At least five more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what? The neo-con wet dream of a Three Stooges Reich. Nothing more. No, the world is not safer. No, the Iraqi people are not free. No, the US will not control the last few decades of the world’s oil flow. The war in Iraq is worse than immoral, worse than illegal under international law, it is insanely stupid. It was insanely stupid in its inception, insanely stupid in its execution, and insanely stupid in its perpetuation.
Here are twenty-one pieces (some news, some op-ed) that highlight the national state of emergency that the US regimestream news media continues to CONCEAL from and LIE to you about, and that the Democratic Party leadership (in particular, John Kerry) have cravenly and cowardly refused to confront...
This LNS Post Coup II Supplement is organized into six sections: Theft of 2004 Election, Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure (National Security), Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure (Economic Security), Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure (Environmental Security), Complicity of the Corporatist News Media and More Names for the John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes…These six categories represent the only real agenda to pursue, moving forward: Free Press in the US (i.e., Media Reform), Democracy in the US (i.e., Election Reform), National Security (Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris and Clarke’s Against All Enemies), Economic Security (fiscal responsibility, e.g., debt reduction), Environmental Security (i.e., renewable energy resources, the fight against global warming) and the Defense of Those Who Speak Out in Resistance (e.g., the John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes)…There is no other realistic agenda, anything else (the “traditional” Democratic agenda in particular) is nothing more than denial and co-dependency…
Donate to www.blackboxvoting.org, www.moveon.org, www.buzzflash.com, www.truthout.org and www.mediamatters.org.
Do not donate to the Democratic Party unless it joins the Resistance – for REAL (as in “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor”) The Kerry capitulation is unforgivable, so is Sen. Harry Reid’s remarks about accepting Scalia as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, so is the attack on Michael Moore by Al From of the DLC…No, do not give the Democratic Party one more penny until it shows up in the streets and in the courts where the *civil* war is already underway…BUT do not fall into the revisionist thinking of those like John MacArthur who says, in the Providence Journal, “I am sorry I didn’t vote for Ralph Nader.” We are at a very dangerous juncture in the Resistance. John Kerry has betrayed us, but this tragic fact does not re-cast the betrayal of that shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader. His betrayal of all that is good in 2000, and his feeble attempt to repeat that betrayal in 2004 still stand on their own as acts of ignominy. Just because Kerry too fails to understand the national state of emergency or refuses to risk what he would risk in resisting does not lessen the eggreious wrongs of the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader. Both the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader and Kerry should both be ostracized, and indeed equated, for their betrayals.
The Theft of the 2004 Election:
Mark Crispin Miller, www.buzzflash.com: As you know (and way too many others don't), Rep. John Conyers recently held open hearings in the US Congress, on the all-important subject of the voting in Ohio on November 2nd. There was a lot of harrowing testimony on the tricks and tactics used there by Bush/Cheney to suppress as many Democratic votes as possible, and to exaggerate Ohio's electoral support for the regime.
It was a public inquiry of towering importance, and not only because it was (allegedly) Ohio that gave Bush just enough electoral votes to win. Ohio matters more than anyone can say, because what went down there went down not only in Ohio. There is in fact abundant evidence--strong evidence--suggesting that Team Bush pursued that crooked twofold strategy throughout the nation. In other words, they used a broad variety of means to trash the Kerry vote and to exaggerate the Bush vote, and did so everywhere they could.
Now, this being a democratic republic (or so we've all been taught), you'd think that Conyers' charges -- and the hearing -- would get a lot of coverage in the press.
And yet the New York Times, our nation's "newspaper of record," did not even mention it, much less cover it. The hearings were on Wednesday. There was no word of it in Thursday's paper, nor any word, belatedly, in Friday's. (Thursday's Times did run a couple of long stories on the electoral situation in Ukraine, but none on the quite similar, and -- to Americans -- vastly more important story here at home.)
Such silence is bizarre. It's deeply wrong. In fact, it's un-American. For what public issue could there be that matters quite as much as the integrity of our elections? What, then, could possibly explain, or excuse, the Times' failure even to note Conyers' hearings? For that matter, what explains the Times' thorough indifference to this crucial subject? Like all American news outlets, the Times is obligated, by the First Amendment, to attempt to keep its readership informed about the government, so that the government is answerable to us, its ultimate custodians. Rather than deal squarely with the ever-mounting evidence of massive fraud by the Republicans, the Times instead has merely ridiculed those raising questions, as if such patriotic citizens were laughably insane.
Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: On Friday December 10 two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in process recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell’s office. The Director Board of Elections stated that “all voter records for the state of Ohio were “locked-down,” and now they are not considered public records.”
Are we entering Watergate territory? Remember the coverup was worse than the crime.
Just in the nick of time, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is taking his ongoing investigation of Ohio election fraud to Columbus on Monday for a "2004 Election Forum." Conyers will be joined by Congressmembers Maxine Waters (D-CA), Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), and Ted Strickland (D-OH), along with Rev. Jesse Jackson, attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and John Bonifaz, and other Ohio leaders. The forum will address new evidence of election irregularities and fraud in Ohio, the issue of Ohio electors meeting while recounts and litigation are pending, and to discuss legislative and other responses to the problems.
First, this is a direct slap in the face to Ken Blackwell, since Columbus is where his office is. How will Blackwell respond?
www.fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com: On Friday December 10 two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in process recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell’s office. The Director Board of Elections stated that “all voter records for the state of Ohio were “locked-down,” and now they are not considered public records.”
The volunteers were working with voter printouts received directly from Carole Garman, Director, Greene County Board of Elections. Joan Quinn and Eve Roberson, retired attorney and election official respectively, were hand-copying voter discrepancies from precinct voting books on behalf of the presidential candidates Mr. Cobb (Green) and Mr. Badnarik Libertarian) who had requested the recount.
One of the goals of the recount was to determine how many minority voters were unable to vote or denied voting at the polls. Upon requesting copies of precinct records from predominantly minority precincts, Ms. Garman contacted Secretary of State Blackwell’s office and spoke to Pat Wolfe, Election Administrator. Ms. Wolfe told Ms. Garman to assert that all voter records for the State of Ohio were “locked down” and that they are “not considered public records.”
Quinn and Roberson asked specifically for the legal authority authorizing Mr. Blackwell to “lock down” public records. Garman stated that it was the Secretary of State’s decision. Ohio statute requires the Directors of Boards of Election to comply with public requests for inspection and copying of public election records. As the volunteer team continued recording information from the precinct records in question, Garman entered the room and stated she was withdrawing permission to inspect or copy any voting records at the Board of Elections. Garman then physically removed the precinct book from Ms. Roberson’s hands. They later requested the records again from Garman’s office, which was again denied.
Greg Palast, DemocracyNow!: See, 93,000 votes were tossed on the floor, never counted. We’re not talking recount here, we’re talking never count. 93,000 votes are called spoiled. 155,000 votes called provisional. More absentee ballots tossed. And supposedly George Bush won by 119,000. Folks, now what’s going on here? Whose votes were not counted that were twice the Bush margin of victory? Just, you know, was it random? Well, not exactly. Overwhelmingly the votes not counted, not counted, were cast in African American precincts. These are very Black votes, see, and when I use the term “overwhelmingly,” the non-counted votes cast into the machines but not counted for technical reasons – when I say “overwhelmingly Black votes,” that is not my phrase. That’s from Dr. Mark Salling of Cleveland State University who’s been investigating this for the ACLU, and the statisticians and demographers say it’s overwhelmingly Black votes which are not counted. The technical term is “spoiled” votes. Okay, now, how do votes spoil? Do you leave them out of the fridge? What do you do? These are like undervotes, overvotes – they use those technical terms, and in Ohio it’s hanging chads. We’re back to that. Dimpled chads, pregnant chads. Because Ohio is the last state in America to use the old punch card system for 75% of the vote. You’ve heard a lot about the dangers of blackbox voting. I want to talk to you about good old-fashioned punch card voting. 93,000 votes tossed in the garbage out of Black precincts. How? Okay? Because when – just like in – Black voters, Black neighborhoods get the bad schools, they get the bad hospitals, they get the bum voting machines, see? And their votes go in the garbage. And they know it. In fact, it should be against the law. And, in fact, it is. The ACLU sued the State of Ohio for a racist ballot counting system. They sued five states. Okay? Before the election. Before the election, four states said, “Well, gee, we’re kind of embarrassed. Yeah, we’re losing thousands of Black votes.” And they all agreed to fix the machines before the election, but one state. The Secretary of State of Ohio said, “Yes.” He said, ‘Yes, I know that the machines we use in Ohio eliminate tens of thousands of Black votes on bad machines.’ The only -- the only state that said, ‘Yeah, we'll fix them after the inauguration.’
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: Some scattered observations from my notes of the proceedings:
Rep. Nadler: The right to vote and to have the votes counted is indispensable. Confidence in our election processes is on the wane, and the stability of our government is threatened. We do not have the luxury of waiting to fix all this, as the next national election comes in two years.
Rep. Scott: The complaints were not limited to Ohio. In his state of Virginia, some 500 complaints were made by voters. In his own district, voters were given ballots that did not have his name on them.
Rep. Watt: The basic premise of our democracy is the vote. If it is broken, it must be fixed, and we must institutionalize a process that continually evaluates the way we run elections. If we can deliver ballots to rural voters in Afghanistan on the backs of donkeys, surely we can make sure our elections are free and fair here in America.
Ralph Neas (President, People for the American Way): In Cuyahoga county, Ohio, there were fewer voting machines available to the voters during the Presidential election than there were during the primary election. Secretary of State Blackwell, he of the paper-weight obstructionism, wins the Katherine Harris award this time around. There should be prosecutions over all this, and people should go to jail.
Cliff Arnebeck (Chair, Common Cause Ohio): The fraud must be fixed. It must be fixed now, and not in the future. People cannot and will not accept a fraudulent election for the office of President. The best precedent that can be set is to state flatly that people will not tolerate fraud, and will not ‘move on’ until the problems are repaired. How can we, with a straight face, talk about democracy in Iraq when we cannot guarantee democracy here at home?
Shawnta Walcott (Zogby Inc.): This election has created an unprecedented level of suspicion that things did not go as they should have. Zogby Inc. wants to see a blue-ribbon panel created immediately to investigate the claims made at this hearing.
Rep. Jackson: We must have a standardized national voting process and take the matter out of the hands of individual states, which can keep the process "separate and unequal." We must have a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. How can people argue that the right to own a gun is implicitly stated in the constitution, and then turn around and say it is acceptable to have the right to vote only be ‘implicit’ in the constitution?
It was this last point, made over and over again by Reverend Jesse Jackson, that drew the most applause from the audience and attention from the Congressmen. In demanding a constitutional amendment cementing the simple right to vote, Jackson spoke of the long line that reached from Selma, Alabama to Ohio, and into this room. "This is not about who won or lost," he said. "This is about participating in democracy. The 2004 election is not past-tense. We are not whining. It is time to take this struggle to the streets and fully legitimize this struggle."
Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: My favorite moment was when John Bonifaz of the National Voting Institute resoundingly declared if a recount shows Ohio should have sent "a different set of electors, that set of electors will meet, and will cast their votes for President. And if that happens, the U.S. Congress will receive the votes of two competing slates of electors. One slate will be chosen by Mr. Blackwell. The other will be chosen by the will of the people."
Of course, if that happens, "we the people" will have to exert our will by surrounding Congress on January 6 when they decide which Electors to accept - and which President to inaugurate - taking our cue from the people of Ukraine.
As for Rove-controlled media coverage, if you rely on the Washington Post, the event didn't happen (Demand an explanation from Michael Getler ombudsman@washpost.com 202-334-7582. If you rely on the NY Times (which didn't think American Democracy important enough to send its own reporter - write Daniel Okrent public@nytimes.com), the event was completely insignificant.
Wayne Madsen, Online Journal: An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.
According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.
According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.
Bev Harris, www.blackboxvoting.org: Why the Feeney vote-rigging story sounds like disinformation, as Wayne Madsen writes it
The story hangs together better at BradBlog.com.
ABOUT DISINFORMATION: Like a good lie, it has elements of truth. Trouble is, the truth in Madsen's story doesn't relate to the nuts and bolts of the story.
DISINFORMATION IS DANGEROUS TO THE CLEAN VOTING MOVEMENT: Getting the facts is tedious, unexciting work, consisting of auditing and personal interviews, and it takes time. Many Americans want a magic bullet, a single shot that will blow the lid off everything at once.
That's risky. If the mainstream media continues to be bombarded with stories that sound credible, but aren't, when the real thing comes down the pike it will be ignored.
While MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and I had a run-in recently, I agree with Olbermann's earlier critique of the Madsen homeland security story, and this new Madsen story is just as weak. Most of both Madsen stories are bait and switch. Madsen wanders all over the place, recapping unrelated information from real news agencies, piggybacking onto their credibility, with only the most tenuous ties to what he is actually trying to prove. The work done on BradBlog is much more focused, and Brad seems to be a responsible researcher.
The Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security
Michael Scheuer, LA Times: The agency did its job, but higher-ups endangered the nation.
The Central Intelligence Agency is the best place to work in the United States. No federal agency has a smarter, more dedicated or harder-working set of individuals than the CIA's women and men. I had intended to work at the CIA for the duration of my career, and I left it with deep regret and a great sense of personal loss. I was neither forced out nor pressed to resign. Resigning was my decision alone.
I cannot state these facts more clearly, and I fiercely deny the accusations that I am a disgruntled former employee. I am, however, a disgruntled American - one who decided that being a good citizen was no longer compatible with being a good member of the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service.
I do not profess a broad expertise in international affairs, but between January 1996 and June 1999 I was in charge of running operations against Al Qaeda from Washington. When it comes to this small slice of the large U.S. national security pie, I speak with firsthand experience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically that during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sound intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden - either by capture or by U.S. military attack. I witnessed and documented, along with dozens of other CIA officers, instances where life-risking intelligence-gathering work of the agency's men and women in the field was wasted.
Because of classification issues, I argued this point only obliquely in my book "Imperial Hubris," but it is a fact - and fortunately, no American has to depend on my word alone. The 9/11 commission report documents most of the occasions on which senior U.S. bureaucrats and policymakers had the chance to attack Bin Laden in 1998-1999. It is mystifying that the American public has not been outraged over these missed opportunities.
Richard Clarke, DemocracyNow!: In order to liberate the city to hold an election we destroyed the city where 300,000 people had called their home. Again, not exactly what the administration has told you. They have told you we liberated it to have an election but the reality is we have destroyed it. The third thing that has happened recently is the president continues the appointments of his new Cabinet. His new Cabinet, which is, if the old Cabinet was a closed circle, this Cabinet is an infinite dot. They are keeping Donald Rumsfeld. They are appointing as the attorney general someone who participated in drafting memos saying the torture was permitted. So the man who is now protecting our civil liberties believes torture is permitted. They have at the head of CIA a Republican politician. And they have now appointed as secretary of Homeland Security a man who totally failed in his mission in Baghdad to help create a police department. The fourth thing that I would note in recent days is the administration discussing the Iranian Nuclear Program. Now, there may well be an Iranian Nuclear Program. And if there is, that should be a source of concern for all of us. But who in the world, who in a punitive coalition, who in the United Nations, will believe us when we go to them again and say that a country in the Middle East is building a nuclear bomb and we have to do something about it? Nonetheless, word is leaking out of the Pentagon that orders have gone to central command to update the contingency plan for hostilities against Iran. We all need to watch this space very carefully and very closely. Because while we do have to worry about Iranian-sponsored terrorism and Iranian nuclear programs, we also have to make sure that we do not repeat the mistake of Iraq.
Le Nouvel Observateur Editorial: The Russian President took a shot at United States' policy Saturday, evoking a "dictatorship coated in beautiful pseudo-democratic phraseology."
Rssian President Vladimir Putin took a shot at the "globalization" policy of the United States, without naming it, when he evoked an international affairs' "dictatorship coated in beautiful pseudo-democratic phraseology" during a speech published Saturday December 4th by the Russian presidency.
"The new century is often called the century of globalization. That bears within itself possibilities for economic and scientific progress(...) At the same time the attempts to transform a pluralist civilization with many faces created by God (...) according to the principles of a unipolar world seem extremely dangerous," the Russian president declared during a three day visit to India.
The Russian president warned against the development, within this framework, of "all the threats" that "terrorism, large-scale criminal activity and drug trafficking" constitute.
Robert Scheer, LA Times: And despite the exposure of the Khan black market ring, nothing has changed: In a White House meeting Friday, Bush honored Musharraf - who since seizing power has purged his country's Supreme Court and rewritten its constitution - as a "courageous leader."
The administration again hastened to explain that Musharraf was vital in the three-year effort to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," as Bush frequently has proclaimed. How embarrassing then, when hours later Musharraf conceded in a Washington Post interview that Bin Laden's trail had grown completely cold but that the arch-terrorist is still very much alive and functioning.
Musharraf complained that attempts to pin down Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives had been seriously undermined by what he politely called "voids" in U.S. troop commitments to the area, which are equal to a mere 15% of the U.S. forces in Iraq. The U.S. strategy instead has been to rely on Pakistan's military to trap Bin Laden, a dependence that Bush administration officials have cited while refusing to pressure for access to Khan.
Musharraf complains that calls for international access to Khan show "a lack of trust" in Pakistan, but his real problem is the scientist's enormous popularity as the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb program. Khan "has been a hero for the masses," said the general who has survived several assassination attempts and faces the possibility of a revolt if he tilts too far toward the West.
Meanwhile, Bush is so eager to cater to Musharraf that he is even championing the dictator as key to the creation of a democratic Palestinian state "that is truly free. One that's got an independent judiciary; one that's got a civil society; one that's got the capacity to fight off the terrorists; one that allows for dissent; one in which people can vote. And President Musharraf can play a big role in helping achieve that objective."
Edmond Lococo, Bloomberg: Armor Holdings Inc., the sole supplier of protective plates for the Humvee military vehicles used in Iraq, said it could increase output by as much as 22 percent per month with no investment and is awaiting an order from the Army.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday the Army was working as fast as it can and supply is dictated by ``a matter of physics, not a matter of money.''
Jacksonville, Florida-based Armor Holdings last month told the Army it could add armor to as many as 550 of the trucks a month, up from 450 vehicles now, Robert Mecredy, president of the company's aerospace and defense group said in a telephone interview today.
``We're prepared to build 50 to 100 vehicles more per month,'' Mecredy said in the interview. ``I've told the customer that and I stand ready to do that.''
Daily Kos: From CNN (And I'm not even discussing the part where that shameless failure Rumsfeld tried to play down the importance of the armor. Bastard!!!):
Rumsfeld replied that, "You go to war with the Army you have," not the one you might want, and that any rate the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armor to produce it as fast as humanly possible.
Oh really, Mr. Secretary? Well, that's pretty strange because seven months ago, standing next to Rumsfeld, General Myers said we only needed six more months to get everything done that needed to be done (link)...
The Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security
CNN MoneyLine: Hit by rising health care and energy costs, employers announced more than 100,000 job cuts in November, capping the first three-month stretch above that level since early 2002, an outplacement firm said Tuesday.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said companies announced 104,530 job cuts in November, up 5.1 percent from a year earlier and 2.6 percent from October.
The September through November totals mark the first time that announced job cuts have topped 100,000 for three or more straight months since January to April of 2002, the firm said.
"Higher health care and energy costs for employers and employees are definitely taking a toll. Companies are being forced to enact more cost-containment measures to protect profits," the firm's CEO John Challenger said in a statement.
Anthony Chan, senior economist at JPMorgan Fleming Asset Management, said the numbers -- especially the increase in announced layoffs from a year earlier -- were a "bit of a concern" given the recent weakness in the job market.
The Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security
John F. Harris, Washington Post: Former president Bill Clinton chided supporters to stop "bellyaching and whining" about the political obstacles and begin a new effort to
address the intertwined problems of energy dependence and global warming.
Speaking at a day-long symposium he sponsored at New York University, the former president said he was distressed that the energy issue's link with both national security and environmental degradation received "almost no serious discussion" among the candidates or the media in the just-ended presidential campaign, even though this "may have a bigger impact on America and the world than virtually all the things that were debated."
Clinton has vowed to use his platform as an ex-president to promote the issue of reducing consumption of old energy sources such as petroleum and coal that produce the most "greenhouse gases." At the same time, he has stressed the importance of reducing U.S. reliance on unstable Middle Eastern governments – a dependence he says complicates the fight against terrorism.
Reuters: Calling humanity a threat to the planet, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai urged democratic reform and an end to corporate greed after becoming the first African woman to collect the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
She said sweeping changes were needed to restore a "world of beauty and wonder" by overcoming challenges ranging from AIDS to climate instability.
Maathai founded a campaign that has planted 30 million trees across Africa in a bid to slow deforestation.
"Activities that devastate the environment and societies contistem," Maathai, 64, told an audience of about 1,000 people including Norway's King Harald and Queen Sonja.
"I call on leaders, especially in Africa, to expand democratic space and build fair and just societies," she said.
"Further, industry and global institutions must appreciate that ensuring economic justice, equity and ecological integrity are of greater value than profits at any cost," she said. She said grassroots citizens' movements should be encouraged
The Complicity of the Corporatist News Media:
Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star: The other night on ABC News Nightline, Ted Koppel asked National Public Radio war correspondent Anne Garrels, who has been in Iraq throughout the war, "When you hear people in this country, Anne, say, look, the media is only giving the negative side of what's going on there, why don't they ever show the good side, what do you tell 'em?"
"I tell them that there isn't much good to show," she replied, describing how even military commanders have only bad news to share.
Two weeks ago on CNN, Time's Michael Ware, who has been covering Iraq for two years, gave an alarming account of being trapped in his Baghdad compound, which is regularly bombed and encircled by "kidnap teams."
He reported that the U.S. military has "lost control" and that Americans are "the midwives of the next generation of jihad, of the next Al Qaeda."
At the end of the exchange, anchor Aaron Brown warned, "(O)ther people see the situation there differently than Michael. We talk to them as well."
Kate Moran, The Day: Elliot criticized the press for not sufficiently challenging the Bush administration's hyperbolic claims about the weapons threat in Iraq. Condoleezza Rice, he said, was able to peddle fear that the “smoking gun” in Iraq could be a “mushroom cloud.”
Safer, an editor and correspondent for “60 Minutes” for three decades, perceived that reporters had soaked up the mood of cautiousness and deference to the White House that he said infected Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Even for those reporters inclined to be critical, Safer said, disproving the Bush administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction was a nearly impossible task. Safer said the president could assert the danger in Iraq but that the press had little means to investigate such a claim outside “the best testimony of weapons inspectors.”
As Safer sees it, news outlets have lost credibility in part because readers do not associate them with a human face, of the kind that Katharine Graham of The Washington Post presented to the world during the Watergate era. Increasingly, he noted, the media are owned and controlled by sprawling corporations, such as Viacom, Disney and General Electric.
Two More Names for the John P. O’Neil Wall of Heroes:
Dana Priest, Washington Post: A senior CIA operative who handled sensitive informants in Iraq asserts that CIA managers asked him to falsify his reporting on weapons of mass destruction and retaliated against him after he refused.
The operative, who remains under cover, asserts in a lawsuit made public yesterday that a co-worker warned him in 2001 "that CIA management planned to 'get him' for his role in reporting intelligence contrary to official CIA dogma."
Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzalez interview David DeBatto, DemocracyNow!: AMY GOODMAN: Well, your piece at salon.com, called "Whitewashing Torture" was quite something. Tell us what happened to Sergeant Frank, known as 'Greg,' Ford?
DAVID DEBATTO: Well, apparently, Ford, who as you said, was stationed in Samarra, Iraq, which is about a hundred kilometers north, or so, north of Baghdad in the spring of 2003, had witnessed what he calls repeated incidents of torture and abuse over approximately two to three week period of Iraqi detainees by his fellow intelligence operatives in Samarra. After confronting the team leader several times without success, he eventually did go to his commanding officer, as you mentioned, Captain Artiga in an attempt to file a formal complaint for an investigation of these incidents. Unfortunately, according to Ford, instead of an investigation being conducted, within about a day-and-a-half later, he was, in fact, strapped to a gurney, put on a C-130, and flown initially to Kuwait and eventually to Landstuhl, Germany, where he then underwent a series of psychological evaluations in Germany and also at two bases in the United States for approximately eight months.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, what was the upshot of that? I mean, I would assume if he was medevaced out there'd have to be some paperwork to explain why he was being medevaced out and what his problems were.
DAVID DEBATTO: Absolutely, and what happened in this case, and I reviewed literally dozens if not hundreds of -- of documents on the case: There were no orders. There was no medevac order, which is required by the army, when you do send a soldier out of anywhere, really, when there's a medical issue. There were no regular or standard sets of orders, which again are required by army regulations whenever a soldier leaves one area and is sent to another. Not only that, but reviewing all of the medical documents, including the original document or diagnosis from the psychiatrist in Iraq and following him all the way through the other evaluation, every army psychiatrist diagnosed Sergeant Ford as completely normal with absolutely no psychological or mental health issues whatsoever.
AMY GOODMAN: David DeBatto explain what happened when Sergeant Ford went and reported the abuse, right through to the first psychological analysis of him.
DAVID DEBATTO: Well, according to Ford, he was given about thirty seconds to change his mind and retract his allegations by Captain Artiga. He refused to do so, and immediately he was allegedly stripped of his weapon and M-16, and his ammunition by the company first sergeant. He was also assigned a 24-hour escort, or what he considered to be a guard to literally shadow him until further notice, and that was a senior counter intelligence agent who also figures in the piece later as a witness to all of this. Shortly thereafter, he was ordered to report to an army psychiatrist on the base in Iraq to undergo what's known as combat stress evaluation for people that are having some difficulty handing emotionally the -- the stress of combat. What happened after that is the -- one of the most interesting points of the story, I think. The army psychiatrist that saw Sergeant Ford apparently (and I've reviewed her report) deemed him to be completely normal, and sent that report back to Captain Artiga. When Captain Artiga saw the report from the psychiatrist he was, according to a witness, Sergeant Marciello, "livid." He didn't accept the report. He stormed back over to the army psychiatrist, and according to the witness I have, literally forced her, browbeat her and intimidated the psychiatrist to change her evaluation to read 'mentally unstable,' and ordered her to ship Sergeant Ford medically out of the country to receive a psychological evaluation in Germany.
Restore the Republic!
http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/12/ana04029.html
December 11, 2004
The New York Times Ignores the Voting Problems
A SPECIAL BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
From Author and Professor Mark Crispin Miller
Dear BuzzFlash Readers and Americans Concerned About the Preservation of Democracy:
As you know (and way too many others don't), Rep. John Conyers recently held open hearings in the US Congress, on the all-important subject of the voting in Ohio on November 2nd. There was a lot of harrowing testimony on the tricks and tactics used there by Bush/Cheney to suppress as many Democratic votes as possible, and to exaggerate Ohio's electoral support for the regime.
It was a public inquiry of towering importance, and not only because it was (allegedly) Ohio that gave Bush just enough electoral votes to win. Ohio matters more than anyone can say, because what went down there went down not only in Ohio. There is in fact abundant evidence--strong evidence--suggesting that Team Bush pursued that crooked twofold strategy throughout the nation. In other words, they used a broad variety of means to trash the Kerry vote and to exaggerate the Bush vote, and did so everywhere they could.
Now, this being a democratic republic (or so we've all been taught), you'd think that Conyers' charges -- and the hearing -- would get a lot of coverage in the press.
And yet the New York Times, our nation's "newspaper of record," did not even mention it, much less cover it. The hearings were on Wednesday. There was no word of it in Thursday's paper, nor any word, belatedly, in Friday's. (Thursday's Times did run a couple of long stories on the electoral situation in Ukraine, but none on the quite similar, and -- to Americans -- vastly more important story here at home.)
Such silence is bizarre. It's deeply wrong. In fact, it's un-American. For what public issue could there be that matters quite as much as the integrity of our elections? What, then, could possibly explain, or excuse, the Times' failure even to note Conyers' hearings? For that matter, what explains the Times' thorough indifference to this crucial subject? Like all American news outlets, the Times is obligated, by the First Amendment, to attempt to keep its readership informed about the government, so that the government is answerable to us, its ultimate custodians. Rather than deal squarely with the ever-mounting evidence of massive fraud by the Republicans, the Times instead has merely ridiculed those raising questions, as if such patriotic citizens were laughably insane.
Soon after Election Day, several other US papers likewise tried to laugh off the innumerable glitches and anomalies that mainly favored the Republicans. For instance, the Baltimore Sun and Boston Globe at first derided the whole issue -- and then recanted, in effect, by running serious articles about the growing likelihood of systematic fraud. And yet the Times has never come around. Except for one stern editorial, our leading national daily has all but ignored the controversy raging everywhere; and as the Times has gone, of course, so has the TV news, which also downplayed the Conyers' hearings, or tuned them out entirely. (The hearings did run, uninterrupted, on C-SPAN.)
Let's not let them get away with it. We should do all we can to get the Times' attention, so that it will cover this enormous story thoroughly, upfront and every day. Let them hear from you, right now.
Contact them by phone, by fax, by email; by mail, or, if you're in New York, just drop in briefly to express your views about the paper's shocking irresponsibility. If you're a subscriber, do consider canceling that subscription--and be sure to tell them why.
Let them know how much you care about American democracy, which they have put at risk, because they haven't done their job.
Sincerely,
Mark Crispin Miller
A SPECIAL BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
Mark Crispin Miller is author of many books, including "The Bush Dyslexicon" and "Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order." He is the writer and star of "A Patriot Act."
Contact the New York Times:
Executive Editor Bill Keller at 212/556-7799
Fax to News Department at 212/556-7614
E-mail News Department at national@nytimes.com
If these numbers don't work, the general number is 212/556-1234
Write the New York Times at:
Bill Keller
Executive Editor
New York Times
229 W. 43rd St., NY, NY, 10036-3959
The public editor is Daniel Okrent, at public@nytimes.com
* * *
BuzzFlash Afternote: After reading Mark Crispin Miller's letter of outrage about the lack of the New York Times coverage of the Conyers' hearings, we searched Nexis, which includes an online archive of New York Times articles. Using the keyword "Conyers," we found no items in the last week and only two in the last 30 days. The two pieces in the last 30 days are quite telling. One was a letter from a reader who lambasted the New York Times for its story: "[Your articles,]'Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried' (front page, Nov. 12) and ''Mostly Good Reviews for Electronic Voting'' (news article, Nov. 12) rush to judgment prematurely." The reader admonished the Times: "It is essential that Congress heed Representative John Conyers' call to investigate."
And the other item mentioning Conyers in the last 30 days of the NYT? Why it was the November 12th article the reader was complaining about: "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried."
Now, it's your turn to let the old media know that you value democracy and you wish that they did to.
http://blog.democrats.com/node/1887
Stolen Election 2004: Saturday Update
by Bob Fertik on December 10, 2004 - 11:06pm.
Ken Blackwell is trying to cover up the Stolen Election!
Blackwell Locks Out Recount Volunteers
On Friday December 10 two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in process recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell’s office. The Director Board of Elections stated that “all voter records for the state of Ohio were “locked-down,” and now they are not considered public records.”
Are we entering Watergate territory? Remember the coverup was worse than the crime.
Just in the nick of time, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is taking his ongoing investigation of Ohio election fraud to Columbus on Monday for a "2004 Election Forum." Conyers will be joined by Congressmembers Maxine Waters (D-CA), Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), and Ted Strickland (D-OH), along with Rev. Jesse Jackson, attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and John Bonifaz, and other Ohio leaders. The forum will address
new evidence of election irregularities and fraud in Ohio, the issue of Ohio electors meeting while recounts and litigation are pending, and to discuss legislative and other responses to the problems.
First, this is a direct slap in the face to Ken Blackwell, since Columbus is where his office is. How will Blackwell respond?
Second, Conyers & Co. are firing a shot across the bow of the Electors, who will be meeting that very day to cast their 20 crucial votes for Bush. Does this mean Conyers will lead the challenge to Ohio's Electors on January 6 - and challenge the legitimacy of Bush's "victory"? Stay tuned...
The recount will begin on Monday, and county officials are already complaining about the cost. But Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis put the estimated $1.5 million cost in context:
that money represents less than 0.1% of the $200 billion minimum figure the Bush Administration will spend to "bring democracy to Iraq." The litany of fraud and manipulation that has surrounded the 2004 Ohio election is staggering ... and growing. Its footprints are posted in part at http://freepress.org and numerous other web sites.
The Ohio election, which will determine this most heavily contested of all US presidential campaigns, has no credibility with tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions the world over.
Simply put: if this government can't spend $1.5 million to re-check its own presidential vote counts, it has no credibility as a proponent of global democracy.
It also betrays US history.
Wasserman & Fitrakis also debunk the argument that the recount "won't change the outcome"
a true electronic investigation might well throw the vote to Kerry. There are more than enough Ohio votes stashed in electronic machines with no paper trail to change the victor. The range of other dubious events surrounding this election far exceeds the mere 116,000 margin now being claimed for Bush.
W&F also make the case for a re-vote:
As for a re-vote, this controversial step has been made necessary by the stunning contempt shown people of color and other residents of the inner city. As widely reported, misallocation of voting machines and other problems made it virtually impossible for tens of thousands of Ohioans to vote November 2. Waits of three to eleven hours in the pouring rain are not a reasonable price for casting a ballot, especially when those costs are levied in a discriminatory fashion.
We will never know how many tens of thousands of Ohioans were turned away at the polls, were forced to leave before voting, or never went once they heard how long the lines were. This was a de facto denial of the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote, as surely as were the poll tax and literacy tests of the Jim Crow south.
As co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney campaign, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who officiated over this election, was clearly a partisan. Without a re-vote to restore the rights of all Ohioans, this election's stench of manipulation will fester through the history books as surely as all those staged in Stalin's Soviet Union.
Ukraine has now taken the obvious step of re-running a national election so that its fledgling democracy can maintain its credibility. Ohio can do no less.
http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/2004/12/blackwell-locks-out-recount-volunteers.html
Ohio Election Fraud (Formerly "Fairness")
Before the Ohio Election Fraud, this blog was entitled "Fairness". Since November 2, 2004, a day that will live in infamy, this blog has been devoted exclusively to fighting the crimes committed against the citizens of Ohio, and against our American way of life, in the 2004 "election".
December 10, 2004
Blackwell Locks Out Recount Volunteers
Subject: Blackwell Locks Down Ohio Voting Records
Ohio Election Investigation Thwarted by Surprise Blackwell Order
Dayton, Ohio Friday December 10, 2004
On Friday December 10 two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in process recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell’s office. The Director Board of Elections stated that “all voter records for the state of Ohio were “locked-down,” and now they are not considered public records.”
The volunteers were working with voter printouts received directly from Carole Garman, Director, Greene County Board of Elections. Joan Quinn and Eve Roberson, retired attorney and election official respectively, were hand-copying voter discrepancies from precinct voting books on behalf of the presidential candidates Mr. Cobb (Green) and Mr. Badnarik Libertarian) who had requested the recount.
One of the goals of the recount was to determine how many minority voters were unable to vote or denied voting at the polls. Upon requesting copies of precinct records from predominantly minority precincts, Ms. Garman contacted Secretary of State Blackwell’s office and spoke to Pat Wolfe, Election Administrator. Ms. Wolfe told Ms. Garman to assert that all voter records for the State of Ohio were “locked down” and that they are “not considered public records.”
Quinn and Roberson asked specifically for the legal authority authorizing Mr. Blackwell to “lock down” public records. Garman stated that it was the Secretary of State’s decision. Ohio statute requires the Directors of Boards of Election to comply with public requests for inspection and copying of public election records. As the volunteer team continued recording information from the precinct records in question, Garman entered the room and stated she was withdrawing permission to inspect or copy any voting records at the Board of Elections. Garman then physically removed the precinct book from Ms. Roberson’s hands. They later requested the records again from Garman’s office, which was again denied.
Ohio Revised Code Title XXXV Elections, Sec. 3503.26 that requires all election records to be made available for public inspection and copying. ORC Sec. 3599.161 makes it a crime for any employee of the Board of Elections to knowingly prevent or prohibit any person from inspecting the public records filed in the office of the Board of Elections. Finally, ORC Sec. 3599.42 clearly states: “A violation of any provision of Title XXXV (35) of the Revised Code constitutes a prima facie case of election fraud within the purview of such Title.”
Contact Information: Joan Quinn (937) 320-9680, (916) 396-9714 – cell Katrina Sumner (937) 608-5861
Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
Investigative Reporter Greg Palast on the "Apartheid Ballot Counting System in America"
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As Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell certified President Bush's reelection on Monday, we hear an address by investigative reporter Greg Palast about the disenfranchisement of black votes in the Nov. 2nd election. [includes rush transcript]
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President Bush secured his reelection Monday after Ohio's Republican secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell certified the victory by a margin of 119,000 votes. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Monday that the presidential voting was widely perceived as "very free and fair."
But questions remain over the fairness of the Nov. 2nd election. At a forum on Capitol Hill yesterday, voting rights advocates reminded attendees of the more than 414,000 calls made to national hotlines monitoring complaints about the election. Among those calls, according to a new report from the Common Cause Education Fund, were many accounts from Ohio.
Yesterday at the New York Society for Ethical Culture investigative reporter Greg Palast spoke about the fairness of the election.
Greg Palast, investigative reporter speaking at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on December 7, 2004.
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AMY GOODMAN: Well, at the same forum that Richard Clarke spoke at last night at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, investigative reporter Greg Palast also spoke, who has investigated the 2000 election for the BBC and continues to do that work in Ohio. He spoke about the fairness of the 2004 election.
GREG PALAST: I actually came here tonight to warn you that there are cooks and cranks and crazies out there on the internet who think that John Kerry won. Now, I know because one of those articles on the internet called “John Kerry Won” on tompaine.com, I wrote it. To warn you. But you have to understand, I mean, some things – well, maybe you can explain this to me. See, this is – I got the CNN exit polls, and it said that in Ohio that Kerry defeated Bush among women 53 to 47%, and among men, by – Kerry defeated Bush by 51 to 49%, so who’s the third sex that put our president over the top? So I thought I’d investigate, which is unusual. See, I’m a reporter. My reports appear on BBC Television. I’m a mainstream guy, as they say. And for the big newspaper of Britain, I used to have – the Guardian Observer, I have – I used to write George Orwell’s old column there, and he’d enjoy this, though that information. And so I wrote a story called, “Kerry Won: Here’s the Facts.” And I got a – I actually got a letter, an e-mail, from the New York Times. Here it is. They wanted to follow – they wanted to investigate! Cool! And they asked me, question 1, asking BBC investigative reporter, they said, “Are you a conspiracy nut?” Question 2: “Are you a sore loser?” Question 3: there is no question three, that was the end of the interview. And so they ran a story on the front page saying, “Internet Theories of Bush Loss Easily Debunked.” Okay, but see, that – remember the subtitle called – of “Kerry Won” – “Here’s the Facts.” And since they won’t tell you, I thought maybe I’d share them tonight. And here’s the facts. See, George Bush was declared victor today, by the way, by a Secretary of State of Florida, who – uh, Mr. Blacksick -- and of, excuse me, I said Florida. You know, Florida of the North. I was just in Colu—you know, New Kiev, Ohio, two days ago so I get confused. And, of Ohio, Mr. Blackwell, he certified the election today. It’s very convenient for him because he’s both chairman of the republican campaign and the person in charge of the vote count, so he’s wearing two hats. I understand he has two heads, but I’ll investigate. But, see, he certified the vote, but not all the votes. See, 93,000 votes were tossed on the floor, never counted. We’re not talking recount here, we’re talking never count. 93,000 votes are called spoiled. 155,000 votes called provisional. More absentee ballots tossed. And supposedly George Bush won by 119,000. Folks, now what’s going on here? Whose votes were not counted that were twice the Bush margin of victory? Just, you know, was it random? Well, not exactly. Overwhelmingly the votes not counted, not counted, were cast in African American precincts. These are very Black votes, see, and when I use the term “overwhelmingly,” the non-counted votes cast into the machines but not counted for technical reasons – when I say “overwhelmingly Black votes,” that is not my phrase. That’s from Dr. Mark Salling of Cleveland State University who’s been investigating this for the ACLU, and the statisticians and demographers say it’s overwhelmingly Black votes which are not counted. The technical term is “spoiled” votes. Okay, now, how do votes spoil? Do you leave them out of the fridge? What do you do? These are like undervotes, overvotes – they use those technical terms, and in Ohio it’s hanging chads. We’re back to that. Dimpled chads, pregnant chads. Because Ohio is the last state in America to use the old punch card system for 75% of the vote. You’ve heard a lot about the dangers of blackbox voting. I want to talk to you about good old-fashioned punch card voting. 93,000 votes tossed in the garbage out of Black precincts. How? Okay? Because when – just like in – Black voters, Black neighborhoods get the bad schools, they get the bad hospitals, they get the bum voting machines, see? And their votes go in the garbage. And they know it. In fact, it should be against the law. And, in fact, it is. The ACLU sued the State of Ohio for a racist ballot counting system. They sued five states. Okay? Before the election. Before the election, four states said, “Well, gee, we’re kind of embarrassed. Yeah, we’re losing thousands of Black votes.” And they all agreed to fix the machines before the election, but one state. The Secretary of State of Ohio said, “Yes.” He said, ‘Yes, I know that the machines we use in Ohio eliminate tens of thousands of Black votes on bad machines.’ The only -- the only state that said, ‘Yeah, we'll fix them after the inauguration.’ Now, see, we have to talk about here is when we talk about votes not counted, I just want to -- on radio you’re going to have to look at this chart now so imagine with me. There's a big line, see? If you think Ohio is unusual, if you think Ohio is unusual, here’s the problem. See this big bar there, that's the number of Black votes which aren't counted in America and the little bar, that’s the number of white votes which are not counted in America, see? And if you are a Black person -- now where is this from? Yes, it’s true, you can get it on the internet, but it's actually from Appendix 14 of a report, this important information of the U.S Civil Rights Commission that found that if you are a Black person in America, the chance of your vote being tossed in the garbage -- you cast your vote and it's thrown away -- the chance of it being thrown away is 800% higher than if you are a white voter, okay? See, and it kind of adds up with 2 million votes which are discarded in America, half of them by Black voters, 1 million Black votes not counted in America. We have an apartheid ballot counting system in America. And we ain’t talking about it. Okay? But now we’re going to talk about it, alright? That's not all. There’s provisional ballots, see? So the fix this year is supposed to be provisional ballots. The republicans had a plan for that, too. There were 155,000 of them. 2 million votes were not counted in the 2000 election, now we're pushing up maybe towards 3 million votes, because we have something called provisional ballots, back of the bus bogus ballots. Who gets those ballots? No points for guessing Black vote. Overwhelmingly, 30,000 ballots were handed out, provisional ballots were handed out to Ohio. Urban, as they say, in other words, Black voters, who supposedly voted in the wrong precinct, knowing that those ballots would never, ever be counted. Now, how did this happen? How did all these voters end up with ballots. Well, I was going to show you something on a machine tonight. Something our office received one night, Oliver Shykles, our researcher on the elections, received one night something over the internet through our e-mail. And by the way, if you ever have – if anyone ever has any documents someone wants to shred that says “confidential,” “secret,” whatever, go to gregpalast.com. Don’t waste it. We’ll use it. Someone sent us lists. By the time we're done, 30-40,000 names. Golly gee, called caging lists. If you go down the caging list, something interesting. They were all names of voters in African American precincts. This list was put together and handed to the chairman of the Republican National Campaigns – of the state campaigns and the Republican National Committee. What are they doing with these names of the Black folk? We asked the Republican National Committee chiefs and State Committee chiefs on BBC Television: what are you doing with these lists of Black voters -- of voters? We didn’t tell them it was Black voters. We just showed them the list of voters. “Oh, those are the lists of our donors.” Oh, I said. Well, we went through -- Leni von Eckardt is one of our researchers -- went through the list, and golly gee, several of those addresses were homeless shelters. So you get a lot of money for the Bush-Cheney campaign from the homeless shelters. Then they said, “Okay, oh, no, no. We’ve checked again. We just wanted to check to see if people had changed their address.” Every expert told us there was one reason. Because they had a plan, a secret plan, to challenge hundreds of thousands of voters nationwide. That's what those lists were. They were target lists, challenge lists, ok? Now, by the way people that they were going to challenge, just because their address changed, that doesn't remove your vote. I mean, Leni went through and found out there were several of them whose address had changed from Black districts because they had gone to Baghdad. These were Black soldiers who had been shipped out. The republicans planned en masse to remover them from the voter -- to prohibit their votes from being counted. So you had hundreds of thousands of votes thrown in the garbage by this plan. Now is that against the law? It's not against the law to go to Baghdad at the commander-in-chief's command. You don't lose your vote. But you know what is against the law? Profiling Black voters for challenge.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast, investigative journalist with the BBC, made the film Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. This is Democracy Now! Greg Palast, speaking last night at New York Society for Ethical Culture along with Richard Clarke.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120904W.shtml
Author's Note | To read my blog report from the hearing today, please go here. Statements made and then placed on the record during the hearing can be found here. - wrp
From Selma to Ohio: A Report from the Conyers Hearing
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Report
Wednesday 08 December 2004
It looked for all the world like a real hearing. Along the far wall were arrayed Congressional Representatives from the Judiciary Committee. Before them at a long table sat witnesses and experts in front of microphones, prepared to give testimony on the record. Behind the witnesses sat row upon row of everyday citizens who came out to watch the proceedings; the crowd was so large that an overflow room needed to be opened on another floor. Along both walls were arrayed more than a dozen television cameras.
It looked like a real hearing but it wasn’t, because despite the issuing of invitations by the Democratic Minority members to their GOP Majority brethren on the Judiciary Committee, not one Republican congressman bothered to show up or give their blessing to the proceedings. Judiciary staffers from the Minority office told me the GOP majority would not even allow this hearing to be videotaped on the television equipment that came with the hearing room, and so they were forced to pester C-SPAN into showing up. They did, along with a number of other media outlets, but the effect was a quieting of the entire event.
In the official sense, then, this was not a true Congressional hearing. It bore no weight in law. One cannot overstate, however, the importance of what took place in room 2237 of the Rayburn House Office Building today. In this place was discussed the very future of participatory democracy in America, and the serious problems that future holds if the allegations of vote fraud in Ohio and elsewhere which were the subject of this hearing, are not dealt with in immediate and dynamic fashion.
It all began with a letter from Rep. John Conyers to Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell. In that letter, Conyers described a long series of irregularities in the Ohio Presidential election that amounted to an accusation of fraud. The letter was the basis for today’s hearing, and made sure to invite Blackwell to participate. It is worth noting that Blackwell did not show up today.
The hearing itself was a showcase for both fact and passion. The witnesses, the Representatives before them, and the crowd that filled the room lit the place up with a concerned electricity. Some believed the irregularities and outright fraud which marred the Ohio vote require immediate redress, a successful completion of which could come to overthrow the results of last month's election. Others saw the hearings as a gift to their children and the future, a means to ensure that any and all elections to come will not suffer the kind of nonsense that afflicted both November of 2004 and November of 2000.
Jon Bonifaz, general counsel for the National Voting Institute, is bringing a lawsuit against Secretary of State Blackwell in order to bring about a full recount of the vote in Ohio. He said of the hearings today, "I think this moves the ball forward with respect to demonstrating that people in this country, throughout this nation, demand a full accounting of what happened on election day, and demand that all votes be properly counted. Until we get to that point of all votes being properly counted, we cannot declare this to be a legitimate election."
Some scattered observations from my notes of the proceedings:
Rep. Nadler: The right to vote and to have the votes counted is indispensable. Confidence in our election processes is on the wane, and the stability of our government is threatened. We do not have the luxury of waiting to fix all this, as the next national election comes in two years.
Rep. Scott: The complaints were not limited to Ohio. In his state of Virginia, some 500 complaints were made by voters. In his own district, voters were given ballots that did not have his name on them.
Rep. Watt: The basic premise of our democracy is the vote. If it is broken, it must be fixed, and we must institutionalize a process that continually evaluates the way we run elections. If we can deliver ballots to rural voters in Afghanistan on the backs of donkeys, surely we can make sure our elections are free and fair here in America.
Ralph Neas (President, People for the American Way): In Cuyahoga county, Ohio, there were fewer voting machines available to the voters during the Presidential election than there were during the primary election. Secretary of State Blackwell, he of the paper-weight obstructionism, wins the Katherine Harris award this time around. There should be prosecutions over all this, and people should go to jail.
Cliff Arnebeck (Chair, Common Cause Ohio): The fraud must be fixed. It must be fixed now, and not in the future. People cannot and will not accept a fraudulent election for the office of President. The best precedent that can be set is to state flatly that people will not tolerate fraud, and will not ‘move on’ until the problems are repaired. How can we, with a straight face, talk about democracy in Iraq when we cannot guarantee democracy here at home?
Shawnta Walcott (Zogby Inc.): This election has created an unprecedented level of suspicion that things did not go as they should have. Zogby Inc. wants to see a blue-ribbon panel created immediately to investigate the claims made at this hearing.
Rep. Jackson: We must have a standardized national voting process and take the matter out of the hands of individual states, which can keep the process "separate and unequal." We must have a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. How can people argue that the right to own a gun is implicitly stated in the constitution, and then turn around and say it is acceptable to have the right to vote only be ‘implicit’ in the constitution?
It was this last point, made over and over again by Reverend Jesse Jackson, that drew the most applause from the audience and attention from the Congressmen. In demanding a constitutional amendment cementing the simple right to vote, Jackson spoke of the long line that reached from Selma, Alabama to Ohio, and into this room. "This is not about who won or lost," he said. "This is about participating in democracy. The 2004 election is not past-tense. We are not whining. It is time to take this struggle to the streets and fully legitimize this struggle."
The importance of the presence of Reverend Jackson was described best by Cliff Arnebeck. "If you look at who was here," said Arnebeck, "you had leaders from the generally white political reform movement, and leaders from the black civil rights movement. This is a powerful coalition. We are not talking about one group having dominance over the other, but a real partnership of the traditional political reform community with the traditional civil rights community, and Reverend Jackson is the one that proposed it, has initiated the organization of it."
"Jesse Jackson, as you could see today, is giving tremendous moral leadership to this," continued Arnebeck. "He has tremendous credibility. This is a man who walked with Dr. Martin Luther King in the long civil rights struggle that we honor so much in our history now. This is the man who was holding Dr. King when he died. I was sitting right next to him when he talked about the fact that there aren't members of Congress with children dying in Iraq, and tears were in his eyes. This is a man who feels this stuff deeply, and when he talks about what is at stake, he means it in the deepest part of his being. It shows, and people respect that, and I feel privileged to be associated with him in this struggle."
The hearing today took place in a unique moment in our history. Election fraud and voter disenfranchisement are not new in our history, but have been as much a part of the process as campaign buttons and baby-kissing. The fact that the electorate’s voting habits are becoming more clearly drawn, and the fact that so many were watching like hawks after Florida in 2000, means that the standard-issue fraud which has always existed now has a bright light shining upon it, and means the new kinds of fraud involving electronic machines and computer tabulators are likewise suffering intense scrutiny. In this moment, that bright light means the problems, both new and old, can and must be addressed, repaired, and purged from our democratic process.
Aspects of the hearing could have been better. There was a lot of heat from the panelists and from the crowd, but not nearly as much cold data delivered. Had the forum presented that cold data, had the forum made an irrefutable case, the process to come would have been better served. The data was there – the panelists came armed with reams of paper and facts – but needs to be more fully delivered to the public at large. There were also grumblings among the assembled about why it was that Dennis Kucinich was not in attendance, about why Howard Dean chose this day to hold a press conference that sucked some of the media oxygen out of the hearing room, and about why no Kerry campaign people or Senate staffers made any kind of public appearance at the event.
There was also a moment of deep frustration when the Representatives opened the floor to general questions from the audience. This led to something that always seems to happen when liberals and progressives get in a room together. Person after person came to the microphone not to ask questions, but to pontificate at length on whatever crossed their minds. As usual, this stole time from people who actually had questions, and led to a watering-down of the information at hand. When Conyers gently prodded people to move it along, some got openly aggressive and angry, despite the fact that they were riding roughshod over the stated process. Rep. Frank finally had to lay down the stomp on the quickly-unwinding process. The open forum could have been a beneficial addition to the hearing, but became in the end a waste of valuable time.
At the end of the day, the hearing was a beginning, a chance for those fighting this fight to look upon one another and know they are not alone. Rep. Conyers and his fellow Congressmen are to be commended for putting the process in motion. The most striking moment came when the hearing ended, and all of the people assembled began embracing one another. They had made their voices heard, they knew they were not alone, and it smelled like vindication in there when all was said and done.
The hearing was a beginning. There will be more, especially in Ohio. The lawsuits will continue. Rep. Conyers intimated today that he might object to the seating of the Ohio Electors when the certification process begins. The protests will continue to grow across the country. Perhaps, if we can follow through and accomplish the cleansing of our democratic process, we will look back on this day in room 2237 of the Rayburn House Office Building and know that yet another popular movement towards achieving that more perfect union began here, in this time, and in this place.
________________________________________
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
http://blog.democrats.com/node/1847/print
Jump to TO Features for Thursday December 9, 2004
Stolen Election 2004: Thursday Update
by Bob Fertik on December 9, 2004 - 10:11am.
I traveled to Washington for the House Judiciary Committee Democratic forum on Ohio election problems.
The event was broadcast by C-Span and Pacifica Radio, and there were a dozen more cameras capturing every word. Here are 30 minutes of video highlights and text highlights from William Rivers Pitt and Nero Fiddled.
My favorite moment was when John Bonifaz of the National Voting Institute resoundingly declared if a recount shows Ohio should have sent
"a different set of electors, that set of electors will meet, and will cast their votes for President. And if that happens, the U.S. Congress will receive the votes of two competing slates of electors. One slate will be chosen by Mr. Blackwell. The other will be chosen by the will of the people."
Of course, if that happens, "we the people" will have to exert our will by surrounding Congress on January 6 when they decide which Electors to accept - and which President to inaugurate - taking our cue from the people of Ukraine.
As for Rove-controlled media coverage, if you rely on the Washington Post, the event didn't happen (Demand an explanation from Michael Getler ombudsman@washpost.com 202-334-7582. If you rely on the NY Times (which didn't think American Democracy important enough to send its own reporter - write Daniel Okrent public@nytimes.com), the event was completely insignificant.
Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, convened a hearing to examine accusations of voting problems in Ohio. Many of the election complaints, such as disparities in vote totals and a shortage of voting machines in Democratic-leaning urban precincts, have already been cited and explained.
Cited - yes! In a 34-point letter that Conyers sent to Ken Blackwell, seeking an explanation. Explained - no way! Blackwell didn't respond to Conyers' letter, and didn't attend the hearing despite being invited. Instead, his mouthpiece issued a two-sentence dismissal, showing his utter contempt for Democracy:
"Ohio had a great election. There were issues with long lines but I think you'll find the entire country experienced delays,"
spokesman Carlo LoParo said, dismissing reports of Election Day irregularities.
One key person who did not testify at the hearing was Clint Curtis, who wrote a computer program in 2002 to "flip the vote" at the request of Florida House Speaker Tom Feeney. BradBlog says Curtis was in the room and "swarmed afterwards." While in DC,
Curtis met this morning with a U.S. Senator's office to discuss what he claims to know about a certain aspect of his case. We're being purposely vague on details here, as we've been asked, so as not to spook anybody out there in particular.
Curtis also met with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government (CREW), the group that filed the ethics complaint against Tom DeLay. If Curtis has the goods, CREW has the lawyers to expose it and demand accountability.
Curtis did begin to tell his story to a national audience through interviews on Air America Radio's Unfiltered and the Thom Hartmann show.
Far away from the limelight, former Congressman Dan Hamburg (D-CA) and his wife Carrie Hamburg were arrested in Columbus after attempting to deliver a letter about voting irregularities to Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.
http://onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Madsen/120604madsen.html
Special Report
Texas to Florida: White House-linked clandestine operation paid for "vote switching" software
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
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December 6, 2004—The manipulation of computer voting machines in the recent presidential election and the funding of programmers who were involved in the operation are tied to an intricate web of shady off-shore financial trusts and companies, shady espionage operatives, Republican Party politicians close to the Bush family, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contract vehicles.
An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.
According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.
According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.
Yang, an engineering and computer services company subcontracted to NASA prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, was founded in 1986 by Dr. Tyng-Lin (Tim) Yang. Granted minority-owned "Section 8A" and woman-owned preferential status by the U.S. government, Yang's clients also include the Florida Department of Transportation (DOT). Yang's President, Li-Woan (Lee) Yang, is Tim Yang's wife. Feeney was the registered agent for another Yang company, Y & H Greens, Inc., a company that was dissolved in 1988 and operated from the Yangs' residence on Merritt Island. The Yangs also serve as co-trustees for an entity called Yang of Merritt Island, Ltd., founded on January 31, 2000, and also run from their residence.
In the autumn of 1999, Curtis, who served as a sort of technology adviser for Yang, first became aware of Feeney's interest in election rigging. Curtis said at one meeting, Feeney "bragged that he could reduce the minority vote and deliver the election to 'George.'" At the same meeting, according to Curtis, Feeney said he had "implemented a list that would eliminate thousands of voters that would vote for Democratic candidates" and that "a proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25 percent."
Feeney's desire to manipulate the vote would be manifested in his home base of Volusia County in the 2000 presidential election. According to The Washington Post, at 10 p.m. on election night, Al Gore was leading Bush in Volusia County by 83,000 to 62,000 votes. One-half hour later, Gore's vote total had been reduced by 16,000 to 67,000 and an obscure Socialist candidate saw a sudden surge to 10,000 votes in a precinct with only 600 voters. The information on the Volusia optical scanner voting anomalies came from a leaked internal Diebold memorandum. In the end, Bush won Florida and the White House by a mere 537 votes in the most controversial U.S. presidential election in history.
Feeney had long been a voice in Florida GOP politics. He was gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush's running mate in 1994, a race in which Democratic incumbent Lawton Chiles defeated Bush. Chiles once referred to Feeney as "the David Duke of Florida politics."
In 2002, Feeney asked Curtis if he could develop a touch screen voting machine "flip flop" program. According to Curtis, Feeney asked him, "Can you write a program to flip votes around on touch screen machines?" Curtis said Feeney wanted the program to merely reduce votes in heavily Democratic areas and flip Republican votes to 51 percent and keep Democrat votes to 49 percent. Curtis added that Feeney "did not want to win by a lot." In return, Curtis said Feeney offered him "big jobs." Curtis's main tasks at Yang were to develop the Florida DOT's Electronic Document Management System. He also worked on the Project Pipeline Information System at another one of Yang's major clients, Exxon Mobil's Coral Gables facility.
Curtis said he developed the voting program and eventually handed off his prototype to Feeney. The program was also reviewed by Curtis's senior coder, Hai Lin (Henry) Nee, who according to Florida Department of Transportation sources, was an illegal alien working in the United States. According Curtis, not only did Nee review the vote switching program code but he constantly downloaded sensitive data to his computer from NASA's computers. Nee, according to Curtis, moonlighted at an Orlando company called Azure Systems, described by The Orlando Sentinel as a "three person engineering firm" and one of a number of companies linked to Ting Ih-Hsu, a former Lockheed Martin employee. At the same time Nee was reviewing Yang's vote switching program, he was also being investigated by U.S. federal investigators for illegally shipping Hellfire missile parts to China. Oddly, although U.S. law enforcement agents had put Nee and his associates under surveillance for illegal exports of technology to China in 1999, he and his colleagues were not arrested until March of this year.
Curtis claimed that Yang's corporate bosses stressed that the company had "unlimited" sources of money that came "mostly" from China. According to Florida DOT employees, House Speaker Feeney pressured their agency to give money to Yang for nonexistent software. The sources also revealed that Feeney was aware that Yang was employing a number of illegal aliens on State of Florida and federal contracts.
Feeney's ties to Yang paralleled similar close ties to NASA. Feeney's wife Ellen has worked as an engineer for NASA's Kennedy Space Center since 1985. Jeb Bush ensured that Florida's 24th Congressional District was redrawn so that Feeney would have an easy time in his 2002 race against Democratic opponent Harry Jacobs. According to Florida state officials, who spoke on the condition anonymity, 500 Yang employees at the Kennedy Space Center were paid for their time when they agreed to picket against Jacobs. In addition, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe, according to the same sources, lobbied extensively for Feeney within NASA. In addition, O'Keefe and his close friend and former Pentagon boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, made campaign appearances for Feeney at the Kennedy Space Center.
Feeney's close ties to Jeb Bush and Cheney paid off. In 2002, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in a race that also saw the re-election of Jeb Bush. Early in "vote switch's" development stages, Feeney had told Curtis that he wanted the program "made to control Palm Beach" in 2002. Palm Beach County's Election Supervisor was still the controversial Theresa LePore, nicknamed "Madam Butterfly," who designed the infamous "butterfly ballots" in the 2000 election. LePore had once been an employee of Saudi multi-billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi link that is tied to a huge multi-billion tranche of money distributed throughout off-shore trusts, accounts, and corporations with interlocking directorships that are controlled by Bush interests in Houston. It was this Bush-controlled money cache, originating in the East, and known in Houston by the name "Five Star" and other cryptonyms that was, according to U.S. intelligence insiders, used to fund the rigging of the 2004 election.
When he arrived in Congress, Feeney was given a seat on the House Science and Technology Committee, which oversees NASA's operations. Feeney was also appointed to the important House Finance and Judiciary Committees. He was also given a clean bill of ethical health by Florida's Ethics Commission, a panel that has a Republican majority.
After Feeney's ascension to Congress, Yang's questionable billing activities with its Florida DOT contract came to the attention of Ray C. Lemme, a seasoned senior investigator with the Florida DOT Inspector General's Office and a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. Lemme had a lot of evidence to suspect that Yang was overbilling the DOT for "millions." After discovering Yang's dirty laundry, Curtis went to work for the DOT. Mavis Georgalis, the DOT's contracting officer for the Yang contract, was also aware of improprieties with the contract. As a result of pressure from the Florida State House, both Curtis and Georgalis were eventually fired by the DOT because of their complaints about the Yang contract. Someone was obviously trying to send Curtis a message when, on August 14, 2002, he discovered that someone poisoned his pet Pomeranian dog, Emily. Lemme was forced to stop his official investigation of Yang for similar reasons. However, he decided to continue an "unofficial" investigation of Yang and its practices on the side. It was a fateful decision.
According to DOT employees familiar with the Yang case, Lemme was aware that it was Jeb Bush who personally shut down his investigation of Yang. Lemme also leaked details concerning his investigation to the Daytona Beach News Journal. The investigator had previously requested a full audit of the Yang contract with the DOT, a request that was denied. Lemme also became aware of something else outside the framework of the DOT contract—that Yang had been involved in producing a prototype vote switching program for use with touch screen voting machines and that Tom Feeney was in on the scam. The last time Clint Curtis spoke to Lemme, he remembers the silver haired investigator excited about where his case was leading. Lemme told Curtis that the cover up of Yang was coming from "as high up as I could imagine" and that he had "proof" that was "shocking."
On Sunday, June 29, 2003, evidence indicates that Lemme drove from Tallahassee to Valdosta, Georgia, the home of Moody Air Force Base. A motel receipt indicated that Lemme checked in at the Knight's Inn off Interstate 75 at 6:49 p.m. Lemme's wife said that her husband left home for work on Monday, June 30, at 5:15 a.m., an hour earlier than usual. According to a Leon County Sheriff's report, Lemme's wife said she received a voice message after she returned home at 6:45 p.m. on Monday. The message was from her husband's supervisor, Bob Clift, who informed her that earlier in the day, at 6:15 a.m., Lemme called into work, left a message, and said he would not be coming to work that day. Clift said he was checking up on Ray Lemme. Mrs. Lemme called Clift and told him that her husband was not at home. Mrs. Lemme told police that her husband was working on a "big case." Mrs. Lemme filed a missing person report with the Leon County, Sheriff's Office. Clift later determined that Ray Lemme made his earlier call to work at 6:15 a.m., one hour after he supposedly left his home for work, from a pay phone at the junction of Interstate 10 and Highway 1 in Jefferson County, Florida. Shortly after 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 1, the maid assigned to clean Lemme's room—132—received no answer when she knocked. The door was locked. There was no response when the maid called the room's telephone. The hotel manager then called the police.
The following is from the Valdosta Police Detective Report filed by Detective Craig Spencer and dated July 1, 2003: "On July 1, 2003 at approximately 1330 hours, I received a page advising me to be en route to Knights Inn at 2110 West Hill Avenue in reference to an unattended death." When Spencer and other police officers and detectives arrived at the motel, the manager told them that the occupant of Room 132, Ray Lemme, was to have checked out by 11a.m. The officers yelled through the slightly ajar door but received no answer and they discovered the upper swing latch was locked. The officers used a special tool provided by the motel to open the swing latch lock. Spencer said that one of the officers entered the room and found a suicide note and then proceeded to the bathroom where Lemme was found dead in the bathtub. Police also discovered that the inside of Lemmes's left elbow—the cubital tunnel—was slashed. There were spurts of blood on the wall but no blood found on the floor. A belt possibly used as a tourniquet and a double- edged straight razor blade were found on the side of the tub. A bath towel was unfolded and neatly placed on the floor next to the tub.
Later on July 1, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory in Moultrie informed the Valdosta Police that based on the "suicide" details, no autopsy would be performed on Lemme. Unlike Florida, Georgia does not perform mandatory autopsies. A doctor, with 25 years' clinical experience, who was interviewed for this story claimed that the circumstances of Lemme's death appeared to him to be a classic "mob hit." If the Leon County Sheriff missing person report is to be believed, it is clear that someone other than Lemme checked into the Valdosta motel on Sunday evening using his name. Clearly, the Leon County Sheriff's report contains a number of details that directly conflict with facts found in the Valdosta Police report. In addition, the Lowndes County, Georgia, Coroner's report fails to indicate an estimated time of death based on a full medical examination—it surmised that the time of death was the same time as indicated on the suicide note: 8:10 a.m. on July 1.
An empty manila folder and a blank legal pad notebook were found on the hotel room's desk along with an undated and unsigned suicide note written on lined paper, which lacked any identifiable fingerprints, from Lemme's day planner. The note merely contained the time 8:10 a.m. with the following notation: "I love my family (family underlined once) with all my heart. I am sorry. I am depressed and in pain. Mary Ann (Lemme's wife), I love you." ("I love you" underlined twice). It was certainly not indicative of a person who was ecstatic that he was finally going to nail a long investigation that involved vote rigging, overbilling, and fraud abetted by the very top political leadership in Tallahassee. Interestingly, the last number on Lemme's pager (an 850 960-XXXX) ended with the number "911." It is also interesting that Lemme's watch, when discovered by the police, was stopped at 12:34 p.m. on June 30–a possible indication that Lemme was trying to convey the time of a possible in extremis situation. Also, Lemme's Florida driver's license was in his room while his wallet was in the glove box of his car, which was parked in front of the room. Two motel receipts were found in Lemme's room by the police. One was a check-in receipt dated June 29 and timed at 6:44 p.m. The other was a receipt, without a notation of check-in or check-out, dated June 30 and timed at 6:54 a.m. A witness told police that Lemme's car was parked in front of his room on the afternoon of June 30.
Sergeant Eugene Bell of the Valdosta Police Department interviewed a 39-year old female guest who was staying in Room 236 over the weekend. She and her daughter noticed three men standing in the parking lot across from Lemme's room at 8 a.m. on the morning of July 1. The behavior of the men made the guest suspicious enough that the woman initially believed the men were engaged in a drug deal. According to the police report, the camera used to photograph the crime scene was later discovered to have a defect in the flash memory card. The defect resulted in no usable photographs being submitted with the official police report.
Lemme was no stranger to Florida politics. His wife, Mary Ann, worked as a secretary for Martha Walters Barnett, a partner with the politically-connected Holland & Knight law firm in Tallahassee, where she specializes in campaign finance and election law and government contracts. Another Holland & Knight partner, Ginny Myrick, was appointed by Jeb Bush as the vice chair of the Florida Community Trust, a state land acquisition and grant program. Although officially a bipartisan law firm, even Democrats working for Holland & Knight largely support Jeb Bush. In addition, Bill McBride, Bush's Democratic opponent in the 2002 gubernatorial race and a Holland & Knight partner who had defeated former Attorney General Janet Reno in the Democratic primary amid reports of voting irregularities from around the state, commented that his race against Bush "may be the Democrats' race to lose."
The NASA connection to the money trail that is linked to the development of the vote switching program is of particular note. When the first sketchy details of the vote switching operation emerged, a Houston-controlled money tranche associated with an offshore entity called Five Star Trust, registered in the Isle of Man, was reported by high-level intelligence sources familiar with past Bush-related covert activities to be behind the operation. Five Star has been connected by these informed sources to have originated in 1983, when deposed Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush were allegedly looking for a repository for an estimated $3 billion in looted Philippine gold and gems. Since that time, Five Star's accounts are said to funnel more funds from Saudi Arabia as well as cash reserves hidden away in offshore artificial shells by Enron before it collapsed. What is not yet certain is whether Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator and close Cheney friend who supported Feeney's and Yang's activities in Florida, facilitated the transfer of Five Star funds from Houston to Cape Canaveral using contract vehicles of both the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers to disburse the funds to the principal players. A NASA insider in Texas said he has long suspected large amounts of money have been moved into the United States and that these transfers involved NASA and Saudi and Chinese money sources.
There is additional information that the election rigging principals connected to the State of Florida and Jeb Bush may have also tried to use contractors tied closely to state contracts to parlay the touch screen software into Maine, which has proportional distribution of its electoral votes by congressional district, and Ohio, the key state in 2004. The information was provided by insiders in Tallahassee who are close to offices involved in procurement by the state government.
Sources close to U.S. intelligence pointed to a $29.6 million check supposedly issued on October 22, 2004, by Laurentian Bank in Montreal, Canada, that was rumored by intelligence circles to have been used to pay for the technicians who developed the software to rig the election. The computer voting machine technicians and maintenance personnel involved with the rigging were reported to have included Russians, Mexicans, and Brazilians.
According to Laurentian Bank, the check, a U.S. dollar "money order," is a bogus instrument tied to Nigerian scamming activities. Laurentian Bank said that a U.S. dollar money order would never be for amounts over $1,000 and any higher amount would be in the form of a bank draft that would require the signature of two senior bank officers. In addition, the bank would never use a cell phone number (514-588-5569) on their checks. The payer on the "check," Equity Financial Trust of Toronto, is said by the Canadian Fraud Office to be involved with Nigerian scammers. In fact, the Canadian Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions reports that Equity Financial Trust, Toronto, Ontario "may be violating provisions of the Bank Act (Canada) or other Canadian financial institution regulations" and "may also be conducting unauthorized banking transactions in the United States."
The payee on the "check," Five Star Investments, Ltd., once registered on the Isle of Man, is a Lexington, Kentucky-based entity tied to Marion "J.R." Horn, convicted in 2002 by Judge Joseph M. Hood of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Kentucky for wire fraud. He was also ordered to serve time in Buckner Federal Penitentiary, North Carolina for a "mental study." He eventually served an unusually light 18-month sentence while on parole for another fraud case. When interviewed by a researcher for this article, Horn expressed surprise that the check his lawyer in Nassau was waiting to clear a bank in New York, was, in fact, a fake. According to CIA documents obtained from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Five Star Trust may have, in fact, had a past relationship with Horn. According to Offshorebusiness.com, Five Star Trust has been linked with an "illegal" bank.
The connection of Enron money and Nigerian scammers to Five Star is intriguing because of a September 23, 2004, Houston Chronicle report that said Enron was involved in an off-the-books deal to invest in Nigerian power generation barges. Tina Trinkle, a former Merrill Lynch banker, said she was asked not to do the normal background checks for such a business deal.
A former Justice Department prosecutor who investigated the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) said that the bogus check and those responsible for it are typical "feints" used to mask actual clandestine money movements from law enforcement investigators. In addition, the former prosecutor said the purported check lacked the necessary SWIFT codes in the numbers found at the bottom of the check to facilitate the movement of money through international financial networks. He said that in his experience as a prosecutor, the name "Five Star Trust" came up in relation to the covert activities of the Nugan Hand Bank, a CIA-connected activity that was involved in covert activities in Australia and South East Asia.
Five Star entities, active and dissolved, have been discovered in the Isle of Man, the island of Nevis, the Bahamas, Florida, Kentucky, and Texas. Other Five Star-related entities stored large sums of money in the Cook Islands, according to U.S. intelligence sources, and these funds were directly linked to Khashoggi and BCCI. Khashoggi also approached top Nigerian leaders in 1982 to set up a company there that would deal exclusively in minerals. According to knowledgeable insiders, Khashoggi used a company called Triad to hammer out lucrative international deals on precious minerals. In 1994, Five Star Investments, Ltd., the entity tied to Horn, attempted to buy International Standards Group ISG), Ltd., a consulting company based in Boca Raton, Florida. According to the Palm Beach Post, Horn was the person who proposed the acquisition. ISG was also the target of a bid by UMI, Inc., a mortgage banker based in Coral Gables, Florida. The Palm Beach Post was never able to determine the source of UMI's cash.
Phony checks are not the only telltale signs associated with some of the various Five Star entities. Another bogus document, a bogus UN customs declaration for a shipment to a "Counter Terrorist Unit" in Lagos, Nigeria, was also obtained in the investigation of this story.
Horn has had a running battle with the CIA over allegations that he is owed money for his past activities on behalf of the agency. Although Horn has produced a number of dubious documents to support his claims, one of the names mentioned in documents filed in U.S. court in Washington, DC is that of E. Warren Goss, an actual attorney in Boulder, Colorado. It has not been established if E. Warren Goss has any family connection to Porter Goss, the current CIA director.
In a September 17, 2003, declaration by Marilyn A. Dorn, Information Review Officer in the Directorate of Operations at the CIA, in response to Horn's Freedom of Information Act request, it was determined that the agency had no records containing the names "Five Star Trust" or a reported subsidiary, "U.S. Mortgage and Trust (Bahamas)." Dorn reported that no records containing references to either entity were discovered but that two documents, cables—"field traffic consisting of one and a half pages and eight partial lines of message text, respectively, dating from the early 1980s"—were responsive to Horn's request. It is interesting that the CIA admits the time frame because the genesis of Five Star Trust was 1983, when, according to U.S. intelligence insiders, then-Vice President Bush authorized a Boeing 747 with a special "carriage" to airlift several tons of gold bars from Clark Air Force base in the Philippines to LaGuardia Airport in New York.
The gold bars were then transported to the International Diamond Exchange Vaults near Rockefeller Center. A CIA proprietary firm called Oceaneering International of Houston wa