E-Mail This Article to a Friend Outrageous and uncovered, continued

4) Surveillance society quietly moves in

It’s a well-known dirty trick in the halls of government: if you want to pass unpopular legislation that you know won’t stand up to scrutiny, just wait until the public isn’t looking. That’s precisely what the Bush administration did December 13, 2003, the day American troops captured Saddam Hussein.

Bush celebrated the occasion by privately signing into law the Intelligence Authorization Act — a controversial expansion of the PATRIOT Act that included items culled from the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003," a draft proposal that had been shelved due to public outcry after being leaked.

Specifically, the IAA allows the government to obtain an individual’s financial records without a court order. The law also makes it illegal for institutions to inform anyone that the government has requested those records, or that information has been shared with the authorities.

"The law also broadens the definition of ‘financial institution’ to include insurance companies, travel and real-estate agencies, stockbrokers, the US Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, airlines, car dealerships, and any other business ‘whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters’" warned Nikki Swartz in the Information Management Journal. According to Swartz, the definition is now so broad that it could plausibly be used to access even school transcripts or medical records.

(Note: Almost everything on the Project Censored list is well-sourced and, at the very least, plausible. But one of the sources for this story: "Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7," written by Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson, and published on http://www.capitolhillblue.com/, a Virginia Web site that’s been around since 1994, seems shaky.

Hampton and Thompson claim that the feds now monitor "virtually every financial transaction of every American," in real time and the Pentagon uses the information to launch investigations of "persons of interest" and as a basis for adding names to the Transportation Security Administration’s "no fly" lists.

The principal sources Hampton and Thompson base their story on seem to be an anonymous "security consultant who worked on the ... project" and an "Allen Banks" — someone identified simply as a "security expert," without any detail as to who he is or how he would be privy to such information.

Thompson, who is the site’s publisher, defended the accuracy of the story, saying that he’d spoken with "over 30 sources" — police, banks, credit-card agencies — and that he reached his conclusions based on those sources as well as on the fact that there were "too many coincidences."

"To some extent," he added, "it was a conclusion by me, looking at the links." Banks and other private industries had been instructed to e-mail data to the feds under TIA, and they continued sending data to the same places after TIA was killed because they never received orders to stop, Thompson said. His caveat: "If I had to go into court and prove this, there’s no way I could prove it.")

5) US uses tsunami to military advantage in Southeast Asia

President Bush initially offered an embarrassingly low $15 million in aid after the tsunami hit the Indian Ocean last December. But more important, Project Censored found that the US government exploited the catastrophe to its own strategic advantage.

Establishing a stronger military presence in the area could help the United States keep closer tabs on China. It could also fortify an important military launching ground and help consolidate control over potentially lucrative trade routes.

So "in the name of relief, the US revived the Utapao military base in Thailand it had used during the Vietnam War [and] reactivated its military cooperation agreements with Thailand and the Visiting Forces Agreement with the Philippines," veteran Indian journalist Rahul Bedi reported.

Last February, the State Department mended broken ties with the notoriously vicious and corrupt Indonesian military — although human-rights observers charged the military with withholding "food and other relief from civilians suspected of supporting the secessionist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement," Jim Lobe reported for the Inter Press Service.

6) The real oil-for-food scam

Last year, right-wingers in Congress began kicking up a fuss about how the United Nations had allegedly allowed Saddam Hussein to rake in $10 billion in illegal cash through the Oil for Food program. Headlines screamed scandal. New York Times columnist William Safire referred to the alleged UN con game as "the richest rip-off in world history."

But those who knew how the program had been set up and run — and under whose watch — were not swayed.

The initial accusations were based on a General Accounting Office report released in April 2004 and were later bolstered by a more detailed report commissioned by the CIA.

According to the GAO, Hussein smuggled $6 billion worth of oil out of Iraq — most of it through the Persian Gulf. Yet the UN fleet charged with intercepting any such smugglers was under direct command of American officers, and consisted overwhelmingly of US Navy ships. Most of the oil that left Iraq by land did so through Jordan and Turkey — with the approval of the United States. The first Bush administration informally exempted Jordan from the ban on purchasing Iraqi oil — an arrangement that provided Hussein with $4.4 billion over 10 years, according to the CIA’s own findings.

Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the first six years of economic sanctions against the country, unearthed yet another scam: The United States allegedly allowed an oil company run by Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov’s sister to purchase cheap oil from Iraq and resell it to US companies at market value — purportedly earning Hussein "hundreds of millions" more.

"It has been estimated that 80 percent of the oil illegally smuggled out of Iraq under ‘oil for food’ ended up in the United States," Ritter wrote in the UK Independent.