Top 25 Most Censored Stories of 2016

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Theses are the most suppressed, censored and left out Stories of the Year 2016.
Collected by www.ProjectCensored.org.

The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2015-2016 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. During this year’s cycle, Project Censored reviewed 235 Validated Independent News stories (VINs) representing the collective efforts of 221 college students and 33 professors from 18 college and university campuses that participate in our affiliate program.


25. NYPD Editing Wikipedia on Police Brutality

In March 2015, Kelly Weill reported in Capital New York that computers operating at One Police Plaza, the headquarters of the New York Police Department (NYPD), had been used “to alter Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality,” including the entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. As Mother Jones subsequently reported, “The pages have been edited to cast the NYPD in a more favorable light and lessen allegations of police misconduct.” According to Weill’s report, an NYPD spokesperson indicated that the matter was under internal review.
Capital New York identified eighty-five Internet Protocol (IP) addresses associated with the NYPD that had been used to edit or to attempt to delete Wikipedia entries. “Notable” Wikipedia activity was linked to approximately one dozen of those IP addresses, Weill reported.
On the evening of December 3, 2014, after a Staten Island grand jury ruled not to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in Eric Garner’s death, a computer user on the NYPD headquarters network made multiple edits to the “Death of Eric Garner” Wikipedia entry. For example, edits included changing text that read “push Garner’s face into the sidewalk” to “push Garner’s head down into the sidewalk.” Another edit revised text that read, “Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” to read, “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.” As Mother Jones noted, additional edits suggested that “Garner’s death was his own fault.”
On November 25, 2006, undercover NYPD officers fired fifty times at three unarmed men, killing Sean Bell, whose death led to widespread protests against police brutality. On April 12, 2007, a user on the NYPD headquarters network attempted to delete the Wikipedia entry for “Sean Bell shooting incident.” On the website’s internal “Articles for deletion” page, the user wrote: “No one except Al Sharpton cares anymore.”
On three occasions between October 2012 and March 2013, a user on the One Police Plaza network made edits to Wikipedia’s “Stop-and-frisk in New York City” entry.
As Weill noted, revisions and counter-revisions are “typical of Wikipedia’s self-policing user community.” However, those made with NYPD IP addresses seemed to violate Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policy involving contributions that promote one’s own self-interests.
All of the NYPD edits documented by Capital New York were made anonymously (rather than with a Wikipedia account). Capital New York developed a computer program to search Wikipedia for all of the anonymous edits made from the range of IP addresses registered to One Police Plaza. Weill concluded by providing a link to a list of all the anonymous Wikipedia edits made by NYPD IP addresses.
The Washington Post and Time magazine each ran stories based on Weill’s original Capital New York report.

Kelly Weill, “Edits to Wikipedia Pages on Bell, Garner, Diallo Traced to 1 Police Plaza,” Capital New York (since renamed Politico New York), Politico, March 13, 2015, http://www.capitalnewyork.com/articl...-police-plaza; since redirected to http://www.politico.com/states/new-y...e-plaza-087652.
Inae Oh, “The NYPD is Editing the Wikipedia Pages of Eric Garner, Sean Bell,” Mother Jones, March 13, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015...rner-sean-bell.


24. India’s Solar Plans Blocked by US Interests, WTO

The United Nations Conference on Climate Change, held in December 2015 in Paris, featured lofty rhetoric about international cooperation to tackle climate change, including overtures by the US and other nations to include India. Anticipating the Paris summit, World Trade Organization (WTO) director-general Roberto Azevêdo wrote, “The challenge is not to stop trading but to ensure that trade is an ally in the fight against climate change.” However, in February 2016, the WTO ruled against India’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission. In a case initiated by the US in 2013, the WTO found that India’s solar initiative, which required that 10 percent of solar cells be produced locally, violated international trade laws. As Dipti Bhatnagar and Sam Cossar-Gilbert of Friends of the Earth International reported in the Ecologist, “The WTO ruling sets a dangerous precedent for countries wanting to support homegrown renewable energy initiatives.”
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched India’s National Solar Mission in 2010. Ben Beachy and Ilana Solomon described how the National Solar Mission aimed to develop long-term policy, research and development, and domestic production to reduce the cost of solar power generation in India and, ultimately, to increase India’s solar capacity to 100,000 megawatts by 2022—a target that would surpass the combined current solar capacity of the world’s top five solar-producing countries. By the time of the WTO ruling, the National Solar Mission had already increased India’s solar capacity from “nearly nothing” to 5,000 megawatts, Beachy and Solomon reported.
However, US Trade Representative Michael Froman claimed that India’s subsidized solar program discriminated against American suppliers, arguing that India’s solar plan created unfair barriers to imports of US-made solar panels. Even though India had argued that the program helped it to meet its commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the WTO ruling stated that domestic policies in conflict with its rules could not be justified on the basis that they fulfill international climate commitments. As Beachy and Solomon summarized, “antiquated trade rules trump climate imperatives.”
On the WTO ruling against India, Froman described the decision as “important” for the message it sent “to other countries considering discriminatory ‘localization’ policies.” But, Beachy and Solomon noted, the US position was “perverse” because “nearly half of U.S. states have renewable energy programs that, like India’s solar program, include ‘buy-local’ rules that create local, green jobs and bring new solar entrepreneurs into the economy.”
This was not the first time the US appealed to the WTO to challenge another nation’s domestic climate initiatives. A similar program in Canada, Ontario’s Green Energy Act, sought to boost renewable technologies and create clean-energy jobs. Spurred by the US, in 2012 the WTO ruled against the program, which had to be modified to comply with WTO rules.
In February 2016, Forbes ran an opinion piece clearly in favor of the WTO ruling (and free trade in general), while a September 2015 article in the Wall Street Journal provided coverage of India’s position, but noting opportunities for foreign companies if the WTO ruled against India’s requirement that some solar panels should be produced domestically. A Reuters report on the WTO ruling emphasized the US perspective and provided little detail about India’s solar program—accounted for by the claim that “Indian officials were not immediately available to comment,” despite basic information about its solar program having been previously available in a variety of public forums.

Ben Beachy and Ilana Solomon, “The WTO Just Ruled against India’s Booming Solar Program,” Sierra Club, February 24, 2016, http://www.sierraclub.org/compass/20...-solar-program.
Dipti Bhatnagar and Sam Cossar-Gilbert, “World Trade Organisation Smashes India’s Solar Panels Industry,” Ecologist, February 28, 2016, http://www.theecologist.org/News/new..._industry.html.
Charles Pierson, “How the US and the WTO Crushed India’s Subsidies for Solar Energy,” CounterPunch, August 28, 2015, http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/...-solar-energy/.


23. Modern-Day Child Slavery: Sex Trafficking of Underage Girls in the US

In December 2015, D. Parvaz published “Selling American Girls,” a seven-part investigative report for Al Jazeera America that documented sex trafficking in the US. Each part of her report examined a different role in the sex trafficking trade and its enforcement, from the prostitutes and their buyers, pimps, and advocates, to law enforcement officers and judges.
Sex trafficking in the US is pervasive. According to the US Department of Justice, human trafficking is the second-fastest-growing criminal enterprise after drug trafficking, with minors constituting roughly half the victims in the US. In 2015, over 4,100 of the 5,544 trafficking cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center’s hotline involved sex trafficking.
Sex trafficking is also a major component of the underground economy in many American cities. A 2014 study conducted by the Urban Institute found that the underground commercial sex economy in the US produced multimillion-dollar profits. Researchers at the Urban Institute studied eight major US cities—Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Miami, Seattle, San Diego, and Washington, DC—to estimate that, in each city, the underground sex economy was worth between $39.9 and $290 million in 2007. “From high-end escort services to high school ‘sneaker pimps,’” the report’s authors wrote, “the sex trade leaves no demographic unrepresented and circuits almost every major US city.”
As Parvaz reported, “The variety of men engaged in purchasing sex across the U.S. is staggering.” According to Michael Osborn, chief of the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children Unit, the FBI focuses on “recovering” the victims of sex trafficking and capturing their pimps, who “represent a national threat” because they move among cities and across states to avoid capture. Buyers (or “johns”), by contrast, tend to remain in local jurisdictions, which the FBI leaves to local law enforcement. Because precincts, counties, and states keep track of john arrests in different ways, if at all, there are no comprehensive statistics for how many are arrested each year. Enforcement tends to be stronger in cases where buyers are charged with soliciting minors. In one study of 134 cases involving prostitutes who were minors, 113 johns were convicted. On average they were sentenced to three years in prison, but served just 1.5 years. Twenty-six percent of those convicted served no time at all.
Many pimps look for children who come from unstable family backgrounds or destitute neighborhoods. According to FAIR Girls, an antitrafficking organization, 70–75 percent of the girls they assisted had histories with foster care systems. Special Agent Renea Green of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told Al Jazeera America, “We had a trafficker tell us he looked for victims, for girls, walking from the local DFAC [Department of Family and Children Services] office.”
While safe harbor laws, which criminalize adults who purchase sex with a minor, have been passed in thirty-four states, according to the Polaris Project these laws tend to vary widely from state to state, leaving many girls treated as criminals rather than as victims.
Sex trafficking in the US has been a focus of corporate news coverage, but reports tend to focus primarily on the prostitutes and their pimps, while neglecting other important issues raised in the Al Jazeera America report, such as the prosecution of buyers and the criminal penalties that girls and young women often face. Most news coverage is from local news outlets, which tend to report specific instances of sex trafficking, rather than discussing the topic in a broader social context.

D. Parvaz, “Selling American Girls,” Al Jazeera America, December 15, 2015, http://projects.aljazeera.com/2015/12/sex-trafficking/.

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22. Department of Education Cooperates with ALEC to Privatize Education

The Department of Education and school districts throughout the US are working with billionaire families such as the Waltons and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to undermine public education, Dustin Beilke reported for PR Watch in January 2016. Instead of defending public education in pursuit of equity for all students, the Department of Education (DoE) is working with organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—an alliance of corporate lobbyists and state legislators—as well as local chambers of commerce to encourage the conversion of public institutions into private charter schools.
A December 2015 DoE presentation showed that the federal government had spent over three billion dollars of tax-payer money to boost charter schools, supporting an uncritical assessment of how effective charter schools actually are. Beilke described the 25-slide overview of the DoE’s charter schools program as “an uncritical PR document embracing a magical idea of charter schools.”
According to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), although many charter schools have failed and closed in the last twenty years, the DoE continues to provide significant funding to promote them. An October 2015 CMD investigation, “Charter School Black Hole,” uncovered how much the federal government has invested in charter schools, as well as the DoE’s ties to ALEC. As Beilke reported, a slide from the December 2015 DoE overview of its charter school program acknowledged that it had spent $3.3 billion to “fund the start-up, replication and expansion of public charter schools.” However, Beilke reported, “CMD was unable to extract this number from DOE despite inquiries and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests since 2014.” The actual figure may be higher, because the list of charter schools receiving DoE funding appears to have been incomplete. Overall, the DoE overview suggested that it functions as a “propagandist” for charter schools, Beilke wrote.
According to the CMD report, “laws governing charters have been built by proponents,
favoring ‘flexibility’ over rules,” permitting an “epidemic of fraud, waste, and mismanagement that would not be tolerated in public schools.” As Beilke concluded, “the Department of Education’s charter school agenda matches that of the anti-education, pro-privatization movement that funds and promotes so much of the misinformation about public education.”
Corporate media have provided significant coverage of ALEC’s involvement in promoting charter schools, including its lobbying efforts, but the role of the DoE has not been well covered in the corporate press. A 2012 New York Times article, “Public Money Finds Back Door to Private Schools,” mentioned both ALEC and the DoE, but did not establish any connection between them.


Dustin Beilke, “Feds Cheerlead for Charter Schools, Aiding Private Philanthropy’s Takeover of America’s Public Schools,” PR Watch, Center for Media and Democracy, January 20, 2016, http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/01/...over-america’s.



21. Little Guantanamos: Secretive “Communication Management Units” in the US

In March 2016, inmates from two highly secretive US prisons, known as Communication Management Units (CMUs), appealed a previous summary judgment for the government in their case against the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In March 2015, the US District Court for the District of Columbia had ruled against the prisoners, asserting that CMUs did not violate inmates’ rights because restrictions were “limited in nature” compared to ordinary prison units, and far better than solitary confinement. In their appeal, attorneys for the Center for Constitutional Rights argued that CMUs represent a “fundamental disruption” to prisoners’ rights and freedoms. CMUs have strict regulations against outside communication. Prisoners are isolated from the rest of the prison population, and are limited to four hours of visits per month, none of which permit direct contact, and three phones calls per month (for a total of forty-five minutes), which must be carried out in English. Lawyers representing the CMU inmates argued that the typical time served in a CMU is three to five years, or fifty-five times longer than the average time in administrative detention.
Beginning in 2006, the Federal Bureau of Prisons created CMUs without any written conditions or procedures. Prisoners receive very little information as to why they are transferred to the unit in the first place. They are able to appeal their transfer, but not a single prisoner has ever been released through the appeal process. Without written rules in place, it is suggested that these transfers take place based on discrimination.
In January 2015, the Federal Bureau of Prisons finalized rules regarding who can be sent to CMUs and how the facilities should operate, but as Christie Thompson of the Marshall Project reported, prisoner advocates claimed the new rules imposed “even stricter limits on contact without providing a legitimate way for inmates to appeal being placed under such restrictions.”
About 178 inmates are held in CMUs. Nearly 60 percent of them are Muslims, according to Center for Constitutional Rights attorneys representing the prisoners. Journalist Will Potter, who has visited a CMU, told the Real News Network that CMUs are effectively “political prisons for political prisoners.” “People are sent to the CMU because of their race, and their religion and their political beliefs,” rather than the crimes they have committed, Potter said.
In a January 2015 TED Talk on CMUs, Potter noted that CMU guards call non-Muslim prisoners “balancers,” meaning they “help balance the racial numbers, in hopes of deflecting law suits.” Many of these “balancers” are animal rights and environmental activists. Journalists are not permitted in CMUs, but Potter was able to visit an imprisoned environmental activist, Daniel McGowan, “as a friend.”
There are two known CMUs in the United States, one in Marion, Illinois, and the other in Terre Haute, Indiana. Both operate within larger federal prisons.
In March 2011, NPR ran a two-part investigative report and the Nation published a detailed article on CMUs. In 2011 and 2013, the Huffington Post published reports by Daniel McGowan, the first of which was written while he was imprisoned in the Marion, Illinois, CMU. The Huffington Post has consistently published articles by attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights on CCR’s efforts to defend prisoners’ rights to due process and to bring CMU policies in line with constitutional requirements. Otherwise, coverage of CMUs in the popular press is limited to articles such as the New York Times report from April 2016, “The Terrorists in U.S. Prisons,” which briefly mentioned CMUs and their predominantly Muslim inmates, but did not discuss challenges to the CMUs’ constitutionality.

Will Potter, “The Secret US Prisons You’ve Never Heard of Before, “ TED video, filmed January 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/will_potte...eard_of_before.
Will Potter, interview by Sharmini Peries, “‘Little Guantanamos’ in the US,” Real News Network, broadcast October 20, 2015, transcript, http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?...&jumival=14945.
Carrie Johnson, “Inmates Try to Revive Lawsuit over Secretive Prison Units,” NPR, March 15, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/03/15/470430...e-prison-units.
Chip Gibbons, “Circuit Court Weighs Appeals in ‘Communication Management Units’ Prison Case,” Bill of Rights Defense Committee, March 17, 2016, http://bordc.org/news/circuit-court-...s-prison-case/.



20. The Walmarting of American Education

In January 2016, Walmart publicized a plan to close 269 of its retail stores. As Jeff Bryant reported for AlterNet, the announcement was significant news in small towns and suburban communities directly affected by the closures, but otherwise it did not garner prominent media attention. “Stories about local communities being devastated by business decisions made in distant headquarters have become a staple of this era,” he wrote. At the same time, Bryant reported, the Walton Family Foundation (WFF) announced a five-year strategic plan to spend a billion dollars to support and expand charter schools in thirteen US cities and states. As Education Week reported, WFF was “doubling down on its investments in school choice.” (Notably this article disclosed that WFF “provides grant support for Education Week’s coverage of school choice and parent-empowerment issues.”)
Over the past twenty years, WFF has given more than $1.3 billion to K–12 education, according to its own calculations. The WFF boasts that one in four charter schools across the nation have received WFF startup funds. (For previous Censored coverage, see “Education ‘Reform’ a Trojan Horse for Privatization,” Censored story #13 in Censored 2013.)
In his AlterNet article, Bryant described how WFF’s commitment to charter schools is a product of the Walton family having been “fully inculcated” in the educational philosophy of libertarian economist Milton Friedman and by the “myth of school failure” spread by the Reagan administration.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned to abolish the Department of Education. One of the landmarks of his presidency was the 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” which warned against a “rising tide of mediocrity.” Though critics have since rebutted many of the report’s claims and questioned the validity of its statistical analysis, “A Nation at Risk” was and remains influential. Indeed, John Walton read the report the year it was published and shared it with family members, leading his father, Sam Walton, to announce, “I’d like to see an all-out revolution in education.”
In 1995, Friedman argued that “our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured,” and that only by “privatizing a major segment of it” could the restructuring succeed. As Bryant described, “Central to Friedman’s ideology was that schools should be thought of as businesses,” and their students understood as customers. Friedman’s philosophy meshed with the Walton’s business sensibilities, as did a shared animosity towards unions. In this view, businesses—and, by extension, schools—thrive by providing customers with what they want at lower prices than their competitors can offer; and employees—or teachers—remain loyal because of profit-sharing and other options that give them a stake in the business, rather than due to higher wages.
In a related report for Salon, excerpted from his book Schools on Trial, Nikhil Goyal documented how the New Markets Tax Credit Program, established in 2000 by the Clinton administration, encouraged private investors to “put money into community projects, like the development of new charter schools, in low-income communities.” Under the program, such ventures can earn investors a 39 percent federal tax break over seven years. Goyal quoted journalist Juan González, “The program . . . is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.”
Walmart founder Sam Walton established the Walton Family Foundation (WFF) in 1987 as a philanthropic endeavor. Walmart’s vast earnings generate the foundation’s money. The Walton family is among the world’s richest, with a combined net worth of approximately $150 billion in January 2016.
Although corporate news attended to WFF’s $1 billion commitment to charter schools, this coverage often favored charter school expansion, as in an April 2016 CNBC report that spotlighted how charter schools would decrease educational inequality. Salon and Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post each republished Bryant’s AlterNet piece in March 2016.

Jeff Bryant, “How the Cutthroat Walmart Business Model is Reshaping American Public Education,” AlterNet, March 13, 2016, http://www.alternet.org/education/ho...ter1052509&t=2.

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19. Global Epidemic of Electronic Waste

Consumers in the US generate an estimated 3.14 million tons of electronic waste annually, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, and about 40 percent of this—50,000 dump trucks a year—goes to be recycled. A 2016 study by the Basel Action Network (BAN), a nonprofit that aims to end the global trade in toxic electronic waste, found that nearly one-third of these devices is exported to developing countries, where the low-tech dismantling of the recycled equipment contaminates the environment and endangers workers, many of whom are children. “People have a right to know where their stuff goes,” BAN’s executive director Jim Puckett told Katie Campbell and Ken Christensen of KCTS9/EarthFix in May 2016.
From July 2014 to December 2015, BAN installed GPS tracking devices in 200 used, nonfunctional pieces of computer equipment, delivered the equipment to publicly accessible electronic waste recycling drop-off sites around the US, and then followed what happened to the equipment.
As of May 2016, BAN found that sixty-five of the devices (approximately 32 percent) were exported, rather than recycled domestically. Based on laws in the places where the electronics went, BAN estimated that sixty-two of the devices (31 percent) were likely to be illegal shipments. Puckett told the Intercept that the GPS tracking devices are “like little lie detectors … They tell their story and they tell it dispassionately.”
BAN partnered with Carlo Ratti of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Senseable City Lab to determine exactly where the equipment went. Ratti told the PBS NewsHour that he and his fellow researchers were surprised by how far waste traveled. Global e-waste flows “actually almost cover the whole planet.” Each recycled device in the BAN study traveled an average of 2,500 miles.
Most equipment went to Hong Kong, but BAN tracked devices to ten different countries including China, Taiwan, Pakistan, Mexico, Thailand, Cambodia, and Kenya. Elizabeth Grossman, writing for the Intercept, quoted Puckett as describing Hong Kong’s New Territories, near the Chinese border, as the “new ground zero” for e-waste processing. As the Chinese government has cracked down on electronic waste imports, Chinese workers have crossed the border to Hong Kong without official documentation to do similar work there.
If improperly disposed, e-waste can release a variety of toxins, including lead, mercury, and cadmium. However, the US only restricts e-waste exports of one type of component, cathode ray tubes. Though many US states prohibit dumping used electronics in landfills and have e-waste recycling programs, no federal law regulates e-waste recycling.
In Hong Kong, Puckett, a Chinese journalist and translator, and a local driver followed a GPS signal to a fence with a sign identifying the land on the other side as farmland. Peering over the fence, Puckett found workers covered in black toner ink—a probable carcinogen associated with respiratory problems—breaking up printers that were piled fifteen feet high across a lot as big as a football field. “There is no protection of this labor force … There are no occupational laws that are going to protect them,” Puckett said. Earlier, at another site where workers dismantled LCD TVs, they found workers without protective facemasks who were unaware of the mercury vapors released when the fluorescent tubes that light the LCD screens break. Even in trace amounts, mercury can be a neurotoxin.
Since 1989, 182 national governments and the European Union have signed the Basel Convention, an international treaty to stop developed countries from dumping hazardous waste in less developed nations. As EarthFix reported, the US is the world’s only industrialized country that has not ratified the treaty.
In April 2016, US News & World Report published an article anticipating the release of BAN’s report, Disconnect: Goodwill and Dell Exporting the Public’s E-waste to Developing Countries. Otherwise, it has been poorly covered in the US corporate press.

Katie Campbell and Ken Christensen, “On the Trail of America’s Dangerous, Dead Electronics,” KCTS9/EarthFix, May 9, 2016, http://www.opb.org/news/series/circu...d-electronics/.
Katie Campbell and Ken Christensen, “Watchdog Group Tracks What Really Happens to Your ‘Recycled’ E-Waste,” PBS NewsHour, PBS, broadcast May 9, 2016, transcript, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/watch...ycled-e-waste/.
Elizabeth Grossman, “GPS Tracking Devices Catch Major U.S. Recyclers Exporting Toxic E-Waste,” Intercept, May 10, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/...waste-exports/.



18. Women’s Movements Offer Global Paradigm Shift toward Social Justice

From LGBTQ movements and indigenous farming struggles to Black Lives Matter and efforts to create sustainable development, women around the world are leading the way toward greater social justice. In Magazine, Rucha Chitnis wrote that, as responses to “corporate power, land grabs, economic injustice, and climate change,” women’s movements offer “a paradigm shift.” Women-led movements have “redefined leadership and development models, connected the dots between issues and oppression, prioritized collective power and movement-building, and critically examined how issues of gender, race, caste, class, sexuality, and ability disproportionately exclude and marginalize.” Chitnis’s Magazine report gave numerous examples of such developments.
One is the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), which stood in solidarity with the women of Ferguson, Missouri, in opposition to police brutality there. The letter of support from NDWA read in part, “As domestic workers, as women, we know that dignity is everyone’s issue and justice is everyone’s hope …We organize to create a world where every single one of us, domestic workers, black teens, immigrant children, aging grandparents—all of us—are treated with respect and dignity.”
Women have long understood that social movements benefit from recognizing the intersections among different forms of oppression. Women around the world are working with a clear and common theme, which Chitnis framed in terms of a 1983 essay by the black lesbian feminist poet, Audre Lorde, “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions.” In that piece Lorde concluded, “I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.”
On LGBTQ issues, Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum, stated, “People of color within LGBTQ movements; girls of color in the fight against the school-to-prison pipeline; women within immigration movements; trans women within feminist movements; and people with disabilities fighting police abuse—all face vulnerabilities that reflect the intersections of racism, sexism, class oppression, transphobia, ableism, and more.”
Another example Chitnis cited comes from India, where Dayamani Barla, a tribal journalist from Jharkhand, has “led a powerful movement to stop the world’s largest steel company, ArcelorMittal, from displacing thousands of indigenous farming communities.” Taking into account hydroelectric dams, mining, and extractive industries that have displaced, dispossessed, and impoverished millions of tribal people across India, Barla told Magazine that globalization “has given rise to a kind of fascism.” But Barla is not “anti-development.” Instead, she said, “We want development of our identity and our history. We want that every person should get equal education and healthy life. We want polluted rivers to be pollution free. We want wastelands to be turned green. We want that everyone should get pure air, water, and food. This is our model of development.”
After Nepal’s devastating April 2015 earthquake, Rita Thapa, a Nepali public health physician, women’s rights advocate, and peace activist, saw how women and girls were more vulnerable than their male counterparts. Nevertheless, Thapa told Magazine about the crucial role of women in the country’s recovery and rebuilding efforts: With “little display of money or power,” women held their communities together, feeding the young and old, caring for the sick, and (literally) picking up the rubble. “Everyone can learn from this,” Thapa told Magazine.
Chitnis summarized, “Whether it is indigenous women in the Amazon fighting corporate polluters and climate change or undocumented Latina domestic workers advocating for worker rights and dignity in California, women’s groups and networks are making links between unbridled capitalism, violence, and the erosion of human rights and destruction of the Earth.”

Rucha Chitnis, “How Women-Led Movements are Redefining Power, from California to Nepal,” Magazine, March 8, 2016, http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-po...nepal-20160308.



17. Deadly Medical Neglect for Immigrants in Privatized US Jails

Over one hundred inmates in privatized, immigrant-only prisons have died, many in disturbing circumstances involving negligent medical and mental health care, Seth Freed Wessler reported for the Nation in January 2016.
Wessler’s article documented the deadly consequences of medical neglect in eleven immigrant-only prisons, known as Criminal Alien Requirement facilities. From 1998 to 2014, at least 137 inmates died in these special immigrant-only facilities run by the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation under contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Wessler’s report was based on more than 9,000 pages of medical records for 103 of the inmates who died in custody since the BOP first opened contract facilities. He fought over two years to obtain these files, using FOIA requests and ultimately a federal lawsuit to compel the BOP to release the records.
The Nation convened a panel of twenty-three independent reviewers, including seventeen medical doctors and six psychiatrists, to review the files. In twenty-five cases, multiple reviewers found evidence of inadequate care that likely contributed to an inmate’s premature death. By contrast, in just thirty-nine cases did the reviewers find that care had likely been in accordance with recognized medical standards.
Unlike prisons that are run directly by the federal government—including immigration detention centers, where federal authorities typically hold immigrants pending deportation—these private, for-profit institutions are not held to the same standards. “Though the prisons are part of the federal infrastructure, the private contractors that run them operate under a different—and less stringent—set of rules in order to allow cost-cutting innovations,” Wessler wrote.  (For background on the economics and politics of privatized prisons, see “Private Prison Companies Fund Anti-Immigrant Legislation,” Censored story #5 from Censored 2012.)
As a result, men with cancer, AIDS, mental illness, and liver and heart disease endured critical delays in care, prison medical units failed to make correct diagnoses of patients with obvious and painful symptoms, and inmates died of treatable diseases that they likely would have survived with access to adequate care.
The medical files documented at least seven suicides in the BOP’s immigrant-only contract prisons. One BOP official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Wessler, “In regular BOP prisons, mental-health treatment is part of the mission, because rehabilitation is part of the mission … For criminal-alien prisons, it’s just, ‘Hold them.’” Seven of the thirteen privatized facilities were not compliant with the standards for adequate mental health care.
Furthermore, licensed vocational nurses (or LVNs, who are meant to function as support staff for registered nurses or medical doctors) were often inmates’ sole medical providers. “In 19 of the 103 deaths we reviewed,” Wessler wrote, “at least one doctor flagged the overextension of LVNs as an inadequacy in care.”
Forty percent of the men held in these prisons were incarcerated for “immigration-related” crimes for which only noncitizens can be convicted, including, for example, trying to re-enter the US after being deported. Until the 1990s, this crime was rarely ever prosecuted. The privatization of US prisons began in the late 1990s, as an effort by President Bill Clinton’s administration to reduce the size of the federal workforce and to cut costs in the federal prison system.
An extensive search of corporate media coverage yielded just three somewhat comparable reports, each dating back to 2009, on the subject of inmate deaths in private prisons. Two of those articles were from the New York Times, with another from the Washington Post. More recently, corporate news has focused on exposing the costs of incarcerating immigrants, or comparing the frequency with which illegal immigrants and US citizens are convicted of rape or murder, as in reports from CNN and Fox News. The deadly medical neglect of inmates in privatized, immigrant-only prisons—as documented by Seth Freed Wessler for the Nation—has gone unreported in the US corporate press.

Seth Freed Wessler, “This Man Will Almost Certainly Die,” Nation, January 28, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/pri...prison-deaths/.
Seth Freed Wessler, “A Guide to Our Investigation of Deaths Inside the Federal Bureau of Prison’s Immigrant-Only Facilities,” Nation, January 28, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/a-g...ly-facilities/.
Seth Freed Wessler, interview by Juan González and Amy Goodman, “‘This Man Will Almost Certainly Die’: The Secret Deaths of Dozens at Privatized Immigrant-Only Jails,” broadcast February 9, 2016, Democracy Now!, transcript, http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/9..._certainly_die.

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16. Over Three-Quarters of Freedom of Information Act Requests Not Fully Answered

On his election, President Obama promised greater governmental transparency to the American people. In practice, the Obama administration has set a record for failures to find and produce government documents in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As Ted Bridis and Jack Gillum reported for the Associated Press’s Big Story, in response to FOIA requests, 129,825 times during the 2015 fiscal year—or more than one in every six cases—government searchers said they came up empty-handed. Overall, Bridis and Gillum wrote, “People who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests, also a record.” The 77 percent figure represents a 12 percent increase, compared with the first full year after President Obama’s election.
Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, the Freedom of Information Act encourages and enforces government disclosures to citizens and foreigners who request federal records, with exemptions for disclosures that would threaten national security, violate personal privacy, or expose confidential decision-making in certain areas.
Censorship and refusal to disclose are only two parts of a three-piece puzzle, the last being human error. As Bridis and Gillum reported, federal workers and the procedures they use to retrieve requested files also contribute to the problem. Though federal workers are required by law to make a reasonable search for requested files, the means of doing so are left to their discretion. “Skepticism,” Bridis and Gillum wrote, has led many experts making FOIA requests to specify “exactly how they want federal employees to search files.” Official efforts are reportedly underway to address this issue, by implementing specific guidelines, methods, and even lists of search terms to use.
However, an already overworked government staff will be challenged to implement the recommended improvements. As Bridis and Gillum reported, in 2015 the total number of FOIA requests increased 19 percent, compared to the previous year. During that time the number of new, full-time workers handling FOIA requests rose only 7 percent.
Though the corporate press, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, have run stories on the Obama administration’s efforts to improve government transparency, most of these articles predate the dramatic increase in the number of FOIA requests that the Obama administration has failed to respond to adequately. And, whereas corporate media have focused on the president and his administration, Bridis and Gillum focus on the role of the government agencies actually tasked with responding to FOIA requests. A March 2015 story in the Washington Post drew largely from a previous report by Ted Bridis. US News & World Report reran Bridis and Gillum’s report, as did the Wall Street Journal. Notably, however, the Journal ran it as an opinion piece.
 

Ted Bridis and Jack Gillum, “US Gov’t Sets Record for Failures to Find Files When Asked,” Big Story (Associated Press), March 18, 2016, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/697e3...les-when-asked.



15. Understanding Climate Change and Gender Inequality

We need to understand climate change through the lens of gender equality, Georgie Johnson reported for Greenpeace’s Energydesk in March 2016. As Johnson’s report showed, climate change has different impacts on men and women, based on preexisting social and economic inequalities. Because most international efforts to address climate change do not include women, the resulting policies do not take into account the particular challenges that climate change poses for women and girls. This is ironic because, according to a 2014 European Union study, women are more likely than men to be concerned about climate change.
Johnson identified two key factors to understanding climate change and gender. First, women (and other marginalized groups) are affected by climate change disproportionately due to social and economic inequality. For example, women accounted for 61 percent of fatalities caused by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008, 70–80 percent in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and 91 percent in the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh. As Johnson noted, gender inequality shaped the disproportionate rate at which women and girls died in these disasters. The reasons could be as simple as women not being taught to swim. In more unequal societies, where women do not tend to move in public spaces, adhering to social expectations to stay at home unless chaperoned by a male could lead women to ignore early warning signs to seek safer shelter.
For women who do survive, the aftermath of crises is also dangerous: Women are at greater risk of sexual assault and domestic abuse after natural disasters and in areas of conflict. For example, in the year after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, 80 percent of those left behind in the Ninth Ward were women, and incidents of gender-based violence (including sexual assault and domestic violence) in the state were almost four times higher than before the storm.
Second, and more affirmatively, women can nonetheless offer “incredibly powerful solutions to climate change,” because they comprise nearly three-quarters of the global poor. This makes them “uniquely placed” to share knowledge about climate impacts and to implement solutions. Around the world women are “working to mitigate and adapt to climate change, either through direct on-the-ground solutions or as researchers, organisers and campaigners.” For instance, Johnson described women farmers in El Salvador who have harnessed geothermal energy to replace wood and fossil fuels in their communities, reducing 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year.
“If we had gender parity in politics,” Johnson wrote, “climate change policy might have more teeth.”

Georgie Johnson, “Why Climate Change is a Gender Equality Issue,” Greenpeace Energydesk, March 8, 2016, https://energydesk.greenpeace.org/20...nder-equality/.



14. FBI’s New Plan to Spy on High School Students across the Country

Under new guidelines issued in January 2016, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, Sarah Lazare reported for AlterNet. The new guidelines also warn that young people who are poor, are immigrants, or talk about travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit violence. As Lazare wrote, the FBI’s “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools” guidelines combine “McCarthy-era theories of radicalization”—in which authorities monitor thoughts and behaviors suspected of leading to acts of violent subversion—with elements of a “widely unpopular” and “deeply controversial” British surveillance program, known as Prevent, that monitors Muslim communities and individuals.
The new guidelines depict US high schools as “hotbeds of extremism,” Lazare summarized. Claiming that youth “possess inherent risk factors,” the FBI guidelines describe high school students as “ideal targets” for recruitment by violent extremists. Educational materials prepared by the FBI for schools indicate that activities ranging from using “unusual language” or “private messaging apps” and encryption (“going dark,” in FBI speak) to playing online games outside of school could indicate that “someone plans to commit violence.”
The guidelines draw on a conveyor belt theory of extremism, which contends that extreme ideas lead to violence, a model tracing back to “the first red scare in America, as well as J. Edgar Hoover’s crackdown on civil rights and anti-war activists,” Lazare wrote. As Hugh Handeyside, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project told Lazare, by broadening the definition of violent extremism, “the FBI is policing students’ thoughts and trying to predict the future based on those thoughts.”
The guidelines “are almost certainly designed” to target Muslim-American students. “In its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination,” Lazare wrote, “the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance.” Nonetheless, the guidelines’ repeated focus on “immigrant” and “diaspora” populations, as well as cultural and religious differences, reveal an underlying agenda. The FBI “consistently invokes an Islamic threat without naming it,” Lazare reported. Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror, about Islamophobia, told AlterNet, “In practice, schools seeking to implement this document will end up monitoring Muslim students disproportionately.”
Writing for Just Security, an online forum based at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law, Danielle Jefferis of the ACLU’s National Security Project reported that “the FBI’s request that school officials spy and report on students’ ideas and beliefs risks stifling curiosity and free expression, which corrupts the trust that should exist between teachers and students.” Though the FBI asserts that it does not want to limit students’ freedom of speech, the guidelines encourage school officials to identify students who “engage in communications indicating support for extreme ideologies” or who are “curious about” subject matter that could be deemed extreme.
In calling for schools to create threat assessment teams and to “enhance domain awareness,” the FBI engages in what Jefferis characterized as “fear mongering,” which “will almost assuredly ratchet up the pressure on school officials to go to law enforcement before seeking out alternatives.” This forces school principals with the false dilemma of choosing between keeping their schools safe or upholding students’ rights to freedom of expression and equal protection. Instead, Jefferis concluded, “Our kids are safer, and our communities are stronger, when we work to protect—not erode—our fundamental values and freedoms.”
Lazare’s AlterNet report was republished by Salon. PressTV, the Free Thought Project, MintPress News, and the Intercept subsequently ran stories on the FBI’s “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools” guidelines, but US corporate news media appear not to have covered this story in any detail.

Sarah Lazare, “The FBI Has a New Plan to Spy on High School Students across the Country” AlterNet, March 2, 2016, http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-pro...across-country.
Danielle Jefferis, “The FBI Wants Schools to Spy on Their Students’ Thoughts,” Just Security, March 11, 2016, https://www.justsecurity.org/29901/f...ents-thoughts/.

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13. US “Vaccine Court” Has Paid over Three Billion Dollars to Vaccine-Injured Families

Since 1988, the US government has paid $3.2 billion to 4,150 individuals and families for injuries and deaths attributed to shots for flu, diphtheria, whooping cough, and other conditions. Though vaccines “remain one of the greatest success stories in public health,” Tracy Seipel reported, “for some Americans, rare side effects of inoculations have led to hardship, serious injury, and even death.”
As Anders Kelto reported on NPR’s All Things Considered, high-profile lawsuits against drug companies in the 1980s successfully charged that children immunized with the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine experienced adverse reactions, including seizures and brain damage, leading to at least two court settlements worth millions of dollars. In response, drug companies threatened to stop producing vaccines for the US market because litigation risks were too great unless the government provided them with “no-fault” protection. NPR quoted Anna Kirkland, a professor of women’s studies and political science at the University of Michigan: “There was a real fear that some of our childhood vaccines would no longer be available.”
In 1986, that fear led Congress to establish the little-known Office of Special Masters of the US Court of Federal Claims (known informally as the vaccine court) and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. NPR reported that the court administers a “no-fault compensation program that serves as an alternative to the traditional U.S. tort system.” As Kirkland explained, the vaccine court served to “shield the vaccine makers from liability.” It also created a fund to compensate injured vaccine recipients, through a 75-cent surcharge on every vaccine dose.
As the NPR report explained, “Petitioners don’t have to prove that the immunization caused their condition—the court operates under a presumption of causation if the injury develops within a certain period of time.” To win a claim, petitioners must provide proof of developing a condition listed on a vaccine injury table. Settlements for conditions not included in the table require a higher burden of proof. But, as Seipel reported, the other restriction that petitioners face is filing within strict time limits. A petition must be filed within three years of the first symptoms, within two years of death, or within four years after the first symptom of a vaccine-related injury that resulted in death.
The problem of the time limit is two-fold. First, and most fundamentally, most people simply do not know about the government’s vaccine-injury compensation program, and they may not learn about it in time to petition. Second, in cases where parents allege that a vaccine has injured a child of theirs, the full extent of the injury may not be known until the child is older. As Anna Kirkland, the Michigan professor who has studied the vaccine court, told NPR, publicizing the vaccine court and injury compensation program creates a dilemma: Once critics see compensation settlements, they conclude that “vaccines are dangerous and you shouldn’t vaccinate.” If the court were to achieve greater visibility, especially regarding payouts to injured patients, the public might conclude that vaccines are more generally dangerous than significant research and evidence indicates.
Jessica Boehm of Cronkite News reported that vaccine information statements, which include information about both possible side effects and the vaccine compensation program, are provided to patients before each shot. However, few people read the fine print. According to Drew Downing, a lawyer who specializes in vaccine injury cases, “That’s really the only place that the vaccine program is really ever talked about.” As Seipel reported, other critics have noted that, when patients seek medical attention for an adverse reaction, they should be informed about the court system and compensation program.
Boehm’s Cronkite News report indicated that annual revenues of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund significantly exceed the amount spent on injury claims through the compensation program. According to Government Accountability Office figures, since 2005 the vaccine court has compensated an average of 190 of the 466 claims it receives each year. During that time, the program’s annual budget has averaged $148.7 million. Some critics of the program, Boehm reported, question the program’s record of stringent compensation, given that it now maintains a $3.5 billion fund. Others contended that the large trust fund is a “safety net,” maintained by the program in the event that the vaccine court might rule to compensate thousands of families, as could have occurred in 2007 when the court began its Omnibus Autism Proceeding to determine whether two types of vaccines triggered autism in children. In 2009 the court ruled against the families, but if it had not the settlement would have required at least that much in compensation. Vaccine-injured victims are entitled to lost wages, medical and rehabilitation expenses, and up to $250,000 in compensation for pain and suffering. For vaccine-related deaths, compensation is limited to $250,000.
Since 2002, the Washington Post has published a handful of editorials, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor that have addressed the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In 2009 it ran a front-page article on the vaccine court’s finding of no link between vaccines and autism in children. Coverage of the vaccine court and its injury program in the New York Times appears to have been limited to a single story from 1994, sourced from the Associated Press, on a new vaccine for whooping cough, which mentioned the program and compensation fund in passing.

Anders Kelto, “Vaccine Court Aims to Protect Patients and Vaccines,” All Things Considered (NPR), broadcast June 2, 2015, edited transcript, http://www.npr.org/sections/health-s...s-and-vaccines.
Tracy Seipel, “Vaccine Battles Call New Attention to Obscure Compensation Court,” Marin Independent Journal, August 2, 2015, http://www.marinij.com/article/NO/20...NEWS/150809969.
Jessica Boehm, “Vaccine Injury Fund Tops $3.5 Billion, as Patients Fight for Payment,” Cronkite News (Arizona PBS), May 8, 2015, http://cronkitenewsonline.com/2015/0...t-for-payment/.



12. Why Our Lives Depend on Keeping 80 Percent of Fossil Fuels in the Ground

The Spring 2016 issue of Magazine featured articles on the theme “After Oil.” Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, wrote that, when it comes to climate change, the essential problem is not “industry versus environmentalists, or Republicans against Democrats. It’s people against physics.” For that reason, the compromises and trade-offs typical of most public policy debates will not work, because “lobbying physics is useless.” What does physics tell us? McKibben reported that we “have to keep 80 percent of the fossil fuel reserves we know about underground,” the aim of a Keep It in the Ground movement that began five years ago.
At that time, McKibben reported, environmentalists engaged in climate policy focused on reducing demand. Such an approach has been making “slow but steady progress.” Reducing demand was working, but not quickly enough, so the Keep It in the Ground movement focused on the supply side of climate policy. “We have to leave fossil fuel in the ground,” McKibben reported. The world’s remaining concentrations of fossil fuels can be understood as “money pits”—untapped coal, gas, and oil could be worth $20 trillion—or as “carbon bombs,” which will wreck the planet if they are used. For this reason, the Keep It in the Ground movement has opposed the Keystone pipeline and what would have been the world’s largest coal mine in Queensland, Australia, while advocating for colleges and universities, doctors’ associations, and churches from around the world to divest from fossil fuels. Blocking pipelines, McKibben wrote, cuts the fuse on the carbon bomb, while divestment campaigns have “driven the necessity of keeping carbon underground from the fringes into the heart of the world’s establishment.”
With alternatives to fossil fuel becoming increasingly less expensive, “we don’t need to win this fight forever,” McKibben wrote. Instead, if we can hold off fossil fuel development for “just a few more years … we’ll have made the transition to clean energy irreversible.”
That transition was the focus of Richard Heinberg’s article, which reported on what the US could do in the next ten years to transition to 100 percent renewable energy. Heinberg, a Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, wrote that the transition to renewable energy would be unlike previous energy transitions, which were “additive” and “driven by opportunity, not policy.” We still use firewood, even after adding coal and other energy sources, for example. By contrast, the shift to renewable energy would involve trading our currently dominant energy sources for alternative ones “that have different characteristics,” entailing “hefty” challenges.
Heinberg and his colleague David Fridley, a scientist in the Energy Analysis Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have analyzed and assessed a variety of already-formulated plans for transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. In Heinberg’s Magazine article, he provided a summary of three “levels” of change, tailored to the United States. The first level focused on what can be done “relatively quickly and cheaply,” scaling up to the third level, which would take “long, expensive, sustained effort” to implement.
First, the transition would be kick-started by shifting electricity production from coal sources to solar and wind power. Since solar and wind power generate electricity, “it makes sense to electrify as much of our energy usage as we can,” Heinberg wrote. Along with retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency and increasing the market share of local organic foods, level one changes “could achieve at least a 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions in 10 to 20 years.”
Level two addresses “harder stuff,” including some of the consequences of how solar and wind power differ from fossil fuels. Because solar and wind provide intermittent energy, when they become our primary energy sources, we would have to “accommodate that intermittency,” for example by significantly increasing “grid-level” energy storage and by timing energy use to coordinate with available sunlight and wind energy. Although most manufacturing already runs on electricity, many raw materials either are fossil fuels or require fossil fuels for mining or transportation. “Considerable effort” would be required to replace industrial materials based on fossil fuels. Adding level two changes would achieve “roughly 80 percent reduction in emissions” compared to our current levels, Heinberg reported.
Level three addresses the “really hard stuff.” Concrete is currently fundamental for all kinds of construction. Making cement—concrete’s crucial ingredient—requires high heat. Theoretically, this could be provided by sunlight, electricity, or hydrogen, but this shift would entail “a nearly complete redesign of the process,” Heinberg reported. Similarly, eliminating all fossil fuel inputs from our food system would require not only local organic food (as noted in level one) but also the redesign of the food system “to minimize processing, packaging, and transport.” In the transport sector, paving and repairing roads without oil-based asphalt is “possible,” but would require “complete redesign” of processes and equipment. Aviation fuels have no good substitute, and air travel might have to be relegated to a “specialty transportation mode,” he wrote. Together, however, addressing these most difficult aspects of the transition to renewable energy could get us “beyond zero carbon emissions.”
Leading up to and in the aftermath of the United Nations Climate Change Conference that took place in Paris in December 2015, popular and corporate media featured limited coverage of the Keep It in the Ground movement and its issues. An article in the Huffington Post quoted the executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, as saying, “Three quarters of the fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground,” a position that illustrated, according to the article, “how the discourse is moving ‘upstream,’” from controlling emissions to limiting fossil fuel production. In January 2016, Time magazine ran a brief article on a scientific report published in the journal Nature, which found that 80 percent of coal reserves, half of gas, and one-third of oil reserves could not be used if the world is to avoid global temperatures rising more than two degrees Celsius. Notably, however, the Time coverage of this report—just five sentences in length—was based entirely on a much more detailed article on the findings, originally published by the Guardian.

Bill McKibben, “Why We Need to Keep 80 Percent of Fossil Fuels in the Ground,” Magazine, February 15, 2016, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/li...round-20160215.
Richard Heinberg, “100% Renewable Energy: What We Can Do in 10 Years,”  Magazine, February 22, 2016, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/li...years-20160222.

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11. CIA Warned Bush Administration of Terrorist Attack Prior to 9/11

Based on new interviews with Cofer Black, the former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, Chris Whipple reported in Politico that the George W. Bush administration ignored CIA warnings in the months before 9/11. Noting that neither Black nor Tenet has spoken about the warnings “in such detail until now—or have been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings were,” Whipple wrote that, starting in spring 2001, the CIA “repeatedly and urgently” warned the White House that an attack was imminent. (Whipple distinguished Tenet’s detailed interview remarks from the “general terms” in which Tenet had described these events in his 2007 memoir, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA.)
In Spring 2001, Tenet and Black proposed to Bush administration officials a plan aimed at ending the threat of al-Qaeda. Known as the “Blue Sky paper,” the plan called for covert CIA and military operations against al-Qaeda, “getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” Tenet told Whipple that the White House responded, “We’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want to start the clock ticking.” Whipple interpreted Tenet’s account to imply that, in Whipple’s words, the White House “did not want a paper trail, to show that they’d been warned.” According to Black, Bush’s staff was “mentally stuck” in an outdated conception of terrorism. “They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties,” Black told Whipple, making it “very difficult” to communicate the urgency of the CIA’s warnings regarding al-Qaeda.
Black recounted for Whipple how, on the morning of July 10, 2001, Richard Blee, who led the CIA’s al-Qaeda unit, told Black, “Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in.” According to Black the information was “absolutely compelling,” “multiple-sourced,” and “the last straw.” Black and Blee briefed Tenet, who then called Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice. According to Tenet he told Rice, “I have to come see you.”
Whipple reported that Tenet “vividly recalls” the meeting with Rice and her team. (At the time President Bush was on a trip in Boston.) Tenet told Whipple that Blee began by reporting, “There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple.” According to Tenet, Rice asked what should be done, and Black, slamming his fist on the table, told her, “We need to go on wartime footing now!”
In her 2011 book, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, Rice wrote that her recollection of the meeting was “not very crisp because we were discussing the threat everyday … I thought we were doing what needed to be done.” Whipple wrote that, in response to an inquiry about her response to the claims by Black and Tenet, Rice’s chief of staff told Whipple that she stands by the account in her memoir. Tenet told Whipple he testified about the July 10 meeting with Rice and her team before the 9/11 Commission, but this was not included in the Commission’s final report. Black told Whipple that the White House’s inaction “remains incomprehensible.”
At the end of July, Tenet told Whipple, he and his deputies gathered in his conference room at CIA headquarters. According to Tenet, Blee told them, “They’re coming here.” Tenet described the ensuing silence as “deafening.” “You could feel the oxygen come out of the room.”
Whipple conducted interviews with George Tenet and Cofer Black for a documentary, The Spymasters, about Tenet and the eleven other living former CIA directors. Showtime broadcast the program in November 2015.

Chris Whipple, “The Attacks Will be Spectacular,” Politico, November 12, 2015, http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...11-bush-213353.



10. CISA: The Internet Surveillance Act No One is Discussing

On December 18, 2015, President Obama signed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) into law as part of a 2,000 page omnibus spending bill. As drafted, CISA was intended to “improve cybersecurity in the United States through enhanced sharing of information about cybersecurity threats, and for other purposes.” The act authorized the creation of a system for corporate informants to provide customers’ data to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which, in turn, would share this information with other federal agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, Defense (which includes the NSA), Energy, Justice (which includes the FBI), the Treasury (which oversees the IRS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
As Sam Thielman of the Guardian reported, civil liberties experts had been “dismayed” when Congress used the omnibus spending bill to advance some of the legislation’s “most invasive” components. Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union criticized Congress for using the spending bill “to pursue their extremist agendas.” “Sneaking damaging and discriminatory riders into a must-pass bill usurps the democratic process,” he told the Guardian. Lauren Weinstein, who cofounded People For Internet Responsibility, also spoke critically of the legislation: “There is not a culture of security and privacy established in the government yet. You have to have that before you even consider sharing the amounts of data [CISA] would cover.” Evan Greer of Fight for the Future called CISA “a disingenuous attempt to quietly expand the US government’s surveillance programs.”
In July 2015, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had attempted to attach the bill as an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act, but the Senate blocked this by a vote of 56-40.
As Andy Greenberg reported for Wired, the final Senate version of the bill removed personal information protections that privacy advocates had fought successfully to have included in a previous version. Greenberg reported that CISA had “alarmed the privacy community” by providing a loophole in privacy laws that would enable intelligence and law enforcement officials to engage in surveillance without warrants. The version of CISA approved in the Senate by a vote of 74 to 21 in October 2015, Greenberg reported, “creates the ability for the president to set up ‘portals’ for agencies like the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, so that companies hand information directly to law enforcement and intelligence agencies instead of to the Department of Homeland Security.” Commenting on this aspect of the legislation, Jadzia Butler and Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote, “Information shared for cybersecurity reasons should be used for cybersecurity purposes, but this legislation does not impose this simple requirement.”
Greenberg’s Wired article noted that tech firms—including Apple, Twitter, and Reddit—as well as fifty-five civil liberties groups had opposed the bill, and that, in July 2015, DHS itself warned that the bill would “sweep away privacy protections” while inundating the agency with data of “dubious” value.
In April 2016, Jason R. Edgecombe reported for TechCrunch on the release by DHS and the Department of Justice of additional “Privacy and Civil Liberties Interim Guidelines” to supplement CISA. The interim guidelines aimed to address continued concerns over inadequate privacy safeguards. In particular, the language of CISA required that private entities sharing information with the government only had to protect “information that the entity knows at the time of sharing to be personal information or information that identifies a specific person” (emphasis added). As Edgecombe observed, “This is a low bar: If the entity doing the sharing isn’t aware ‘at the time of sharing’ that a CTI [cyber threat indicator] identifies a specific person, it is not required to de-identify that information.”
The interim guidelines required DHS and other government agencies receiving private information under CISA to review cyber threat indicators for personally identifiable information and to remove it before sharing the data further. As Edgecombe reported, however, the interim guidelines only protect personal information “not directly linked to a cybersecurity threat.” And they do not require destruction of personal information unless it is “known not to be directly related to uses authorized under CISA.” As he reported, this wording created a “potentially vast loophole,” because CISA authorized “a number of law enforcement activities unrelated to cybersecurity.” “The best way to prevent personal information from falling into the hands of the feds,” Edgecombe concluded, “is for non-governmental entities to decline to share it in the first place.” As Censored 2017 went to press, the DHS/DOJ final guidelines had not yet been made public.
Assessing where presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump stand on cybersecurity issues, Violet Blue of Engadget reported that, while most people felt that CISA did not go far enough in protecting citizens’ privacy, “Clinton felt the law didn’t go far enough in facilitating the sharing of data between companies and the government.” Sanders voted against CISA. (“Our civil liberties and right to privacy shouldn’t be the price we pay for security. #CISA”, he tweeted on October 22, 2015.) Though Trump had not taken a specific position on CISA, Blue noted, “Trump is an outspoken supporter of government surveillance.” The NSA, he has said, “should be given as much leeway as possible.”
In November 2015, NBC News asked, “Why aren’t Presidential Candidates Talking about Cybersecurity?” The story noted that Sanders was the only candidate (other than Republican Rand Paul) to oppose CISA, and it included a “quick primer” on CISA that consisted of two sentences. On December 22, 2015, CNBC’s Everett Rosenfeld reported on President Obama having signed the “controversial ‘surveillance’ act,” but this report was derivative of Andy Greenberg’s previous report for Wired.

Andy Greenberg, “Congress Slips CISA into a Budget Bill That’s Sure to Pass,” Wired, December 16, 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/12/congres...-sure-to-pass/.
Sam Thielman, “Congress Adds Contested Cybersecurity Measures to ‘Must-Pass’ Spending Bill,” Guardian, December 16, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...-spending-bill.
Jason R. Edgecombe, “Interim Guidelines to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act,” TechCrunch, April 13, 2016, http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/13/int...n-sharing-act/.
Violet Blue, “Where the Candidates Stand on Cyber Issues,” Engadget, May 13, 2016, http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/13/w...-cyber-issues/.

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9. Big Pharma Political Lobbying Not Limited to Presidential Campaigns

Pharmaceutical companies have been among the biggest political spenders for years, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. As Mike Ludwig of Truthout reported, based on CRP data, large pharmaceutical companies made over $51 million in campaign donations during the 2012 presidential election, nearly $32 million in the 2014 elections, and, as of September 2015, they had already put $10 million into the 2016 election. During the 2014 elections, Pfizer led drug companies with $1.5 million in federal campaign donations, followed by Amgen ($1.3 million) and McKesson ($1.1 million).
Although these are large sums of money, campaign donations by large pharmaceutical companies pale in comparison to how much they spent on lobbying politicians and influencing policies outside of elections. As Ludwig reported, according to data gathered on the 2014 election, the industry spent seven dollars on lobbying for every dollar spent on the election. The $229 million spent by drug companies and their lobbying groups that year was down from a peak of $273 million in 2009, the year that Congress debated the Affordable Care Act.
According to records from MapLight’s lobbying database, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) has been the drug companies’ lead lobbying group. Since 2008, PhRMA has spend over $163 million on lobbying, making it the fifth largest lobbying spender in the nation, outspending powerful defense contractors (such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman), the oil and gas industry (e.g., ExxonMobil), and Koch Industries, among others. Pfizer is among the nation’s top 25 lobbying spenders, having spent over $101 million since 2008 and $9.4 million in 2015 alone.
What do big pharmaceutical companies hope to achieve through lobbying? As Ludwig wrote, “lobbying allows Big Pharma to take advantage of Washington’s revolving door and directly influence legislation.” Specifically, records filed by drug companies and their lobbying groups indicated the industry’s top concerns, including policy on patents and trademarks, management of Medicare and Medicaid, and international trade. For example, Ludwig’s article described how the pharmaceutical industry sought to persuade the Obama administration to pressure India to tighten its laws on generic drugs. India’s less strict patent laws have allowed some manufacturers to make generic versions of drugs used in developing countries to treat HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, undermining the monopolies created by US patent laws that permit drug companies up to twenty years before generic versions of their drug, which would drive down prices, can enter the market. Pharmaceutical lobbyists also consistently lobby to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices. Pharmaceutical lobbyists also consistently lobby to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders advocated on behalf of Medicare price negotiations during their 2016 presidential campaigns. A PhRMA press release dramatically said that Clinton’s proposed plan would “turn back the clock on medical innovation and halt progress against diseases that patients fear most.”
Since Ludwig’s September 2015 report, updated records published by the Center for Responsive Politics indicate that the 2016 campaign has followed the pattern of past election seasons. As of May 16, 2016, Pfizer had made $1.27 million in campaign contributions (with 64 percent going to Republican candidates) in 2015–16, followed by Amgen (over $939,000, with 60 percent to Republicans) and Celgene (over $848,000, with nearly 90 percent to Republican or “Conservative” candidates). Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America made over $242,000 in campaign donations, nearly 75 percent of which has gone to Republican candidates.
As in previous years, the pharmaceutical industry’s investment in lobbying has dramatically outpaced its campaign contributions. Based on data from the Senate Office of Public Records, as of April 25, 2016, PhRMA had spent over $5.98 million on lobbying in 2016, followed by Pfizer ($3.28 million), Merck ($3.26 million), and Novartis (over $3.13 million). Collectively, pharmaceutical and health product lobbying for the first months of 2016 (through April 25) totaled over $63.1 million.
As Ludwig wrote, the pharmaceutical industry includes some of the most profitable companies in the world, and the industry has “a clear interest in maintaining the political status quo.” While representatives of the industry assure the public that profits go to the research and development of new drugs, a closer examination of Big Pharma’s spending on political contributions and, especially, lobbying reveals that it spends hundreds of millions of dollars to influence US politics, health care policy, and international trade.
Although the cost of prescription drugs has been a major issue in the 2016 presidential election campaign, corporate news coverage has failed to report the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry engages in political lobbying. Apart from articles published by CNN and US News & World Report, which both drew on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, drug companies’ campaign donations have received limited news coverage. Also citing the Center for Responsive Politics, a February 2016 article in the New York Times briefly mentioned the amount spent by the pharmaceutical industry on lobbying. Otherwise, this topic appears to have gone significantly underreported, despite the corporate news media’s nonstop coverage of the 2016 electoral campaign.

Mike Ludwig, “How Much of Big Pharma’s Massive Profits are Used to Influence Politicians?” Truthout, September 30, 2015, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...ce-politicians.



8. Syria’s War Spurred by Contest for Gas Delivery to Europe, Not Muslim Sectarianism

At least four years into the crisis in Syria, “most people have no idea how this war even got started,” Mnar Muhawesh reported for MintPress News in September 2015.
In 2011–12, after Syrian president Bashar al-Assad refused to cooperate with Turkey’s proposal to create a natural gas pipeline between Qatar and Turkey through Syria, Turkey and its allies became “the major architects of Syria’s ‘civil war.’” The proposed pipeline would have bypassed Russia to reach European markets currently dominated by Russian gas giant Gazprom. As a result, Muhawesh wrote, “The Middle East is being torn to shreds by manipulative plans to gain oil and gas access by pitting people against one another based on religion. The ensuing chaos provides ample cover to install a new regime that’s more amenable to opening up oil pipelines and ensuring favorable routes for the highest bidders.”
In 2012, the US, UK, France, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, along with Turkey, began to organize, arm, and finance rebels to form the Free Syrian Army, consistent with long-standing US plans to destabilize Syria. These nations formed a pact, “The Group of Friends of the Syrian People,” that implemented a sectarian divide and conquer strategy to overthrow President Assad. “It’s important to note the timing,” Muhawesh wrote. “This coalition and meddling in Syria came about immediately on the heels of discussions of an Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline that was to be built between 2014 and 2016 from Iran’s giant South Pars field through Iraq and Syria. With a possible extension to Lebanon, it would eventually reach Europe, the target export market.” As MintPress News reported, access to oil and gas—not sectarian differences—is the underlying cause of the violent conflict and humanitarian disaster in Syria. “The war is being sold to the public as a Sunni-Shiite conflict” by the Friends of Syria because, if the public understood the economic interests at stake, “most people would not support any covert funding and arming of rebels or direct intervention.”
Based on secret US cables revealed by WikiLeaks, Muhawesh reported that “foreign meddling in Syria began several years before the Syrian revolt erupted.” US State Department cables from 2006 documented plans to instigate civil strife that would lead to the overthrow of Assad’s government. The leaks revealed the United States partnering with nations including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt to fuel Sunni-Shiite sectarianism to divide Syria.
Although there is plenty of coverage in US corporate media about the violence in Syria and the refugee crisis that is sweeping Europe and reaching North America, this coverage has failed to address the economic interests, including control of potentially lucrative gas pipelines, that motivate the US and its allies.  (US corporate news coverage of the Ukraine crisis was comparable in that it too downplayed geopolitical oil interests as a source of tension among Russia, the US, and their respective allies, as Nafeez Ahmed has reported. See “US Media Hypocrisy in Covering Ukraine Crisis,” Censored story #9 from Censored 2015.) Instead, corporate news coverage has characterized the conflict in Syria as a battle for democracy that has been hijacked by Sunni-Shiite interests. For example, Oren Dorell of USA Today identified “a mind-boggling and dangerous stew of shifting and competing alliances” involved in the Syrian conflict—including groups categorized as progovernment, antigovernment, anti-Islamic State, and “other fighters”—but he did not address the gas interests that, according to Muhawesh’s reporting, ultimately underpin the conflict. Instead, much of what passes for news coverage in the corporate press adheres to a pattern that Muhawesh identified and critiqued as simplistic and “Orientalist,” framing conflict in the Middle East and especially Syria as sectarian in order “to paint the region and its people as barbaric.”

Mnar Muhawesh, “Refugee Crisis & Syria War Fueled by Competing Gas Pipelines,” MintPress News, September 9, 2015, http://www.mintpressnews.com/migrant...elines/209294/.

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7. No End in Sight for Fukushima Disaster

Five years after the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the nuclear power plant at Fukushima, Dahr Jamail reported that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) officials in charge of the plant continue to release large quantities of radioactive waste water into the Pacific Ocean. Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, called Fukushima “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of humankind.” As Jamail reported, experts such as Gundersen continue warning officials and the public that this problem is not going away. As Gundersen told Jamail, “With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started…but they never end.” Another expert quoted in Jamail’s Truthout article, M.V. Ramana, a physicist and lecturer at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and the Nuclear Futures Laboratory, explained, “March 2011 was just the beginning of the disaster, which is still unfolding.”
Although the Fukushima plant has been offline since the disaster, uncontrolled fission continues to generate heat and require cooling. The cooling process has produced “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of tons” of highly radioactive water, Jamail reported. TEPCO has no backup safety systems or proactive plan for dealing with the accumulation of contaminated water, so much of it is released into the Pacific Ocean. Drawing on reports from the Asahi Shimbun and Agence France-Presse, Common Dreams reported that, on September 14, 2015, “Despite the objections of environmentalists and after overcoming local opposition from fishermen, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) pumped more than 850 tons of groundwater from below the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.” Each day, according to these reports, TEPCO was pumping approximately 300 tons of groundwater to the surface for treatment before placing it in storage. Officially no water is released into the ocean until it is tested for radioactive content, but many experts are skeptical of this claim. As Jamail reported, “The company has repeatedly come under fire for periodically dumping large amounts of radioactive water.”
According to Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear advocate and author, once it is released, “There is no way to prevent radioactive water [from] reaching the western shores of the North American continent and then circulating around the rest of the Pacific Ocean … At the moment, it seems like this is going to occur for the rest of time.” Radioactive water affects ocean life through a process described by Caldicott as “biological magnification.” The effect of radiation expands each step up the food chain—from algae, to crustaceans and small fish, up to the ocean’s largest creatures.
While biological magnification may ultimately impact human health, a December 2015 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution study showed a 50 percent increase in seawater radiation levels 1,600 miles west of San Francisco. That report indicated that these levels are far below what the US government considers dangerous, but Caldicott and other experts question the standards that the US government and other official agencies use to determine safe levels of radiation exposure.
Meanwhile, Linda Pentz Gunter, writing for the Ecologist, reported that the Japanese government has kept its citizens “in the dark” from the start of the disaster about high radiation levels and dangers to health. “In order to proclaim the Fukushima area ‘safe’,” Gunter wrote, “the Government increased exposure limits to twenty times the international norm,” a determination preliminary to Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s stated goal of lifting evacuation orders and forcing displaced Fukushima refugees to return home by March 2017. Government policy is now to “‘normaliz[e]’ radiation standards,” Gunter wrote, and to tell the Japanese people that everything is all right, despite medical or scientific evidence to the contrary.
At a conference in February 2016, prefectural governors urged young people to return to Fukushima. Doing so would facilitate the region’s reconstruction and “help you lead a meaningful life,” said Fukushima’s governor, Masao Uchibori. However, as Gunter reported, young people appear not to be cooperating. Instead, most of the returning evacuees are senior citizens, with stronger traditional ties to the land and their ancestral burial grounds. This creates a further dilemma for local authorities, according to Gunter: Local tax revenues are levied on both individuals and corporations, with nearly a quarter of the taxes collected by local prefectures and municipalities coming from individuals. “The onus is on governors and mayors,” she wrote, “to lure as many working people as possible back to their towns and regions in order to effectively finance local public services.” Retired senior citizens do not contribute to income tax.
Gunter reported the public remarks of Tetsunari Iida, the founder and executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP) in Japan: Prime Minister Shinzō Abe “says ‘everything is under control’… Yes—under the control of the media!” While Iida directed his critique to Japan’s press, it could easily apply to US corporate media coverage of Fukushima and its aftermath, as documented by sociologist Celine-Marie Pascale of American University. Pascale conducted a content analysis of more than 2,100 articles, editorials, and letters to the editor on Fukushima, published by the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, and the Huffington Post between March 11, 2011 and March 11, 2013. Her analysis focused on two basic questions, “Risk for whom?” and “Risk from what?” Pascale found that just 6 percent of the articles reported on risk to the general public. “This in itself,” she reported, “is a significant finding about the focus of news media during one of the largest nuclear disasters in history.”
More specifically, Pascale found that the great majority of news coverage that focused on risks to the public significantly discounted those risks. Sixty-five of the 129 articles that focused on risk to the general population characterized it as being “quite low on the basis of comparisons to other risks or claims of no evidence.” (For example, Pascale wrote, “Media practices encouraged publics to understand the largest nuclear disaster in history as no more significant than the radiation produced by the sun.”) An additional forty-four articles characterized risk as low on the basis of uncertain evidence. In other words, assessments of uncertain risk were interpreted by news media as low risk. Over two years, the four major US news outlets that Pascale studied reported just seventeen articles that characterized the disaster as having even “potentially high risk to the general population.” Pascale concluded: “The largest and longest lasting nuclear disaster of our time was routinely and consistently reported as being of little consequence to people, food supplies, or environments. Impressively this was done systematically across The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post. In short, the media coverage was premised on misinformation, the minimization of public health risks, and the exacerbation of uncertainties.”
A flurry of corporate media coverage around the fifth anniversary of the disaster for the most part reproduced the pattern identified by Pascale. For example, as CNBC’s anniversary report acknowledged, “Elevated [radiation] levels off the coast of Japan show that the situation is not yet under control, and that the facility is still leaking radiation.” But, the report continued, “the levels observed near the United States are below—very far below—those set by health and safety standards, and are also far outstripped by naturally occurring radiation.”
In February 2016, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported that three TEPCO executives, including Tsunehisa Katsumata, TEPCO’s chairman at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, were formally charged with negligence in the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Dahr Jamail, “Radioactive Water from Fukushima is Leaking into the Pacific,” Truthout, January 27, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...to-the-pacific.
Linda Pentz Gunter, “No Bliss in This Ignorance: The Great Fukushima Nuclear Cover-Up,” Ecologist, February 20, 2016, http://www.theecologist.org/News/new...r_coverup.html.
Celine-Marie Pascale, “Vernacular Epistemologies of Risk: The Crisis in Fukushima,” Current Sociology, March 3, 2016, http://csi.sagepub.com/content/early...27284.abstract.



6. Over 1.5 Million American Families Live on Two Dollars Per Person Per Day

According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, sociologists and authors of the book $2.00 per Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, in 2011 more than 1.5 million US families—including three million children—lived on as little as two dollars per person per day in any given month. Edin and Shaefer determined this figure on the basis of data from the US Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), income data from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), additional data on family homelessness, and their own fieldwork in four study sites, including Chicago, Cleveland, and rural communities in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta.
As Marcus Harrison Green wrote in Magazine, their depiction of what poverty truly looks like in the US reads “like a Dickens novel.” As Green noted, US media often neglect the experiences of the poor, making the study’s findings “startling for many.” (For previous Project Censored coverage of how corporate media neglect to cover poor people, see “Millions in Poverty Get Less Media Coverage Than Billionaires Do,” Censored story #9 in Censored 2016.) From families who depend on their mother making plasma donations twice a week for their income, to others with nothing but a carton of spoiled milk in their refrigerator, Edin and Shaefer documented family households living “from crisis to crisis.” One of their informants told Shaefer that she had been beaten and raped and was always “looking out for the next threat.”
As Jared Bernstein noted in his September 2015 report for the Atlantic, in addition to providing a vivid account of what it’s like to live in extreme poverty, Edin and Shaefer’s research also offers a policy critique that highlights the long-term consequences of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform initiative. Since then, Bernstein wrote, “anti-poverty policy in this country has evolved to be ‘pro-work,’” with the fateful consequence that “if you’re disconnected from the job market, public policy won’t help you much at all.” As Edin and Shaefer found, the number of families living on less than two dollars per person per day has more than doubled since 1996. The working-age people in their study wanted decent, steady jobs—not only because work was an economic necessity, but also because they understood jobs as a source of dignity for themselves and their families. A “huge flaw” in welfare reform, Bernstein reported, is the “insistence on work without regard to job availability.”
The jobs held by members of poor families typically pay low wages with unstable hours and unsafe working conditions, contradicting the consistent assumption of conservative policy agendas that there is “an ample supply of perfectly good jobs” that poor people could have if they really wanted to work. Instead, the extreme poverty documented by Edin and Shaefer is driven by the “state of the low-wage labor market,” Shaefer told Magazine. “People make the assumption that low-income families don’t work or don’t want to work.” In the Mississippi Delta, Shaefer described, “Work isn’t just hard to come by, it’s often nonexistent.” Otherwise, however, the norm among the families with children that they studied is “a parent who works or has worked recently.”
Edin and Shaefer proposed three policy changes to address extreme poverty in the United States. First, policy must start by “expanding work opportunities for those at the very bottom of society.” This means improving the quality of the jobs available by raising the minimum wage, stabilizing work schedules, and increasing accountability for labor standards that often go unenforced. It also means countering the ideological assumption that poor people are unwilling to work. Second, policy must address housing instability, which Shaefer described as both a cause and a consequence of extreme poverty. “Parents should be able to raise their children in a place of their own.” Third, families must be insured against extreme poverty even when parents are not able to work. Edin and Shaefer proposed to revive and scale up employment programs that were part of the 2009 Recovery Act. As Bernstein reported, “If America’s anti-poverty policy framework is founded on work in the paid labor market, and if that labor market doesn’t provide the necessary quantity or quality of jobs, public policy must make up the difference.”
Corporate coverage of Edin and Shaefer’s sociological study of extreme poverty has been limited. In early 2012, USA Today published a straightforward report on a previous version of their findings, which indicated 1.46 million families lived on less than two dollars per person per day. USA Today quoted a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who disputed Edin and Shaefer’s findings: “When you look at that type of family, you don’t see the type of deprivation this study suggests.” More recently, the Los Angeles Times ran an opinion piece by Edin and Shaefer, and the New York Times published William Julius Wilson’s favorable review of their book in its Sunday Book Review. Wilson, a leading sociologist in the study of poverty, described their book as “an essential call to action,” and observed, “the rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the categorical talk about opportunity and the American dream.”

Marcus Harrison Green, “1.5 Million American Families Live on $2 a Day—These Authors Spent Years Finding Out Why,”  Magazine, September 24, 2015, http://www.yesmagazine.org/commonomi...t-why-20150924.
Jared Bernstein, “America’s Poorest are Getting Virtually No Assistance,” Atlantic, September 6, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...oorest/403960/.

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5. Corporate Exploitation of Global Refugee Crisis Masked as Humanitarianism

According to a June 2015 United Nations report, sixty million people worldwide are now refugees due to conflict in their home nations. The UN report indicated that during 2014 one out of every 122 people was a refugee, internally displaced, or an asylum seeker; and over half of these refugees were children. (For previous Project Censored coverage of the global refugee crisis, see “Global Forced Displacement Tops Fifty Million,” Censored story #14 in Censored 2016: Media Freedom on the Line.)
While Syrian refugees account for the largest number (an estimated 11.5 million people), other places such as Colombia, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia have large refugee populations that remain largely unreported. According António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at the time of the report, “We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before.”
Although the extent of the global refugee crisis has been covered in the corporate media (including, for example, the New York Times and the Washington Post), the exploitation of refugees has been less well covered. In February 2016, Sarah Lazare published an article on AlterNet that warned of the World Bank’s private enterprise solution to the Syrian displacement crisis. “Under the guise of humanitarian aid,” Lazare wrote, “the World Bank is enticing Western companies to launch ‘new investments’ in Jordan in order to profit from the labor of stranded Syrian refugees. In a country where migrant workers have faced forced servitude, torture and wage theft, there is reason to be concerned that this capital-intensive ‘solution’ to the mounting crisis of displacement will establish sweatshops that specifically target war refugees for hyper-exploitation.”
According to a World Bank press release by its president, Jim Yong Kim, “We are exploring the creation of special economic zones (SEZs), and encouraging investments in municipal projects and labor-intensive work.” According to World Bank materials, the goal is to help alleviate hardships faced by refugees in Jordan by developing five SEZs along the Syrian border. “We are using a holistic approach to addressing the refugee influx through private sector development,” Lazare quoted one World Bank spokesperson as saying. However, as Lazare also noted, despite her multiple attempts to obtain more information from the World Bank on the proposed SEZs, specific details remained scant; furthermore, she reported, the history of Jordan’s existing special economic zones (operated under a variety of names) is marred by human trafficking, torture, and wage theft, “often in the service of U.S. companies.”
“At a time of mass human displacement from ongoing wars,” Lazare wrote, “we should be asking hard questions about the political implications of encouraging Western companies to target and profit from the labor of people violently uprooted from their homes.” The World Bank program “raises deeper questions about the global responsibility to address the large-scale human harm the West played a role in unleashing” in Syria. Myriam Francois, a journalist and research associate at SOAS, University of London, told Lazare that the development of SEZs in Jordan “will change refugee camps from emergency and temporary responses to a crisis, to much more permanent settlements.” The SEZ proposals, Francois said, are “less about Syrian needs and more about keeping Syrian refugees out of Europe by creating (barely) sustainable conditions within the camps which would then make claims to asylum much harder to recognize.”
Describing an agreement between Turkey and the European Union to keep millions of refugees from entering Europe as “a deal between devils,” Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report said that Turkey has “cashed in on the people it has helped make homeless.” As Al Jazeera reported, Turkey accepted $3.3 billion from the European Union (EU) “in return for checking the flow of refugees across the Aegean Sea.” Turkey reportedly asked for double that amount to cover the costs of dealing with the refugees. Earlier in March 2016, European Council president Donald Tusk had warned refugees from Asia and Africa, “Do not come to Europe … It is all for nothing.”
Noting that “the great bulk of Turkey’s refugees are victims of Turkey’s role in the war against Syria, in alliance with Europe and the United States and the royal oil aristocrats of the Persian Gulf,” Ford described human trafficking in Turkey as “on a scale not seen since the Atlantic slave trade.”
In addition to the EU money, Turkey has also sought admission to the European Union—and, with this, the right for 75 million Turks to enter Europe without visa restrictions—as a condition for controlling its refugee population. Thus, according to Ford, Turkey has engaged in a “vast protections racket trap,” effectively agreeing to protect Europe from further incursions by “the formerly colonized peoples whose labor and lands have fattened Europe and its white settler states for half a millennium.” However, Ford concluded, “Europeans will never accept Turkey into the fold, because it is Muslim and not-quite-white.”
Corporate exploitation of the global refugee crisis is underreported in the popular and corporate press, and often subject to distorted pro-business coverage, as in a September 2015 Wall Street Journal article on the number of small businesses and large corporations that are finding ways to profit from the flood of migrants. Unlike Lazare’s AlterNet report, the Journal’s coverage dealt only with Syrians who had managed to migrate to European countries. According to the Journal, private equity groups across Europe were pursuing a new investment opportunity with “promising organic and acquisitive growth potential,” the management of camps and services for refugees. “The margins are very low,” the article quoted Willy Koch, the retired founder of the Swiss company ORS Service AG. “One of the keys is, certainly, volume.”

Sarah Lazare, “World Bank Woos Western Corporations to Profit from Labor of Stranded Syrian Refugees,” AlterNet, February 24, 2016, http://www.alternet.org/labor/world-...yrian-refugees.
Glen Ford, “Turkey and Europe: Human Trafficking on a Scale Not Seen since the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Black Agenda Radio, Black Agenda Report, broadcast March 8, 2016, transcript, http://www.blackagendareport.com/tur...an_trafficking.



4. Search Engine Algorithms and Electronic Voting Machines Could Swing 2016 Election

From search engine algorithms to electronic voting machines, technology provides opportunities for manipulation of voters and their votes in ways that could profoundly affect the results of the 2016 election. In the US, the 2012 presidential election was won by a margin of just 3.9 percent; and, historically, half of US presidential elections have been won by margins under 7.6 percent. These narrow but consequential victory margins underscore the importance of understanding how secret, proprietary technologies—whether they are newly developing or increasingly outdated—potentially swing election results.
Mark Frary, in Index on Censorship, describes the latest research by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology on what they call the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). Their research focuses on the powerful role played by the secret algorithms (including Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank) that determine the contents of our Internet search results and social media news feeds.
Epstein and Robertson studied over 4,500 undecided voters in the US and India, using randomized, controlled, double-blind methods, with research subjects who matched as closely as possible each country’s electorate. “The results,” Frary reported, “were shocking.” Epstein and Robertson showed that biased search rankings “could shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more.” The effect could be greater than 20 percent in some demographic groups, and—perhaps most significantly—this search-ranking bias “could be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.”
In an earlier article for Politico, Epstein wrote that the Search Engine Manipulation Effect “turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered … We believe SEME is a serious threat to the democratic system of government.”
Epstein described how the study’s measures—including research subjects’ trust, liking, and voting preferences—“all shifted predictably” based on information provided by a Google-like search engine that he and Robertson created, which they called Kadoodle. In one of the experiments, Epstein and Robertson documented SEME with real voters during an actual election campaign: In a study involving 2,000 eligible undecided voters in India’s 2014 Lok Sabha election, they found that “search engine rankings could boost the proportion of people favoring any candidate by more than 20 percent—more than 60 percent in some demographic groups.”
Predictably, Google challenged these findings. As Frary reported, a senior vice president at Google, Amit Singhal, responded in Politico, “There is absolutely no truth to Epstein’s hypothesis that Google could work secretly to influence election outcomes. Google has never ever re-ranked search results on any topic (including elections) to manipulate user sentiment.” However, as Frary duly noted, “Singhal specifically says ‘re-ranked’ rather than ‘ranked.’ What he means by this is that the algorithm decides on the ranking of search results and that no one goes in and manipulates them afterwards. Google’s stated mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ should perhaps have a caveat—‘as long as our algorithm decides you should see it.’”
Hidden algorithms shape online content in significantly different ways from more widely recognized concerns about editorial censorship on television and in print. On TV and in print, Frary observed, “there is a person at the heart of the decision process … We can imagine how commissioning editors think, but the algorithms behind Facebook and Google are opaque.” This concern has led Emily Bell, a journalism professor at Columbia University, to observe, “If there is a free press, journalists are no longer in charge of it. Engineers who rarely think about journalism or cultural impact or democratic responsibility are making decisions every day that shape how news is created and disseminated.”
When filtering is financially motivated, secret, and beyond our control, Robert Epstein told Index on Censorship, “we should be extremely concerned.” Online filtering on massive platforms such as Google and Facebook, he warned, is “rapidly becoming the most powerful form of mind control that has ever existed.”
More than 75 percent of online searches in the US are conducted on Google—in other countries Google’s share of Internet searches is as high as 90 percent; some 1.5 billion individuals, political parties, businesses, and other organizations now use Facebook. Epstein and Robertson are now researching how to counter SEME. “We found the monster; now we’re trying to figure out how to kill it,” Epstein wrote in his Politico article. These efforts hinge in part on eroding public trust in Google, including our willingness to accept whatever our search results present to us as fact.
As Frary reported, Facebook, Google, and others are “highly secretive about how their algorithms work.” Electronic voting machines present similar challenges, as Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis document in their book, The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft. “Electronic voting machines are owned by private corporations … And the courts have ruled that the source code on these electronic voting machines is proprietary,” Wasserman told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! in February 2016.
In 2016, about 80 percent of the US electorate will vote using outdated electronic voting machines that rely on proprietary software from private corporations, according to a September 2015 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Forty-three states are using machines that will be at least ten years old in 2016; in fourteen states, machines will be fifteen or more years old. The Brennan Center study identified “increased failures and crashes, which can lead to long lines and lost votes” as the “biggest risk” of outdated voting equipment, while noting that older machines also have “serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today.”
“From a security perspective,” Jeremy Epstein of the National Science Foundation noted, “old software is riskier, because new methods of attack are constantly being developed, and older software is likely to be vulnerable.” Virginia recently decertified an electronic voting system used in twenty-four of its precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to “record voting data or inject malicious data”. The investigation also raised concerns over the AccuVote-TSx machine, which is used in over twenty states. In 2014, voters in Virginia Beach observed that when they selected one candidate, the machine would register their selection for a different candidate, due to an “alignment problem.”
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! asked Wasserman how voters using electronic voting machines could be sure that their votes are counted. He told her, “They can’t be. You cannot verify an electronic voting machine … The proprietary software prevents the public from getting access to the actual vote count.” In a March 2016 article on the Free Press website, Fitrakis and Wasserman wrote that the “veracity of outcomes” in electoral races for the offices of president, US Congress, governorships, state legislatures, county commissioners, and others “will vary from state to state based on the whims and interest of those in charge of the electronic tallies.”
On Democracy Now! and elsewhere, Wasserman and Fitrakis have advocated universal, hand-counted paper ballots and automatic voter registration as part of their “Ohio Plan” to prevent stripping and flipping in US elections.
Corporate media outlets including CNNMoney, Fortune, and the Washington Post provided some coverage of Epstein and Robertson’s research. In May 2016, the Huffington Post published an article by actor and activist Tim Robbins, titled “We Need to Fix Our Broken Election System.” “Every broken machine, every disenfranchised voter, every discrepancy between the exit polls and the final results,” Robbins wrote, suggests “malfeasance” and “leads to more and more disillusionment that results in less and less voters.”

Robert Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Politico, August 19, 2015 http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...lection-121548.
Mark Frary, “Whose World are You Watching? The Secret Algorithms Controlling the News We See,” Index on Censorship 44, no. 4 (December 2015), 69–73. (Extract available via: http://ioc.sagepub.com/content/44/4/69.extract)
Lawrence Norden and Christopher Famighetti, “America’s Voting Machines at Risk,” Brennan Center for Justice (New York University School of Law), September 15, 2015, https://www.brennancenter.org/public...-machines-risk.
Harvey Wasserman, interview by Amy Goodman, “Could the 2016 Election be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?” Democracy Now!, broadcast February 23, 2016, transcript, http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/2...tion_be_stolen.
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Is the 2016 Election Already being Stripped & Flipped?,” Free Press, March 31, 2016, http://freepress.org/article/2016-el...ripped-flipped.

[uzn]

3. Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Threaten to Permanently Disrupt Vital Ocean Bacteria

Imagine a car heading toward a cliff’s edge with its gas pedal stuck to the floor. That, Robert Perkins wrote, is a metaphor for “what climate change will do to the key group of ocean bacteria known as Trichodesmium,” according to a study published in the September 2015 issue of Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Southern California and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Trichodesmium is found in nutrient-poor parts of the ocean, where it converts nitrogen gas into material that can be used by other forms of life. From algae to whales, all life needs nitrogen to grow. Reporting for the Guardian, Emma Howard quoted Eric Webb, one of the study’s researchers, who explained how the process of “nitrogen fixation” makes Trichodesmium “the fertilising agent of the open ocean.”
The study tested the effects of elevated levels of carbon dioxide by subjecting hundreds of generations of Trichodesmium bred over a five-year period to CO2 levels predicted for the year 2100 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Responding to increased ocean acidification, the bacteria went into “reproductive overdrive,” Howard reported, evolving to grow faster and to produce 50 percent more nitrogen. One consequence of this is that Trichodesmium could consume significant quantities of nutrients that are in limited supply in the ocean, such as iron and phosphorous, leaving other organisms that depend on the same nutrients without enough to survive. Alternatively, Trichodesmium might consume nutrients at a rate that would lead to its own extinction, leaving other organisms without the nitrogen that the bacteria makes available. Either way, the effects of elevated CO2 levels on the bacteria could trigger catastrophic effects up the marine food chain.
Most significantly, the researchers found that even when the bacteria was returned to lower, present-day levels of carbon dioxide, Trichodesmium remained “stuck in the fast lane,” a finding that Webb described as “unprecedented in evolutionary biology.” The study’s lead author, David Hutchins, observed, “Losing the ability to regulate your growth rate is not a healthy thing … The last thing you want is to be stuck with these high growth rates when there aren’t enough nutrients to go around. It’s a losing strategy in the struggle to survive.”
The next stages of the team’s research involve studying the DNA of Trichodesmium to better understand “how and why the irreversible evolution occurs,” Perkins reported.
In addition to the coverage noted here, the Nature Communications study was reported by Grist, Reuters, and, in the corporate press, by the Washington Post.

Robert Perkins, “Climate Change Will Irreversibly Force Key Ocean Bacteria into Overdrive,” USC News (University of Southern California), September 1, 2015, https://news.usc.edu/85742/climate-c...nto-overdrive/.
Emma Howard, “Climate Change Will Alter Ocean Bacteria Crucial to Food Chain—Study,” Guardian, September 2, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/environme...say-scientists.



2. Crisis in Evidence-Based Medicine

In April 2015, the Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, wrote, “Something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.” Describing the upshot of a UK symposium held that month on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, Horton summarized the “case against science”: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming.”
Horton is not the first editor of a prominent medical journal to raise these concerns. In 2009, Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, made comparable claims in an article for the New York Review of Books: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
Countering the pharmaceutical industry’s undue influence on the medical profession, Angell concluded, would require “a sharp break from an extremely lucrative pattern of behavior.” Horton’s Lancet editorial echoed Angell’s assessment: “Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative.”
No biomedical study better epitomizes the corruption and conflicts of interest noted by insider critics like Angell and Horton than Study 329, a now notorious clinical trial published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2001. Study 329 reported that paroxetine—marketed by SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK) as Paxil in the US and as Seroxat in the UK—was safe and effective for treating depressed children and adolescents. A GSK marketing campaign built on the published study, touting the drug’s “remarkable efficacy and safety,” led to doctors prescribing Paxil to more than two million US children and adolescents by the end of 2002.
However, within a year of the original report, the US Food and Drug Administration declared Study 329 a “failed trial” because further evidence indicated that adolescents prescribed the drug to treat depression fared no better than those on a placebo. In 2003, UK drug regulators instructed doctors not to prescribe Seroxat to adolescents. In 2012, in what the US Department of Justice described as the “largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history,” GSK paid a three billion dollar fine to resolve its liability over fraud allegations and failure to report safety data.
In 2015 the BMJ published a major reanalysis of GSK’s Study 329. Charlie Cooper of the Independent reported that the reanalysis—conducted by an international team of researchers from Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK, and based on thousands of pages of newly available GSK data—“starkly” contradicted the original report’s claims. Furthermore, Cooper noted, the reassessment of Study 329 marked “a milestone in the medical community’s campaign to open up clinical trial data held by pharmaceutical companies to independent scientific scrutiny.”
As Sarah Boseley reported for the Guardian, the reanalysis of Study 329 found that paroxetine’s beneficial effects were far less, and its harmful effects far greater, than the original study reported. In particular, by examining the full set of clinical trials data, the researchers who conducted the reassessment found that eleven of the 275 children and adolescents on the drug developed suicidal or self-harming behavior. The original study had acknowledged only five of these cases. David Healy, a psychiatry professor and one of the reassessment’s coauthors, observed, “This is a very high rate of kids going on to become suicidal. It doesn’t take expertise to find this. It takes extraordinary expertise to avoid finding it.” Boseley’s report also documented renewed calls for the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to retract the original GSK study, whose lead author was Martin Keller of Brown University. Peter Doshi, the BMJ’s associate editor, observed, “It is often said that science self-corrects. But for those who have been calling for a retraction of the Keller paper for many years, the system has failed.” Neither the journal’s editors, nor any of the paper’s twenty-two listed authors have intervened to correct the record, and none of the authors have been disciplined, Doshi noted.
Nevertheless, as documented by Charlie Cooper for the Independent and Sarah Boseley of the Guardian, the reanalysis of the complete set of original clinical trials data for Study 329 is the first major success of a new open data initiative known as Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIAT), which has been promoted by the BMJ. As Cooper reported, “The BMJ’s final judgment on the infamous ‘Study 329’ represents a symbolic victory for the burgeoning ‘open data’ movement in health.” RIAT is part of a broader movement to force pharmaceutical companies to make all of their data available for independent scientific scrutiny. The AllTrials campaign, which calls for open publication of all clinical trials results, now has the backing of over 600 medical and research organizations, Cooper reported. Boseley’s Guardian article quoted BMJ editor in chief Fiona Godlee, who said that the reanalysis of Study 329 showed “the extent to which drug regulation is failing us.” Godlee called for independent rather than industry funded and managed clinical trials, as well as legislation “to ensure that the results of all clinical trials are made fully available” to third-party scrutiny. Both news stories noted the cooperation of GlaxoSmithKline in making the original data available for reanalysis. GSK posted 77,000 pages of de-identified case reports from the trial on a website—though, it should be noted, the company was obliged to do so under the terms of their settlement.
Richard Horton’s Lancet editorial received no coverage in the US corporate press. The Washington Post featured one story on the reanalysis of the original paroxetine study. The article provided a great deal of information about the misrepresentation of the original study—including, for instance, that the discrepancy between the original report and the BMJ reanalysis was partly due to “the miscoding of a serious suicide attempt as ‘emotional lability,’ a temporary condition that involves uncontrollable episodes of crying.” However, the Washington Post report made only passing mention of the open data movement and did not identify any of the specific initiatives (such as RIAT or AllTrials) by name. Otherwise, the corporate press ignored the reassessment of the paroxetine study.

In May 2014, President Obama signed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. Although it requires federal agencies to make data—including funding sources for clinical trials—publicly available, the DATA Act’s requirements do not apply to privately funded biomedical research.
Richard Horton, “What is Medicine’s 5 Sigma?,” Lancet 385, no. 9976, April 11, 2015, http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journa...%2960696-1.pdf.
Charlie Cooper, “Anti-Depressant was Given to Millions of Young People ‘After Trials Showed It was Dangerous’,” Independent, September 16, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...-10504555.html.
Sarah Boseley, “Seroxat Study Under-Reported Harmful Effects on Young People, Say Scientists,” Guardian, September 16, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/science/...s-young-people.



1. US Military Forces Deployed in Seventy Percent of World’s Nations

If you throw a dart at a world map and do not hit water, Nick Turse reported for TomDispatch, the odds are that US Special Operations Forces “have been there sometime in 2015.” According to a spokesperson for Special Operations Command (SOCOM), in 2015 Special Operations Forces (SOF) deployed in 147 of the world’s 195 recognized nations, an increase of eighty percent since 2010. “The global growth of SOF missions has been breathtaking,” Turse wrote.
As SOCOM commander General Joseph Votel told the audience of the Aspen Security Forum in July 2015, more SOF troops are deployed to more locations and are conducting more operations than at the height of the Afghan and Iraq wars. In Turse’s words, “Everyday, in around 80 or more countries that Special Operations Command will not name, they undertake missions the command refuses to talk about.”
Calculated in 2014 constant dollars, the SOCOM budget has more than tripled since 2001, when funding totaled three billion dollars. By 2015, SOCOM funding had risen to nearly ten billion dollars. That figure, Turse noted, did not include additional funding from specific military branches, which SOCOM estimated to amount to another eight billion dollars annually, or other undisclosed sums that were not available to the Government Accountability Office.
Every day, Turse wrote, “America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations.” The majority of these are training missions, “designed to tutor proxies and forge stronger ties with allies.” Training missions focus on everything from basic rifle marksmanship and land navigation to small unit tactics and counterterrorism operations. For example, between 2012–2014, Special Operations Forces carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) missions in as many as sixty-seven countries per year. Officially, JCETs are devoted to training US forces, but according to a SOCOM official interviewed by Turse, these missions also “foster key military partnerships with foreign militaries” and “build interoperability between U.S. SOF and partner-nation forces.” JCETs, Turse wrote, “are just a fraction of the story” when it comes to multinational overseas training operations. In 2014, Special Operations Forces organized seventy-five training operations in thirty countries, a figure projected to increase to ninety-eight exercises by the end of 2015, according to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense.
In addition to training, Special Operations Forces also engage in “direct action.” Counterterrorism missions, including what Turse described as “low-profile drone assassinations and kill/capture raids by muscled-up, high-octane operators,” are the specific domains of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) forces, such as the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force.
Africa has seen the greatest increase in SOCOM deployments since 2006. In that year, just 1 percent of special operators deployed overseas went to Africa. As of 2014, that figure had risen to 10 percent. In the Intercept, Turse reported on the development by US forces of the Chabelley Airfield in the east African nation of Djibouti. “Unbeknownst to most Americans and without any apparent public announcement,” Turse wrote in October 2015, “the U.S. has recently taken steps to transform this tiny, out-of-the-way outpost into an ‘enduring’ base, a key hub for its secret war, run by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), in Africa and the Middle East.” Chabelley, he reported, has become “essential” to secret US drone operations over Yemen, southwest Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and parts of Ethiopia and southern Egypt. Aerial images of Chabelley taken between April 2013 and March 2015 testify to the significant expansion of the base and the presence of drones, though officials refused to respond to questions about the number and types of drones based there. As Turse summarized, “The startling transformation of this little-known garrison in this little-known country is in line with U.S. military activity in Africa, where, largely under the radar, the number of missions, special operations deployments, and outposts has grown rapidly and with little outside scrutiny.” (For previous Project Censored coverage of US military operations in Africa, see Brian Martin Murphy, “The ‘New’ American Imperialism in Africa: Secret Sahara Wars and AFRICOM,” in Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times.)
If, as Turse reported, SOCOM has “grown in every conceivable way from funding and personnel to global reach and deployments” since 9/11, has its expansion resulted in significant success? In an October 2015 report for the Nation, Turse reported skepticism from a number of experts in response to this question. According to Sean Naylor, the author of Relentless Strike, a history of Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC operations are “a tool in the policymaker’s toolkit,” not a “substitute for strategy.” JSOC may have had an impact on the history of Iraq—where its forces captured Saddam Hussein, killed Uday and Qusay Hussein, and “eviscerated” Al Qaeda in Iraq—but, as Turse wrote, impacts are not the same as successes. Similarly, Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and author of Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, told Turse, “As far back as Vietnam … the United States military has tended to confuse inputs with outcomes. Effort, as measured by operations conducted, bomb tonnage dropped, or bodies counted, is taken as evidence of progress made. Today, tallying up the number of countries in which Special Operations forces are present repeats this error.”
Corporate media have not covered the massive expansion of Special Operations Forces around the globe, much less raised critical questions about whether these missions result in meaningful accomplishments. The increase that has taken place over the past five to ten years is not “breaking” news, and so it has gone all but completely unreported by the corporate press. Instead, the global presence of US military personnel is typically treated as the unspoken background for more dramatic reports of specific military operations or policy decisions. Thus, for example, in October 2015, Time magazine ran a graphic documenting “places with some of the most significant number” of US military personnel stationed “in over 150 countries across the world.” However, the Time map of the world featured just nine points—none of which were located in Africa—and the entire graphic ran as a sidebar to the primary story, about President Obama’s announcement to maintain the current number of troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016, which reversed his earlier plan to withdraw most military personnel by the end of his presidency.
Nick Turse, “A Secret War in 135 Countries,” TomDispatch, September 24, 2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176048/.
Nick Turse, “The Stealth Expansion of a Secret US Drone Base in Africa,” Intercept, October 21, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/10/21/...ase-in-africa/.
Nick Turse, “American Special Operations Forces Have a Very Funny Definition of Success,” Nation, October 26, 2015, http://www.thenation.com/article/ame...on-of-success/.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

I could think of a lot bigger and more suppressed stories than these.

We could start with Pizzagate/Pedogate.

Or all of the Wikileaks-related stories: proof of all kinds of political corruption from direct MSM collusion to pay-for-play, to espionage and outright treason.

[uzn]

Posted by A Voice from the Mountains (here)
I could think of a lot bigger and more suppressed stories than these.

We could start with Pizzagate/Pedogate.

Or all of the Wikileaks-related stories: proof of all kinds of political corruption from direct MSM collusion to pay-for-play, to espionage and outright treason.

Sure, but here these are mainstrem Stories that came over Reuters but still did not make a Headline / got surpressed. Here on Avalon People are way ahead of surpressed stuff / Leaks. These are a Collection from 2015-2016, not the newest gossip. But I found some of them worth reading and mentioning.

[Ewan]

From #23:

According to FAIR Girls, an antitrafficking organization, 70–75 percent of the girls they assisted had histories with foster care systems. Special Agent Renea Green of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told Al Jazeera America, “We had a trafficker tell us he looked for victims, for girls, walking from the local DFAC [Department of Family and Children Services] office.”

Which ties right in with the information in Traffic and Traffic2, referenced here regarding the involvement of adoption agencies and foster care etc. Though it seems in the UK our system just employs the trafficker directly within the system.

And in #24

the WTO found that India’s solar initiative, which required that 10 percent of solar cells be produced locally, violated international trade laws.

God almighty you have to laugh at the insanity of it. :D

I could probably make a comment on all 25 so i'll jst stop there.

[Justplain]

This one is excellent:

8. Syria’s War Spurred by Contest for Gas Delivery to Europe, Not Muslim Sectarianism

Although this makes obvious sense i dont remember anyone inducting/deducting this idea anywhere till i read this. It is so obvious, why would Russia risk a widening conflict with the west except to protect its natural gas supply monopoly to Europe? Why would the americans be so intent on overthrowing the asad government except to further put the screws to russia? Why is qatar such a prominent name as a sponsor of isis?

As stated, the syrian conflict has nothing to do with the freedom of syrians, it has to do with the fascist interests on both sides.