Censored 2014

by Mickey Huff

  28. “About JDC,” American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, http://www.jdc.org/about-jdc/.

  29. Asher Zeiger, “Israel Changes Birth-control Policy for Ethiopian Immigrants,” Times of Israel, January 29, 2013, http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-changes-birth-control-policy-for-ethio-pian-immigrants/.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Abunimah, “Did Israel Violate the Genocide Convention?”

  32. Ibid.

  33. David Sheen, “A Year in Review: Anti-African Racism and Asylum Seekers in Israel,” Uruknet, May 29, 2013, http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m97985&hd&l=e.

  34. Ibid.

  CENSORED NEWS CLUSTER

  Technologies and

  Ecologies of War

  Targol Mesbah and Zara Zimbardo

  Censored #7

  Merchants of Death and Nuclear Weapons

  Marc Pilisuk, “Occupying the Merchants of Death,” Project Censored, November 22, 2012, http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/occupying-the-merchants-of-death/.

  Student Researcher: Jessica Eccles (Sonoma State University)

  Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

  Censored #11

  Bush Blocked Iran Nuclear Deal

  Gareth Porter, “Bush Blocked Iran Disarmament Deal,” Consortium News, June 6, 2012, http://consortiumnews.com/2012/06/06/bush-blocked-iran-nuke-deal/.

  Student Researcher: Seamus O’Herlihy (Santa Rosa Junior College)

  Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (Santa Rosa Junior College)

  Censored #12

  The US Has Left Iraq with an Epidemic of Cancers and Birth Defects

  Sarah Morrison, “Iraq Records Huge Rise in Birth Defects,” Independent, October 14, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/iraq-records-huge-rise-in-birth-defects-8210444.html.

  Ross Caputi, “The Victims of Fallujah’s Health Crisis are Stifled by Western Silence,” Guardian, October 25, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/25/fallujah-iraq-health-crisis-silence?INTCMP=SRCH.

  Dahr Jamail, “Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq with Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers,” Democracy Now!, March 20, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/20/ten_years_later_us_has_left.

  M. Al-Sabbak, S. Sadik Ali, O. Savabi, et al., “Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities,” Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 89, no. 5 (November 2012), http://www.springerlink.com/content/u35001451t13g645/fulltext.html.

  Student Researchers: Ivan Konza (Florida Atlantic University); Marc David Prophete (Indian River State College)

  Faculty Evaluators: James F. Tracy (Florida Atlantic University); Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

  RELATED VALIDATED INDEPENDENT NEWS STORY

  Oil and Fraud: Why We Went to Iraq

  “Secret Pentagon Docs Reveal Pre-War Plans to Get Big Oil into Iraq,” Institute for Public Accuracy, July 17, 2012, http://www.accuracy.org/release/secret-pentagon-docs-reveal-pre-war-plans-to-get-big-oil-into-iraq/.

  “‘Fuel on the Fire’: Author Greg Muttitt on Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, Arab Spring,” Democracy Now!, July 16, 2012, http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/16/fuel_on_the_fire_au-thor_greg.

  Student Researcher: Jennifer Garza (Sonoma State University)

  Faculty Evaluator: Barbara Widhalm (Sonoma State University)

  INTRODUCTION

  The tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq passed largely in silence in the corporate news media. Writing in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked that we “don’t want to ‘look back’ on things that might demand onerous labor on our part.” But, Coates observed, the failures of the Iraq War are likely to be repeated if the nation only “looks for-ward.”1

  Looking back to the beginnings of “endless war” in October 2001, United States Vice President Dick Cheney glibly declared, “It is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.”2 Before considering some of the extant consequences of a perpetual war on terror, let us briefly reflect on the semantics of Cheney’s statement. The uncertainty projected onto the open-ended war on terror, with its attendant incitement of fear, is presented here in contradistinction to the definitive end of the Gulf War. It replays the rhetoric of precision and speed that characterized the surgical language of the Gulf War: in Operation Desert Storm, precision-guided munitions and smart bombs were supposed to strategically take out military targets with minimal collateral cost. By most accounts, the Gulf War did end, once Saddam Hussein withdrew his troops from Kuwait in late February 1991, and US troops returned in March. Yet, the extent of the casualties from the use of depleted uranium is becoming more apparent—although not through US corporate media’s reporting. Thus, for example, in a recent book on “slow violence” and the temporality and scale of ecological disasters, Rob Nixon brings attention to the “ecology of the aftermath” in his discussion of belated Gulf War victims who suffer from the long-term consequences of exposure to radioactive depleted uranium.3

  To conceptualize the war event in terms of an ecology of war suggests an alternate temporality to normalized accounts of its duration. It also significantly shifts the spatial coordinates of war’s logistics to make visible the range of violence, from the consequences of corporate oil extraction to reckless dumping of toxic metals.

  These censored stories reveal critical glimpses into the breadth and depth of the cost of war in ways that we are not yet able to measure. Looking back again, Censored 2009’s #1 story was, “Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation.”4 As reported in the story, a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group Opinion Re-search Business (ORB) found casualty figures at least ten times greater than otherwise reported in corporate media. The same year, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes published The Three Trillion Dollar War5 Their study’s stark quantification of the war’s human and economic costs challenges readers to weigh US interventionist policies in terms of the “opportunity costs” of the trillions spent, what the US has sacrificed domestically by pursuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the wars’ hidden costs, Stiglitz and Bilmes identified long-term physical and mental health care for veterans.6 As this year’s censored stories on war illustrate, we are now facing costs staggeringly far beyond even Bilmes and Stiglitz’s calculations, uncountable and unaccountable.

  In 2012, Hollywood offered frames within which to selectively understand US foreign policy, its military role, and the retroactive justification for targeted killing and torture, through feature films such as Zero Dark Thirty and Argo.7 By contrast, the independent documentary films Dirty Wars, by Richard Rowley and investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, and The Invisible War, by Kirby Dick, have exposed both America’s covert and increasingly privatized wars and the extent of sexual assault in the United States military. The political lines drawn to understand war’s officially recognized “end” and “beginning” are erased by the realities of suffocating sanctions imposed on Iran and the Iraq military campaign’s continuing contamination epidemics. As the national gaze is focused on the apocalyptic vision of potential nuclear annihilation at Iran’s hands, we are blinded to the actual slow apocalypse in poisoned areas of Iraq.

  The independent news stories featured in this Censored News Cluster bring the ecologies of war into sharper focus.

  Censored #7: Merchants of Death and Nuclear Weapons

  With the coordinated production of fear and obsession around Iran’s alleged nuclear threat, a commensurate assessment of our sprawling military-industrial complex’s economic logic is arrested. Public debate is corralled into concern projected abroad, away from domestic scrutiny. Drawing on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s 2012 report, Marc Pilisuk wrote,

  Despite a White House pledge to seek a world without nuclear weapons, the 2011 federal budget for nuclear weapons research and development exceeded $7 billion and
could (if the Obama administration has its way) exceed $8 billion per year by the end of this decade. This steady and growing investment stands in stark contrast to the promising U.S. rhetoric of nuclear disarmament.8

  The corporate players financing and profiting from the nuclear complex are backed with political support that contradicts official rhetoric. “The staggering budget for this dangerous drift is staunchly defended by corporate lobbyists and gigantic contracts are awarded out of public view.”9 This report names all the institutions most heavily involved in financing nuclear arms makers.

  Pilisuk’s report also analyzed the economic relationships that un-dergird the United States’ increasing reliance on drones as weapons of war. As critics of the US drone strikes have noted, the Obama administration describes US drone policy in seductive and sanitized terms, as “targeted” killings that are “costless” to the US.10 Writing for the Guardian, George Monbiot, for example, contrasted President Obama’s sorrow for the child victims of the December 2012 Newtown school shooting with his silence regarding children murdered by drones:

  If the victims of Mr. Obama’s drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms which suggest that they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats” . . . since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.11

  Elsewhere the victims of US drone strikes are linguistically reduced to the status of vegetation: Justifying drone strikes, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst and Obama counterterror-ism adviser Bruce Riedel likened drones to lawn mowers: “You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.”12

  Pilisuk warned against a proliferating combination of nuclear weapons with remote weapons delivery systems, such as drones. Compared with the Cold War’s large-scale nuclear delivery systems, today’s drones are much more economical. Thus, in Pilisuk’s view, “the world is quickly moving toward a matrix of surveillance vehicles of unknown origin and likely soon to include nuclear weapons. This is not the world that sane people wish to hand off to our children.”13

  The satirical newspaper the Onion ran the headline in February 2012, “Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon.” “Reporting” from Tehran, the Onion’s mock story continued, “Obviously, the prospect of this happening is very distressing to Iran and all countries like Iran. After all, the United States is a volatile nation that’s proven it needs little provocation to attack anyone anywhere in the world whom it perceives to be a threat.”14 Although the Onion only slightly exaggerates the number of US nuclear warheads, the article’s reversal makes absurdly explicit the doublespeak and double standards at play.

  Censored #11: Bush Blocked Iran Nuclear Deal

  Corporate media’s recurrent narrative on nuclear weapons portrays the US as consistently doing everything in its power to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, while Iran resolutely pursues that goal. Gareth Porter’s report for Consortium News throws a wrench into the works of the Bush and Obama administrations’ self-rationalizing and polarizing foreign policies toward Iran (e.g., “leave all options on the table”). The specter of a “nuclear Middle East,” a persistent phrase in White House discourse regarding Iran, clearly aims to generate fear and anxiety in the US public. A highly effective spell, each time administration officials invoke this phrase it renders invisible the reality that the Middle East is already “nuclear,” given Israel’s possession of war-heads. US government officials and corporate media emphasize the in-tolerable existential threat of Iran possibly acquiring nuclear weapons, while downplaying Israel’s status as an existing nuclear power in the region. The echo chamber of “We can’t wait for a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” is reanimated, from Iraq to Iran.

  The formulaic and predictable steps to war are being followed in textbook (read: CIA handbook) fashion: demonize the enemy, exaggerate a threat, fake a diplomatic effort, and then establish a line that was supposedly crossed as a pretext for military intervention. The construction of simmering inevitability lays the psychic national backdrop against which allegedly imminent threats can be brought to boil in the public’s imagination. Fear and selective amnesia never fail as the tandem tools of empire. Recognizable masks for war are donned and adjusted as Oceania begins another propaganda round of “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”15

  In another instance of the double standards and rhetorical distinctions that characterize the US promotion of its foreign policy, economic sanctions are presented as peaceful means to neutralize the nation’s enemies.

  Although India, Israel, and Pakistan possess nuclear arsenals, none are currently a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).16 By contrast, Iran—which has been a NPT signatory since 1968—has been repeatedly targeted, most recently with sanctions that have had devastating effects on the Iranian people, despite the fact that the NPT’s terms allow for uranium enrichment.

  Against this backdrop, revelations in Seyed Hossein Mousavian’s recent memoir, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis, deserve more widespread news coverage. Mousavian, one of Iran’s top nuclear negotiators in 2004–05, offers new details about how President George W. Bush blocked a deal with Iran, despite a number of European Union members’ support for the deal. By Mousavian’s account, Iran had offered a deal to the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom that would have made it impossible for it to build nuclear weapons. The deal involved Iran shipping its uranium to an “agreed upon country” for enrichment in exchange for yellowcake, the raw material used to make fuel rods. As Gareth Porter reported, “Iran did not have the capability to fabricate fuel rods, so the implication was that the LEU [Low Enriched Uranium] would have to be shipped to another country for conversion or would have to be done under international auspices within Iran. Once the fuel rods were fabricated, it would be practically impossible for Iran to reconvert them for military purposes.”17

  As such, it is important to note that the current sanctions on Iran were not in fact inevitable, as the official Washington narrative insists. Moreover, these sanctions are not a “peaceful” or “humanitarian” means of negotiation given some of the more deadly consequences most vividly evidenced in the lack of access to medicine and medical equipment.

  In June 2012, Hamid Dabashi offered a searing critique of Nicholas Kristof’s report for the New York Times in which Kristof unequivocally declared that sanctions against Iran were working. Based on his much-hyped “i,700-mile drive around the country,” Kristof offered his “blunt” claim that US-led “sanctions are succeeding as intended: They are inflicting prodigious economic pain on Iranians and are generating discontent.”18 Assessing Kristof’s reportage, Dabashi wrote, “This is journalism at the de facto service of a bewildered empire, a journalism that does not only fail to raise very basic and simple questions about dangerous policies of the journalist’s home country but that has in fact become the effective extension of imperial wars by other means.”19

  Censored #12: The US Has Left Iraq with an Epidemic of Cancers and Birth Defects

  Depleted uranium is highly radioactive with a 4.5 billion year half-life. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has classified it as a “weapon of indiscriminate effect,” alongside nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.20 Yet, depleted uranium has been used in conventional warfare—particularly by US forces—since the Gulf War; more recently, its use has also been documented in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Lebanon.21 By 2003, US Army training manuals advised personnel to use respiratory and skin protection when operating within seventy-five yards of destroyed tanks or spent shells, though Pentagon officials categorically denied any link between depleted uranium and the dramatic rise in cancers reported in areas known to have been densely bombarded.22

  Acknowledging the severe health consequences of exposure to deplet
ed uranium would also dramatically affect the US government’s position on the vexed topic of Gulf War illness (also known as Gulf War syndrome). Indeed, the “slow violence” of environmental contamination has not discriminated against US veterans of the Gulf War.

  While contemporary corporate media coverage of ongoing violence in postwar Iraq focuses superficially on “sectarian” conflict, the magnitude of the health crisis that permeates daily life due to the war remains effectively invisible. Nonetheless, epidemiological studies are beginning to register the extent of long-term health effects in Basra and Fallujah, two known sites of intensive bombing during the war. At Al-Basra Maternity Hospital, a team of researchers reported that, from 2003 to 2011, “congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing seventeen-fold.”23

  In addition to depleted uranium, this study also found unhealthy levels of other heavy metals—including mercury and lead—among the affected populations. Reporting for the UK’s Independent, Sarah Morrison quoted Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan and one of the study’s lead authors: the study’s first documentation of a “footprint of metal in the population” is “compelling evidence linking the staggering increases in Iraqi birth defects to neuro-toxic metal contamination following the repeated bombardments of Iraqi cities.” Dr. Savabieasfahani called the “epidemic” a “public health crisis.”24 She added: “We need extensive environmental sampling, of food, water and air to find out where this is coming from. Then we can clean it up. Now we are seeing 50 percent of children being born with malformations; in a few years it could be everyone.”

  The stark case of censorship in this instance pushes the question of media ethics and accountability to an extreme. Although new epidemiological studies demonstrate links between Iraq’s current health crises and the US’s past military activities and make plain the severity of this environmental disaster, US officials refuse to acknowledge responsibility and American corporate media ignore investigating the story. As Ross Caputi reports in the Guardian: