US Plan for Global Domination Tops Project Censored's Annual List

By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet. Posted September 17, 2003.

We know a lot more now about the dangers and disasters of U.S. empire building in Iraq -- the ongoing bloodshed on the ground, expansion of terrorist activities, the huge budget busting costs of occupation, the stretching and undermining of the military, and the increased sense of fear and insecurity that many Americans feel as a result of the invasion and its potential for blowback.

We also now have a better handle on the immediate and flimsy reasons for the invasion. Bush told us we were going to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened us; he was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programs (the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Africa); he had huge stocks of chemical and biological weapons that could be launched somehow in a way that threatened the US. And finally that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda. According to some polls, as much as 70 percent of the public believed this. But now it seems clear these were all falsehoods. The lies and deceptions Bush and his minions were feeding to the media are making their way into public discourse and are being covered fairly extensively in the press, in columns by Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd in the NY Times and in wide ranging reporting at the Washington Post, and elsewhere.

But far, far less is known about the planning and the actors that brought us this foreign policy disaster? What ideas and worldviews motivated the push to overreach and try to dominate the globe, with Iraq as step number one? What secrets, maneuvers behind the scenes policy power struggles after the attacks of 9/11, led the U.S. to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11?

The reminder that the media often reports the 'news" as fed to it by those in power, and skips past the real news -- the reasons for the behaviors and policies -- is good reason for the continued existence of Project Censored, a program in its 27th year that collects under-reported stories from around the country and compiles a list of the top 10 "censored stories" as well as 15 runner-ups. About 200 students and faculty from Sonoma State University compiled and reviewed the stories for Project Censored. The project describes its mission "to stimulate responsible journalists to provide more mass media coverage of those under-covered issues and to encourage the general public to demand mass media coverage of those issues or to seek information from other sources."

Most of the stories on Project Censored's Top Ten relate to the US's war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. On the one hand, this emphasis indicates how the issue dominates the news, but on the other, how few news consumers really understand very little about how it happened and why. Taken together, these stories paint a chilling picture of a long-ranging plan to dominate huge sections of the globe militarily and economically, and to silence dissent, curb civil liberties and undermine workers' rights in the course of it. Some of the information published as part of the project is pretty shocking, like the fact that the US removed 8,000 incriminating pages from Iraq's weapons report to the UN; or that Donald Rumsfeld may have a plan to deliberately provoke terrorists so we can react. Other issues like the attacks on civil liberties have been covered in the mainstream press, but not in the comprehensive way Project Censored would like to see.

The "Top Ten Censored Stories" followed by the 15 runner-ups:

1. The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance

Sources: The Sunday Herald (9/15/02), Harper's Magazine (10/02), Mother Jones (3/03), Pilger.com (12/12/02)

Project Censored has decided that the incredible lack of public knowledge of the US plan for total global domination, represented by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) represents the media's biggest failure over the past year. The PNAC plans advocated the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and other current foreign policy objectives, long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Chillingly, one document published by the PNAC in 2000 actually describes the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" to persuade the American public to accept the acts of war and aggression the administration wants to carry out. "But most people in the country are totally unaware that the PNAC exists," said Peter Phillips, a professor at Sonoma State and major domo of The Project Censored Project, "and that failure has aided and abetted this disaster in Iraq."

According to Project Censored authors. "In the 1970s, the United States and the Middle East were embroiled in a tug-of-war over oil. At the time, the prospect of seizing control of Arab oil fields by force was considered out of line. Still, the idea of Middle East dominance was very attractive to a group of hard-line Washington insiders that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and other operatives. During the Clinton years they were active in conservative think tanks like the PNAC. When Bush was elected they came roaring back into power.

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