Censored!
Top Ten Stories the American News Media Ignored
Second in a Two Part Series

     In 1974, Richard Nixon became the first President to resign from office because he faced certain impeachment and removal from office for his involvement in Watergate and the subsequent cover up. Yet, despite the fact that the break-in was discovered in the midst of the 1972 presidential election, the story never became a factor in the 1972 election.
     This amazing situation—a publicly-known story of epochal impact, utterly sidelined from the national debate—gave rise to Project Censored, founded by Carl Jensen at Sonoma State College (now University) and continued under the leadership of Peter Phillips. Every year, between 700 and 1000 stories are submitted that fit the same general profile—stories of clear and compelling importance that are effectively censored from the mainstream of public awareness by the gatekeepers of the corporate press.
     Last issue, we covered the first five of Project Censored’s Top Ten Stories of 2003-2004. We continue with the rest of the Top Ten.

The Sale of Electoral Politics

     The Help America Vote Act required that states submit blueprints for switching to electronic voting systems by last Jan. 1, and for implementing those plans in time for the 2006 elections. But critics say that if Americans don’t want a repeat of the 2000 Florida elections fiasco—on a much grander scale—the administration’s plans must be halted in its tracks.
     The transfer represents the privatization of the voting process into the hands of a select few fervent GOP supporters who’ve insisted on keeping their operating systems and codes a trade secret—meaning they enjoy absolute control over the entire voting process, including ballot counting and oversight. There is no paper trail.
     One prime example is Diebold Inc., which already operates more than 40,000 machines in 37 states across the country. Many of these are in Georgia, which last November became the first state to conduct an election entirely with touch-screen machines. Oddly enough, incumbent Democratic governor Roy Barnes lost to Republican candidate, Sonny Perdue, 46 percent to 51 percent—“a swing from as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls,” wrote Andrew Gumbel in the Independent. In the same election, incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland likewise lost to his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, thanks to “a last-minute swing of nine to 12 points.” And in and around Atlanta, 77 memory cards went missing or were otherwise temporarily unaccounted for before the votes they’d registered could be counted.
     Similar upsets occurred “in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and New Hampshire—all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party,” Gumbel continued.
     “It makes it really hard to show their product has been tampered with if it’s a felony to inspect it,” voting systems specialist and research fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government Rebecca Mercuri told the Independent.
     The other top two e-voting machine manufacturers, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S), are equally suspect. All three companies are prominent Republican Party donors.

7. Conservative Organization Drives Judicial Appointments

     Ever since the Reagan Administration, the neocons have pursued an aggressive campaign to stack the federal courts with rightwing judges. Their main vehicle: the Federalist Society, an organization founded in 1982 by a small group of radically conservative law students at the University of Chicago.
     With the help of Republicans in Congress, 85 extra federal judgeships were created under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush (the First); Bill Clinton got nine. Now, seven out of 12 circuit courts are anti-abortion. Seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices are Republican appointees—and it’s been 10 years since a post has opened up, meaning another right-winger or two could be appointed sometime soon. During Bush Sr.’s tenure, one White House insider boasted that no one who wasn’t a Federalist ever received a judicial appointment from the president.
     One of George W.’s earliest moves in office was to consolidate the Federalist Society’s power even further: He “simply eliminated the longstanding role in the evaluation of prospective judges by the resolutely centrist American Bar Association, whose ratings had long kept extremists and incompetents off the bench,” wrote Martin Garbus in American Prospect. “Today the Federalists have more influence in judicial-selection than the ABA ever had.”
     The Federalists have consistently acted in favor of property rights over rights of the individual, business deregulation, creationist teachings, and much of the rest of the right-wing agenda. But one of the principal victims has been the democratic process itself: it was the Supreme Court that stopped a hand count of 175,000 uncounted (largely Democratic) ballots in Florida, which could have cost Bush the 2000 presidential election. They have interfered with redistricting efforts to empower black and Latino voters, and have erected barriers to the participation of third party candidates in the electoral process.

Secrets of Cheney’s Energy Task Force Come to Light

     As the Bush Administration continues to protect the iron wall of secrecy around Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, at least two documents show that Bush Administration’s foreign policy is being driven by the dictates of the energy industry.
     When George W. Bush took office in January, 2001, he said that tackling the country’s energy crisis would be a top priority. The United States faced nationwide oil and natural gas shortages, and a series of electrical blackouts were rolling across California. The president established the National Energy Policy Development Group and appointed Vice President and former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney as its head.
     One of the big issues on the table was oil, which accounted for 40 percent of the nation’s energy supply and provided fuel for the vast majority of the country’s transportation—as well as its vast war machine. But rather than lay the groundwork for converting the economy to alternative, renewable sources, NEPDG’s report, released in May, 2001, promoted a central goal of “mak[ing] energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy.” In other words, Cheney’s group wanted to find additional sources of oil overseas, and ensure U.S. access to that oil—whatever it took.
     Documents recently obtained from Cheney’s Energy Task Force as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the public-interest group Judicial Watch indicate that Cheney and his colleagues had their sites on the black gold under the Iraqi dessert well before 9/11.
     Last July, the Commerce Department finally turned over records that included “a map of Iraqi oil fields, pipelines, refineries, and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts’,” according to Judicial Watch’s subsequent press release. There were similar maps and charts for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The documents were dated March, 2001.
     “The media remains reluctant to explain the close link between the energy policies of the Bush Administration and US military strategy,” wrote Michael Klare in Censored 2005.

     As the National Commission on Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, completed its first year, Ellen Mariani and her attorney held a press conference to announce her own startling conclusions. Mariani, wife of Louis Neil Mariani, who died when terrorists flew United Airlines flight 175 into the World Trade Center’s south tower, had come to believe that top American officials—including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and others—had foreknowledge of the attacks, purposefully failed to prevent them, and had since taken pains to cover up the truth.
     The administration, she argues in a federal lawsuit, allowed Sept. 11 to happen so that Bush and Co. could launch their seemingly endless, global “war on terror” for their own personal and financial gain. The suit uses the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act to charge the nation’s leaders with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and wrongful death.
     Her lawyer, Philip J. Berg, a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania, filed a 62-page complaint including 40pages of evidence. “Compelling evidence … will be presented in this case through discovery, subpoena power by this Court, and testimony at trial,” he wrote in a press release. At the very least, the case presents the potential to uncover and publicize critical documents and testimony about the Bush Administration’s handling of the Al-Qaeda threat and its aftermath. But only Fox News showed up to the press conference; and it never ran anything on the topic.

     If you thought nuclear energy was dead, think again: The Bush Administration’s energy bill—based on Cheney’s industry-stacked Energy Task Force—offers no incentives for companies to switch to renewable energy sources. But it does provide as much as $7.5 billion in tax credits to build six new nuclear reactors, in a secretly-crafted provision of the bill, released late on a Saturday night last November. This in addition to almost $4 billion set aside for other nuclear energy programs. “Nuclear power already has had 50 years of subsidy totaling over $140 billion, ”reported Nuclear Information and Resource Service’s Cindy Folkers.
     The administration also removed terrorism protection provisions included in the House version of the bill, and reversed a previous ban on the export of enriched uranium, which may be used to construct nuclear bombs. The press has been “woefully silent on the bill’s nuclear provisions” wrote Folkers and Michael Mariotte in their update for Project Censored’s book, Censored 2005.