 “The Late Great USA,” which was criticized by President Bush at the conclusion of the SPP summit in Quebec |
WND staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi has been honored for his reporting on NAFTA Superhighways by Project Censored, a prestigious project on media accountability at Sonoma State University.
His work was listed at No. 9 on the 2008 list for “The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007.” The list soon will be published, and will replace the existing 2007 honors for 2006 publishing posted on the website now.
Corsi’s honor came just two days after President Bush ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists” anyone who would make the claim that the Bush administration was pursuing NAFTA Superhighways under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.
On Monday and Tuesday, Corsi reported on the third annual SPP summit in Montebello, Quebec, where he heard in person the press conference where Bush, along with Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, and Felipe Calderon, Mexico’s president, all ridiculed the idea that a hidden SPP agenda was aimed at creating a North American Union and building NAFTA Superhighways.
As WND reported during the SPP news conference, a Fox News reporter asked Bush if he would be willing to categorically deny that there is a plan to create a North American Union, or that there are plans to create NAFTA Superhighways.
“As you three leaders meet here, there are a growing number of people in each of your countries who have expressed concern about the Security and Prosperity Partnership. This is addressed to all three of you. Can you say today that this is not a prelude to a North American Union, similar to a European Union? Are there plans to build some kind of superhighway connecting all three countries? And do you believe all of these theories about a possible erosion of national identity stem from a lack of transparency from this partnership?” was the question, according to a White House transcript.
Corsi is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book, “The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada,” published by WND books.
Corsi’s central argument is that SPP is advancing a North American economic and political integration, following the path of the stealth methodology whereby Europe advanced over a 50-year period from a Coal and Steel Agreement under the Treaty of Rome 1957, to a full-fledged European Union regional government, with the euro established as a regional currency.
Instead of answering the question directly, Bush sidestepped, adopting the tactic that those who are arguing the European Union model of integrating nations into a larger continental union is being used in North America should be ridiculed.
He called it an old political scare tactic, to try to create a wild conspiracy and then demand that those who “are not engaged” prove it isn’t happening.
Bush claimed to be “amused” by what he considered a scare tactic.
“If you have been in politics as long as I have,” he told the international press attending the SPP press conference, “you get used to that kind of technique where you lay out a conspiracy and then force people to try to prove it doesn’t exist.”
Bush then tried to down-play the importance of the closed door SPP working group meetings, commenting that, “It’s quite comical, actually, when you realize the difference between reality and what some people are talking on TV about.”
Corsi told WND that learning of the award yesterday, he felt vindicated.
“It’s good to know that an established media watchdog like Project Censored can see through the political smoke-screens of professional politicians and the bias of the commercial media,” he said.
Corsi said he took being ridiculed by Bush in an international forum as “an honor, the type of abuse you expect to get when your writing hits too near the truth hidden beneath the political lies.”
“Bush can say all day long that there is no NAFTA Superhighway,” Corsi explained, “but maybe he ought to consult with his fellow 1,000,000 Texans who the Texas Department of Transportation plans to displace over the next 50 years as they build out the planned 4,000 miles of the four-football-field-wide car-truck-train-pipeline corridors … tearing up over half a million acres of valuable Texas farm land, ranch land, and homes.”
The article for which Corsi won the Project Censored award was published in June 2006 under the title, “Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Superhighway.”
Corsi also has written multiple WND reports citing government documents back to the origin of NAFTA that discuss superhighway trade corridors.
“It is ridiculous to think that the investment bankers plan to build the Trans-Texas Corridor to the border with Oklahoma, just to let it stop there,” Corsi told WND.
“What’s Oklahoma going to do, funnel the four-football-fields of traffic back onto I-35, or take the billions offered by foreign investment consortia to make sure their campaign coffers suffer no pain?”
Corsi has documented that the extension north of TTC-35 is already being hotly contested in Oklahoma.
He has also shown that the North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc. (NASCO), a trade association based in Dallas, has extended its I-35 “Super corridor” membership as far north as Minnesota.
He has also written that the Ports-to-Plains Corridor Coalition, a trade group based in Denver, has proposed to apply the Trans-Texas Corridor model along a rural route, extending from Laredo, Texas, through the panhandle of Oklahoma, to enter Denver near Limon, along Interstate 70.
Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored and a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, told WND that Corsi’s article will be published in a book entitled, “Censored 2007, Media in Action: The Top 25 Censored Stories.”
This yearbook will be published by Steven Stories Press in New York and translated into Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. The list of stories in the top 25 will be translated into dozens of languages and featured on hundreds of radio and TV shows.
“We focus on important stories that are ignored or censored by the commercial mainstream media,” Philips told WND.
Corsi has been invited to attend Project Censored’s Media Accountability Conference at Sonoma State University on Oct. 26-27, to participate in a panel on his paper and to receive his award.
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