by Dimitar
Ouzounov, a professor of earth sciences at Chapman University in California.
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MSNBC’s report emphasized Ouzounov’s claim that scientists could study the ionosphere, part of the earth’s upper atmosphere, to predict earthquakes, while noting that the research had not yet been published or formally reviewed by other scientists. The MSNBC report did not address whether increases in both the concentration of electrons and infrared radiation in the ionosphere in the days before the earthquake might have been caused by the sort of technologies identified in the Case Orange Report or the
European Union Times
story, cited above.

“Peacekeeping” provides cover for the potential consolidation of power by political elites and the domestic mobilization of the US military. Peter Dale Scott and Allen Roland, in articles from Global Research and the People’s Voice, respectively, revealed how a federal program of emergency measures—originally implemented during the Eisenhower administration as a legitimate response to the threat of nuclear attack—is being adapted to bestow far-reaching powers on the executive branch in response to any situation that the president considers an emergency. The National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (HR 645), introduced by Representative Alcee Hastings (D-FL) in January 2009, proposed to establish emergency centers to provide “temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency, major disaster,” or to “meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.” In his report, Roland described the proposed legislation as “the militarization of FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] internment facilities.”

Scott’s reports traced the history of “Continuity of Operations” or “Continuity of Government” (COG) programs, dating back to their formation under the Eisenhower administration, to their transformation during Reagan’s presidency, to the implementation of COG following 9/11 by the Bush executive. COG plans are the probable source for the USA PATRIOT Act, presented to Congress five days after 9/11, and also for the Department of Homeland Security’s Project Endgame—a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone. The consequences include the removal of time-honored constitutional protections and increased militarization of civilian law enforcement.

Nearly a decade since 9/11, aspects of COG remain in effect. COG plans are still authorized by a proclamation of emergency that has been extended each year by presidential authority, most recently by President Barack Obama in September 2010.
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The New York Times
reported that “President Obama called for tolerance” and declared that the US was “not—and never will be—at war with Islam,” but made no mention of the president’s continuation of the national emergency with respect to terrorism.
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Congress is also to blame. The National Emergencies Act requires that “not later than six months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated.” As Peter Dale Scott documented, since implementation of COG in the days following 9/11 nearly a decade ago, Congress has not once met to discuss the state of emergency declared by George W. Bush in response to 9/11. Thus, the state of emergency remains in effect today.

Under these conditions, US military troops can engage in police actions in US cities, operations that would otherwise violate long-standing Posse Comitatus statutes. Scott’s reports alerted us to antecedents of the current militarization of US domestic law enforcement and to the challenges that this militarization presents to our cherished conception of the United States as a nation governed by laws and its Constitution.

A deadly explosion on May 20, 2011, at a Chinese factory where workers assemble Apple’s iPads and iPhones, garnered attention in the corporate media. However, while noting that the blast in the Foxconn plant killed three workers and injured fifteen others, most corporate news focused on the question of whether the accident would negatively impact Apple’s ability to supply its much sought-after iPads and iPhones.
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By contrast, before the Foxconn disaster, Dan Margolis reported on the systemic conditions that threaten workers’ health in factories contracted with Apple. On a daily basis, factory conditions expose Chinese workers to poisonous chemicals as they assemble Apple iPods. Citing a report by China’s Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, Margolis
revealed how Apple hides mistreatment of workers and environmental damage behind a “secretive supply chain.” According to this report, management in factories subcontracted by Apple forced workers to use n-hexane, a neurotoxin and irritant, in place of alcohol as a cleaning agent. Margolis reported that forty-nine workers from one plant were admitted to a hospital after falling ill, while more were likely poisoned but pushed out of work before they fell ill. The manufacturer, Lian Jian, forced the latter group to sign papers saying they would not hold the company accountable for their health. Management at factories producing Apple products also forced workers to work more overtime than legally permitted under Chinese law, and subjected workers to humiliating surveillance, including strip searches when leaving work.

The Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs concluded that Apple is able to get away with abuses of workers and the environment due to its “culture of secrecy,” which makes monitoring of Apple’s production unusually difficult. For example, while hundreds of other companies that operate in China (including Walmart and Nike) participate in the Green Choice Alliance, a nongovernmental organization that monitors corporate polluters, Apple does not. As Margolis noted, Apple’s practices contradict the image it markets to the public of itself as “a benevolent corporate giant … that does more than its part to better the world.”

Abuses of power in the name of “peacekeeping,” “diplomacy,” and “development” demonstrate how elites not only take advantage of military and economic crises but also contribute to their formation in the first place. Thus Mike Lewis reported on the politicization of international aid by donor governments pursuing their own political and military purposes. The nongovernmental relief organization Oxfam International found that national governments spent billions of dollars in international aid—which could have transformed the lives of people in some of the world’s poorest countries—on unsustainable, expensive, and dangerous projects that supported those governments’ own short-term foreign policy and security objectives.

The politicization and militarization of aid has made it harder for aid agencies to provide help to those in need. For example, after the United States identified armed groups operating in central and southern Somalia as terrorists, US aid to Somalia in 2010 dropped to
an eighth of what it was in 2008. Moreover, by blurring the distinction between military and civilian activities, politicized aid potentially makes aid workers and intended beneficiaries targets. The Oxfam report showed that 225 aid workers were killed, injured, or kidnapped in violent attacks during 2010, compared with 85 in 2002.

Although commitments of international aid by wealthy countries have risen steadily since 2002, more than 40 percent of the $178 billion went to just two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, which figure prominently in the donor nations’ foreign policy and national security interests. Equally insecure, impoverished, and conflict-inflicted countries that fall outside of the donor nations’ immediate interests are, by contrast, relatively neglected.

The Guardian
reported Oxfam’s findings, but otherwise major newspapers in the US and the UK passed over the report’s critical analysis of the politicization of international aid.
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As President Barack Obama publicly emphasizes diplomacy, his administration has expanded the United States’ global military presence, as documented in the first Censored News Cluster, “Human Costs of War and Violence.” While corporate media lavished attention on the killing of Osama bin Laden and SEAL Team Six as a single, dramatic military operation, Tim Reid and Michael Evans reported that President Obama has secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world. American troops now operate in seventy-five countries. This dramatic expansion goes far beyond the covert missions authorized by President George W. Bush, and reflects how aggressively the Obama administration is pursuing al-Qaeda behind the public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy.

Keith Harmon Snow documented the lethal consequences of US foreign policy in central Africa, where millions of dollars in military hardware provided by the United States under the veil of the “War on Terror” has contributed to atrocities in the Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda.
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The United States African Command (AFRICOM) projects an image of US troops in Africa undertaking exclusively humanitarian and peacekeeping operations, but as Snow’s report indicated, under cover of the long shadow of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, US military operations actually include “overseeing strategic minerals (essential for US military
stockpiles) and covert missions in northeastern Congo.” Snow wrote that “Pentagon-trained African proxy warriors” operate not only throughout Africa, but also as far away as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti.

Closer to the United States’ own borders, a trio of news stories revealed the scope of the US military’s involvement in Mexico’s war on drugs. Together, Bill Conroy, Erin Rosa, E. Eduardo Castillo, and Martha Mendoza documented the unprecedented numbers of US law enforcement agents active in Mexico since President Felipe Calderón launched a crackdown on drug trafficking four years ago.
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More than thirty-five thousand people have been killed in drug-related violence during that time. US agents generally provide intelligence and training to the Mexican military. Although the exact number of US agents operating in Mexico is not known with certainty, journalists using the Freedom of Information Act, federal budget requests, government audits, congressional testimony, and agency accountability reports have been able to establish a figure of several hundred agents. Michael Werbowski showed how narcotics traffickers in Mexico have ruthlessly exploited the increasing economic interdependence among Mexico, the United States, and Canada.