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 administration -- 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."
Editor's note: The preceding was excerpted from the January 2001 cover story of WorldNet Magazine, WND's monthly sister publication. Readers may subscribe to WorldNet at our online store.
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