http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=21206
The year's 10 most underreported stories
WND's 'Operation Spike' pinpoints major events media ignored
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By David Kupelian
� 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
Editor's note: The following look at the past year's top 10 most "spiked"
stories is a short version of the comprehensive 5,000-word cover story in
the January 2001 edition of WorldNet Magazine, WND's monthly print
publication. Readers are invited to subscribe to WorldNet by visiting WND's
online store.
At the close of each year, most news organizations present their
retrospective replays of what they consider to have been the top news
stories in the previous 12 months. However, the editors of WorldNetDaily
have always found it more newsworthy to publish a year-end compilation of
the most important unreported or underreported news events of the year � to
bring forth perhaps for one last time major news stories that were
undeservedly "spiked" by the establishment press.
WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah has sponsored "Operation Spike" every year
since 1988, and since he founded WorldNetDaily in May 1997, he has continued
the annual tradition. Beginning last year and continuing this season, WND
has invited its readers to join in and submit what they considered the most
underreported stories of 2000 in the site's Operation Spike forum.
Here, with our readers' help, are WorldNetDaily editors' picks for the 10
most underreported stories of the past year.
VOTER FRAUD
Hands down, the biggest � and most underreported � story of 2000 was voter
fraud.
As WorldNetDaily Editor Joseph Farah wrote in "Voter fraud epidemic," "Voter
fraud is epidemic throughout the country. From Miami to L.A., elections have
been won and lost because of illegal voter registration and phony ballot
counts. No wonder fewer and fewer people are bothering to vote. What's the
point? Elections are being rigged. The fix is in. The sanctity of the
American electoral system is not under attack, it is under siege."
An exclusive WND investigation revealed that President Bill Clinton and the
California Democratic Party conspired to mail non-citizens and non-eligible
voters bogus "Voter Identification Cards" to make it easier for them to cast
ballots.
In Florida, Haitian voters were intimidated and coerced by Gore supporters
to vote for the Democratic candidate.
In Wisconsin, the votes of homeless people were purchased for packs of
cigarettes.
In some predominantly Democratic precincts in Texas, 125 percent of
registered voters cast ballots.
But perhaps the most deeply disturbing of all voter fraud stories to emerge
during the election season centered on the military. Reports surfaced that
entire units of U.S. servicemen overseas were denied absentee ballots,
preventing them from voting for their next commander-in-chief.
WorldNetDaily's Jon Dougherty was the preeminent reporter nationally on this
issue, and was first to sound the alarm, even before the election ("Military
missing absentee ballots"), that a significant number of America's military
service personnel were not going to be able to vote in the closest � and by
many accounts the most important � election in memory.
CLINTON, GORE COMPLICITY IN OIL PRICE-HIKES
One of the giant stories of the year, by any news organization's yardstick,
was the unprecedented run-up in oil prices. All but unreported, however,
were some of the hidden, but very real, reasons for the huge increases.
WorldNetDaily was virtually alone among the news media in reporting how the
Clinton administration clearly contributed to the dramatic increase in oil
prices. "Contradictory and self-serving policies," reported Ken Timmerman in
November, "led the Clinton-Gore administration to cause the current
skyrocketing oil prices, say Middle East and petroleum industry analysts."
The former Time magazine correspondent showed how, "by interfering in the
oil markets in 1998 when prices were perceived by some to be too low, the
administration put into motion the huge current run-up of prices, according
to Matthew Simmons, who has tracked oil prices for 30 years as the head of a
Houston-based investment bank, Simmons & Co. International.�
Another WorldNetDaily report spotlighting Clinton's and Gore's complicity in
raising oil prices proved to be a blockbuster � featured and discussed for
several consecutive days on the Rush Limbaugh show. In that story, Clinton
approves oil-price hikes, WND disclosed: "Oil ministers from OPEC nations
have quietly told national security advisers on Capitol Hill that the oil
production cutbacks -- and resulting price increases -- are being
implemented at the request of the Clinton administration on behalf of
Russia, Indonesia, Mexico and Iran.
"Russia, Mexico and Indonesia are reported to be directing their increased
oil profits toward paying back overdue Western loans," the article revealed.
"According to one government defense adviser, the windfall profits are part
of a larger scheme to use the American public to pay off failed and corrupt
investment schemes in the three countries."
THE REAL IMPACT OF CLINTON LAND GRABS
Roads across public lands in national forests are being quietly closed to
vehicles, horses, and even hikers. "Human exclusion zones" is the official
term. People are losing their homes and livelihoods with scarcely a notice
by the mass media. Entire industries -- cattle grazing, timber cutting,
mining -- are being shut down in the name of protecting the environment from
any use by human beings, including recreation.
In 1996, President Clinton used the 1906 Antiquities Act to create the
designation of Utah's 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument. Although no more of these controversial monument designations were
made for the next several years, beginning last January -- toward the very
end of his second term as president -- Clinton began designating more
monuments in rapid succession: 10 new monuments in all in 2000.
Although all the monuments are already public land, inside each monument
there are "inholdings" � private property, state parks, game reserves or
other non-federally owned parcels � that will all be bought eventually by
the federal government.
But as reported by WND's Sarah Foster, the really untold story in all of
this is the cost to the American public in loss of access to "their" lands.
Restrictions are already kicking in at Escalante, since its designation is
now four years old: Roads are being closed to the public, and the government
wants to close the land off to all off-road use. With no roads and no
off-road use, essentially access will be closed to humans. Property-rights
advocates see this as a clear harbinger of what will happen to other
monuments in the future.
GORE'S CORRUPT TENNESSEE ACTIVITIES
Throughout this year's tense, near-radioactive presidential campaign season,
most of the establishment news media gave Gore a free pass when it came to
his role as No. 2 man in the most scandal-plagued administration in American
history. His illegal campaign fundraising, his lying to the FBI, his secret
arms deal with the Russians � all were given little attention and even less
weight.
To fill this deficit, between early September and Election Day, Nov. 7,
2000, WorldNetDaily published an exhaustive series of investigative reports
by native Tennessee reporters Charles Thompson and Tony Hays on Gore and his
Tennessee past -- including his vast connections to Soviet operative Armand
Hammer, alleged interference with various Tennessee criminal investigations
involving family and friends, and even documented reports of Gore, the
environmental champion, being a notorious polluter in his home state.
As a result of these reports, claim radio, newspaper and law enforcement
representatives in Tennessee, Gore lost his home state and its 11 electoral
votes -- and thus lost the presidency.
MISSING WHITE HOUSE E-MAILS
What is possibly one of the more expansive scandals of the Clinton administr
ation -- involving hundreds of thousands of missing White House e-mail
documents under subpoena -- was all but ignored by most of the media during
2000. WorldNetDaily's Washington Bureau Chief Paul Sperry first reported
that the stash of unrecorded White House e-mails was as high as 1 million,
and includes messages from the Democratic National Committee during the 1996
Clinton-Gore campaign. In addition, Sperry broke the story of how the
supposedly independent contractor hired to "restore" White House e-mail
records employs two senior Clinton officials.
Sperry also first reported that the contractor that previously handled White
House e-mail operations hotly disputed claims that it caused a computer
"error" that led to a two-year hole in records of e-mail sent to West Wing
officials. (Firm won't take hit for 'Project X' fiasco)
As with most of the rest of the Clinton-Gore administration scandals, both
the president and the vice president emerged essentially untouched by the
massive disappearance of vital documentation under subpoena by both Congress
and the special prosecutor's office.
CHINA'S ANIMOSITY TOWARD THE UNITED STATES
Based on the Clinton administration's unprecedented coziness with the
communist Chinese � illegal donations; technology transfers, sales and
thefts; "permanent normal trade relations" status; training China's military
in the United States; Clinton's own statement that "the Chinese will � run
[the Panama Canal] in a competent and able and fair manner" � China should
be America's best friend. And during 2000, most "mainstream" media coverage
of the world's most populous country has conveyed this impression.
In reality, China has threatened unambiguously and repeatedly to bomb the
United States if the U.S. interferes in the mainland's relentless campaign
to conquer Taiwan. In a January 1996 meeting, Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai,
deputy chief of China's general staff, told former Assistant Secretary of
Defense Charles W. Freeman, Jr., "In the 1950s, you three times threatened
nuclear strikes on China, and you could do that because we couldn't hit
back. Now we can. So you are not going to threaten us again because, in the
end, you care a lot more about Los Angeles than Taipei."
"China is neither Iraq nor Yugoslavia, but a very special country,"
reiterated a recent editorial in the People's Liberation Army official
newspaper. It warned that U.S. intervention in a conflict between China and
Taiwan would result in "serious damage" to the United States, reminding
readers that the PRC "is a country that has certain abilities of launching
strategic counterattack and the capacity of launching a long-distance
strike" -- a scarcely-veiled allusion to a nuclear attack.
According to long-time China expert Steven Mosher, in an October interview
with WND's Geoff Metcalf: Chinese President Jiang Zemin said to his central
military commission, the leading generals in the People's Liberation Army,
air force and navy, that they should "... prepare for war with the United
States by the year 2008."
SINO-RUSSO MILITARY ALLIANCE
A development closely related to communist China's current relationship with
the United States � it regards America as its No. 1 enemy � is China's newly
developing military alliance with Russia.
China is modernizing its military, but not only with help from the United
States. It is also importing advanced weaponry from Russia. In December
1999, Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin signed a strategic
cooperation agreement in Beijing that called for an additional $20 billion
of Russian arms transfers to the People's Republic of China by 2004. The
agreement also doubled the number of Russian military technicians and
nuclear experts working in China, from an estimated 4,000 today to nearly
9,000. Ken Timmerman reports, "Russia's Cold War arsenal is being
transferred lock stock and barrel to China."
"There is not a single Russian weapon, not a single Russian military
technology, that is off-limits to China," says Russian researcher Alexander
Nemets.
Indeed, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 through
early 1999, China purchased at least $6.5 billion in weapons from Moscow,
according to official Russian statistics. But according to Nemets, "the
actual figure is probably two to three times higher."
BORDER WARS ON THE U.S.-MEXICO BOUNDARY
Shortly after 10 p.m. local time on March 14, "two Mexican army Humvees
carrying about 16 armed soldiers drove across the international boundary and
into the United States near Santa Teresa, New Mexico." There the vehicles
pursued a well-marked Border Patrol vehicle (complete with decals and
emergency lights flashing) over a mile into the United States.
The lead Mexican army vehicle, the Border Patrol council said, contained
nine soldiers "armed with seven automatic assault rifles, one submachine
gun, and two .45 caliber pistols," and was eventually apprehended by other
Border Patrol units. The second Humvee, however, "pursued a Border Patrol
agent on horseback and fired a shot at him. The soldiers then disembarked
their vehicle, fired upon one more Border Patrol agent and chased another
agent before fleeing [back] to Mexico in their vehicle."
Though the incident was "the most serious to date," the council said, "it is
but one of hundreds of incursions that have been reported over the past
several years," and it has led union officials to call on Congress and the
Clinton administration to deal with it.
Although WorldNetDaily's Jon Dougherty filed 11 such news reports on the
escalating friction along the vast U.S.-Mexican border, the seemingly
important story attracted little other national press coverage.
SECURITY MELTDOWN DURING THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION
During the Clinton-Gore administration, serious security breaches have
spread to every federal agency dealing with national security secrets, from
the Commerce Department to Energy's nuclear weapons labs to the Pentagon to
the State Department -- and even to the CIA. But during 2000, the evidence
of the administration-wide problem hit its peak.
WND's Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry reported that career officials in
the U.S. intelligence community had admitted privately that "the Clinton
administration came in and ordered a wholesale stand-down of national
security safeguards in every agency that counts."
The holes just keep getting bigger, reported Sperry, and the espionage
apparently bolder.
At Los Alamos, somehow two shirt-pocket-sized hard-drives loaded with
top-secret nuclear bomb data just "vanished" from locked compartments inside
a locked bag in a vault with motion and infrared sensors in the supposedly
super-secret X Division where physicists with the highest security clearance
design nuclear weapons.
The bipartisan Cox Commission report documented how China's People's
Liberation Army stole from Los Alamos and other labs secrets to every
warhead deployed in the U.S. arsenal.
Taiwanese American scientist Wen Ho Lee, who downloaded Los Alamos nuclear
codes on 10 portable tapes, has traveled extensively throughout China in
recent years, giving lectures to People's Liberation Army nuclear
physicists.
In his book, "Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White
House," Gary Aldrich charged, among other things, that White House officials
were hiring hard-drug users and other security risks over agents' vetoes.
Many of them gained access to classified information. Although Aldrich's
book was a bestseller, the media managed to avoid dealing with the subject
in any but the most superficial way.
PALESTINIAN KIDS RAISED TO BE MARTYRS
In the now-explosive middle East crisis, most of the press has concentrated
on daily reporting of excessive Israeli force � real or perceived � used
against Palestinians attacking Israeli military and civilian targets in the
three-month-old "intifada" or uprising.
But what has barely been touched upon by most news organizations, from the
New York Times and CNN to National Public Radio and the BBC, is the fact
that many Palestinian children are being raised for the very purpose of
becoming "martyrs" in the "jihad" (or holy war) against Israel.
WorldNetDaily Managing Editor David Kupelian filed several reports
documenting the widespread recruitment of "martyrs" among Palestinian
children, who are promised heavenly rewards (or divine punishment if they
don't cooperate) for sacrificing their lives in the pursuit of their
leaders' nationalist and religious goal of expelling Jews from Israel, which
they consider their historic homeland of Palestine.
"Once again," said WorldNetDaily founder and Editor Joseph Farah, "the
establishment press has missed many of the most important stories of the
year � stories that are fundamental to really understanding current world
events. Although their reporting resources are vastly greater than those of
WorldNetDaily, we somehow manage to be there first and best with these sorts
of crucial stories, year after year. I think the reason is just that
WorldNetDaily recognizes what its job really is. I'm speaking of the
traditional role of a free press, which is to be a watchdog on government.
"WorldNetDaily still believes in approaching news reporting the
old-fashioned way -- by actually digging out the truth and reporting it
forthrightly," added Farah. "During 2001, readers once again can rely on
WorldNetDaily to investigate and tell the truly important stories that too
often are unreported, spun and spiked by the establishment media."
WorldNetDaily The year's 10 most underreported stories.url
