Top 25 CENSORED stories of the year

ProjectCensored.org; Wisdom Quarterly

Project Censored 2013 is now available

  

Project Censored director Mickey Huff was recently interviewed for "Inside Story."  He discussed the ongoing problems of censorship and under-reporting in the US. Moreover, he highlighted some of 2012's most significant stories -- like the emerging police state, Fukushima, Occupy -- published in Censored 2013: Dispatches From the Media Revolution.

Censored 2013 focuses on the importance of independent journalism for democratic self-government. And it holds to account the corporate-owned ("mainstream") media for their failure to provide responsible and relevant news coverage.
  
The book has additional chapters of original analysis covering drones and targeted killing, “GuatánamoSpeak,” the democracy movement in Kashmir, corporate education “reform,” Iraq... 

Top 25 Censored Stories

1. Signs of an emerging Police State
2. Oceans in peril
3. Fukushima Nuclear disaster worse than anticipated
4. FBI agents responsible for majority of terrorist plots in US
5. First Federal Reserve audit reveals trillions loaned to banks
6. Small network of corporations run global economy
7. 2012: The International Year of Cooperatives
8. NATO War Crimes in Libya
9. Prison slavery in today’s USA
10. HR 347 would make many forms of non-violent protest illegal
11. Members of Congress grow wealthier despite recession
12. US joins forces with al-Qaeda in Syria
13. Education “reform” a Trojan Horse for privatization
14. Who are the Top 1 Percent and how do they earn a living?
15. Dangers of everyday technology
16. Sexual violence against soldiers on rise, under wraps
17. Students crushed by One Trillion dollars in student loans
18. Palestinian women prisoners shackled during childbirth
19. NY police PLANT drugs on innocents to meet arrest quotas
20. Stealing from public ed. to feed prison-industrial complex
21. Conservatives attack Post Office to break Union and privatize
22. Wachovia Bank laundered money for Latin drug cartels
23. US covers up [another] Afghan massacre
24. Alabama farmers look to replace migrants with prisoners
25. Evidence points to Guantánamo dry boarding

(Marc Pilisuk) The unjust foundations favoring the 1% over the 99% are everywhere. The Occupy Movement has found many targets among the corporate elite. The financial and extraction sectors have been clearly located (Phillips and Soeiro, 2012).  But one hard to find target is the behind-the-scenes force propelling us toward nuclear war...

• REPORT: Media Freedom Foundation Project Censored
• Project Censored Book Release Celebration Party
• VIDEO: California "Censored 2013" book release
• Occupying the Merchants of Death

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NSA is spying on texts, emails, calls (video)

DemocracyNow.org (Apr. 20, 2012); Wisdom Quarterly

 

"Brain-whatting?" "Never mind, go to sleep."

(DN) National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower William Binney drops a bombshell: Domestic surveillance has become more expansive under Pres. Obama than Pres. Bush. 

  

He estimates that the NSA has assembled 20 trillion "transactions" -- phone calls, emails, and many other forms of data such as texts -- produced by ordinary law-abiding Americans. 

  

"We need more money like the NSA gets."

This includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. 

  

Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Director Keith Alexander's assertion that the NSA is not intercepting information about U.S. citizens.

    

Daily podcast - Facebook.com/democracynow - Twitter: @democracynow - YouTube.com/democracynow - Listen on SoundCloud.com/democracy-now - Subscribe to email digest - Support independent media: democracynow.org/donate/YT

Uprising!

10-25-12 8:00 AM

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How to get your Zombie to kill

Making Manchurian Candidates?

 Phil Stewart (Reuters, "Drug Turns Crime Victims Into Zombies"); Wisdom Quarterly

What does a Manchurian Candidate look like? (indybay.org)

   

There's nothing to fear but fear (and zombies).

Halloween and the Day of the Dead are coming soon, so here's a true-life scary story.
   
BOGOTA, Colombia - The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus. 

   

Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone.

   

Fernandez is just one of hundreds of victims every month who, according to Colombian hospitals, are temporarily turned into zombies by a home-grown drug called scopolamine,  which has been embraced by thieves and rapists.

[Expect to see scop' on the dance floor as soon as pushers manage to get ayahuasca, iboga, and the dreaded GLINT into tablet form.]

   

"When I woke up in the hospital, I asked for my baby and nobody said anything. They just looked at me," Fernandez said, weeping. Police believe her son Diego was taken by a gang which traffics in infants.
  

WATCH: To be cool in school Jerri Blank had to stoop to glint (Strangers With Candy)

 

Colorless, odorless, and tasteless, scopolamine is slipped into drinks and sprinkled onto food. Victims become so docile that they have been known to help thieves rob their homes and empty their bank accounts. Women have been drugged repeatedly over days and gang-raped or rented out as prostitutes.

   

In the case of Fernandez, the mother of three was rendered submissive enough to surrender her youngest child.

  

Most troubling for police is the way the drug acts on the brain. Since scopolamine completely blocks the formation of memories, unlike most date-rape drugs used in the United States and elsewhere, it is usually impossible for victims to ever identify their aggressors.

 

"When a patient (of U.S. date-rape drugs) is under hypnosis, he or she usually recalls what happened.

  

But with scopolamine, this isn't possible because the memory was never recorded," said Dr. Camilo Uribe, the world's leading expert on the drug. Scopolamine has a long, dark history in Colombia dating back to before the Spanish conquest. 

   

Legend has it that Colombian Indian tribes used the drug to bury alive the wives and slaves of fallen chiefs so that they would quietly accompany their masters into the afterworld.

  

Nazi "Angel of Death" Joseph Mengele experimented on scopolamine as an interrogation drug. And scopolamine's sedative and amnesia-producing qualities were used by mothers in the early 20th century to help them through childbirth.

  

Finding the drug in Colombia these days is not hard.

  

How to react to fear of secret-zombie agents and operatives? Buy a kit? (Examiner).

   

The tree which naturally produces scopolamine grows wild around the capital and is so famous in the countryside that mothers warn their children not to fall asleep below its yellow and white flowers. 

  

The tree is popularly known as the "borrachero," or "get-you-drunk," and the pollen alone is said to conjure up strange dreams.

  

"We probably should put some sort of fence up," jokes biologist Gustavo Morales at Bogota's botanical gardens, eyeing children playing with borrachero seeds everywhere. "If you ate a few of those, it would kill you."
  

Although scopolamine can be easily extracted from the seeds, experienced criminals hardly ever bother with them, police say.

   

Pure, cheap scopolamine is brought across the border from neighboring Ecuador, where the borrachero tree is harvested for medical purposes, Uribe said. The alkaloid is used legally in medicines across the world to treat everything from motion sickness to the tremors of Parkinson's disease.

 

The use of scopolamine by criminals appears to be confined to Colombia, at least for now, and it's not clear why the drug is such a rampant problem in Colombia. Some analysts blame it on a culture of crime in the Andean nation, home to the world's largest cocaine and kidnapping industries, not to mention Latin America's longest-running [CIA-sponsored] guerrilla war.

  

There are so many scopolamine cases that they usually don't make the news unless particularly bizarre. One such incident involved three young Bogota women who preyed on men by smearing the drug on their breasts and luring their victims to take a lick.

   

Losing all willpower, the men readily gave up their bank access codes. The breast-temptress thieves then held them hostage for days while draining their accounts.

   

The U.S. Embassy in Bogota takes scopolamine very seriously and offers staff tips on how avoid being drugged. One piece of advice may seem obvious: Don't let your drinks out of your sight when at a Bogota bar or nightclub.

  

Still, at least three visiting U.S. government employees here have been drugged and robbed over the past two years. Other American victims from time to time appear at the embassy seeking help, still shaking off a scopolamine hangover.

 

"I remember one case; an American reported being drugged," an embassy official said. "He says to his doorman, 'Why did you let them walk out with my stuff.' The doorman says, 'Because you told me to.'"

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Combating the Surveillance State (audio)

Glenn Greenwald, Esq. (Salon.com), AlternativeRadio.org (Program #GREG002, 2012)

Spying, snooping, prying, eavesdropping, using a mobile cell phone, call it what you want. The government is doing it on a scale never before seen. Massive corporations are doing a lot to help. Meanwhile, the same government and corporations are more secretive and un-transparent than ever.

• PLAY

Sophisticated new technologies allow for more intrusions into our private lives. Beyond omnipresent smart phones and cell towers remotely tracking/geo-locating, recording, and even predicting all activities, there are increasingly more cameras filming, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identifying on innocent Americans. Nevertheless, drone aircraft are aiming at them from American skies.

 

The invasive monitoring of public space and the simultaneous erosion of our rights has been largely a bi-partisan affair, from Bush/Cheney to Obama/Biden. State surveillance power, undermining basic freedoms in the name of protecting them, is growing relentlessly.

 

The swelling domestic databases of the NSA (the little-known "National Security Administration," an American Gestapo/Stasi) and the FBI may contain our personal information.

  

And this burgeoning Orwellian apparatus has become a cash cow for corporations providing what are called security services. Comedian Stephen Colbert sarcastically observes, "There are bound to be casualties in the never-ending war on terror and one of them just happens to be the U.S. Constitution."

Glenn Greenwald is a lawyer and the author of How Would a Patriot Act? and Great American Hypocrites. He is the recipient of the Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media for his "pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues." He also received an Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary for his coverage of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning. Greenwald is a columnist and blogger at Salon.com and his articles appear in various newspapers and magazines.

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