This play is appropriate for ages 7+
TERTAINMENT AN EN : The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told By Himself)
Oct. 5 29, 2011
tickets: start at $10 phone: 331-9224 x205 online: BCTheater.org 854 Fulton St. Downtown Boise, ID
More U.S. soldiers died from suicide than in combat in 2010.
Yet there are instances when Project Censored seems to wander too far afield. Its claims of “censorship” seem dubious at times, as with the charge that the mainstream media has ignored the real unemployment rate because it hasn’t turned an eye toward the analysis of economist John Williams, who maintains a website called Shadow Government Statistics. Huff and Phillips regularly discuss questions surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center on their KPFA radio show, and their emphasis on this particular issue, along with a recent tendency to give weight to fringe theories concerning things like suspicious contrails issuing from airplanes, have caused allies of the organization to defect in the past. The organization’s definition of censorship has evolved, too, to the point where the authors cast it as a form of propaganda that is “intentional by nature ... In essence, this is a conspiracy.” Nevertheless, the Project Censored team delivers yet another rundown of surprising, alarming, and thought-provoking stories that are worth noting—more so, perhaps, because they received so little attention to begin with. Without further ado, here are the Top 10.
MORE U.S. SOLDIERS
1 COMMITTED SUICIDE THAN DIED IN COMBAT IN 2010
Six more, to be exact. That’s the figure reported by Good Magazine and spotlighted by Project Censored in an article highlighting the fact that 462 American soldiers were killed in combat in 2010 while 468 soldiers, counting enlisted men and women as well as veterans, took their own lives. This was the second consecutive year that more soldiers died by their own hands than in combat. In 2009, the 381 suicides of activeduty soldiers recorded by the military also exceeded the number of deaths in battle. The Good report, which references Congressional Quarterly as a source, was published in January 2011, just weeks after military authorities announced that a psychological screening program seemed to be stemming the suicide rate among active-duty soldiers. “This new data, that American soldiers are now more dangerous to themselves than the insurgents, flies right in the face of any suggestion that things are ‘working,’” Good Senior Editor Cord Jefferson wrote. Project Censored also spotlighted Hedges’ sobering portrayal of Jess Goodell, a Marine who was stationed in the Mortuary Affairs
12 | OCTOBER 12–18, 2011 | BOISEweekly
unit in Iraq. Goodell published a memoir titled, Death and After in Iraq, also the name of Hedges’ column.
U.S. MILITARY’S “FRIEND”
2 FAKE-OUT
Anyone suspicious of “sock puppets,” those online commenters pretending to be someone they’re not, would be unnerved by the U.S. military’s “online persona management service,” a little-known program described in The Guardian UK, Raw Story and Computerworld stories unearthed and highlighted by Project Censored. The U.S. Central Command secured a contract with a Los Angeles-based tech company to develop the program, which enables U.S. service workers to use fake online personas on social media sites to influence online chatter. Using up to 10 false identities, they can counter charged political dialogue with pro-military propaganda. “These ‘personas’ were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account,” according to a Raw Story account. A Centcom spokesperson told the Guardian UK that the program would only intervene in online conversations in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu or Pashto, and that it wouldn’t initially target Twitter or Facebook. However, critics likened this U.S. endeavor to manipulate social media to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the Internet.
3
OBAMA’S HIT LIST
The Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military have the authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad, outside war zones, if strong evidence exists that they’re involved in terrorist activity, The Washington Post reported in a front-page story in January 2010. Despite this prominent press treatment of targeted assassinations under the Obama administration, Project Censored deems this an underreported news story because “a moral, ethical and legal analysis of the assassinations seems to be significantly lacking inside the corporate media.” The authors instead point us to coverage in Salon, the Inter Press Service, Common Dreams and several other sources that sharply question the president’s authority to license extrajudicial executions of individuals. In December 2010, Human Rights Watch asked WWW. B O I S E WE E KLY. C O M