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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111904W.shtml

UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for
Florida E-Vote Count
By UC Berkeley

Thursday 18 November 2004

Research team calls for investigation.
Today the University of California's Berkeley
Quantitative Methods Research Team released a
statistical study - the sole method available to
monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting
irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more
excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in
the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an
unexplained discrepancy between votes for President
Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were
used versus counties using traditional voting methods
- what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm."
Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by
chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The
research team formally disclosed results of the study
at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey
Research Center, where they called on Florida voting
officials to investigate.

The three counties where the voting anomalies were
most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic:
Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively.
Statistical patterns in counties that did not have
e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease
in President Bush's support in Broward County;
machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net
gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush
should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but
instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He
should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade
County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of
19,300 votes.

"For the sake of all future elections involving
electronic voting - someone must investigate and
explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says
Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting
officials in Florida to take action."

The research team is comprised of doctoral
students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology
department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael
Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods
and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and
the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

For its research, the team used
multiple-regression analysis, a statistical method
widely used in the social and physical sciences to
distinguish the individual effects of many variables
on quantitative outcomes like vote totals. This
multiple-regression analysis takes into account of the
following variables by county:

number of voters
median income
Hispanic/Latino population
change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
support for Senator Dole in the 1996 election
support for President Bush in the 2000 election
use of electronic voting or paper ballots
"No matter how many factors and variables we took
into consideration, the significant correlation in the
votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot
be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a
county's use of electronic voting resulted in a
disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.
There is just a trivial probability of evidence like
this appearing in a population where the true
difference is zero - less than once in a thousand
chances."

The data used in this study came from public
sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the
Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working
paper, raw data and other information used in the
study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/.

-------

Jump to TO Features for Friday November 19, 2004

http://blog.democrats.com/node/708

Stolen Election 2004: Thursday Update
by Bob Fertik on November 17, 2004 - 11:46pm.
Democrats.com is co-sponsoring the 2004 Roundtable on
Progressive Politics & Technology Thursday afternoon
in DC, so I'm blogging early. If you happen to attend,
please say hi!

A brand new study by U.C. Berkeley researchers
suggests electronic voting machines may have awarded
130,000 - 260,000 or more in excess votes to Bush in
Florida. As Buzzflash writes,

"The three counties where the voting anomalies were
most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic
counties, not the [conservative] Dixiecrat counties
you’ve all heard about before, but the more heavily
Democratic counties that used e-vote technology,
including Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties
in order of magnitude," said Professor Hout.

The statistical patterns in counties that did not have
e-touch voting machines predicted a 28,000 vote
decrease in President Bush’s share of the 2004 vote in
Broward County, but the machines actually tallied an
increase of 51,000 votes for a net gain of 81,000
votes for the President.

With the research team’s statistical model, it was
expected that President Bush should have lost 8,900
votes in Palm Beach County but instead he gained
41,000, a difference of 49,900 votes.

And President Bush should have gained only 18,000
votes in Miami-Dade County but in fact gained 37,000,
for a difference of 19,300 votes.

"The disparity in favor of the incumbent President
Bush cannot be explained away by other factors. The
study shows that counties that used electronic voting
resulted in disproportionate increases of votes for
the President," said Professor Hout.

Paging Bev Harris - start heading towards South
Florida!

At long last, the Ohio Democratic Party is going to
court to fight for every vote.

The lawsuit asked U.S. District Judge Michael H.
Watson to order Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell
to impose uniform standards for counting provisional
votes on all 88 counties. Democrats want the judge to
take action quickly - before the results of the
election are certified...

Most of Ohio's provisional ballots were cast in urban
areas where Kerry typically fared well. Cuyahoga
County had the most - nearly 25,000. About 13,000 of
those had been verified as of Wednesday, with about
8,600 of that group deemed valid.

Meanwhile, the presidential candidates from the Green
and Libertarian parties have said they will demand a
recount of all the ballots in Ohio - which could
include a review of another group of votes; 92,672
"spoiled" ballots that recorded no vote for president.

But the most important number in Ohio is the number we
will never know - the number of people who didn't cast
a vote because the lines were so long. And as Harvey
Wasserman writes, this was the result of a systematic
effort by Karl Rove and Ken Blackwell to suppress
Democratic votes.

Hour after hour the testimonies are the same: angry
Ohioans telling of vicious Republican manipulation and
de facto intimidation that disenfranchised tens of
thousands and probably cost the Democrats the
election.

At an African-American church on Saturday and then at
the Franklin County Courthouse Monday night, more than
700 people came to testify and witness to tales of the
atrocity that was the November 2 election.

Organized by local ad hoc groups, the hearings had a
court reporter and a team of lawyers along with other
appointed witnesses. At freepress.org we will be
making the testimonies available as they're
transcribed and organized, and we will present a
fuller accounting of the hearings, along with a book
that includes the transcripts.

But one thing was instantly and abundantly clear: the
Republican Party turned Ohio 2004 into an updated
version of the Jim Crow South.

The principle overt method of vote suppression was to
short-change inner city precincts of sufficient voting
machines to allow a timely balloting. In precinct
after precinct, virtually all of them predominantly
black, poor, young and Democratic, the lines stretched
for two, five, eight, even eleven hours. The elderly
and infirm were forced to stand in the rain while city
officials threatened to tow their cars. No chairs or
shelter were provided. Crucial signage was
mysteriously missing. Thousands came to vote, saw the
long lines and left.

How many thousands? Enough to turn the election?
Almost definitely.

None of this was accidental. This was a well-planned
GOP attack on the right to vote, and on Democratic
candidacies. Republican Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell was also co-chair of the Ohio campaign for
Bush. A right-wing Republican was in charge of the
Franklin County Board of Elections.

They all said the election went "smoothly." By their
standards they were right. At least 68 voting machines
sat in a warehouse while precinct managers called
desperately for help. Republican precinct judges and
challengers harassed would-be voters. The names of
long-time activists mysteriously disappeared from
registration lists. The arsenal of dirty tricks was
virtually endless.

With it the Bush/Rove team deprived countless Ohioans
of their right to vote just as surely as if they'd
levied a poll tax or invoked the grandfather clause.

In the coming days we'll issue a more complete
accounting of these devastating hearings. No one who
cares about democracy and fears the consequences of
its destruction could come away from them without
being both infuriated and terrified.

Ralph Nader's NH recount is today. Kim Zetter of Wired
explains the anomalies that prompted Nader's recount
request, which were flagged by Ida Briggs of Michigan,
a programmer with 20 years of experience:

Most people would have expected John Kerry's
performance at the polls this year to be similar to Al
Gore's in 2000. And in 229 out of 300 voting
districts, or wards as they're called in New
Hampshire, that was the case. Kerry either matched the
percentage of votes that Gore received in 2000 in
those wards or did better than Gore. But in 71 wards,
Briggs found, Bush did better in 2004 than he did in
2000.

When Briggs broke the 71 wards down by voting
equipment -- separating wards into those that used
traditional paper ballots and those that used
optical-scan machines -- she discovered that 73
percent of the wards used optical-scan equipment,
while only 27 percent used traditional paper ballots.
Even more interesting was the breakdown per brand of
voting equipment. New Hampshire wards used
optical-scan equipment made by Diebold Election
Systems and Election Systems & Software. About 62
percent of the wards with anomalous results used
Diebold machines.

"Which is pretty high," Briggs said. "Especially in
comparison to hand-counted paper ballots, which
accounted for only 27 percent of the out-of-trend
wards."

In one ward in the city of Manchester, the change was
remarkable. In 2000, Gore beat Bush 49 percent to 48
percent. But this year Bush carried the ward with 53
percent of votes. In another Manchester ward where
Gore won 52 percent to Bush's 44 percent in 2000, Bush
won with 50 percent to Kerry's 49 percent this year.

"The numbers could be real," Briggs said. "But to be
this dramatically outside of the trend raises some red
flags."

Some people have explained away the numbers as a
result of affluent Massachusetts voters moving to New
Hampshire to take advantage of its tax system. These
transplants would be more likely to vote for Bush. But
Briggs thinks this is too anecdotal and shouldn't be
used to dismiss the numbers.

"It's also anecdotal that urban voters tend to vote
more liberal than rural voters, but in New Hampshire
we see that trend reversed," she said.

Briggs said the wards with surprising numbers account
for about 235,000 votes, at least 200,000 of which are
in wards that used Diebold machines. This is
significant because earlier this year, activists found
security flaws in the Diebold counting software that
could allow someone with access to the system to alter
votes.

But Briggs stressed that there was nothing to indicate
fraud.

"My take is this could simply be a glitch. And if
someone made a mistake, then it's an easy find," she
said. "Thank God New Hampshire has a paper trail so we
can just sit down and count the paper ballots."

Unlike states and counties using paperless
touch-screen voting machines, New Hampshire passed a
law in 1994 requiring all voting machines to produce a
paper trail, so the paper can easily be used to verify
the vote results.

But this isn't why Briggs chose to examine New
Hampshire's machines. She chose the state because
Kerry won there, with 50 percent of the votes to
Bush's 49 percent, and people would be less likely to
view her examination as a partisan tactic to overturn
Bush's victory.

The recount will consist only of 11 wards, taken from
a list of wards that Briggs supplied to the Nader
campaign. Because state officials are already busy
conducting 15 recounts in close local races, they will
only be able to count five of the wards Thursday and
will do the remaining six wards at a date to be
determined...

[Nader spokesman Zeese] said they looked at data
showing that in Florida counties using optical-scan
machines numerous Democrats had voted for Bush. But he
concluded, as several academics did, that "it's not
unusual," since many Democrats in Florida had been
voting Republican for years.

But if the New Hampshire recount uncovers problems
with the machines, the Nader campaign will consider
seeking a recount in Florida, since the state uses
many of the same Diebold and ES&S optical-scan
machines as those in New Hampshire. The process in
Florida, however, would be more complicated and
expensive.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1118-22.htm

Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by
CommonDreams.org
'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found
in Florida
by Thom Hartmann

There was something odd about the poll tapes.

A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a
printout from an optical scan voting machine made the
evening of an election, after the machine has read all
the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal
computer. It shows the total results of the election
in that location. The printout is signed by the
polling officials present in that precinct/location,
and then submitted to the county elections office as
the official record of how the people in that
particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location
has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus
produces only one poll tape.)

Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile
investigator of electronic voting machines, along with
people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at
Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the
afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to
see, under a public records request, each of the poll
tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts
in that county. The elections workers - having been
notified in advance of her request - handed her a set
of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking
signatures.

Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not
the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and
thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they
told her that the originals were held in another
location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that
since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev
the following morning to show them to her.

Bev showed up bright and early the morning of
Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting
- and discovered three of the elections officials in
the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered
with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev
and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview
less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us
out and slammed the door."

In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the
stinking evidence.

"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I
looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public
record tapes."

Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.

"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added,
"because what they had done was to have thrown some of
their polling tapes, which are the official records of
the election, into the garbage. These were the ones
signed by the poll workers. These are something we had
done an official public records request for."

When the elections officials inside realized that the
people outside were going through the trash, they
called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.

Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator,
was there.

"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I
don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev
Harris having a tug of war with an election worker
over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she
pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out
those poll tapes. They were throwing away our
democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."

As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the
tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two
police cars just showed up."

She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview,
that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous
debate on the merits of my public records request."

The outcome of that debate was that they all went from
the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office,
to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed
poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the
Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of
State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them
there, as well.

And then things got even odder.

"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed,
original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that
were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing
and finding things not matching, when one of the
elections employees took a bin full of things that
looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes,
actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back
of the building."

This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk
outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office
itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll
tapes, freshly trashed.

"And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they
had taken out [the back door] just came right back in
the front door and we said, 'What are these polling
place tapes doing in your dumpster?'"

A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections
Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was
unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the
record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The
Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November
17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin,
noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections'
warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to
inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after
being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While
there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a
garbage bag, heightening her concern about the
integrity of voting records."

The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections
Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup
copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined
for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to
Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of
tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One
tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots
and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup
tape is delivered to the elections office in a second
car."

Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe
claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation
of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage.
"She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe
told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas."

But the Ollie North action in two locations on two
days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev
and her associates. When they compared the discarded,
signed, original tapes with the recent printouts
submitted to the state and used to tabulate the
Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing
pattern emerged.

"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the
different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of
those were in minority areas."

When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in
precinct after precinct were random, as one would
expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors,
she became uncomfortable.

"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she
said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an
election, just to find out if there was any voting
fraud."

That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The
anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."

Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one
Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all
counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent
explanations for both the mismatched counts and
trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will
continue to play out. And, unless further
investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide
trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of
Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change
the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed
John Kerry winning in Florida).

Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit
another county.

As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward
their next destination, "We just put Volusia County
and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue
to keep a number of documents under seal, including
all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all
of the signed poll tapes."

Why?

"Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies
indicative of fraud."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project
Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of
a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show.
www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection:
The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human
Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America,"
and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

###

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1118-30.htm

Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by the
Columbus Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)
Hearings on Ohio Voting Put 2004 Election in Doubt
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

Highly-charged, jam-packed hearings held here in
Columbus have cast serious doubt on the true outcome
of the presidential election.
On Saturday, November 13, and Monday, November 15, the
Ohio Election Protection Coalition’s public hearings
in Columbus solicited extensive sworn first-person
testimony from 32 of Ohio voters, precinct judges,
poll workers, legal observers, party challengers. An
additional 66 people provided written affidavits of
election irregularities. The unavoidable conclusion is
that this year's election in Ohio was deeply flawed,
that thousands of Ohioans were denied their right to
vote, and that the ultimate vote count is very much in
doubt.

Most importantly, the testimony has revealed a
widespread and concerted effort on the part of
Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to
deny primarily African-American and young voters the
right to cast their ballots within a reasonable time.
By depriving precincts of adequate numbers of
functioning voting machines, Blackwell created waits
of three to eleven hours, driving tens of thousands of
likely Democratic voters away from the polls and very
likely affecting the outcome of the Ohio vote count,
which in turn decided the national election.

On November 17, Blackwell wrote an op-ed piece for
Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, stating:
“Every eligible voter who wanted to vote had the
opportunity to vote. There was no widespread fraud,
and there was no disenfranchisement. A half-million
more Ohioans voted than ever before with fewer errors
than four years ago, a sure sign on success by any
measure,” Blackwell wrote. Moon's extreme right wing
Unification Church has long-standing ties to the Bush
Family and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Additional testimony also called into question the
validity of the actual vote counts. There are thus
serious doubts that the final official tally in Ohio,
due December 1 to Blackwell’s office, will have any
validity. Blackwell will certify the vote count on
December 3.

While Blackwell supervised the Ohio vote he also
served as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney re-election
campaign, a clear conflict of interest that casts
further doubt on how the Ohio election and vote counts
have been conducted.

At the Columbus hearings, witness after witness under
oath gave testimony to an election riddled with
discrimination and disarray. Among them:

Werner Lange, a pastor from Youngstown, Ohio, who said
in part:

“In precincts 1 A and 5 G, voting as Hillman
Elementary School, which is a predominantly African
American community, there were woefully insufficient
number of voting machines in three precincts. I was
told that the standard was to have one voting machine
per 100 registered voters. Precinct A had 750
registered voters. Precinct G had 690. There should
have been 14 voting machines at this site. There were
only 6, three per precinct, less than 50 percent of
the standard. This caused an enormous bottleneck among
voters who had to wait a very, very long time to vote,
many of them giving up in frustration and leaving. . .
. I estimate, by the way, that an estimated loss of
over 8,000 votes from the African American community
in the City of Youngstown alone, with its 84
precincts, were lost due to insufficient voting
machines, and that would translate to some 7,000 votes
lost for John Kerry for President in Youngstown alone.
. . .”

“Just yesterday I went to the Trumbull Board of
Elections in northeast Ohio, I wanted to review their
precinct logs so I could continue my investigation.
This was denied. I was told by the Board of Elections
official that I could not see them until after the
official vote was given.”
Marion Brown, Columbus:

“I am here on behalf of a friend. My friend came to my
home very upset while she was away standing four hours
in the voting, her husband passed away. The funeral
was on yesterday, November 13th, at 2:00. Perhaps had
she not stood so long in the line, she may have been
able to save her husband.”
Victoria Parks:

“In Pickaway County, oh, my goodness, in Pickaway
County, I entered there, I was shown a table, 53 poll
books were plunked down in front of my. I noticed
there were no signature on file in any of the poll
books, in any of the poll books, and furthermore, a
minute later the director of the Board of Elections of
Pickaway County came into the room and snatched the
books away from me and said you cannot look at these
books. I said are you aware that what you are doing is
against the law? She said I have been on the phone
with the Secretary of State and he has instructed me
to take these books away and you cannot see them. I
paraphrase very slightly here. She took them away. I
was persona non grata. I did not want to risk arrest,
and I left. . . . There were no signatures, and
furthermore, the writing in the book seemed to have
been written in the same hand, because that is a
requirement.”
Boyd Mitchell, Columbus:

“What I saw was voter intimidation in the form of city
employees that were sent in to stop illegal parking.
Now, in Driving Park Rec Center there are less than 50
legal parking spots, and there were literally hundreds
and hundreds of voters there, and I estimated at least
70 percent of the people were illegally parked in the
grass around the perimeter of the Driving Park Rec
Center, and two city employees drove up in a city
truck and said that they had been sent there to stop
illegal parking, and they went so far as to harass at
least a couple of voters that I saw, and when they
were talking to us, they were kind. But when they
didn't realize we were overhearing them talking to
voters, they were trying to keep people from parking
where they were parking. They went so far as to set up
some cones, trying to block people from getting into a
grassy area...”

“I calculated that I maybe saw about 20 percent of the
people that left Driving Park D and C, I personally
saw and talked to about 20 percent of them as they
left the poll between 12:30 and 8 p.m. And I saw 15
people who left because the line was too long. The
lines inside were anywhere from 2 1/2 to 5 hours. Most
everybody said 4 hours, and I saw at least 15 people
who did not vote, and I heard a gentleman who was
earlier making some mathematical calculations, well,
if this is going on across town, and, you know, in a
precinct where it was going so heavily for Kerry, and
me only seeing 20 percent of the people coming out, I
saw 15. We could just do the math and extrapolate that
out into a huge number of people who might have voted
had they had a chance.”
Joe Popich (entered into the record copies of the
Perry County Board of Election poll book):

“There are a bunch of irregularities in this log book,
but the most blatant irregularity would be the fact
that there are 360 signatures in this book. There are
33 people who voted absentee ballot at this precinct,
for a total of 393 votes that should be attributed to
that precinct. However, the Board of Elections is
attributing 96 more votes to that precinct than what
this log book reflects.”
Derek Winsor, Columbus:

“Out of the six total voting machines that were at 14
C, three of them showed some type of malfunction that
at one point or another during the three our so hours
that we were waiting, and between my wife and me, we
had asked poll workers individually if they could
explain what was going on and what kind of
reassurances they could give us that, for one machine
in particular that the votes had already been posted
on, that machine would be counted, and the response
was just, oh, they will be counted. And how can you be
sure of that? What storage mechanism do they use to
ensure that the votes are stored, and, again, the
response was just, well, they just are. And that was a
bit of a concern here.”
Carol Shelton, presiding judge, precinct 25 B at the
Linden Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library:

“The precinct is 95 to 99 percent black. . . . There
were 1,500 persons on the precinct rolls. We received
three machines. In my own precinct in Clintonville,
19E, we always received three machines for 700 to 730
voters. Voter turnout in my own precinct has reached
as high as 70 percent while I worked there. I
interviewed many voters in 25 B and asked how many
machines they had had in the past. Everyone who had a
recollection said five or six. I called to get more
machines and ended up being connected with Matt
Damschroder, the Director of the Board of Elections.
After a real hassle -- and someone here has it on
videotape, he sent me a fourth machine which did not
dent the length of the line. Fewer than 700 voted,
although the turnout at the beginning of the day would
cause anyone to predict a turnout of over 80 percent.
This was a clear case of voter suppression by making
voting an impossibility for anyone who had to go to
work or anyone who was stuck at home caring for
children or the elderly while another family member
voted.”
Allesondra Hernandez, Toledo:

“What I witnessed when I had gotten there about 9 A.M.
was a young African American woman who had come out
nearly in tears. She was a new voter, very first
registered, very excited to vote, and she had said
that she had been bounced around to three different
polling places, and this one had just turned her down
again. People were there to help her out, and I was
concerned. I started asking around to everyone else,
and they had informed me earlier that day that she was
not the only one, but there were at least three others
who had been bounced around. Also earlier that day the
polls had opened an hour late, did not open until
about 7:30 A.M. The polling machines were locked in
the principal's office. Hundreds of people were turned
away, were forced to leave the line because they
needed to be at school, they needed to be at work, or
they needed to take their children to school. The
people there who were assisting did the best they
could to take down numbers and take down names, but I
am assuming that a majority of those people could not
come back because of work and/or because of school,
because they had shown up to vote, and that was the
time that they could vote, and that is why they were
there. Also along the same lines, they ran out of
pencils for those ballots.”
Erin Deignan, Columbus:

“I was an official poll worker judge in precinct
Columbus 25 F, at the East Linden School. We had
between 1100 and 1200 people on the voter registry
there. We had three voting machines. We did the math.
I am sure lots of other people did too. With the
five-minute limit, 13 hours the polls were open, three
machines, that is 468 voters, that is less than half
of the people we had on the registry. We stayed open
three hours past 7:30 and got about 550 people
through, but we had one Board of Elections worker come
in the morning. We asked if he could bring more
machines. He is said more machines had been delivered,
but they didn't have any more. We had another Board of
Elections official come later in the day, and he said
that in Upper Arlington he had seen 12 machines.”
Matthew Segal, Gambier:

“In this past election, Kenyon College students and
the residents of Gambier, Ohio, had to endure some of
the most extenuating voting circumstances in the
entire country. As many of you may already know,
because they had it on national media attention,
Kenyon students and the residents of Gambier had to
stand in line up to 10 to 12 hours in the rain,
through a hot gym, and crowded narrow lines, making it
extremely uncomfortable. As a result of this, voters
were disenfranchised, having class to attend to,
sports commitments, and midterms for the next day,
which they had to study for. Obviously, it is a
disgrace that kids who are being perpetually told the
importance of voting, could not vote because they had
other commitments and had to be put up with a 12-hour
line.”
Blackwell characterized Ohio’s Election Day as
“tremendously successful” in the Washington Times.
Several people at Saturday’s hearing said they’d like
to hear Mr. Blackwell testify under oath, preferably
under a criminal indictment.

Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D, J.D., a legal advisor for the
Election Protection Coalition, convened and moderated
the public hearings. Harvey Wasserman is Senior Editor
of the Columbus Free Press and freepress.org. Audio
from the hearings can be found at:
www.theneighborhoodnetwork.org.

© 2004 Columbus Free Press

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions
Wednesday, 17 November 2004, 10:45 pm
Article: Alastair Thompson

Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions
Full 51 State Early Exit Poll Data Released For The
First Time

By Scoop Co-Editor Alastair Thompson
Scoop.co.nz is delighted to be able today to publish a
full set of 4pm exit poll data for the first time on
the Internet since the US election. The data emerged
this evening NZT in a post on the Democratic
Underground website under the forum name TruthIsAll.

The new data confirms what was already widely known
about the swing in favour of George Bush, but
amplifies the extent of that swing.

Click for big version
Figure 1: Graph showing the "red shift" between 2004
US General Election exit polls & the actual 2004 US
Election results
In the data which is shown below in tabulated form,
and above in graph form, we can see that 42 of the 51
states in the union swung towards George Bush while
only nine swung towards Kerry.

There has to date been no official explanation for the
discrepancy.

Ordinarily in the absence of an obvious mistabulation
error, roughly the same number of states should have
swung towards each candidate.

Moreover many of the states that swung against
Democratic Party hopeful John Kerry swung to an extent
that is well beyond the margin of error in exit polls.
Exit polls by their nature - they ask voters how they
actually voted rather than about their intentions -
are typically considered highly accurate.

Last week in an analysis of a similar, but incomplete
set of data, Dr Stephen F. Freeman from the University
of Pennsylvania calculated that the odds of just three
of the major swing states, Florida, Ohio and
Pennsylvania all swinging as far as they did against
their respective exit polls were 250 milllion to 1.
(See…"The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy" – Dr
Stephen F. Freeman - .pdf format)

Dr Freeman's academic paper contains a thorough
description of why and how exit polls are conducted
(in some countries they use them to prevent against
vote fraud), and considers a number of hypotheses for
why this year's polls could have been so dramatically
wrong. He concludes that the reasons are unknown.

CAUTIONARY NOTE: The data that is released today shows
the 4pm data run from the Edison-Mitofsky polling
company. This run was based on 63% of the full 13660
sample in the poll. However as we also have a set of
data from around midnight with which to compare this
data, we can tell that the final exit poll results
were not that far different than these early results.
This in itself tends to suggest that the polling
system did not have a systemic bias in its early data
as suggested by some commentators in early reports on
this puzzle.

(For a more detailed description of the limitations of
this data and the claimed gender bias in the early
data see.. EXTENDED FOOTNOTE ON THE LIMITATIONS OF
THIS DATA - By Jonathan Simon )

*****************
For more background and the latest news links on this
news subject see also Scoop's A Very American Coup
Special Feature

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh111604.shtml

TWIN TOWERS! Rice for Powell? Your “press corps” knows
to pander and fawn to Washington’s two favorite icons:
// link // print // previous // next //

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2004

TWIN TOWERS: Bush wants to put Condi Rice in for
Powell. And what a perfect swap it is! How better to
capture the way the press rolled over regarding Iraq?
Of course, Powell has long been the press corps’ prime
icon—the man who can do and say anything. Major
scribes all know their Hard Pundit Law—they must
affirm what the genial man says. In July 2003,
Margaret Carlson captured their Stepford-like approach
to Powell when questioned by Charlie Rose (see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 7/4/03):

ROSE (7/3/03): Where were you on the war?
CARLSON: I was, give diplomacy a chance. [Brightening]
I was with Colin Powell the whole way along! Whatever
Colin Powell—

ROSE: Oh, so whatever Colin—you know. OK.

CARLSON: Yeah. Whatever Colin does, I’ll go with.

ROSE: Is that right?

And yes, that was precisely right, as we had seen five
months before. When Powell appeared before the UN on
2/5/03, he made a notably shaky presentation
supporting the plan to wage war in Iraq. But all your
major “liberal” pundits knew what they were required
to do. Starting the day after Powell’s performance,
pundits stampeded into print, swearing fealty to
Colin’s appraisals. But uh-oh! One month later, it was
already clear that Powell’s presentation had been
rather shaky. Result? Here’s the late Mary McGrory in
the Post, explaining why she had rushed into print
swearing that Powell was perfect:
MCGRORY (3/6/03): What impressed me about Powell’s
presentation, besides his magisterial presence and
impeccable prose, were the poisons he showed and the
malice behind them. I did not have the benefit of the
informed criticism that followed.
How worthless is your mainstream “press corps?” One
day after his shaky UN outing, McGrory rushed into
print praising Powell—and now she said that she had
done so because of his “presence” and his “impeccable
prose.” “I did not have the benefit of the informed
criticism that followed,” she haplessly
added—explaining why she’d affirmed a presentation
without knowing if it was boffo or bunkum. But at the
Post, almost all “liberal” pundits had rushed to
praise Powell—Richard Cohen and William Raspberry too
(links below). And even today, every pundit knows to
insist that Powell clearly believed his own
twaddle—even though Bob Woodward’s Bush at War plainly
showed that Powell included material in his UN pitch
that he thought to be “iffy” and “murky” (links
below). Nothing—nothing—changes the way this
pandered-to poobah is reviewed.
But if Powell has been the corps’ Icon I, Rice has
been its Icon II—Darling Condi, the wholly
untouchable. Indeed, Rice’s testimony before the 9/11
Commission provided one of the most instructive recent
cases of press corps pimping and fawning. Must icons
like Condi play by the rules? Must Darling Condi honor
her oath? The press corps answered—no, and no—as it
kept the public from seeing the shape of this icon’s
inexcusable conduct.

Rice appeared before the commission on April 8, 2004.
Special rules had been crafted for her appearance—no
one could question for more than ten minutes. Blessed
by these special restrictions, Rice knew what she had
to do when questioned by Richard Ben-Veniste. She
stalled; she hemmed and hawed; she fudged and evaded;
and yes, eventually, she told a flat lie. And how did
the “press corps” react to all this? How else? They
all pandered to Condi! Rice had baldly broken her
oath—and your pundits all pandered to Condi.

How did the sequence of questioning go? As he began,
Ben-Veniste asked a bone-simple, yes-or-no question
about a briefing Bush received in the summer before
9/11. Eventually, he was forced to ask his question
three times. But here was its first iteration:

BEN-VENISTE (4/8/04): Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that
the August 6th PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing]
warned against possible attacks in this country?
After Rice gave an odd reply, Ben-Veniste asked his
question again. This time he used more specific
language—language he had taken straight from the PDB
itself:
BEN-VENISTE (second iteration): As of the August 6th
briefing, you learned that al Qaeda members have
resided or traveled to the United States for years and
maintained a support system in the United States. And
you learned that FBI information since the 1998 Blind
Sheik—warning of hijackings to free the Blind Sheik
indicated a pattern of suspicious activity in the
country, up until August 6th, consistent with
preparation for hijackings. Isn’t that so?
The answer to that question was simple—yes. In fact,
the highlighted language came straight from the PDB in
question (text of PDB below). But Ben-Veniste was at a
disadvantage; the August 6 PDB was still classified,
so while he and Rice knew what it said, the press and
the public had no way to know. And Darling Condi knew
what this meant; it meant that she could dissemble as
much as she pleased, and her fake answers couldn’t be
checked. So the Icon hemmed and hawed again—forcing
Ben-Veniste to ask his question a third, final time:
BEN-VENISTE (third iteration): You have indicated here
that this [PDB] was some historical document. And I am
asking you whether it is not the case that you learned
in the PDB memo of August 6th that the FBI was saying
that it had information suggesting that
preparations—not historically, but ongoing, along with
these numerous full-field investigations against al
Qaeda cells—that preparations were being made
consistent with hijackings within the United States.
Again, the highlighted language came straight from the
PDB (text below). The answer to this question was
bone-simple —yes. But Condi knew the PDB was still
under wraps—so she refused “to tell the whole truth.”
In fact, Rice’s third answer was so far from the truth
that it can best be described as a lie.
But Condi Rice is the press corps’ darling, an icon
who plays by The Condi Rules. Indeed, the aftermath of
this rank exchange tells you all you need to know
about the soul of your modern “press.” Surprise! Two
days after Rice’s exchange with Ben-Veniste, the
August 6 PDB was made public. Result? It became clear
that Ben-Veniste had been quoting straight from its
text—and that Rice had refused, three separate times,
to answer his bone-simple question.

Rice had refused to honor her oath, about a major
life-or-death matter. Given three separate chances to
answer, she had refused to do so each time; the third
time, she’d basically lied to the nation. But
remember—this was Darling Condi, Icon II, the princess
who plays by The Condi Rules. So how did the pandering
press corps react when they discovered what had
happened? Easy! Pundits savaged Ben-Veniste for rudely
asking his question three times! And pundits all knew
that they must never say that Darling Condi had broken
her oath. Ben-Veniste was slammed in the press—and the
press refused to report Rice’s conduct. In this
episode, we see the basic shape of the way your “press
corps” handled 9/11 and Iraq—and we see the way
they’re going to act as Rice comes up for her new
station.

Powell and Condi? Icons both. It’s like the old joke
from the Soviet Union: They pretend to tell you the
truth, and the “press corps” pretends to report on
them.

FOR THE RECORD: For the record, here are paragraphs
6-10 of the 11-paragraph PDB. The reader can see that
Ben-Veniste’s question came straight from paragraph
10:

PRESIDENTIAL DAILY BRIEFING, 8/6/01: (pgh 7) Al Qaeda
members—including some who are U.S. citizens—have
resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the
group apparently maintains a support structure that
could aid attacks….
(8) A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden
cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth
for attacks.

(9) We have not been able to corroborate some of the
more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a
[REDACTED] service in 1998 saying that bin Laden
wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release
of “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held
extremists.

(10) Nevertheless, FBI information since that time
indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijackings or
other types of attacks, including recent surveillance
of federal buildings in New York.

The answer to Ben-Veniste’s question was bone-simple:
Yes! But to see Darling Condi lie in your face, review
our four-part series, “Rice Under Oath.” For links to
all four reports, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/17/04.
VISIT OUR INCOMPARABLE ARCHIVES: Again: To see Darling
Condi lie in your face, review our four-part series,
“Rice Under Oath.” For links to all four reports, see
THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/17/04.

To see McGrory take it back about Powell, see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 3/6/03, with links to prior reporting.

In Woodward’s book, Powell pimps some iffy scuds. See
THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/24/04.

To see Gwen Ifill give Rice home cookin’, see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 8/11/03, with links to prior reporting.

How does Koppel handle Colin? See THE DAILY HOWLER,
10/19/04, for a study in private press culture.

Finally, why didn’t the “press corps” ask questions
before the war? Jim Lehrer said they were just too
stupid. To revisit this utterly foolish excuse, see
THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/17/04. The actual reason was
perfectly clear when the “press corps” trashed
Ben-Veniste and pimped for its darling, Icon Condi.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1117-01.htm

Published on Wednesday, November 17, 2004 by the
Boston Globe
Media Accused of Ignoring Election Irregularities
by Mark Jurkowitz

Two weeks after Election Day, explosive allegations
about a media coverup are percolating.

There's the widely circulated e-mail about a CBS
producer who complained that a news industry
"lock-down" has prevented journalists from
investigating voting problems that cropped up on Nov
2. There's the rumor that MSNBC host Keith Olbermann,
who has devoted serious air time to discussing
Election Day irregularities, was fired for broaching
the topic. There's the assertion by Bev Harris,
executive director of Black Box Voting Inc., that she
had received calls from network employees saying they
had been told to lay off the sensitive subject of
voting fraud.

In the days after Nov. 2, the Internet was abuzz with
charges from partisans that voting irregularities
might have cost John F. Kerry the White House.

With some media outlets moving swiftly to debunk the
notion that the election had been stolen by the
Republicans, the press itself has come under scrutiny,
accused of everything from a conspiracy of silence to
a collective passivity about pursuing voting
irregularities.

"The mainstream media is not treating this as an
important story overall," said Steve Rendall, senior
analyst at the liberal media watchdog group Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting."The mainstream media has
largely treated the story as some crazy Internet
story." At the same time, Rendall acknowledged: "There
has been excess in the way stuff has flown around the
Internet and e-mail lists."

Tracking down the sources of the rapidly proliferating
online allegations about a media "lock-down" is a
daunting task. But the response to them has been
unequivocal. "Absolutely untrue," a CBS spokeswoman,
Sandy Genelius, said when asked about the report of
the whistle-blowing CBS producer. "Absolutely,
positively, categorically false. Besides that, it's
absurd."

"There are a lot of nervous people out there," said
Olbermann, whose disappearance from MSNBC was the
result not of being terminated but of taking a
vacation. "I'm both amused and a little terrified that
I became the subject of an Internet rumor."

In an appearance Nov. 8 on the "Democracy Now!"
program, Harris, whose organization is investigating
allegations of voter fraud in Florida and Ohio, told
host Amy Goodman that sources in television news have
told her "there is now a lock-down on this story. It
is officially . . . 'Let's move on' time." In an
interview with The Boston Globe, she reiterated those
potent allegations but declined to reveal her sources.
She also appeared to soft-pedal the idea that the
media was at fault, saying instead that it was too
early in the fraud-investigation process to blame
reporters for not being more aggressive.

"I'm not terribly concerned about . . . the media's
coverage of it yet," she said. "We're still early. . .
. Caution's probably appropriate. [It's] a very
sensitive story."

Not all accusations that journalists have not
vigorously pursued allegations of voting problems
involve speculation that they are being muzzled by
their bosses. But several left-leaning critics
complain that reporters have lost interest in what is
still an important story because the outcome of the
2004 election, unlike in 2000, is not being contested.

Media Matters for America, a liberal media monitoring
organization, posted an item on its website recently
that cited several stories about faulty voting
equipment in Ohio that did not generate much media
interest. David Brock, the organization's president,
said in an interview: "I haven't seen anything that is
suggesting that further probing of the issue would
change the results of the election." But he added that
"there are some irregularities, and I would imagine
some reader and viewer interest. . . . It seems that
there should have been somewhat more coverage of this.
There was all this pressure and buildup and very
little follow-up."

TomPaine.com, a liberal website that collects news and
commentary about public policy issues, has posted
several analyses arguing that Kerry was hurt in Ohio
by a shortage of voting machines, as well as by
discarded votes that came disproportionately from
minority precincts. The website's executive editor,
Alexandra Walker, said her organization leaves the
conspiracy theories surrounding the media's behavior
to "the blogosphere."

But she also argued that, with the election results
not being disputed, "the public interest angle was not
enough to keep [voter irregularities] in the sights of
political reporters. The horse-race coverage of
political campaigns shortchanges readers."

No one has been more engaged in the issue than
Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's prime-time "Countdown"
program.

"The thing that woke me up was the lock-down in Warren
County," he said, referring to a Cincinnati Enquirer
report that officials in that Ohio county, citing
terrorist threats, barred observers from the vote
count. "I began to investigate then or at least raise
questions. . . . It turns out there are a lot of valid
stories, at least valid stories worth investigating."

Olbermann said there are a number of reasons much of
the media have not been pursuing the story as ardently
as he is, including "a love-hate [relationship] with
the blogs. Whatever new media is appearing, the
established news industry tend to look down on it." At
the same time, Olbermann flatly denies the
blogger-fueled rumor that he was fired for his
interest in voting irregularities, pointing out that
MSNBC has let him pursue the probe.

"It's still largely a game of telephone on the Net,"
he said.

© Copyright 2004 Boston Globe

###

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1116-27.htm

Published on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 by the Toronto
Star
Should Canada Indict Bush?
by Thomas Walkom

When U.S. President George W. Bush arrives in Ottawa —
probably later this year — should he be welcomed? Or
should he be charged with war crimes?

It's an interesting question. On the face of it, Bush
seems a perfect candidate for prosecution under
Canada's Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada's
ineffectual laws in line with the rules of the new
International Criminal Court. While never tested, it
lays out sweeping categories under which a foreign
leader like Bush could face arrest.

In particular, it holds that anyone who commits a war
crime, even outside Canada, may be prosecuted by our
courts. What is a war crime? According to the statute,
it is any conduct defined as such by "customary
international law" or by conventions that Canada has
adopted.

War crimes also specifically include any breach of the
1949 Geneva Conventions, such as torture, degradation,
wilfully depriving prisoners of war of their rights
"to a fair and regular trial," launching attacks "in
the knowledge that such attacks will cause incidental
loss of life or injury to civilians" and deportation
of persons from an area under occupation.

Outside of one well-publicized (and quickly squelched)
attempt in Belgium, no one has tried to formally
indict Bush. But both Oxfam International and the U.S.
group Human Rights Watch have warned that some of the
actions undertaken by the U.S. and its allies,
particularly in Iraq, may fall under the war crime
rubric.

The case for the prosecution looks quite promising.
First, there is the fact of the Iraq war itself. After
1945, Allied tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo — in an
astonishing precedent — ruled that states no longer
had the unfettered right to invade other countries and
that leaders who started such conflicts could be tried
for waging illegal war.

Concurrently, the new United Nations outlawed all
aggressive wars except those authorized by its
Security Council.

Today, a strong case could be made that Bush violated
the Nuremberg principles by invading Iraq. Indeed,
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has already labelled
that war illegal in terms of the U.N. Charter.

Second, there is the manner in which the U.S.
conducted this war.

The mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib
prison is a clear contravention of the Geneva Accord.
The U.S. is also deporting selected prisoners to camps
outside of Iraq (another contravention). U.S. press
reports also talk of shadowy prisons in Jordan run by
the CIA, where suspects are routinely tortured. And
the estimated civilian death toll of 100,000 may well
contravene the Geneva Accords prohibition against the
use of excessive force.

Canada's war crimes law specifically permits
prosecution not only of those who carry out such
crimes but of the military and political superiors who
allow them to happen.

What has emerged since Abu Ghraib shows that officials
at the highest levels of the Bush administration
permitted and even encouraged the use of torture.

Given that Bush, as he likes to remind everyone, is
the U.S. military's commander-in-chief, it is hard to
argue he bears no responsibility.

Then there is Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. says detainees
there do not fall under the Geneva accords. That's an
old argument.

In 1946, Japanese defendants explained their
mistreatment of prisoners of war by noting that their
country had never signed any of the Geneva
Conventions. The Japanese were convicted anyway.

Oddly enough, Canada may be one of the few places
where someone like Bush could be brought to justice.
Impeachment in the U.S. is most unlikely. And, at
Bush's insistence, the new international criminal
court has no jurisdiction over any American.

But a Canadian war crimes charge, too, would face many
hurdles. Bush was furious last year when Belgians
launched a war crimes suit in their country against
him — so furious that Belgium not only backed down
under U.S. threats but changed its law to prevent
further recurrences.

As well, according to a foreign affairs spokesperson,
visiting heads of state are immune from prosecution
when in Canada on official business. If Ottawa wanted
to act, it would have to wait until Bush was out of
office — or hope to catch him when he comes up here to
fish.

And, of course, Canada's government would have to want
to act. War crimes prosecutions are political
decisions that must be authorized by the federal
attorney-general.

Still, Prime Minister Paul Martin has staked out his
strong opposition to war crimes. This was his focus in
a September address to the U.N. General Assembly.

There, Martin was talking specifically about war
crimes committed by militiamen in far-off Sudan. But
as my friends on the Star's editorial board noted in
one of their strong defences of concerted
international action against war crimes, the rule must
be, "One law for all."

Thomas Walkom writes every Tuesday for the Toronto
Star Tribune.

© 2004 Toronto Star

###

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4018325.stm

Chirac questions US-led Iraq war
French President Jacques Chirac says he is "not at all
sure" the world has become safer with the removal from
power of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
In a BBC interview Mr Chirac suggests the situation in
Iraq has helped to prompt an increase in terrorism.

The interview, to be aired on BBC Two's Newsnight
programme on Wednesday, comes ahead of his visit to
the UK this week.

President Chirac also maintains that any intervention
in Iraq should have been through the United Nations.

There's no doubt that there has been an increase in
terrorism and one of the origins of that has been the
situation in Iraq
French President Jacques Chirac

"To a certain extent Saddam Hussein's departure was a
positive thing, " Mr Chirac says when asked if the
world is safer now, as US President George W Bush has
repeatedly stated.

"But it also provoked reactions, such as the
mobilisation in a number of countries, of men and
women of Islam, which has made the world more
dangerous," Mr Chirac says.

"There's no doubt that there has been an increase in
terrorism and one of the origins of that has been the
situation in Iraq.

"I'm not at all sure that one can say that the world
is safer," Mr Chirac says.

Return favours

He also signals that he believes Britain's support for
the US-led war has brought few dividends.

In an earlier interview with British journalists, Mr
Chirac said Prime Minister Tony Blair had received
nothing in return for backing the Bush administration.

"I'm not sure it is in the nature of our American
friends at the moment to return favours
systematically," he said.

"I am not sure, with America as it is these days, that
it would be easy for someone, even the British, to be
an honest broker."

Mr Chirac said he had urged Mr Blair last year to
press President Bush to restart the Middle East peace
process in return for British support for the US-led
war in Iraq.

Speaking in Washington on Monday, Mr Blair called for
Europe and the US to bury their differences over Iraq.

"It is not a sensible or intelligent response for us
in Europe to ridicule American arguments and parody
their political leadership," he said.

The signs are that Mr Chirac and Mr Blair will again
at best agree to disagree on the Iraq war when they
meet on Thursday, says BBC World Affairs correspondent
Mike Wooldridge.

You can see the interview with President Chirac on
Newsnight on BBC Two at 2230 GMT on Wednesday 17
November, or watch it on the Newsnight website

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4018325.stm

Published: 2004/11/17 11:16:12 GMT

© BBC MMIV

Nov. 18, 2004
By Justin Rood, CQ Staff

The CIA official who now runs the unit responsible for
analyzing
terrorist intelligence should share blame for mistakes
that opened the
door to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, says Michael
Scheuer, the agency
Osama bin Laden expert who resigned last week.

According to Scheuer, John O. Brennan, the CIA
official in charge of
the new interagency Terrorist Threat Integration
Center (TTIC), played a
key role in the United States’ failure to capture bin
Laden before the 2001
attacks.

In a telephone interview, Scheuer said, “I know for a
fact that the
director of the TTIC was one of the people that
dissuaded [former CIA
Director George J.] Tenet and others from trying to
capture bin Laden
in May 1998.”

In a letter to Congress last fall Scheuer called it
“our best chance to
capture Bin Laden — an operation which showed no U.S.
hand, risked no
U.S. lives, and was endorsed by senior commanders of
the Joint Special
Operations Command at Fort Bragg.” He said it “was
cancelled because
senior officials from the [Central Intelligence]
Agency, the Executive
Branch, and other Intelligence community components
decided to accept
assurances from an Islamic country that it could
acquire bin Laden from
the Taliban. . . . ”

In the interview Tuesday, Scheuer disclosed that the
unnamed “Islamic
country” was Saudi Arabia. In May 1998, Brennan was
serving as chief of
station in “a major Middle East capital,” according to
a CIA press
release.

“The makers of this decision ignored the extensive
documentary record
that showed nothing but uncooperativeness from this
Islamic country,”
Scheuer said in his letter to Congress.

Although he would not expound further because the
details are still
classified, he said, Scheuer insisted that Brennan
“was pivotal in
persuading the government not to go ahead with the
operation.”

A CIA spokesperson declined to make Brennan available
or comment for
this story.

*Names Other Officials*

Others were also to blame for failing to stop the
attacks, Scheuer said, going beyond a September 2004
letter to the Senate and House Intelligence
committees that cited “failures in leadership and
management,” particularly by “certain senior civil
servants” who exhibited “arrogance, bad judgment,
disdain for expertise, and bureaucratic cowardice” in
making decisions that allowed al Qaeda to prosper and
attack the United States.

But on Nov. 16 Scheuer— who on Nov. 10 resigned his
post as a senior
analyst in the Usama bin Laden unit of the CIA’s
Counterterrorism
Center — singled out Tenet, former FBI Director Louis
J. Freeh, National
Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden,
former Defense
Secretary William S. Cohen, and current Defense
Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, among others, saying they failed to take the
actions he felt
were necessary to kill bin Laden and prevent the Sept.
11 attacks.

The 9/11 commission thoroughly investigated the U.S.
government’s
repeated attempts to capture or kill bin Laden before
the 2001 attacks,
but did not affix blame to any specific officials for
the 9/11
intelligence failures.

Scheuer has been critical of some of the commission’s
conclusions in
the past. The 9/11 commission declined to comment on
his allegations
through its current entity, the 9/11 Public Discourse
Project.

Perhaps Scheuer’s most urgent criticism of the CIA is
its transfer of
experts out of its Usama bin Laden unit and into TTIC
and elsewhere,
without replacing them or doing enough to develop new
expertise.

“On 9/11, we had no more than 100 experienced
officers,” said Scheuer
of the unit, which provides support for covert
actions and intelligence
gathering against Osama bin Laden and his network.

“I think Tenet sent 25 [analysts] to the FBI right
after 9/11. And now
they’re sending another bunch over to TTIC. At the end
of the day, what
happens is [that] the group of officers which support
operations ...
against bin Laden has been starved, to send people to
TTIC,” he said.

Offense vs. Defense

TTIC keeps an eye out for terror threats to U.S.
interests by analyzing
and reporting on daily threat information, but it does
not task
collection or run covert operations, leading Scheuer
to dismiss it as
“kind of the voyeur of terrorist threats.”

Instead, Scheuer says, the CIA should be putting
knowledgeable people
in
the bin Laden unit, where they can run offense against
bin Laden,
rather
than at TTIC, where they take a defensive posture
against impending
attacks.

“I think a better investment is to attack the people
who are
thre