I can't believe Project Censored has been doing what they do for 34 years! That is, the media research program has been teaching Sonoma State University students and the public about censorship, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the importance of a free press in the US by researching important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media. I hope everyone reading this will purchase or donate a copy of Top Censored Stories of 2009/2010 to their local library. And also please consider donating some $$ to this worthy cause.

Note: FGI has no connection to or affiliation with Project Censored. We just love their work!

Top Censored Stories of 2009/2010

• 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
• 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
• 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
• 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
• 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
• 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
• 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
• 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
• 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
• 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
• 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
• 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
• 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
• 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
• 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
• 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
• 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
• 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
• 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
• 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
• 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
• 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
• 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
• 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
• 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Not Your Father's Censorship, Quasi-monopolies and wary governments curb Web freedoms, by HARRY LEWIS, The Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Chronicle Review", Volume 55, Issue 19, Page B9. [subscription required, but freely available here for a short time]

Now, with almost everything digitized, new communication technologies have led to a global proliferation of censorship agents, methods, and rationales....

Should we feel comfortable relying almost exclusively on private companies to help us find the truth, when we cannot know what version of the truth they are showing us?...

Storing information and making it available are now service businesses, and therein lies another censorship opportunity....

U.S. copyright law is such a heavy club that it can abet censorship by parties that simply object to what people are saying about them....

Harry Lewis is a professor of computer science at Harvard University and a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is a co-author of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (Addison-Wesley, 2008).

Why are Docs From the Bailout Being Redacted?, by Ben Protess , ProPublica - October 22, 2008.

Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Secrecy News!

A new book is out entitled, "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering" edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain from the Berkman Center's OpenNet Initiative. This is a must-have for libraries -- many of whom deal with filtering at the personal computer level -- in order to inform the public on the more insidious filtering of internet traffic that happens at the country or backbone level. "Access Denied provides the definitive analysis of government justifications for denying their own people access to some information and also documents global Internet filtering practices on a country-by-country basis. (Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, USC)"

The site includes country profiles for those countries "in which it was believed that there was the most to learn about the extent and processes of Internet filtering." Read the BBC review and the Review in Nature.

Bush Hits the Delete Button: Public information the administration doesn't want you to see, by Paul Kiel, Utne Reader, March-April 2008.

Since 2006 ... the investigative website TPMmuckraker.com [has] been keeping a running tally of the diminishing access to government information. Reporter Steve Benen got the list started over at his own blog, the Carpetbagger Report. Then his fellow Muckrakers joined in by trawling the news and--as is the website's custom--tapping the collective wisdom of their readers to cobble together a dossier on an administration that has, as deputy editor Paul Kiel writes, "discontinued annual reports, classified normally public data, de-funded studies, quieted underlings, and generally done whatever was necessary to keep bad information under wraps."

Here, Utne Reader presents an excerpted (but not redacted) version of the list Kiel continues to compile. [Bush Admin: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Us, 2007 Version By Paul Kiel - November 23, 2007.]

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) now has online all five volumes of the Iraqi Perspectives Project report, which the Department of Defense (DoD) refused to put online.

• The announcement: DoD Report on Captured Iraqi Documents by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, March 20, 2008.
• The five volume report: Iraqi Perspectives Project Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents (Redacted) Institute for Defense Analyses November 2007 (released March 2008)

ABC News is reporting that the Pentagon canceled plans to post a new comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism on the website of the Joint Forces Command. The story says, "The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online." The Pentagon also canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release.

• Pentagon Report on Saddam's Iraq Censored?, ABC News: Rapid Report March 12, 2008.
• Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda, ABC News: Rapid Report, March 13, 2008.

The report was prepared by Kevin M. Woods and James Lacey "under the Iraqi Perspectives sub task of the Joint Advanced Warfighting Program (JAWP) task order for the Director, Joint Center for Operational Analyses and Lessons Learned, United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM)" and the Institute For Defense Analyses. It is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion and on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government in U.S. custody.

The executive summary of the report says

This study found no "smoking gun" (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. Saddam's interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations.

The ABC report says that when asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed a Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."

ABC has posted a copy of an executive summary of the document here:

• Iraqi Perspectives Report Saddam And Terrorism: Emerging Insights From Captured Iraqi Documents Volume 1 (Redacted) January 2007. IDA Paper P-4287. (9 pages, 3.4 Meg PDF) [another copy is available at www.webcitation.org/5WJZa7Cuc]

ABC also has a copy of a longer version of what is apparently the same report here:

• Iraqi Perspectives Project Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents Volume 1 (Redacted) "This volume is a redacted version of Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, Volume I (IDA Paper P-4151). November 2007 Approved for public release; distribution unlimited. IDA Paper P-4287 Log: H 07-001575 ( 94 page, 11.7 Megs, PDF) [another copy is available at www.webcitation.org/5WJaXglxS]

Great Lakes: Danger Zones?, By Sheila Kaplan, The Center for Public Integrity, February 7, 2008.

For more than seven months, the nation’s top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states, reportedly because it contains such potentially “alarming information” as evidence of elevated infant mortality and cancer rates.

The 400-plus-page study, Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern, was undertaken by a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the request of the International Joint Commission, an independent bilateral organization that advises the U.S. and Canadian governments on the use and quality of boundary waters between the two countries. The study was originally scheduled for release in July 2007 by the IJC and the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the study, which warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen “areas of concern”—including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee—may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants.

Excerpts are available on the Center for Public Integrity web site.

US censors Arctic scientists' findings as it prepares for oil and gas auction, By Daniel Howden, The Independent, January 22, 2008.

The United States has blocked the release of a landmark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic as it prepares to sell off exploration licences for the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska, one of the last intact habitats of the polar bear.

Scientists at the release of the censored report in Norway said there was "huge frustration" that the US had derailed a science-based effort to manage the race for the vast energy reserves of the Arctic.

The long-awaited assessment was meant to bring together work by scientists in all eight Arctic nations to give an up-to-date picture of oil and gas exploitation in the high north. In addition to that it was supposed to give policy makers a clear set of recommendations on how to extract safely what are thought to be up to one quarter of the world's energy reserves.

Speaking yesterday from Tromso, one of the report's lead authors, who asked not to be named, said: "They [the US] have blocked it. We have no executive summary and no plain language conclusions."...

 

Library Journal Academic Newswire reports that Bassem Youssef, the Chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) unit responsible for administering two warrantless search programs, who was scheduled to discuss "a number of critical failures within the FBI's counterterrorism program undermining the basic Constitutional rights of American citizens and threatening the effectiveness of America's counterterrorism effort" on Saturday, January 12, at the ALA's Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia will now "only be allowed to answer selected questions."

The FBI cited "rules concerning prepublication clearance of any potential speech."  Youssef's lawyer says that these "are not the formal rules", that the FBI has not previously published them or incorporated into  employment agreements, that they are secret, that they "constitute secret censorship requirements", and that  "Mr. Youssef is prevented from showing these rules to anyone outside the FBI."

• FBI Agent's ALA Midwinter Talk "Censored." Library Journal Academic Newswire, January 10, 2008.