News to Me ( 25
NORTH BAY BOH E MI A N | OCTO BE R 1 2–1 8 , 20 1 1 | BO H E M I AN.COM
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In a CounterPunch article entitled “Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants” that is spotlighted by Project Censored, Peter CervantesGautschi spotlights Brewer’s links to CCA and goes deeper still, offering a historic account of how investors in CCA and prison giant Geo Group have for years actively pushed for legislation that would result in the widespread incarceration of undocumented immigrants.
6
Google spies?
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A flurry of stories aired in the spring of 2010 when it became apparent that Google Street View vehicles, in the process of collecting data for its mapping service, also picked up consumer “payload” data on Wi-Fi networks, including email messages, website data, user names and passwords. The tech giant publicly apologized for what it characterized as a mistake, saying it had “failed badly.” The Federal Trade Commission admonished Google in a letter, but declined to pursue it further. From there, Project Censored authors make the leap that the FTC abandoned its inquiry because a week earlier, Obama attended a Democratic Party fundraiser at the Palo Alto home of Google executive Marissa Mayer, citing a San Francisco Chronicle article about the $30,000 per-person affair. Project Censored authors also point to an article by Eric Sommer titled “Google’s Deep CIA Connections,” appearing on Pravda.ru (a website whose most-read article was “Bermuda Triangle: New Anomalous Phenomenon Discovered”). Sommer claims that “Google is, in fact, a key participant in U.S. military and CIA intelligence operations,” basing his argument on a perplexing set of links between investors in Google and CIA technologies.
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Stay positive—at all costs
A military training program that Project Censored has deemed “U.S. Army and psychology’s largest experiment— ever” was profiled in a detailed American Psychologist series in early 2011. Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is described as a “holistic approach to warrior training,” emphasizing positive psychology as a means to counter mental health problems arising from horrific combat situations. While the American Psychologist series reads like a puff piece finessed by the professionals who developed CSF, Project Censored spotlighted articles in Truthout and The Psychology of Well-Being that raised questions about the wisdom of launching a required, untested psychology program for more than 1 million soldiers, one that encourages soldiers to think positive even in the face of traumatizing events. In an article appearing on OpEdNews.com, authors Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, and Stephen Soldz write that the CSF “training” program would better be described as a research project. They point out that a hypothesis of the program’s success lies at the very core of CSF, “yet it is merely a hypothesis—a tentative explanation or prediction that can only be confirmed through further research.”
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The myth of clean nuclear power
The terrifying meltdowns of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactors reignited a worldwide debate about the wisdom of relying on nuclear energy as an electricity source. While Germany opted to phase out its nuclear facilities by 2022 in the wake of the tragedy, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) came under scrutiny after a Union of Concerned Scientists report analyzed 14 “near misses” at nuclear power plants in 2010, revealing the shortcomings in NRC inspections.