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7) Journalists face unprecedented dangers to life and livelihood

Last year was the deadliest year for reporters since the International Federation of Journalists began keeping tabs in 1984. A total of 129 media workers lost their lives, and 49 of them — more than a third — were killed in Iraq.

"As far as anyone has yet proved, no commanding officer ever ordered a subordinate to fire on journalists as such," wrote Weissman in an update for Censored 2006. But what can be shown is a pattern of tacit complicity, side by side with a heavy-handed campaign to curb journalists’ right to roam freely.

The Pentagon has refused to implement basic safeguards to protect journalists who aren’t embedded with coalition forces, despite repeated requests by Reuters and media-advocacy organizations.

The US military exonerated the army of any wrongdoing in its now-infamous attack on the Palestine Hotel — which, as the Pentagon knew, functioned as headquarters for about 100 media workers — when coalition forces rolled into Baghdad on April 8, 2003.

To date, US authorities have not disciplined a single officer or soldier involved in the killing of a journalist, according to Project Censored.

8) Iraqi farmers threatened by Bremer’s mandates

Historians believe it was in the "fertile crescent" of Mesopotamia, where Iraq now lies, that humans first learned to farm. "It is here, in around 8500 or 8000 BC, that mankind first domesticated wheat, here that agriculture was born," wrote Jeremy Smith in the Ecologist. This entire time, "Iraqi farmers have been naturally selecting wheat varieties that work best with their climate ... and cross-pollinated them with others with different strengths.

"The US, however, has decided that, despite 10,000 years of practice, Iraqis don’t know what wheat works best in their own conditions."

Smith was referring to Order 81, one of 100 directives penned by L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, and left as a legacy by the American government when it transferred operations to interim Iraqi authorities. The regulation sets criteria for the patenting of seeds that can be met only by multinational companies like Monsanto or Syngenta, and it grants the patent holder exclusive rights over every aspect of all plant products yielded by those seeds. Because of naturally occurring cross-pollination, the new scheme effectively launches a process whereby Iraqi farmers will soon have to purchase their seeds rather than using seeds saved from their own crops or bought at the local market.

Native varieties will be replaced by foreign — and genetically engineered — seeds, and Iraqi agriculture will become more vulnerable to disease as biological diversity is lost.

Texas A&M University, which brags that its agriculture program is a "world leader" in the use of biotechnology, has already embarked on a $107 million project to "re-educate" Iraqi farmers to grow industrial-size harvests, for export, using American seeds.

And anyone who’s ever paid attention to how this has worked elsewhere in the global South knows what comes next: farmers will lose their land, and the country will lose its ability to feed itself, engendering poverty and dependency.

9) Iran’s new oil-trade system challenges US currency

The Bush administration has been paying a lot more attention to Iran recently. Part of that interest is clearly in Iran’s nuclear program — but there may be more to the story. One bit of news that hasn’t received the public vetting it merits is Iran’s declared intent to open an international oil-exchange market, or "bourse."

Not only would the new entity compete against the New York Mercantile Exchange and London’s International Petroleum Exchange (both owned by American corporations), but it would also ignite international oil trading in euros.

"A shift away from US dollars to euros in the oil market would cause the demand for petrodollars to drop, perhaps causing the value of the dollar to plummet," Brian Miller and Celeste Vogler of Project Censored wrote in Censored 2006.

"Russia, Venezuela, and some members of OPEC have expressed interest in moving towards a petroeuro system," he said. And it isn’t entirely implausible that China, which is "the world’s second largest holder of US currency reserves," might eventually follow suit.

Although China, as a major exporter of goods to the US, has a vested interest in helping shore up the American economy and has even linked its own currency, the yuan, to the dollar, it has also become increasingly dependent on Iranian oil and gas.

"Barring a US attack, it appears imminent that Iran’s euro-dominated oil bourse will open in March, 2006," Miller and Vogler continued. "Logically, the most appropriate US strategy is compromise with the EU and OPEC towards a dual-currency system for international oil trades."

But you won’t hear any discussion of that alternative on the six o’clock evening news.

10) Mountaintop removal threatens ecosystem and economy

On August 15, environmental activists created a human blockade by locking themselves to drilling equipment, obstructing the National Coal Corp.’s access to a strip mine in the Appalachian mountains 40 miles north of Knoxville.

Under contention is a technique wherein entire mountaintops are removed using explosives to access the coal underneath — a practice that is nothing short of devastating for the local ecosystem, but which could become much more widespread.

As it stands, 93 new coal plants are in the works nationwide, according to Project Censored’s findings. "Areas incredibly rich in biodiversity are being turned into the biological equivalent of parking lots," wrote John Conner of the Katùah branch of Earth First! — which has been throwing all its energy into direct-action campaigns to block the project — in Censored 2006. "It is the final solution for 200-million-year-old mountains."

Camille T. Taiara is a staff reporter for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.