The theft of the 2004 election has not yet been
successfully pulled off...No, it is not over yet...Here are thirteen important
pieces. Read them and share them with others. Go to
www.moveon.org and sign the petition demanding a US
GAO investigation. Follow the rapidly developing story
lines in Fraudida, OhNoNo, Knew Mexico and iOWEya at
www.democrats.com and www.blackbox.voting. Please
continue to distribute Prof. Steven Freeman's study on
the Two Hundred Fifty Million to One Election Scenario
that the Corporatist News Media is shilling...
www.bobharris.com: Common sense. Not a conspiracy
theory. Just what you're seeing, right in front of
you.
Without getting into all the state-by-state details --
I'll let Prof. Freeman tend to the numbers -- what
happened last Tuesday, where a wide variety of
extremely accurate exit polls suddenly turned out to
be at the extremes or even beyond their margin of
error, was exceedingly unlikely -- even if the
benefits of these errors had been evenly distributed.
But they weren't evenly distributed. They favored
Bush. Over and over and over. That's the coin
flipping. And flipping. And still coming up heads.
Heads in Florida. Heads in Ohio. Heads in a bunch of
other swing states (even while the exit polls remained
relatively accurate elsewhere). Almost everywhere the
election was close, the coin just kept coming up
heads.
How bad was it?
According to Dr. Freeman's analysis... 1 in
250,000,000.
One in a quarter of a billion.
In simpler terms, that 50-50 coin flip just came up
"heads" almost thirty times in a row.
Do you still trust that coin now?
That is what you're being asked to do.
Greg Guma, UPI: Exit polling by Edison Media Research
and Mitofsky International, which created the National
Election Poll for ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC, had
shown Kerry leading by 3 percentage points in Florida
and by 4 points in Ohio. Kerry lost Florida by 5.2
percent, with Bush running ahead of his 2000
performance in 58 of the state's 67 counties. In Ohio,
the margin was 2.5 percent.
Florida's 8.2-percent spread -- between the early
exits and the results -- is more than double the
standard error rate. In Ohio, the spread is 6.5
percent.
www.blackboxvoting.org: Black Box Voting began to
compare the special printouts given in the FOIA
request with the signed polling tapes from election
night. Lo and behold, some were missing. By this time,
Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson had
joined the group at Volusia County. Some polling place
tapes didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct
215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off
by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other
Republicans.
Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to
Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15,
without signatures, or the ones with signatures,
printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?
Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia
employee boxed up some items from an office containing
Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you
guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took
them to the back of the building and disappeared.
Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from
Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia,
decided now would be a good time to go through the
trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they
found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes,
fresh from Volusia elections office.
www.dailykos.com: Let's pull it together. Right now,
it's 286-252 in favor of Bush. Ohio has not even
begun to count the provisional ballots. There are
155,000 or so. Ohio has a history of provisional
ballots, based on state law. In 2000, 90% of the
ballots counted, and of those I understand that 90%
were for Gore. Applying that standard to the 155,000
would give Kerry 125,550 additional votes, and Bush
13,950. That would narrow the margin from 132,000
(the 136,000 figure includes the now-infamous Gahanna
4,000 vote error in Franklin County) down to about
24,600. Originally, this was why Kerry conceded; he
just couldn't get it done on the provisional ballots
alone.
Ahh, but now there's a new development. A recount (or
an "audit," as one diary called it). Fine. Whatever,
call it what you want. But Kerry couldn't ask for it,
because he'd be called a sore loser, Al Gore with a
Brahmin accent. The lawyers are there, they're
sniffing around, they're ready to deal with the
shenanigans. But (here's the great part) it's not
Kerry's recount. The media is treating the
Cobb/Badnarik recount request as a joke, but it's not.
If the recount is held, the first thing elections
officials have to do is dust off the 93,000 undervotes
on punch cards (dear God, not again). And yes, Ohio
has a uniform state standard: 0 or 1 corners
attached, vote counts. 2 or 3, no dice. So the
recount won't be shut down -- and Blackwell can't
change the rules. God, I love Bush v. Gore (never
thought I'd write those words).
Again, look at the history. Traditionally, 90% count,
and the split is about 4-1 for Democrats -- undervotes
are almost exclusively from poor and/or minority
areas. Take 93,000, 90% is 83,700. 80% of that is
66,960 for Kerry, with 16,740 for Bush. That 24,600
vote Bush lead after the provisionals now goes to . .
. . fanfare, please . . . . ladies and gentlemen, I
give you the 44th President of the United States, John
Kerry, by a 25,660 vote margin in Ohio.
Now the margins could change, most likely on the
undervotes. Let's say Kerry only gets 70%, rather
than 80, of the undervotes. He still wins, this time
by about 9,000 votes.
Obviously, it would help if we could turn around New
Mexico, Iowa and/or Nevada as well, to create a
cushion for legal challenges and to create more
legitimacy to this process.
LILIAN FRIEDBERG, www.opednews.com: Dear New York
Times, etal,
As a long-time subscribed reader of your
publication—one I have always staunchly defended one
of the best in the world--I am incensed by your
dismissive handling of what is one of the most
significant breaking news stories since
Watergate.(your Nov.12 article,Vote Fraud Theories,
Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried)…
One glaring omission in your coverage involves the way
this story began: you claim that it emerged from the
ether “in the course of seven days” as mysteriously as
the creationist version of human evolution. But that
is not the case.
So how did thousands of Times’ readers get swept up in
the maelstrom of the “online market of dark ideas
surrounding the last week’s presidential election”?
What really happened to spawn the internet hysteria?
The stage was set on election night, with worldwide
shock and disbelief over Bush’s “overnight sensation”
victory: observers throughout the country and the
world who had been following the election closely
tucked themselves into bed Tuesday night confident
that “help was on the way.” This logical assumption
was based not only on early exit polls: it was based
on the worldwide public perception, particularly
salient in the United States, that the only way a
Republican victory could be secured was through a
dubious fiat similar to the one we witnessed in 2000.
As one astute reader responding to your front-page
coverage of this highly significant media event
succinctly stated: “If George W. Bush had won the 2000
election honestly, people would not be so quick to
assume that he did not win this one fair and square
either.” Of course, that was in the letters section,
A30. So many readers may have missed it.
Gayle Rogalski, Orlando Sun-Sentinel: I would like to
thank the authors of two Nov. 9 letters, regarding the
real results of the Nov. 2 election. These letters are
the only mention I have seen in the media about the
fraudulent election we just had. Obviously, the
mainstream media has been unable to print the truth
about this election. For those of us who thought we
voted for the candidates of our choice, our votes very
well may not have been counted that way. For instance,
in Baker County, where 69.3 percent of 12,887
registered voters are Democrats and 24.3 percent are
Republicans, the supposed Democratic vote count was
2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush. Does anyone
believe that is correct?
Apparently this was repeated in enough places to shift
just enough votes from one candidate to the other.
Manipulation of the main computers compiling the total
votes can be very easily and quickly accomplished as
we have just seen.
Of course everyone knew Ohio would be manipulated
after a major Republican and CEO of a voting machine
company vowed to do anything he had to to get Bush
re-elected.
Robert Scheer, LA Times: This is the culmination of a
three-year campaign by the president's men to
scapegoat the CIA for the fact that 9/11 occurred on
Bush's watch.
So far, half a dozen of the nation's top spymasters
have been forced out abruptly - a strange way to
handle things at a time when Bin Laden and Al Qaeda
are still seeking to attack the U.S. Ironically, this
all comes as Goss is suppressing a lengthy study,
prepared for Congress by the CIA's inspector general,
that, according to an intelligence official who has
read it, names individuals in the government
responsible for failures that paved the way for the
9/11 attacks.
Thus Bush, with Goss as his hatchet man, is having
it both ways: He can be seen to be cleaning house at
the CIA - when he is simply punishing independent
voices - while denying Congress access to an
independent audit of actual intelligence failures.
Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service: No country can
justify torture, the humiliation of prisoners or
violation of international conventions in the guise of
fighting terrorism, says a U.N. report released here.
The 19-page study, which is likely to go before the
current session of the U.N. General Assembly in
December, does not identify the United States by name
but catalogues the widely publicized torture and
humiliation of prisoners and detainees in Iraq and
Afghanistan by U.S. troops waging the so-called ”war
on terrorism.” The hard line taken by the United
Nations comes amidst the controversial appointment of
a new U.S. attorney general, who has implicitly
defended the use of torture against ''terrorists'' and
''terror suspects''.
Knut Royce, Newsday: The White House has ordered the
new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of
officers believed to have been disloyal to President
George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to
the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the
hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable
sources.
"The agency is being purged on instructions from the
White House," said a former senior CIA official who
maintains close ties to both the agency and to the
White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get
rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The
CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of
liberals and people who have been obstructing the
president's agenda."
Charles Geraci, Editors & Publishers: "How can you get
to the conclusion morality was the most important
issue in this campaign?" Dean asked. "It's beyond me,
but that was what the media was riding. They're
entitled to their opinion. It doesn't happen to be the
opinion of thoughtful people who are looking."
"The truth is the president of the United States used
the same device that Slobodan Milosevic used in
Serbia. When you appeal to homophobia, when you appeal
to sexism, when you appeal to racism, that is
extraordinarily damaging to the country," Dean
charged. "I know George Bush. I served with him for
six years [as a fellow governor]. He's not a
homophobe. He's not a racist. He's not a sexist. In
some ways, what he did was worse … because he knew
better."
Dean also criticized Bush for the ballot initiatives
in 11 states calling for gay marriage to be outlawed,
saying this "had only one effect, which is to appeal
to homophobia and fear and gay-baiting in order to win
a presidential election."
And he took a shot at Rev. Jerry Falwell.: "Most
Americans are decent people -- not all. I mean, there
are those hate-mongers. I wouldn't call Jerry Falwell
a decent person."
Wesley Clark (D-NATO), Washington Post: We should be
under no illusions: This is not so much a war as it is
an effort to birth a nation. It is past time for the
administration to undertake diplomatic efforts in the
region and political efforts inside Iraq that are
worthy of the risks and burdens born by our men and
women in uniform. No one knows better than they do:
You cannot win in Iraq simply by killing the opponent.
Much as we honor our troops and pray for their
well-being, if diplomacy fails, their sacrifices and
even their successes in Fallujah won't be enough.
Benjamin DeMott, Harper’s Magazine: The promise was
not kept. The plain, sad reality--I report this
following four full days studying the work--is that
The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity
of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands
as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the
audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal
realities that demand immediate inspection and
confrontation. Because it is continuously engaged in
scotching all attempts to distinguish better from
worse leadership responses, the Commission can’t
discharge its duty to educate the audience about the
habits of mind and temperament essential in those
chosen to discharge command responsibility during
crises. It can’t tell the truth about what was done
and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial
turning points. The Commissioners' immeasurably
valuable access to the principals involved offered an
extraordinary opportunity to amass material precious
to future historians: commentary based on
moment-to-moment reaction to major events. But the 567
pages, which purport to provide definitive
interpretations of the reactions, are in fact useless
to historians, because a seeming terror of bias
transforms query after commissarial query--and silence
after silence--into suggested new lines of
self-justification for the interviewees. In the course
of blaming everybody a little, the Commission blames
nobody—blurs the reasons for the actions and
hesitations of successive administrations, masks
choices that, fearlessly defined, might actually have
vitalized our public political discourse.
At the core of all these failures lies a deep wariness
of earnest, well-informed public debate. And the
wariness is rooted, clearly, in a conception of the
nature of citizen virtue that (1) strips the critical
instinct of its standing as essential equipment for
the competent democratic mind, and (2) finds merit in
the consumer credulity that relishes pop culture and
shrugs off buyer-beware warnings. The ideal readers of
The 9/11 Commission Report are those who resemble the
Commission itself in believing that a strong
inclination to trust the word of highly placed others
is evidence of personal moral distinction. As the
Report's project becomes ever more visibly that of
sanctifying equivocation and deference, the
Commissioners retreat ever further from evaluating the
behavior of which their interviews and research
nonetheless allow brief glimpses—behavior on which
fair judgments of character and intelligence could and
should have been based. Issues of commitment and
responsibility are time and again reconfigured as
matters of opinion, or as puzzles of memory, or as
pointlessly distracting 'partisan' squabbles. See,
here it is again, says the Commission's undervoice.
People differ, of course. But of course. And they
believe with the utmost sincerity in their own account
of events. And they are all honorable men and women.
Little can be gained, therefore, by assessing,
weighing, in the end pronouncing this position—this
version—superior to that. Reader, given our shared
probity and undoubted concern for the future of the
Republic, let us think process and structure, forgoing
Blame Games. Let us look to the future. We need to
move on.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editorial: The Bush
administration would like to throw cold water on the
idea of doing anything substantive about global
warming. But the heat should be on the president until
the United States limits emissions of greenhouse
gases…
A new study of available research has documented that
global warming already is changing natural systems. In
a report for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change,
two scientists said warmer temperatures are affecting
plants, animals and natural rhythms across the
country. The range of a butterfly species, the sachem
skipper, has shifted 420 miles north from California
into central Washington. Along the Pacific Coast, U.S.
fish species are moving farther north. Nationally,
precipitation levels have increased up to 10 percent.
Worse is in store, as previous Post-Intelligencer
reports have shown. Along much of Washington's coast,
steep terrain will limit the problems caused by rising
sea levels. Even so, some lower-lying areas, including
Olympia, could face bigger problems, just as Florida
will. Hotter summers are predicted to cause more
forest fires. And some ski resorts, heeding scientific
predictions of reduced snow packs, have long pushed
for measures against global warming.
West Coast and Northeastern states have initiated
their own efforts to reduce emissions of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which contribute
significantly to global warming. Regional programs can
have limited value, especially in reducing public
frustration over the failure to confront the
increasingly obvious problems…
Most other economic powers have decided to join the
Kyoto agreement on climate change. With each major
scientific study, the need to limit global warming
becomes more obvious. Domestically and
internationally, pressure should force action by
Congress and a president who came into office
promising to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
http://www.bobharris.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=175&Itemid=2
Math, not conspiracy theory
Friday, 12 November 2004
Finally picking back up again from my last post on
last week's "elections"... (I've been delaying because
frankly I get sick to my stomach just trying to start.
That's the truth.)
I hope you'll download and read a paper called The
Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy, released on
Thursday by Prof. Steven Freeman of the University of
Pennsylvania. It's worth seeing in its entirety. A
lot of other folks have been posting about it.
Rightly so.
What jumped out at a lot of people on the night of the
election was how the "errors" in the exit polls
consistently occured in the same direction.
The thing about genuine errors, extremes, and
anomalies in results... is that they're random.
The chance that a flipped coin will land "heads" four
times in a row is only 1 in 16 -- but you're just as
likely to see it land "tails" four times in a row.
And if it's an honest coin, flipped fairly, over time,
you will. Very basic math will tell you exactly how
likely a given outcome is.
But even without the math, we have a sense of this in
our daily lives. If you were betting another guy a
dollar a flip, and the coin came up tails ten times in
a row (about a 1 in 1000 chance) common sense would
tell you the coin was weighted.
And if somebody told you it wasn't -- that it was just
an error or pure random chance, never mind, keep
emptying your wallet -- you'd start to wonder about
their motives.
Common sense. Not a conspiracy theory. Just what
you're seeing, right in front of you.
Without getting into all the state-by-state details --
I'll let Prof. Freeman tend to the numbers -- what
happened last Tuesday, where a wide variety of
extremely accurate exit polls suddenly turned out to
be at the extremes or even beyond their margin of
error, was exceedingly unlikely -- even if the
benefits of these errors had been evenly distributed.
But they weren't evenly distributed. They favored
Bush. Over and over and over. That's the coin
flipping. And flipping. And still coming up heads.
Heads in Florida. Heads in Ohio. Heads in a bunch of
other swing states (even while the exit polls remained
relatively accurate elsewhere). Almost everywhere the
election was close, the coin just kept coming up
heads.
How bad was it?
According to Dr. Freeman's analysis... 1 in
250,000,000.
One in a quarter of a billion.
In simpler terms, that 50-50 coin flip just came up
"heads" almost thirty times in a row.
Do you still trust that coin now?
That is what you're being asked to do.
Now, a lot of folks are understandably unwilling to
come right out and say the word "fraud." I get that.
I respect everybody here. And I won't guess other
people's feelings on it, but for me, merely
acknowledging the possibility that our elections were
hijacked this broadly makes me feel all sorts of
unpleasant emotions.
It's frankly a terrifying prospect, because if true,
we have one hell of a goddam fight in front of us,
against a group of powerful people who clearly will
stop at nothing whatsoever to continue centralizing
their power.
That's what the word "fraud" means here.
So yes, I would very much prefer to believe in the
remote possibility that there are factors unaccounted
for, and the numbers are off a little, reducing the
chance down to, oh, one in 50,000 or so.
Sure, maybe all the Republican voters just didn't feel
like talking to exit pollers, only in swing states,
all at once, for hours. (That's one of the
explanations we're being given, often by the same
people deriding reasonable suspicion of foul play as a
conspiracy theory. Nice.)
I do not know exactly what happened or how, nor can I
(or you) yet. And without more specific knowledge, I
understand how it might seem irresponsible to come
right out and say that the election was bullshit. It
feels like an allegation without evidence.
But it should not be tinfoil hat territory to simply
understand what the basic math means and scream foul.
The math is evidence. And we already know that the
votes weren't secure; we already know how somebody
could easily rig the vote counts; and we've already
caught dozens of consistently pro-Bush impossibilities
(like more Bush votes in some parts of Ohio than there
were registered voters) in the final tally.
That's a hell of a lot to go on.
And now we learn it's a 99.9999996% likelihood that
the numbers were wrong, as far as can be calculated
with the limited data available, precisely because the
outcome was so incredibly slanted for Bush.
I repeat: we know the numbers are screwed up because
of how absurdly they were slanted.
Let that sink in.
Just because we weren't standing right there when it
happened doesn't mean we can't see what was done.
Look, Nicole is dead. There are bloody size 12 shoe
prints running down the walk, and her ex-husband has
been threatening her for years.
But gee, would her husband really do such a horrible
thing...?
Let's talk about that. Would they?
We already know that allies of this twice-unelected
president in Florida and Ohio screwed with the voter
rolls, screwed with people's ability to vote, and are
working right this very minute to continue distorting
the vote, right before our eyes. Is screwing with the
votes on election day somehow qualitatively different?
No one should need reminding that Karl Rove has always
broken any rule necessary to win at all costs, and
that there have been no costs for cheating since this
administration took office. Someone near the top of
this administration has already committed treason by
leaking Valerie Plame's name to the press, and
received nothing but protection ever since.
And let's not forget that this very same band of merry
men conspired for over a year to lie their way into an
illegal war and generate rationalizations for torture,
indefinite detention, and even disappearances -- a
series of high crimes against the constitution,
existing law, and humanity which makes electoral
tinkering seem tame by comparison.
I mean, what sort of behavior is necessary to start
suspecting the beneficiaries of the obvious rigging in
their favor? Does Karl Rove have to come to the house
personally and start humping the furniture?
(He will, you know. You probably want to dig out that
old can of Scotchgard.)
Until Karl finally shows up... just do the math.
PS -- The Blogging Of The President has been a central
link festival for the ongoing developments in this
stuff.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1116-33.htm
Published on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 by United
Press International
Election 2004: Lingering Suspicions
by Greg Guma
The Internet, that wonderful engine of democracy, is
rife with messages purporting to demonstrate how the
U.S. presidential election results were manipulated in
ways benefiting the Republicans.
To start, voting analyses of selected Florida and Ohio
precincts conducted by the University of
Pennsylvania's Steven Freeman and independent
investigator Faun Otter have revealed surprisingly
high percentages for Bush. Those skeptical about the
results further suggest spoiled ballots and
provisional votes, which may have a disproportionate
impact on the results in the areas with high
concentrations of minority voters, could have made the
difference.
The earliest exit poll data released on Nov. 2
indicated Kerry -- who had run narrowly behind Bush
but within the margin of error for most of the race --
was rolling to victory and carrying many of the
battleground states, including Florida and Ohio, by
higher than expected margins. These same polls also
suggested the Republicans were ahead in most of the
tight U.S. Senate races.
By the end of the night, however, the predictions in
the presidential exit were wrong while the Senate
projections were largely correct.
Exit polling by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky
International, which created the National Election
Poll for ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC, had shown
Kerry leading by 3 percentage points in Florida and by
4 points in Ohio. Kerry lost Florida by 5.2 percent,
with Bush running ahead of his 2000 performance in 58
of the state's 67 counties. In Ohio, the margin was
2.5 percent.
Florida's 8.2-percent spread -- between the early
exits and the results -- is more than double the
standard error rate. In Ohio, the spread is 6.5
percent.
In Baker County, Fla. located near the city of
Jacksonville and just across the border from Georgia,
there are 12,887 registered voters: 69.3 percent are
Democrats, 24.3 percent are Republicans. Yet 2,180 of
county residents voted for Kerry while 7,738 voted for
Bush -- the opposite of what some election critics say
was the typically pattern elsewhere in the United
States.
In Florida's Dixie County, located on the Gulf Coast
between Tallahassee and Tampa, 77.5 percent of the
4,988 registered voters are Democrats, 15 percent are
Republicans. On Election Day, Bush carried the county
with 4,433 votes vs. 1,959 for Kerry.
Nationally, few outlets have pursued the story of what
happened in Baker and Dixie, why and whether it
actually indicates a problem with the counting of the
ballots. Most of the coverage of the alleged
irregularities has focused on why the exit polls were
so far off. Skeptics dismiss them as flawed or somehow
favoring Kerry and say that, though they may have
influenced the narrative of election coverage, they
couldn't affect the outcome.
To explain the difference, some unconvincing theories
have been floated including the one offered by the
architects of the sampling system used for exit
polling. They say Kerry voters were simply more
willing to answer the questions. It's called the
"chattiness thesis" and it sounds like a weak excuse
-- but so was the pollsters' earlier claims that the
numbers were right, the media just read them wrong. In
an article for Tom Paine.com, a liberal Internet
publication, Greg Palast, an author and frequent
critic of the 2000 election returns in Florida, goes
farther.
"Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio
punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these
votes were simply not recorded," he writes. Palast
says he thinks the election was decided by "spoilage,"
the small part of the vote that is voided and thrown
away.
In Ohio, as in Florida four years ago, a large number
of spoiled votes were cast on punch cards, 54 percent
of which were cast by black voters, according to
statisticians investigating the issue for Verified
Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University
professor to assess electronic voting. Verified Voting
has collected 31,000 reports of alleged election
abnormalities.
Other factors also could have affected the vote count,
including last-minute legal challenges filed in
several states, both by Democrats trying to block
Ralph Nader from appearing on state ballots and
Republicans concerned about lax registration rules.
Long lines at precincts in the evening and the large
number of total provisional ballots cast across the
United States also may have influenced the outcome
somewhat.
Taken together, such factors could significantly
change the vote in some areas, bringing the count more
into line with the exit poll results.
Were the election results manipulated in some way? At
the moment, the question invokes the same kind of
polarizations generated by the election choice itself;
a much more thorough analysis is needed -- and will
not be quick in the offing -- before the Internet
chatter can taken seriously, even though some will
always believe it did in fact occur.
Even if the thesis can eventually be demonstrated to
be accurate, that some form of manipulation did occur,
the technology involved is so complex that those
responsible will likely escape the consequences.
Postscript: There is as yet no solid proof that a
cyber-attack occurred on Nov. 2. For one thing, it
would probably require hacking into multiple local
computer systems, presumably from one or more remote
locations. Nevertheless, suspicions are mounting and
evidence is emerging to suggest that the U.S.
presidential election results were manipulated to some
extent.
Could it be pulled off? As far as we know, the CIA’s
successes in cyber-war include targeting specific bank
accounts and shutting down computer systems. But
stealing an election is considerably more difficult,
requiring the alteration of data in many computers.
According to Robert Parry, writing for Consortium
News, "a preprogrammed ‘kernel of brain’ would have to
be inserted into election computers beforehand, or
teams of hackers would be needed to penetrate the
lightly protected systems, targeting touch-screen
systems without a paper backup for verifying the
numbers."
It’s a form of "information warfare," a hot item
within the U.S. military since the mid-1990. The
Pentagon has even produced a 13-page booklet,
"Information Warfare for Dummies." Indirectly, this
primer acknowledges considerable secret capabilities
in these areas.
It also recognizes the sensitivity of the topic. "Due
to the moral, ethical and legal questions raised by
hacking, the military likes to keep a low profile on
this issue," it explains.
So, did it happen here? Perhaps time will tell. But as
the Pentagon readily admits, cyber-warfare has
considerable advantages over other tactics. "The
intrusions can be carried out remotely, transcending
the boundaries of time and space," the manual
explains.
And, best of all, if the fraud is ever discovered,
there is such a technological buffer between those
responsible and those doing the deed you might say
it’s the state-of-the-art in plausible deniability.
Greg Guma edits the Vermont Guardian, a statewide
weekly, and Toward Freedom. He can be reached at
greg@vermontguardian.com
© 2004 United Press International
###
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
TUESDAY NOV 16 2004: Volusia County on lockdown
County election records just got put on lockdown
Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth,
Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.
Here's what happened so far:
Friday Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson
and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records.
They were rebuffed by an elections official named
Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone from
investigations in downstate Florida, and told Volusia
County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box
Voting would be in to pick up the Nov. 2 Freedom of
Information request, or would file for a hand recount.
"No, Bev, please don't do that!" Lowe exclaimed. But
this is the way it has to be, folks. Black Box Voting
didn't back down.
Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew
and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it
over with a smile, but Harris noticed that one item,
the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real
ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15,
and not signed by anyone.
Harris asked to see the real ones, and they said for
"privacy" reasons they can't make copies of the signed
ones. She insisted on at least viewing them (although
refusing to give copies of the signatures is not
legally defensible, according to Berkeley elections
attorney, Lowell Finley). They said the real ones were
in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin'
time and an arrangment was made to come back this
morning to review them.
Lana Hires, a Volusia County employee who gained some
notoriety in an election 2000 Diebold memo, where she
asked for an explanation of minus 16,022 votes for
Gore, so she wouldn't have to stand there "looking
dumb" when the auditor came in, was particularly
unhappy about seeing the Black Box Voting
investigators in the office. She vigorously shook her
head when Deanie Lowe suggested going to the
warehouse.
Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris showed up at the
warehouse at 8:15 Tuesday morning, Nov. 16. There was
Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised.
She ordered them out. Well, they couldn't see why
because there she was, with a couple other people,
handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones
with the signatures on them. Harris and Wynne stepped
out and Volusia County officials promptly shut the
door.
There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door.
Harris looked into it and what do you know, but there
were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at
Harris and Wynne, who drove away a small bit, and then
videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles
marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare
and soon all doors were slammed.
So, Harris and Wynne went and parked behind a bus to
see what they would do next. They pulled out some
large pylons, which blocked the door. Harris decided
to go look at the garbage some more while Wynne
videotaped. A man who identified himself as "Pete"
came out and Harris immediately wrote a public records
request for the contents of the garbage bag, which
also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled
out.
A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag
open. Harris and Wynne then looked through it, as Pete
looked on. He was quite friendly.
Black Box Voting collected various poll tapes and
other information and asked if they could copy it, for
the public records request. "You won't be going
anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way."
Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two
county elections officials, and everyone stood around
discussing the merits of the "black bag" public
records request.
The police finally let Harris and Wynne go, about the
time the Votergate.tv film crew arrived, and everyone
trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot
thickened.
Black Box Voting began to compare the special
printouts given in the FOIA request with the signed
polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some
were missing. By this time, Black Box Voting
investigator Andy Stephenson had joined the group at
Volusia County. Some polling place tapes didn't match.
In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an
African-American precinct, the votes were off by
hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other
Republicans.
Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to
Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15,
without signatures, or the ones with signatures,
printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?
Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia
employee boxed up some items from an office containing
Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you
guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took
them to the back of the building and disappeared.
Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from
Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia,
decided now would be a good time to go through the
trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they
found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes,
fresh from Volusia elections office.
So, Black Box Voting compared these with the Nov. 2
signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given,
unsigned, finding several of the MISSING poll tapes.
There they were: In the garbage.
So, Wynne went to the car and got the polling place
tapes she had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my
my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling
place tape that was signed by six officials.
This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there
had said that bag was destined for the shredder.
By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene,
suddenly threatening to charge Black Box Voting extra
for the time spent looking at the real stuff Volusia
had withheld earlier. Other lawyers appeared, phoned,
people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and
someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS
server.
Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson then
went to get the Diebold "GEMS" central server locked
down. He also got the memory cards locked down and
secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were
scattered around unsecured in any way before that.
Everyone agreed to convene tomorrow morning, to
further audit, discuss the hand count that Black Box
Voting will require of Volusia County, and of course,
it is time to talk about contesting the election in
Volusia.
# # # # #
SATURDAY NOV 13 2004:
What is a fraud audit?
A fraud audit is not the same as a recount. It does
not presume innocence. It does not make the assumption
that if there is an anomaly with a benign explanation,
it's okay to stop investigating. Any embezzler (or
vote manipulator) worth his salt will build in an
explanation that makes it sound like it could be an
honest mistake, or a "glitch." Any investigator worth
his salt knows you have to look deeper.
Forensic auditing begins with indicators, like oddball
statistics, mismatched records, or secretive,
obstructive behavior. The next step is to obtain
diagnostic documents. Later steps may include pulling
all the ballots for hand recounts.
Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, has
interfaced with law enforcement, including the FBI,
state attorneys-general, the IRS, local police, and
banking authorities, in several previous
investigations during her work as an investigative
writer. Her methods for isolating fraud have resulted
in convictions or settlements from embezzlers and
financial fraudsters. Black Box Voting is the first
publicly funded, independent consumer protection group
to investigate this election using forensic auditing
methods.
Irresponsible media
You may have seen recent stories in the media (ABC
News, Salon.com), and at other voting integrity Web
sites like VerifiedVoting.org, telling you there is no
reason to believe suspicions of fraud in the 2004
election. In fact, no member of the media nor any
organization has done any real forensic auditing to
determine whether there was or was not fraud. Trust in
our electoral process is critical to our democracy. We
need the right kind of investigation into anomalies,
using appropriate methods.
"Feel-good" statements, dismissive of real concerns
into voting integrity, are not responsible. The truth
is what it is. We might see something very
uncomfortable unfold during these investigations. Or,
maybe not. It's still too early to tell, but the
evidence is mounting.
Snoopy 50-year-old women
Think of this like an assets investigation in a bad
divorce: One party may have things to hide, the other
party (we, the voters) wants to find out the truth. If
you are looking for hidden assets owned by your ex,
you don't call in a computer scientist from a
university. You enlist the help of private
investigators, accountants, lawyers, and your plain
old common sense. In fact, snoopy 50-year-old women
have proved invaluable in investigating voting
machines.
This is not a computer problem. It is not something a
reporter who spends four hours researching a story can
pronounce judgment on. We have been surprised to see
prominent scientists announcing "results" before the
data is in. We don't know what happened on Nov. 2. We
will find out.
Here's what Black Box Voting is doing to investigate
appropriately:
We are doing forensic analysis of the available
evidence. We are targeting specific locations based on
criteria indicative of fraud.
Why we can't disclose our documents yet
Initially, we hoped to have everything public all the
time. This resulted in butt-covering behavior on the
part public officials, which hampered our
investigations. Therefore, we adjusted our methods to
keep critical investigations under wraps. That's just
the way it has to be right now.
Isn't it too late?
We are dealing with well financed people who are
trying to run out the clock. They probably will
succeed in that. However, we probably will succeed in
proving fraud. What we have going for us is this:
- Public outrage: We read your letters and hear your
anguish on the phone. Do not let go of those emotions.
Your job is to focus those emotions into stubborn,
relentless, nonstop pressure to make sure that there
will be consequences for any and all electoral fraud.
- Law enforcement. There are still plenty of honest
cops. Also, in our experience, different law
enforcement agencies don't always get along, and where
one fails us, another may not.
- We have the courts. (Somewhat.) Not all judges are
unfriendly. They vote too. We can follow the example
of tobacco industry lawsuits, launching many lawsuits,
then sharing discovery and strategy until at last, we
prevail.
- We have the media (barely). Network TV has not yet
been able to get its brain around the story of
electoral betrayal in a 2-minute news byte. For the
time being, you must be your own "network TV." Don't
count on TV to spread the word. Instead count on
America's spirit of self reliance. We will prevail. Be
the media.
- We have the Internet. Use it to share information at
every level -- instant messaging, e-mailing,
listservs, blogs, forums, Web sites, announcements,
online media, online documents, film and video clips,
audio clips, and any way that you can imagine to use
it effectively. The Internet allows us to respond
without boundaries, quickly, in unpredictable ways.
- We have truth.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/14/144941/51
[UPDATE] This Election is Not Over -- With Exciting
New Math Calculations!
by jsmdlawyer
Sun Nov 14th, 2004 at 11:49:40 PST
Since 11/2, there have been various stages of dealing
with what happened. Anger, denial, claims of fraud,
etc., etc. Blaming Kerry for "quitting." More
recently, talk has shifted to procedural issues like
how to fix the voting system (didn't we DO this four
years ago? Apparently not.)
What has become clear to me, reading between the lines
and ignoring a lot of shit (sorry) is that THIS
ELECTION IS NOT OVER. Floating around in various
threads is the notion that several states are still
counting votes (Ohio and New Mexico principally, but
also Iowa and Nevada).
Diaries :: jsmdlawyer's diary ::
I made a comment here this morning about the 155,000
provisional ballots in Ohio, and the critical
importance of the requested recount, so as to get to
the 93,000 undervotes.
Folks, it's not over. I don't think the Kerry folks
think it's over either. If I'm right, and if it comes
out the way I think it might, it will be the greatest
stealth campaign in the history of the world, quite
frankly.
Let's pull it together. Right now, it's 286-252 in
favor of Bush. Ohio has not even begun to count the
provisional ballots. There are 155,000 or so. Ohio
has a history of provisional ballots, based on state
law. In 2000, 90% of the ballots counted, and of
those I understand that 90% were for Gore. Applying
that standard to the 155,000 would give Kerry 125,550
additional votes, and Bush 13,950. That would narrow
the margin from 132,000 (the 136,000 figure includes
the now-infamous Gahanna 4,000 vote error in Franklin
County) down to about 24,600. Originally, this was
why Kerry conceded; he just couldn't get it done on
the provisional ballots alone.
Ahh, but now there's a new development. A recount (or
an "audit," as one diary called it). Fine. Whatever,
call it what you want. But Kerry couldn't ask for it,
because he'd be called a sore loser, Al Gore with a
Brahmin accent. The lawyers are there, they're
sniffing around, they're ready to deal with the
shenanigans. But (here's the great part) it's not
Kerry's recount. The media is treating the
Cobb/Badnarik recount request as a joke, but it's not.
If the recount is held, the first thing elections
officials have to do is dust off the 93,000 undervotes
on punch cards (dear God, not again). And yes, Ohio
has a uniform state standard: 0 or 1 corners
attached, vote counts. 2 or 3, no dice. So the
recount won't be shut down -- and Blackwell can't
change the rules. God, I love Bush v. Gore (never
thought I'd write those words).
Again, look at the history. Traditionally, 90% count,
and the split is about 4-1 for Democrats -- undervotes
are almost exclusively from poor and/or minority
areas. Take 93,000, 90% is 83,700. 80% of that is
66,960 for Kerry, with 16,740 for Bush. That 24,600
vote Bush lead after the provisionals now goes to . .
. . fanfare, please . . . . ladies and gentlemen, I
give you the 44th President of the United States, John
Kerry, by a 25,660 vote margin in Ohio.
Now the margins could change, most likely on the
undervotes. Let's say Kerry only gets 70%, rather
than 80, of the undervotes. He still wins, this time
by about 9,000 votes.
Obviously, it would help if we could turn around New
Mexico, Iowa and/or Nevada as well, to create a
cushion for legal challenges and to create more
legitimacy to this process.
OHIO HAS NOT EVEN BEGUN THIS PROCESS OF COUNTING
PROVISIONAL BALLOTS, OR THE RECOUNT THAT HAS BEEN
REQUESTED BY COBB AND BADNARIK.
Since 11/2, Blackwell has been trying to make rule
changes, like the one where he tried to say that if
you left your birthday off the provisional ballot, it
didn't count. Sorry, Ken, there's a prior rule about
that, and it says that the absence of the birthday is
not enough to disqualify a provisional ballot.
Privately, I suspect they are absolutely freaking out,
because Bush v. Gore limits their ability to pull
post-election shenanigans like changing the rules.
I think that one of the reasons that Bush has been
accepting a lot of Cabinet resignations now, rather
than in January, is to create an inevitability in the
minds of the public and the media that this is a done
deal. No one in the media is dealing with the
analysis I set forth herein, which is not my own
analysis, but simply a mathematical exercise gleaned
from what little public information is out there. The
media went home on 11/3, and other than a few smirking
"conspiracy" stories since, has not really addressed
the final counting of votes in Ohio or elsewhere.
Bush's lead in New Mexico has been cut from 14,000 to
less than 6,000, and they're still counting.
Repeat after me: it ain't over til they count the
votes. Which means it ain't over. Will Kerry win?
No idea. Can he win? Yes.
Update [2004-11-14 17:33:59 by jsmdlawyer]: A couple
of good questions have been raised. I will try to
answer. My understanding is that the 93,000 figure is
undervotes, not spoiled ballots, which includes
overvotes. If someone has information to the contrary,
please let me know. I also understand that Ohio law is
very unfavorable to overvotes.
Second, my math doesn't include the usual "errors" and
"mistakes" that get made, almost invariably in favor
of the Republican. Who'da thunk it? Or "machine
errors" in Cuyahoga and Franklin Counties (I believe
there are potentially a lot of votes in Franklin,
because the turnout numbers seem very off in several
precincts in Columbus, including where I worked on
Election Day, and I've heard similar questions raised
in Cleveland as well). So I don't think that my
analysis is anything approaching a best case scenario,
but a reasonable middle ground.
Bottom line: is this a 100-1 shot? NO WAY. Is it a
slam dunk for our guy? Similarly, absolutely not. If I
had to lay odds right now, I'd say it's 50-50. If that
sounds chickenshit, sorry; but I bet it's better odds
than you thought when you woke up today. ;-)
Update [2004-11-14 23:15:43 by jsmdlawyer]: OK, based
on some comments (not the love notes, but some other
ones), another math exercise is in order.
I assumed 90% of the provisionals and 90% of the
undervotes would count. A number of posts (not the
trolls, just the pessimists -- nothing wrong with
that, just not who I am) said I was too optimistic.
OK, fair enough -- let's try a different math problem.
Let's say only 70% of the provisionals count -- a bit
higher than the 2/3 being reported in Cleveland -- but
let's go with it. 70% of 155,000 is 108,500. Let's
assume 90% are for Kerry (there's no reason to
question that right now -- they are what they are,
after all). That would mean 97,650 votes for Kerry and
10,850 votes for Bush, a lead for Kerry of 86,800.
Subtracting that from Bush's current lead of 132,000
yields a Bush lead of 45,200.
Now we move on to the undervotes. If 90% is too high
for the number to be counted (unlike provos, there is
a standard and a history to go with it), let's use 80%
instead, to be conservative (no pun intended). 80% of
93,000 is 74,400. Use the same percentage (80%) for
Kerry (again, no reason to change here -- the ballots
are what they are). 59,520 votes for Kerry, 14,880 for
Bush, a net of 44,640. So now the lead for Bush is 560
votes -- gee, isn't that really close to 537? And
remember, we haven't even touched the other aspects of
a recount (some overvotes may count, not as many as
we'd like, and who knows what may be under those
voting machine rocks when they get turned over in the
recount). WE ARE STILL IN THE GAME.
If you think I'm wrong, please tell me. Don't shout at
me, don't insult me; tell me, show me. I'm an
optimist, I can't help it, it's who I am. You
pessimists out there, poke holes in my balloon. A few
have tried, and I've tried to respond. It's your move.
Have at it. I'm ready for ya.
Update [2004-11-15 10:50:28 by jsmdlawyer]: Last
update. In comments, ineedalife, after calling me a
"rube," then said my calculations were "naive." So
just for him, here's a worst-case scenario.
Only 70% of the provisionals get counted. That's
108,500 votes. Kerry gets 85% rather than 90%. That's
92,225 for Kerry and 16,275 for Bush. Lead for Bush is
now 56,050.
On the undervotes, only 70% get counted, and they
break for Kerry 70-30 rather than 80-20. Of the 93,000
undervotes, that's 45,570 for Kerry and 19,530 for
Bush, knocking the lead down by another 26,040 votes.
The lead is now 30,010 votes, with the recount still
to go. Overvotes. Machine errors. Shenanigii (love
that word). Absentees (at least some, from what I can
tell). The margin will narrow further, maybe
completely.
OK, so Bush wins by 5,000 votes. Or 10,000. Does that
make you feel worse than you do now, or better? And
remember, this is clearly the WORST CASE; it could
easily get a lot better. Take that mandate and shove
up Dick Cheney's ass. Fuck mandate, it's more like
2000 Redux. I feel better. Don't you?
http://www.opednews.com/friedberg_111504_media_whitewash.htm
An Open Letter to the New York Times (and by
implication) the Rest of the US Media Who are Trying
to Whitewash the 2004 Presidential Election Scandal
by LILIAN FRIEDBERG
OpEdNews.com
Dear New York Times, etal,
As a long-time subscribed reader of your
publication—one I have always staunchly defended one
of the best in the world--I am incensed by your
dismissive handling of what is one of the most
significant breaking news stories since
Watergate.(your Nov.12 article,Vote Fraud Theories,
Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried)
Here I am, seated at my computer, submerged in the
nefarious bowels of the internet—reading a New York
Times article with all the “twitchy cloak-and-dagger
thrust” of booking an airline ticket, making a hotel
reservation, a bank transfer or reading the Washington
Post, Atlantic, New Yorker, ABC, NBC, and CBS
headlines—things most of us do on a regular basis in
the “parallel universe” that is the internet (citing
another derogatory and patently absurd quip by NBC
News’ Chip Reid).
I am neither internet enthusiast nor blogger: the term
blogosphere did not even enter my vocabulary until
several weeks before the 2004 election when these
citizen journalists, some more legitimate than others,
began emerging as a powerful political force in the
election. I am not unlike most of your readers:
educator, writer, editor, translator with a PhD and a
two-page publications list under my belt, in German
and English. I volunteer for my local park district,
where I offer performing arts programs for children
and youth. All in all, I’m pretty average—not unlike
the now nearly 40,000 people who’ve signed the
electronic petition to Congress requesting an
investigation of the 2004 presidential election.
(Note: I do not argue for the legitimacy of all these
signatures—what’s a few thousand plus or minus in the
greater scheme of things?). The internet is not a
distant planet: I would venture to guess that it is
“inhabited” or at least visited by 99.9% of your
readers.
These readers don’t appreciate their entirely
justifiable concerns about the accuracy of the
electoral process being discredited and dismissed as
conspiracy theorist-quackery—as eight out of nine
responses printed in today’s evidence.
One glaring omission in your coverage involves the way
this story began: you claim that it emerged from the
ether “in the course of seven days” as mysteriously as
the creationist version of human evolution. But that
is not the case.
So how did thousands of Times’ readers get swept up in
the maelstrom of the “online market of dark ideas
surrounding the last week’s presidential election”?
What really happened to spawn the internet hysteria?
The stage was set on election night, with worldwide
shock and disbelief over Bush’s “overnight sensation”
victory: observers throughout the country and the
world who had been following the election closely
tucked themselves into bed Tuesday night confident
that “help was on the way.” This logical assumption
was based not only on early exit polls: it was based
on the worldwide public perception, particularly
salient in the United States, that the only way a
Republican victory could be secured was through a
dubious fiat similar to the one we witnessed in 2000.
As one astute reader responding to your front-page
coverage of this highly significant media event
succinctly stated: “If George W. Bush had won the 2000
election honestly, people would not be so quick to
assume that he did not win this one fair and square
either.” Of course, that was in the letters section,
A30. So many readers may have missed it.
Years before the election, perhaps it was with the
quiet passage of the 2002 Help America Vote Act which
mandated the use of Diebold and ES&S machines
notorious for their "tamperability"--concerned
citizens from various walks of life--professors,
computer scientists, systems analysts, even
grandmothers and literary publicists from Seattle--had
been attempting to sound the alarm: the Diebold voting
machines are not secure; the democratic process itself
is in jeopardy, seriously so. Bev Harris, Executive
Director of the consumer protection organization
Blackboxvoting.org, first published her groundbreaking
book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st
Century in 2003. Avi Rubin, professor of Computer
Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical
Director of the Hopkins Security Information Security
Institute, authored that study. Rubin is a qualified
expert with years of practical experience in the
fields of cryptography, network security, Web security
and secure Internet services who was employed by such
companies as AT&T and Bellcore prior to accepting his
appointment at Johns Hopkins. On Wednesday, October
27, 2004, one week before the election, CBS's 60
Minutes broadcast an alarming segment covering
electronic voting, featuring not only Rubin, but David
Jefferson of the Center for Applied Scientific
Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Jefferson described the system currently in place as
the "electoral weapon of mass destruction" which could
easily be manipulated by a "rogue programmer." Mark
Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York
University and author of several "legitimate" books on
American government published by Norton & Company,
also pointed out the potential for problems with the
machine-voting systems, and these are but a few of the
"minority report-esque" voices who attempted to sound
the alarm before the most recent election scandal
broke loose on the internet. Are we to discredit these
experts as "internet conspiracy theorists?"
In the hours since you posted your disparaging report,
the bloggers have lashed backed faster than you could
flog them: As Joseph Cannon’s Friday blog points out,
even as you discount the “early” reports that began
appearing just two days after the election, you
neglect to take into consideration Dr. Stephen F.
Freeman’s (University of Pennsylvania; degree: MIT)
study published on November 10, which—two days prior
to your biased and poorly researched report—lent
support to the bloggers’ “conspiracy theories.”
Instead, you invoke the imprimatur of Harvard, Cornell
and Stanford, citing an email by three unnamed
political scientists posted to the website
ustogether.org (a study that has since been revised
and is now being referred to in the scientific
community as the Dopp and Liddle report). According to
your account, there was not sufficient “concrete
support” to merit the investigations sought by the
three Congressmen (John Conyers. Jerrold Nadler and
Robert Wexler). The “Dixiecrat” theory has, in fact,
since been de-debunked by solid research findings, not
by anonymous emails shot off from prestigious schools.
At present, the three primary studies circulating on
the net are the Dopp and Liddle report, the Caltech
report and the Freeman’s MIT report. Dr. Freeman’s
report concludes that while “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," and that
furthermore that, "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
of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or
random error." Freeman concludes that the odds of
those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by
chance are 250,000,000 to one.
These studies do not involve a the kind of fuzzy math
implied by the Times’ report of
“blog-to-e-mail-to-blog”—they involve a diligent,
however frenzied, study of the actual data produced by
exit polls versus actual results. These so-called
“internet conspiracy theorists” are credentialed
professionals engaged in hard research--most of which
is beyond my grasp as a classically literary-minded
PhD, but which clearly reflects solid research
conducted by people who, by virtue of their
professional training in precisely the fields required
to analyze this data, are hard at work doing the job
of the entire nation right now. They are doing your
job, and they deserve your support and gratitude, not
disdain, derision and dismissal. The fact of the
matter is, the situation we face as a nation is far
too complicated to be figured out without the aid of
sophisticated independent scientists who can analyze
the data. The jury is still out on this one: the
fact of the matter is, there are three well-researched
statistical analyses that will need to be studied,
compared and analyzed by highly discerning and
well-trained minds. That is likely to take some
time—consider the stakes involved, we’d best just hold
our breath waiting for the research to be complete. In
the meantime, these three studies alone provide enough
evidence of “anomalies” to merit a thorough, time and
cost intensive investigation.
Let’s not even begin to ”discuss” or otherwise dismiss
the most recent findings of investigative journalist
Greg Palast, one of those
internet-conspiracy-theorist-bloggers charged with
snowballing rumors in cyberspace: in his BBC report
(also available online) he states that “documents from
the Bush campaign's Florida HQ suggest a plan to
disrupt voting in African-American districts.” Is it
the BBC that is spreading rumors, or Germany’s highly
regarded Spiegel (also available online), which
rightly identifies Palast as an “investigative
reporter, documentary film producer and best-selling
author” and the remaining “internet conspiracy
theorists” as “watchdog groups” (in most democracies,
this is a positive moniker not a pejorative).
I must confess, Mssrs. Zeller, Fessenden and Schwartz,
in my professional capacity as a translator of German
historical and literary texts, I often have the
unpleasant task of researching “internet conspiracy
theories” and subjecting myself to the horrific
rantings of stark-raving lunatics on the net. One
classic example can be found at this site:
http://www.regmeister.net/verbrecher/verbrecher.htm.
This, sirs, is an “internet conspiracy theory”—the
remaining sources I have cited here are highly
legitimate studies and reports conducted by
credentialed scientists and respectable journalists.
Had you done your research, you’d have recognized the
difference. Perhaps you got your internets confused: I
see from today’s headlines that the “Pentagon [is]
Envisioning a Costly Internet for War”—Tim Weiner
reports that “the Pentagon is building its own
Internet, the military’s world wide web for the wars
of the future. The goal is to give all American
commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign
enemies and threats—a ‘God’s-eye view’ of battle.”
Maybe that was the internets you had in mind—I’m quite
content with the God’s eye-view I’m getting right here
and now on this ol’ fashioned democratic internet.
The story is bigger than Watergate. Your dismissal of
it is on a par with the Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Lilian Friedberg
Reporting from the Democratic Mandate of the United
States of America
Lilian Friedberg friedberg@chidjembe.com is a
writer, translator, editor and performing artist from
Chicago, IL. She recently completed her PhD in
Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois. Her
work has appeared in such venues as American Indian
Quarterly, African Studies Quarterly, German
Quarterly, New German Critique, Denver Quarterly,
Chicago Review, Transition and various other venues.
She recently co-edited, with Sander Gilman, a volume
of selected essays by German Jewish journalist Henryk
Broder, (A Jew in the New Germany, Univ. of Illinois
Press). Friedberg is artistic director of the Chicago
Djembe Project, an arts organization dedicated to
respect and cooperation across cultures and genders
through the African djembe drum tradition.
WWW.Chidjembe.com
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/letters/sfl-pbmail979xnov15,0,4998399.story?coll=sfla-news-letters
Media ignoring election fraud
Gayle Rogalski
Delray Beach
November 15, 2004
I would like to thank the authors of two Nov. 9
letters, regarding the real results of the Nov. 2
election. These letters are the only mention I have
seen in the media about the fraudulent election we
just had.
Obviously, the mainstream media has been unable to
print the truth about this election. For those of us
who thought we voted for the candidates of our choice,
our votes very well may not have been counted that
way. For instance, in Baker County, where 69.3 percent
of 12,887 registered voters are Democrats and 24.3
percent are Republicans, the supposed Democratic vote
count was 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush. Does
anyone believe that is correct?
Apparently this was repeated in enough places to shift
just enough votes from one candidate to the other.
Manipulation of the main computers compiling the total
votes can be very easily and quickly accomplished as
we have just seen.
Of course everyone knew Ohio would be manipulated
after a major Republican and CEO of a voting machine
company vowed to do anything he had to to get Bush
re-elected.
This is the tip of a very crooked iceberg. This
election (as well as the 2000 election) and this
country were hijacked by the people with the most
power in this country. Of course, the paper trail
addition to voting machines that was fought so hard
for and at every turn denied in this state alone
allowed for this fiasco to be.
Obviously voting in this country is no longer a means
to elect our public servants. It is quite obvious many
of these people are not serving us but their own
agendas. Please call your congressional
representatives and demand an investigation of this
fiasco. The future necessitates people waking up and
taking responsiblity for their government before it's
too late if it isn't already.
Learn what is really going on from alternative sources
because you are not being told the truth by anyone
else. Learn what is going on and what you can do to
help change it and take back our country. The future
of your children and grandchildren depend on it.
Copyright © 2004, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111704W.shtml
The Peter Principle and the Neocon Coup
By Robert Scheer
The Los Angeles Times
Tuesday 16 November 2004
The bloodletting has begun.
I'm not referring to the latest attempt to reconquer
Iraq, but rather the wholesale political revenge
campaign being waged by the hard-liners in the Bush
administration against anybody and everybody inside
the government who challenged the way the second
Persian Gulf war in a decade was marketed and run.
Out: Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose
political epitaph should now read, "You break it, you
own it" for his prescient but unwanted warning to the
president on the danger of imperial overreach in Iraq.
Out: Top CIA officials who dared challenge, behind
the scenes, the White House's unprecedented
exploitation of raw intelligence data in order to sell
a war to a Congress and a public hungry for revenge
after 9/11.
Out: Veteran CIA counterterrorism expert and Osama
bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer, better known as the
best-selling author "Anonymous," whose balanced and
devastating critiques of the Iraq war, the CIA and the
way President Bush is handling the war on terror have
been a welcome counterpoint to the "it's true if we
say it's true" idiocy of the White House PR machine.
Meanwhile, incompetence begat by ideological
blindness has been rewarded. The neoconservatives who
created the ongoing Iraq mess have more than survived
the failure of their impossibly rosy scenarios for a
peaceful and democratic Iraq under U.S. rule. In fact,
despite calls for their resignations - from the former
head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni,
among others - the neocon gang is thriving. They have
not been held responsible for the "16 words" about
yellowcake, the rise and fall of Ahmad Chalabi, the
Abu Ghraib scandal, the post-invasion looting of
Iraq's munitions stores and the disastrous elimination
of the Iraqi armed forces.
As of today, the neocons on Zinni's list of losers -
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz; the
vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby;
National Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams;
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith
and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - are all
still employed even as Bush's new director of central
intelligence, Porter J. Goss, is eviscerating the
CIA's leadership.
This is the culmination of a three-year campaign by
the president's men to scapegoat the CIA for the fact
that 9/11 occurred on Bush's watch.
So far, half a dozen of the nation's top spymasters
have been forced out abruptly - a strange way to
handle things at a time when Bin Laden and Al Qaeda
are still seeking to attack the U.S. Ironically, this
all comes as Goss is suppressing a lengthy study,
prepared for Congress by the CIA's inspector general,
that, according to an intelligence official who has
read it, names individuals in the government
responsible for failures that paved the way for the
9/11 attacks.
Thus Bush, with Goss as his hatchet man, is having
it both ways: He can be seen to be cleaning house at
the CIA - when he is simply punishing independent
voices - while denying Congress access to an
independent audit of actual intelligence failures.
We should remember that as flawed as its performance
was under former Director George J. Tenet, the CIA at
least sometimes tried to be a counterweight to the
fraudulent claims of Rumsfeld's and Dick Cheney's
neoconservative staffs. All of the nation's
traditional intelligence centers were bypassed by a
rogue operation based in Feith's Office of Special
Plans. Feith was given broad access to raw
intelligence streams - the better to cherry-pick
factoids and fabrications that found their way into
even the president's crucial prewar State of the Union
address.
Now, by successfully discarding those who won't buy
into the administration's ideological fantasies of
remaking the world in our image, the neoconservatives
have consolidated control of the United States' vast
military power.
With the ravaging of the CIA and the ousting of
Powell - instead of the more-deserving Rumsfeld - the
coup of the neoconservatives is complete. They have
achieved a remarkable political victory by failing
upward.
-------
Jump to TO Features for Wednesday November 17, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1112-01.htm
Published on Friday, November 12, 2004 by the Inter
Press Service
U.N. Report Slams Use of Torture to Beat Terror
by Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS - No country can justify torture, the
humiliation of prisoners or violation of international
conventions in the guise of fighting terrorism, says a
U.N. report released here.
The 19-page study, which is likely to go before the
current session of the U.N. General Assembly in
December, does not identify the United States by name
but catalogues the widely publicized torture and
humiliation of prisoners and detainees in Iraq and
Afghanistan by U.S. troops waging the so-called ”war
on terrorism.”
Bush is thumbing his nose at the international
community and all those who respect human rights by
nominating Gonzales. You cannot simply up and bolt
from the Geneva Conventions and the Anti-Torture
Convention. Gonzales is Ashcroft without the edges and
the delirium and the baritone. But the policy will
remain the same.
Matt Rothschild, editor of 'The Progressive' magazine
The hard line taken by the United Nations comes amidst
the controversial appointment of a new U.S. attorney
general, who has implicitly defended the use of
torture against ''terrorists'' and ''terror
suspects''.
On Wednesday, U.S. President George W Bush named White
House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales as attorney
general to succeed John Ashcroft, who announced his
resignation last week.
In a now-infamous memo to the White House in January
2002, Gonzales argued that captured members of the
former ruling Taliban regime in Afghanistan were not
protected under the Geneva Conventions, which
stipulate the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs).
The United States has signed the Geneva Conventions.
The same policy was applied to prisoners in Abu Ghraib
prison in Baghdad who were tortured and humiliated by
U.S. troops following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in
March 2003, raising outrage among human rights
activists and other people worldwide.
The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command is now
prosecuting several U.S. soldiers on criminal charges,
including involuntary manslaughter, for their
treatment of prisoners.
Gonzales has also described international conventions
governing prisoners of war, including the Geneva
Conventions, as ''obsolete.''
According to the author of the 19-page U.N. report,
'Torture, and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment', ''The condoning of torture
is, per se, a violation of the prohibition of
torture.”
The study, by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights
Theo van Boven, points out that ''legal argument of
necessity and self-defense, invoking domestic law,
have recently been put forward, aimed at providing a
justification to exempt officials suspected of having
committed or instigated acts of torture against
suspected terrorists from criminal liability.''
But, Van Boven says, ''the absolute nature of the
prohibition of torture and other forms of
ill-treatment means that no exceptional circumstances
whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war,
internal political instability or any other public
emergency, may be invoked as justification for
torture.''
Von Boven said he has received information ''on
certain methods that have been condoned and used to
secure information from suspected terrorists.''
He says these include, ''holding detainees in painful
and-or stressful positions, depriving them of sleep
and light for prolonged periods, exposing them to
extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, hooding,
depriving them of clothing, stripping detainees naked
and threatening them with dogs.''
''The jurisprudence of both international and regional
human rights mechanisms is unanimous in stating that
such methods violate the prohibition of torture and
ill-treatment,'' Von Boven adds.
In the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks on the United States, he says, ''thousands of
persons suspected of terrorism, including children,
have been detained, denied the opportunity to have
legal status determined and prevented from having
access to lawyers.''
Some of them, he adds, are said to be still held in
solitary confinement, ''which in itself may constitute
a violation of the right to be free from torture.''
Asked if he supports a call by Amnesty International
for an independent commission to probe U.S. detention
policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Van Boven told
reporters in October that such a probe is imperative.
''Whenever there are serious allegations of torture,
investigations are absolutely necessary. And the
results of these investigations should be made public
because it's absolutely a public affair,'' said the
special rapporteur.
In view of the U.N. position, the appointment of
Gonzales as the new U.S. attorney general is a slap in
the face of the international community, says Matt
Rothschild, editor of 'The Progressive' magazine.
''Bush is thumbing his nose at the international
community and all those who respect human rights by
nominating Gonzales,'' Rothschild told IPS.
''You cannot simply up and bolt from the Geneva
Conventions and the Anti-Torture Convention. Gonzales
is Ashcroft without the edges and the delirium and the
baritone. But the policy will remain the same,'' he
added.
''It was Gonzales, along with Ashcroft and (Defense
Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld and (Vice President Dick)
Cheney, who signed off on tougher interrogation
methods and on the hiding of prisoners from the
International Red Cross,'' said Rothschild.
According to Francis A Boyle, who teaches
international law at the University of Illinois, ''As
White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales originated,
authorized, approved and aided and abetted grave
breaches of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of
1949, which are serious war crimes.”
''In other words, Gonzales is a prima facie war
criminal. He must be prosecuted under the Geneva
Conventions and the U.S. War Crimes Act,'' Boyle told
IPS.
In any event, the U.S. Senate must reject his
nomination, because, as a presumptive war criminal,
Gonzales is not fit to be attorney general of the
United States, he continued.
''Should Gonzales travel around the world in that
capacity, human rights lawyers such as myself will
attempt to get him prosecuted along the lines of what
happened to (former Chilean dictator) General
(Pinochet,'' said Boyle, author of 'Destroying World
Order'.
Jordan J Paust, law foundation professor at the
University of Houston, agrees with Boyle's thesis.
''The denial of protections under the Geneva
Conventions is a violation of the Geneva Conventions,
and every violation of the laws of war is a war crime.
Complicity in connection with war crimes (such as
aiding and abetting the denial of protections) is also
criminally sanctionable,'' Paust told IPS.
Thus, it appears Gonzales is reasonably accused of
international criminal activity, he added, although he
has the human right to be presumed innocent until
proven guilty in a court of law that provides basic
human rights to due process protections, ”that he
chose to deny others with respect to the military
commissions at Guantanamo Bay” (where Washington
detains terror suspects).
''Whether or not Gonzales is guilty, the taint in this
instance is surely enough to require that he not be
confirmed in any U.S. governmental position,
especially since the Bush administration has stated
that it is still the policy of the United States to
have a government under law and to promote the rule of
law and human rights -- rights that are reflected also
in the Geneva Conventions,'' Paust added.
''Making Alberto Gonzales the attorney general of the
United States would be a travesty,'' says Michael
Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional
Rights.
''It would mean taking one of the legal architects of
an illegal and immoral policy and installing him as
the official who is charged with protecting our
constitutional rights. The Gonzales memo paved the way
for Abu Ghraib,'' Ratner said in a statement issued
Thursday.
###
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111504V.shtml
CIA Plans to Purge Its Agency
By Knut Royce
Newsday
Sunday 14 November 2004
Sources say White House has ordered new chief to
eliminate officers who were disloyal to Bush.
Washington - The White House has ordered the new
CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of
officers believed to have been disloyal to President
George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to
the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the
hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable
sources.
"The agency is being purged on instructions from
the White House," said a former senior CIA official
who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the
White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get
rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The
CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of
liberals and people who have been obstructing the
president's agenda."
One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen
R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services,
the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post
reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his
resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of
staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White
House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.
But the former senior CIA official said that the
White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider
his resignation. That might be the spin they put on
it, but they want him out." He said the job had
already been offered to the former chief of the
European Division who retired after a spat with
then-CIA Director George Tenet.
Another recently retired top CIA official said he
was unsure Kappes had "officially resigned, but I do
know he was unhappy."
Without confirming or denying that the job offer
had been made, a CIA spokesman asked Newsday to
withhold naming the former officer because of his
undercover role over the years. He said he had no
comment about Goss' personnel plans, but he added that
changes at the top are not unusual when new directors
come in.
On Friday John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year veteran of
the intelligence division who served as acting CIA
director before Goss took over, announced that he was
retiring. The spokesman said that the retirement had
been planned and was unrelated to the Kappes
resignation or to other morale problems inside the
CIA.
It could not be learned yesterday if the White
House had identified Kappes, a respected operations
officer, as one of the officials "disloyal" to Bush.
"The president understands and appreciates the
sacrifices made by the members of the intelligence
community in the war against terrorism," said a White
House official of the report that he was purging the
CIA of "disloyal" officials. " . . . The suggestion
[that he ordered a purge] is inaccurate."
But another former CIA official who retains good
contacts within the agency said that Goss and his top
aides, who served on his staff when Goss was chairman
of the House intelligence committee, believe the
agency had relied too much over the years on liaison
work with foreign intelligence agencies and had not
done enough to develop its own intelligence collection
system.
"Goss is not a believer in liaison work," said
this retired official. But, he said, the CIA's "best
intelligence really comes from liaison work. The CIA
is simply not going to develop the assets [agents and
case officers] that would meet the intelligence
requirements."
Tensions between the White House and the CIA have
been the talk of the town for at least a year,
especially as leaks about the mishandling of the Iraq
war have dominated front pages.
Some of the most damaging leaks came from Michael
Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, who
wrote a book anonymously called "Imperial Hubris" that
criticized what he said was the administration's lack
of resolve in tracking down the al-Qaida chieftain and
the reallocation of intelligence and military manpower
from the war on terrorism to the war in Iraq. Scheuer
announced Thursday that he was resigning from the
agency.
-------
Jump to TO Features for Monday November 15, 2004
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included information for research and educational
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