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

[Ted Moffett]

You're much more amusing when trying to convince us that those locally
in positions of social and religious power, who promote a sexist
bigoted ideology, with real world political and social impacts on
peoples lives, are actually harmless nice guys, than when trying to
convince us that human impacts on climate are not a major problem,
that must be addressed

But really this is not funny at all, in either case...
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 10/1/11, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Given our current level of knowledge about the intricacies of how the
> climate works, I'd say that trying to manipulate the weather right now would
> be a text-book example of "a disaster waiting to happen".
>
> Also, until James Hansen can tell us exactly what set of conditions or
> events set off the last ice age with a high degree of confidence, I really
> don't think he should be telling us how confident he is that the next one
> will not happen.  That just seems like common sense to me.
>
>
> Paul
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com>
> To: Moscow Vision 2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com>
> Sent: Saturday, October 1, 2011 12:05 PM
> Subject: [Vision2020] Top Ten 2010 Censored Stories: # 1: More 2010 U.S.
> Soldier Suicides Than Combat Deaths
>
> 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.
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
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