Top 10 Censored Stories of 1997

In March, for the 22nd year in a row, the Sonoma State University program announced the conclusion of its annual search for major significant but little reported news stories.

The top 25 "censored" or underreported stories of 1997 are fully reported and documented in the project yearbook, "Censored 1998: The News That Didn't Make the News."

And once again, the project, twice honored for publishing the best alternative political issues book in the country, has cast the spotlight on stories that many Americans have never heard of but need to know about. They include, among others:

• The United States is the world's principal arms merchant, providing weapons in almost every conflict worldwide and in the process fanning a never-ending cycle of arms sales and arms development.

• Many cosmetics and health products routinely used by consumers are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration yet are often contaminated with carcinogenic byproducts or products that when combined create carcinogens.

• The academic freedom and independence of America's university and college system is being compromised by the increasing practice of big business and industry creating endowed professorships, funding think tanks and research centers, sponsoring grants and contracting for research.

"These and other stories in our annual yearbook provide continuing and convincing evidence that mainstream media in the United States is failing to provide the public information it needs in order to function in a democracy," said Prof. Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored.

"Alternative media, newspapers and magazines, are doing the job, but unfortunately many Americans don't see the alternative press. As a result, much vital information is censored simply because it is not available in the papers and television news most people routinely see," he said.

"They don't like to hear the suggestion that by not covering certain stories they are effectively censoring the news. But that is exactly the case," said Phillips. "Project Censored defines censorship as the interference with the free flow of information in our society." The concept of news censorship is more complicated than a government official or industry "spin doctor" simply stamping CENSORED on information and hiding it from the public, according to Phillips.

"There are a variety of factors that go into censorship in an otherwise democratic society including the tendency to report entertainment, sex and celebrity news rather than the harder more serious issues of the day," he said. "Increasingly, we believe the leading factors are the conglomeration of media chains and the ownership and control of media giants like NBC and CBS by corporations like General Electric and Westinghouse.

"A reporter for NBC is less likely to investigate nuclear energy issues when he or she knows the corporate boss is chairman of the board of nuclear energy giant General Electric," he said. "That subtle but very effective influence is increasingly the case in newspapers and on television throughout the country."

"Those two examples are not unusual," said Phillips. Phillips contends several factors clearly show that the public is hungry for the information that Project Censored highlights in its annual yearbook. First, he noted that two years in a row the American Association of Wholesale Independent Booksellers named "Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News as the best alternative political book of the year.

"And second, we learned that last year's protest movement against NASA's launch of the Cassini space probe with 72 pounds of plutonium on board was organized in many regions by people who didn't even know about Cassini until they read about it in our book," he said. Phillips also thinks mainstream media pays attention to Project Censored, too, but rarely will admit it. "Before our book was published last year there was virtually no mainstream coverage of the Cassini mission. But given the widespread attention the story got after our book was in bookstores across the country, most Americans knew about the mission and its controversial plutonium payload," he said.

However pleased he is with Project Censored's success in drawing attention to stories contained in its annual yearbook, Phillips is not gloating. "That's what the students and faculty involved in the project are working for. To point out the shortcomings of the press and encourage, mainstream reporters and producers to take the challenge and perform the service we know they are capable of doing if given the chance by their editors," he said. "If we help to inform the public and to cause the media to do a better job, then we will have done our job."

This year's yearbook is the culmination of work by 125 student, faculty and community experts based at Sonoma State University. The top 25 censored stories are culled from more than 600 stories nominated by reporters and editors and readers from throughout the country. Each story is reviewed by student researchers and faculty experts to determine the veracity and significance of the report and to what extent the subject was covered by mainstream media. The final list is submitted to a panel of national judges who vote to determine the order of significance.

Most U.S. weaponry is sold to strife-torn regions such as the Middle East. These weapons sales fan the flames of war instead of promoting stability, and put U.S. troops based around the world at growing risk. The last five times the U.S. troops were sent into conflict, they found themselves facing adversaries that had previously received U.S. weapons, military technology, or training. Meanwhile, the Pentagon uses the presence of advanced U.S. weapons in foreign arsenals to justify increased new weapons spending -- ostensibly to maintain U.S. military superiority.

On June 7, 1997, the House of Representatives unanimously approved the Arms Transfer Code of Conduct. This Code would prohibit U.S. commercial arms sales or military aid and training to foreign governments that are undemocratic, abuse human rights, or engage in aggression against neighboring states; yet the Clinton administration, along with the Defense, Commerce, and State Departments, has continued to aggressively promote the arms industry at every opportunity. With Washington's share of the arms business jumping from 16 percent worldwide in 1988 to 63 percent today, U.S. arms dealers currently sell $10 billion in weapons to non-democratic governments each year. During Clinton's first year in office, U.S. foreign military aid soared to $36 billion, more than double what Bush approved in 1992.

Given that international arms sales exacerbate conflicts and drain scarce resources from developing countries, why does the Clinton administration push them so vigorously? The most plausible motive is the drive for corporate profits. It is no small detail that U.S. global arms market dominance has been accomplished as much through subsidies as sales. In return for arms manufacturers' huge political contributions, much of the U.S. arms exports are paid with government grants, subsidized loans, tax breaks and promotional activities.

Sources: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, October 1996, "Costly Giveaways" by Lora Lumpe; In These Times, August 11, 1997, "Guns 'R' Us" by Martha Honey

Consumers regularly assume that these products are not harmful because they believe that they are approved for safety by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But although the FDA classifies cosmetics (dividing them into 13 categories), it does not regulate them. An FDA document posted on the agency's World Wide Web home page explains that "a cosmetic manufacturer may use any ingredient or raw material and market the final product without government approval." (This is with the exception of seven known toxins, such as hexachlorophene, mercury compounds, and chloroform). Should the FDA deem a product a danger to public health, it has the power to pull a cosmetic product from the shelves, but in many of these cases the FDA has failed to do so, while evidence mounts that some of the most common cosmetic ingredients may double as deadly carcinogens.

Examples of products with potential carcinogens are: Clairol "Nice and Easy" haircolor, which releases carcinogenic formaldehyde as well as Cocamide DEA (a substance which can be contaminated with carcinogenic nitrosamines or react to produce a nitrosamine during storage or use); Vidal Sassoon shampoo (which like the hair dye, contains Cocamide DEA); Cover Girl makeup contains TEA (which is also associated with carcinogenic nitrosamines); Crest toothpaste which contains titanium dioxide, saccharin, and FD&C Blue number 1 (known carcinogens).

One of the cosmetic toxins that consumer advocates are most concerned about are nitrosamines, which contaminate a wide variety of cosmetic products. In the 1970s nitrosamine contamination of cooked bacon and other nitrite-treated meats became a public-health issue, and the food industry, which is more strictly regulated than the cosmetic industry, has since drastically lowered the amount of nitrosamines found in these processed meats. But today nitrosamines contaminate cosmetics at significantly higher levels than were once contained in bacon.

The FDA has long known that nitrosamines in cosmetics pose a risk to public health. On April 10, 1979, FDA commissioner Donald Kennedy called on the cosmetic industry to "take immediate measures to eliminate, to the extent possible, NDELA [a potent nitrosamine] and any other N-nitrosamine from cosmetic products." Since that warning, however, cosmetic manufacturers have done little to remove N-nitrosamines from their products, and the FDA has done even less to monitor them.

Individual FDA scientists are speaking out. The FDA's Donald Harvey and Hardy Chou proclaimed that the continued use of these ingredients contradict what should be a social goal: keeping "human exposure to N-nitrosamines to the lowest level technologically feasible, by reducing levels in all personal care products."

Sources: In These Times, February 17, 1997, "To Die For" by Joel Bleifuss; In These Times, March 3, 1997, "Take a Powder" by Joel Bleifuss

Although universities often claim that corporate moneys come without strings attached, this usually not the case. A British pharmaceutical corporation, Boots, gave $250,000 to University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) for research comparing its hyperthyroid drug, Synthroid, with lower cost alternatives. Instead of demonstrating Synthroid's superiority as Boots had hoped, the study found that the other drugs were bioequivalents. This information could have saved consumers $356 million if they had switched to a cheaper alternative, but Boots took action to protect Synthroid's domination of the $600 million market. The corporation prevented publication of the results in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and then announced that the research was badly flawed. The researcher was unable to counter the claim because she was legally precluded from releasing the study.

University Presidents often sit on the boards of directors of major corporations, inviting conflicts of interest and developing biases that undermine academic freedom and interfere with the ability of the university to be critical or objective.

While university presidents and chancellors gain from their corporate activities, industry and business are returned favors. University boards of trustees are dominated by captains of industry, who hire chancellors and presidents with pro-industry biases. New York University's board includes former CBS owner Laurence Tisch, Hartz Mountain chief Leonard Stern, Salomon Brothers brokerage firm founder, William B. Salomon, and real estate magnate-turned publisher Mortimer Zuckerman.

Federal tax dollars fund about $7 billion worth of research, to which corporations can buy access for a fraction of the actual cost. This is the largely the result of two 1980s federal laws which allow universities to sell patent rights derived from taxpayer-funded research to corporations -- encouraging "rent-a-researcher" programs. The result of these changes has been a covert transfer of resources from the public to the private sector and the changing of universities from centers of instruction to centers for corporate R & D.

Sources: Covertaction Quarterly, Spring 1997, "Phi Beta Capitalism", by Lawrence Soley; Dollars and Sense, March/April 1997, "Big money on Campus" by Lawrence Soley.

The ECHELON system, designed and coordinated by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is one of the world's biggest, most closely held intelligence projects. Unlike many of the Cold War electronic spy systems, ECHELON is designed primarily to gather electronic transmissions from nonmilitary targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. The system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Computers at each secret station in the ECHELON network automatically search millions of messages for pre-programmed keywords. For each message containing one of those keywords, the computer automatically notes time and place of origin and interception, and gives the message a four-digit code for future reference. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970's, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. Using the ECHELON system, an agency in one country may automatically pick up information gathered elsewhere in the system. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.

The exposure of ECHELON occurred after more than fifty people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields -- concerned that the UKUSA activities had been secret too long and were going too far -- agreed to be interviewed by Hager, a long-time researcher of spying and intelligence. Materials leaked to Hager included precise information on where the spying is conducted, how the system works, the system's capabilities and shortcomings, and other details such as code names.

The potential abuses of and few restraints around the use of ECHELON have motivated other intelligence workers to come forward. In one example, a group of "highly placed intelligence operatives" from the British Government Communications Headquarters came forward protesting what they regarded as "gross malpractice and negligence" within the establishments in which they operate, citing cases of GCHQ interception of charitable organizations such as Amnesty International and Christian Aid.

Sources: Covertaction Quarterly, Winter 1996/1997, "Secret power: Exposing the Global Surveillance System", by Nicky Hager.

According to the Amnesty International report, the following are some of the American companies currently engaged in the production and sale of such weapons: Arianne International of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; B-west Imports Inc., of Tucson, Arizona; and Taserton, of Corona, California. Arianne International makes the "Myotron," a compact version of the stun gun. B-West joined with Paralyzer Protection, a South African company, to produce shock batons that deliver a charge of between 80,000 and 120,000 volts. Taserton was the first company to manufacture the taser, a product which shoots two wires attached to darts with metal hooks. When these hooks catch a victim's skin or clothing, the device delivers a debilitating shock. Los Angeles police officers used the device against Rodney King in 1991.

These weapons are currently in use in the U.S. and are being exported to countries all over the world. The U.S. government is a large purchaser of stun devices -- especially stun guns, electroshock batons, and electric shields. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Amnesty both claim the devices are unsafe and may encourage sadistic acts by police officers and prison guards -- both here and abroad. "Stun belts offer enormous possibilities for abuse and the infliction of gratuitous pain," says Jenni Gainsbourough of the ACLU's National Prison Project. She adds that because use of the belt leaves little physical evidence, this increases the likelihood of sadistic, but hard-to-prove, misuse of these weapons. In June 1996, Amnesty International asked the Bureau of Prisons to suspend the use of electroshock belt, citing the possibility of physical danger to inmates and the potential for misuse.

Manufacturers of electroshock weapons continue to denounce allegations that use of their devices is dangerous and may constitute a gross violation of human rights. Instead, they are making more advanced innovations. A new stun weapon may soon be added to police arsenals -- the electroshock razor wire, specially designed for surrounding demonstrators who get out of hand.

Sources: The Progressive, September 1997, "Shock Value: U.S. Stun Devices Pose Human-Rights Risk." by Anne-Marie Cusac.

This amount of plutonium has the potential to cause devastating damage. According to Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, "Plutonium is so toxic that less that one millionth of a gram is a carcinogenic dose." She states: "One pound, if uniformly distributed, could hypothetically induce lung cancer in every person on earth." Dr. John Gofman, professor emeritus of radiological physics at the University of California, Berkeley confirms the increased hazard of lung cancer which would occur if the probe burned up and formed plutonium oxide particles.

On November 17, when the U.S. Space Command announced the probe would re-enter the earth's atmosphere with a predicted impact point in East Central Australia, President Clinton telephoned the Australian Prime Minister John Howard and offered "the assets the U.S. has in the Department of Energy," to deal with any radioactive contamination. Howard placed the Australian military and government on full alert and warned the public to use "extreme caution" if they came in contact with the remnants of the Russian space probe.

In the first of a series of blunders, the day after the space probe had fallen on South America, the Space Command remained focused on Australia. Later they reported the probe had fallen in the Pacific, just west of South America. A Russian news source put the site in a different patch of the Pacific altogether. Major media in the United States reported the probe as having crashed "harmlessly" into the ocean. On November 18, 1996 The Washington Post ran the headline: "Errant Russian Spacecraft Crashes Harmlessly After Scaring Australia."

On November 29, U.S. Space Command completely revised its account. It changed not only where, but also when the probe fell. The final report placed the crash site not west of South America, but directly on Chile and Bolivia. The date of the crash was also revised from November 17 to November 16, the night before. Apparently, U.S. Space Command had initially tracked the booster stage of the Russian craft, and not the actual probe itself.

The New York Times mentioned the incident on page 7 under "World Briefs" on December 14, 1996. The Russian government has been uncooperative, still refusing to give Chile a description of the canisters to aid in retrieval efforts.

Source: Covertaction Quarterly, Spring 1997, "Space Probe Explodes", by Karl Grossman.

Joseph D'Agostino reports on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary "The Human Laboratory" which accused the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), of acting in conjunction with the Population Council of New York City, to use uninformed women in Bangladesh, Haiti, and the Philippines for tests of Norplant. Many of these women were subjects in pre-injection drug trials that began in 1985 in Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries. Norplant is a set of six plastic cylinders containing a synthetic version of a female hormone. It is intended to prevent pregnancy for five years. Surgery is required for removal -- at a cost far beyond the reach of low-income women, whether in Bangladesh or the United States if the removal is not subsidized.

The BBC documentary said the women stated that they had been told that the drug was safe and not experimental. Implantation was free. One woman interviewed in the documentary said that after implantation, suddenly her body became weak, and that she couldn't get up, look after her children, or cook. Other women reported similar problems, stating that when they asked to have Norplant removed, they were told it would ruin the study. The Narrator of the documentary, Farida Akhter, recounted that when another woman begged to have the implant removed -- saying "I'm dying, please help me get it out" -- she was told, "Okay, when you die, inform us, we'll get it out of your body." Many women who were used in the trials have suffering from eyesight disorders, strokes, persistent bleeding and other side effects.

Now Norplant devices are figuring in reproductive rights policies in the U.S. as well. Journalist Rebecca Kavoussi reports that the reproductive rights of women addicted to drugs or alcohol have once again become the focus of legislation. Senate Bill 5278, now under consideration in the state of Washington, would require "involuntary use of long-term pharmaceutical birth control" (Norplant) for women who give birth to drug-addicted babies. Under this proposal, a woman who gives birth to a drug-addicted baby would get two chances -- the first voluntary, the second mandatory -- to undergo drug treatment and counseling. Upon the birth of a third drug-addicted child, the state would force the mother to undergo surgery to insert the Norplant contraceptive.

Jennifer Washburn focuses on Medicaid rejection of Norplant removals in the U.S. State Medicaid agencies, for example, often generously cover the cost of Norplant insertion but don't cover removal before the full five years. Although Medicaid policy may cover early removal "when determined "medically necessary, " medical necessity is determined by the provider and the Medicaid agency, not the patient.

Sources: 7. November/December 1996, "The misuses of Norplant, Who Gets Stuck?" by Jennifer Washburn; Wahington Free Press, March/ April 1997, "Norplant and the Dark Side of The Law" by Rebecca Kavoussi; Human Events, May 16, 1997, "BBC Documentary Claims That U.S. Foreign Aid Funded Norplant Testing On Uninformed Third World Women" by Joseph D' Agostino.

Another part of the law provides $5 million-per-year grants to any state that wants to participate in any one of three pilot ID programs. One of these programs is the "Criminal Alien Identification Program," which is to be used by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to record fingerprints of aliens previously arrested.

The author of the national ID law, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), stated in a Capitol Hill magazine that it was her intention to see Congress immediately implement a national ID system whereby every American would be required to carry a card with a "magnetic strip on it on which the bearer's unique voice, retina pattern, or fingerprint is digitally encoded." Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX), among others, has strongly denounced the new law, calling it "an abomination, and wholly at odds with the American tradition of individual freedom."

Source: Witwigo, May/June 1997, "National I.D. Card is Now Federal Law and Georgia Wants To Help Lead The Way" by Cyndee Parker.

In the past decade Mattel, the makers of "Barbie," bought out six major competitors, making it the largest toy manufacturer in the world. Employing 25,000 people worldwide, Mattel now only employs 6,000 workers in the U.S. NAFTA has freed Mattel to further reduce its American work force and take advantage of repressive labor laws in other countries.

In the Dynamic factory just outside of Bangkok, 4,500 women and children stuff, cut, dress and assemble Barbie dolls and Disney properties. Many of the workers have respiratory infections, their lungs filled with dust from fabrics in the factory. They complain of hair and memory loss, constant pain in their hands, neck and shoulders, episodes of vomiting, and irregular menstrual periods. Metha is a militant woman in her twenties who tried to start a union at the Dynamics plant. She claims the company not only fired her but threatened to shut her up "forever." She developed respiratory problems and was hospitalized. She expresses her fear to talk to a reporter by saying, "Barbie is powerful. Three friends have already died. If they kill me, who will ever know I lived?"

Though separated by distance, these Mattel workers are intimately connected by experience, as are those of countless other abused workers in toy factories in Thailand and China, where Mattel now produces the bulk of their toys.

Under pressure, the industry adopted a code of conduct, which conveniently calls upon companies to monitor themselves. There's little evidence, however, according to authors Foek and Press, of any changes in these abusive practices.

Sources: The Nation, December 30, 1996, "Barbie's Betrayal: The Toy Industry's Broken Workers," by Eyal Press; The Humanist, January/February 1997, "Sweatshop Barbie: Exploitation of Their World Labor," by Anton Foek.

Some examples of the chemicals to be incinerated include nerve gas and mustard agent; bioaccumulative organochlorines such as dioxins, furans, chloromethane, vinyl chloride, and PCBs; metals such as lead, mercury, copper and nickel; and toxins such as arsenic. These represent only a fraction of the thousands of chemicals and metals that will potentially be emitted throughout the Columbia River watershed and from the toxic ash and effluents which pose a significant health threat via entrance to the aquifer.

Contrary to what incineration advocates claim, there is no urgent need to incinerate, since the stockpile at Umatilla has small potential for explosion or chain reaction as a result of decay. A 1994 General Accounting Office report estimates that the actual number of years for safe weapons storage is 120 years rather than the 17.7 years originally estimated by the National Research Council. Thus, the timeline for action could conceivably be lengthened until all the alternatives -- such as chemical neutralization, molten metals, electro-chemical oxidation, and solvated electron technology (SET) -- are considered. A delay is supported by a National Academy of Sciences report, entitled Review and Evaluation of Alternative Chemical Disposal Technologies, which states that there has been sufficient development to warrant re-evaluation of alternative technologies for chemical agent destruction.

Source: Earth First, March 1997, "Army Plan to Burn Surplus Nerve Gas Stockpile" by Mark Brown and Kayrn Jones.

Dr. Donna Allen, president of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.

Ben Bagdikian, professor emeritus and former dean, Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Richard Barnet, author of 15 books and numerous articles for The New York Times Magazine, The Nation and the Progressive.

Susan Faludi, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

Dr. George Gerbner, dean emeritus, Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania and author of Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Media Control Means for American.

Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News columnist.

Aileen C. Hernandez, a long time civil and human rights worker and labor organizer, former commissioner on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as second national president of the National Organization for Women, lifetime member of NAACP.

Dr. Carl Jensen, founder and former director of Project Censored, author of Censored: The News that Didn't Make the News and Why, 1990-96, and 20 Years of Censored News.

Sut Jhally, professor of communications and executive director, The Media Education Foundation, University of Massachusetts.

Nicholas Johnson, professor, College of Law, University of Iowa and former FCC Commissioner.

Rhoda H. Karpatkin, president, Consumers Union, non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports.

Charles L. Klotzer, editor and publisher emeritus, St. Louis Journalism Review.

Judith Krug, director, Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association.

Frances Moore Lappe, co-founder and co-director, Center for Living Democracy.

William Lutz, professor, English, Rutgers University.

Julianne Malveaux, Ph.D., economist columnist, King Features and Pacifica radio talk show host.

Jack L. Nelson, professor, Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University.

Michael Parenti, political analyst, lecturer, and author of The Politics of News Media and Make Believe Media.

Herbert I. Schiller, professor emeritus of communications, University of California, San Diego.

Barbara Seaman, author, The Doctors' Case Against the Pill and co-founder of the National Women's Health Network.

Holly Sklar, author, Chaos or Community and Seeking Solutions Not Scapegoats for Bad Economics and others.

Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, president, D.C. Productions, Ltd.; former press secretary for Betty Ford.