http://www.fantasylandmedia.org
Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want to keep from the public eye.
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Guardian UK:
"A United Nations investigator probing discrimination against Native Americans has called on the US government to return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes as a step toward combating continuing and systemic racial discrimination.
James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.
Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and 'numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination'."
-->Why The NY Times didn't cover this story goes back to the role our flagship newspaper plays in promoting America's image to the public. Imagine if this had occurred in North Korea or Iran? Much of the US media has lost the distinction between honest reporting and propaganda.
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The NY Times:
"The government does a poor job of estimating what it will cost to tear down a nuclear reactor, Congressional auditors say, and it may not be overseeing plant owners well enough to assure that they set aside enough money to do the job.
For a study it plans to issue on Monday, the Government Accountability Office scrutinized 12 of the nation’s 104 power reactors and found that for 5 of them, the decommissioning cost calculated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was 76 percent or less of what the reactor’s owner thought would be needed.
The most striking example was Indian Point 3 in Buchanan, N.Y., which could be forced to close by 2015 because of a licensing dispute. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimated the cost of decommissioning the reactor at $474.2 million, just 57 percent of the 'site-specific' estimate made by Entergy, the owner, which put the figure at $836.45 million.
-->The NY Times covered this story on its Green Blog, but not in print. Why not publish this story about collusion between the nuclear energy business and federal regulators? And why not explain the use of these low estimates in the selling of nuclear power to the American people?
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Guardian UK:
"The former chief US prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay has denounced the military trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks due to appear in court at Guantanamo on Saturday, as intended primarily to prevent the defendants from presenting evidence of torture.
Morris Davis, a former colonel who was chief prosecutor when Mohammed was brought to Guantanamo in 2006, said the military commissions will be badly discredited by the use of testimony obtained from waterboarding and other 'enhanced interrogation' techniques used on the accused men...
Davis, who resigned over the issue, wanted to see Barack Obama follow through on a commitment to move the trials to more open civilian courts but said that advocates of military tribunals prevailed in large part because the rules of evidence prevent the defendants from giving detailed descriptions of how they were tortured as well as other sensitive information such as details of the CIA's secret detention programme and the co-operation of foreign countries, such as Britain, in their capture and interrogations.
'The truth is the reason the apologists want a second-rate military commission option is because of what we did to the detainees, not because of what the detainees did to us,' he told the Guardian."
-->Why wouldn't this statement made by the former US prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay make it into the US media? Ever protective of America's image, The NY Times did not cover this story at all. Too bad, because it explains the reasoning behind the military tribunals in about three paragraphs.
