Some of the underreported stories of 2005.

They have a list of the over hyped ones as well. But these are the stories whose lack of coverage makes me want to grab a reporter by his ears and beat his head against the wall!

The United States is becoming a torture regime. It is no longer a secret that the US tortures prisoners. But numerous aspects of this abomination remain undercovered. The year was full of shocking revelations about how far the Bush administration has taken us into totalitarian atrocities: the NSA listening to and reading US citizens' foreign telephone calls and email without warrants; the Pentagon spying on peace groups; the rendition of prisoners to secret CIA detention centers in Eastern Europe; the testimony of former prisoners at Guantanamo and victims of rendition that they were brutally abused while in prison; more evidence that the US maintains secret detention centers around the world; the Guantanamo Bay hunger strikers; dozens of deaths of "war on terror" prisoners in US custody; the Graham Amendment, which voids habeas corpus for suspects in the "war on terror"and renders moot a Supreme Court challenge to Bush's military tribunal system; the Army's newly expanded list of permissible interrogation techniques; the evidence that the decision to employ torture began at the highest levels of the White House--the list goes on and on.

This should send a chill down the spine of every American!

Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar. This British report was squelched by the Official Secrets Act, but not before it caused a sensation around the world due to its detailed plausibility--except in the US, where corporate media dismissed the allegation out of hand.

I saw the media begin to pursue this story and then they just lost their nerve. Pussies!

Failures of Homeland Security: Hurricane Katrina, racism, and the gutting of FEMA. This was a huge story that, while briefly covered extensively by the US press, disappeared from the mix far too quickly and without enough analysis. And both the corruption of rebuilding contacts and the complete subsequent abandonment of New Orleans by the feds have received virtually no attention.

This president has built his whole reputaion on keeping us safe. And he isn't! The Department of Homeland Security is a joke!

The Downing Street Memos. Ignored for weeks by US media until the blogosphere buzz became simply too loud, these early revelations of "fixing the intelligence around the policy" have now gone down the memory hole again. But their content has been completely corroborated by subsequent revelations.

But this is the one that really burns my ass! This story should have been front page news on every single news outlet in the country. It got covered by Keith Olbermann and....uh...nobody else! I must have posted about his thing twenty times and so did many more of us, but nothing! Still pisses me off!