Top 10 Censored Stories of 2003

The Bush administration's plans for global domination top this year's list of stories overlooked or under-reported by the major media outlets. The Top 10 Censored Stories, compiled each year by faculty members and students at Sonoma State University in California, features plenty of Bush-related horrors but also highlights union-busting efforts, increasing corporate control of the Internet, and new colonialism in Africa.

1 Bush Insiders Plan for a New American Empire
An obscure think tank called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), founded in the early '90s by Reagan-era hawks such as William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, served as the incubator for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, according to reports by Harper's, Mother Jones, and British journalist John Pilger. Among the goals of the PNAC are permanent U.S. military dominance in the world and control of world markets -- particularly the oil market. To this end, the hawks had targeted oil-rich Iraq for "regime change" long before last year's debate on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

2 Homeland Security Threatens our Civil Liberties
Not since the dark days of COINTELPRO in the late '60s has the government so determinedly sought to quash political dissent in the United States. Among the greatest threats to civil liberties, according to Global Outlook, www.rense.com, and the Center for Public Integrity, came in the form of the Northern Command, a U.S. military force created to help domestic law enforcement agencies deal with "homeland security" and disaster scenarios, including civil unrest. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is working to strengthen the already draconian measures of the PATRIOT Act.

3 U.S. illegally Removes Pages from Iraq U.N. Report
The Bush administration removed some 8,000 pages from the 11,800-page weapons declaration submitted by the Iraqi government to the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the eve of the U.S. invasion last year, reported ArtVoice and The Humanist. The reason had less to do with top-secret military intelligence than with erasing references to the role U.S. corporations like Honeywell, Eastman Kodak, and Bechtel played in the creation of Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological, and nuclear capabilities.

4 Rumsfeld's Plan to Provoke Terrorists
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created a new Pentagon organization, the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, to incite terrorist groups to commit acts of violence against innocent civilians as a way to expose them to U.S. military retaliation, according to the Los Angeles Times and CounterPunch.