Here are thirteen more important items on some vital
issues: the second consecutive stolen US presidential
election, the tragedy in Iraq, our economic
insecurity, the continuing struggle to get to the
truth about the Bush abomination’s pre-9/11 negligence
and post-9/11 incompetence and the Corporatist media’s
complicity with all of it…
Please read them and share them with others.
Moveon.org, www.moveon.org. is gathering names for an
important petition backing up the requests of six US
congressmen for a GAO investigation of the election.
Bob Fertik at www.democrats.com is doing a fantastic
job of compiling all the 2004 election theft news hour
by hour and day by day.
Robert and Sam Parry at www.consortiumnews.com have
written several very important articles about the
theft of the 2004 election.
Greg Palast, www.gregpalast.com, is also doing great
work!
Prof. Steven Freeman of Univ. of Pennsylvania has done
a stunning study on the exit polls in Bardoground
States, concluding that the odds on all of them being
wrong at once due to random error or other accidental
mishap is two hundred fifty million to one. It is
available in .pdf form from www.truthout.org and other
bastions of the Information Rebellion.
Please support the work of these brave and principled
Americans, and please refer others to their sites.
As Dunston Woods, LNS foreign correspondent says: “It
ain’t over until the fat cats are in sing sing.”
Colin Shea, The Freezer Box, www.zogby.com: I smell a
rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor
of the species Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty
bite from this pest four years ago and never quite
recovered. Symptoms of a long-term infection are
becoming distressingly apparent.
The first sign of the rat was on election night. The
jubilation of early exit polling had given way to
rising anxiety as states fell one by one to the Red
Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a
Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had
gathered. We had been hoping to go home to bed early,
confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a
flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and
Ohio.
By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly
sipping beers and watching as those two key states
seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson.
Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier
rushed in and handed us a printout.
"Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet
decisively. "Definitely. He's got both Florida and
Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry only needs one."
Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake
with the world a better place. Victory was at hand...
The facts as I see them now defy all logical
explanations save one--massive and systematic vote
fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004
presidential election as legitimate until these
discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained.
From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu
Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers
and assign accountability when it does not suit his
purposes. But this is one time when no American should
accept not getting a straight answer. Until then,
George Bush is still, and will remain, the ‘Accidental
President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and
shameful legacies will be that of seizing power
through two illegitimate elections conducted on his
brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental
corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy
the world has known. We must not permit this to happen
again.
www.redefeatbush.com: Check out these stunning results
from Palm Beach County:
Absentee Kerry: 58%
Absentee Bush: 42%
Absentee Total: 91,038
Kerry Absentee Margin: +16
Early Kerry: 72%
Early Bush: 28%
Early Total: 49,365
Kerry Early Voting Margin: +43
Election Day Kerry: 40%
Election Day Total: 404,666
Kerry Election Day Margin: -20
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive: Unless you're a
soldier or the loved one of a soldier, being a citizen
of the empire is a remote occupation.
As Bush and Rumsfeld launched their offensive into
Fallujah, the biggest urban assault conducted by the
U.S. military in almost four decades, the morning
shows focused instead on the Scott Peterson murder
trial.
Then throughout the week, the Peterson trial continued
to compete with the Fallujah assault, as though both
were of equal import.
Katie Couric and Matt Lauer should be ashamed of
themselves. By what standard is the Scott Peterson
trial news?
The news is that the Iraq occupation is falling apart.
There is violent resistance across much of the
country.
And any lingering hope that the U.S. is installing
democracy should be put to rest. Bush's puppet Iyad
Allawi has already invoked emergency powers, and the
Sunni clerics are calling for a boycott of January's
elections.
And the Today show wants us to focus on the Scott
Peterson trial?
Pam Zubeck, The Gazette: President Bush's willingness
"to take a lot more body bags" from the Iraqi war will
plunge the United States economy into a tailspin as
European nations further distance themselves from the
war with boycotts of American markets, a Pulitzer
Prize winning journalist predicted on Friday.
"I just see very hard times ahead," Seymour Hersh,
who broke the Abu Ghraib prison detainee scandal story
last spring in The New Yorker magazine, said in a
keynote address to about 100 people attending the
Military Reporters and Editors conference…
He predicted Europe will find new ways to "gang up on
us." Key NATO nations have resisted involvement in the
war after the United Nations refused to sanction the
military assault that began in March 2003. Some
countries that did cooperate have since pulled out.
"You're going to see American profits disappear.
American corporations are going to be in big trouble.
It's going to be a mantra not to buy American," he
said. "All our major manufacturers are reporting major
slowdowns in Europe. You're going to see the dollar
disappear. Economically, this country is going to be
in trouble and he's going to continue to fight this
war."
Sam Parry, www.consortiumnews.com: Having worked in
mainstream Washington journalism for much of the last
quarter century, however, I certainly understood – and
even sympathized – with the pressures that reporters
and editors face.
Especially when challenging Republicans and
conservatives, journalists can expect to be accused of
lacking patriotism, undermining national unity or
having a “liberal bias.” Beyond those ideological
assaults, there's also the formidable pressure that
the Bush family’s gold-plated connections can bring
down on a journalist’s head.
Yet, while it may be understandable for national
journalists to go easy on the Bushes, that pattern
over the years has eroded public confidence in the
media’s fairness and integrity. Millions of Americans
now flatly don’t trust the national news media to tell
the truth when the Bushes are involved.
That perception, in turn, has led rank-and-file
Americans to step forward via Web sites to lend
whatever knowledge and expertise they have to
investigate this powerful family. As amateurs, these
Americans are sure to make mistakes or jump to
conclusions that aren’t well supported by facts.
But the big media has no moral foundation upon which
to criticize these shortcomings by common citizens. If
the professional journalists focused more on doing
their jobs, rather than protecting their careers, the
American people would be far better served.
Dana Priest and Walter Pincus, Washington Post: The
deputy director of the CIA resigned yesterday after a
series of confrontations over the past week between
senior operations officials and CIA Director Porter J.
Goss's new chief of staff that have left the agency in
turmoil, according to several current and former CIA
officials.
John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year CIA veteran who was
acting director for two months this summer until Goss
took over, resigned after warning Goss that his top
aide, former Capitol Hill staff member Patrick Murray,
was treating senior officials disrespectfully and
risked widespread resignations, the officials said.
Yesterday, the agency official who oversees foreign
operations, Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R.
Kappes, tendered his resignation after a confrontation
with Murray. Goss and the White House pleaded with
Kappes to reconsider and he agreed to delay his
decision until Monday, the officials said.
Several other senior clandestine service officers are
threatening to leave, current and former agency
officials said.
The disruption comes as the CIA is trying to stay
abreast of a worldwide terrorist threat from al Qaeda,
a growing insurgency in Iraq, the return of the
Taliban in Afghanistan and congressional proposals to
reorganize the intelligence agencies. The agency also
has been criticized for not preventing the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks and not accurately assessing Saddam
Hussein's ability to produce weapons of mass
destruction.
Greg Palast, www.gregpalast.com: It was heartening
that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the
political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention
of the color of votes not counted in America. "Don't
tell us that in the strongest democracy on earth a
million disenfranchised African Americans is the best
we can do." The Senator promised the NAACP convention,
"This November, we're going to make sure that every
single vote is counted."
But this week, Kerry became the first presidential
candidate in history to break a campaign promise after
losing an election. The Senator waited less than 24
hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio
voters still waiting for their provisional and
chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.
While disappointing, I can understand the cold
calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count
the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have to
demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell,
armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat,
would undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or
restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry's team
would also, as one state attorney general pointed out
to me, have to litigate each and every rejected
provisional ballot in court. This would entail
locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to
their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging
each with a holster full of regulations from the old
Jim Crow handbook.
Given the odds and the cost to his political career,
Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the
will to power of the Ohio Republican machine.
We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing
absentee ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen
tallies, in purges of legal voters from registries and
other games played in swing states. But why dwell on
these things? Our betters in the political and media
elite have told us to get over it, move on.
To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war.
As Ohio's politically ambitious Secretary of State
brags on his own website, "Last time I checked,
Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in
Congress."
Buzzflash News Alert, www.buzzflash.com: In "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Dr. Steven F. Freeman says:
"As much as we can say in social science that
something is impossible, it is impossible that the
discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts
in the three critical battleground states [Ohio,
Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could
have been due to chance or random error."
The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies
occurring by chance are 250,000,000 to one. 250
MILLION to ONE.
He concludes the paper with this:
"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature
conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll
discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one
that is the responsibility of the media, academia,
polling agencies, and the public to investigate."
Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters: In a statement, Scheuer
said the CIA had not forced him to resign, "but I have
concluded that there has not been adequate national
debate over the nature of the threat posed by Osama
bin Laden and the forces he leads and inspires, and
the nature and dimensions of intelligence reform
needed to address that threat."
He intends to speak to the media over the next
several weeks, including an appearance on the CBS show
"60 Minutes" on Sunday.
Scheuer's statement said senior leadership had
allowed the intelligence officers working against al
Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to be made scapegoats for
pre-Sept. 11 failures.
Scheuer was chief of the CIA Counterterrorist
Center's unit which focused on bin Laden from 1996 to
1999 and remained a CIA analyst after that.
"The Atlantic Monthly" in its December issue
published a letter sent by Scheuer to U.S.
congressional intelligence committees that said the
key pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures were mainly the
result of bad decisions by senior officials.
"While the 11 September attacks probably were
unstoppable, it was decisions by human beings -
featuring arrogance, bad judgment, disdain for
expertise, and bureaucratic cowardice - that made sure
the Intelligence Community did not operate optimally
to defend America," Scheuer said in the letter.
Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: Memo to the Washington
Post and the rest of the corporate-owned media: the
progressive Internet is bigger and more powerful than
you are when the truth is on our side - as it almost
always is.
How many times do we have to prove this before they
get it?
In the fall of 2002, the Bush administration and the
"liberal" media began pounding the drums for war in
Iraq. Progressives on the Internet exposed every Bush
claim as a lie, including Iraq's alleged WMD's - and
the American public's alleged support for war. (I
personally debated Bill O'Reilly on this point, and
kicked his ass before he threw me off his show.) In
the dead of winter, progressive organizers used the
Internet to mobilize millions for anti-war marches all
around the world. In fact, it was the growing
opposition to the war at home and abroad that forced
Bush to rush to war, because he knew the momentum -
and the truth - were on our side.
In early 2003, as the war began and the "rally around
the flag" effect pushed Bush's approval ratings into
the 70's, the "liberal" media gravely warned
Democratic candidates to support the Iraq War to be
"credible." But unknown candidate Howard Dean used the
Internet to enlist 640,000 devoted supporters, raise
$50 million, and surge to the head of the Democratic
field - on an anti-war platform. (It's all explained
in Joe Trippi's excellent book, The Revolution Will
Not be Televised.)
In early 2004, Bush planned to raise an unprecedented
$200 million to blow the Democratic nominee out of the
water, starting with an immediate vicious attack on
the winner of the winter primaries. But John Kerry,
the Democratic Party, and Moveon all raised tens of
millions over the Internet, and fought the ruthless
Bush campaign to a draw.
In early October, Sinclair Broadcasting Group
announced plans to force its swing-state affiliates to
broadcast the lie-filled Kerry-bashing film "Stolen
Honor." Within days, progressive activists persuaded
advertisers and investors to rebel, and Sinclair beat
a speedy retreat.
On Election Day, progressive hopes soared as
pre-election polls and mid-day exit polls all pointed
to a Kerry victory. But as the evening dragged on, the
returns from Florida and Ohio showed the election
going to Bush. The next morning, while progressives
struggled to understand the unlikely numbers, Kerry
offered a quick and gracious concession. The Busheviks
immediately celebrated their "triumph" and proclaimed
their imaginary "mandate" for privatizing Social
Security, eliminating the progressive income tax, and
outlawing abortion.
But on the Internet, progressives said: wait a minute.
We started with the exit polls. We could understand
some inaccuracies - but why did they all favor Bush by
several points? The media's official explanation -
that Democrats were more likely to talk to exit
pollsters - was ludicrous on its face...
Then we heard from the voters...
Then we looked at the vote-counting machines...
Then we pored over the county-by-county election
returns...
This conclusion was reached by individual voters, not
by the Kerry campaign or the Democrats. In fact, they
were entirely MIA, with the exception of three
Congressmen who asked the GAO for a study of voting
problems - a study that would take months to complete
and thus have no impact on this election.
Indeed, if any one person played a pivotal role, it
was MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who noticed the most
significant problems and did what journalists are
supposed to do - try to get the facts. Another crucial
person was Air America Radio's Randi Rhodes, who
broadcast Internet findings to her passionate and
growing radio audience.
Sam Parry, www.consortiumnews.com: The Washington Post
and the big media have spoken: Questions about Nov. 2
voting irregularities and George W. Bush’s unusual
vote tallies are just the ravings of Internet
conspiracy theorists.
In a Nov. 11 story on A2, the Post gave the back of
its hand to our story about Bush’s statistically
improbable vote totals in Florida and elsewhere. While
agreeing with our analysis that Bush pulled off the
difficult task of winning more votes in Florida than
the number of registered Republicans, the Post accuses
us of overlooking the obvious explanation that many
independents, “Dixiecrats” and other Democrats voted
for Bush.
Mocking us as “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy
theorists,” Post reporters Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan
Keating signaled their determination to put questions
about Bush’s victory outside the bounds of responsible
debate. Yet, if they hadn’t been so set in this
agenda, they might have avoided sloppy mistakes and
untrue assertions...
It also should be the job of journalists to probe
questions as significant as the integrity of the U.S.
voting system, not to simply belittle those who raise
legitimate questions. The fact that Internet journals
and blogs are doing more to examine these concerns
than wealthy news organizations like the Washington
Post is another indictment of the nation’s mainstream
press.
Nat Parry, www.consortiumnews.com: I helped coordinate
the mission, and on Election Day, I escorted about 10
observers to polling stations in Northern Virginia.
While the observers were strictly neutral during the
election, it was clear that many of them worried about
four more years of Bush.
Besides Bush’s policies, some of the parliamentarians
felt that questionable U.S. election tactics,
including voter intimidation, undermined the image of
popular rule in the nation that had long been
considered the world’s leading democracy.
One Albanian told me that she had struggled for
democracy for much of her life and suffered beatings
by state security forces for speaking out for freedom.
During those dark days, the United States had been the
brightest beacon of hope, inspiring activists to keep
fighting, she said.
But now, in the United States, she was learning about
voter intimidation and other irregularities during a
briefing at the national call center of the Election
Protection Coalition in Arlington, Virginia.
Her voice shook as she recounted reports of black
voters being challenged by Republican lawyers at
polling places, of minorities asked for two forms of
identification when only one was needed, of polling
places moved to police stations in minority precincts,
of hundreds of electronic voting malfunctions, and of
polling stations lacking enough provisional ballots.
The Albanian parliamentarian, flipping through page
after page of her notes, was stunned by the bigger
picture of disenfranchisement aimed at minority
voters. “How could this happen here?” she asked me.
“How could this happen in America?”
Sam Parry, www.consortiumnews.com: George W. Bush’s
vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida,
are so statistically stunning that they border on the
unbelievable.
While it’s extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote
total that exceeds his party’s registration in any
voting jurisdiction – because of non-voters – Bush
racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47
out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those
counties, his vote total more than doubled the number
of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush
more than tripled the number.
Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than
registered Republicans...
Similar surprising jumps in Bush’s vote tallies across
the country – especially when matched against national
exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48
percent – have fed suspicion among rank-and-file
Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote,
possibly through systematic computer hacking.
Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election
Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in
six battleground states – Florida, Ohio, New Mexico,
Colorado, Nevada and Iowa – was virtually
inconceivable.
“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So
reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as
they leave the polling places that they are used as
guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third
World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is
unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It
boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that
incompetent and invites speculation that more than
honest error was at play here."
http://www.zogby.com/soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10398
I Smell a Rat
I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and
all-too-familiar odor of the species Republicanus
floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest four
years ago and never quite recovered. Symptoms of a
long-term infection are becoming distressingly
apparent.
The first sign of the rat was on election night. The
jubilation of early exit polling had given way to
rising anxiety as states fell one by one to the Red
Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a
Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had
gathered. We had been hoping to go home to bed early,
confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a
flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and
Ohio.
By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly
sipping beers and watching as those two key states
seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson.
Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier
rushed in and handed us a printout.
"Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet
decisively. "Definitely. He's got both Florida and
Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry only needs one."
Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake
with the world a better place. Victory was at hand.
The morning told a different story, of course. No
Florida victory for Kerry--Bush had a decisive margin
of nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was not even close
enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be
counted. The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had
four more years and a powerful mandate. Onward
Christian soldiers--next stop, Tehran.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics
I work with statistics and polling data every day.
Something rubbed me the wrong way. I checked the exit
polls for Florida--all wrong. CNN's results indicated
a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and
independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.
Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very
imprecision is itself quantifiable and follows regular
patterns. Differences between actual results and those
expected from polling data must be explainable by
identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust
enough. With almost 3.000 respondents in Florida
alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.
The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy
Dopp, who conducted a simple analysis of voter
registrations by party in Florida and compared them to
presidential vote results. Basically she multiplied
the total votes cast in a county by the percentage of
voters registered Republican: this gave an expected
Republican vote. She then compared this to the actual
result.
Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for
Bush far in excess of what one would expect based on
the share of Republican registrations in that county.
They key phrase is "certain counties"--there is
extraordinary variance between individual counties.
Most counties fall more or less in line with what one
would expect based on the share of Republican
registrations, but some differ wildly.
How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp found
one over-riding factor: whether the county used
electronic touch-screen voting, or paper ballots which
were optically scanned into a computer. All of those
with touch-screen voting had results relatively in
line with her expected results, while all of those
with extreme variance were in counties with optical
scanning.
The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are
scanned; results are fed into precinct computers;
these are sent to a county-wide database, whose
results are fed into the statewide electoral totals.
At any point after physical ballots become databases,
the system is vulnerable to external hackers.
It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed
simplistic. I re-ran the results using CNN's exit
polling data. In each county, I took the number of
registrations and assigned correctional factors based
on the CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans,
Democrats, and independents. I then used the vote
shares from the polls to predict a likely number of
Republican votes per county. I compared this
‘expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican
vote.
The results are shocking. Overall, Bush received 2%
fewer votes in counties with electronic touch-screen
voting than expected. In counties with optical
scanning, he received 16% more. This 16% would not be
strange if it were spread across counties more or less
evenly. It is not. In 11 different counties, the
‘actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than the
expected vote. 13 counties had Bush vote tallies
50--100% higher than expected. In one county where 88%
of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly
two thirds of the vote--three times more than
predicted by my model.
Again, polling can be wrong. It is difficult to
believe it can be that wrong. Fortunately, however, we
can test how wrong it would have to be to give the
‘actual' result.
I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong
CNN would have to have been to explain the election
result. In the first, I assumed they had been wildly
off the mark in the turnout figures--i.e. far more
Republicans and independents had come out than
Democrats. In the second I assumed the voting shares
were completely wrong, and that the Republicans had
been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat
base.
In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans
and independents voted, and the remaining ballots were
cast by Democrats. This explains the result in
counties with optical scanning to within 5%. However,
in this scenario Democratic turnout would have been
only 51% in the optical scanning counties--barely
exceeding half of Republican turnout. It also does not
solve the enormous problems in individual counties. 7
counties in this scenario still have actual vote
tallies for Bush that are at least 100% higher than
predicted by the model--an extremely unlikely result.
In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had
actually got 100% of the vote from Republicans and 50%
from independents (versus CNN polling results which
were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough
votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left
the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots
cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted
for Bush). If this did not explain the result, I
calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for
Bush.
In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result
and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted
14% of Democratic ballots--not an unreasonable
assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more
than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have
defected to Bush to account for the county result--in
four counties, at least 70% would have been required.
These results are absurdly unlikely.
The second rat
A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus
cuyahogus, has been found in Ohio. Before the
election, I wrote snide letters to a state legislator
for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports,
was preparing an army of enforcers to keep ‘suspect'
(read: minority) voters away from the polls. One of
his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to
the effect that they had no intention of trying to
suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to
encourage people to vote.
They did their job too well. According to the official
statistics for Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts
had voter turnout well above the national average: in
fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered voters,
and in several cases well above the total number of
people who have lived in the precinct in the last
century or so.
In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters
were registered in the county. According to county
regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the
precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these
thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted
than are registered to vote -- this out of a total of
251.946 registrations. These are not marginal
differences--this is a 39% over-vote. In some
precincts the over-vote was well over 100%. One
precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000
ballots. As one astute observer noted, it's the
ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes.
Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be
surprised.
What to do?
This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either the
raw data from two critical battleground states is
completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly
awry in our electoral system--again. Like many
Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of
the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000. But
at the same time, I was convinced of one thing: we
must let the system work, and accept its result, no
matter how unjust it might appear.
With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in
the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its
position: that it would recognize its fragile mandate
for what it was, respect the will of the majority of
people who voted against them, and move to build
consensus wherever possible and effect change
cautiously when needed. Above all, we believed that
both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the
over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity
of the electoral system and healing the bruised faith
of both constituencies.
This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the
nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division.
Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public
interest have been the hallmark of his Administration.
I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to
place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their
proper context. For the GOP to claim now that we must
take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly
suspicious results in a hard-fought and
extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It
does not even merit discussion.
The facts as I see them now defy all logical
explanations save one--massive and systematic vote
fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004
presidential election as legitimate until these
discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained.
From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu
Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers
and assign accountability when it does not suit his
purposes. But this is one time when no American should
accept not getting a straight answer. Until then,
George Bush is still, and will remain, the ‘Accidental
President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and
shameful legacies will be that of seizing power
through two illegitimate elections conducted on his
brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental
corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy
the world has known. We must not permit this to happen
again.
(11/12/2004)
- By Colin Shea, The Freezer Box
http://www.redefeatbush.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=293
Check out these stunning results from Palm Beach
County:
Absentee Kerry: 58%
Absentee Bush: 42%
Absentee Total: 91,038
Kerry Absentee Margin: +16
Early Kerry: 72%
Early Bush: 28%
Early Total: 49,365
Kerry Early Voting Margin: +43
Election Day Kerry: 40%
Election Day Total: 404,666
Kerry Election Day Margin: -20
If a similar breakdown were available from other
Florida counties would it show a similar result? Is
there any possible legitimate explanation for this
outcome? We do not find the argument that Democrats
voted absentee or early voting and the Republicans
waited to vote on election day, because the facts of
organizational strength on the ground were precisely
the opposite of that. It was the Republicans who were
by far the better organized with their GOTV operation.
Don't believe it? Get the official Palm Beach County
election returns spreadsheet and see for yourself.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1112-23.htm
Published on Friday, November 12, 2004 by The
Progressive
Is the Scott Peterson Trial More Important than
Fallujah?
by Matthew Rothschild
Unless you're a soldier or the loved one of a soldier,
being a citizen of the empire is a remote occupation.
As Bush and Rumsfeld launched their offensive into
Fallujah, the biggest urban assault conducted by the
U.S. military in almost four decades, the morning
shows focused instead on the Scott Peterson murder
trial.
Then throughout the week, the Peterson trial continued
to compete with the Fallujah assault, as though both
were of equal import.
Katie Couric and Matt Lauer should be ashamed of
themselves. By what standard is the Scott Peterson
trial news?
Only by the standard of bread and circuses.
Rumsfeld himself was back into his entertaining mode
when he showed up at the Pentagon's press conference
on Monday, joking about how he had bit his tongue
during the whole Presidential campaign.
And he was blasé about the possibility of mass
civilian casualties in Fallujah, a city that used to
have 300,000 people and may still have as many as
50,000 to 100,000, with only 3,000 or 4,000
insurgents.
Rumsfeld said they're certainly wouldn't be a lot of
civilians killed, and then he added, "certainly not by
U.S. forces."
So, are the Iraqi troops going to do the slaughtering?
And anyway, how can Rumsfeld be so sure when the U.S.
military is bringing in the heavy artillery?
Already, innocent people are dying in Fallujah.
Already, U.S. soldiers are dying, at least 18, with
dozens more wounded.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon, back to counting scalps as it
did in Vietnam, claims to have killed 500 insurgents,
according to CNN.
But U.S. tanks can patrol every street of Fallujah and
still the United States will not win this war. Most of
the insurgents had fled the city before the assault,
and resistance is by no means localized to the city
limits of Fallujah.
The news is that the Iraq occupation is falling apart.
There is violent resistance across much of the
country.
And any lingering hope that the U.S. is installing
democracy should be put to rest. Bush's puppet Iyad
Allawi has already invoked emergency powers, and the
Sunni clerics are calling for a boycott of January's
elections.
And the Today show wants us to focus on the Scott
Peterson trial?
© 2004 The Progressive
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111404J.shtml
Journalist Predicts War in Iraq Will
Plunge U.S. Economy into Downturn
By Pam Zubeck
The Gazette
Friday 12 November 2004
Crystal City, Va. - President Bush's willingness
"to take a lot more body bags" from the Iraqi war will
plunge the United States economy into a tailspin as
European nations further distance themselves from the
war with boycotts of American markets, a Pulitzer
Prize winning journalist predicted on Friday.
"I just see very hard times ahead," Seymour Hersh,
who broke the Abu Ghraib prison detainee scandal story
last spring in The New Yorker magazine, said in a
keynote address to about 100 people attending the
Military Reporters and Editors conference.
Hersh, a legend in journalism circles since he
exposed the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during
the Vietnam War, earned the Pulitzer in 1969 for
international reporting. Last spring, he again grabbed
worldwide attention by reporting the abuse of Iraqi
war detainees who were threatened with unmuzzled dogs,
stripped naked and subjected to other forms of what
some believe was torture.
He said Bush's dismissal of opposition views on
the war and his insistence the United States push
ahead against an insurgency Hersh called "the war we
started" will have profound impact on the economy.
"This president believes in what he's doing. He is
prepared to take a lot more body bags," he said. "He
is going to fight this all the way. The bombing has
gone up exponentially ... How are we going to end this
if the president's convinced that he has to see this
through?"
He predicted Europe will find new ways to "gang up
on us." Key NATO nations have resisted involvement in
the war after the United Nations refused to sanction
the military assault that began in March 2003. Some
countries that did cooperate have since pulled out.
"You're going to see American profits disappear.
American corporations are going to be in big trouble.
It's going to be a mantra not to buy American," he
said. "All our major manufacturers are reporting major
slowdowns in Europe. You're going to see the dollar
disappear. Economically, this country is going to be
in trouble and he's going to continue to fight this
war."
Hersh suggested the administration open talks with
the insurgency, which he described as the only form of
government existing in Iraq today, to end the war. He
acknowledged that's not likely, given Bush's stance.
Hence, he said, journalists' jobs are tougher
because government officials won't speak openly about
options, fearing retribution due to Bush's perspective
that opposition is equivalent to treason.
"There are people here in this town (Washington,
D.C.) at high levels and lower levels in the different
agencies that know how bad it is," he said. "Getting
them to talk is going to be the problem. I don't think
we can."
Hersh also predicted that White House Chief
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, nominated to replace John
Ashcroft after he announced his resignation as
attorney general on Tuesday, will face a tough
confirmation hearing.
He said military lawyers, who he said "went crazy"
in opposition to Gonzales' legal opinions involving
interrogation policies, will testify against him.
Those policies, some believe, led to the Abu Ghraib
scandal.
-------
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111304.html
Big Media, Some Nerve!
By Robert Parry
November 13, 2004
You might think that the major media that got suckered
by George W. Bush’s Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction
claims just last year would show some humility about
its own fallibility.
But, no, the elite U.S. news media is now criticizing
common citizens who have raised questions about voter
fraud in the Nov. 2 election. The New York Times has
joined the Washington Post and other major news
outlets in scouring the Internet to find and discredit
Americans who have expressed suspicions that Bush’s
victory might not have been entirely legitimate. The
New York Times' front-page story was entitled, “Vote
Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried.”
[Nov. 12, 2004.]
As odd as these attacks might seem to some, this
pattern of protecting the Bush family has a history.
It actually dates back a couple of decades, as the
major media has either averted its eyes or rallied to
the Bushes’ defense when the family has faced
suspicions of lying or corruption. [This pattern is
detailed in my new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of
the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]
That was the case in the 1980s when then-Vice
President George H.W. Bush was implicated in a string
of scandals, starting with the clandestine supplying
of Nicaraguan contra rebels.
When one of Oliver North’s secret supply planes was
shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986, the
surviving crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, correctly
named Vice President Bush's office and the CIA as
participants in the illegal operations. But for years,
the big media accepted Bush’s denials and dismissed
Hasenfus’s claims.
After the Nicaraguan contras were implicated in
cocaine trafficking – when Vice President Bush was in
charge of drug interdiction – again the New York Times
and other leading publications pooh-poohed the
stories. They even put down then-freshman Sen. John
Kerry when he investigated. However, the charges again
turned out to be true, as CIA inspector general
Frederick Hitz concluded in a little-noticed report a
decade later. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s
“Kerry’s Contra-Cocaine Chapter.”]
Arming Saddam
When George H.W. Bush was linked to the misguided
strategy of covertly arming Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in
the 1980s, again major U.S. news outlets – with the
exception of the Los Angeles Times – did little to dig
out the truth. Even today, after the junior George
Bush has sent more than 1,100 U.S. troops to their
deaths to clear Iraq of non-existent WMD stockpiles in
2003-04, the U.S. news media won’t tell the American
people about the senior George Bush’s role in helping
Hussein build a real WMD arsenal in the 1980s.
During the eight-year Clinton-Gore administration,
shoddy reporting from the New York Times and the
Washington Post – about President Clinton’s Whitewater
“scandal” and about Al Gore’s supposed exaggerations
in Campaign 2000 – helped pave the way for the Bush
Family’s restoration. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al
Gore vs. the Media” or “Protecting Bush-Cheney.”]
The big news organizations couldn’t even get the
stories straight about their own Florida recount in
2001. After examining all legally cast votes in
Florida and finding that Al Gore should have won that
crucial state – regardless of what chad standard was
used – the New York Times and other news outlets
buried the lead that Gore – not Bush – deserved to be
president.
Since these unofficial recount results were released
in November 2001 – after the Sept. 11 attacks – the
news organizations apparently thought it was best not
to clue in the American people to the fact that the
sitting president had really lost the election. So the
news organizations spun their stories to Bush’s
advantage by focusing on a hypothetical partial
recount that excluded so-called “overvotes,” where
voters both checked a box and wrote in the candidate’s
name, legal votes under Florida law.
After reading those slanted “Bush Won” stories, I
wrote an article for Consortiumnews.com noting that
the obvious lead should have been that Gore won. I
suggested that the news judgments of senior editors
may have been influenced by a desire to appear
patriotic at a time of national crisis. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Gore’s Victory.”]
The article had been on the Internet for only an hour
or two when I received an angry phone call from New
York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who
accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of
then Times executive editor Howell Raines. I was
surprised that the mighty New York Times would be so
sensitive about an Internet article that had
questioned its judgment.
Professional Pressures
Having worked in mainstream Washington journalism for
much of the last quarter century, however, I certainly
understood – and even sympathized – with the pressures
that reporters and editors face.
Especially when challenging Republicans and
conservatives, journalists can expect to be accused of
lacking patriotism, undermining national unity or
having a “liberal bias.” Beyond those ideological
assaults, there's also the formidable pressure that
the Bush family’s gold-plated connections can bring
down on a journalist’s head.
Yet, while it may be understandable for national
journalists to go easy on the Bushes, that pattern
over the years has eroded public confidence in the
media’s fairness and integrity. Millions of Americans
now flatly don’t trust the national news media to tell
the truth when the Bushes are involved.
That perception, in turn, has led rank-and-file
Americans to step forward via Web sites to lend
whatever knowledge and expertise they have to
investigate this powerful family. As amateurs, these
Americans are sure to make mistakes or jump to
conclusions that aren’t well supported by facts.
But the big media has no moral foundation upon which
to criticize these shortcomings by common citizens. If
the professional journalists focused more on doing
their jobs, rather than protecting their careers, the
American people would be far better served.
________________________________________
Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and
Newsweek, has written a new book, Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. It
can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also
available at Amazon.com.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46580-2004Nov12.html?nav=headlines
Deputy Chief Resigns From CIA
Agency Is Said to Be in Turmoil Under New Director
Goss
By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A01
The deputy director of the CIA resigned yesterday
after a series of confrontations over the past week
between senior operations officials and CIA Director
Porter J. Goss's new chief of staff that have left the
agency in turmoil, according to several current and
former CIA officials.
John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year CIA veteran who was
acting director for two months this summer until Goss
took over, resigned after warning Goss that his top
aide, former Capitol Hill staff member Patrick Murray,
was treating senior officials disrespectfully and
risked widespread resignations, the officials said.
Yesterday, the agency official who oversees foreign
operations, Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R.
Kappes, tendered his resignation after a confrontation
with Murray. Goss and the White House pleaded with
Kappes to reconsider and he agreed to delay his
decision until Monday, the officials said.
Several other senior clandestine service officers are
threatening to leave, current and former agency
officials said.
The disruption comes as the CIA is trying to stay
abreast of a worldwide terrorist threat from al Qaeda,
a growing insurgency in Iraq, the return of the
Taliban in Afghanistan and congressional proposals to
reorganize the intelligence agencies. The agency also
has been criticized for not preventing the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks and not accurately assessing Saddam
Hussein's ability to produce weapons of mass
destruction.
"It's the worst roiling I've ever heard of," said one
former senior official with knowledge of the events.
"There's confusion throughout the ranks and an
extraordinary loss of morale and incentive."
Current and retired senior managers have criticized
Goss, former chairman of the House intelligence
committee, for not interacting with senior managers
and for giving Murray too much authority over
day-to-day operations. Murray was Goss's chief of
staff on the intelligence committee.
Transitions between CIA directors are often unsettling
for career officers. Goss's arrival has been
especially tense because he brought with him four
former members of the intelligence committee known
widely on the Hill and within the agency for their
abrasive management style and for their criticism of
the agency's clandestine services in a committee
report.
Three are former mid-level CIA officials who left the
agency disgruntled, according to former colleagues.
The fourth, Murray, who also worked at the Justice
Department, has a reputation for being highly
partisan. When senior managers have gone to Goss to
complain about his staff actions, one CIA officer
said, Goss has told them: "Talk to my chief of staff.
I don't do personnel."
The overall effect, said one former senior CIA
official, who has kept up his contacts in the
Directorate of Operations, "is that Goss doesn't seem
engaged at all."
If other senior clandestine officers leave, said one
former officer who maintains contacts within the
Langley headquarters, "the middle-level people who
move up may eventually work out, but meanwhile the
level of experience and competence will go down."
The CIA declined to comment on the issues raised by
the current and former officials, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. A CIA spokesman said
McLaughlin's retirement "was a long-planned personal
decision taken at a natural transition point in the
administration and not connected to any other
factors."
McLaughlin issued a statement that said: "I have come
to the purely personal decision that it is time to
move on to other endeavors."
Goss, too, issued a statement, which applauded
McLaughlin's "outstanding service."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111304A.shtml
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=393&row=0
KERRY WON OHIO
JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004
Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes
vanished.
By Greg Palast
This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of
State, told his State Senate President, "The
possibility of a close election with punch cards as
the state’s primary voting device invites a
Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of
Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his
fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an
opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter
what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted
JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because
their votes won't be counted.
The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry
in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two
Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and
"provisional" ballots.
OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN
American democracy has a dark little secret. In a
typical presidential election, two million ballots are
simply chucked in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and
not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster
reveals something special about these votes left to
rot. In a careful county-by-county,
precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000
race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that
54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by
African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is
typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes
"disappeared" into the spoiled pile is approximately
one million. The other million in the no-count pit
come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor
white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.
Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the
Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's
vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically
insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the
White House.
Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are
"overvotes" -- too many punches in the cards, and
"undervotes." Here we find the hanging, dimpled and
"pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional punch
card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the
hole doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't
read these, but we humans, who know a hole when we see
one, have no problem reading these cards … if allowed
to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by
halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not,
as is generally believed, by halting a "recount."
Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000
federal investigators determined that Black voters'
ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters,
mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found
those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the
only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these
vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by
the ACLU.
Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU
found. The civil rights group's expert testimony
concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on forcing 73%
of its electorate to use punch card machines had an
"overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in
Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he
hopes to fix the machinery … sometime after George
Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's
Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican,
strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU
case until after the election.
Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio
simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling
station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have
checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they
would have gotten another card.
Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those
reading machines had been installed, almost all the
93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would
have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000
votes.
JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT
Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted
votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the
White House would have turned Democrat blue.
But that won't happen because of the peculiar way
provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not
counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the
provisional ballot was designed especially for voters
of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus
to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from
voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing
states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely
to be tallied.
Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only
by the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections
official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot
veto to Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, Blackwell.
Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large
proportion of provisional ballots won't be counted.
For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State
has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong"
precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same
President.
Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these
second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in
provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate)
was the direct result of the national Republican
strategy that targeted African-American precincts for
mass challenges on election day.
This is the first time in four decades that a
political party has systematically barred -- in this
case successfully -- hundreds of thousands of Black
voters from access to the voting booth. While
investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three
dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging"
lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and
addresses of voters they intended to block on any
pretext.
We found that every single address of the thousands on
these Republican hit lists was located in
Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty
and racist. It may also be a crime.
Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not
bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist
game was played by applying minor technical voting
requirements only to African-Americans. That year,
Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority
voters, even with a legal pretext, a criminal offence
under the Voting Rights Act.
But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their
legally questionable mass challenge to Black voters is
not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local
party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were
copied directly to the Republican National Committee's
chief of research and to the director of a state
campaign.
Many challenges center on changes of address. On one
Republican caging list, 50 addresses changed from
Jacksonville to overseas, African-American soldiers
shipped Over There.
You don't have to guess the preferences registered on
the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a
challenging rampage, while Democrats pledged to hold
to the tradition of letting voters vote.
Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid"
provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations,
like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are rigged to
knock out enough voters to keep Bush's skinny lead
alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican
officials -- late and improbably large purges of voter
rolls, rejection of registrations -- maximized the use
of provisional ballots which will never be counted.
For example, a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible
"felon" voter (and there's plenty in that category,
mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even
though they are wrongly identified.
KERRY BLACKS OUT
It was heartening that, during his campaign, John
Kerry broke the political omerta that seems to
prohibit public mention of the color of votes not
counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the
strongest democracy on earth a million disenfranchised
African Americans is the best we can do." The Senator
promised the NAACP convention, "This November, we're
going to make sure that every single vote is counted."
But this week, Kerry became the first presidential
candidate in history to break a campaign promise after
losing an election. The Senator waited less than 24
hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio
voters still waiting for their provisional and
chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.
While disappointing, I can understand the cold
calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count
the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have to
demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell,
armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat,
would undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or
restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry's team
would also, as one state attorney general pointed out
to me, have to litigate each and every rejected
provisional ballot in court. This would entail
locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to
their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging
each with a holster full of regulations from the old
Jim Crow handbook.
Given the odds and the cost to his political career,
Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the
will to power of the Ohio Republican machine.
We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing
absentee ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen
tallies, in purges of legal voters from registries and
other games played in swing states. But why dwell on
these things? Our betters in the political and media
elite have told us to get over it, move on.
To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war.
As Ohio's politically ambitious Secretary of State
brags on his own website, "Last time I checked,
Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in
Congress."
NEW MEXICO GOES KERRY - BUT WHO'S COUNTING?
Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico
where ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry
supporters) spoil at a rate five times that of white
voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional
ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like
candy" to Hispanic, not white, voters according to a
director of the Catholic Church's get-out-the-vote
drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the
votes … but that won't happen.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of The
Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2004).
Oliver Shykles and Matthew Pascarella of
GregPalast.com contributed to this article.
View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family
Fortunes," now available on DVD, at
http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm
To receive Greg’s investigative reports click here:
http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm
http://www.buzzflash.com/
November 11, 2004
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
BuzzFlash was forwarded a copy of a new research paper
(271k PDF) on the exit polls from the 2004 election.
In "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Dr. Steven
F. Freeman says:
"As much as we can say in social science that
something is impossible, it is impossible that the
discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts
in the three critical battleground states [Ohio,
Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could
have been due to chance or random error."
The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies
occurring by chance are 250,000,000 to one. 250
MILLION to ONE.
He concludes the paper with this:
"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature
conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll
discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one
that is the responsibility of the media, academia,
polling agencies, and the public to investigate."
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111304Z.shtml
CIA Critic of U.S. War on Terror Resigns
By Tabassum Zakaria
Reuters
Friday 12 November 2004
Washington - A CIA analyst who wrote a book that
criticized the U.S. war on terror has resigned from
the spy agency after it effectively banned him from
publicly discussing his views, his publicist said on
Thursday.
Michael Scheuer, whose book "Imperial Hubris: Why
the West Is Losing the War on Terror" was signed as
"anonymous" and published this summer, will resign
effective Friday after 22 years at the Central
Intelligence Agency.
In a statement, Scheuer said the CIA had not
forced him to resign, "but I have concluded that there
has not been adequate national debate over the nature
of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and the forces
he leads and inspires, and the nature and dimensions
of intelligence reform needed to address that threat."
He intends to speak to the media over the next
several weeks, including an appearance on the CBS show
"60 Minutes" on Sunday.
Scheuer's statement said senior leadership had
allowed the intelligence officers working against al
Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to be made scapegoats for
pre-Sept. 11 failures.
Scheuer was chief of the CIA Counterterrorist
Center's unit which focused on bin Laden from 1996 to
1999 and remained a CIA analyst after that.
"The Atlantic Monthly" in its December issue
published a letter sent by Scheuer to U.S.
congressional intelligence committees that said the
key pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures were mainly the
result of bad decisions by senior officials.
"While the 11 September attacks probably were
unstoppable, it was decisions by human beings -
featuring arrogance, bad judgment, disdain for
expertise, and bureaucratic cowardice - that made sure
the Intelligence Community did not operate optimally
to defend America," Scheuer said in the letter.
In June, just before Scheuer's book was published,
he did a series of media interviews, appearing on TV
in silhouette and was identified in print as "Mike."
In the first week of August, CIA officials told
him that he had to ask for permission in advance for
media interviews and provide summaries of what would
be discussed ahead of time, Scheuer's editor and
publicist Christina Davidson said.
"They rejected every single request," she said.
"It was effectively a ban."
His book said the United States was losing the war
against terrorism and that sticking to current
policies would only make its enemies in the Islamic
world grow stronger.
The statement released by his publicist about
Scheuer's resignation said that "after a cordial
meeting with senior CIA officials on Tuesday, Scheuer
decided that it would be in the best interests of the
intelligence community and the country for him to
resign in order to continue speaking publicly with
regard to Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the 9-11
Commission Report." A CIA spokeswoman had no immediate
comment.
http://blog.democrats.com/ohio-recount
Ohio recount moves from conspiracy to reality
by Bob Fertik on November 11, 2004 - 3:27pm.
There's nothing the "liberal" media loves better than
writing breathless, fact-free prose ridiculing
progressive Internet activists as tin-foil-hatted
conspiracy theorists.
Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the
Ether
By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 11, 2004; Page A02
Even as Sen. John Kerry's campaign is steadfastly
refusing to challenge the results of the presidential
election, the bloggers and the mortally wounded party
loyalists and the spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy
theorists are filling the Internet with head-turning
allegations.
Are these paper-killing, Rove-kissing stenographers
still so utterly clueless about the power of
progressive Internet activists?
Memo to the Washington Post and the rest of the
corporate-owned media: the progressive Internet is
bigger and more powerful than you are when the truth
is on our side - as it almost always is.
How many times do we have to prove this before they
get it?
In the fall of 2002, the Bush administration and the
"liberal" media began pounding the drums for war in
Iraq. Progressives on the Internet exposed every Bush
claim as a lie, including Iraq's alleged WMD's - and
the American public's alleged support for war. (I
personally debated Bill O'Reilly on this point, and
kicked his ass before he threw me off his show.) In
the dead of winter, progressive organizers used the
Internet to mobilize millions for anti-war marches all
around the world. In fact, it was the growing
opposition to the war at home and abroad that forced
Bush to rush to war, because he knew the momentum -
and the truth - were on our side.
In early 2003, as the war began and the "rally around
the flag" effect pushed Bush's approval ratings into
the 70's, the "liberal" media gravely warned
Democratic candidates to support the Iraq War to be
"credible." But unknown candidate Howard Dean used the
Internet to enlist 640,000 devoted supporters, raise
$50 million, and surge to the head of the Democratic
field - on an anti-war platform. (It's all explained
in Joe Trippi's excellent book, The Revolution Will
Not be Televised.)
In early 2004, Bush planned to raise an unprecedented
$200 million to blow the Democratic nominee out of the
water, starting with an immediate vicious attack on
the winner of the winter primaries. But John Kerry,
the Democratic Party, and Moveon all raised tens of
millions over the Internet, and fought the ruthless
Bush campaign to a draw.
In early October, Sinclair Broadcasting Group
announced plans to force its swing-state affiliates to
broadcast the lie-filled Kerry-bashing film "Stolen
Honor." Within days, progressive activists persuaded
advertisers and investors to rebel, and Sinclair beat
a speedy retreat.
On Election Day, progressive hopes soared as
pre-election polls and mid-day exit polls all pointed
to a Kerry victory. But as the evening dragged on, the
returns from Florida and Ohio showed the election
going to Bush. The next morning, while progressives
struggled to understand the unlikely numbers, Kerry
offered a quick and gracious concession. The Busheviks
immediately celebrated their "triumph" and proclaimed
their imaginary "mandate" for privatizing Social
Security, eliminating the progressive income tax, and
outlawing abortion.
But on the Internet, progressives said: wait a minute.
We started with the exit polls. We could understand
some inaccuracies - but why did they all favor Bush by
several points? The media's official explanation -
that Democrats were more likely to talk to exit
pollsters - was ludicrous on its face.
Then we heard from the voters. We heard stories about
lines that were hours long, forcing some voters to
give up without voting. We heard stories about
provisional ballots being denied to voters whose
registrations had never been received. We heard
stories about touchscreen voters whose votes for Kerry
mysteriously turned into votes for Bush, requiring
numerous touches to correct.
Then we looked at the vote-counting machines. We knew
the electronic machines could fail without leaving a
trace, because we fought for two years to get Congress
and state officials to require paper trails. Sure
enough, we quickly got reports that computer errors
resulted in major voting errors, ranging from several
thousand to tens of thousands of votes - even votes
counting backwards.
Then we pored over the county-by-county election
returns. Why did Bush do so well in rural Democratic
counties? Why did Kerry run behind down-ballot
candidates in rural Republican counties?
As these anomalies accumulated, we started blogging
and writing articles to connect the dots. As the
evidence accumulated, we gradually came to a
conclusion: there were enough problems to justify a
serious examination of the election results.
This conclusion was reached by individual voters, not
by the Kerry campaign or the Democrats. In fact, they
were entirely MIA, with the exception of three
Congressmen who asked the GAO for a study of voting
problems - a study that would take months to complete
and thus have no impact on this election.
Indeed, if any one person played a pivotal role, it
was MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who noticed the most
significant problems and did what journalists are
supposed to do - try to get the facts. Another crucial
person was Air America Radio's Randi Rhodes, who
broadcast Internet findings to her passionate and
growing radio audience.
On Thursday, the collective efforts of progressive
Internet activists reached a critical mass - but in an
entirely unexpected way. Green candidate David Cobb
and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik jointly
announced their intentions to file a formal demand for
a recount of the presidential ballots cast in Ohio -
and called upon Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell,
a Republican who chaired the Ohio Bush campaign, to
recuse himself from the recount process.
This announcement is political dynamite. In 2000, Al
Gore spent weeks in court trying to get a statewide
recount. When the Florida Supreme Court finally
ordered one on December 8, rightwing Justice Antonin
Scalia immediately stopped it with an infamous
injunction claiming it would harm Bush - taking sides
in a dispute and violating all principles of
injunctive relief. Three days later, 5 partisan
Republican Justices declared the election over in
their infamous Bush v. Gore decision, thus throwing
out 175,000 never-counted votes and making Bush's
Presidency a judicial coup d'etat, not an election.
But now, as soon as Cobb and Badnarik raise $110,000
(I'll guess 48 hours), John Kerry will get the
unexpected and astonishing gift of a recount in Ohio.
And because Ohio law is more specific than Florida
law, that recount will be orderly and (hopefully)
accurate, and the American people will find out who
really won the election.
This is a huge victory for progressive Internet
activists, for American Democracy - and possibly for
President John Kerry.
Developing...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111204.html
Washington Post's Sloppy Analysis
By Sam Parry
November 12, 2004
The Washington Post and the big media have spoken:
Questions about Nov. 2 voting irregularities and
George W. Bush’s unusual vote tallies are just the
ravings of Internet conspiracy theorists.
In a Nov. 11 story on A2, the Post gave the back of
its hand to our story about Bush’s statistically
improbable vote totals in Florida and elsewhere. While
agreeing with our analysis that Bush pulled off the
difficult task of winning more votes in Florida than
the number of registered Republicans, the Post accuses
us of overlooking the obvious explanation that many
independents, “Dixiecrats” and other Democrats voted
for Bush.
Mocking us as “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy
theorists,” Post reporters Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan
Keating signaled their determination to put questions
about Bush’s victory outside the bounds of responsible
debate. Yet, if they hadn’t been so set in this
agenda, they might have avoided sloppy mistakes and
untrue assertions.
In an example of their slipshod reporting,
Roig-Franzia and Keating state that we focused our
data analysis on rural counties in Florida. They
suggest that Bush’s gains in these rural counties
might be explained by the greater appeal of
son-of-the-South Al Gore in 2000 than Bostonian John
Kerry in 2004.
But we didn’t focus on rural counties in Florida.
Rather we looked at the vote tallies statewide and
zeroed in on Bush’s performance in the larger, more
metropolitan counties of southern and central Florida,
where Bush got the vast majority of his new votes over
his state totals in 2000.
It was in these large counties where Bush’s new totals
compared most surprisingly with new voter registration
because Democrats did a much better job in many of
these counties of registering new voters. In other
words, Bush outperformed Kerry among a relatively
smaller ratio of Republicans to Democrats in many of
these counties.
Also undermining the Post’s claims, Kerry actually
improved on Gore’s total in the smallest 20 counties
in Florida by 5,618 votes -- 50,883 votes for Kerry
vs. 45,265 for Gore, a 12.5% increase. So, even the
Post’s notion that Gore’s Southern heritage made him
more attractive to rural Floridians doesn’t fit with
the actual results.
Simple Question
We began our analysis of the vote totals with one
simple question: Where did Bush earn his new votes?
Since one of every nine new Bush voters nationwide
came from Florida, we thought this battleground state
was a good place to examine county-by-county tallies.
We also didn’t go into the analysis expecting to find
statistical oddities. We were open to the possibility
that Bush’s totals might have fit within statistical
norms.
What we found, however, led us to report that Bush’s
vote tallies were statistically improbable – though
not impossible. Contrary to the Post’s claim, we did
take into account the Dixiecrat element, which is why
we didn’t focus on the Bush totals from Florida’s
panhandle or the smaller, rural counties.
Our analysis found that of the 13 Florida counties
where Bush’s vote total exceeded the number of
registered Republicans for the first time, only two
were counties with fewer than 100,000 registered
voters. In 2000, Bush’s vote total exceeded the number
of registered Republicans in 34 counties – not 32 as
the Post inaccurately reported – but in 2004, this
total shot up to 47 counties.
Rather than a rural surge of support, Bush actually
earned more than seven out of 10 new votes in the 20
largest counties in Florida. Many of these counties
are either Democratic strongholds – such as
Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach – or they are
swing counties, such as Orange, Hillsborough, and
Duval.
Many of these large counties saw substantially more
newly registered Democrats than Republicans. For
example, in Orange County, a swing county home to
Orlando, Democrats registered twice as many new voters
than Republicans in the years since 2000. In Palm
Beach and Broward combined, Democrats registered
111,000 new voters compared with fewer than 20,000 new
Republicans.
However, in these three counties combined, Bush turned
out about 10,000 more new voters than Kerry, a feat
made all the more remarkable given that Kerry improved
Democratic turnout in these counties by 21 percent.
No Landslide
Historically, increases like those Bush registered
throughout Florida and across much of the country
occur when there are huge swings in voting patterns
caused by national landslides.
In 1972, for instance, Richard Nixon won millions of
votes from Democrats who two elections earlier had
supported Lyndon Johnson. But in 2004, the Democratic
ticket didn’t suffer a hemorrhage of votes, actually
turning out about 5 million more voters nationwide
than in 2000.
Nor was that the case in Florida. In county after
county in Florida, Bush achieved statistically
stunning gains even as Kerry more than held his own.
Bush earned nearly 35 percent more votes statewide
than he did in 2000, which was already a huge surge
for Bush over Bob Dole’s 1996 Florida turnout.
Contrary to assertions in the flawed Post article, the
most surprising numbers actually don’t come from small
rural counties in the state, but rather from large
counties, including Orange county (mentioned above),
Hillsborough (Tampa), Brevard (Cape Canaveral), Duval
(Jacksonville), Polk (next to Orange county), and
heavily Democratic Leon (Tallahassee) and Alachua
(Gainesville). These are not tiny Dixiecrat counties
with longtime registered Democrats who haven’t voted
Democratic in years.
Rather, these seven counties have large, diverse
populations that collectively saw Bush turn out
1,025,493 votes, exceeding the 946,420 registered
Republicans. In these counties, Bush turned out nearly
twice as many new votes than the number of newly
registered Republicans. In these same counties, Kerry
got more than 200,000 new votes, meaning that Bush’s
tally can’t be attributed to crossover Democrats.
While Bush’s totals are not statistically impossible,
they do raise eyebrows. Our question was: where did
these gains come from? We are not claiming that the
surprising numbers are evidence of fraud, but we do
believe the tallies deserve an honest and independent
review.
It also should be the job of journalists to probe
questions as significant as the integrity of the U.S.
voting system, not to simply belittle those who raise
legitimate questions. The fact that Internet journals
and blogs are doing more to examine these concerns
than wealthy news organizations like the Washington
Post is another indictment of the nation’s mainstream
press.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111104.html
Bush Victory's Lesson to the World
By Nat Parry
November 11, 2004
On the surface, the world’s reaction to George W.
Bush’s victory has been one of disbelief and
revulsion. But underneath, the lesson may be even more
troubling, as authoritarian regimes are tempted to
cite flaws in the U.S. electoral process to justify
their own anti-democratic impulses.
The day after the election, the British Daily Mirror
asked plaintively, “How can 59,017,382 people be so
dumb?” Not to be outdone, Russia’s Pravda asserted
that “America was betrayed and murdered on Nov. 2,
2004. Also killed during this time of madness were the
following virtues: truth, justice, integrity, freedom,
compassion, brotherhood, tolerance, faith, hope,
charity, peace, and respect for other cultures and
nations.”
While those two commentaries may be harsher than most,
their points of view appear to be widespread. A couple
of weeks before the U.S. election, a newspaper survey
of public opinion in 10 countries, including Russia
and Great Britain, found that respondents, by a 2-to-1
margin, were hoping for a John Kerry victory.
In the days after the election, the television news
reports in Denmark spent hours wondering how Kerry
could have lost to Bush in what was such an easy and
clear choice for the betterment of the world.
A Danish friend told me in an e-mail that he and his
friends watched the U.S. election returns until 5:00
in the morning. “A lot of people here in Denmark
followed the U.S. election very intensively,” he said,
“and got very disappointed” at Bush’s victory.
“The future looks pretty bleak,” another Danish friend
said. “It’s just hard to keep up the optimism with the
perspective of four more years.”
Election Mission
I also witnessed the reaction of European
parliamentarians who came to the U.S. as part of the
Election Observation Mission of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which
includes the United States as a member.
I helped coordinate the mission, and on Election Day,
I escorted about 10 observers to polling stations in
Northern Virginia. While the observers were strictly
neutral during the election, it was clear that many of
them worried about four more years of Bush.
Besides Bush’s policies, some of the parliamentarians
felt that questionable U.S. election tactics,
including voter intimidation, undermined the image of
popular rule in the nation that had long been
considered the world’s leading democracy.
One Albanian told me that she had struggled for
democracy for much of her life and suffered beatings
by state security forces for speaking out for freedom.
During those dark days, the United States had been the
brightest beacon of hope, inspiring activists to keep
fighting, she said.
But now, in the United States, she was learning about
voter intimidation and other irregularities during a
briefing at the national call center of the Election
Protection Coalition in Arlington, Virginia.
Her voice shook as she recounted reports of black
voters being challenged by Republican lawyers at
polling places, of minorities asked for two forms of
identification when only one was needed, of polling
places moved to police stations in minority precincts,
of hundreds of electronic voting malfunctions, and of
polling stations lacking enough provisional ballots.
The Albanian parliamentarian, flipping through page
after page of her notes, was stunned by the bigger
picture of disenfranchisement aimed at minority
voters. “How could this happen here?” she asked me.
“How could this happen in America?”
Roadblock to Progress
She also was concerned about the worldwide
consequences for democracy in Albania and elsewhere.
When anti-democratic abuses happen in the United
States, they encourage anti-democratic forces
everywhere, she said.
This lesson was not missed by the OSCE observer
delegation from Belarus. As I heard from numerous
sources, the primary reason the Belarusians were so
interested in observing the U.S. election was so they
could cite flaws in the American electoral system to
excuse their own lack of transparency.
Belarus is among the least democratic countries in
Europe with one of the worst human rights records. For
months, Belarus had been making statements at the
OSCE’s Permanent Council in Vienna condemning the U.S.
for its lack of democracy and its failure to respect
human rights.
When the New York Police Department arrested 1,821
protesters at the Republican National Convention,
Belarus cited it as proof that the United States
didn’t respect fundamental freedoms, particularly free
speech and the right to assemble.
On Oct. 21, the Permanent Representative of Belarus to
the OSCE issued a harsh statement about the U.S.
electoral system, asserting that it “does not meet
present-day requirements, is archaic, unwieldy,
frequently complicated and bureaucratic in nature and,
in the final analysis, does not guarantee the holding
of genuinely democratic elections.”
The Belarus representative noted that the United
States itself has criticized early voting and
electronic voting in other countries because the lack
of security could lead to “manipulating voters’
votes.” Of course, the Belarusian criticism may have
more to do with posturing than a concern for
democracy. But by raising legitimate criticism about
the U.S. electoral system, Belarus deflected criticism
of its own system.
Obligations
Another issue raised by Belarus was the limited access
granted to observers seeking to examine the situation
at U.S. polling stations.
According to international obligations laid out in the
Copenhagen Document of 1990 – which the U.S.
government signed – all participating states in the
OSCE are required to grant international observers
unfettered access to polling stations in order to
monitor the process of voting and the counting of
votes.
However, U.S. authorities only granted the OSCE
observers access to selected polling stations. While
this policy may have had more to do with a lack of
experience in dealing with international observers
than any concerted effort to conceal electoral fraud,
the impact on future OSCE observation missions in
other countries could be profound.
Many OSCE officials worry that the U.S. precedent will
be cited next time the OSCE seeks to observe elections
in a country like Belarus. As election observers know,
they must have the right to pop in unannounced at any
polling station they choose, not be shepherded only to
model precincts.
From its observation mission, the OSCE concluded that
the U.S. “mostly” met its international commitments
for holding free and fair elections. But the mission
cited a number of “significant issues,” particularly
around implementation of the "Help America Vote Act,"
electoral fraud and voter suppression, as well as
problems relating to the use of electronic voting
machines.
The OSCE found implementation of the "Help America
Vote Act" created new problems, such as multiple
interpretations of the rules on provisional balloting.
Further progress was needed on voter registration
criteria and procedures, verifying and counting
provisional ballots, and voter identification
requirements, the OSCE said.
The Election Observation Mission cited Election Day
problems with provisional ballots and electronic
voting machines, as well as long waits to vote.
“Significant delays at the polling station are likely
to deter some voters from voting and may restrict the
right to vote,” the OSCE said.
A German observer said he couldn’t imagine German
voters showing the patience he saw among Americans as
they waited hours to cast their ballots.
The OSCE also expressed concern that political party
observers were present in many polling stations, while
domestic non-partisan observers had no legal right to
similar access. Still, despite pre-election
indications that partisans would challenge voters over
their qualifications, the OSCE noted that few voters
were actually challenged.
Although the OSCE Election Observation Mission’s
findings are not legally binding and do not carry
weight other than as political pressure, it is
significant that such a concerted international effort
went into observing the fairness of the U.S.
elections.
While the OSCE billed the observation mission as a
formality that all participating states are obliged to
accept, and emphasized that it had dispatched
observers in previous U.S. elections, the reality is
that never had such an extensive mission been
undertaken in the United States.
International Response
In recent months, there have been other indications
that the international community is taking a harder
line toward U.S. behavior.
At last July’s Annual Session of the OSCE
Parliamentary Assembly, a resolution was passed
condemning the use of torture in the U.S.-led global
war on terrorism. The assembly called on all
participating states to follow international
commitments laid out in the Geneva Conventions and the
UN Convention Against Torture.
Around the same time, the UN Security Council refused
to extend the exemption from prosecution in the
International Criminal Court for U.S. forces.
Previously, U.S. forces were left exempt fr